Kim
masks, hanging above the fiend-embroidered draperies of those ghastly
functions—horned masks, scowling masks, and masks of idiotic terror. In
a corner, a Japanese warrior, mailed and plumed, menaced him with a
halberd, and a score of lances and _khandas_ and _kuttars_ gave back
the unsteady gleam. But what interested Kim more than all these
things—he had seen devil-dance masks at the Lahore Museum—was a glimpse
of the soft-eyed Hindu child who had left him in the doorway, sitting
cross-legged under the table of pearls with a little smile on his
scarlet lips.
“I think that Lurgan Sahib wishes to make me afraid. And I am sure that
that devil’s brat below the table wishes to see me afraid.
“This place,” he said aloud, “is like a Wonder House. Where is my bed?”
Lurgan Sahib pointed to a native quilt in a corner by the loathsome
masks, picked up the lamp, and left the room black.
“Was that Lurgan Sahib?” Kim asked as he cuddled down. No answer. He
could hear the Hindu boy breathing, however, and, guided by the sound,
crawled across the floor, and cuffed into the darkness, crying: “Give
answer, devil! Is this the way to lie to a Sahib?”
From the darkness he fancied he could hear the echo of a chuckle. It
could not be his soft-fleshed companion, because he was weeping. So Kim
lifted up his voice and called aloud:
“Lurgan Sahib! O Lurgan Sahib! Is it an order that thy servant does not
speak to me?”
“It is an order.” The voice came from behind him and he started.
“Very good. But remember,” he muttered, as he resought the quilt, “I
will beat thee in the morning. I do not love Hindus.”
That was no cheerful night; the room being overfull of voices and
music. Kim was waked twice by someone calling his name. The second time
he set out in search, and ended by bruising his nose against a box that
certainly spoke with a human tongue, but in no sort of human accent. It
seemed to end in a tin trumpet and to be joined by wires to a smaller
box on the floor—so far, at least, as he could judge by touch. And the
voice, very hard and whirring, came out of the trumpet. Kim rubbed his
nose and grew furious, thinking, as usual, in Hindi.
“This with a beggar from the bazar might be good, but—I am a Sahib and
the son of a Sahib and, which is twice as much more beside, a student
of Nucklao. Yess” (here he turned to English), “a boy of St Xavier’s.
Damn Mr Lurgan’s eyes!—It is some sort of machinery like a
sewing-machine. Oh, it is a _great_ cheek of him—we are not frightened
that way at Lucknow—No!” Then in Hindi: “But what does _he_ gain? He is
only a trader—I am in his shop. But Creighton Sahib is a Colonel—and I
think Creighton Sahib gave orders that it should be done. _How_ I will
beat that Hindu in the morning! What is this?”
The trumpet-box was pouring out a string of the most elaborate abuse
that even Kim had ever heard, in a high uninterested voice, that for a
moment lifted the short hairs of his neck. When the vile thing drew
breath, Kim was reassured by the soft, sewing-machine-like whirr.
“_Chûp!_ (Be still)” he cried, and again he heard a chuckle that
decided him. “_Chûp_—or I break your head.”
The box took no heed. Kim wrenched at the tin trumpet and something
lifted with a click. He had evidently raised a lid. If there were a
devil inside, now was its time, for—he sniffed—thus did the
sewing-machines of the bazar smell. He would clean that _shaitan_. He
slipped off his jacket, and plunged it into the box’s mouth. Something
long and round bent under the pressure, there was a whirr and the voice
stopped—as voices must if you ram a thrice-doubled coat on to the wax
cylinder and into the works of an expensive phonograph. Kim finished
his slumbers with a serene mind.
In the morning he was aware of Lurgan Sahib looking down on him.
“Oah!” said Kim, firmly resolved to cling to his Sahib-dom. “There was
a box in the night that gave me bad talk. So I stopped it. Was it your
box?”
The man held out his hand.
“Shake hands, O’Hara,” he said. “Yes, it was my box. I keep such things
because my friends the Rajahs like them. That one is broken, but it was
cheap at the price. Yes, my friends, the Kings, are very fond of
toys—and so am I sometimes.”
Kim looked him over out of the corners of his eyes. He was a Sahib in
that he wore Sahib’s clothes; the accent of his Urdu, the intonation of
his English, showed that he was anything but a Sahib. He seemed to
understand what moved in Kim’s mind ere the boy opened his mouth, and
he took no pains to explain himself as did Father Victor or the Lucknow
masters. Sweetest of all—he treated Kim as an equal on the Asiatic
side.
“I am sorry you cannot beat my boy this morning. He says he will kill
you with a knife or poison. He is jealous, so I have put him in the
corner and I shall not speak to him today. He has just tried to kill
me. You must help me with the breakfast. He is almost too jealous to
trust, just now.”
Now a genuine imported Sahib from England would have made a great to-do
over this tale. Lurgan Sahib stated it as simply as Mahbub Ali was used
to record his little affairs in the North.
The back veranda of the shop was built out over the sheer hillside, and
they looked down into their neighbours’ chimney-pots, as is the custom
of Simla. But even more than the purely Persian meal cooked by Lurgan
Sahib with his own hands, the shop fascinated Kim. The Lahore Museum
was larger, but here were more wonders—ghost-daggers and prayer-wheels
from Tibet; turquoise and raw amber necklaces; green jade bangles;
curiously packed incense-sticks in jars crusted over with raw garnets;
the devil-masks of overnight and a wall full of peacock-blue draperies;
gilt figures of Buddha, and little portable lacquer altars; Russian
samovars with turquoises on the lid; egg-shell china sets in quaint
octagonal cane boxes; yellow ivory crucifixes—from Japan of all places
in the world, so Lurgan Sahib said; carpets in dusty bales, smelling
atrociously, pushed back behind torn and rotten screens of geometrical
work; Persian water-jugs for the hands after meals; dull copper
incense-burners neither Chinese nor Persian, with friezes of fantastic
devils running round them; tarnished silver belts that knotted like raw
hide; hairpins of jade, ivory, and plasma; arms of all sorts and kinds,
and a thousand other oddments were cased, or piled, or merely thrown
into the room, leaving a clear space only round the rickety deal table,
where Lurgan Sahib worked.
“Those things are nothing,” said his host, following Kim’s glance. “I
buy them because they are pretty, and sometimes I sell—if I like the
buyer’s look. My work is on the table—some of it.”
It blazed in the morning light—all red and blue and green flashes,
picked out with the vicious blue-white spurt of a diamond here and
there. Kim opened his eyes.
“Oh, they are quite well, those stones. It will not hurt them to take
the sun. Besides, they are cheap. But with sick stones it is very
different.” He piled Kim’s plate anew. “There is no one but _me_ can
doctor a sick pearl and re-blue turquoises. I grant you opals—any fool
can cure an opal—but for a sick pearl there is only me. Suppose I were
to die! Then there would be no one ... Oh no! _You_ cannot do anything
with jewels. It will be quite enough if you understand a little about
the Turquoise—some day.”
He moved to the end of the veranda to refill the heavy, porous clay
water-jug from the filter.
“Do you want drink?”
Kim nodded. Lurgan Sahib, fifteen feet off, laid one hand on the jar.
Next instant, it stood at Kim’s elbow, full to within half an inch of
the brim—the white cloth only showing, by a small wrinkle, where it had
slid into place.
“Wah!” said Kim in most utter amazement. “That is magic.” Lurgan
Sahib’s smile showed that the compliment had gone home.
“Throw it back.”
“It will break.”
“I say, throw it back.”
Kim pitched it at random. It fell short and crashed into fifty pieces,
while the water dripped through the rough veranda boarding.
“I said it would break.”
“All one. Look at it. Look at the largest piece.”
That lay with a sparkle of water in its curve, as it were a star on the
floor. Kim looked intently. Lurgan Sahib laid one hand gently on the
nape of his neck, stroked it twice or thrice, and whispered: “Look! It
shall come to life again, piece by piece. First the big piece shall
join itself to two others on the right and the left—on the right and
the left. Look!”
To save his life, Kim could not have turned his head. The light touch
held him as in a vice, and his blood tingled pleasantly through him.
There was one large piece of the jar where there had been three, and
above them the shadowy outline of the entire vessel. He could see the
veranda through it, but it was thickening and darkening with each beat
of his pulse. Yet the jar—how slowly the thoughts came!—the jar had
been smashed before his eyes. Another wave of prickling fire raced down
his neck, as Lurgan Sahib moved his hand.
“Look! It is coming into shape,” said Lurgan Sahib.
So far Kim had been thinking in Hindi, but a tremor came on him, and
with an effort like that of a swimmer before sharks, who hurls himself
half out of the water, his mind leaped up from a darkness that was
swallowing it and took refuge in—the multiplication-table in English!
“Look! It is coming into shape,” whispered Lurgan Sahib.
The jar had been smashed—yess, smashed—not the native word, he would
not think of that—but smashed—into fifty pieces, and twice three was
six, and thrice three was nine, and four times three was twelve. He
clung desperately to the repetition. The shadow-outline of the jar
cleared like a mist after rubbing eyes. There were the broken shards;
there was the spilt water drying in the sun, and through the cracks of
the veranda showed, all ribbed, the white house-wall below—and thrice
twelve was thirty-six!
“Look! Is it coming into shape?” asked Lurgan Sahib.
“But it is smashed—smashed,” he gasped—Lurgan Sahib had been muttering
softly for the last half-minute. Kim wrenched his head aside. “Look!
_Dekho!_ It is there as it was there.”
“It is there as it was there,” said Lurgan, watching Kim closely while
the boy rubbed his neck. “But you are the first of many who has ever
seen it so.” He wiped his broad forehead.
“Was that more magic?” Kim asked suspiciously. The tingle had gone from
his veins; he felt unusually wide awake.
“No, that was not magic. It was only to see if there was—a flaw in a
jewel. Sometimes very fine jewels will fly all to pieces if a man holds
them in his hand, and knows the proper way. That is why one must be
careful before one sets them. Tell me, did you see the shape of the
pot?”
“For a little time. It began to grow like a flower from the ground.”
“And then what did you do? I mean, how did you think?”
“Oah! I knew it was broken, and so, I think, that was what I
thought—and it was broken.”
“Hm! Has anyone ever done that same sort of magic to you before?”
“If it was,” said Kim “do you think I should let it again? I should run
away.”
“And now you are not afraid—eh?”
“Not now.”
Lurgan Sahib looked at him more closely than ever. “I shall ask Mahbub
Ali—not now, but some day later,” he muttered. “I am pleased with
you—yes; and I am pleased with you—no. You are the first that ever
saved himself. I wish I knew what it was that ... But you are right.
You should not tell that—not even to me.”
He turned into the dusky gloom of the shop, and sat down at the table,
rubbing his hands softly. A small, husky sob came from behind a pile of
carpets. It was the Hindu child obediently facing towards the wall. His
thin shoulders worked with grief.
“Ah! He is jealous, so jealous. I wonder if he will try to poison me