Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (582 page)

“Ooshv — ooshy — wooshy — woggle wop!” cried a big wave without a head. “Get up, old girl!” and he smacked the ship most disrespectfully under the counter, and she squirmed as she took the drift of the next sea.

“She — ah — rides very prettily,” repeated the strong man as the companion stairs spurned him from them and he wound his arms round the nearest steward.

“Damn prettily,” said the necked officer.

“I’m going to lie down. Never could stand the China seas.”

“Most refreshing thing in the world,” said the strong man faintly.

I took counsel purely with myself, which is to say. my stomach, and pcrceived that the worst would not befall me.

“Come to the toVsle, then, and feel the wind,” said 1 to the strong man. The plover’s- egg eyes

“With pleasure,” said he, and I bore him away to where the cut-water was pulling up the scared dying-fishes as a spaniel Hushes game. In front of us was the illimitable blue, lightly ridged by the procession of the big blind rollers. I p rose the stem till six feet of the red paint stood clear above the blue — from twenty-three feet to eighteen 1 could count as I leaned over. 1 hen the sapphire crashed into splintered crystal with a musical jar. and the white spray licked the anchor channels as we drove down and down, sucking at the sea. 1 kept my eye upon the strong man, and I noticed that his mouth was slightly open, the better to inhale the rushing wind. When I looked a second time he was gone. The driven spray was scarcely quicker in its flight. My excellent stomach behaved with temperance and chastity. I enjoyed the fo’c’sle, and my delight was the greater when I reflected on the strong man. Unless I was much mistaken, he would know all about it in half an hour.

I went aft, and a lull between two waves heard the petulant pop of a champagne cork. No one drinks champagne after tiffin except ... It.

The strong man had ordered the champagne. There were bottles of it flying about the quarter-deck. The engaged couple were sipping it out of one glass, but their faces were averted like our parents of old. They were ashamed.

“You may go! You may go to Hongkong for me!” shouted half-a-dozen little waves together, pulling the ship several ways at once. She rolled stately, and from that moment settled down to the work of the evening. I cannot blame her, for I am sure she did not know her own strength. It didn’t hurt her to be on her side, and play cat-and-mouse, and puss-in-the corner, and hide-and-seek, but it destrojred the passengers. One by one they sank into long chairs and gazed at the sky. But even there the little white moved, and there was not one stable thing in heaven above or the waters beneath. My virtuous and very respectable stomach behaved with integrity and resolution. I treated it to a gin cocktail, which I sucked by the side of the strong man, who told me in confidence that he had been overcome by the sun at the fo’c’sle. Sun fever does not make people cold and clammy and blue. I sat with him and tried to make him talk about the Florida and his voyages in the past. He evaded me and went down below. Three minutes later I followed him with a thick cheroot. Into his bunk I went, for I knew he would be helpless. He was — he was — he was. He wallowed supine, and I stood in the doorway smoking.

“What is it?” said I.

He wrestled with his pride — his wicked pride — but he would not tell a lie.

“It,” said he. And it was so.

******

The rolling continues. The ship is a shambles, and I have six places on each side of me all to myself.

A FALLEN IDOL

WILL the public be good enough to look into this business? It has sent Crewe to bed, and Mottlebv is applying for home leave, and I’ve lost my faith in man altogether, and the Club gives it up. Trivey is the only man who is unaffected by the catastrophe, and he says “I told you so.” We were all proud of Trivey at the Club, and would have crowned him with wreaths of Bougainvillea had he permitted the liberty. But Trivey was an austere man. The utmost that he permitted himself to say was: “I can stretch a little bit when I’m in the humour.” We called him the Monumental Liar. Nothing that the Club offered was too good for Trivey. He had the soft chair opposite the thermantidote in the hot weather, and he made up his own four at whist. When visitors came in — globe-trotters for choice — Trivey used to unmuzzle himself and tell tales that sent the globe-trotter out of the Club on tiptoe looking for snakes in his hat and tigers in the compound. Whenever a man from a strange Club came in Trivey used to call for a whisky and ginger-wine and rout that man on all points — from horses upward. There was a man whose nickname was “Ananias,” who came from the Prince’s Plungers to look at Trivey; and, though Trivey was only a civilian, the Plunger man resigned his title to the nickname before eleven o’clock. He made it over to Trivey on a card, and Trivey hung up the concession in his quarters. We loved Trivey — all of us; and now we don’t love him any more.

A man from the frontier came in and began to tell tales — some very good ones, and some better than good. He was an outsider, but he had a wonderful imagination — for the frontier. He told six stories before Trivey brought up his first line, and three more before Trivey hurled his reserves into the fray.

“When I was at Anungaracharlupillay in Madras,” said Trivey quietly, “there was a rogue elephant cutting about the district. And I came upon him asleep.” All the Club stopped talking here, until Trivey had finished the story. He told us that he, in the company of another man, had found the rogue asleep, but just as they got up to the brute’s head it woke up with a scream. Then Trivey, who was careful to explain that he was a “bit powerful about the arms,” caught hold of its ears as it rose, and hung there, kicking the animal in the eyes, which so bewildered it that it stayed screaming and frightened until Trivey’s ally shot it behind the shoulder, and the villagers ran in and hamstrung it. It evidently died from loss of blood. Trivey was hanging on the ears and kicking hard for nearly fifteen minutes. When the frontier man heard the story he put his hands in front of his face and sobbed audibly. We gave him all the drinks he wanted, and he recovered sufficiently to carry away eighty rupees at whist later on; but his nerve was irretrievably shattered. He will be no use on the frontier any more. The rest of the Club were very pleased with Trivey, because these frontier men, and especially the guides, want a great deal of keeping in order. Trivey was quite modest. He was a truly great soul, and popular applause never turned his head. As I have said, we loved Trivey, till that fatal day when Crewe announced that he had been transferred for a couple of months to Anun- garacharlupillay. “Oh!” said Trivey, “I dare say they’ll remember about my rogue elephant down there. You ask ‘em, Crewe.” Then we felt sorry for Trivey, because we were sure that he was arriving at that stage of mental decay when a man begins to believe in his own fictions. That spoils a man’s hand. Crewe wrote up once or twice to Mottleby, saying that he would bring back a story that would make our hair curl. Good stories are scarce in Madras, and we rather scoffed at the announcement. When Crewe returned it was easy to see that he was bursting with importance. He gave a big dinner at the Club and invited nearly everybody but Trivey, who went off after dinner to teach a young subaltern to play “snooker.” At coffee and cheroots, Crewe could not restrain himself any longer. “I say, you Johnnies, it’s all true — every single word of it — and you can throw the decanter at my head and I’ll apologise. The whole village was full of it. There was a rogue elephant, and it slept, and Trivey did catch hold of its ears and kick it in the eyes, and hang on for ten minutes, at least, and all the rest of it. I neglected my regular work to sift that story, and on my honour the tale’s an absolute fact. The headsman said so, all the shikaries said so, and all the villages corroborated it. Now would a whole village volunteer a lie that would do them no good?”

You might have heard a cigar-ash fall after this statement. Then Mottleby said, with deep disgust: “What can you do with a man like that? His best and brightest lie, too!” “‘Tisn’t!” shrieked Crewe. “It’s a fact — a nickel-plated, teak-wood, Tantalus- action, forty-five rupee fact.” “That only makes it worse,” said Mottleby; and we all felt that was true. We ran into the billiard- room to talk to Trivey, but he said we had put him off his stroke; and that was all the satisfaction we got out of him. Later on he repeated that he was a “bit powerful about the arms,” and went to bed. We sat up half the night devising vengeance on Trivey. We were very angry, and there was no hope of hushing up the tale. The man had taken us in completely, and now that we’ve lost our champion Ananias, all the frontier will laugh at us, and we shall never be able to trust a word that Trivey says.

I ask with Mottleby: “What can you do with a man like that?”

NEW BROOMS

“If seven maids with seven mops

Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,

“That they could sweep it clear?”

RAM BUKSH, Aryan, went to bed with his buffalo, five goats, three children and a wife, because the evening mists were chilly. His hut was builded on the mud scooped from a green and smelly tank, and there were microbes in the thin blood of Ram Buksh.

Ram Buksh went to bed on a charpoy stretched across the blue tepid drain, because the nights were hot; and there were more microbes in his blood. Then the rains came, and Ram Buksh paddled, mid-thigh deep, in water for a day or two with his buffaloes till lie was aware of a cranvpsome feeling at the pit of his stomach. “Mother of my children,” said Ram Buksh, “this is death.” They gave him cardamoms and capsicums, and gingelly- oil and cloves, and they prayed for him. “It is enough,” said Ram Buksh, and he twisted himself into a knot and died, and they burned him slightly — for the wood was damp — and the rest of him floated do™ the river, and was caught in an undercurrent at the bank, and there stayed; and when Imam Din, the Jeweller, drank of the stream five days later, he drank Lethe, and passed away, crying in vain upon his gods.

His family did not report his death to the Municipality, for they desired to keep Imam Din with them. Therefore, they buried him under the flagging in the courtyard, secretly and by night. Twelve days later, Imam Din had made connection with the well of the house, and there was typhus among the women in the zenana, but no one knew anything about it — some died and some did not; and Ari Booj, the Faquir, added to the interest of the proceedings by joining the funeral procession and distributing gratis the more malignant forms of smallpox, from which he was just recovering. He had come all the way from Delhi, and had slept on no less than fifteen different charpoys; and that was how they got the smallpox into Bahadurgarh. But Eshmith Sahib’s Dhobi picked it up from Ari Booj when Imam Din’s wife was being buried — for he was a merry man, and sent home a beautiful sample among the Sunday shirts. So Eshmith Sahib died.

He was only a link in the chain which crawled from the highest to the lowest. The wonder was not that men died like sheep, but that they did not die like flies; for their lives and their surroundings, their deaths, were part of a huge conspiracy against cleanliness. And the people loved to have it so. They huddled together in frowsy clusters, while Death mowed his way through them till the scythe blunted against the unresisting flesh, and he had to get a new one. They died by fever, tens of thousands in a month; they died by cholera a thousand in a week; they died of smallpox, scores in the mohulla, and by dysentery by tens in a house; and when all other deaths failed they laid them down and died because their hands were too weak to hold on to life.

To and fro stamped the Englishman, who is everlastingly at war with the scheme of things. “You shall not die,” he said, and he decreed that there should be no more famines. He poured grain down their throats, and when all failed he went down into the strife and died with them, swearing, and toiling, and working till the last. He fought the famine and put it to flight. Then he wiped his forehead, and attacked the pestilence that walketh in the darkness. Death’s scythe swept to and fro, around and about him; but he only planted his feet more firmly in the way of it, and fought off Death with a dog-whip. “Live, you ruffian!” said the Englishman to Ram Buksh as he rode through the reeking village. “Jenabl” said Ram Buksh, “it is as it was in the days of our fathers!” “Then stand back while I alter it,” said the Englishman; and by force, and cunning, and a brutal disregard of vested interests, he strove to keep Ram Buksh alive. “Clean your mohullas; pay for clean water; keep your streets swept; and see that your food is sound, or I’ll make your life a burden to 3rou,” said the Englishman. Sometimes he died; but more often Ram Buksh went down, and the Englishman regarded each death as a personal insult.

“Softty, there!” said the Government of India. “You’re twisting his tail. You mustn’t do that. The spread of education forbids, and Ram Buksh is an intelligent voter. Let him work out his own salvation.”

“H’m!” said the Englishman with his head in a midden; “collectively you always were a fool. Here, Ram Buksh, the Sirkar says you are to do all these things for yourself.”

“Jenab!” says Ram Buksh, and fell to breeding microbes with renewed vigour.