Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (42 page)

There was no answer. The flaming colours 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 there, 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 recognised a casual acquaintance, a young Bengali law student, called Grish Chunder, whose father had sent him to England to become civilised. 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 the
Sachi Durpan
,and intrigued with the wives of his fourteen-year-old 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 on your mind? You do not talk.'

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

‘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 hang up
tulsi
and feast the
purohit,
and take you back into the caste again, and make a good
khuttri
of you again, you advanced Freethinker. 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
Mlechh
– an outcaste. By Jove, that is
most
peculiar!'

‘Outcaste 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 his legs as he sat on my table. He was speaking in his 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. Oah, yess! But
if
hespoke 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 call sacked 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 appear 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 honour 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 instance. They kiss you behind doors.'

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 speculation 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 the office, and by the look in his eyesI 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 speak 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 departed.

‘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' – 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, insisting 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 hypnotised boys into mirrors and ink-pools would help me to that. But I recognised Grish Chunder's point of view and sympathised 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 books 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 at all. It's some rot I wrote last night before Iwent to bed, and it was too much bother to hunt for rhymes; so I made it a sort of blank verse instead.'

Here is Charlie's ‘blank verse': –

‘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 uponwhich 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 shan'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 aback, might for aught he or I knew have been one of the crew of the Argo – had been certain 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 ray own poor inventions while Charlie wrote of the ways of bank-clerks.