Indian Tales | Page 5

so careful to shut the doors of each successive life behind us
had, in this case, been neglectful, and Charlie was looking, though that
he did not know, where never man had been permitted to look with full
knowledge since Time began. Above all, he was absolutely ignorant of
the knowledge sold to me for five pounds; and he would retain that
ignorance, for bank-clerks do not understand metempsychosis, and a
sound commercial education does not include Greek. He would supply
me--here I capered among the dumb gods of Egypt and laughed in their
battered faces--with material to make my tale sure--so sure that the
world would hail it as an impudent and vamped fiction. And I--I alone
would know that it was absolutely and literally true. I--I alone held this
jewel to my hand for the cutting and polishing. Therefore I danced
again among the gods till a policeman saw me and took steps in my
direction.
It remained now only to encourage Charlie to talk, and here there was
no difficulty. But I had forgotten those accursed books of poetry. He
came to me time after time, as useless as a surcharged
phonograph--drunk on Byron, Shelley, or Keats. Knowing now what
the boy had been in his past lives, and desperately anxious not to lose
one word of his babble, I could not hide from him my respect and
interest. He misconstrued both into respect for the present soul of
Charlie Mears, to whom life was as new as it was to Adam, and interest
in his readings; and stretched my patience to breaking point by reciting
poetry--not his own now, but that of others. I wished every English
poet blotted out of the memory of mankind. I blasphemed the mightiest
names of song because they had drawn Charlie from the path of direct
narrative, and would, later, spur him to imitate them; but I choked

down my impatience until the first flood of enthusiasm should have
spent itself and the boy returned to his dreams.
"What's the use of my telling you what I think, when these chaps wrote
things for the angels to read?" he growled, one evening. "Why don't
you write something like theirs?"
"I don't think you're treating me quite fairly," I said, speaking under
strong restraint.
"I've given you the story," he said, shortly, replunging into "Lara."
"But I want the details."
"The things I make up about that damned ship that you call a galley?
They're quite easy. You can just make 'em up yourself. Turn up the gas
a little, I want to go on reading."
I could have broken the gas globe over his head for his amazing
stupidity. I could indeed make up things for myself did I only know
what Charlie did not know that he knew. But since the doors were shut
behind me I could only wait his youthful pleasure and strive to keep
him in good temper. One minute's want of guard might spoil a priceless
revelation; now and again he would toss his books aside--he kept them
in my rooms, for his mother would have been shocked at the waste of
good money had she seen them--and launched into his sea dreams,
Again I cursed all the poets of England. The plastic mind of the
bank-clerk had been overlaid, colored and distorted by that which he
had read, and the result as delivered was a confused tangle of other
voices most like the muttered song through a City telephone in the
busiest part of the day.
He talked of the galley--his own galley had he but known it--with
illustrations borrowed from the "Bride of Abydos." He pointed the
experiences of his hero with quotations from "The Corsair," and threw
in deep and desperate moral reflections from "Cain" and "Manfred,"
expecting me to use them all. Only when the talk turned on Longfellow
were the jarring cross-currents dumb, and I knew that Charlie was
speaking the truth as he remembered it.
"What do you think of this?" I said one evening, as soon as I
understood the medium in which his memory worked best, and, before
he could expostulate, read him the whole of "The Saga of King Olaf!"
He listened open-mouthed, flushed, his hands drumming on the back of
the sofa where he lay, till I came to the Song of Einar Tamberskelver

and the verse:
"Einar then, the arrow taking From the loosened string, Answered:
'That was Norway breaking 'Neath thy hand, O King.'"
He gasped with pure delight of sound.
"That's better than Byron, a little," I ventured.
"Better? Why it's _true!_ How could he have known?"
I went back and repeated:
"What was that?' said Olaf, standing On the quarter-deck, 'Something
heard I like the stranding Of a shattered wreck?'"
"How could he