Abaft the Funnel. Rudyard Kipling

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the ex-Everything!

      Also the ex-Everything else!

      Figure you the situation!

      He clasps my hand.

      As a child clasps the hand of its nurse.

      He demands of me particular rensignments of my health. It is to him a matter important.

      Other time he regulated the health of forty-five millions.

      I riposte. I enquire of his liver—his pancreas, his abdomen.

      The sacred internals of Sir Wollobie!

      He has them all. And they all make him ill.

      He is very lonely. He speaks of his wife. There is no Lady Wollobie, but a woman in a flat in Bayswater who cries in her sleep for more curricles.

      He does not say this, but I understand.

      He derides the Council of the Indian Office. He imprecates the Government.

      He curses the journals.

      He has a clob. He curses that clob.

      Females with teeth monstrous explain to him the theory of Government.

      Men of long hair, the psychologues of the paint-pots, correct him tenderly, but from above.

      He has known of the actualities of life—Death, Power, Responsibility, Honour—the Good accomplished, the effacement of Wrong for forty years.

      There remains to him a seat in a penny 'bus.

      If I do not take him from that.

      I rap my heels on the knife-board. I sing "tra la la." I am also well disposed to larmes.

      He courbes himself underneath an ulstaire and he damns the fog to eternity.

      He wills not that I leave him. He desires that I come to dinner.

      I am grave. I think upon Lady Wollobie—shorn of chaprassies—at the Clob. Not in Bayswater.

      I accept. He will bore me affreusely, but … I have taken his seat.

      He descends from the tumbril of his humiliation, and the street hawker rolls a barrow up his waistcoat.

      Then intervenes the fog—dense, impenetrable, hopeless, without end.

      It is because of the fog that there is a drop upon the end of my nose so chiselled.

      Gentlemen the Governors, the Lieutenant-Governors and the Commissaires, behold the doom prepared.

      I am descended to the gates of your Life in Death. Which is Brompton or Bayswater.

      You do not believe? You will try the constituencies when you return; is it not so?

      You will fail. As others failed.

      Your seat waits you on the top of an Omnibuse Proletariat.

      I shall be there.

      You will embrace me as a shipwrecked man embraces a log. You will be "dam glad t' see me."

      I shall grin.

      Oh Life! Oh Death! Oh Power! Oh Toil! Oh Hope! Oh Stars! Oh Honour! Oh Lodgings! Oh Fog! Oh Omnibuses! Oh Despair! Oh Skittles!

      FOOTNOTES:

[8] "Turnovers," Vol. VIII.

      GRIFFITHS THE SAFE MAN[9]

      As the title indicates, this story deals with the safeness of Griffiths the safe man, the secure person, the reliable individual, the sort of man you would bank with. I am proud to write about Griffiths, for I owe him a pleasant day. This story is dedicated to my friend Griffiths, the remarkably trustworthy mortal.

      In the beginning there were points about Griffiths. He quoted proverbs. A man who quotes proverbs is confounded by proverbs. He is also confounded by his friends. But I never confounded Griffiths—not even in that supreme moment when the sweat stood on his brow in agony and his teeth were fixed like bayonets and he swore horribly. Even then, I say, I sat on my own trunk, the trunk that opened, and told Griffiths that I had always respected him, but never more than at the present moment. He was so safe, y' know.

      Safeness is a matter of no importance to me. If my trunk won't lock when I jump on it thrice, I strap it up and go on to something else. If my carpet-bag is too full, I let the tails of shirts and the ends of ties bubble over and go down the street with the affair. It all comes right in the end, and if it does not, what is a man that he should fight against Fate?

      But Griffiths is not constructed in that manner. He says: "Safe bind is safe find." That, rather, is what he used to say. He has seen reason to alter his views. Everything about Griffiths is safe—entirely safe. His trunk is locked by two hermetical gun-metal double-end Chubbs; his bedding-roll opens to a letter padlock capable of two million combinations; his hat-box has a lever patent safety on it; and the grief of his life is that he cannot lock up the ribs of his umbrella safely. If you could get at his soul you would find it ready strapped up and labelled for heaven. That is Griffiths.

      When we went to Japan together, Griffiths kept all his money under lock and key. I carried mine in my coat-tail pocket. But all Griffiths' contraptions did not prevent him from spending exactly as much as I did. You see, when he had worried his way through the big strap, and the little strap, and the slide-valve, and the spring lock, and the key that turned twice and a quarter, he felt as though he had earned any money he found, whereas I could get masses of sinful wealth by merely pulling out my handkerchief—dollars and five dollars and ten dollars, all mixed up with the tobacco or flying down the road. They looked much too pretty to spend.

      "Safe bind, safe find," said Griffiths in the treaty port.

      He never really began to lock things up severely till we got our passports to travel up-country. He took charge of mine for me, on the ground that I was an imbecile. As you are asked for your passport at every other shop, all the hotels, most of the places of amusement, and on the top of each hill, I got to appreciate Griffiths' self-sacrifice. He would be biting a strap with his teeth or calculating the combinations of his padlocks among a ring of admiring Japanese while I went for a walk into the interior.

      "Safe bind, safe find," said Griffiths. That was true, because I was bound to find Griffiths somewhere near his beloved keys and straps. He never seemed to see that half the pleasure of his trip was being strapped and keyed out of him.

      We never had any serious difficulty about the passports in the whole course of our wanderings. What I purpose to describe now is merely an incident of travel. It had no effect on myself, but it nearly broke Griffiths' heart.

      We were travelling from Kyoto to Otsu along a very dusty road full of pretty girls. Every time I stopped to play with one of them Griffiths grew impatient. He had telegraphed for rooms at the only hotel in Otsu, and was afraid that there would be no accommodation. There were only three rooms in the hotel, and "Safe bind, safe find," said Griffiths. He was telegraphing СКАЧАТЬ