by Anthology
He was sitting by the fire staring at the red coals. “I can’t understand what you find so difficult. It’s all as clear 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 twenty-five 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 known 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 hind 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!”
Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills remembrance, and the finest story in the world would never be written.
THE FLIGHT THAT FAILED
E.M. Hull
A tale of a plane that started—but didn’t arrive, and of a man who was there only if you thought so—but who ruled the strange and vastly important events that happened that night.
The white crescent of moon flitted from cloud to cloud, as if it, too, was a great, three-engined plane charging high above the night waters of the northern Atlantic.
Twice, when its shape was partly hidden by a woolpack of a cloud, the illusion of another plane with all lights on was so vivid that Squadron Leader Clair stiffened, fingers instinctively reaching for the radio switch, and words quivering on his lips to warn the silly fool out there that this was war, and that, within half an hour, they would enter the danger zone.
Reflections, Clair muttered the second time, damn those reflections of that bright, glowing moon.
In the half light, he turned to Flying Officer Wilson, but, for a moment, so dazzling was the play of moon rays through the domed glass cockpit that—for that prolonged instant—the navigator’s body seemed to shine, as if a million glittering reflections were concentrated on his long, powerful frame.
Clair shook his head to clear his vision, and said: “Never saw the moon so bright. Puts one in mind of the old folk tales about the power of the moonbeams to conjure shapes, to reflect strange things that do not exist—”
His voice trailed. He squinted at the man beside him. With a tiny start, he saw that it was not Wilson, but one of the passengers. The fellow said in a quiet voice:
“How goes it?”
It was not th
e words themselves, but a suggestive quality in the tone that, for a moment, brought to Clair a pleasant kaleidoscope of memory: his family home on the lower St. Lawrence, his mother, tall and serene, his calm-eyed father, and his younger sister soon to be married.
He shook the picture out of his brain a little irritated; they were private possessions, not to be shared by any chance interrogator. Besides, here was merely some faint heart requiring reassurance about the flight.
“Everything’s fine!” Clair said; and then in a precise voice, he added: “I’m sorry, sir, passengers are not allowed in the cockpit. I must ask you to—”
For a second time, then, he stopped in the middle of a sentence, and stared.
It was hard to see the man’s face; the moon made a dazzling, reflecting fire where it splashed against his skin and body. But what Clair could make out against that surprising glare was finely constructed, a strangely strong, sensitive countenance with gray eyes that smiled a secret smile, and gazed steadily, expectantly, across at him. A tremendously interesting face it was, only—
It was not the face of any one of the passengers.
With a gasp, Clair ran his mind over the passengers, as he had checked them in hours before. Typical, they had been, two dozen of them. A sprinkling of diplomats, a little troop of military men, and a faded group of civil servants, including one government scientist.
He remembered them all, vividly, and this man had not been—Beside him, the stranger said quietly:
“I wish to report my presence aboard your ship!”
“You . . . WHAT?” said Clair; and his amazement was all the more violent because his mind had already led him to the very verge of the truth.
The man made no reply, simply sat there smiling quietly—and the moon, which had momentarily flashed behind a cloud, jerked into sight again, and rode the dark-blue heavens to the south-southwest.
The light shattered into blazing fragments on the cockpit glass, and cascaded like countless tiny jewels, bathing the stranger in a shield of radiance.
Swiftly, Clair drew his mind into a tight acceptance of the situation that was here. His eyes narrowed; his face took on a stern expression. When he finally spoke, it was the squadron leader, commander of men, who said curtly:
“I have no idea why you have chosen to stow yourself on this ship, nor do I desire any details. It is my duty to place you in irons until we land in England.”
With a flick of his hand, he drew his automatic—as the cockpit door opened, and vaguely silhouetted the bulky figure that was Wilson.
“Queerest thing that ever happened to me, Bill,” the flying officer began. “One second I was sitting beside you, the next I was lying in the baggage compartment. I must have walked in my sleep and . . . oh!”
His eyes glinted steely blue in the moonlight, as he sent one swift glance at the gun in Clair’s fingers, then flashed his gaze to the stranger. “Trouble?” he said, and snatched his own gun. It was the stranger who shook his head. “No trouble at the moment,” he said. “But there is going to be in a half an hour. They’ve found out about your cargo, and the attack will be in force.”
He finished softly: “You will need me then.”
For a single, appalled moment, Clair blanched. “You know about our cargo!” he said harshly; and then, dismayed by his own admission, snapped:
“Flying Officer Wilson, you will take this man to the baggage room, search him, and put the irons on him. If he goes quietly, keep your gun in your pocket. No use alarming the passengers unnecessarily.”
“I shall go quietly,” said the stranger.
Almost disconcerted by the man’s acquiescence, Clair watched him being led through the moonlit cabin. The affair seemed unsatisfactory—unfinished.
Ten minutes later, the first distant streaks of dawn tinted the long, dark waters to the east; but the crescent moon was still master of the sky. Clair sat at the controls, his forehead twisted into a worried frown. Only occasionally did he glance at the flying shape of light that, for so many hours now, had flooded the night and the sea with its brilliance.
His brow cleared finally. Because—there was nothing to do but carry on. He turned to Wilson to say something to that effect; the navigator’s voice cut off his words:
“Bill!”
With a start, Clair saw that his friend was gazing with a tensed fixedness into the mirror that showed the long, dimly visible passenger cabin. His own gaze flicked up, strained against the quiet gloom that was out there. But there was nothing.
The moon glowed in through the dozen windows, probing at the passengers with soft fingers of light. Some of the men were sleeping, heads nodding low, their faces shadowed by their posture. Others sat talking; and their countenances, too, made patterns of light and shade, that shifted, as they moved, into a thousand subtly different umbral effects.
It was a restful scene, utterly normal. A puzzled question was forming on Clair’s lips, when once more, urgently, Wilson spoke:
“The third seat from the back—the fellow leaning across the aisle talking to Lord Laidlaw, the British diplomatic agent—it’s him.”
Clair saw. Very slowly, he stood up. He had no real sense of abnormal things. “Take the wheel, sir,” he said. “I’ll go see what’s what.”
Wilson said: “I’ll keep an eye on you.”
As Clair squeezed out into the passenger cabin, the stranger looked up. It seemed impossible that the fellow was able to see him, where there were only shadows, where the moonlight did not penetrate, but he must have. He smiled, said something to his lordship, and then stood up.
Clair’s fingers flashed to his gun, then relaxed, as the man turned his back, and, walking to the rear of the aisle, sank into a double seat that was there.
Once more, he looked up, seemingly straight into Clair’s eyes. He beckoned Clair to the vacant seat beside him. The squadron leader approached hesitantly. There was something very strange here, but his mind wouldn’t quite hurdle over the strangeness.
He loomed over the man, then, frowning, sank down beside him. He said curtly:
“How did you break out of those irons?”
There was no immediate answer; and, for the thousandth time in that long night, Clair grew conscious of the intense brilliance of the moon. Crescent-shaped, it raced high in the heavens to the south-southwest; and it did shining things to the broad, dark belly of the sea. The water seemed as near as the night, and, like ridges of glass, sent up a shadowed blaze of reflections.
Reflections that caught his eyes, and made it preternaturally hard for him to look intently at the stranger, as the man said:
“I didn’t think you would believe me if I told you that the irons would be useless against me. Accordingly, I am letting the fact speak for itself.”
Clair made an impatient gesture. He felt a genuine irritation at the other for talking nonsense now, when the zone of danger was so incredibly near.
“Look here,” he snapped, “it is within my authority to put a bullet in you if I consider that your presence will endanger this ship. Who are you?”
“Let me understand you,” the man said, and his voice was curiously troubled. “You see nothing unusual in the fact that I have broken out of the irons?”
“Obviously,” said Clair, “you’re one of those people with very small hands.”
“I see.” The man was silent; then: “This is going to be even more difficult than I imagined. I thought that my escaping from your manacles would release you to a small degree from your normal mental inhibitions.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m afraid,” was the strangely sad reply, “I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand. If I could convince you, I would tell you my identity, but your mind is too enthralled by the practical world in which you have your being. By a trick, by means of a moon-ray time reflector machine, I have established my existence in that world, and now you accept me. But I am afraid I shall have to plan my purpose around that limited fact. I h
ad hoped you would free all my enormous strength but—”
He broke off, then finished: “Your friend searched me, and found no weapons; therefore you should not object to letting me sit here till the destroyer planes come—even under the terrible handicap of your reality, I think I can save you then.”
Clair had listened to the unfolding words with the growing, empty conviction that he was talking to a madman. Now, for a moment, he cursed silently the incredibly bad luck that had forced such a situation upon him in this, his most important flight. He began angrily:
“I don’t know what kind of nonsense you’ve got in your mind, but I’ll tell you this much: if a flight of Messerschmitts attack us in the next forty minutes, our machine guns won’t be much good. In any event, they’ll be manned by Flying Officer Wilson, Colonel Ingraham and Major Gray. If you have some queer idea that you—” He cut himself off decisively: “I’m afraid I have no choice, but to put the irons on you again. They’re adjustable, and this time I’ll see that they don’t slip off.”
The man nodded gravely, and, without a word, led the way back to the baggage compartment—Returning forward, Clair paused beside Lord
Laidlaw. He said: “For your private information, sir, the man to whom you were talking a minute ago is a stowaway. I would like to ask you what he said to you.”
His lordship was a plump-faced man with keen, grayish eyes. He fixed them shrewdly on the squadron leader. “Funny chap,” he commented finally. “Had a hard time seeing him because of the way the moon kept shining in his face. I’m afraid his remarks were very trite, though they stirred some pleasant memories and generally titillated the idealistic side of my nature. He asked me how it went with me and my family.”
Frowning, Clair strode on to the cockpit.
The light in the east was stronger; a world of graying shadows that streaked the gray-dark waters; and all the horizon glowed with that first faint promise of a brilliant morning.
Some of the ice began to thaw out of Clair’s mind; the new lines of worry in his forehead smoothed, and an eager expectancy crept into his eyes.
