The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Other Ghost Stories
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 had 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
behind 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 be 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; because 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--not 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 be 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 to-day; 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 brown
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?”