Kim
searched me from head to foot. Within earshot of the _te-rain_ it was!”
“Why did he not slay thee out of hand?”
“They are not so foolish. If I am taken in Delhi at the instance of
lawyers, upon a proven charge of murder, my body is handed over to the
State that desires it. I go back guarded, and then—I die slowly for an
example to the rest of Us. The South is not my country. I run in
circles—like a goat with one eye. I have not eaten for two days. I am
marked”—he touched the filthy bandage on his leg—“so that they will
know me at Delhi.”
“Thou art safe in the _te-rain_, at least.”
“Live a year at the Great Game and tell me that again! The wires will
be out against me at Delhi, describing every tear and rag upon me.
Twenty—a hundred, if need be—will have seen me slay that boy. And thou
art useless!”
Kim knew enough of native methods of attack not to doubt that the case
would be deadly complete—even to the corpse. The Mahratta twitched his
fingers with pain from time to time. The Kamboh in his corner glared
sullenly; the lama was busy over his beads; and Kim, fumbling
doctor-fashion at the man’s neck, thought out his plan between
invocations.
“Hast thou a charm to change my shape? Else I am dead. Five—ten minutes
alone, if I had not been so pressed, and I might—”
“Is he cured yet, miracle-worker?” said the Kamboh jealously. “Thou
hast chanted long enough.”
“Nay. There is no cure for his hurts, as I see, except he sit for three
days in the habit of a _bairagi_.” This is a common penance, often
imposed on a fat trader by his spiritual teacher.
“One priest always goes about to make another priest,” was the retort.
Like most grossly superstitious folk, the Kamboh could not keep his
tongue from deriding his Church.
“Will thy son be a priest, then? It is time he took more of my
quinine.”
“We Jats are all buffaloes,” said the Kamboh, softening anew.
Kim rubbed a finger-tip of bitterness on the child’s trusting little
lips. “I have asked for nothing,” he said sternly to the father,
“except food. Dost thou grudge me that? I go to heal another man. Have
I thy leave—Prince?”
Up flew the man’s huge paws in supplication. “Nay—nay. Do not mock me
thus.”
“It pleases me to cure this sick one. Thou shalt acquire merit by
aiding. What colour ash is there in thy pipe-bowl? White. That is
auspicious. Was there raw turmeric among thy foodstuffs?”
“I—I—”
“Open thy bundle!”
It was the usual collection of small oddments: bits of cloth, quack
medicines, cheap fairings, a clothful of _atta_—greyish, rough-ground
native flour—twists of down-country tobacco, tawdry pipe-stems, and a
packet of curry-stuff, all wrapped in a quilt. Kim turned it over with
the air of a wise warlock, muttering a Mohammedan invocation.
“This is wisdom I learned from the Sahibs,” he whispered to the lama;
and here, when one thinks of his training at Lurgan’s, he spoke no more
than the truth. “There is a great evil in this man’s fortune, as shown
by the Stars, which—which troubles him. Shall I take it away?”
“Friend of the Stars, thou hast done well in all things. Let it be at
thy pleasure. Is it another healing?”
“Quick! Be quick!” gasped the Mahratta. “The train may stop.”
“A healing against the shadow of death,” said Kim, mixing the Kamboh’s
flour with the mingled charcoal and tobacco ash in the red-earth bowl
of the pipe. E, without a word, slipped off his turban and shook down
his long black hair.
“That is my food—priest,” the jat growled.
“A buffalo in the temple! Hast thou dared to look even thus far?” said
Kim. “I must do mysteries before fools; but have a care for thine eyes.
Is there a film before them already? I save the babe, and for return
thou—oh, shameless!” The man flinched at the direct gaze, for Kim was
wholly in earnest.
“Shall I curse thee, or shall I—” He picked up the outer cloth of the
bundle and threw it over the bowed head. “Dare so much as to think a
wish to see, and—and—even I cannot save thee. Sit! Be dumb!”
“I am blind—dumb. Forbear to curse! Co—come, child; we will play a game
of hiding. Do not, for my sake, look from under the cloth.”
“I see hope,” said E23. “What is thy scheme?”
“This comes next,” said Kim, plucking the thin body-shirt. E23
hesitated, with all a North-West man’s dislike of baring his body.
“What is caste to a cut throat?” said Kim, rending it to the waist. “We
must make thee a yellow Saddhu all over. Strip—strip swiftly, and shake
thy hair over thine eyes while I scatter the ash. Now, a caste-mark on
thy forehead.” He drew from his bosom the little Survey paint-box and a
cake of crimson lake.
“Art thou only a beginner?” said E23, labouring literally for the dear
life, as he slid out of his body-wrappings and stood clear in the
loin-cloth while Kim splashed in a noble caste-mark on the ash-smeared
brow.
“But two days entered to the Game, brother,” Kim replied. “Smear more
ash on the bosom.”
“Hast thou met—a physician of sick pearls?” He switched out his long,
tight-rolled turban-cloth and, with swiftest hands, rolled it over and
under about his loins into the intricate devices of a Saddhu’s
cincture.
“Hah! Dost thou know his touch, then? He was my teacher for a while. We
must bar thy legs. Ash cures wounds. Smear it again.”
“I was his pride once, but thou art almost better. The Gods are kind to
us! Give me _that_.”
It was a tin box of opium pills among the rubbish of the Jat’s bundle.
E23 gulped down a half handful. “They are good against hunger, fear,
and chill. And they make the eyes red too,” he explained. “Now I shall
have heart to play the Game. We lack only a Saddhu’s tongs. What of the
old clothes?”
Kim rolled them small, and stuffed them into the slack folds of his
tunic. With a yellow-ochre paint cake he smeared the legs and the
breast, great streaks against the background of flour, ash, and
turmeric.
“The blood on them is enough to hang thee, brother.”
“Maybe; but no need to throw them out of the window ... It is
finished.” His voice thrilled with a boy’s pure delight in the Game.
“Turn and look, O Jat!”
“The Gods protect us,” said the hooded Kamboh, emerging like a buffalo
from the reeds. “But—whither went the Mahratta? What hast thou done?”
Kim had been trained by Lurgan Sahib; E23, by virtue of his business,
was no bad actor. In place of the tremulous, shrinking trader there
lolled against the corner an all but naked, ash-smeared, ochre-barred,
dusty-haired Saddhu, his swollen eyes—opium takes quick effect on an
empty stomach—luminous with insolence and bestial lust, his legs
crossed under him, Kim’s brown rosary round his neck, and a scant yard
of worn, flowered chintz on his shoulders. The child buried his face in
his amazed father’s arms.
“Look up, Princeling! We travel with warlocks, but they will not hurt
thee. Oh, do not cry ... What is the sense of curing a child one day
and killing him with fright the next?”
“The child will be fortunate all his life. He has seen a great healing.
When I was a child I made clay men and horses.”
“I have made them too. Sír Banás, he comes in the night and makes them
all alive at the back of our kitchen-midden,” piped the child.
“And so thou art not frightened at anything. Eh, Prince?”
“I was frightened because my father was frightened. I felt his arms
shake.”
“Oh, chicken-man!” said Kim, and even the abashed Jat laughed. “I have
done a healing on this poor trader. He must forsake his gains and his
account-books, and sit by the wayside three nights to overcome the
malignity of his enemies. The Stars are against him.”
“The fewer money-lenders the better, say I; but, Saddhu or no Saddhu,
he should pay for my stuff on his shoulders.”
“So? But that is thy child on thy shoulder—given over to the
burning-ghat not two days ago. There remains one thing more. I did this
charm in thy presence because need was great. I changed his shape and
his soul. None the less, if, by any chance, O man from Jullundur, thou
rememberest what thou hast seen, either among the elders sitting under
the village tree, or in thine own house, or in company of thy priest
when he blesses thy cattle, a murrain will come among the buffaloes,
and a fire in thy thatch, and rats in the corn-bins, and the curse of
our Gods upon thy fields that they may be barren before thy feet and
after thy ploughshare.” This was part of an old curse picked up from a
_faquir_ by the Taksali Gate in the days of Kim’s innocence. It lost
nothing by repetition.
“Cease, Holy One! In mercy, cease!” cried the Jat. “Do not curse the
household. I saw nothing! I heard nothing! I am thy cow!” and he made
to grab at Kim’s bare foot beating rhythmically on the carriage floor.
“But since thou hast been permitted to aid me in the matter of a pinch
of flour and a little opium and such trifles as I have honoured by
using in my art, so will the Gods return a blessing,” and he gave it at
length, to the man’s immense relief. It was one that he had learned
from Lurgan Sahib.
The lama stared through his spectacles as he had not stared at the
business of disguisement. “Friend of the Stars,” he said at last, “thou
hast acquired great wisdom. Beware that it do not give birth to pride.
No man having the Law before his eyes speaks hastily of any matter
which he has seen or encountered.”
“No—no—no, indeed,” cried the farmer, fearful lest the master should be
minded to improve on the pupil. E23, with relaxed mouth, gave himself
up to the opium that is meat, tobacco, and medicine to the spent
Asiatic.
So, in a silence of awe and great miscomprehension, they slid into
Delhi about lamp-lighting time.
CHAPTER XII
Who hath desired the Sea—the sight of salt-water unbounded?
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber
wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm—grey, foamless, enormous, and
growing?
Stark calm on the lap of the Line—or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing?
His Sea in no showing the same—his Sea and the same ’neath all showing—
His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise—so and no otherwise Hill-men desire their Hills!
The Sea and the Hills.
“I have found my heart again,” said E23, under cover of the platform’s
tumult. “Hunger and fear make men dazed, or I might have thought of
this escape before. I was right. They come to hunt for me. Thou hast
saved my head.”
A group of yellow-trousered Punjab policemen, headed by a hot and
perspiring young Englishman, parted the crowd about the carriages.
Behind them, inconspicuous as a cat, ambled a small fat person who
looked like a lawyer’s tout.
“See the young Sahib reading from a paper. My description is in his
hand,” said E23. “Thev go carriage by carriage, like fisher-folk
netting a pool.”
When the procession reached their compartment, E23 was counting his
beads with a steady jerk of the wrist; while Kim jeered at him for
being so drugged as to have lost the ringed fire-tongs which are the
Saddhu’s distinguishing mark. The lama, deep in meditation, stared
straight before him; and the farmer, glancing furtively, gathered up
his belongings.
“Nothing here but a parcel of holy-bolies,” said the Englishman aloud,
and passed on amid a ripple of uneasiness; for native police mean
extortion to the native all India over.
“The trouble now,” whispered E23, “lies in sending a wire as to the
place where I hid that letter I was sent to find. I cannot go to the
_tar_-office in this guise.”
“Is it not enough I have saved thy neck?”
“Not if the work be left unfinished. Did never the healer of sick
pearls tell thee so? Comes another Sahib! Ah!”
This was a tallish, sallowish District Superintendent of Police—belt,
helmet, polished spurs and all—strutting and twirling his dark
moustache.