The Phantom Rickshaw, and Other Ghost Stories

“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 sha’n’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 back, might for aught he or I knew have been one of the crew of the Argo – had been certainly 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 my own poor inventions while Charlie wrote of the ways of bank-clerks.

I got together and placed on one file all my notes; and the net result was not cheering. I read them a second time. There was nothing that might not have been compiled at second-hand from other people’s books – except, perhaps, the story of the fight in the harbor. The adventures of a Viking had been written many times before; the history of a Greek galley-slave was no new thing, and though I wrote both, who could challenge or confirm the accuracy of my details? I might as well tell a tale of two thousand years hence. The Lords of Life and Death were as cunning as Grish Chunder had hinted. They would allow nothing to escape that might trouble or make easy the minds of men. Though I was convinced of this, yet I could not leave the tale alone. Exaltation followed reaction, not once, but twenty times in the next few weeks. My moods varied with the March sunlight and flying clouds. By night or in the beauty of a spring morning I perceived that I could write that tale and shift continents thereby. In the wet, windy afternoons, I saw that the tale might indeed be written, but would be nothing more than a faked, false-varnished, sham-rusted piece of Wardour Street work at the end. Then I blessed Charlie in many ways – though it was no fault of his. He seemed to be busy with prize competitions, and I saw less and less of him as the weeks went by and the earth cracked and grew ripe to spring, and the buds swelled in their sheaths. He did not care to read or talk of what he had read, and there was a new ring of self-assertion in his voice. I hardly cared to remind him of the galley when we met; but Charlie alluded to it on every occasion, always as a story from which money was to be made.

“I think I deserve twenty-five per cent., don’t I, at least,” he said, with beautiful frankness. “I supplied all the ideas, didn’t I?”

This greediness for silver was a new side in his nature. I assumed that it had been developed in the City, where Charlie was picking up the curious nasal drawl of the underbred City man.

“When the thing’s done we’ll talk about it. I can’t make anything of it at present. Red-haired or black-haired hero are equally difficult.”

He was sitting by the fire staring at the red coals. “I can’t understand what you find so difficult. It’s all as clean as mud to me,” he replied. A jet of gas puffed out between the bars, took light and whistled softly. “Suppose we take the red-haired hero’s adventures first, from the time that he came south to my galley and captured it and sailed to the Beaches.”

I knew better now than to interrupt Charlie. I was out of reach of pen and paper, and dared not move to get them lest I should break the current. The gas-jet puffed and whinnied, Charlie’s voice dropped almost to a whisper, and he told a tale of the sailing of an open galley to Furdurstrandi, of sunsets on the open sea, seen under the curve of the one sail evening after evening when the galley’s beak was notched into the centre of the sinking disc, and “we sailed by that for we had no other guide,” quoth Charlie. He spoke of a landing on an island and explorations in its woods, where the crew killed three men whom they found asleep under the pines. Their ghosts, Charlie said, followed the galley, swimming and choking in the water, and the crew cast lots and threw one of their number overboard as a sacrifice to the strange gods whom they had offended. Then they ate sea-weed when their provisions failed, and their legs swelled, and their leader, the red-haired man, killed two rowers who mutinied, and after a year spent among the woods they set sail for their own country, and a wind that never failed carried them back so safely that they all slept at night. This and much more Charlie told. Sometimes the voice fell so low that I could not catch the words, though every nerve was on the strain. He spoke of their leader, the red-haired man, as a pagan speaks of his God; for it was he who cheered them and slew them impartially as he thought best for their needs; and it was he who steered them for three days among floating ice, each floe crowded with strange beasts that “tried to sail with us,” said Charlie, “and we beat them back with the handles of the oars.”

The gas-jet went out, a burned coal gave way, and the fire settled down with a tiny crash to the bottom of the grate. Charlie ceased speaking, and I said no word.

“By Jove!” he said, at last, shaking his head. “I’ve been staring at the fire till I’m dizzy. What was I going to say?”

“Something about the galley.”

“I remember now. It’s 25 per cent. of the profits, isn’t it?”

“It’s anything you like when I’ve done the tale.”

“I wanted to be sure of that. I must go now. I’ve, I’ve an appointment.” And he left me.

Had my eyes not been held I might have know that that broken muttering over the fire was the swan-song of Charlie Mears. But I thought it the prelude to fuller revelation. At last and at last I should cheat the Lords of Life and Death!

When next Charlie came to me I received him with rapture. He was nervous and embarrassed, but his eyes were very full of light, and his lips a little parted.

“I’ve done a poem,” he said; and then quickly: “it’s the best I’ve ever done. Read it.” He thrust it into my hand and retreated to the window.

I groaned inwardly. It would be the work of half an hour to criticise – that is to say praise – the poem sufficiently to please Charlie. Then I had good reason to groan, for Charlie, discarding his favorite centipede metres, had launched into shorter and choppier verse, and verse with a motive at the back of it. This is what I read:

“The day is most fair, the cheery wind
Halloos behind the hill,
Where he bends the wood as seemeth good,
And the sapling to his will!
Riot O wind; there is that in my blood
That would not have thee still!

“She gave me herself, O Earth, O Sky;
Grey sea, she is mine alone!
Let the sullen boulders hear my cry,
And rejoice tho’ they be but stone!

“Mine! I have won her, O good brown earth,
Make merry! ‘Tis hard on Spring;
Make merry; my love is doubly worth
All worship your fields can bring!
Let the bind that tills you feel my mirth
At the early harrowing.”

“Yes, it’s the early harrowing, past a doubt,” I said, with a dread at my heart. Charlie smiled, but did not answer.

“Red cloud of the sunset, tell it abroad;
I am victor. Greet me, O Sun,
Dominant master and absolute lord
Over the soul of one!”

“Well?” said Charlie, looking over my shoulder.

I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed, when he silently laid a photograph on the paper – the photograph of a girl with a curly head, and a foolish slack mouth.

“Isn’t it – isn’t it wonderful?” he whispered, pink to the tips of his ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. “I didn’t know; I didn’t think – it came like a thunderclap.”

“Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie?”

“My God – she – she loves me!” He sat down repeating the last words to himself. I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and how he had loved in his past lives.

“What will your mother say?” I asked, cheerfully.

“I don’t care a damn what she says.”

At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should, properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must have described to the newly named beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve. Incidentally I learned that She was a tobacconist’s assistant with a weakness for pretty dress, and had told him four or five times already that She had never been kissed by a man before.

Charlie spoke on, and on, and on; while I, separated from him by thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully behind us. It is that we may not remember our first wooings. Were it not so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years.

“Now, about that galley-story,” I said, still more cheerfully, in a pause in the rush of the speech.

Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. “The galley – what galley? Good heavens, don’t joke, man! This is serious! You don’t know how serious it is!”