The Wish House and Other Stories (31 page)

I fancy that his mother did not encourage his aspirations; and I
know that his writing-table at home was the edge of his washstand. This he told me almost at the outset of our acquaintance – when he was ravaging my bookshelves, and a little before I was implored to speak the truth as to his chances of ‘writing something really great, you know’. Maybe I encouraged him too much, for, one night, he called on me, his eyes flaming with excitement, and said breathlessly:

‘Do you mind – can you let me stay here and write all this evening? I won’t interrupt you, I won’t really. There’s no place for me to write at my mother’s.’

‘What’s the trouble?’ I said, knowing well what that trouble was.

‘I’ve a notion in my head that would make the most splendid story that was ever written. Do let me write it out here. It’s
such
a notion!’

There was no resisting the appeal. I set him a table; he hardly thanked me, but plunged into his work at once. For half an hour the pen scratched without stopping. Then Charlie sighed and tugged his hair. The scratching grew slower, there were more erasures, and at last ceased. The finest story in the world would not come forth.

‘It looks such awful rot now,’ he said mournfully. ‘And yet it seemed so good when I was thinking about it. What’s wrong?’

I could not dishearten him by saying the truth. So I answered: ‘Perhaps you don’t feel in the mood for writing.’

‘Yes I do – except when I look at this stuff. Ugh!’

‘Read me what you’ve done,’ I said.

He read, and it was wondrous bad, and he paused at all the specially turgid sentences, expecting a little approval; for he was proud of those sentences, as I knew he would be.

‘It needs compression,’ I suggested cautiously.

‘I hate cutting my things down. I don’t think you could alter a word here without spoiling the sense. It reads better aloud than when I was writing it.’

‘Charlie, you’re suffering from an alarming disease afflicting a numerous class. Put the thing by, and tackle it again in a week.’

‘I want to do it at once. What do you think of it?’

‘How can I judge from a half-written tale? Tell me the story as it lies in your head.’

Charlie told, and in the telling there was everything that his ignorance had so carefully prevented from escaping into the written word. I looked at him, wondering whether it were possible that he did not know the originality, the power of the notion that had come in his way? It was distinctly a Notion among notions. Men had been puffed up with pride by ideas not a tithe as excellent and practicable.
But Charlie babbled on serenely, interrupting the current of pure fancy with samples of horrible sentences that he purposed to use. I heard him out to the end. It would be folly to allow his thought to remain in his own inept hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be done indeed; but, oh so much!

‘What do you think?’ he said at last. ‘I fancy I shall call it “The Story of a Ship”.’

‘I think the idea’s pretty good; but you won’t be able to handle it for ever so long. Now I—‘

‘Would it be of any use to you? Would you care to take it? I should be proud,’ said Charlie promptly.

There are few things sweeter in this world than the guileless, hot-headed, intemperate, open admiration of a junior. Even a woman in her blindest devotion does not fall into the gait of the man she adores, tilt her bonnet to the angle at which he wears his hat, or interlard her speech with his pet oaths. And Charlie did all these things. Still it was necessary to salve my conscience before I possessed myself of Charlie’s thoughts.

‘Let’s make a bargain. I’ll give you a fiver for the notion,’ I said.

Charlie became a bank-clerk at once.

Oh, that’s impossible. Between two pals, you know, if I may call you so, and speaking as a man of the world, I couldn’t. Take the notion if it’s any use to you. I’ve heaps more.’

He had – none knew this better than I – but they were the notions of other men.

‘Look at it as a matter of business – between men of the world,’ I returned. ‘Five pounds will buy you any number of poetry-books. Business is business, and you may be sure I shouldn’t give that price unless—‘

‘Oh, if you put it
that
way,’ said Charlie, visibly moved by the thought of the books. The bargain was clinched with an agreement that he should at unstated intervals come to me with all the notions that he possessed, should have a table of his own to write at, and unquestioned right to inflict upon me all his poems and fragments of poems. Then I said, ‘Now tell me how you came by this idea.’

‘It came by itself.’ Charlie’s eyes opened a little.

‘Yes, but you told me a great deal about the hero that you must have read before somewhere.’

‘I haven’t any time for reading, except when you let me sit here, and on Sundays I’m on my bicycle or down the river all day. There’s nothing wrong about the hero, is there?’

‘Tell me again and I shall understand clearly. You say that your hero went pirating. How did he live?’

‘He was on the lower deck of this ship-thing that I was telling you about.’

‘What sort of ship?’

‘It was the kind rowed with oars, and the sea spurts through the oar-holes and the men row sitting up to their knees in water. Then there’s a bench running down between the two lines of oars and an overseer with a whip walks up and down the bench to make the men work.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘It’s in the tale. There’s a rope running overhead, looped to the upper deck, for the overseer to catch hold of when the ship rolls. When the overseer misses the rope once and falls among the rowers, remember the hero laughs at him and gets licked for it. He’s chained to his oar of course – the hero.’

‘How is he chained?’

‘With an iron band round his waist fixed to the bench he sits on, and a sort of handcuff on his left wrist chaining him to the oar. He’s on the lower deck where the worst men are sent, and the only light comes from the hatchways and through the oar-holes. Can’t you imagine the sunlight just squeezing through between the handle and the hole and wobbling about as the ship moves?’

‘I can, but I can’t imagine your imagining it.’

‘How could it be any other way? Now you listen to me. The long oars on the upper deck are managed by four men to each bench, the lower ones by three, and the lowest of all by two. Remember it’s quite dark on the lowest deck and all the men there go mad. When a man dies at his oar on that deck he isn’t thrown overboard, but cut up in his chains and stuffed through the oar-hole in little pieces.’

‘Why?’ I demanded amazed, not so much at the information as the tone of command in which it was flung out.

‘To save trouble and to frighten the others. It needs two overseers to drag a man’s body up to the top deck; and if the men at the lower deck oars were left alone, of course they’d stop rowing and try to pull up the benches by all standing up together in their chains.’

‘You’ve a most provident imagination. Where have you been reading about galleys and galley-slaves?’

‘Nowhere that I remember. I row a little when I get the chance. But, perhaps, if you say so, I may have read something.’

He went away shortly afterwards to deal with booksellers, and I wondered how a bank-clerk aged twenty could put into my hands
with a profligate abundance of detail, all given with absolute assurance, the story of extravagant and bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, and death in unnamed seas. He had led his hero a desperate dance through revolt against the overseers, to command of a ship of his own, and at last to the establishment of a kingdom on an island ‘somewhere in the sea, you know’; and, delighted with my paltry five pounds, had gone out to buy the notions of other men, that these might teach him how to write. I had the consolation of knowing that this notion was mine by right of purchase, and I thought that I could make something of it.

When next he came to me he was drunk – royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors. Most of all was he drunk with Longfellow.

‘Isn’t it splendid? Isn’t it superb?’ he cried, after hasty greetings. ‘Listen to this –

he 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 haven’t braved any dangers, but I feel as if I know 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,

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 oar-heads bucking. 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 lent me
Treasure Island;
and I made up 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 life-like. 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 notepaper, 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. I mean it to mean “I’m beastly tired”. It’s great nonsense,’ he repeated, ‘but all those men in the ship seem as real 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 notepaper 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 notepaper 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, Erckmann, 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. This 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 marvellous 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 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 of the Egyptian court till a policeman saw me and took steps in my direction.