No More Learning

"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 today; and a boy of today 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.