Kim
Then he would shake his head benignly, and over the ever-clicking
rosary point out how free that elephant-calf was from the sin of pride.
He was as humble as a _chela_ who, seeing his master sitting in the
dust outside the Gates of Learning, over-leapt the gates (though they
were locked) and took his master to his heart in the presence of the
proud-stomached city. Rich would be the reward of such a master and
such a _chela_ when the time came for them to seek freedom together!
So did the lama speak, coming and going across India as softly as a
bat. A sharp-tongued old woman in a house among the fruit-trees behind
Saharunpore honoured him as the woman honoured the prophet, but his
chamber was by no means upon the wall. In an apartment of the forecourt
overlooked by cooing doves he would sit, while she laid aside her
useless veil and chattered of spirits and fiends of Kulu, of
grandchildren unborn, and of the free-tongued brat who had talked to
her in the resting-place. Once, too, he strayed alone from the Grand
Trunk Road below Umballa to the very village whose priest had tried to
drug him; but the kind Heaven that guards lamas sent him at twilight
through the crops, absorbed and unsuspicious, to the Rissaldar’s door.
Here was like to have been a grave misunderstanding, for the old
soldier asked him why the Friend of the Stars had gone that way only
six days before.
“That may not be,” said the lama. “He has gone back to his own people.”
“He sat in that corner telling a hundred merry tales five nights ago,”
his host insisted. “True, he vanished somewhat suddenly in the dawn
after foolish talk with my granddaughter. He grows apace, but he is the
same Friend of the Stars as brought me true word of the war. Have ye
parted?”
“Yes—and no,” the lama replied. “We—we have not altogether parted, but
the time is not ripe that we should take the Road together. He acquires
wisdom in another place. We must wait.”
“All one—but if it were not the boy how did he come to speak so
continually of thee?”
“And what said he?” asked the lama eagerly.
“Sweet words—an hundred thousand—that thou art his father and mother
and such all. Pity that he does not take the Qpeen’s service. He is
fearless.”
This news amazed the lama, who did not then know how religiously Kim
kept to the contract made with Mahbub Ali, and perforce ratified by
Colonel Creighton...
“There is no holding the young pony from the game,” said the
horse-dealer when the Colonel pointed out that vagabonding over India
in holiday time was absurd. “If permission be refused to go and come as
he chooses, he will make light of the refusal. Then who is to catch
him? Colonel Sahib, only once in a thousand years is a horse born so
well fitted for the game as this our colt. And we need men.”
CHAPTER X
Your tiercel’s too long at hack, Sire. He’s no eyass
But a passage-hawk that footed ere we caught him,
Dangerously free o’ the air. Faith! were he mine
(As mine’s the glove he binds to for his tirings)
I’d fly him with a make-hawk. He’s in yarak
Plumed to the very point—so manned, so weathered...
Give him the firmament God made him for,
And what shall take the air of him?—_Old Play._
Lurgan Sahib did not use as direct speech, but his advice tallied with
Mahbub’s; and the upshot was good for Kim. He knew better now than to
leave Lucknow city in native garb, and if Mahbub were anywhere within
reach of a letter, it was to Mahbub’s camp he headed, and made his
change under the Pathan’s wary eye. Could the little Survey paint-box
that he used for map-tinting in term-time have found a tongue to tell
of holiday doings, he might have been expelled. Once Mahbub and he went
together as far as the beautiful city of Bombay, with three truckloads
of tram-horses, and Mahbub nearly melted when Kim proposed a sail in a
dhow across the Indian Ocean to buy Gulf Arabs, which, he understood
from a hanger-on of the dealer Abdul Rahman, fetched better prices than
mere Kabulis.
He dipped his hand into the dish with that great trader when Mahbub and
a few co-religionists were invited to a big Haj dinner. They came back
by way of Karachi by sea, when Kim took his first experience of
sea-sickness sitting on the fore-hatch of a coasting-steamer, well
persuaded he had been poisoned. The Babu’s famous drug-box proved
useless, though Kim had restocked it at Bombay. Mahbub had business at
Quetta, and there Kim, as Mahbub admitted, earned his keep, and perhaps
a little over, by spending four curious days as scullion in the house
of a fat Commissariat sergeant, from whose office-box, in an auspicious
moment, he removed a little vellum ledger which he copied out—it seemed
to deal entirely with cattle and camel sales—by moonlight, lying behind
an outhouse, all through one hot night. Then he returned the ledger to
its place, and, at Mahbub’s word, left that service unpaid, rejoining
him six miles down the road, the clean copy in his bosom.
“That soldier is a small fish,” Mahbub Ali explained, “but in time we
shall catch the larger one. He only sells oxen at two prices—one for
himself and one for the Government—which I do not think is a sin.”
“Why could not I take away the little book and be done with it?”
“Then he would have been frightened, and he would have told his master.
Then we should miss, perhaps, a great number of new rifles which seek
their way up from Quetta to the North. The Game is so large that one
sees but a little at a time.”
“Oho!” said Kim, and held his tongue. That was in the monsoon holidays,
after he had taken the prize for mathematics. The Christmas holidays he
spent—deducting ten days for private amusements—with Lurgan Sahib,
where he sat for the most part in front of a roaring wood-fire—Jakko
road was four feet deep in snow that year—and—the small Hindu had gone
away to be married—helped Lurgan to thread pearls. He made Kim learn
whole chapters of the Koran by heart, till he could deliver them with
the very roll and cadence of a mullah. Moreover, he told Kim the names
and properties of many native drugs, as well as the runes proper to
recite when you administer them. And in the evenings he wrote charms on
parchment—elaborate pentagrams crowned with the names of devils—Murra,
and Awan the Companion of Kings—all fantastically written in the
corners. More to the point, he advised Kim as to the care of his own
body, the cure of fever-fits, and simple remedies of the Road. A week
before it was time to go down, Colonel Creighton Sahib—this was
unfair—sent Kim a written examination paper that concerned itself
solely with rods and chains and links and angles.
Next holidays he was out with Mahbub, and here, by the way, he nearly
died of thirst, plodding through the sand on a camel to the mysterious
city of Bikanir, where the wells are four hundred feet deep, and lined
throughout with camel-bone. It was not an amusing trip from Kim’s point
of view, because—in defiance of the contract—the Colonel ordered him to
make a map of that wild, walled city; and since Mohammedan horse-boys
and pipe-tenders are not expected to drag Survey-chains round the
capital of an independent Native State, Kim was forced to pace all his
distances by means of a bead rosary. He used the compass for bearings
as occasion served—after dark chiefly, when the camels had been fed—and
by the help of his little Survey paint-box of six colour-cakes and
three brushes, he achieved something not remotely unlike the city of
Jeysulmir. Mahbub laughed a great deal, and advised him to make up a
written report as well; and in the back of the big account-book that
lay under the flap of Mahbub’s pet saddle Kim fell to work..
“It must hold everything that thou hast seen or touched or considered.
Write as though the Jung-i-Lat Sahib himself had come by stealth with a
vast army outsetting to war.”
“How great an army?”
“Oh, half a lakh of men.”
“Folly! Remember how few and bad were the wells in the sand. Not a
thousand thirsty men could come near by here.”
“Then write that down—also all the old breaches in the walls and whence
the firewood is cut—and what is the temper and disposition of the King.
I stay here till all my horses are sold. I will hire a room by the
gateway, and thou shalt be my accountant. There is a good lock to the
door.”
The report in its unmistakable St Xavier’s running script, and the
brown, yellow, and lake-daubed map, was on hand a few years ago (a
careless clerk filed it with the rough notes of E’s second Seistan
survey), but by now the pencil characters must be almost illegible. Kim
translated it, sweating under the light of an oil-lamp, to Mahbub, the
second day of their return-journey.
The Pathan rose and stooped over his dappled saddle-bags.
“I knew it would be worthy a dress of honour, and so I made one ready,”
he said, smiling. “Were I Amir of Afghanistan (and some day we may see
him), I would fill thy mouth with gold.” He laid the garments formally
at Kim’s feet. There was a gold-embroidered Peshawur turban-cap, rising
to a cone, and a big turban-cloth ending in a broad fringe of gold.
There was a Delhi embroidered waistcoat to slip over a milky white
shirt, fastening to the right, ample and flowing; green pyjamas with
twisted silk waist-string; and that nothing might be lacking,
russia-leather slippers, smelling divinely, with arrogantly curled
tips.
“Upon a Wednesday, and in the morning, to put on new clothes is
auspicious,” said Mahbub solemnly. “But we must not forget the wicked
folk in the world. So!”
He capped all the splendour, that was taking Kim’s delighted breath
away, with a mother-of-pearl, nickel-plated, self-extracting .450
revolver.
“I had thought of a smaller bore, but reflected that this takes
Government bullets. A man can always come by those—especially across
the Border. Stand up and let me look.” He clapped Kim on the shoulder.
“May you never be tired, Pathan! Oh, the hearts to be broken! Oh, the
eyes under the eyelashes, looking sideways!”
Kim turned about, pointed his toes, stretched, and felt mechanically
for the moustache that was just beginning. Then he stooped towards
Mahbub’s feet to make proper acknowledgment with fluttering,
quick-patting hands; his heart too full for words. Mahbub forestalled
and embraced him.
“My son, said he, “what need of words between us? But is not the little
gun a delight? All six cartridges come out at one twist. It is borne in
the bosom next the skin, which, as it were, keeps it oiled. Never put
it elsewhere, and please God, thou shalt some day kill a man with it.”
“_Hai mai!_” said Kim ruefully. “If a Sahib kills a man he is hanged in
the jail.”
“True: but one pace beyond the Border, men are wiser. Put it away; but
fill it first. Of what use is a gun unfed?”
“When I go back to the _madrissah_ I must return it. They do not allow
little guns. Thou wilt keep it for me?”
“Son, I am wearied of that _madrissah_, where they take the best years
of a man to teach him what he can only learn upon the Road. The folly
of the Sahibs has neither top nor bottom. No matter. Maybe thy written
report shall save thee further bondage; and God He knows we need men
more and more in the Game.”
They marched, jaw-bound against blowing sand, across the salt desert to
Jodhpur, where Mahbub and his handsome nephew Habib Ullah did much
trading; and then sorrowfully, in European clothes, which he was fast
outgrowing, Kim went second-class to St Xavier’s. Three weeks later,
Colonel Creighton, pricing Tibetan ghost-daggers at Lurgan’s shop,
faced Mahbub Ali openly mutinous. Lurgan Sahib operated as support in
reserve.
“The pony is made—finished—mouthed and paced, Sahib! From now on, day
by day, he will lose his manners if he is kept at tricks. Drop the rein