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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      ‘India.’

      She stared at him a moment interestedly. ‘Tell me what it’s like,’ she said. Her whole attitude and accent were changed again. There was plainly one subject on which she could be serious. ‘Is it really good?’

      ‘It’s the best,’ said Tarvin, and stopped.

      ‘Well!’ she exclaimed.‘Don’t tantalise me. What is it made of?’

      ‘Oh, diamonds, pearls, rubies, opals, turquoises, amethysts, sapphires—a rope of them. The rubies are as big as your fist; the diamonds are the size of hens’ eggs. It’s worth a king’s ransom.’

      She caught her breath. Then after a long moment, ‘Oh!’ she sighed; and then, ‘Oh!’ she murmured again, languorously, wonderingly, longingly. ‘And where is it?‘she asked briskly, of a sudden.

      ‘Round the neck of an idol in the province of Rajputana. Do you want it?’ he asked grimly.

      She laughed.‘Yes,’ she answered.

      ‘I’ll get it for you,’ said Tarvin simply.

      ‘Yes, you will!’ pouted she.

      ‘I will,’ repeated Tarvin.

      She threw back her gay blonde head, and laughed to the painted Cupids on the ceiling of the car. She always threw back her head when she laughed; it showed her throat.

      ▲▲▲

IV

      Your patience, Sirs, the Devil took me up

      To the burned mountain over Sicily,

      (Fit place for me), and thence I saw my Earth—

      Not all Earth’s splendour, ’twas beyond my need;

      And that one spot I love—all Earth to me.

      And her I love, my Heaven. What said I? …

      My love was safe from all the powers of Hell—

      For you—e’en you—acquit her of my guilt.

      But Sula, nestling by our sail-specked sea,

      My city, child of mine, my heart, my home.

      Mine and my pride—evil might visit there!

      It was for Sula and her naked ports,

      Prey to the galleys of the Algerine;

      Our city Sula, that I drove my price—

      For love of Sula and for love of her.

      The twain were woven, gold on sackcloth, twined

      Past any sundering—till God shall judge

      The evil and the good.

      —The Grand–Master’s Defence.

      The president engaged rooms at the hotel beside the railroad track at Topaz, and stayed over the next day. Tarvin and Sheriff took possession of him, and showed him the town, and what they called its ‘natural resources.’ Tarvin caused the president to hold rein when he had ridden with him to a point outside the town, and discoursed, in the midst of the open plain, and in the face of the snow-capped mountains, on the reasonableness and necessity of making Topaz the end of a division for the new railroad, and putting the division superintendent, the workshops, and the round-house here.

      In his heart he knew the president to be absolutely opposed to bringing the railroad to Topaz at all; but he preferred to assume the minor point. It was much easier, as a matter of fact, to show that Topaz ought to be made a junction, and the end of a division, than it was to show that it ought to be a station on the Three C.’s. If it was anything it would have to be a junction; the difficulty was to prove that it ought to be anything.

      Tarvin knew the whole Topaz situation forward and back, as he might have known the multiplication table. He was not president of the board of trade and the head of a land and improvement company, organised with a capital of a million on a cash basis of $2000, for nothing. Tarvin’s company included all the solid men of the town; it owned the open plain from Topaz to the foothills, and had laid it out in streets, avenues, and public parks. One could see the whole thing on a map hung in the company’s office on Connecticut Avenue, which was furnished in oak, floored with mosaic, carpeted with Turkish rugs, and draped with silk. There one could buy town lots at any point within two miles of the town; there, in fact, Tarvin had some town lots to sell. The habit of having them to sell had taught him the worst and the best that could be said about the place; and he knew to an exactitude all that he could make a given man believe about it.

      He was aware, for example, that Rustler not only had richer mines in its near neighbourhood than Topaz, but that it tapped a mining country behind it of unexplored and fabulous wealth; and he knew that the president knew it. He was equally familiar with other facts-as, for example, that the mines about Topaz were fairly good, though nothing remarkable in a region of great mineral wealth; and that, although the town lay in a wide and well-irrigated valley, and in the midst of an excellent cattle country, these were limited advantages, and easily matched elsewhere. In other words, the natural resources of Topaz constituted no such claim for it as a ‘great railroad centre’ as he would have liked any one to suppose who heard him talk.

      But he was not talking to himself. His private word to himself was that Topaz was created to be a railroad town, and the way to create it was to make it a railroad town. This proposition,. which could not have been squared to any system of logic, proceeded on the soundest system of reasoning. As thus: Topaz was not an existence at all; Topaz was a hope. Very well! And when one wished to make such hopes realities in the West, what did one do? Why, get some one else to believe in them, of course. Topaz was valueless without the Three C.’s. Then what was its value to the Three C.’s? Obviously the value that the Three C.’s would give it.

      Tarvin’s pledge to the president amounted to this: that if he would give them the chance, they would be worthy of it; and he contended that, in essence, that was all that any town could say. The point for the president to judge was which place would be most likely to be worthy of such an opportunity—Topaz or Rustler—and he claimed there could be no question about that. When you came to size it up, he said, it was the character of the inhabitants that counted. They were dead at Rustler—dead and buried. Everybody knew that: there was no trade, no industry, no life, no energy, no money there. And look at Topaz! The president could see the character of her citizens at a glance as he walked the streets. They were wide awake down here. They meant business. They believed in their town, and they were ready to put their money on her. The president had only to say what he expected of them. And then he broached to him his plan for getting one of the Denver smelters to establish a huge branch at Topaz; he said that he had an agreement with one of them in his pocket, conditioned solely on the Three C.’s coming their way. The company couldn’t make any such arrangement with Rustler; he knew that. Rustler hadn’t the flux, for one thing. The smelter people had come up from Denver at the expense of Topaz, and had proved Topaz’s allegation that Rustler couldn’t find a proper flux for smelting its ore nearer to her own borders than fifteen miles—in other words, she couldn’t find it this side of Topaz.

      Tarvin СКАЧАТЬ