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.
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