Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (590 page)

Oh, my friends, I have been to one source of the river of missionary enterprise, and the waters thereof are bitter — bitter as hate, narrow as the grave! Not now do I wonder that the missionary in the East is at times, to our thinking, a little intolerant towards beliefs he cannot understand and people he does not appreciate. Rather it is a mystery to me that these delegates of an imperious ecclesiasticism have not a hundred times ere this provoked murder and fire among our wards. If they were true to the iron teachings of Centreville or Petumna or Chunkhaven, when they came they would have done so. For Centreville or Smithson or Squeehawken teach the only true creeds in all the world, and to err from their tenets, as laid down by the bishops and the elders, is damnation. How it may be in England at the centres of supply I cannot tell, but shall presently learn. Here in America I am afraid of these grim men of the denominations, who know so intimately the will of the Lord and enforce it to the uttermost. Left to themselves they would prayer fully, in all good faith and sinceritjr, slide gradually, ere a hundred years, from the mental inquisitions which they now work with some success to an institootion — be sure it would be an “institootion” with a journal of its own — not far different from what the Torquemada ruled aforetime. Does this seem extravagant? I have watched the expression on the men’s faces when they told me that they would rather see their son or daughter dead at their feet than doing such and such things — trampling on the grass on a Sunday, or something equally heinous — and I was grateful that the law of men stood between me and their interpretation of the law of God. They would assuredly slay the body for the soul’s sake and account it righteousness. And this would befall not in the next generation, perhaps, but in the next, for the very look I saw in a Eusufzai’s face at Peshawar when he turned and spat in my tracks I have seen this day at Chautauqua in the face of a preacher. The will was there, but not the power.

The Professor went up the lake on a visit, taking my ticket of admission with him, and I found a child, aged seven, fishing with a worm and pin, and spent the rest of the afternoon in his company. He was a delightful young citizen, full of information and apparently ignorant of denominations. We caught sun fish and catfish and pickerel together.

The trouble began when I attempted to escape through the wicket on the jetty and let the creeds fight it out among themselves. Without that ticket I could not go, unless I paid five dollars. That was the rule to prevent people cheating.

“You see,” quoth a man in charge, “you’ve no idea of the meanness of these people. Why, there was a lady this season — a prominent member of the Baptist connection — we know, but we can’t prove it that she had two of her hired girls in a cellar when the grounds were being canvassed for the annual poll-tax of five dollars a head. So she saved ten dollars. We can’t be too careful with this crowd. You’ve got to produce that ticket as a proof that you haven’t been living in the grounds for weeks and weeks.”

“For weeks and weeks!” The blue went out of the sky as he said it. “But I wouldn’t stay here for one week if I could help it,” I answered.

“No more would I,” he said earnestly.

Returned the Professor in a steamer, and him I basely left to make explanations about that ticket, while I returned to Lakewood — the nice hotel without any regulations. I feared that I should be kept in those terrible grounds for the rest of my life.

And it turned out an hour later that the same fear lay upon the Professor also. He arrived heated but exultant, having baffled the combined forces of all the denominations and recovered the five-dollar deposit. “I wouldn’t go inside those gates for anything.” he said. “I waited on the jetty. What do you think of it all?”

“It has shown me a new side of American life,” I responded. “I never want to see it again — and I’m awfully sorry for the girls who take it seriously. I suppose the bulk of them don’t. They just have a good time. But it would be better”

“How?”

“If they all got married instead of pumping up interest in a bric-a-brac museum and advertised lectures, and having their names in the papers. One never gets to believe in the proper destiny of woman until one sees a thousand of ‘em doing something different. I don’t like Chautauqua. There’s something wrong with it, and I haven’t time to find out where. But it is wrong.”

THE BOW FLUME CABLE-CAR

“SEE those things yonder?” He looked in the direction of the Market Street cable-cars which, moved without any visible agency, were conveying the good people of San Francisco to a picnic somewhere across the harbour. The stranger was not more than seven feet high. His face was burnished copper, his hands and beard were fiery red and his eyes a baleful blue. He had thrust his large frame into a suit of black clothes which made no pretensions toward fitting him, and his cheek was distended with plug-tobacco. “Those cars,” he said, more to himself than to me, “run upon a concealed cable worked by machinery, and that’s what broke our syndicate at Bow Flume. Concealed machinery, no — concealed ropes. Don’t you mix yourself with them. They are untrustworthy.”

“These cars work comfortably,” I ventured. “They run over people now and then, but that doesn’t matter.”

“Certainly not, not in ‘Frisco — by no means. It’s different out yonder.” He waved a palm- leaf fan in the direction of Mission Dolores among the sandhills. Then without a moment’s pause, and in a low and melancholy voice, he continued: “Young feller, all patent machinery is a monopoly, and don’t you try to bust it or else it will bust you. ‘Bout five years ago I was at Bow Flume — a minin’-town way back yonder — beyond the Sacramento. I ran a saloon there with O’Grady — Howlin’ O’Grady, so called on account of the noise he made when intoxicated. I never christened my saloon any high-soundin’ name, but owing to my happy trick of firing out men who was too full of bug-juice and disposed to be promiscuous in their dealin’s, the boys called it ‘The Wake Up an’ Git Bar.’ O’Grady, my partner, was an unreasonable inventorman.

He invented a check on the whisky bar’ls that wasn’t no good except lettin’ the whisky run off at odd times and shutting down when a man was most thirstiest. I remember half Bow Flume city firing their six-shooters into a cask — and Bourbon at that — which was refusing to run on account of O’Grady’s patent double- check tap. But that wasn’t what I started to tell you about — not by a long ways. O’Grady went to ‘Frisco when the Bow Flume saloon was booming. He hed a good time in ‘Frisco, kase he came back with a very bad head and no clothes worth talkin’ about. He had been jailed most time, but he had investigated the mechanism of these cars yonder — when he wasn’t in the cage. He came back with the liquor for the saloon, and the boys whooped round him for half a day, singing songs of glory. ‘Boys,’ says O’Grady, when a half of Bow Flume were lying on the floor kissing the cuspidors and singing ‘Way Down the Swanee River,’ being full of some new stuff O’Grady had got up from ‘Frisco — ’boys,’ says O’Grady, ‘I have the makings of a company in me. You know the road from this saloon to Bow Flume is bad and ‘most perpendicular.’ That was the exact state of the case. Bow Flume city was three hundred feet above our saloon. The boys used to roll down and get full, and any that happened to be sober rolled them up again when the time came to get. Some dropped into the canon that way — bad payers mostly. You see, a man held all the hill Bow Flume was built on, and he wanted forty thousand dollars for a forty-five by hundred lot o’ ground. We kept the whisky and the boys came down for it. The exercise disposed them to thirst. ‘Boys,’ says O’Grady, ‘as you know, I have visited the great metropolis of ‘Frisco.’ Then they had drinks all round for ‘Frisco. ‘And I have been jailed a few while enjoying the sights.’ Then they had drinks all round for the jail that held O’Grady. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I have a proposal to make.’ More drinks on account of the proposal. ‘I have got a hold of the idea of those ‘Frisco cable-cars. Some of the idea I got in ‘Frisco.

The rest I have invented.” says O’Grady. Then they drank all round for the invention.

“I am coining to the point. O’Grady made a company — the drunkest I ever saw — to run a cable-car on the ‘Frisco model from Wake Up an’ Git Saloon’ to Bow Flume. The boys put in about four thousand dollars, for Bow Flume was squirling gold then. There’s nary shanty there now. O’Grady put in four thousand dollars of his own. and I was roped in for as much. O’Grady desired the concern to represent the resources of Bow Flume. We got a car built in ‘Frisco for two thousand dollars, with an elegant bar at one end — nickel- plated fixings and ruby glass.

“The notion was to dispense liquor en route. A Bow Flume man could put himself outside t^o drinks in a minute and a half, the same not being pressed for urgent business. The boys graded the road for love, and we run a rope in a little trough in the middle. That rope ran swift, and any blame fool that had his foot cut off. fooling in the middle of the road, might ha’ found salvation by using our Bow Flume Palace Car. The boys said that was square. O’Grady took the contract for building the engine to wind the rope. He called his show a mule — it was a crossbreed between a threshing machine and an elevator ram. I don’t think he had followed the ‘Frisco patterns. He put all our dollars into that blamed barroom on the car, knowing what would please the boys best. They didn’t care much about the machinery, so long as the car hummed.

“We charged the boys a dollar a head per trip. One free drink included. That paid — paid like — Paradise. They liked the motion. O’Grady was engineer, and another man sort of tended to the rope engine when he wasn’t otherwise engaged. Those cable-cars run by gripping on to the rope. You know that. When the grip’s off the car is braked down and stands still. There ought to have been two cars by right — one to run up and the other down. But O’Grady had a blamed invention for reversing the engine, so the cable ran both ways — up to Bow Flume and down to the saloon — the terminus being in front of our door. A man could kick a friend slick from the bar into the car. The boys appreciated that. The Bow Flume Palace Car Company earned twenty on the hundred in three months, besides the profits of the drinks. We might have lasted to this day if O’Grady hadn’t tinkered his blamed engine up on top of Bow Flume Hill. The boys complained the show didn’t hum sufficient. They required railroad speed. O’Grady ran ‘em up and down at fourteen miles an hour; and his latest improvement was to touch twenty-four. The strain on the brakes was terrible — quite terrible. But every time O’Grady raised the record, the boys gave him a testimonial. ‘Twasn’t in human nature not to crowd ahead after that. Testimonials demoralise the publickest of men.

“I rode on the car that memorial day. Just as we started with a double load of boys and a razzle-dazzle assortment of drinks, something went zip under the car bottom. We proceeded with velocity. All the prominent members of the company were aboard. ‘The grip has got snubbed on the rope,’ says O’Grady quite quietly. ‘Boys, this will be the biggest smash on record. Something’s going to happen.’ We proceeded at the rate of twenty-four miles an hour till the end of our journey. I don’t know what happened there. We could get clear of the rope anyways at the point where it turned round a pulley to start up hill again. We struck — struck the stoop of the ‘Wake Up an’ Git Saloon’ — my saloon — and the next thing I knew was feeling of my legs under an assortment of matchwood and broken glass, representing liquor and fixtures to the tune of eight thousand. The car had been flicked through the saloon, bringing down the entire roof on the floor. It had then bucked out into the firmament, describing a parabola over the bluff at the back of the saloon, and was lying at the foot of that bluff, three hundred feet below, like a busted kaleidoscope — all nickel, shavings and bits of red glass. O’Grady and most of the prominent members of the company were dead — very dead — and there wasn’t enough left of the saloon to pay for a drink.

I took in the situation lying on my stomach at the edge of the bluff, and I suspicioned that any lawsuits that might arise would be complicated by shooting. So I quit Bow Flume by the back trail. I guess the coroner judged that there were no summons — leastways I never heard any more about it. Since that time I’ve had a distrust to cable-cars. The rope breaking is no great odds, bekase you can stop the car, but it’s getting the grip tangled with the running rope that spreads ruin and desolation over thriving communities and prevents the development of local resources.”

IN PARTIBUS

THE ‘buses run to Battersea,

The ‘buses run to Bow,

The ‘buses run to Westbourne Grove,

And Nottinghill also;

But I am sick of London town,

From Shepherd’s Bush to Bow.

I see the smut upon my cuff

And feel him on my nose;

I cannot leave my window wide

When gentle zephyr blows,

Because he brings disgusting things

And drops ‘em on my “clo’es.”

The sky, a greasy soup-toureen,

Shuts down atop my brow.

Yes, I have sighed for London town

And I have got it now: