Rudyard Kipling : The Complete Novels and Stories. Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг

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СКАЧАТЬ I answered out of my astonishment:—“What do you want with her?” Would you believe it, for the next two minutes, he and I were shouting at each other like maniacs,—he vowing that it was the younger sister he had meant to propose to all along, and I telling him till my throat was hoarse that he must have made a mistake! I can’t account for this except, again, by the fact that we were neither of us ourselves. Everything seemed to me like a bad dream—from the stamping of the horses in the darkness to Saumarez telling me the story of his loving Edith Copleigh since the first. He was still clawing my shoulder and begging me to tell him where Edith Copleigh was, when another lull came and brought light with it, and we saw the dust-cloud forming on the plain in front of us. So we knew the worst was over. The moon was low down, and there was just the glimmer of the false dawn that comes about an hour before the real one. But the light was very faint, and the dun cloud roared like a bull. I wondered where Edith Copleigh had gone; and as I was wondering I saw three things together: First Maud Copleigh’s face come smiling out of the darkness and move towards Saumarez who was standing by me. I heard the girl whisper:—“George,” and slide her arm through the arm that was not clawing my shoulder, and I saw that look on her face which only comes once or twice in a life-time—when a woman is perfectly happy and the air is full of trumpets and gorgeous-coloured fire and the Earth turns into cloud because she loves and is loved. At the same time, I saw Saumarez’s face as he heard Maud Copleigh’s voice, and fifty yards away from the clump of orange-trees, I saw a brown holland habit getting upon a horse.

      It must have been my state of over-excitement that made me so quick to meddle with what did not concern me. Saumarez was moving off to the habit; but I pushed him back and said:—“Stop here and explain. I’ll fetch her back!” And I ran out to get at my own horse. I had a perfectly unnecessary notion that everything must be done decently and in order, and that Saumarez’s first care was to wipe the happy look out of Maud Copleigh’s face. All the time I was linking up the curb-chain I wondered how he would do it.

      I cantered after Edith Copleigh, thinking to bring her back slowly on some pretence or another. But she galloped away as soon as she saw me, and I was forced to ride after her in earnest. She called back over her shoulder—“Go away! I’m going home. Oh, go away!” two or three times; but my business was to catch her first, and argue later. The ride just fitted in with the rest of the evil dream. The ground was very bad, and now and again we rushed through the whirling, choking “dust-devils” in the skirts of the flying storm. There was a burning hot wind blowing that brought up a stench of stale brick-kilns with it; and through the half light and through the dust-devils, across that desolate plain, flickered the brown holland habit on the grey horse. She headed for the Station at first. Then she wheeled round and set off for the river through beds of burnt down jungle-grass, bad even to ride pig over. In cold blood I should never have dreamed of going over such a country at night, but it seemed quite right and natural with the lightning crackling over head, and a reek like the smell of the Pit in my nostrils. I rode and shouted, and she bent forward and lashed her horse, and the aftermath of the dust-storm came up, and caught us both, and drove us downwind like pieces of paper.

      I don’t know how far we rode; but the drumming of the horse-hoofs and the roar of the wind and the race of the faint blood-red moon through the yellow mist seemed to have gone on for years and years, and I was literally drenched with sweat from my helmet to my gaiters when the grey stumbled, recovered himself and pulled up dead lame. My brute was used up altogether. Edith Copleigh was in a sad state, plastered with dust, her hemlet off and crying bitterly. “Why can’t you let me alone?” she said. “I only wanted to get away and go home. Oh, please let me go!”

      “You have got to come back with me, Miss Copleigh. Saumarez has something to say to you.”

      It was a foolish way of putting it; but I hardly knew Miss Copleigh, and, though I was playing Providence at the cost of my horse, I could not tell her in as many word what Saumarez had told me. I thought he could do that better himself. All her pretence about being tired and wanting to go home broke down, and she rocked herself to and fro in the saddle as she sobbed, and the hot wind blew her black hair to leeward. I am not going to repeat what she said, because she was utterly unstrung.

      This, if you please, was the cynical Miss Copleigh. Here was I, almost an utter stranger to her, trying to tell her that Saumarez loved her and she was to come back to hear him say so! I believe I made myself understood, for she gathered the grey together and made him hobble somehow, and we set off for the tomb, while the storm went thundering down to Umballa and a few big drops of warm rain fell. I found out that she had been standing close to Saumarez when he proposed to her sister, and had wanted to go home to cry in peace, as an English girl should. She dabbed her eyes with her pocket-handkerchief as we went along, and babbled to me out of sheer lightness of heart and hysteria. That was perfectly unnatural; and yet, it seemed all right at the time and in the place. All the world was only the two Copleigh girls, Saumarez and I, ringed in with the lightning and the dark; and the guidance of this misguided world seemed to lie in my hands.

      When we returned to the tomb in the deep dead stillness that followed the storm, the dawn was just breaking and nobody had gone away. They were waiting for our return. Saumarez most of all. His face was white and drawn. As Miss Copleigh and I limped up, he came forward to meet us, and, when he helped her down from her saddle, he kissed her before all the picnic. It was like a scene in a theatre, and the likeness was heightened by all the dust-white, ghostly-looking men and women, under the orange-trees clapping their hands—as if they were watching a play—at Saumarez’s choice. I never knew anything so un-English in my life.

      Lastly, Saumarez said we must all go home or the Station would come out to look for us, and would I be good enough to ride home with Maud Copleigh? Nothing would give me greater pleasure, I said.

      So, we formed up, six couples in all, and went back two by two; Saumarez walking at the side of Edith Copleigh who was riding his horse.

      The air was cleared; and, little by little, as the sun rose, I felt we were all dropping back again into ordinary men and women and that the “Great Pop Picnic” was a thing altogether apart and out of the world—never to happen again. It had gone with the dust-storm and the tingle in the hot air.

      I felt tired and limp, and a good deal ashamed of myself as I went in for a bath and some sleep.

      There is a woman’s version of this story, but it will never be written …. […] unless Maud Copleigh cares to try.

      ▲▲▲

The Rescue of Pluffles

      Thus, for a season, they fought it fair—

      She and his cousin May—

      Tactful, talented, debonnaire,

      Decorous foes were they;

      But never can battle of man compare

      With merciless feminine fray.

      Two and One.

      Mrs. Hauksbee was sometimes nice to her own sex. Here is a story to prove this; and you can believe just as much as ever you please.

      Pluffles was a subaltern in the “Unmentionables.” He was callow, even for a subaltern. He was callow all over—like a canary that had not finished fledging itself. The worst of it was he had three times as much money as was good for him; Pluffles’ Papa being a rich man and Pluffles being the only son. Pluffles’ Mamma adored him. She was only a little less callow than Pluffles and she believed everything he said.

      Pluffles’ weakness was not believing what people said. He preferred what СКАЧАТЬ