Till
that evening Charlie had spoken nothing that might not lie within the
experiences of a Greek galley-slave. But now, or there was no virtue in books,
he had talked of some desperate adventure of the Vikings, of Thorfin
Karlsefne's sailing to Wineland, which is America, in the ninth or tenth
century. The battle in the harbor he had seen; and his own death he had
described. But this was a much more startling plunge into the past. Was it
possible that he had skipped half a dozen lives and was then dimly remembering
some episode of a thousand years later? It was a maddening jumble, and the
worst of it was that Charlie Mears in his normal condition was the last person
in the world to clear it up. I could only wait and watch, but I went to bed
that night full of the wildest imaginings. There was nothing that was not
possible if Charlie's detestable memory only held good.
I might rewrite the Saga of Thorfin Karlsefne as it had never been written
before, might tell the story of the first discovery of America, myself the
discoverer. But I was entirely at Charlie's mercy, and so long as there was a
three-and-six-penny Bohn volume within his reach Charlie would not tell. I
dared not curse him openly; I hardly dared jog his memory, for I was dealing
with the experiences of a thousand years ago, told through the mouth of a boy
of today; and a boy of today is affected by every change of tone and gust of
opinion, so that he lies even when he desires to speak the truth.
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