THE COLLECTED WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING (Illustrated Edition). Rudyard Kipling

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СКАЧАТЬ subject? All right. I will be good. But they had to get up early in the morning to do anything to it without letting me into it. What did your father and mother say at the last?'

      'Don't speak of that,' begged Kate.

      'Well, I won't.'

      'I wake up at night, and think of mother. It's dreadful. At the last I suppose I should have stayed behind and shirked if some one had said the right word--or the wrong one--as I got on board the train, and waved my handkerchief to them.'

      'Good heaven! Why didn't I stay!' he groaned.

      'You couldn't have said it, Nick,' she told him quietly.

      'You mean your father could. Of course he could, and if he had happened to be some one else he would. When I think of that I want to----!'

      'Don't say anything against father, please,' she said, with a tightening of the lips.

      'Oh, dear child!' he murmured contritely, 'I didn't mean that. But I have to say something against somebody. Give me somebody to curse, and I'll be quiet.'

      'Nick!'

      'Well, I'm not a block of wood,' he growled.

      'No; you are only a very foolish man.'

      Tarvin smiled. 'Now you're shouting.'

      She asked him about the Maharaj Kunwar, to change the subject, and Tarvin told her that he was a little brick. But he added that the society of Rhatore wasn't all as good.

      'You ought to see Sitabhai!'

      He went on to tell her about the Maharajah and the people of the palace with whom she would come in contact. They talked of the strange mingling of impassiveness and childishness in the people, which had already impressed Kate, and spoke of their primitive passions and simple ideas--simple as the massive strength of the Orient is simple.

      'They aren't what we should call cultured. They don't know Ibsen a little bit, and they don't go in for Tolstoi for sour apples,' said Tarvin, who did not read three newspapers a day at Topaz for nothing. 'If they really knew the modern young woman, I suppose her life wouldn't be worth an hour's purchase. But they've got some rattling good old-fashioned ideas, all the same--the sort I used to hear once upon a time at my dear old mother's knee, away back in the State of Maine. Mother believed in marriage, you know; and that's where she agreed with me and with the fine old-style natives of India. The venerable, ramshackle, tumble-down institution of matrimony is still in use here, you know.'

      'But I never said I sympathised with Nora, Nick,' exclaimed Kate, leaping all the chasms of connection.

      'Well, then, that's where you are solid with the Indian Empire. The Doll's House glanced right off this blessed old-timey country. You wouldn't know where it had been hit.'

      'But I don't agree with all your ideas either,' she felt bound to add.

      'I can think of one,' retorted Tarvin, with a shrewd smile. 'But I'll convert you to my views there.'

      Kate stopped short in the street along which they were walking. 'I trusted you, Nick!' she said reproachfully.

      He stopped, and gazed ruefully at her for a moment. 'O Lord!' he groaned. 'I trusted myself! But I'm always thinking of it. What can you expect? But I tell you what, Kate, this shall be the end--last, final, ultimate. I'm done. From this out I'm a reformed man. I don't promise not to think, and I'll have to go on feeling, just the same. But I'll be quiet. Shake on it.' He offered his hand, and Kate took it.

      They walked on for some moments in silence until Tarvin said mournfully, 'You didn't see Heckler just before you came away, did you?'

      She shook her head.

      'No; Jim and you never did get along much together. But I wish I knew what he's thinking about me. Didn't hear any rumour, any report, going around about what had become of me, I suppose?'

      'They thought in town that you had gone to San Francisco to see some of the Western directors of the Colorado and California Central, I think. They thought that because the conductor of your train brought back word that you said you were going to Alaska, and they didn't believe that. I wish you had a better reputation for truth-telling at Topaz, Nick.'

      'So do I, Kate; so do I,' exclaimed Tarvin heartily. 'But if I had, how would I ever get the right thing believed? That's just what I wanted them to think--that I was looking after their interests. But where would I be if I had sent that story back? They would have had me working a land-grab in Chile before night. That reminds me--don't mention that I'm here in writing home, please. Perhaps they'll figure that out, too, by the rule of contraries, if I give them the chance. But I don't want to give them the chance.'

      'I'm not likely to mention it,' said Kate, flushing.

      A moment later she recurred to the subject of her mother. In the yearning for home that came upon her anew in the midst of all the strangeness through which Tarvin was taking her, the thought of her mother, patient, alone, looking for some word from her, hurt her as if for the first time. The memory was for the moment intolerable to her; but when Tarvin asked her why she had come at all if she felt that way, she answered with the courage of better moments--'Why do men go to war?'

      Kate saw little of Tarvin during the next few days. Mrs. Estes made her known at the palace, and she had plenty to occupy her mind and heart. There she stepped bewilderedly into a land where it was always twilight--a labyrinth of passages, courtyards, stairs, and hidden ways, all overflowing with veiled women, who peered at her and laughed behind her back, or childishly examined her dress, her helmet, and her gloves. It seemed impossible that she should ever know the smallest part of the vast warren, or distinguish one pale face from another in the gloom, as the women led her through long lines of lonely chambers where the wind sighed alone under the glittering ceilings, to hanging gardens two hundred feet above the level of the ground, but still jealously guarded by high walls, and down again by interminable stairways, from the glare and the blue of the flat roofs to silent subterranean chambers hewn against the heat of the summer sixty feet into the heart of the living rock.. At every step she found women and children, and yet more women and children. The palace was reported to hold within its walls four thousand living, and no man knew how many buried, dead.

      There were many women--how many she did not know--worked upon by intrigues she could not comprehend, who refused her ministrations absolutely. They were not ill, they said, and the touch of the white woman meant pollution. Others there were who thrust their children before her and bade her bring colour and strength back to these pale buds born in the darkness; and terrible, fierce-eyed girls who leaped upon her out of the dark, overwhelming her with passionate complaints that she did not and dared not understand. Monstrous and obscene pictures glared at her from the walls of the little rooms, and the images of shameless gods mocked her from their greasy niches above the doorways. The heat and the smell of cooking, faint fumes of incense, and the indescribable taint of overcrowded humanity, caught her by the throat. But what she heard and what she guessed sickened her more than any visible horror. Plainly it was one thing to be stirred to generous action by a vivid recital of the state of the women of India, another to face the unutterable fact in the isolation of the women's apartments of the palace of Rhatore.

      Tarvin meanwhile was going about spying out the land on a system which he had contrived for himself. It was conducted on the principle of exhaustion of the possibilities in the order of their importance--every movement which he made having the directest, though not always the most obvious, relation СКАЧАТЬ