No More Learning

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?