Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (984 page)

‘He’d never dare to steal except under your protection. Give him what he’d have got in the Mahdi’s time — a first-class flogging.
You
know he deserves it!’

‘I’m afraid that isn’t allowed. You have to let me shift all those bullocks of his back again.’

‘And if I don’t?’

‘Then, I shall have to ride back and collect all my men and begin war against you.’

‘But what prevents my cutting your throat where you sit?

‘For one thing, you aren’t Abdullah, and —  — ’

‘There! You confess he’s a cad!’

‘And for another, the Government would only send another officer who didn’t understand your ways, and then there
would
be war, and no one would score except Abdullah. He’d steal your camels and get credit for it.’

‘So he would, the scoundrel! This is a hard world for honest men. Now, you admit Abdullah is a cad. Listen to me, and I’ll tell you a few more things about him. He was, etc., etc. He is, etc., etc.’

‘You’re perfectly right, Sheikh, but don’t you see I can’t tell him what I think of him so long as he’s loyal and you’re out against us? Now, if
you
come in I promise you that I’ll give Abdullah a telling-off — yes, in your presence — that will do you good to listen to.’

‘No! I won’t come in! But — I tell you what I will do. I’ll accompany you to-morrow as your guest, understand, to your camp. Then you send for Abdullah, and
if
I judge that his fat face has been sufficiently blackened in my presence, I’ll think about coming in later.’

So it was arranged, and they slept out the rest of the night, side by side, and in the morning they gathered up and returned all Abdullah’s cattle, and in the evening, in Farid’s presence, Abdullah got the tongue-lashing of his wicked old life, and Farid of the Desert laughed and came in; and they all lived happy ever afterwards.

Somewhere or other in the nearer provinces the old heady game must be going on still, but the Soudan proper has settled to civilisation of the brick-bungalow and bougainvillea sort, and there is a huge technical college where the young men are trained to become fitters, surveyors, draftsmen, and telegraph employees at fabulous wages. In due time, they will forget how warily their fathers had to walk in the Mahdi’s time to secure even half a bellyful; then, as has happened elsewhere. They will honestly believe that they themselves originally created and since then have upheld the easy life into which they were bought at so heavy a price. Then the demand will go up for ‘extension of local government,’ ‘Soudan for the Soudanese,’ and so on till the whole cycle has to be retrodden. It is a hard law but an old one — Rome died learning it, as our western civilisation may die — that if you give any man anything that he has not painfully earned for himself, you infallibly make him or his descendants your devoted enemies.

SOUVENIRS OF FRANCE

These two articles were published in Paris in
Revue des Deux Mondes
on the 1st and 15 March, 1933.

CONTENTS

I

II

I

IN
the spring of the Paris Exhibition of 1878 my father was in charge of the Indian Section of Arts and Manufactures there, and it was his duty to arrange them as they arrived. He promised me, then twelve or thirteen years old, that I should accompany him to Paris on condition that I gave no trouble. The democracy of an English School had made that easy.

Our happy expedition crossed the Channel in a steamer, I think, made of two steamers attached to each other side by side. (Was it the old
Calais-Douvres
designed to prevent sea-sickness which even the gods themselves cannot do?) And, late at night, we came to a boarding-house full of English people at the back of the Parc Monceau. In the morning, when I had waked to the divine smell of roasting coffee and the bell-like call of the
marchand-d’habits
, my father said in effect, “I shall be busy every day for some time. Here is —  — ” I think it was two francs. “There are lots of restaurants, all called Duval, where you can eat. I will get you a free pass for the Exhibition and you can go where you please.” Then he was swallowed by black-coated officials and workmen in blouses.

Imagine the delight of a child let loose among all the wonders of all the world as they emerged from packing-cases, free to enter every unfinished building that was being raised round an edifice called the Trocadero, and to pass at all times through gates in wooden barricades behind which workmen put up kiosques and pavilions, or set out plants and trees! At first, these genial deep-voiced men asked questions, but after a few days no one looked at my pass, and I considered myself an accepted fly on this great wheel of colour and smells and sights, all revolving to a ceaseless
mitraille
of hammers and machinery. My father, too, had been entirely correct as to this Monsieur Duval. His restaurants were everywhere in Paris; his satisfying
déjeuners
cost exactly one franc. There were also, if one had made the necessary economies, celestial gingerbreads to be bought everywhere.

At the boarding-house were two English boys from a School called Christ’s Hospital, or, in talk, the Blue Coat School, which dates from the time of Edward VI. We fraternised, and soon discovered that the Bois de Boulogne was an ideal ground for paper-chases, which, at that time, were not understood in France.

But the scholars of Christ’s Hospital are obligated to wear the ancient costume of their School. This consists of white linen bands round the neck, in lieu of collar; a long blue cloth bedgown, fastened by many bright flat buttons and loosely girt at the hip with a leather girdle; blue knee breeches; vividly yellow stockings, and square-toed shoes with buckles. Hats are not worn, and when engaged in athletic exercise the skirts of the blue bedgown are drawn through the girdle. I ask you to consider the effect on a pious
gendarmerie
of two such apparitions, scattering or pursuing trails of torn paper through their sacred Bois in ‘78! My friends were often halted and questioned; but the
gendarmes
, tolerant so long as you are polite, soon perceived them to be the young of some species of the insane English. “But what”, they demanded unofficially, “is the genesis and intention of this bizarre uniform? Military? Civil? Ecclesiastical?”

My brutal experiments in French among my workmen at my Trocadero made me interpreter here. I have often wondered what the
gendarmes
and the interested priests must have thought. With the ribaldly inquisitive cabmen of those days (they talked too much, those gentlemen in leather hats) one was less polite; for a selection of simple phrases drawn, again, from my blue-bloused friends at the Trocadero, would act on them marvellously. You see, they dared not abandon their vehicles, and the radius of a whiplash is limited. But conceive this against to-day’s background! Three small savages capering on, let us say, the
trottoir
of the Avenue d’Iéna while they harpoon a red and roaring
cocher
with epithets of Zoological origin or the ripostes of Cambronne! . . . Primitive? Possibly — but Love is founded on a variety of experiences.

When these delights palled, and I had sufficiently superintended my Exposition for the day, I would explore my Paris. Thus I came to know the Bridges and the men who clipped the poodles on the little quays below them. I perceived from the pantomime of the artists engaged that there were two schools of thought in this art. One began at the head; the other at the tail. When I told this to my father, who was also an artist, he laughed enormously. And I accepted it as a tribute to my powers of narration

I discovered on my own account Quasimodo’s Notre Dame. (I believed profoundly in the phantasmagoria of
Notre Dame
, including Esmeralda and her Djali (translated).) I even came to know a little of the Left Bank and the book-boxes of the Quai Voltaire then filled with savage prints and lithographs of the War of ‘70. The tobacconists, too, sold glazed clay pipes of the heads of bearded soldiers and generals. I considered myself well informed as to that war because, a few years before, I had been given a scrap-book of pictures cut out of the
Illustrated London News
. One was called “The Burning of Bazeilles”, and another — a terrible perspective of a forlorn army laying down their rifles in a wilderness of snow — represented Bourbaki’s disarmament at the Swiss frontier. The concierge and his wife at the boarding-house also told me tales of that war of which I comprehended — and forgot — nothing.

But my Exposition was always the heart of things for me. A feature of it was the head of Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty which, later, was presented to the United States. One ascended by a staircase (5 c.) to the dome of the skull and looked out through the vacant eye-balls at a bright-coloured world beneath. I climbed up there often, and once an elderly Frenchman said to me, “Now, you young Englisher, you can say you have looked through the eyes of Liberty Herself”. He spoke less than the truth. It was through the eyes of France that I began to see.

What I did not understand — and it was much — I brought home at evening and laid before my father, who either explained it or told me where I could get the information. He treated me always as a comrade, and his severest orders were, at most, suggestions or invitations. “If I were you, I should do so-and-so” — ”You might do worse than, etc.” prefaced delightful talks while I was going to bed and he was dressing for some function. It was one of his “suggestions” that led me to look (but not for long) at an Algerian exhibit of educational appliances — copy-books filled with classical French sentences, and simple sums perpetrated by young Algerians for whom I felt sympathy, being under a similar yoke. By some means or other I gathered dimly that France “had sound ideas about her Colonies” and that I “might do worse” than remember that. I forgot, of course — to remember later.

This was eight years after the war of ‘70 and six since the last of the £200,000,000 indemnity had been paid. The Boche had done his best to cripple France, but his memory did not include “the night-cap of Père Bugeaud”, nor his prevision anything in the least resembling the Maréchal Lyautey. Madagascar, Tonquin, Indo-China, and the rest were not. The Boche, disregarding the possibilities of a fringe of administration on a beach in North Africa, thought Colonial affairs might divert France. Others must have seen more among the packing-cases where my father talked with the black-coated officials with the rosettes.

I returned to England and my School with a knowledge that there existed a land across the water, where everything was different, and delightful, where one walked among marvels, and all food tasted extremely well. Therefore, I thought well of that place.

Later, I was “invited” to study French. “You’ll never be able to talk it, but if I were you, I’d try to read it” was his word. I append here the method of instruction. Give an English boy the first half of
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
in his native tongue. When he is properly intoxicated, withdraw it and present to him the second half in the original. Afterwards —
not
before — Dumas the Prince of
amuseurs
, and the rest as God pleases.

The official study of the French language in the English schools of those days assumed that its literature was “Immoral”; whereas the proper slant of accents and the correct assignment of genders was virtuous. In my own interests, then, I made my “graves” and “acutes” as nearly vertical as might be, while my caligraphy served as a fig-leaf to cover those delicate problems of sex in inanimate objects so dear to the meticulous Gaul. During my holidays I would read all the French books that interested, and should not have interested, me, till at sixteen I could deal with them almost as with English.

This served me well a few years later, when, as a subordinate on an Indian journal, it was part of my duty to translate columns upon columns of the
Novoe Vremya
detailing Russian campaigns in Central Asia which were then of some interest. At that time I was a young man in my father’s house — a family reunited after long separations in childhood, very content to be together. Never was youth more fortunate! People from all parts of the world would visit my father in his capacity of Provincial Art Director and Curator of the Art Museum. Among these was a French official, or philosopher, named Gustave Le Bon — of the type as it seemed to me of those black-coated ones in Paris six or seven years before. Some of his talk dealt with the significance of those wearisome educational exhibits from Algeria, which I had seen: the theory and the logic of Colonial administration, and so forth, all set out in beautifully balanced French of which the dominant word was “
Emprise morale
”. He talked also on occasion like a Maxim articulate, and my father almost as swiftly, each explaining and comparing the ends and aims of his government. Thus was a second link of the chain riveted which in due time would assist to draw my heart towards France.