Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (111 page)

Kim rolled them small, and stuffed them into the slack folds of his tunic. With a yellow-ochre paint cake he smeared the legs and breast, great streaks against the background of flour, ash, and turmeric.

‘The blood on them is enough to hang thee, brother.’

‘May be; but no need to throw them out of the window. . . . It is finished.’ His voice thrilled with a boy’s pure delight in the Game. ‘Turn and look, O Jat!’

‘The Gods protect us,’ said the hooded Kamboh, emerging like a buffalo from the reeds. ‘But  —  whither went the Mahratta? What hast thou done?’

Kim had been trained by Lurgan Sahib; and E.23, by virtue of his business, was no bad actor. In place of the tremulous, shrinking trader there lolled against the corner an all but naked, ash-smeared, ochre-barred, dusty-haired Saddhu, his swollen eyes  —  opium takes quick effect on an empty stomach  —  luminous with insolence and bestial lust, his legs crossed under him, Kim’s brown rosary round his neck, and a scant yard of worn, flowered chintz on his shoulders. The child buried his face in his amazed father’s arms.

‘Look up, Princeling! We travel with warlocks, but they will not hurt thee. Oh, do not cry. . . . What is the sense of curing a child one day and killing him with fright the next?’

‘The child will be fortunate all his life. He has seen a great healing. When I was a child I made clay men and horses.’

‘I have made them too. Sir Banas, he comes in the night and makes them all alive at the back of our kitchen-midden,’ piped the child.

‘And so thou art not frightened at anything. Eh, Prince?’

‘I was frightened because my father was frightened. I felt his arms shake.’

‘Oh, chicken-man,’ said Kim, and even the abashed Jat laughed. ‘I have done a healing on this poor trader. He must forsake his gains and his account-books, and sit by the wayside three nights to overcome the malignity of his enemies. The Stars are against him.’

‘The fewer money-lenders the better, say I; but, Saddhu or no Saddhu, he should pay for my stuff on his shoulders.’

‘So? But that is thy child on thy shoulder  —  given over to the burning-ghat not two days ago. There remains one thing more. I did this charm in thy presence because need was great. I changed his shape and his soul. None the less, if, by any chance, O man from Jullundur, thou rememberest what thou hast seen, either among the elders sitting under the village tree, or in thy own house, or in company of thy priest when he blesses thy cattle, a murrain will come among the buffaloes, and a fire in thy thatch, and rats in the corn-bin, and the curse of our Gods upon thy fields that they may be barren before thy feet and after thy ploughshare.’ This was part of an old curse picked up from a faquir by the Taksali Gate in the days of Kim’s innocence. It lost nothing by repetition.

‘Cease, Holy One! In mercy, cease!’ cried the Jat. ‘Do not curse the household. I saw nothing! I heard nothing! I am thy cow!’ and he made to grab at Kim’s bare foot beating rhythmically on the carriage floor.

‘But since thou hast been permitted to aid me in the matter of a pinch of flour and a little opium and such trifles as I have honoured by using in my art, so will the Gods return a blessing,’ and he gave it at length, to the man’s immense relief. It was one that he had learned from Lurgan Sahib.

The lama stared through his spectacles as he had not stared at the business of disguisement.

‘Friend of the Stars,’ he said at last, ‘thou hast acquired great wisdom. Beware that it do not give birth to pride. No man having the Law before his eyes speaks hastily of any matter which he has seen or encountered.’

‘No  —  no  —  no indeed,’ cried the farmer, fearful lest the master should be minded to improve on the pupil. E.23, with relaxed mouth, gave himself up to the opium that is meat, tobacco, and medicine to the spent Asiatic.

So, in a silence of awe and great miscomprehension, they slid into Delhi about lamp-lighting time.

CHAPTER XII

‘Who hath desired the Sea  —  the sight of salt-water unbounded?
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm  —  gray, foamless, enormous, and growing?
Stark calm on the lap of the Line  —  or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing?
His Sea in no showing the same  —  his Sea and the same ‘neath all showing  — 
His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise  —  so and no otherwise Hill-men desire their Hills!’

‘I   HAVE found my heart again,’ said E.23, under cover of the platform’s tumult. ‘Hunger and fear make men dazed, or I might have thought of this escape before. I was right. They come to hunt for me. Thou hast saved my head.’

A group of yellow-trousered Punjab policemen, headed by a hot and perspiring young Englishman, parted the crowd about the carriages. Behind them, inconspicuous as a cat, ambled a small fat person who looked like a lawyer’s tout.

‘See the young Sahib reading from a paper. My description is in his hand,’ said E.23. ‘They go carriage by carriage, like fisher-folk netting a pool.’

When the procession reached their compartment, E.23 was counting his beads with a steady jerk of the wrist; while Kim jeered at him for being so drugged as to have lost the ringed fire-tongs which are the Saddhu’s distinguishing mark. The lama, deep in meditation, stared straight before him; and the farmer, glancing furtively, gathered up his belongings.

‘Nothing here but a parcel of holy-bolies,’ said the Englishman aloud, and passed on amid a ripple of uneasiness; for native police mean extortion to the native all India over.

‘The trouble now,’ whispered E.23, ‘lies in sending a wire as to the place where I hid that letter I was sent to find. I cannot go to the tar-office in this guise.’

‘Is it not enough I have saved thy neck?’

‘Not if the work be left unfinished. Did never the healer of sick pearls tell thee so? Comes another Sahib! Ah!’

This was a tallish, sallowish District Superintendent of Police,  —  belt, helmet, polished spurs and all,  —  strutting and twirling his dark moustache.

‘What fools are these Police Sahibs!’ said Kim genially.

E.23 glanced up under his eyelids. ‘It is well said,’ he muttered in a changed voice. ‘I go to drink water. Keep my place.’

He blundered out almost into the Englishman’s arms, and was bad-worded in clumsy Urdu.

‘Tum-mut? You drunk? You mustn’t bang about as though Delhi station belonged to you, my friend.’

E.23, not moving a muscle of his countenance, answered with a stream of the filthiest abuse, at which Kim naturally rejoiced. It reminded him of the drummer-boys and the barrack-sweepers at Umballa in the terrible time of his first schooling.

‘My good fool,’ the Englishman drawled. ‘Nickle-jao! Go back to your carriage.’

Step by step, withdrawing deferentially, and dropping his voice, the yellow Saddhu clomb back to the carriage, cursing the D. S. P. to remotest posterity by  —  here Kim almost jumped  —  by the curse of the Queen’s Stone, by the writing under the Queen’s Stone, and by an assortment of Gods with wholly new names.

‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’  —  the Englishman flushed angrily,  —  ’but it’s some piece of blasted impertinence. Come out of that!’

E.23, affecting to misunderstand, gravely produced his ticket, which the Englishman wrenched angrily from his hand.

‘Oh zoolum! What oppression!’ growled the Jat from his corner. ‘All for the sake of a jest too.’ He had been grinning at the freedom of the Saddhu’s tongue. ‘Thy charms do not work well to-day, Holy One!’

The Saddhu followed the policeman, fawning and supplicating. The ruck of passengers, busy with their babies and their bundles, had not noticed the affair. Kim slipped out behind him; for it flashed through his head that he had heard this angry, stupid Sahib discoursing loud personalities to an old lady near Umballa three years ago.

‘It is well,’ the Saddhu whispered, jammed in the calling, shouting, bewildered press  —  a Persian greyhound between his feet and a cadgeful of yelling hawks under charge of a Rajput falconer in the small of his back. ‘He has gone now to send word of the letter which I hid. They told me he was in Peshawur. I might have known that he is like the crocodile  —  always at the other ford. He has saved me from present calamity, but I owe my life to thee.’

‘Is he also one of Us?’ Kim ducked under a Mewar camel-driver’s greasy armpit and cannoned off a covey of jabbering Sikh matrons.

‘Not less than the greatest. We are both fortunate! I will make report to him of what thou hast done. I am safe under his protection.’

He bored through the edge of the crowd besieging the carriages, and squatted by the bench near the telegraph-office.

‘Return, or they take thy place! Have no fear for the work, brother  —  or my life. Thou hast given me breathing-space, and Strickland Sahib has pulled me to land. We may work together at the Game yet. Farewell!’

Kim hurried to his carriage: elated, bewildered, but a little nettled in that he had no key to the secrets about him.

‘I am only a beginner at the Game, that is sure. I could not have leaped into safety as did the Saddhu. He knew it was darkest under the lamp. I could not have thought to tell news under pretence of cursing . . . and how clever was the Sahib! No matter, I saved the life of one. . . . Where is the Kamboh gone, Holy One?’ he whispered, as he took his seat in the now crowded compartment.

‘A fear gripped him,’ the lama replied, with a touch of tender malice. ‘He saw thee change the Mahratta to a Saddhu in the twinkling of an eye, as a protection against evil. That shook him. Then he saw the Saddhu fall sheer into the hands of the polis  —  all the effect of thy art. Then he gathered up his son and fled; for he said that thou didst change a quiet trader into an impudent bandier of words with the Sahibs, and he feared a like fate. Where is the Saddhu?’

‘With the polis,’ said Kim. . . . ‘Yet I saved the Kamboh’s child.’

The lama snuffed blandly.

‘Ah, chela, see how thou art overtaken! Thou didst cure the Kamboh’s child solely to acquire merit. But thou didst put a spell on the Mahratta with prideful workings  —  I watched thee  —  and with side-long glances to bewilder an old old man and a foolish farmer: whence calamity and suspicion.’

Kim controlled himself with an effort beyond his years. Not more than any other youngster did he like to eat dirt or to be misjudged, but he saw himself in a cleft stick. The train rolled out of Delhi into the night.

‘It is true,’ he murmured. ‘Where I have offended thee I have done wrong.’

‘It is more, chela. Thou hast loosed an Act upon the world, and as a stone thrown into a pool so spread the consequences thou canst not tell how far.’

This ignorance was well both for Kim’s vanity and for the lama’s peace of mind, when we think that there was then being handed in at Simla a code-wire reporting the arrival of E.23 at Delhi, and, more important, the whereabouts of a letter he had been commissioned to  —  abstract. Incidentally, an over-zealous policeman had arrested, on charge of murder done in a far southern State, a horribly indignant Ajmir cotton-broker, who was explaining himself to a Mr. Strickland on Delhi platform, while E.23 was paddling through by-ways into the locked heart of Delhi city. In two hours several telegrams had reached the angry minister of a southern State reporting that all trace of a somewhat bruised Mahratta had been lost; and by the time the leisurely train halted at Saharunpore the last ripple of the stone Kim had helped to heave was lapping against the steps of a mosque in far-away Roum  —  where it disturbed a pious man at prayers.

The lama made his in ample form near the dewy bougainvillea-trellis near the platform, cheered by the clear sunshine and the presence of his disciple. ‘We will put these things behind us,’ he said, indicating the brazen engine and the gleaming track. ‘The jolting of the te-rain  —  though a wonderful thing  —  has turned my bones to water. We will use clean air henceforward.’

‘Let us go to the Kulu woman’s house,’ said Kim, and stepped forth cheerily under the bundles. Early morning Saharunpore-way is clean and well scented. He thought of the other mornings at St. Xavier’s, and it topped his already thrice-heaped contentment.

‘Where is this new haste born from? Wise men do not run about like chickens in the sun. We have come hundreds upon hundreds of kos already, and, till now, I have scarcely been alone with thee an instant. How canst thou receive instruction all jostled of crowds? How can I, whelmed by a flux of talk, meditate upon the Way?’

‘Her tongue grows no shorter with the years, then?’ The disciple smiled.

‘Nor her desire for charms. I remember once when I spoke of the Wheel of Life’  —  the lama fumbled in his bosom for his latest copy  —  ’she was only curious about the devils that besiege children. She shall acquire merit by entertaining us  —  in a little while  —  at an after-occasion  —  softly, softly. Now we will wander loose-foot, waiting upon the Chain of Things. The Search is sure.’

So they travelled very easily across and among the broad bloomful fruit-gardens  —  by way of Aminabad, Sahaigunge, Akrola of the Ford, and little Phulesa  —  the line of the Sewaliks always to the north, and behind them again the snows. After long, sweet sleep under the dry stars came the lordly, leisurely passage through a waking village  —  begging-bowl held forth in silence, but eyes roving in defiance of the Law from sky’s edge to sky’s edge. Then would Kim return soft-footed through the soft dust to his master under the shadow of a mango tree or the thinner shade of a white Doon siris, to eat and drink at ease. At mid-day, after talk and a little wayfaring, they slept; meeting the world refreshed when the air was cooler. Night found them adventuring into new territory  —  some chosen village spied three hours before across the fat land, and much discussed upon the road.

There they told their tale,  —  a new one each evening so far as Kim was concerned,  —  and there were they made welcome, either by priest or headman, after the custom of the kindly East.

When the shadows shortened and the lama leaned more heavily upon Kim, there was always the Wheel of Life to draw forth, to hold flat under wiped stones, and with a long straw to expound cycle by cycle. Here sat the Gods on high  —  and they were dreams of dreams. Here was our Heaven and the world of the demi-Gods  —  horsemen fighting among the hills. Here were the agonies done upon the beasts, souls ascending or descending the ladder and therefore not to be interfered with. Here were the Hells, hot and cold, and the abodes of tormented ghosts. Let the chela study the troubles that come from over-eating  —  bloated stomach and burning bowels. Obediently then, with bowed head and brown finger alert to follow the pointer, did the chela study; but when they came to the Human World, busy and profitless, that is just above the Hells, his mind was distracted; for by the roadside trundled the very Wheel itself, eating, drinking, trading, marrying, and quarrelling  —  all warmly alive. Often the lama made the living pictures the matter of his text, bidding, Kim  —  too ready  —  note how the flesh takes a thousand thousand shapes, desirable or detestable as men reckon; but in truth of no account either way; and how the stupid spirit, bond-slave to the Hog, the Dove, and the Serpent  —  lusting after betel-nut, a new yoke of oxen, women, or the favour of kings  —  is bound to follow the body through all the Heavens and all the Hells, and strictly round again. Sometimes a woman or a poor man, watching the ritual  —  it was nothing less  —  when the great yellow chart was unfolded, would throw a few flowers or a handful of cowries upon its edge. It sufficed these humble ones that they had met a Holy One who might be moved to remember them in his prayers.