Kim
on his back and let go,” said the horse-dealer. “We need him.”
“But he is so young, Mahbub—not more than sixteen—is he?”
“When I was fifteen, I had shot my man and begot my man, Sahib.”
“You impenitent old heathen!” Creighton turned to Lurgan. The black
beard nodded assent to the wisdom of the Afghan’s dyed scarlet.
“_I_ should have used him long ago,” said Lurgan. “The younger the
better. That is why I always have my really valuable jewels watched by
a child. You sent him to me to try. I tried him in every way: he is the
only boy I could not make to see things.”
“In the crystal—in the ink-pool?” demanded Mahbub.
“No. Under my hand, as I told you. That has never happened before. It
means that he is strong enough—but you think it skittles, Colonel
Creighton—to make anyone do anything he wants. And that is three years
ago. I have taught him a good deal since, Colonel Creighton. I think
you waste him now.”
“Hmm! Maybe you’re right. But, as you know, there is no Survey work for
him at present.”
“Let him out let him go,” Mahbub interrupted. “Who expects any colt to
carry heavy weight at first? Let him run with the caravans—like our
white camel-colts—for luck. I would take him myself, but—”
“There is a little business where he would be most useful—in the
South,” said Lurgan, with peculiar suavity, dropping his heavy blued
eyelids.
“E.23 has that in hand,” said Creighton quickly. “He must not go down
there. Besides, he knows no Turki.”
“Only tell him the shape and the smell of the letters we want and he
will bring them back,” Lurgan insisted.
“No. That is a man’s job,” said Creighton.
It was a wry-necked matter of unauthorized and incendiary
correspondence between a person who claimed to be the ultimate
authority in all matters of the Mohammedan religion throughout the
world, and a younger member of a royal house who had been brought to
book for kidnapping women within British territory. The Moslem
Archbishop had been emphatic and over-arrogant; the young prince was
merely sulky at the curtailment of his privileges, but there was no
need he should continue a correspondence which might some day
compromise him. One letter indeed had been procured, but the finder was
later found dead by the roadside in the habit of an Arab trader, as
E.23, taking up the work, duly reported.
These facts, and a few others not to be published, made both Mahbub and
Creighton shake their heads.
“Let him go out with his Red Lama,” said the horse-dealer with visible
effort. “He is fond of the old man. He can learn his paces by the
rosary at least.”
“I have had some dealings with the old man—by letter,” said Colonel
Creighton, smiling to himself. “Whither goes he?”
“Up and down the land, as he has these three years. He seeks a River of
Healing. God’s curse upon all—” Mahbub checked himself. “He beds down
at the Temple of the Tirthankars or at Buddh Gaya when he is in from
the Road. Then he goes to see the boy at the _madrissah_, as we know
for the boy was punished for it twice or thrice. He is quite mad, but a
peaceful man. I have met him. The Babu also has had dealings with him.
We have watched him for three years. Red Lamas are not so common in
Hind that one loses track.”
“Babus are very curious,” said Lurgan meditatively. “Do you know what
Hurree Babu really wants? He wants to be made a member of the Royal
Society by taking ethnological notes. I tell you, I tell him about the
lama everything which Mahbub and the boy have told me. Hurree Babu goes
down to Benares—at his own expense, I think.”
“_I_ don’t,” said Creighton briefly. He had paid Hurree’s travelling
expenses, out of a most lively curiosity to learn what the lama might
be.
“And he applies to the lama for information on lamaism, and
devil-dances, and spells and charms, several times in these few years.
Holy Virgin! I could have told him all that yeears ago. I think Hurree
Babu is getting too old for the Road. He likes better to collect
manners and customs information. Yes, he wants to be an FRS.
“Hurree thinks well of the boy, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, very indeed—we have had some pleasant evenings at my little
place—but I think it would be waste to throw him away with Hurree on
the Ethnological side.”
“Not for a first experience. How does that strike you, Mahbub? Let the
boy run with the lama for six months. After that we can see. He will
get experience.”
“He has it already, Sahib—as a fish controls the water he swims in. But
for every reason it will be well to loose him from the school.”
“Very good, then,” said Creighton, half to himself. “He can go with the
lama, and if Hurree Babu cares to keep an eye on them so much the
better. He won’t lead the boy into any danger as Mahbub would.
Curious—his wish to be an F R S. Very human, too. He _is_ best on the
Ethnological side—Hurree.”
No money and no preferment would have drawn Creighton from his work on
the Indian Survey, but deep in his heart also lay the ambition to write
“F R S” after his name. Honours of a sort he knew could be obtained by
ingenuity and the help of friends, but, to the best of his belief,
nothing save work—papers representing a life of it—took a man into the
Society which he had bombarded for years with monographs on strange
Asiatic cults and unknown customs. Nine men out of ten would flee from
a Royal Society soiree in extremity of boredom; but Creighton was the
tenth, and at times his soul yearned for the crowded rooms in easy
London where silver-haired, bald-headed gentlemen who know nothing of
the Army move among spectroscopic experiments, the lesser plants of the
frozen tundras, electric flight-measuring machines, and apparatus for
slicing into fractional millimetres the left eye of the female
mosquito. By all right and reason, it was the Royal Geographical that
should have appealed to him, but men are as chancy as children in their
choice of playthings. So Creighton smiled, and thought the better of
Hurree Babu, moved by like desire.
He dropped the ghost-dagger and looked up at Mahbub.
“How soon can we get the colt from the stable?” said the horse-dealer,
reading his eyes.
“Hmm! If I withdraw him by order now—what will he do, think you? I have
never before assisted at the teaching of such an one.”
“He will come to me,” said Mahbub promptly. “Lurgan Sahib and I will
prepare him for the Road.”
“So be it, then. For six months he shall run at his choice. But who
will be his sponsor?”
Lurgan slightly inclined his head. “He will not tell anything, if that
is what you are afraid of, Colonel Creighton.”
“It’s only a boy, after all.”
“Ye-es; but first, he has nothing to tell; and secondly, he knows what
would happen. Also, he is very fond of Mahbub, and of me a little.”
“Will he draw pay?” demanded the practical horse-dealer.
“Food and water allowance only. Twenty rupees a month.”
One advantage of the Secret Service is that it has no worrying audit.
That Service is ludicrously starved, of course, but the funds are
administered by a few men who do not call for vouchers or present
itemized accounts. Mahbub’s eyes lighted with almost a Sikh’s love of
money. Even Lurgan’s impassive face changed. He considered the years to
come when Kim would have been entered and made to the Great Game that
never ceases day and night, throughout India. He foresaw honour and
credit in the mouths of a chosen few, coming to him from his pupil.
Lurgan Sahib had made E.23 what E.23 was, out of a bewildered,
impertinent, lying, little North-West Province man.
But the joy of these masters was pale and smoky beside the joy of Kim
when St Xavier’s Head called him aside, with word that Colonel
Creighton had sent for him.
“I understand, O’Hara, that he has found you a place as an assistant
chain-man in the Canal Department: that comes of taking up mathematics.
It is great luck for you, for you are only sixteen; but of course you
understand that you do not become _pukka_ (permanent) till you have
passed the autumn examination. So you must not think you are going out
into the world to enjoy yourself, or that your fortune is made. There
is a great deal of hard work before you. Only, if you succeed in
becoming _pukka_, you can rise, you know, to four hundred and fifty a
month.” Whereat the Principal gave him much good advice as to his
conduct, and his manners, and his morals; and others, his elders, who
had not been wafted into billets, talked as only Anglo-Indian lads can,
of favouritism and corruption. Indeed, young Cazalet, whose father was
a pensioner at Chunar, hinted very broadly that Colonel Creighton’s
interest in Kim was directly paternal; and Kim, instead of retaliating,
did not even use language. He was thinking of the immense fun to come,
of Mahbub’s letter of the day before, all neatly written in English,
making appointment for that afternoon in a house the very name of which
would have crisped the Principal’s hair with horror...
Said Kim to Mahbub in Lucknow railway station that evening, above the
luggage-scales: “I feared lest at the last, the roof would fall upon me
and cheat me. It is indeed all finished, O my father?”
Mahbub snapped his fingers to show the utterness of that end, and his
eyes blazed like red coals.
“Then where is the pistol that I may wear it?”
“Softly! A half-year, to run without heel-ropes. I begged that much
from Colonel Creighton Sahib. At twenty rupees a month. Old Red Hat
knows that thou art coming.”
“I will pay thee _dustoorie_ (commission) on my pay for three months,”
said Kim gravely. “Yea, two rupees a month. But first we must get rid
of these.” He plucked his thin linen trousers and dragged at his
collar. “I have brought with me all that I need on the Road. My trunk
has gone up to Lurgan Sahib’s.”
“Who sends his salaams to thee—Sahib.”
“Lurgan Sahib is a very clever man. But what dost thou do?”
“I go North again, upon the Great Game. What else? Is thy mind still
set on following old Red Hat?”
“Do not forget he made me that I am—though he did not know it. Year by
year, he sent the money that taught me.”
“I would have done as much—had it struck my thick head,” Mahbub
growled. “Come away. The lamps are lit now, and none will mark thee in
the bazar. We go to Huneefa’s house.”
On the way thither, Mahbub gave him much the same sort of advice as his
mother gave to Lemuel, and curiously enough, Mahbub was exact to point
out how Huneefa and her likes destroyed kings.
“And I remember,” he quoted maliciously, “one who said, ‘Trust a snake
before an harlot, and an harlot before a Pathan, Mahbub Ali.’ Now,
excepting as to Pathans, of whom I am one, all that is true. Most true
is it in the Great Game, for it is by means of women that all plans
come to ruin and we lie out in the dawning with our throats cut. So it
happened to such a one.” He gave the reddest particulars.
“Then why—?” Kim paused before a filthy staircase that climbed to the
warm darkness of an upper chamber, in the ward that is behind Azim
Ullah’s tobacco-shop. Those who know it call it The Birdcage—it is so
full of whisperings and whistlings and chirrupings.
The room, with its dirty cushions and half-smoked hookahs, smelt
abominably of stale tobacco. In one corner lay a huge and shapeless
woman clad in greenish gauzes, and decked, brow, nose, ear, neck,
wrist, arm, waist, and ankle with heavy native jewellery. When she
turned it was like the clashing of copper pots. A lean cat in the
balcony outside the window mewed hungrily. Kim checked, bewildered, at
the door-curtain.
“Is that the new stuff, Mahbub?” said Huneefa lazily, scarce troubling
to remove the mouthpiece from her lips. “O Buktanoos!”—like most of her
kind, she swore by the Djinns—“O Buktanoos! He is very good to look
upon.”