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

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СКАЧАТЬ since thou hast been permitted to aid me in the matter of a pinch of flour and a little opium and such trifles as I have honoured by using in my art, so will the Gods return a blessing,’ and he gave it at length, to the man’s immense relief. It was one that he had learned from Lurgan Sahib.

      The lama stared through his spectacles as he had not stared at the business of diguisement. [disguisement.]

      ‘Friend of the Stars,’ he said at last, ‘thou hast acquired great wisdom. Beware that it do not give birth to pride. No man having the Law before his eyes speaks hastily of any matter which he has seen or encountered.’

      ‘No—no—no indeed,’ cried the farmer, fearful lest the master should be minded to improve on the pupil. E.23, with relaxed mouth, gave himself up to the opium that is meat, tobacco, and medicine to the spent Asiatic.

      So, in a silence of awe and great miscomprehension, they slid into Delhi about lamp-lighting time.

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Chapter 12

      Who hath desired the Sea—the sight of salt-water unbounded?

      The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?

      The sleek-barrelled swell before storm—gray, foamless, enormous, and growing?

      Stark calm on the lap of the Line—or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing?

      His Sea in no showing the same—his Sea and the same ’neath all showing—

      His Sea that his being fulfils?

      So and no otherwise—so and no otherwise Hill-men desire their Hills!

      ‘I have found my heart again,’ said E.23, under cover of the platform’s tumult. ‘Hunger and fear make men dazed, or I might have thought of this escape before. I was right. They come to hunt for me. Thou hast saved my head.’

      A group of yellow-trousered Punjab policemen, headed by a hot and perspiring young Englishman, parted the crowd about the carriages. Behind them, inconspicuous as a cat, ambled a small fat person who looked like a lawyer’s tout.

      ‘See the young Sahib reading from a paper. My description is in his hand,’ said E.23. ‘They go carriage by carriage, like fisher-folk netting a pool.’

      When the procession reached their compartment, E.23 was counting his beads with a steady jerk of the wrist; while Kim jeered at him for being so drugged as to have lost the ringed fire-tongs which are the Saddhu’s distinguishing mark. The lama, deep in meditation, stared straight before him; and the farmer, glancing furtively, gathered up his belongings.

      ‘Nothing here but a parcel of holy-bolies,’ said the Englishman aloud, and passed on amid a ripple of uneasiness; for native police mean extortion to the native all India over.

      ‘The trouble now,’ whispered E.23, ‘lies in sending a wire as to the place where I hid that letter I was sent to find. I cannot go to the tar-office in this guise.’

      ‘Is it not enough I have saved thy neck?’

      ‘Not if the work be left unfinished. Did never the healer of sick pearls tell thee so? Comes another Sahib! Ah!’

      This was a tallish, sallowish District Superintendent of Police,—belt, helmet, polished spurs and all,—strutting and twirling his dark moustache.

      ‘What fools are these Police Sahibs!’ said Kim genially.

      E.23 glanced up under his eyelids. ‘It is well said,’ he muttered in a changed voice. ‘I go to drink water. Keep my place.’

      He blundered out almost into the Englishman’s arms, and was bad-worded in clumsy Urdu.

      ‘Tum mut? You drunk? You mustn’t bang about as though Delhi station belonged to you, my friend.’

      E.23, not moving a muscle of his countenance, answered with a stream of the filthiest abuse, at which Kim naturally rejoiced. It reminded him of the drummer-boys and the barrack-sweepers at Umballa in the terrible time of his first schooling.

      ‘My good fool,’ the Englishman drawled. ‘Nickle-jao! Go back to your carriage.’

      Step by step, withdrawing deferentially, and dropping his voice, the yellow Saddhu clomb back to the carriage, cursing the D.S.P. to remotest posterity by—here Kim almost jumped—by the curse of the Queen’s Stone, by the writing under the Queen’s Stone, and by an assortment of Gods with wholly new names.

      ‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’—the Englishman flushed angrily,—‘but it’s some piece of blasted impertinence. Come out of that!’

      E.23, affecting to misunderstand, gravely produced his ticket, which the Englishman wrenched angrily from his hand.

      ‘Oh zoolum! What oppression!’ growled the Jat from his corner. ‘All for the sake of a jest too.’ He had been grinning at the freedom of the Saddhu’s tongue. ‘Thy charms do not work well to-day, Holy One!’

      The Saddhu followed the policeman, fawning and supplicating. The ruck of passengers, busy with their babies and their bundles, had not noticed the affair. Kim slipped out behind him; for it flashed through his head that he had heard this angry, stupid Sahib discoursing loud personalities to an old lady near Umballa three years ago.

      ‘It is well,’ the Saddhu whispered, jammed in the calling, shouting, bewildered press—a Persian greyhound between his feet and a cadgeful of yelling hawks under charge of a Rajput falconer in the small of his back. ‘He has gone now to send word of the letter which I hid. They told me he was in Peshawur. I might have known that he is like the crocodile—always at the other ford. He has saved me from present calamity, but I owe my life to thee.’

      ‘Is he also one of Us?’ Kim ducked under a Mewar camel-driver’s greasy armpit and cannoned off a covey of jabbering Sikh matrons.

      ‘Not less than the greatest. We are both fortunate! I will make report to him of what thou hast done. I am safe under his protection.’

      He bored through the edge of the crowd, besieging the carriages, and squatted by the bench near the telegraph-office.

      ‘Return, or they take thy place! Have no fear for the work, brother—or my life. Thou hast given me breathing-space, and Strickland Sahib has pulled me to land. We may work together at the Game yet. Farewell!’

      Kim hurried to his carriage: elated, bewildered, but a little nettled in that he had no key to the secrets about him.

      ‘I am only a beginner at the Game, that is sure. I could not have leaped into safety as did the Saddhu. He knew it was darkest under the lamp. I could not have thought to tell news under pretence of cursing … and how clever was the Sahib! No matter, I saved the life of one…. Where is the Kamboh gone, Holy One?’ he whispered, as he took his seat in the now crowded compartment.

      ‘A fear gripped him,’ the lama replied, with a touch of tender malice. ‘He saw thee change the Mahratta to a Saddhu in the twinkling of an eye, as a protection against evil. СКАЧАТЬ