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There was no answer. The flaming colors 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, 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 Sachi Durpan, and intrigued with the wives of his
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 in your mind? You do not talk."

"Grish Chunder, you've been too well educated to believe in a God,
haven't vou?"

"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 bang up tulsi and feast the purohit, and take you back into
caste again and make a good khuttrj of you again, you advanced
social Free-thinker. 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 Grish 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 Malechk-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 h's
legs as he sat on my table. He was speaking in 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. Osh, 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 ap~ pear 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 honor 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 in-stance."

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 speculations 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 talk 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 de. parted.

"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, declaring 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 do 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; dil 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 book 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 't 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 a 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 sharkskin; 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 thr oarblade, 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

"THE FINEST STORY IN THE WORLD"183

~hat. Can't you fill in the rest your-self? 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-haired 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 pre tended 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 m~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?"

"That wasn't exactly what I meant, old fellow: perhaps it would be
better to wait a little and go ahead with the galley-story."

"Ah, but I sha'n't get the credit of that. Tit-Bits would publish my
name and address if I win. What are you grinning at? They
wou'd."

"I know it. Suppose you go for a walk. I want to look through my
notes about our story."

Now this reprehensible youth who left me, a little hurt and put
back, might for aught he or I knew have been one of the crew of
the Argo-had been certainly slave or comrade to Thorfin
Karlsefne. Therefore he was deeply interested in guinea
competitions. Remembering what Grish Chunder had said I
laughed aloud. The Lords of Life and Death would never allow
Charlie Mears to speak with full knowledge of his pasts, and I
must even piece out what he had told me with my own poor
inventions while Charlie wrote of the ways of bank-clerks.

I got together and placed on one file all my notes; and the net
result was not cheering. I read them a second time. There was
nothing that might not have been compiled at second-hand from
other people's books-except, perhaps, the story of the fight in the
harbor. The adventures of a Viking bad been written many times
before; the history of a Greek galley-slave was no new thing, and
though I wrote both, who could challenge or confirm the accuracy
of my details? I might as well tell a tale of two thousand years
hence. The Lords of Life and Death were as cunning as Grish
Chunder had hinted. They would allow nothing to escape that
might trouble or make easy the minds of men. Though I was
convinced of this, yet I could not leave the tale alone. Exaltation
followed reaction, not once, but twenty times in the next few
weeks. My moods varied with the March sunlight and flying
clouds. By night or in the beauty of a spring morning I perceived
that I could write that tale and shift continents thereby. In the wet,
windy afternoons, I saw that the tale might indeed be written, but
would be nothing more than a faked, false-varnished, sham-rusted
piece of Wardour Street work at the end. Then I blessed Charlie in
many ways-though it was no fault of his. He seemed to be busy
with prize competitions, and I saw less and less of him as the
weeks went by and the earth cracked and grew ripe to spring, and
the buds swelled in their sheaths. He did not care to read or talk of
what he had read, and there was a new ring of self-assertion in his
voice. I hardly cared to remind him of the galley when we met;
but Charlie alluded to it on every occasion, always as a story from
which money was to be made.

"I think I deserve twenty-five per cent., don't I, at least," be said,
with beautiful frankness. "I supplied all the ideas, didn't I?"

This greediness for silver was a new side in his nature. I assumed
that it had been developed in the City, where Charlie was picking
up the curious nasal drawl of the underbred City man.

"When the thing's done we'll talk about it. I can't make anything of
it at present. Red-haired or black-haired hero are equally difficult."

He was sitting by the fire staring at the red coals. "I can't
understand what you find so difficult. It's all as clean as mud to
me," he replied. A jet of gas puffed out between the bars, took
light and whistled softly. "Suppose we take the red-haired hero's
adventures first, from the time that he came south to my galley and
captured it and sailed to the Beaches."

I knew better now than to interrupt Charlie. I was out of reach of
pen and paper, and dared not move to get them lest I should break
the current. The gas-jet puffed and whinnied, Charlie's voice
dropped almost to a whisper, and he told a tale of the sail. mg of
an open galley to Furdurstrandi, of sunsets on the open sea, seen
under the curve of the one sail evening aftet evening when the
galley's beak was notched into the centre of the sinking disc, and
"we sailed by that for we had no other guide," quoth Charlie. He
spoke of a landing on an island and explorations in its woods,
where the crew killed three men whom they found asleep under
the pines. Their ghosts, Charlie said, followed the galley,
swimming and choking in the water, and the crew cast lots and
threw one of their number overboard as a sacrifice to the strange
gods whom they bad offended. Then they ate sea-weed when their
provisions failed, and their legs swelled, and their leader, the
red-haired man, killed two rowers who mutinied, and after a year
spent among the woods they set sail for their own country, and a
wind that never failed carried them back so safely that they all
slept at night. This and much more Charlie told. Sometimes the
voice fell so low that I could not catch the words, though every
nerve was on the strain. He spoke of their leader, the red-haired
man, as a pagan speaks of his God; for it was he who cheered them
and slew them impartially as he thought best for their needs; and it
was he who steered them for three days among floating ice, each
floe crowded with strange beasts that "tried to sail with us,' said
Charlie, "and we beat them back with the handles of the oars."

The gas-jet went out, a burned coal gave way, and the fire settled
down with a tiny crash to the bottom of the grate. Charlie ceased
speaking, and I said no word.

"By Jove!" he said, at last, shaking his head. "I've been staring at
the fire till I'm dizzy. What was I going to say.

"Something about the galley."

"I remember now. It's 25 per cent. of the profits, isn't it?"

"It's anything you like when I've done the tale."

"I wanted to be sure of that. I must go now. I've, I've an
appointment." And he left me.

Had my eyes not been held I might have know that that broken
muttering over the fire was the swan-song of Charlie Mears. But I
thought it the prelude to fuller revelation. At last and at last I
should cheat the Lords of Life and Death!

When next Charlie came to me I received him with rapture. He
was nervous and embarrassed, but his eyes were very full of light,
and his lips a little parted.

"I've done a poem," he said; and then quickly: "it's the best I've
ever done. Read it." He thrust it into my hand and retreated to the
window.

I groaned inwardly. It would be the work of half an hour to
criticise-that is to say praise-the poem sufficiently to please
Charlie. Then I had good reason to groan, for Charlie, discarding
his favorite centipede metres, had launched into shorter and
choppier verse, and verse with a motive at the back of it. This is
what I read:

"The day is most fair, the cheery wind
Halloos behind the hill,
Where be bends the wood as seemeth good,
And the sapling to his will!
Riot O wind; there is that in my blood
That would not have thee still!

"She gave me herself, O Earth, O Sky:
Grey sea, she is mine alone I
Let the sullen boulders bear my cry,
And rejoice tho' they be but stone!

'Mine! I have won her O good brown earth,
Make merry! 'Tis bard on Spring;
Make merry; my love is doubly worth
All worship your fields can bring!
Let the bind tbat tills you feel my mirth
At the early harrowing."

"Yes, it's the early harrowing, past a doubt," I said, with a dread at
my heart. Charlie smiled, but did not answer.

"Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad;
I am victor. Greet me O Sun,
Dominant master and absolute lord
Over the soul of one!"

"Well?" said Charlie, looking over my shoulder.

I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed, when he silently
laid a photograph on the paper-the photograph of a girl with a
curly head, and a foolish slack mouth.

"Isn't it-isn't it wonderful?" he whispered, pink to the tips of his
ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. "I didn't know; I
didn't think-it came like a thunderclap."

"Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie?"

"My God-she-she loves mel" He sat down repeating the last words
to himself. I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders
already bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and bow
he had loved in his past lives.

"What will your mother say?" I asked, cheerfully.

"I don't care a damn what she says."

At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should,
properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I
told him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must
have described to the newly named beasts the glory and tenderness
and beauty of Eve. Incidentally I learned that She was a
tobacconist's assistant with a weakness for pretty dress, and had
told him four or five times already that She had never been kissed
by a man before.

Charlie spoke on, and on, and on; while I, separated from him by
thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now
I understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so
carefully behind us. It is that we may not remember our first
wooings. Were it not so, our world would be without inhabitants
in a hundred years.

"Now, about that galley-story," 1 said, still more cheerfully, in a
pause in the rush of the speech.

Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. "The galley-what
galley? Good heavens, don't joke, man! This is serious! You don't
know how serious it is!"

Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman
that kills remembrance, and the finest story' in the world would
never be written.

VOLUME IV UNDER THE DEODARS

THE EDUCATION OF OTIS YEERE

I

In the pleasant orchard-closes
"God bless all our gains," say we;
Put "~1ay God bless all our losses,"
Better suits with our degree.
-The Lost Bower.


THIS is the history of a failure; but the woman who failed said that
it might be an instructive tale
to put into print for the benefit of the younger generation. The
younger generation does not want
instruction, being perfectly willing to instruct if any one will listen
to it. None the less, here
begins the story where every right-minded story should begin, that
is to say at Simla, where all
things begin and many come to an evil end.

The mistake was due to a very clever woman making a blunder
and not retrieving it. Men are
licensed to stumble, but a clever woman's mistake is outside the
regular course of Nature and
Providence; since all good people know that a woman is the only
infallible thing in this world,
except Government Paper of the '70 issue, bearing interest at four
and a half per cent. Yet, we
have to remember that six consecutive days of rebearsing the
leading part of The Feilen A'~ge~,
at the New Gaiety Theatre where the plaster is not yet properly
dry, might have brought about an
unhingement of spirits which, again, might have led to
eccentricities.

Mrs. Hauksbee came to "The Foundry" to tiffin with Mrs.
Mallowe, her

13"
one bosom friend, for she was in nn sense "a woman's woman."
And it was a woman's tiffin, the
door shut to all the world; and they both talked chiflons, which is
French for Mysteries.

"I've enjoyed an interval of sanity," Mrs. Flauksbee announced,
after tiffin was over and the two
were comfortably settled in the little writing-room that opened out
of Mrs. Mallowe's bedroom.

"My dear girl, what has he done?" said Mrs. Mallowe, sweetly. It
is noticeable that ladies of a
certain age call each other "dear girl," just as commissioners of
twenty-eight years' standing
address their equals in the Civil List as "my boy."

"There's no he in the case. Who am I that an imaginary man should
be always credited to me?
Am I an Apache?'1

"No, dear, but somebody's scalp is generally drying at your
wigwam-door. Soaking, rather."

This was an allusion to the Hawley Boy, who was in the habit of
riding all across Simla in the
Rains, to call on Mrs. Hauksbee. That lady laughed.

"For my sins, the Aide at Tyrconnel last night told me off to The
Mussuck. Hsh! Don't laugh.
One of my most devoted admirers. When the duff came
-some one really ought to teach them to make pudding at
Tyrconnel-The Mussuck was at liberty
to attend to me."

"Sweet soul! I know his appetite," said Mrs. Mallowe. "Did he, oh
did he, begin his wooing?"

188
WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING


"By a special mercy of Providence, no. He explained his
importance as a Pillar of the Empire. I
didn't laugh."

"Lucy, I don't believe you."

"Ask Captain Sangar; he was on the other side. Well, as I was
saying, The Mussuck dilated."

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