Books: Kim

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'It is not a good fancy,' said the lama. 'What profit to kill men?'

'Very little - as I know; but if evil men were not now and then
slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers. I do
not speak without knowledge who have seen the land from Delhi south
awash with blood.'

'What madness was that, then?'

'The Gods', who sent it for a plague, alone know. A madness ate
into all the Army, and they turned against their officers. That
was the first evil, but not past remedy if they had then held their
hands. But they chose to kill the Sahibs' wives and children. Then
came the Sahibs from over the sea and called them to most strict
account.'

'Some such rumour, I believe, reached me once long ago. They
called it the Black Year, as I remember.'

'What manner of life hast thou led, not to know The Year? A rumour
indeed! All earth knew, and trembled!'

'Our earth never shook but once - upon the day that the Excellent
One received Enlightenment.'

'Umph! I saw Delhi shake at least- and Delhi is the navel of the
world.'

'So they turned against women and children? That was a bad deed,
for which the punishment cannot be avoided.'

'Many strove to do so, but with very small profit. I was then in
a regiment of cavalry. It broke. Of six hundred and eighty sabres
stood fast to their salt - how many, think you? Three. Of whom I
was one.'

'The greater merit.'

'Merit! We did not consider it merit in those days. My people, my
friends, my brothers fell from me. They said: "The time of the
English is accomplished. Let each strike out a little holding for
himself." But I had talked with the men of Sobraon, of
Chilianwallah, of Moodkee and Ferozeshah. I said: "Abide a little
and the wind turns. There is no blessing in this work." In those
days I rode seventy miles with an English Memsahib and her babe on
my saddle-bow. (Wow! That was a horse fit for a man!) I placed them
in safety, and back came I to my officer the one that was not
killed of our five. "Give me work," said I, "for I am an outcast
among my own kind, and my cousin's blood is wet on my sabre." "Be
content," said he. "There is great work forward. When this madness
is over there is a recompense."'

'Ay, there is a recompense when the madness is over, surely?' the
lama muttered half to himself.

'They did not hang medals in those days on all who by accident had
heard a gun fired. No! In nineteen pitched battles was I; in six-
and-forty skirmishes of horse; and in small affairs without number.
Nine wounds I bear; a medal and four clasps and the medal of an
Order, for my captains, who are now generals, remembered me when
the Kaisar-i-Hind had accomplished fifty years of her reign, and
all the land rejoiced. They said: "Give him the Order of Berittish
India." I carry it upon my neck now. I have also my jaghir
[holding] from the hands of the State - a free gift to me and mine.
The men of the old days -they are now Commissioners - come riding
to me through the crops - high upon horses so that all the village
sees - and we talk out the old skirmishes, one dead man's name
leading to another.'

'And after?' said the lama.

'Oh, afterwards they go away, but not before my village has seen.

'And at the last what wilt thou do?'

'At the last I shall die.'

'And after?'

'Let the Gods order it. I have never pestered Them with prayers.
I do not think They will pester me. Look you, I have noticed in my
long life that those who eternally break in upon Those Above with
complaints and reports and bellowings and weepings are presently
sent for in haste, as our Colonel used to send for slack-jawed
down-country men who talked too much. No, I have never wearied the
Gods. They will remember this, and give me a quiet place where I
can drive my lance in the shade, and wait to welcome my sons: I
have no less than three Rissaldar-majors all - in the regiments.'

'And they likewise, bound upon the Wheel, go forth from life to
life - from despair to despair,' said the lama below his breath,
'hot, uneasy, snatching.'

'Ay,' the old soldier chuckled. 'Three Rissaldar-majors in three
regiments. Gamblers a little, but so am I. They must be well
mounted; and one cannot take the horses as in the old days one took
women. Well, well, my holding can pay for all. How thinkest thou?
It is a well-watered strip, but my men cheat me. I do not know how
to ask save at the lance's point. Ugh! I grow angry and I curse
them, and they feign penitence, but behind my back I know they call
me a toothless old ape.'

'Hast thou never desired any other thing?'

'Yes - yes - a thousand times! A straight back and a close-clinging
knee once more; a quick wrist and a keen eye; and the marrow that
makes a man. Oh, the old days - the good days of my strength!'

'That strength is weakness.'

'It has turned so; but fifty years since I could have proved it
otherwise,' the old soldier retorted, driving his stirrup-edge into
the pony's lean flank.

'But I know a River of great healing.'

'I have drank Gunga-water to the edge of dropsy. All she gave me
was a flux, and no sort of strength.'

'It is not Gunga. The River that I know washes from all taint of
sin. Ascending the far bank one is assured of Freedom. I do not
know thy life, but thy face is the face of the honourable and
courteous. Thou hast clung to thy Way, rendering fidelity when it
was hard to give, in that Black Year of which I now remember
other tales. Enter now upon the Middle Way which is the path to
Freedom. Hear the Most Excellent Law, and do not follow dreams.'

'Speak, then, old man,' the soldier smiled, half saluting. 'We be
all babblers at our age.'

The lama squatted under the shade of a mango, whose shadow played
checkerwise over his face; the soldier sat stiffly on the pony;
and Kim, making sure that there were no snakes, lay down in the
crotch of the twisted roots.

There was a drowsy buzz of small life in hot sunshine, a cooing
of doves, and a sleepy drone of well-wheels across the fields.
Slowly and impressively the lama began. At the end of ten minutes
the old soldier slid from his pony, to hear better as he said,
and sat with the reins round his wrist. The lama's voice faltered
the periods lengthened. Kim was busy watching a grey squirrel.
When the little scolding bunch of fur, close pressed to the
branch, disappeared, preacher and audience were fast asleep, the
old officer's strong-cut head pillowed on his arm, the lama's
thrown back against the tree-bole, where it showed like yellow
ivory. A naked child toddled up, stared, and, moved by some quick
impulse of reverence, made a solemn little obeisance before the
lama - only the child was so short and fat that it toppled over
sideways, and Kim laughed at the sprawling, chubby legs. The
child, scared and indignant, yelled aloud.

'Hai! Hai!' said the soldier, leaping to his feet. 'What is it?
What orders? ... It is ... a child! I dreamed it was an alarm.
Little one - little one - do not cry. Have I slept? That was
discourteous indeed!'

'I fear! I am afraid!' roared the child.

'What is it to fear? Two old men and a boy? How wilt thou ever make
a soldier, Princeling?'

The lama had waked too, but, taking no direct notice of the child,
clicked his rosary.

'What is that?' said the child, stopping a yell midway. 'I have
never seen such things. Give them me.'

'Aha.' said the lama, smiling, and trailing a loop of it on the
grass:

This is a handful of cardamoms,
This is a lump of ghi:
This is millet and chillies and rice,
A supper for thee and me!

The child shrieked with joy, and snatched at the dark, glancing
beads.

'Oho!' said the old soldier. 'Whence hadst thou that song, despiser
of this world?'

'I learned it in Pathankot - sitting on a doorstep,' said the lama
shyly. 'It is good to be kind to babes.'

'As I remember, before the sleep came on us, thou hadst told me
that marriage and bearing were darkeners of the true light,
stumbling-blocks upon the Way. Do children drop from Heaven in thy
country? Is it the Way to sing them songs?'

'No man is all perfect,' said the lama gravely, recoiling the
rosary. 'Run now to thy mother, little one.'

'Hear him!' said the soldier to Kim. 'He is ashamed for that he has
made a child happy. There was a very good householder lost in thee,
my brother. Hai, child!' He threw it a pice. 'Sweetmeats are always
sweet.' And as the little figure capered away into the sunshine:
'They grow up and become men. Holy One, I grieve that I slept in
the midst of thy preaching. Forgive me.'

'We be two old men,' said the lama. 'The fault is mine. I listened
to thy talk of the world and its madness, and one fault led to the
next.'

'Hear him! What harm do thy Gods suffer from play with a babe? And
that song was very well sung. Let us go on and I will sing thee the
song of Nikal Seyn before Delhi - the old song.'

And they fared out from the gloom of the mango tope, the old man's
high, shrill voice ringing across the field, as wail by long-drawn
wail he unfolded the story of Nikal Seyn [Nicholson] - the song
that men sing in the Punjab to this day. Kim was delighted, and the
lama listened with deep interest.

'Ahi! Nikal Seyn is dead - he died before Delhi! Lances of the
North, take vengeance for Nikal Seyn.' He quavered it out to the
end, marking the trills with the flat of his sword on the pony's
rump.

'And now we come to the Big Road,' said he, after receiving the
compliments of Kim; for the lama was markedly silent. 'It is long
since I have ridden this way, but thy boy's talk stirred me. See,
Holy One - the Great Road which is the backbone of all Hind. For
the most part it is shaded, as here, with four lines of trees; the
middle road -all hard takes the quick traffic. In the days before
rail-carriages the Sahibs travelled up and down here in hundreds.
Now there are only country-carts and such like. Left and right is
the rougher road for the heavy carts - grain and cotton and timber,
fodder, lime and hides. A man goes in safety here for at every few
koss is a police-station. The police are thieves and extortioners
(I myself would patrol it with cavalry - young recruits under a
strong captain), but at least they do not suffer any rivals. All
castes and kinds of men move here.

Look! Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and
bunnias, pilgrims -and potters - all the world going and coming. It
is to me as a river from which I am withdrawn like a log after a
flood.'

And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs
straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen
hundred miles - such a river of life as nowhere else exists in
the world. They looked at the green-arched, shade-flecked length
of it, the white breadth speckled with slow-pacing folk; and the
two-roomed police-station opposite.

'Who bears arms against the law?' a constable called out
laughingly, as he caught sight of the soldier's sword. 'Are not
the police enough to destroy evil-doers?'

'It was because of the police I bought it,' was the answer. 'Does
all go well in Hind?'

'Rissaldar Sahib, all goes well.'

'I am like an old tortoise, look you, who puts his head out from
the bank and draws it in again. Ay, this is the Road of Hindustan.
All men come by this way...'

'Son of a swine, is the soft part of the road meant for thee to
scratch thy back upon? Father of all the daughters of shame and
husband of ten thousand virtueless ones, thy mother was devoted
to a devil, being led thereto by her mother. Thy aunts have never
had a nose for seven generations! Thy sister - What Owl's folly
told thee to draw thy carts across the road? A broken wheel? Then
take a broken head and put the two together at leisure!'

The voice and a venomous whip-cracking came out of a pillar of
dust fifty yards away, where a cart had broken down. A thin, high
Kathiawar mare, with eyes and nostrils aflame, rocketed out of
the jam, snorting and wincing as her rider bent her across the
road in chase of a shouting man. He was tall and grey-bearded,
sitting the almost mad beast as a piece of her, and scientifically
lashing his victim between plunges.

The old man's face lit with pride. 'My child!' said he briefly, and
strove to rein the pony's neck to a fitting arch.

'Am I to be beaten before the police?' cried the carter. 'Justice!
I will have Justice -'

'Am I to be blocked by a shouting ape who upsets ten thousand sacks
under a young horse's nose? That is the way to ruin a mare.'

'He speaks truth. He speaks truth. But she follows her man close,'
said the old man. The carter ran under the wheels of his cart and
thence threatened all sorts of vengeance.

'They are strong men, thy sons,' said the policeman serenely,
picking his teeth.

The horseman delivered one last vicious cut with his whip and came
on at a canter.

'My father!' He reigned back ten yards and dismounted.

The old man was off his pony in an instant, and they embraced as do
father and son in the East.

Chapter 4

Good Luck, she is never a lady,
But the cursedest quean alive,
Tricksy, wincing, and jady -
Kittle to lead or drive.
Greet her - she's hailing a stranger!
Meet her - she's busking to leave!
Let her alone for a shrew to the bone
And the hussy comes plucking your sleeve!
Largesse! Largesse, O Fortune!
Give or hold at your will.
If I've no care for Fortune,
Fortune must follow me still!

The Wishing-Caps.

Then, lowering their voices, they spoke together. Kim came to rest
under a tree, but the lama tugged impatiently at his elbow.

'Let us go on. The River is not here.'

'Hai mai! Have we not walked enough for a little? Our River will
not run away. Patience, and he will give us a dole.'

'This.' said the old soldier suddenly, 'is the Friend of the Stars.
He brought me the news yesterday. Having seen the very man Himself,
in a vision, giving orders for the war.'

'Hm!' said his son, all deep in his broad chest. 'He came by a
bazar-rumour and made profit of it.'

His father laughed. 'At least he did not ride to me begging for a
new charger, and the Gods know how many rupees. Are thy brothers'
regiments also under orders?'

'I do not know. I took leave and came swiftly to thee in case -'

'In case they ran before thee to beg. O gamblers and spendthrifts
all! But thou hast never yet ridden in a charge. A good horse is
needed there, truly. A good follower and a good pony also for the
marching. Let us see - let us see.' He thrummed on the pommel.

'This is no place to cast accounts in, my father. Let us go to thy
house.'

'At least pay the boy, then: I have no pice with me, and he brought
auspicious news. Ho! Friend of all the World, a war is toward as
thou hast said.'

'Nay, as I know, the war,' returned Kim composedly.

'Eh?' said the lama, fingering his beads, all eager for the road.

'My master does not trouble the Stars for hire. We brought the news
bear witness, we brought the news, and now we go.' Kim half-crooked
his hand at his side.

The son tossed a silver coin through the sunlight, grumbling
something about beggars and jugglers. It was a four-anna piece, and
would feed them well for days. The lama, seeing the flash of the
metal, droned a blessing.

'Go thy way, Friend of all the World,' piped the old soldier,
wheeling his scrawny mount. 'For once in all my days I have met a
true prophet - who was not in the Army.'

Father and son swung round together: the old man sitting as erect
as the younger.

A Punjabi constable in yellow linen trousers slouched across the
road. He had seen the money pass.

'Halt!' he cried in impressive English. 'Know ye not that there is
a takkus of two annas a head, which is four annas, on those who
enter the Road from this side-road? It is the order of the Sirkar,
and the money is spent for the planting of trees and the
beautification of the ways.'

'And the bellies of the police,' said Kim, slipping out of arm's
reach. 'Consider for a while, man with a mud head. Think you we
came from the nearest pond like the frog, thy father-in-law? Hast
thou ever heard the name of thy brother?'

'And who was he? Leave the boy alone,' cried a senior constable,
immensely delighted, as he squatted down to smoke his pipe in the
veranda.

'He took a label from a bottle of belaitee-pani [soda-water], and,
affixing it to a bridge, collected taxes for a month from those who
passed, saying that it was the Sirkar's order. Then came an
Englishman and broke his head. Ah, brother, I am a town-crow, not a
village-crow!'

The policeman drew back abashed, and Kim hooted at him all down the
road.

'Was there ever such a disciple as I?' he cried merrily to the
lama. 'All earth would have picked thy bones within ten mile of
Lahore city if I had not guarded thee.'

'I consider in my own mind whether thou art a spirit, sometimes, or
sometimes an evil imp,' said the lama, smiling slowly.

'I am thy chela.' Kim dropped into step at his side - that
indescribable gait of the long-distance tramp all the world over.

'Now let us walk,' muttered the lama, and to the click of his
rosary they walked in silence mile upon mile. The lama as usual,
was deep in meditation, but Kim's bright eyes were open wide. This
broad, smiling river of life, he considered, was a vast improvement
on the cramped and crowded Lahore streets. There were new people
and new sights at every stride - castes he knew and castes that
were altogether out of his experience.

They met a troop of long-haired, strong-scented Sansis with baskets
of lizards and other unclean food on their backs, their lean dogs
sniffing at their heels. These people kept their own side of the
road', moving at a quick, furtive jog-trot, and all other castes
gave them ample room; for the Sansi is deep pollution. Behind them,
walking wide and stiffly across the strong shadows, the memory of
his leg-irons still on him, strode one newly released from the
jail; his full stomach and shiny skin to prove that the Government
fed its prisoners better than most honest men could feed
themselves. Kim knew that walk well, and made broad jest of it as
they passed. Then an Akali, a wild-eyed, wild-haired Sikh devotee
in the blue-checked clothes of his faith, with polished-steel
quoits glistening on the cone of his tall blue turban, stalked
past, returning from a visit to one of the independent Sikh States,
where he had been singing the ancient glories of the Khalsa to
College-trained princelings in top-boots and white-cord breeches.
Kim was careful not to irritate that man; for the Akali's temper is
short and his arm quick. Here and there they met or were overtaken
by the gaily dressed crowds of whole villages turning out to some
local fair; the women, with their babes on their hips, walking
behind the men, the older boys prancing on sticks of sugar-cane,
dragging rude brass models of locomotives such as they sell for a
halfpenny, or flashing the sun into the eyes of their betters from
cheap toy mirrors. One could see at a glance what each had bought;
and if there were any doubt it needed only to watch the wives
comparing, brown arm against brown arm, the newly purchased dull
glass bracelets that come from the North-West. These merry-makers
stepped slowly, calling one to the other and stopping to haggle
with sweetmeat-sellers, or to make a prayer before one of the
wayside shrines - sometimes Hindu, sometimes Mussalman - which the
low-caste of both creeds share with beautiful impartiality. A solid
line of blue, rising and falling like the back of a caterpillar in
haste, would swing up through the quivering dust and trot past to a
chorus of quick cackling. That was a gang of changars - the women
who have taken all the embankments of all the Northern railways
under their charge - a flat-footed, big-bosomed, strong-limbed,
blue-petticoated clan of earth-carriers, hurrying north on news of
a job, and wasting no time by the road. They belong to the caste
whose men do not count, and they walked with squared elbows,
swinging hips, and heads on high, as suits women who carry heavy
weights. A little later a marriage procession would strike into the
Grand Trunk with music and shoutings, and a smell of marigold and
jasmine stronger even than the reek of the dust. One could see the
bride's litter, a blur of red and tinsel, staggering through the
haze, while the bridegroom's bewreathed pony turned aside to snatch
a mouthful from a passing fodder-cart. Then Kim would join the
Kentish-fire of good wishes and bad jokes, wishing the couple a
hundred sons and no daughters, as the saying is. Still more
interesting and more to be shouted over it was when a strolling
juggler with some half-trained monkeys, or a panting, feeble bear,
or a woman who tied goats' horns to her feet, and with these danced
on a slack-rope, set the horses to shying and the women to shrill,
long-drawn quavers of amazement.

The lama never raised his eyes. He did not note the money-lender on
his goose-rumped pony, hastening along to collect the cruel
interest; or the long-shouting, deep-voiced little mob -still in
military formation - of native soldiers on leave, rejoicing to be
rid of their breeches and puttees, and saying the most outrageous
things to the most respectable women in sight. Even the seller of
Ganges-water he did not see, and Kim expected that he would at
least buy a bottle of that precious stuff. He looked steadily at
the ground, and strode as steadily hour after hour, his soul busied
elsewhere. But Kim was in the seventh heaven of joy. The Grand Trunk
at this point was built on an embankment to guard against
winter floods from the foothills, so that one walked, as it were, a
little above the country, along a stately corridor, seeing all
India spread out to left and right. It was beautiful to behold the
many-yoked grain and cotton wagons crawling over the country roads:
one could hear their axles, complaining a mile away, coming nearer,
till with shouts and yells and bad words they climbed up the steep
incline and plunged on to the hard main road, carter reviling
carter. It was equally beautiful to watch the people, little clumps
of red and blue and pink and white and saffron, turning aside to go
to their own villages, dispersing and growing small by twos and
threes across the level plain. Kim felt these things, though he
could not give tongue to his feelings, and so contented himself
with buying peeled sugar-cane and spitting the pith generously
about his path. From time to time the lama took snuff, and at last
Kim could endure the silence no longer.

'This is a good land - the land of the South!' said he. 'The air is
good; the water is good. Eh?'

'And they are all bound upon the Wheel,' said the lama. 'Bound from
life after life. To none of these has the Way been shown.' He shook
himself back to this world.

'And now we have walked a weary way,' said Kim. 'Surely we shall
soon come to a parao [a resting-place]. Shall we stay there? Look,
the sun is sloping.'

'Who will receive us this evening?'

'That is all one. This country is full of good folk. Besides' he
sunk his voice beneath a whisper - 'we have money.'

The crowd thickened as they neared the resting-place which marked
the end of their day's journey. A line of stalls selling very
simple food and tobacco, a stack of firewood, a police-station, a
well, a horse-trough, a few trees, and, under them, some trampled
ground dotted with the black ashes of old fires, are all that mark
a parao on the Grand Trunk; if you except the beggars and the crows
- both hungry.

By this time the sun was driving broad golden spokes through the
lower branches of the mango-trees; the parakeets and doves were
coming. home in their hundreds; the chattering, grey-backed Seven
Sisters, talking over the day's adventures, walked back and forth
in twos and threes almost under the feet of the travellers; and
shufflings and scufflings in the branches showed that the bats were
ready to go out on the night-picket. Swiftly the light gathered
itself together, painted for an instant the faces and the
cartwheels and the bullocks' horns as red as blood. Then the night
fell, changing the touch of the air, drawing a low, even haze, like
a gossamer veil of blue, across the face of the country, and
bringing out, keen and distinct, the smell of wood-smoke and cattle
and the good scent of wheaten cakes cooked on ashes. The evening
patrol hurried out of the police-station with important coughings
and reiterated orders; and a live charcoal ball in the cup of a
wayside carter's hookah glowed red while Kim's eye mechanically
watched the last flicker of the sun on the brass tweezers.

The life of the parao was very like that of the Kashmir Serai on a
small scale. Kim dived into the happy Asiatic disorder which, if
you only allow time, will bring you everything that a simple man
needs.

His wants were few, because, since the lama had no caste scruples,
cooked food from the nearest stall would serve; but, for luxury's
sake, Kim bought a handful of dung-cakes to build a fire. All
about, coming and going round the little flames, men cried for oil,
or grain, or sweetmeats, or tobacco, jostling one another while
they waited their turn at the well; and under the men's voices you
heard from halted, shuttered carts the high squeals and giggles of
women whose faces should not be seen in public.

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