The Phantom 'Rickshaw, and Other Ghost Stories
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 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 the 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 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-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
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?”
“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 _would_.”
“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 had 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,” he 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 sailing of an open galley to
Furdurstrandi, of sunsets on the open sea, seen under the curve of the
one sail evening after 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 had 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 he 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!
Let the sullen boulders hear my cry,
And rejoice tho’ they be but stone!