[adapted]

by
Rudyard Kipling

Before the years of knights were gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was a king in Babylon
And you were a Christian slave.—
W. E. Henley.

His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother whose husband had died, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the city every day to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and had big dreams. I met him in a public billiard hall where the man who kept score called him by his first name, and he called the man who kept score “Bulls-eyes.” Charley explained, a little nervous, that he had only come to the place to watch, and since watching games that need skill is not cheap fun for young people, I suggested that Charlie should go back to his mother.

That was our first step toward getting to know each other better. He would visit me sometimes in the evenings instead of going around London with his fellow clerks; and soon, talking about himself as a young man does, he told me of his dreams, which were all about writing. He wanted to make himself a name that would never die mainly through poetry, though he was not too proud to send stories of love and death to the magazines where you drop a penny in the slot. I had to sit still while Charlie read me poems of many hundred lines, and large pieces of plays that would surely surprise the world. My reward was his complete trust, and the things a young man tells about himself and his troubles are almost as holy as those of a young woman.

Charlie had never fallen in love, but was eager to do so at the first chance; he believed in all things good and all things right, but, at the same time, was strangely careful to show me that he knew how the world worked as was right for a bank clerk on twenty-five shillings a week. He rhymed “dove” with “love” and “moon” with “June,” and strongly believed that they had never been rhymed like that before. The long weak gaps in his plays he filled up with quick words of apology and description and went on, seeing all that he planned to do so clearly that he thought it already done, and turned to me for praise.

I think that his mother did not support his dreams, and I know that his desk at home was the edge of his washstand. He told me this almost at the start of our friendship; when he was searching my bookshelves, and a little before I was asked to tell the truth about his chances of “writing something really great, you know.” Maybe I encouraged him too much, for, one night, he visited me, his eyes full of excitement, and said out of breath:

“Do you mind — can you let me stay here and write all this evening? I won’t bother you, I really won’t. There’s no place for me to write at my mother’s house.”

“What’s the trouble?” I said, as I knew very well what that trouble was.

“I’ve an idea in my head that would make the most wonderful story ever written. Please let me write it here. It’s such an idea!”

I could not refuse the request. I gave him a table; he hardly thanked me, but started the work at once. For half an hour the pen moved without stopping. Then Charlie sighed and pulled his hair. The writing grew slower, there was more erasing, and at last it stopped. The finest story in the world would not come out.

“It looks like such terrible nonsense now” he said, sadly. “But it seemed so good when I was thinking about it. What’s wrong?”

I could not make him sad by telling the truth. So I answered: “Maybe you don’t feel like writing.”

“Yes I do — but not when I look at this stuff. Ugh!”

“Read me what you’ve done,” I said. He read, and it was very bad and he paused at all the specially fancy sentences, expecting a little praise; for he was proud of those sentences, as I knew he would be.

“It needs to be shorter,” I said, carefully.

“I hate cutting my things down. I don’t think you could change a word here without ruining the meaning. It reads better out loud than when I was writing it.”

“Charlie, you have a worrying disease that many people have. Put the thing away, and try it again in a week.”

“I want to do it right now. What do you think of it?”

“How can I know from a half-written story? Tell me the story as it is in your head.”

Charlie spoke, and while he spoke there was everything that his ignorance had so carefully kept out of his writing. I looked at him, and wondered whether it was possible that he did not know the newness, the power of the idea that had come to him? It was clearly an Idea among ideas. Men had been made very proud by ideas not even a tenth as good and useful. But Charlie kept talking calmly, breaking the flow of pure imagination with examples of terrible sentences that he planned to use. I heard him out to the end. It would be foolish to allow his idea to remain in his own clumsy hands, when I could do so much with it. Not all that could be done, indeed; but, oh, so much!

“What do you think?” he said, at last. “I think I will call it ‘The Story of a Ship.’”

“I think the idea’s pretty good; but you won’t be able to do it for a very long time. Now I — ”

“Would it be useful to you? Would you like to take it? I would be proud,” said Charlie, quickly.

There are few things sweeter in this world than the honest, hasty, wild, open admiration of a younger man. Even a woman in her most blind love does not copy the walk of the man she loves, tilt her bonnet to the angle at which he wears his hat, or fill her talk with his favorite swear words. And Charlie did all these things. Still it was necessary to ease my conscience before I got hold of Charlie’s thoughts.

“Let’s make a deal. I’ll give you five pounds for the idea,” I said. Charlie became a bank worker at once.

“Oh, that’s not possible. Between two pals, you know, if I can call you that, and speaking as someone who knows the world, I couldn’t. Take the idea if it is useful to you. I have lots more.”

He had — no one knew this better than me — but they were the ideas of other men.

“Look at it as a matter of business—between men who know the world,” I replied. “Five pounds will buy you any number of poetry-books. Business is business, and you can be sure I wouldn’t give that price unless — ”

“Oh, if you say it like that,” said Charlie, clearly moved by the thought of the books.

The deal was made with an agreement that he should, at no set times, come to me with all the ideas that he had, should have his own table to write at, and the right without question to make me read all his poems and pieces of poems.

Then I said, “Now tell me how you got this idea.”

“It came by itself.” Charlie’s eyes opened a little.

“Yes, but you told me a lot about the hero that you must have read somewhere before.”

“I don’t have any time for reading, except when you let me sit here, and on Sundays I’m on my bicycle or on the river all day. There is nothing wrong with the hero, is there?”

“Tell me again and I will understand clearly. You say that your hero became a pirate. How did he live?”

“He was on the lower floor of this kind of ship that I was telling you about.”

“What kind of ship?”

“It was the kind rowed with oars, and the sea splashes through the holes for the oars and the men row sitting up to their knees in water. Then there’s a bench going down between the two lines of oars and a guard with a whip walks up and down the bench to make the men work.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s in the story. There’s a rope running above, tied to the top deck, for the guard to hold on to when the ship rolls. When the guard misses the rope once and falls into the rowers, remember the hero laughs at him and gets beaten for it. He’s chained to his oar of course — the hero.”

“How is he tied up?”

“With an iron band around his waist fixed to the bench he sits on, and a kind of handcuff on his left wrist tying him to the oar. He’s on the lower deck where the worst men are sent, and the only light comes from the hatches and through the holes for the oars. Can’t you imagine the sunlight just squeezing through between the handle and the hole and shaking about as the ship moves?”

“I can, but I can’t imagine you thinking of it.”

“How could it be any other way? Now you listen to me. The long oars on the upper deck are worked by four men to each bench, the lower ones by three, and the lowest of all by two. Remember it’s very dark on the lowest deck and all the men there go crazy. When a man dies at his oar on that deck he isn’t thrown into the sea, but cut up in his chains and pushed through the oar hole in little pieces.”

“Why?” I asked, amazed, not so much at the information as at the commanding tone in which it was thrown out.

“To avoid trouble and to scare the others. It needs two guards to pull a man’s body up to the top deck; and if the men at the oars on the lower deck were left alone, of course they’d stop rowing and try to lift the benches by all standing up together in their chains.”

“You have a very careful imagination. Where have you been reading about galley ships and galley slaves?”

“Nowhere that I remember. I row a little when I get the chance. But, maybe, if you say so, I may have read something.”

He went away soon after to talk with booksellers, and I wondered how a bank clerk aged twenty could give me, with a lot of detail, all told with complete confidence, the story of wild and bloody adventure, riot, piracy, and death in unknown seas. He had led his hero on a desperate path through a revolt against people overseas, to being captain of a ship of his own, and finally the making of a kingdom on an island “somewhere in the sea, you know”; and, delighted with my small five pounds, had gone out to buy the ideas of other men, so that these might teach him how to write. I had the comfort of knowing that this idea was mine because I had bought it, and I thought that I could make something of it.

When he next came to me he was drunk — very drunk on many poets he saw for the first time. His eyes were wide, his words fell over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotes. Most of all, he was drunk with Longfellow.

“Isn’t it wonderful? Isn’t it great?” he shouted, after quick greetings. “Listen to this —

“‘Would you,’ so the man who steers the ship answered,
‘Know the secret of the sea?
Only those who face its dangers
Understand its mystery.’

My gosh!

“‘Only those who face its dangers
Understand its mystery.’”

he repeated twenty times, walking up and down the room and forgetting me. “But I can understand it too,” he said to himself. “I don’t know how to thank you for that five-pound note. And this; listen —”

“‘I remember the black docks and the ships
And the sea tides moving free,
And the Spanish sailors with beards,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.’”