Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (45 page)

The regular working of the empire shifted his world to India, where he tasted utter loneliness in subaltern’s quarters, – one room and one bullock-trunk, – and, with his mess, learned the new life from the beginning. But there were horses in the land – ponies at reasonable price; there was polo for such as could afford it; there were the disreputable remnants of a pack of hounds; and there were cricket, and musketry instruction, and the fitting up of the new gymnasium; and Cottar worried his way along without too much despair. It dawned on him that a regiment in India was nearer the chance of active service than he had conceived, and that a man might as well study his profession. A major of the new school backed this idea with enthusiasm (he was a black little man, full of notions), and he and Cottar accumulated a good library of military works, and read and argued and disputed far into the nights. But the adjutant said the old thing: ‘Get to know your men, young un, and they’ll follow you anywhere. That’s all you want – know your men.’ Cottar thought he knew them fairly well at cricket and the regimental sports, but he never realised the true inwardness of them till he was sent off with a detachment of twenty to sit down in a mud fort near a rushing river which was spanned by a bridge of boats. When the floods came they went out and hunted stray pontoons down the banks. Otherwise there was nothing to do, and the men got drunk, gambled, and quarrelled. They were a sickly crew, for a junior subaltern is by custom saddled with the worst men. Cottar endured their rioting as long as he could, and then sent down-country for a dozen pairs of boxing-gloves. (Nothing in the regulations forbids an officer taking part in healthy sports.)

‘I wouldn’t blame you for fightin’,’ said he, ‘if you only knew how to use your hands; but you don’t. Take these things, and I’ll show you.’ It was great sport, for he could pay back an insubordinate young thief, and teach him something at the same time; and the men appreciated his efforts. Now, instead of blaspheming and swearing at a comrade, and threatening to shoot him, they could take him apart, and soothe themselves to exhaustion. As one man explained whom Cottar found with a shut eye and a diamond-shaped mouth spitting teeth through an embrasure: ‘We tried it with the gloves, sir, for twentyminutes, and
that
done us no good, sir. Then we took off the gloves and tried it that way for another twenty minutes, same as you showed us, sir, an’ that done us a world o’ good. ’Twasn’t fightin’, sir; there was a bet on.’

Cottar dared not laugh, but he invited his men to other sports, such as racing across country in shirt and trousers after a trail of torn paper, and to single-stick in the evenings, till the native population, who had a lust for sport in every form, wished to know whether the white men understood wrestling. They sent in an ambassador, who took the soldiers by the neck and threw them about the dust; and the entire command were all for this new game. They spent money on learning new falls and holds, which was better than buying beer and other doubtful commodities; and the big-limbed peasantry grinned five deep round the tournaments.

That detachment, who had gone up in bullock-carts, returned to headquarters at an average rate of thirty miles a day, fair heel and toe; no sick, no prisoners, and no court-martials pending. They scattered themselves among their friends, singing the praises of their lieutenant and looking for causes of offence.

‘How did you do it, young un?’ the adjutant asked.

‘Oh, I sweated the beef off ’em, and then I sweated some muscle on to ’em. It was rather a lark.’

‘If that’s your way of lookin’ at it, we can give you all the larks you want. Young Davies isn’t feelin’ quite fit, and he’s next for detachment duty. Care to go with him?’

‘Sure he wouldn’t mind? I don’t want to shove myself forward in any way.’

‘You needn’t bother on Davies’s account. We’ll give you the sweepin’s of the corps, and you can see what you can make of ’em.

‘All right,’ said Cottar. ‘It’s better fun than loafin’ about cantonments.’

‘Rummy thing,’ said the adjutant, after Cottar had returned to his wilderness with twenty other devils worse than the first. ‘If Cottar only knew it, half the women in the station would give their eyes – confound ’em! – to have the young un in tow.’

‘That accounts for Mrs Elery sayin’ I was workin’ my nice new boy too hard,’ said a wing commander.

‘Oh, yes; and “Why doesn’t he come to the band-stand in the evenings?” and “Can’t I get him to make up a four at tennis with the Hammon girls?”’ the adjutant snorted. ‘Look at young Davies makin’ an ass of himself over mutton-dressed-as-lamb old enough to be his mother!’

‘No one can accuse young Cottar of runnin’ after women, white
or
black,’ the major replied thoughtfully. ‘But, then, that’s the kind that generally goes the worst mucker in the end.’

‘Not Cottar. I’ve only run across one of his muster before – a fellow called Ingles, in South Africa. He was just the same hard-trained, athetic-sports build of animal. Always kept himself in the pink of condition. Didn’t do him much good, though. Shot at Wesselstroom the week before Majuba. Wonder how the young un will lick his detachment into shape.’

Cottar turned up six weeks later, on foot, with his pupils; and if they did not carry so fine a gloss as the others, it was because they were the baser metal. He never told his experiences, but the men spoke enthusiastically, and fragments of it leaked back to the colonel through sergeants, batmen, and the like.

There was great jealousy between the first and second detachments, but the men united in adoring Cottar, and their way of showing it was by sparing him all the trouble that men know how to make for an unloved officer. He sought popularity as little as he had sought it at school, and therefore it came to him. He favoured no one – not even when the company sloven pulled the company cricket match out of the fire with an unexpected forty-three at the last moment. There was very little getting round him, for he seemed to know by instinct exactly when and where to head off for a trickster or malingerer; but if one were in trouble of mind or body, he headed straight to Cottar, who knew that the difference between a dazed and sulky junior of the upper school and a bewildered, browbeaten lump of a private fresh from the depotwas very small indeed. The sergeants, seeing these things, told him secrets generally hid from the young officers, and the regimental sergeant-major gave him the sifted wisdom of twenty years of service to remember against the time when he should be adjutant. His words were quoted as barrack authority on bets in canteen and at tea; his batman treated his belongings as reverently as the fags of old had treated his razors; and the veriest shrew of the corps, bursting with charges against other women who had stolen her fuel or used the cooking-ranges out of turn, forbore to speak when Cottar, as the regulations ordained, asked of a morning if there were ‘any complaints.’

‘I’m full o’ complaints,’ said Mrs Corporal Morrison, ‘an’ I’d kill O’Halloran’s fat cow of a wife any day, but ye know how it is. ’E puts ’is head just inside the door, an’ looks down ’is blessed nose so bashful, an’’e whispers, “Any complaints?” Ye can’t complain after that.
I
want to kiss him. Some day I think I will. Heigho! she’ll be a lucky woman that gets Young Innocence. See ’im now, girls! Do yer blame me?’

Cottar was cantering across to polo, and he looked a very satisfactory figure of a man as he gave easily to the first excited bucks of his pony, and slipped over a low mud wall to the dusty practice-ground. There were more than Mrs Corporal Morrison who felt as she did. But Cottar was busy for eleven hours of the day in one way or another. He did not care to have his tennis spoiled by petticoats giggling about the court, and after one long afternoon at a garden-party he explained to his major that this sort of thing was ‘futile piffle,’ and the major laughed. Theirs was not a married mess, except for the colonel’s wife, and Cottar stood rather in awe of the good lady. She said ‘my regiment,’ and the world knows what that means. None the less, when they wanted her to give away the prizes after a regimental shooting-match, and she flatly refused because one of the prize-winners was married to a girl who, she believed, had made a jest of her behind her broad back, the mess ordered Cottar to ‘tackle her’ in his best calling-kit, and he did, simply and laboriously, and she gave way altogether.

‘She only wanted to know the facts of the case,’ he explained. ‘I just told her, and she saw at once.’

‘Ye-es,’ said the adjutant. ‘I expect that’s what she did. Comin’ to the Fusiliers’ dance tonight?’

‘No, thanks. I’ve got a fight on with the major.’ The virtuous apprentice sat up till midnight in the major’s quarters, with a stop-watch and a pair of compasses, shifting little painted lead blocks about a map of four inches to the mile. Then he turned in and slept the sleep of innocence, which is full of healthy dreams. One peculiarity about his dreams he noticed at the beginning of his second hot weather. Two and three times a month they duplicated or ran in series. He would find himself sliding into dreamland by the same road – a road that ran along a beach near a pile of brushwood. To the right lay the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for the same sea. By that road he would travel over a swell of rising ground covered with short, withered grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason. Beyond the ridge, which was crowned with some son of street-lamp, anything was possible; but up to the lamp it seemed to him that he knew the road as well as he knew the parade-ground. He learned to look forward to the place; for, once there, he was sure of a good night’s rest, and the hot weather can be rather trying. First, shadowy under closing eyelids, would come the outline of the brushwood pile; next the white sand of the beach road, almost overhanging the black, changeful sea; then the turn inland uphill to the single light. When he was unrestful for any reason, he would tell himself how he was sure to get there – sure to get there – if he shut his eyes and surrendered to the drift of things. But one night after a foolishly hard hour’s polo (the thermometer was 94° in his quarters at ten o’clock), sleep stood away from him altogether, though he did his best to find the well-known road, the point where true sleep began. At last he saw the brushwood, and hurried along to the ridge, for behind him he felt was the wide-awake, sultry world. He reached the lamp in safety, tingling with drowsiness, when a policeman – a common country policeman – sprang up before him and touched himon the shoulder before he could dive into the dim valley below. He was filled with terror – the hopeless terror of dreams – for the policeman said, in the awful, distinct voice of dream-people, ‘I am Policeman Day coming back from the City of Sleep. You come with me.’ Georgie knew it was true – that just beyond him in the valley lay the lights of the City of Sleep, where he would have been sheltered, and that this Policeman Thing had full power and authority to head him back to miserable wakefulness. He found himself looking at the moonlight on the wall, dripping with fright; and he never overcame that horror, though he met the policeman several times that hot weather, and his coming was the forerunner of a bad night. But other dreams – perfectly absurd ones – filled him with an incommunicable delight. All those that he remembered began by the brushwood pile. For instance, he found a small clockwork steamer (he had noticed it many nights before) lying by the sea-road, and stepped into it, whereupon it moved with surpassing swiftness over an absolutely level sea. This was glorious, for he felt he was exploring great matters; and it stopped by a lily carved in stone, which, most naturally, floated on the water. Seeing the lily was labelled ‘Hong-Kong,’ Georgie said: ‘Of course. This is precisely what I expected Hong-Kong would be like. How magnificent!’ Thousands of miles farther on (passengers were arriving and departing all the while) it halted at yet another stone lily, labelled ‘Java’; and this again delighted him hugely, because he knew that now he was at the world’s end. But the little boat ran on and on till it lay in a deep fresh-water lock the sides of which were carven marble, green with moss. Lily-pads grew in the water, and reeds arched above. Some one moved among the reeds – some one whom Georgie knew he had travelled to this world’s end to reach. Therefore everything was entirely well with him. He was unspeakably happy, and vaulted over the ship’s side to find this person. When his feet touched that still water, it changed with the rustle of unrolling maps to nothing less than a sixth quarter of the globe, beyond the most remote imagining of man – a place where islands were colored yellow and blue, their lettering strung acrosstheir faces.They gaveonunknown seas, and Georgie’s urgent desire was to return swiftly across this floating atlas to known bearings. He told himself repeatedly that it was no good to hurry, but still he hurried desperately, and the islands slipped and slid under his feet, the straits yawned and widened, till he found himself utterly lost in the world’s fourth dimension, with no hope of return. Yet only a little distance away he could see the old world with the rivers and mountain-chains marked according to the Sandhurst rules of map-making. Then that person for whom he had come to the Lily Lock (that was its name) ran up across unexplored territories, and showed him a way. They fled hand in hand till they reached a road that spanned ravines, and ran along the edge of precipices, and was tunnelled through mountains. ‘This goes to our brushwood pile,’ said his companion, and all his trouble was at an end. He took a pony, because he understood that this was the Thirty-Mile Ride and he must ride swiftly, and raced through the clattering tunnels and round the curves, always downhill, till he heard the sea to his left, and saw it raging under a full moon, against sandy cliffs. It was heavy going, but he recognized the nature of the country, the dark-purple downs inland, and the bents that whistled in the wind. The road was eaten away in places, and the sea lashed at him – black, foamless tongues of smooth and glossy rollers; but he was sure that there was less danger from the sea than from ‘Them,’ whoever ‘They’ were, inland to his right. He knew, too, that he would be safe if he could reach the down with the lamp on it. This came as he expected: he saw the one light a mile ahead along the beach, dismounted, turned to the right, walked quietly over to the brushwood pile, found the little steamer had returned to the beach whence he had unmoored it, and – must have fallen asleep, for he could remember no more. ‘I’m gettin’ the hang of the geography of that place,’ he said to himself as he shaved next morning. ‘I must have made some sort of circle. Let’s see. The Thirty-Mile Ride (now how the deuce did I know it was called the Thirty-Mile Ride?) joins the sea-road beyond the first down where the lamp is. And that atlas country lies at the back of the Thirty-Mile Ride, somewhere out to the right beyond the hillsand tunnels. Rummy thing, dreams. Wonder what makes mine fit into each other so?’