I saw no more of Charlie for nearly a week. When next I met him it was in Gracechurch Street with a bill-book chained to his waist. Business took him over London Bridge, and I accompanied him. He was very full of the importance of that book and magnified it. As we passed over the Thames we paused to look at a steamer unloading great slabs of white and brown marble. A barge drifted under the steamer’s stern and a lonely ship’s cow in that barge bellowed. Charlie’s face changed from the face of the bank-clerk to that of an unknown and – though he would not have believed this – a much shrewder man. He flung out his arm across the parapet of the bridge and laughing very loudly, said:
‘When they heard our bulls bellow the Skroelings ran away!’
I waited only for an instant, but the barge and the cow had disappeared under the bows of the steamer before I answered.
‘Charlie, what do you suppose are Skroelings?’
‘Never heard of ’em before. They sound like a new kind of seagull. What a chap you are for asking questions!’ he replied. ‘I have to go to the cashier of the Omnibus Company yonder. Will you wait for me and we can lunch somewhere together? I’ve a notion for a poem.’
‘No, thanks. I’m off. You’re sure you know nothing about Skroelings?’
‘Not unless he’s been entered for the Liverpool Handicap.’ He nodded and disappeared into the crowd.
Now it is written in the Saga of Eric the Red or that of Thorfin Karlsefne, that nine hundred years ago when Karlsefne’s galleys came to Lief’s booths, which Leif had erected in the unknown land called Markland, which may or may not have been Rhode Island, the Skroelings – and the Lord He knows who these may or may not have been – came to trade with the Vikings, and ran away because they were frightened at the bellowing of the cattle which Thorfin had brought with him in the ships. But what in the world could a Greek slave know of that affair? I wandered up and down among the streets trying to unravel the mystery, and the more I considered it, the more baffling it grew. One thing only seemed certain, and that certainty took away my breath for a moment. If I came to full knowledge of anything at all, it would not be one life of the soul in Charlie Mears’s body, but half a dozen – half a dozen several and separate existences spent on blue water in the morning of the world!
Then I reviewed the situation.
Obviously if I used my knowledge I should stand alone and unapproachable until all men were as wise as myself. That would be something, but manlike I was ungrateful. It seemed bitterly unfair that Charlie’s memory should fail me when I needed it most. Great Powers Above – -I looked up at them through the fog-smoke – did the Lords of Life and Death know what this meant to me? Nothing less than eternal fame of the best kind, that comes from One, and is shared by one alone. I would be content – remembering Clive, I stood astounded at my own moderation – with the mere right to tell one story, to work out one little contribution to the light literature of the day. If Charlie were permitted full recollection for one hour – for sixty short minutes – of existences that had extended over a thousand years – I would forgo all profit and honour from all that I should make of his speech. I would take no share in the commotion that would follow throughout the particular corner of the Earth that calls itself ‘the world’. The thing should be put forth anonymously. Nay, I would make other men believe that they had written it. They would hire bull-hided self-advertising Englishmen to bellow it abroad. Preachers would found a fresh conduct of life upon it, swearing that it was new and that they had lifted the fear of death from all mankind. Every Orientalist in Europe would patronize it discursively with Sanskrit and Pali texts. Terrible women would invent unclean variants of the men’s belief for the elevation of their sisters. Churches and religions would war over it. Between the hailing and re-starting of an omnibus I foresaw the scuffles that would arise among half a dozen denominations all professing ‘the doctrine of the True Metempsychosis as applied to the world and the New Era’; and saw, too, the respectable English newspapers shying, like frightened kine, over the beautiful simplicity of the tale. The mind leaped forward a hundred – two hundred – a thousand years. I saw with sorrow that men would mutilate and garble the story; that rival creeds would turn it upside down till, at last, the western world which clings to the dread of death more closely than the hope of life, would set it aside as an interesting superstition and stampede after some faith so long forgotten that it seemed altogether new. Upon this I changed the terms of the bargain that I would make with the Lords of Life and Death. Only let me know, let me write the story with sure knowledge that I wrote the truth, and I would burn the manuscript as a solemn sacrifice. Five minutes after the last line was written I would destroy it all. But I must be allowed to write it with absolute certainty.
There was no answer. The flaming colours of an aquarium poster caught my eye, and I wondered whether it would be wise or prudent to lure Charlie into the hands of the professional mesmerist then, and whether, if he were under his power, he would speak of his past lives. If he did, and if people believed him…but Charlie would be frightened and flustered, or made conceited by the interviews. In either case he would begin to lie, through fear or vanity. He was safest in my own hands.
‘They are very funny fools, your English,’ said a voice at my elbow, and turning round I recognized a casual acquaintance, a young Bengali law student, called Grish Chunder, whose father had sent him to England to become civilized. The old man was a retired native official, and on an income of five pounds a month contrived to allow his son two hundred pounds a year, and the run of his teeth in a city where he could pretend to be the cadet of a royal house, and tell stories of the brutal Indian bureaucrats who ground the faces of the poor.
Grish Chunder was a young, fat, full-bodied Bengali, dressed with scrupulous care in frock coat, tall hat, light trousers, and tan gloves. But I had known him in the days when the brutal Indian Government paid for his university education, and he contributed cheap sedition to the Sachi Durpan, and intrigued with the wives of his fourteen-year-old schoolmates.
‘That is very funny and very foolish,’ he said, nodding at the poster. ‘I am going down to the Northbrook Club. Will you come too?’
I walked with him for some time. ‘You are not well,’ he said. ‘What is there on your mind? You do not talk.’
‘Grish Chunder, you’ve been too well educated to believe in a God, haven’t you?’
‘Oah, yes, here! But when I go home I must conciliate popular superstition, and make ceremonies of purification, and my women will anoint idols.’
‘And hang up tulsi and feast the purohit, and take you back into caste again and make a good khuttri of you again, you advanced Freethinker. And you’ll eat desi food, and like it all, from the smell in the courtyard to the mustard oil over you.’
‘I shall very much like it,’ said Grish Chunder unguardedly. ‘Once a Hindu – always a Hindu. But I like to know what the English think they know.’
‘I’ll tell you something that one Englishman knows. It’s an old tale to you.’
I began to tell the story of Charlie in English, but Gnsh Chunder put a question in the vernacular, and the history went forward naturally in the tongue best suited for its telling. After all, it could never have been told in English. Grish Chunder heard me, nodding from time to time, and then came up to my rooms, where I finished the tale.
‘Beshak,’ he said philosophically. ‘Lekin darwaza band hai. (Without doubt; but the door is shut.) I have heard of this remembering of previous existences among my people. It is of course an old tale with us, but, to happen to an Englishman – a cow-fed Mlechh – an outcast. By Jove, that is most peculiar!’
‘Outcast yourself, Grish Chunder! You eat cow-beef every day. Let’s think the thing over. The boy remembers his incarnations.’
‘Does he know that?’ said Grish Chunder quietly, swinging his legs as he sat on my table. He was speaking in his English now.
‘He does not know anything. Would I speak to you if he
did? Go on!’
‘There is no going on at all. If you tell that to your friends they will say you are mad and put it in the papers. Suppose, now, you prosecute for libel.’
‘Let’s leave that out of the question entirely. Is there any chance of his being made to speak?’
‘There is a chance. Oah, yess! But if he spoke it would mean that all this world would end now – instanto – fall down on your head. These things are not allowed, you know. As I said, the door is shut.’
‘Not a ghost of a chance?’
‘How can there be? You are a Christi-an, and it is forbidden to eat, in your books, of the Tree of Life, or else you would never die. How shall you all fear death if you all know what your friend does not know that he knows? I am afraid to be kicked, but I am not afraid to die, because I know what I know. You are not afraid to be kicked, but you are afraid to die. If you were not, by God! you English would be all over the shop in an hour, upsetting the balances of power, and making commotions. It would not be good. But no fear. He will remember a little and a little less, and he will call it dreams. Then he will forget altogether. When I passed my First Arts Examination in Calcutta that was all in the cram-book on Wordsworth. “Trailing clouds of glory”, you know.’
‘This seems to be an exception to the rule.’
‘There are no exceptions to rules. Some are not so hard-looking as others, but they are all the same when you touch. If this friend of yours said so-and-so and so-and-so, indicating that he remembered all his lost lives, or one piece of a lost life, he would not be in the bank another hour. He would be what you called sack because he was mad, and they would send him to an asylum for lunatics. You can see that, my friend.’
‘Of course I can, but I wasn’t thinking of him. His name need never appear in the story.’
‘Ah! I see. That story will never be written. You can try.’
‘I am going to.’
‘For your own credit and for the sake of money, of course?’
‘No. For the sake of writing the story. On my honour that will be all.’
‘Even then there is no chance. You cannot play with the gods. It is a very pretty story now. As they say, Let it go on that-I mean at that. Be quick; he will not last long.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘What I say. He has never, so far, thought about a woman.’
‘Hasn’t he, though!’ I remembered some of Charlie’s confidences.
‘I mean no woman has thought about him. When that comes; bus-hogya – all up! I know. There are millions of women here. Housemaids, for instance. They kiss you behind doors.’
I winced at the thought of my story being ruined by a housemaid. And yet nothing was more probable.
Grish Chunder grinned.
‘Yes – also pretty girls – cousins of his house, and perhaps not of his house. One kiss that he gives back again and remembers will cure all this nonsense, or else—‘
‘Or else what? Remember he does not know that he knows.’
‘I know that. Or else, if nothing happens he will become immersed in the trade and the financial speculation like the rest. It must be so. You can see that it must be so. But the woman will come first, I think.’
There was a rap at the door, and Charlie charged in impetuously. He had been released from office, and by the look in his eyes I could see that he had come over for a long talk; most probably with poems in his pockets. Charlie’s poems were very wearying, but sometimes they led him to speak about the galley.
Grish Chunder looked at him keenly for a minute.
‘I beg your pardon,’ Charlie said uneasily; ‘I didn’t know you had any one with you.’
‘I am going,’ said Grish Chunder.
He drew me into the lobby as he departed.
‘That is your man,’ he said quickly. ‘I tell you he will never speak all you wish. That is rot – bosh. But he would be most good to make to see things. Suppose now we pretend that it was only play’-I had never seen Grish Chunder so excited – ‘and pour the ink-pool into his hand. Eh, what do you think? I tell you that he could see anything that a man could see. Let me get the ink and the camphor. He is a seer and he will tell us very many things.’
‘He may be all you say, but I’m not going to trust him to your gods and devils.’
‘It will not hurt him. He will only feel a little stupid and dull when he wakes up. You have seen boys look into the ink-pool before.’
‘That is the reason why I am not going to see it any more. You’d better go, Grish Chunder.’
He went, insisting far down the staircase that it was throwing away my only chance of looking into the future.
This left me unmoved, for I was concerned for the past, and no peering of hypnotized boys into mirrors and ink-pools would help me to that. But I recognized Grish Chunder’s point of view and sympathized with it.
‘What a big black brute that was!’ said Charlie, when I returned to him. ‘Well, look here, I’ve just done a poem; did it instead of playing dominoes after lunch. May I read it?’
‘Let me read it to myself.’
‘Then you miss the proper expression. Besides, you always make my things sound as if the rhymes were all wrong.’
‘Read it aloud, then. You’re like the rest of ’em.’
Charlie mouthed me his poem, and it was not much worse than the average of his verses. He had been reading his books faithfully, but he was not pleased when I told him that I preferred my Longfellow undiluted with Charlie.
Then we began to go through the MS line by line; Charlie parrying every objection and correction with:
‘Yes, that may be better, but you don’t catch what I’m driving at.’
Charlie was, in one way at least, very like one kind of poet.
There was a pencil scrawl at the back of the paper and ‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘Oh that’s not poetry at all. It’s some rot I wrote last night before I went to bed, and it was too much bother to hunt for rhymes; so I made it a sort of blank verse instead.’
Here is Charlie’s ‘blank verse.’
‘We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low.
Will you never let us go?
We ate bread and onions when you took towns, or ran aboard quickly when you were beaten back by the foe,
The captains walked up and down the deck in fair weather singing songs, but we were below,
We fainted with our chins on the oars and you did not see that we were idle for we still swung to and fro.
Will you never let us go?
The salt made the oar-handles like shark-skin; our knees were cut to the bone with salt cracks; our hair was stuck to our foreheads; and our lips were cut to our gums and you whipped us because we could not row.
Will you never let us go?
But in a little time we shall run out of the portholes as the water runs along the oar-blade, and though you tell the others to row after us you will never catch us till you catch the oar-thresh and tie up the winds in the belly of the sail. Aho!
Will you never let us go?
‘H’m. What’s oar-thresh, Charlie?’
‘The water washed up by the oars. That’s the sort of song they might sing in the galley y’ know. Aren’t you ever going to finish that story and give me some of the profits?’
‘It depends on yourself. If you had only told me more about your hero in the first instance it might have been finished by now. You’re so hazy in your notions.’
‘I only want to give you the general notion of it – the knocking about from place to place and the fighting and all that. Can’t you fill in the rest yourself? Make the hero save a girl on a pirate-galley and marry her or do something.’
‘You’re a really helpful collaborator. I suppose the hero went through some few adventures before he married.’
‘Well then, make him a very artful card – a low sort of man – a sort of political man who went about making treaties and breaking them-a black-h
aired chap who hid behind the mast when the, fighting began.’
‘But you said the other day that he was red-haired.’
‘I couldn’t have. Make him black-haired of course. You’ve no imagination.’
Seeing that I had just discovered the entire principles upon which the half-memory falsely called imagination is based, I felt entitled to laugh, but forbore, for the sake of the tale.
‘You’re right. You’re the man with imagination. A black-haired chap in a decked ship,’ I said.
‘No, an open ship – like a big boat.’
This was maddening.
‘Your ship has been built and designed, closed and decked in; you said so yourself,’ I protested.
‘No, no, not that ship. That was open or half-decked because—By Jove, you’re right. You made me think of the hero as a red-haired chap. Of course if he were red, the ship would be an open one with painted sails.’
Surely, I thought, he would remember now that he had served in two galleys at least – in a three-decked Greek one under the black-haired ‘political man’, and again in a Viking’s open sea-serpent under the man ‘red as a red bear’ who went to Markland. The devil prompted me to speak.
‘Why, “of course”, Charlie?’ said I.
‘I don’t know. Are you making fun of me?’
The current was broken for the time being. I took up a notebook and pretended to make many entries in it.
‘It’s a pleasure to work with an imaginative chap like yourself,’ I said, after a pause. ‘The way that you’ve brought out the character of the hero is simply wonderful.’
‘Do you think so?’ he answered, with a pleased flush. ‘I often tell myself that there’s more in me than my mo—than people think.’
‘There’s an enormous amount in you.’
‘Then, won’t you let me send an essay on The Ways of Bank-Clerks to Tit-Bits, and get the guinea prize?’
The Wish House and Other Stories Page 26