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- Author: Rudyard Kipling
- Performer: 0812971345
Book online «Kim by Rudyard Kipling (best summer reads of all time TXT) 📖». Author Rudyard Kipling
‘I said it; I said it,’ cried the bearer of that burden. ‘Thinkest thou it will betray us?’
‘Not if it be given to me. I can draw out its magic. Otherwise it will do great harm.’
‘A priest always takes his share.’ Whisky was demoralizing the Ao-chung man.
‘It is no matter to me.’ Kim answered, with the craft of his mother-country. ‘Share it among you, and see what comes!’
‘Not I. I was only jesting. Give the order. There is more than enough for us all. We go our way from Shamlegh in the dawn.’
They arranged and re-arranged their artless little plans for another hour, while Kim shivered with cold and pride. The humour of the situation tickled the Irish and the Oriental in his soul. Here were the emissaries of the dread Power of the North, very possibly as great in their own land as Mahbub or Colonel Creighton, suddenly smitten helpless. One of them, he privately knew, would be lame for a time. They had made promises to Kings. Tonight they lay out somewhere below him, chartless, foodless, tentless, gunless - except for Hurree Babu, guideless. And this collapse of their Great Game (Kim wondered to whom they would report it), this panicky bolt into the night, had come about through no craft of Hurree’s or contrivance of Kim’s, but simply, beautifully, and inevitably as the capture of Mahbub’s fakir-friends by the zealous young policeman at Umballa.
‘They are there - with nothing; and, by Jove, it is cold! I am here with all their things. Oh, they will be angry! I am sorry for Hurree Babu.’
Kim might have saved his pity, for though at that moment the Bengali suffered acutely in the flesh, his soul was puffed and lofty. A mile down the hill, on the edge of the pine-forest, two half-frozen men - one powerfully sick at intervals - were varying mutual recriminations with the most poignant abuse of the Babu, who seemed distraught with terror. They demanded a plan of action. He explained that they were very lucky to be alive; that their coolies, if not then stalking them, had passed beyond recall; that the Rajah, his master, was ninety miles away, and, so far from lending them money and a retinue for the Simla journey, would surely cast them into prison if he heard that they had hit a priest. He enlarged on this sin and its consequences till they bade him change the subject. Their one hope, said he, was unostentatious flight from village to village till they reached civilization; and, for the hundredth time dissolved in tears, he demanded of the high stars why the Sahibs ‘had beaten holy man’.
Ten steps would have taken Hurree into the creaking gloom utterly beyond their reach - to the shelter and food of the nearest village, where glib-tongued doctors were scarce. But he preferred to endure cold, belly-pinch, bad words, and occasional blows in the company of his honoured employers. Crouched against a tree-trunk, he sniffed dolefully.
‘And have you thought,’ said the uninjured man hotly, ‘what sort of spectacle we shall present wandering through these hills among these aborigines?’
Hurree Babu had thought of little else for some hours, but the remark was not to his address.
‘We cannot wander! I can hardly walk,’ groaned Kim’s victim.
‘Perhaps the holy man will be merciful in loving-kindness, sar, otherwise -‘
‘I promise myself a peculiar pleasure in emptying my revolver into that young bonze when next we meet,’ was the unchristian answer.
‘Revolvers! Vengeance! Bonzes!’ Hurree crouched lower. The war was breaking out afresh. ‘Have you no consideration for our loss? The baggage! The baggage!’ He could hear the speaker literally dancing on the grass. ‘Everything we bore! Everything we have secured! Our gains! Eight months’ work! Do you know what that means? “Decidedly it is we who can deal with Orientals!” Oh, you have done well.’
They fell to it in several tongues, and Hurree smiled. Kim was with the kiltas, and in the kiltas lay eight months of good diplomacy. There was no means of communicating with the boy, but he could be trusted. For the rest, Hurree could so stage-manage the journey through the hills that Hilas, Bunar, and four hundred miles of hill-roads should tell the tale for a generation. Men who cannot control their own coolies are little respected in the Hills, and the hillman has a very keen sense of humour.
‘If I had done it myself,’ thought Hurree, ‘it would not have been better; and, by Jove, now I think of it, of course I arranged it myself. How quick I have been! Just when I ran downhill I thought it! Thee outrage was accidental, but onlee me could have worked it - ah - for all it was dam’-well worth. Consider the moral effect upon these ignorant peoples! No treaties - no papers - no written documents at all - and me to interpret for them. How I shall laugh with the Colonel! I wish I had their papers also: but you cannot occupy two places in space simultaneously. Thatt is axiomatic.’
My brother kneels (so saith Kabir) To stone and brass in heathen wise, But in my brother’s voice I hear My own unanswered agonies. His God is as his Fates assign - His prayer is all the world’s - and mine.
The Prayer.
At moonrise the cautious coolies got under way. The lama, refreshed by his sleep and the spirit, needed no more than Kim’s shoulder to bear him along - a silent, swift-striding man. They held the shale-sprinkled grass for an hour, swept round the shoulder of an immortal cliff, and climbed into a new country entirely blocked off from all sight of Chini valley. A huge pasture-ground ran up fan-shaped to the living snow. At its base was perhaps half an acre of flat land, on which stood a few soil and timber huts. Behind them - for, hill-fashion, they were perched on the edge of all things - the ground fell sheer two thousand feet to Shamlegh-midden, where never yet man has set foot.
The men made no motion to divide the plunder till they had seen the lama bedded down in the best room of the place, with Kim shampooing his feet, Mohammedan-fashion.
‘We will send food, ‘ said the Ao-chung man, ‘and the red-topped kilta. By dawn there will be none to give evidence, one way or the other. If anything is not needed in the kilta - see here!’
He pointed through the window - opening into space that was filled with moonlight reflected from the snow - and threw out an empty whisky-bottle.
‘No need to listen for the fall. This is the world’s end,’ he said, and went out. The lama looked forth, a hand on either sill, with eyes that shone like yellow opals. From the enormous pit before him white peaks lifted themselves yearning to the moonlight. The rest was as the darkness of interstellar space.
‘These,’ he said slowly, ‘are indeed my Hills. Thus should a man abide, perched above the world, separated from delights, considering vast matters.’
‘Yes; if he has a chela to prepare tea for him, and to fold a blanket for his head, and to chase out calving cows.’
A smoky lamp burned in a niche, but the full moonlight beat it down; and by the mixed light, stooping above the food-bag and cups, Kim moved like a tall ghost.
‘Ai! But now I have let the blood cool, my head still beats and drums, and there is a cord round the back of my neck.’
‘No wonder. It was a strong blow. May he who dealt it -‘
‘But for my own passions there would have been no evil.’
‘What evil? Thou hast saved the Sahibs from the death they deserved a hundred times.’
‘The lesson is not well learnt, chela.’ The lama came to rest on a folded blanket, as Kim went forward with his evening routine. ‘The blow was but a shadow upon a shadow. Evil in itself - my legs weary apace these latter days! - it met evil in me: anger, rage, and a lust to return evil. These wrought in my blood, woke tumult in my stomach, and dazzled my ears.’ Here he drank scalding black-tea ceremonially, taking the hot cup from Kim’s hand. ‘Had I been passionless, the evil blow would have done only bodily evil - a scar, or a bruise - which is illusion. But my mind was not abstracted, for rushed in straightway a lust to let the Spiti men kill. In fighting that lust, my soul was torn and wrenched beyond a thousand blows. Not till I had repeated the Blessings’ (he meant the Buddhist Beatitudes) ‘did I achieve calm. But the evil planted in me by that moment’s carelessness works out to its end. Just is the Wheel, swerving not a hair! Learn the lesson, chela.’
‘It is too high for me,’ Kim muttered. ‘I am still all shaken. I am glad I hurt the man.’
‘I felt that, sleeping upon thy knees, in the wood below. It disquieted me in my dreams - the evil in thy soul working through to mine. Yet on the other hand’ - he loosed his rosary - ‘I have acquired merit by saving two lives - the lives of those that wronged me. Now I must see into the Cause of Things. The boat of my soul staggers.’
‘Sleep, and be strong. That is wisest.’
‘I meditate. There is a need greater than thou knowest.’
Till the dawn, hour after hour, as the moonlight paled on the high peaks, and that which had been belted blackness on the sides of the far hills showed as tender green forest, the lama stared fixedly at the wall. From time to time he groaned. Outside the barred door, where discomfited kine came to ask for their old stable, Shamlegh and the coolies gave itself up to plunder and riotous living. The Ao-chung man was their leader, and once they had opened the Sahibs’ tinned foods and found that they were very good they dared not turn back. Shamlegh kitchen-midden took the dunnage.
When Kim, after a night of bad dreams, stole forth to brush his teeth in the morning chill, a fair-coloured woman with turquoise-studded headgear drew him aside.
‘The others have gone. They left thee this kilta as the promise was. I do not love Sahibs, but thou wilt make us a charm in return for it. We do not wish little Shamlegh to get a bad name on account of the - accident. I am the Woman of Shamlegh.’ She looked him over with bold, bright eyes, unlike the usual furtive glance of hillwomen.
‘Assuredly. But it must be done in secret.’
She raised the heavy kilta like a toy and slung it into her own hut.
‘Out and bar the door! Let none come near till it is finished,’ said Kim.
‘But afterwards - we may talk?’
Kim tilted the kilta on the floor - a cascade of Survey-instruments, books, diaries, letters, maps, and queerly scented native correspondence. At the very bottom was an embroidered bag covering a sealed, gilded, and illuminated document such as one King sends to another. Kim caught his breath with delight, and reviewed the situation from a Sahib’s point of view.
‘The books I do not want. Besides, they are logarithms - Survey, I suppose.’ He laid them aside. ‘The letters I do not understand, but Colonel Creighton will. They must all be kept. The maps - they draw better maps than me - of course. All the native letters - oho! - and particularly the murasla.’ He sniffed the embroidered bag. ‘That must be from Hilas or Bunar, and Hurree Babu spoke truth. By Jove! It is a fine haul. I wish
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