No More Learning

"What's the use of my telling you what I think, when these chaps wrote
things for the angels to read? " he growled, one evening. "Why don't you
write something like theirs? "

"I don't think you're treating me quite fairly," I said, speaking under
strong restraint.

"I've given you the story," he said, shortly replunging into "Lara. "

"But I want the details. "

"The things I make up about that damned ship that you call a galley?
They're quite easy. You can just make 'em up yourself. Turn up the gas a
little, I want to go on reading. "

I could have broken the gas globe over his head for his amazing
stupidity. I could indeed make up things for myself did I only know what
Charlie did not know that he knew. But since the doors were shut behind
me I could only wait his youthful pleasure and strive to keep him
in good temper. One minute's want of guard might spoil a priceless
revelation: now and again he would toss his books aside--he kept them
in my rooms, for his mother would have been shocked at the waste of
good money had she seen them--and launched into his sea dreams. Again I
cursed all the poets of England.
The plastic mind of the bank-clerk had
been overlaid, colored and distorted by that which he had read, and the
result as delivered was a confused tangle of other voices most like the
muttered song through a City telephone in the busiest part of the day.

He talked of the galley--his own galley had he but known it--with
illustrations borrowed from the "Bride of Abydos. " He pointed the
experiences of his hero with quotations from "The Corsair," and threw
in deep and desperate moral reflections from "Cain" and "Manfred,"
expecting me to use them all. Only when the talk turned on Longfellow
were the jarring cross-currents dumb, and I knew that Charlie was
speaking the truth as he remembered it.

"What do you think of this? " I said one evening, as soon as I understood
the medium in which his memory worked best, and, before he could
expostulate read him the whole of "The Saga of King Olaf! "

He listened open-mouthed, flushed his hands drumming on the back of the
sofa where he lay, till I came to the Songs of Emar Tamberskelver and
the verse:

"Emar then, the arrow taking From the loosened string, Answered: 'That
was Norway breaking 'Neath thy hand, O King. '"

He gasped with pure delight of sound.

"That's better than Byron, a little," I ventured.

"Better? Why it's true! How could he have known? "

I went back and repeated:

"'What was that? ' said Olaf, standing
On the quarter-deck,
'Something heard I like the stranding
Of a shattered wreck. '"

"How could he have known how the ships crash and the oars rip out and go
z-zzp all along the line? Why only the other night--But go back please
and read 'The Skerry of Shrieks' again.