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

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СКАЧАТЬ attack for the English troops, and were getting their distance by snap-shots at the only moving object without the square.

      ‘What luck! What stupendous and imperial luck!’ said Dick. ‘It’s “just before the battle, mother.” Oh, God has been most good to me! Only’—the agony of the thought made him screw up his eyes for an instant—‘Maisie …’

      ‘Allahu! We are in,’ said the man, as he drove into the rearguard and the camel knelt.

      ‘Who the deuce are you? Despatches or what? What’s the strength of the enemy behind that ridge? How did you get through?’ asked a dozen voices. For all answer Dick took a long breath, unbuckled his belt, and shouted from the saddle at the top of a wearied and dusty voice, ‘Torpenhow! Ohé, Torp! Coo-ee, Tor-pen-how.’

      A bearded man raking in the ashes of a fire for a light to his pipe moved very swiftly towards that cry, as the rearguard, facing about, began to fire at the puffs of smoke from the hillocks around. Gradually the scattered white cloudlets drew out into the long lines of banked white that hung heavily in the stillness of the dawn before they turned over wave-like and glided into the valleys. The soldiers in the square were coughing and swearing as their own smoke obstructed their view, and they edged forward to get beyond it. A wounded camel leaped to its feet and roared aloud, the cry ending in a bubbling grunt. Some one had cut its throat to prevent confusion. Then came the thick sob of a man receiving his death-wound from a bullet; then a yell of agony and redoubled firing.

      There was no time to ask any questions.

      ‘Get down, man! Get down behind the camel!’

      ‘No. Put me, I pray, in the forefront of the battle.’ Dick turned his face to Torpenhow and raised his hand to set his helmet straight, but, miscalculating the distance, knocked it off. Torpenhow saw that his hair was gray on the temples, and that his face was the face of an old man.

      ‘Come down, you damned fool! Dickie, come off!’

      And Dick came obediently, but as a tree falls, pitching sideways from the Bisharin’s saddle at Torpenhow’s feet. His luck had held to the last, even to the crowning mercy of a kindly bullet through his head.

      Torpenhow knelt under the lee of the camel, with Dick’s body in his arms.

      ▲▲▲

      The Naulahka

      A Story of West and East

      by Rudyard Kipling

       and Wolcott Balestier

      William Heinemann, London 1892

      the naulahka

      ▲▲▲

       I

       II

       III

       IV

       V

       VI

       VII

       VIII

       IX

       X

       XI

       XII

       XIII

       XIV

       XV

       XVI

       XVII

       XVIII

       XIX

       XX

       XXI

I

      There was a strife ’twixt man and maid—

      Oh that was at the birth o’ time!

      But what befell ’twixt man and maid,

      Oh that’s beyond the grip o’ rhyme.

      ’Twas: ‘Sweet, I must not bide wi’ you,’

      And: ‘Love, I canna bide alone’;

      For baith were young, and baith were true,

      And baith were hard as the nether stone.

      Auchinleck’s Ride.

      Nicholas Tarvin sat in the moonlight on the unrailed bridge that crossed the irrigating ditch above Topaz, dangling his feet over the stream. A brown, sad-eyed little woman sat beside him, staring quietly at the moon. She was tanned with the tan of the girl who does not mind wind and rain and sun, and her eyes were sad with the settled melancholy of eyes that know big mountains, and seas of plain, and care, and life. The women of the West shade such eyes under their hands at sunset in their cabin-doors, scanning those hills or those grassless, treeless plains for the homecoming of their men. A hard life is always hardest for the woman.

      Kate Sheriff had lived with her face to the West and with her smouldering eyes fixed upon the wilderness since she could walk. She had advanced into the wilderness with the railroad. Until СКАЧАТЬ