No More Learning

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 alone held this jewel to my hand for
the cutting and polishing.

Therefore I danced again among the gods till a policeman saw me and took
steps in my direction.

It remained now only to encourage Charlie to talk, and here there was no
difficulty. But I had forgotten those accursed books of poetry. He came
to me time after time, as useless as a surcharged phonograph--drunk on
Byron, Shelley, or Keats. Knowing now what the boy had been in his past
lives, and desperately anxious not to lose one word of his babble, I
could not hide from him my respect and interest. He misconstrued both
into respect for the present soul of Charlie Mears, to whom life was as
new as it was to Adam, and interest in his readings; and stretched my
patience to breaking point by reciting poetry--not his own now, but
that of others. I wished every English poet blotted out of the memory of
mankind. I blasphemed the mightiest names of song because they had drawn
Charlie from the path of direct narrative, and would, later, spur him to
imitate them; but I choked down my impatience until the first flood of
enthusiasm should have spent itself and the boy returned to his dreams.

"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.