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By gum!

"'Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.'"

be repeated twenty times, walking up and down the room and
forgetting me. "But I can understand it too," he said to himself. "I
don't know how to thank you for that fiver. And this; listen-

"'I remember the black wharves and the ships
And the sea-tides tossing free,
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.'

I haven't braved any dangers, but I feel as if I knew all about it."

"You certainly seem to have a grip of the sea. Have you ever seen
it?"

"When I was a little chap I went to Brighton once; we used to live
in Coventry, though, before we came to London. I never saw it,

'When descends on the Atlantic
The gigantic
Storm-wind of the Equinox.'"

He shook me by the shoulder to make me understand the passion
that was shaking himself.

"When that storm comes," he continued, "I think that all the oars in
the ship that I was talking about get broken, and the rowers have
their chests smashed in by the bucking oar-heads. By the way,
have you done anything with that notion of mine yet?"

"No. I was waiting to hear more of it from you. Tell me how in the
world you re so certain about the fittings of the ship. You know
nothing of ships."

"I don't know. It's as real as anything to me until I try to write it
down. I was thinking about it only last night in bed, after you had
loaned me 'Treasure Island'; and I made up a a whole lot of new
things to go into the story."

"What sort of things?"

"About the food the men ate; rotten figs and black beans and wine
in a skin bag, passed from bench to bench."

"Was the ship built so long ago as that?"

"As what? I don't know whether it was long ago or not. It's only a
notion, but sometimes it seems just as real as if it was true. Do I
bother you with talking about it?"

"Not in the least. Did you make up anything else?"

"Yes, but it's nonsense." Charlie flushed a little.

"Never mind; let's hear about it."

"Well, I was thinking over the story, and after awhile I got out of
bed and wrote down on a piece of paper the sort of stuff the men
might be supposed to scratch on their oars with the edges of their
handcuffs. It seemed to make the thing more lifelike. It is so real
to me, y'know."

"Have you the paper on you?"

"Ye-es, but what's the use of showing it? It's only a lot of
scratches. All the same, we might have 'em reproduced in the
book on the front page."

"I'll attend to those details. Show me what your men wrote."

He pulled out of his pocket a sheet of note-paper, with a single
line of scratches upon it, and I put this carefully away.

"What is it supposed to mean in English?" I said.

"Oh, I don't know. Perhaps it means 'I'm beastly tired.' It's great
nonsence," he repeated, "but all those men in the ship seem as real
people to me. Do do something to the notion soon; I should like
to see it written and printed."

"But all you've told me would make a long book."

"Make it then. You've only to sit down and write it out."

"Give me a little time. Have you any more notions?"

"Not just now. I'm reading all the books I've bought. They're
splendid."

When he had left I looked at the sheet of note-paper with the
inscription upon it. Then I took my head tenderly between both
hands, to make certain that it was not coming off or turning round.

Then . . . but there seemed to be no interval between quitting my
rooms and finding myself arguing with a policeman outside a door
marked Private in a corridor of the British Museum. All I
demanded, as politely as possible, was "the Greek antiquity man."
The policeman knew nothing except the rules of the Museum, and
it became necessary to forage through all the houses and offices
inside the gates. An elderly gentleman called away from his lunch
put an end to my search by holding the note-paper between finger
and thumb and sniffing at it scornfully.

"What does this mean? H'mm," said he. "So far as I can ascertain
it is an attempt to write extremely corrupt Greek on the part"-here
he glared at me with intention-"of an extremely illiterate-ah-
person." He read slowly from the paper, "Pollock, Erckman,
Tauchnitz, Henniker"- four names familiar to me.

"Can you tell me what the corruption is supposed to mean-the gist
of the thing?" I asked.

"I have been-many times-overcome with weariness in this
particular employment. That is the meaning." He returned me the
paper, and I fled without a word of thanks, explanation, or
apology.

I might have been excused for forgetting much. To me of all men
had been given the chance to write the most marvelous tale in the
world, nothing less than the story of a Greek galley-slave, as told
by himself. Small wonder that his dreaming had seemed real to
Charlie. The Fates that are 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
m~here I capered among the dumb gods of Egypt and laughed in
their battered faces-with material to make my tale sur~so sure that
the world would hail it as an impudent and vamped fict~on. And
I-I alone would know that it was absolutely and literally true. 1,-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 Sag 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 Songs of Emar
Tamberskelver and the verse:

"Emar 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 have known how the ships crash and the oars rip
out and go z-zzp all along the line? Why only the other night. . . .

But go back please and read 'The Skerry of Shrieks' again."

"No, I'm tired. Let's talk. What happened the other night?"

"I had an awful nightmare about that galley of ours. I dreamed I
was drowned in a fight. You see we ran alongside another ship in
harbor. The water was dead still except where our oars whipped it
up. You know where I always sit in the galley?" He spoke haltingly
at first, under a fine English fear of being laughed at.

"No. That's news to me," I answered, meekly, my heart beginning
to beat.

"On the fourth oar from the bow on the right side on the upper
deck. There were four of us at the oar, all chained. I remember
watching the water and trying to get my handcuffs off before the
row began. Then we closed up on the other ship, and all their
fighting men jumped over our bulwarks, and my bench broke and I
was pinned down with the three other fellows on top of me, and
the big oar jammed across our backs."

"Well?" Charlie's eyes were alive and alight. He was looking at the
wall behind my chair.

"I don't know how we fought. The men were trampling all over
my back, and I lay low. Then our rowers on the left side-tied to
their oars, you know-began to yell and back water. I could hear
the water sizzle, and we spun round like a cockchafer and I knew,
lying where I was, that there was a galley coming up bow-on, to
ram us on the left side. I could just lift up my head and see her sail
over the bulwarks. We wanted to meet her bow to bow, but it was
too late. We could only turn a little bit because the galley on our
right had hooked herself on to us and stopped our moving. Then,
by gum! there was a crash! Our left oars began to break as the
other galley, the moving one y'know, stuck her nose into them.

Then the lower-deck oars shot up through the deck-planking, but
first, and one of them jumped clean up into the air and came down
again close to my head."

"How was that managed?"

"The moving galley's bow was plunking them back through their
own oarholes, and I could hear the devil of a shindy in the decks
below. Then her nose caught us nearly in the middle, and we tilted
sideways, and the fellows in the right-hand galley unhitched their
hooks and ropes, and threw things on to our upper deck-arrows,
and hot pitch or something that stung, and we went up and up and
up on the left side, and the right side dipped, and I twisted my head
round and saw the water stand still as it topped the right bulwarks,
and then it curled over and crashed down on the whole lot of us on
the right side, and I felt it hit my back, and I woke."

"One minute, Charlie. When the sea topped the bulwarks, what did
it look like?" I had my reasons for asking. A man of my
acquaintance had once gone down with a leaking ship in a still sea,
and had seen the water-level pause for an instant ere it fell on the
deck.

"It looked just like a banjo-string drawn tight, and it seemed to stay
there for years," said Charlie.

Exactly! The other man had said:

"It looked like a silver wire laid down along the bulwarks, and I
thought it was never going to break." He had paid everything
except the bare life for this little valueless piece of knowledge, and
I had traveled ten thousand weary miles to meet him and take his
knowledge at second hand. But Charlie, the bank-clerk, on
twenty-five shillings a week, he who bad never been out of sight of
a London omnibus, knew it all. It was no consolation to me that
once in his lives he had been forced to die for his gains. I also
must have died scores of times, but hebina me, because I could
have used my knowledge, the doors were shut.

"And then?" I said, trying to put away the devil of envy.

"The funny thing was, though, in all the mess I didn't feel a bit
astonished or frightened. It seemed as if I'd been in a good many
fights, because I told my next man so when the row began. But
that cad of an overseer on my deck wouldn't unloose our chains
and give us a chance. He always said that we'd all he set free after
a battle, but we never were; We never were." Charlie shook his
head mournfully.

"What a scoundrel!"

"I should say he was. He never gave us enough to eat, and
sometimes we were so thirsty that we used to drink salt-water. I
can taste that salt-water still.''

"Now tell me something about the harbor where the fight was
fought."

"I didn't dream about that. I know it was a harbor, though; becabse
we were tied up to a ring on a white wall and all the face of the
stone under water was covered with wood to prevent our ram
getting chipped when the tide made us rock."

"That's curious. Our hero commanded the galley? Didn't he?"

"Didn't he just! He stood by the bows and shouted like a good 'un.
He was the man who killed the overseer."

"But you were all drowned together, Charlie, weren't you?"

"I can't make that fit quite," he said with a puzzled look. "The
galley must have gone down with all hands and yet I fancy that the
hero went on living afterward. Perhaps he climbed into the
attacking ship. I wouldn't see that, of course. I was dead, you
know."

He shivered slightly and protested that he could remember no
more.

I did not press him further, but to satisfy myself that he lay in
ignorance of the workings of his own mind, deliberately
introduced him to Mortimer Collins's "Transmigration," and gave
him a sketch of the plot before he opened the pages.

"What rot it all is!" he said, frankly, at the end of an hour. "I don't
understand his nonsense about the Red Planet Mars and the King,
and the rest of it. Chuck me the Longfellow again."

I handed him the book and wrote out as much as I could remember
of his description of the sea-fight, appealing to him from time to
time for confirmation of fact or detail. He would answer without
raising his eyes from the book, as assuredly as though all his
knowledge lay before flint on the printed page. I spoke under the
normal key of my voice that the current might not be broken, and I
know that he was not aware of what he was saying, for his
thoughts were out on the sea with Longfellow.

"Charlie," I asked, "when the rowers on the galleys mutinied how
did they kill their overseers?"

"Tore up the benches and brained 'em. That happened when a
heavy sea was running. An overseer on the lower deck slipped
from the centre plank and fell among the rowers. They choked him
to death against the side of the ship with their chained hands quite
quietly, and it was too dark for the other overseer to see what had
happened. When he asked, he was pulled down too and choked,
and the lower deck fought their way up deck by deck, with the
pieces of the broken benches banging behind 'em. How they
howled!"

"And what happened after that?"

"I don't know. The hero went away-red hair and red beard and all.

That was after he had captured our galley, I think"

The sound of my voice irritated him, and he motioned slightly with
his left hand as a man does when interruption jars.

"You never told me he was redheaded before, or that he captured
your galley," I said, after a discreet interval.

Charlie did not raise his eyes.

"He was as red as a red bear," said he, abstractedly. "He came
from the north; they said so in the galley when he looked for
rowers-riot slaves, but free men. Afterward-years and years
afterward-news came from another ship, or else he came back"-His
lips moved in silence. He was rapturously retasting some poem
before him.

"Where had he been, then?" I was almost whispering that the
sentence might come gentle to whichever section of Charlie's brain
was working on my behalf.

"To the Beaches-the Long and

Wonderful Beaches!" was the reply, after a minute of silence.

"To Furdurstrandi?" I asked, tingling from head to foot.

"Yes, to Furdurstrandi," he pronounced the word in a new fashion
"And I too saw"- The voice failed.

"Do you know what you have said?" I shouted, incautiously.

He lifted his eyes, fully roused now. "No!" he snapped. "I wish
you'd let a chap go on reading. Hark to this:

"'But Othere, the old sea captain,
He neither paused nor stirred
Till the king listened, and then
'Once more took up his pen
And wrote down every word.

"'And to the King of the Saxons
In witness of the truth,
Raising his noble head,
He stretched his brown hand and said,
"Behold this walrus tooth."

By Jove, what chaps those must have been, to go sailing all over
the shop never knowing where they'd fetch the land! Hah!"

"Charlie," I pleaded, "if you'll only he sensible for a minute or two
I'll make our hero in our tale every inch as good as Othere."

"Umph! Longfellow wrote that poem. I don't care about writing
things any more. I want to read." He was thoroughly out of tune
now, and raging over my own ill-luck, I left him.

Conceive yourself at the door of the world's treasure-house
guarded by a child-an idle irresponsible child playing knuckle-
bones-on whose favor depends the gift of the key, and you will
imagine one-half my torment. Till that evening Charlie had
spoken nothing that might not lie within the experiences of a
Greek galley-slave. But now, or there was no virtue in books, he
had talked of some desperate adventure of the Vikings, of Thorfin
Karlsefne's sailing to Wineland, which is America, in the ninth or
tenth century. The battle in the harbor he had seen; and his own
death he had described. But this was a much more startling plunge
into the past. Was it possible that he had skipped half a dozen
lives and was then dimly remembering some episode of a thousand
years later? It was a maddening jumble, and the worst of it was
that Charlie Mears in his normal condition was the last person in
the world to clear it up. I could only wait and watch, but I went to
bed that night full of the wildest imaginings. There was nothing
that was not possible if Charlie's detestable memory only held
good.

I might rewrite the Saga of Thorfin Karlsefne as it had never been
written before, might tell the story of the first discovery of
America, myself the discoverer. But I was entirely at Charlie's
mercy, and so long as there was a three-and-six-penny Bohn
volume within his reach Charlie would not tell. I dared not curse
him openly; I hardly dared jog his memory, for I was dealing with
the experiences of a thousand years ago, told through the mouth of
a boy of today; and a boy of to-day is affected by every change of
tone and gust of opinion, so that he lies even when he desires to
speak the truth.

I saw no more of him for nearly a week. When next I met him it
was in Gracechurch Street with a billbook 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 bro""n marble. A barge drifted
under the steamer's stern and a lonely 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 in 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 Leif'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 the 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 walked round 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 forego all profit and
honor 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.

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