THE COLLECTED WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING (Illustrated Edition). Rudyard Kipling
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Название: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING (Illustrated Edition)
Автор: Rudyard Kipling
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Книги для детей: прочее
isbn: 9788027202027
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Now it was a few years later, and upon the other edge of America, that a young man came through the clammy sea-fog up a windy street which is flanked with most expensive houses built of wood to imitate stone. To him, as he was standing by a hammered iron gate, entered on horseback—and the horse would have been cheap at a thousand dollars—another young man. And this is what they said:
"Hello, Dan!"
"Hello, Harve!"
"What's the best with you?"
"Well, I'm so's to be that kind o' animal called second mate this trip. Ain't you most through with that triple-invoiced college o' yours?"
"Getting that way. I tell you, the Leland Stanford Junior isn't a circumstance to the old "We're Here"; but I'm coming into the business for keeps next fall."
"Meanin' aour packets?"
"Nothing else. You just wait till I get my knife into you, Dan. I'm going to make the old line lie down and cry when I take hold."
"I'll resk it," said Dan, with a brotherly grin, as Harvey dismounted and asked whether he were coming in.
"That's what I took the cable fer; but, say, is the doctor anywheres araound? I'll draown that crazy nigger some day, his one cussed joke an' all."
There was a low, triumphant chuckle, as the ex-cook of the "We're Here" came out of the fog to take the horse's bridle. He allowed no one but himself to attend to any of Harvey's wants.
"Thick as the Banks, ain't it, doctor?" said Dan, propitiatingly.
But the coal-black Celt with the second-sight did not see fit to reply till he had tapped Dan on the shoulder, and for the twentieth time croaked the old, old prophecy in his ear:
"Master—man. Man—master," said he. "You remember, Dan Troop, what I said? On the 'We're Here'?"
"Well, I won't go so far as to deny that it do look like it as things stand at present," said Dan. "She was an able packet, and one way an' another I owe her a heap—her and dad."
"Me too," quoth Harvey Cheyne.
Kim
Chapter I
'Oh ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when the heathen pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!'
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon,' hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.
There was some justification for Kim,—he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy off the trunnions,—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white—a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi railway, and his regiment went home without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O'Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India. His estate at death consisted of three papers—one he called his 'ne varietur' because those words were written below his signature thereon, and another his 'clearance-certificate.' The third was Kim's birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic—such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue and white Jadoo-Gher—the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim's horn would be exalted between pillars—monstrous pillars—of beauty and strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest regiment in the world, would attend to Kim,—little Kim that should have been better off than his father. Nine hundred first-class devils, whose god was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim, if they had not forgotten O'Hara—poor СКАЧАТЬ