Kim
“Half a koss. Ha! I went ten thousand thousand in the spirit. How, we
are all lapped and swathed and swaddled in these senseless things.” He
looked at his thin blue-veined hand that found the beads so heavy.
“_Chela_, hast thou never a wish to leave me?”
Kim thought of the oilskin packet and the books in the food-bag. If
someone duly authorized would only take delivery of them the Great Game
might play itself for aught he then cared. He was tired and hot in his
head, and a cough that came from the stomach worried him.
“No.” he said almost sternly. “I am not a dog or a snake to bite when I
have learned to love.”
“Thou art too tender towards me.”
“Not that either. I have moved in one matter without consulting thee. I
have sent a message to the Kulu woman by that woman who gave us the
goat’s milk this morn, saying that thou wast a little feeble and
wouldst need a litter. I beat myself in my mind that I did not do it
when we entered the Doon. We stay in this place till the litter
returns.”
“I am content. She is a woman with a heart of gold, as thou sayest, but
a talker—something of a talker.”
“She will not weary thee. I have looked to that also. Holy One, my
heart is very heavy for my many carelessnesses towards thee.” An
hysterical catch rose in his throat. “I have walked thee too far: I
have not picked good food always for thee; I have not considered the
heat; I have talked to people on the road and left thee alone ... I
have—I have ... _Hai mai!_ But I love thee ... and it is all too late
... I was a child ... Oh, why was I not a man? ...” Overborne by
strain, fatigue, and the weight beyond his years, Kim broke down and
sobbed at the lama’s feet.
“What a to-do is here!” said the old man gently. “Thou hast never
stepped a hair’s breadth from the Way of Obedience. Neglect me? Child,
I have lived on thy strength as an old tree lives on the lime of a new
wall. Day by day, since Shamlegh down, I have stolen strength from
thee. _Therefore_, not through any sin of thine, art thou weakened. It
is the Body—the silly, stupid Body—that speaks now. Not the assured
Soul. Be comforted! Know at least the devils that thou fightest. They
are earth-born—children of illusion. We will go to the woman from Kulu.
She shall acquire merit in housing us, and specially in tending me.
Thou shalt run free till strength returns. I had forgotten the stupid
Body. If there be any blame, I bear it. But we are too close to the
Gates of Deliverance to weigh blame. I could praise thee, but what
need? In a little—in a very little—we shall sit beyond all needs.”
And so he petted and comforted Kim with wise saws and grave texts on
that little-understood beast, our Body, who, being but a delusion,
insists on posing as the Soul, to the darkening of the Way, and the
immense multiplication of unnecessary devils.
“Hai! hai! Let us talk of the woman from Kulu. Think you she will ask
another charm for her grandsons? When I was a young man, a very long
time ago, I was plagued with these vapours—and some others—and I went
to an Abbot—a very holy man and a seeker after truth, though then I
knew it not. Sit up and listen, child of my soul! My tale was told.
Said he to me, ‘_Chela_, know this. There are many lies in the world,
and not a few liars, but there are no liars like our bodies, except it
be the sensations of our bodies.’ Considering this I was comforted, and
of his great favour he suffered me to drink tea In his presence. Suffer
me now to drink tea, for I am thirsty.”
With a laugh across his tears, Kim kissed the lama’s feet, and set
about the tea-making.
“Thou leanest on me in the body, Holy One, but I lean on thee for some
other things. Dost know it?”
“I have guessed maybe,” and the lama’s eyes twinkled. “We must change
that.”
So, when with scufflings and scrapings and a hot air of importance,
paddled up nothing less than the Sahiba’s pet palanquin sent twenty
miles, with that same grizzled old Oorya servant in charge, and when
they reached the disorderly order of the long white rambling house
behind Saharunpore, the lama took his own measures.
Said the Sahiba cheerily from an upper window, after compliments: “What
is the good of an old woman’s advice to an old man? I told thee—I
_told_ thee, Holy One, to keep an eye upon the _chela_. How didst thou
do it? Never answer me! _I_ know. He has been running among the women.
Look at his eyes—hollow and sunk—and the Betraying Line from the nose
down! He has been sifted out! Fie! Fie! And a priest, too!”
Kim looked up, over-weary to smile, shaking his head in denial.
“Do not jest,” said the lama. “That time is done. We are here upon
great matters. A sickness of soul took me in the Hills, and him a
sickness of the body. Since then I have lived upon his strength—eating
him.”
“Children together—young and old,” she sniffed, but forbore to make any
new jokes. “May this present hospitality restore ye! Hold awhile and I
will come to gossip of the high good Hills.”
At evening time—her son-in-law was returned, so she did not need to go
on inspection round the farm—she won to the meat of the matter,
explained low-voicedly by the lama. The two old heads nodded wisely
together. Kim had reeled to a room with a cot in it, and was dozing
soddenly. The lama had forbidden him to set blankets or get food.
“I know—I know. Who but I?” she cackled. “We who go down to the
burning-ghats clutch at the hands of those coming up from the River of
Life with full water-jars—yes, brimming water-jars. I did the boy
wrong. He lent thee his strength? It is true that the old eat the young
daily. Stands now we must restore him.”
“Thou hast many times acquired merit—”
“_My_ merit. What is it? Old bag of bones making curries for men who do
not ask ‘Who cooked this?’ Now if it were stored up for my grandson—”
“He that had the belly-pain?”
“To think the Holy One remembers _that!_ I must tell his mother. It is
most singular honour! ‘He that had the belly-pain’—straightway the Holy
One remembered. She will be proud.”
“My _chela_ is to me as is a son to the unenlightened.”
“Say grandson, rather. Mothers have not the wisdom of our years. If a
child cries they say the heavens are falling. Now a grandmother is far
enough separated from the pain of bearing and the pleasure of giving
the breast to consider whether a cry is wickedness pure or the wind.
And since thou speakest once again of wind, when last the Holy One was
here, maybe I offended in pressing for charms.”
“Sister,” said the lama, using that form of address a Buddhist monk may
sometimes employ towards a nun, “if charms comfort thee—”
“They are better than ten thousand doctors.”
“I say, if they comfort thee, I who was Abbot of Such-zen, will make as
many as thou mayest desire. I have never seen thy face—”
“_That_ even the monkeys who steal our loquats count for again. Hee!
hee!”
“But as he who sleeps there said,”—he nodded at the shut door of the
guest-chamber across the forecourt—“thou hast a heart of gold... And he
is in the spirit my very ‘grandson’ to me.”
“Good! I am the Holy One’s cow.” This was pure Hinduism, but the lama
never heeded. “I am old. I have borne sons in the body. Oh, once I
could please men! Now I can cure them.” He heard her armlets tinkle as
though she bared arms for action. “I will take over the boy and dose
him, and stuff him, and make him all whole. Hai! hai! We old people
know something yet.”
Wherefore when Kim, aching in every bone, opened his eyes, and would go
to the cook-house to get his master’s food, he found strong coercion
about him, and a veiled old figure at the door, flanked by the grizzled
manservant, who told him very precisely the things that he was on no
account to do.
“Thou must have? Thou shalt have nothing. What? A locked box in which
to keep holy books? Oh, that is another matter. Heavens forbid I should
come between a priest and his prayers! It shall be brought, and thou
shalt keep the key.”
They pushed the coffer under his cot, and Kim shut away Mahbub’s
pistol, the oilskin packet of letters, and the locked books and
diaries, with a groan of relief. For some absurd reason their weight on
his shoulders was nothing to their weight on his poor mind. His neck
ached under it of nights.
“Thine is a sickness uncommon in youth these days: since young folk
have given up tending their betters. The remedy is sleep, and certain
drugs,” said the Sahiba; and he was glad to give himself up to the
blankness that half menaced and half soothed him.
She brewed drinks, in some mysterious Asiatic equivalent to the
still-room—drenches that smelt pestilently and tasted worse. She stood
over Kim till they went down, and inquired exhaustively after they had
come up. She laid a taboo upon the forecourt, and enforced it by means
of an armed man. It is true he was seventy odd, that his scabbarded
sword ceased at the hilt; but he represented the authority of the
Sahiba, and loaded wains, chattering servants, calves, dogs, hens, and
the like, fetched a wide compass by those parts. Best of all, when the
body was cleared, she cut out from the mass of poor relations that
crowded the back of the buildings—house-hold dogs, we name them—a
cousin’s widow, skilled in what Europeans, who know nothing about it,
call massage. And the two of them, laying him east and west, that the
mysterious earth-currents which thrill the clay of our bodies might
help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long afternoon—bone by
bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and lastly, nerve by
nerve. Kneaded to irresponsible pulp, half hypnotized by the perpetual
flick and readjustment of the uneasy _chudders_ that veiled their eyes,
Kim slid ten thousand miles into slumber—thirty-six hours of it—sleep
that soaked like rain after drought.
Then she fed him, and the house spun to her clamour. She caused fowls
to be slain; she sent for vegetables, and the sober, slow-thinking
gardener, nigh as old as she, sweated for it; she took spices, and
milk, and onion, with little fish from the brooks—anon limes for
sherbets, fat quails from the pits, then chicken-livers upon a skewer,
with sliced ginger between.
“I have seen something of this world,” she said over the crowded trays,
“and there are but two sorts of women in it—those who take the strength
out of a man and those who put it back. Once I was that one, and now I
am this. Nay—do not play the priestling with me. Mine was but a jest.
If it does not hold good now, it will when thou takest the road again.
Cousin,”—this to the poor relation, never wearied of extolling her
patroness’s charity—“he is getting a bloom on the skin of a new-curried
horse. Our work is like polishing jewels to be thrown to a
dance-girl—eh?”
Kim sat up and smiled. The terrible weakness had dropped from him like
an old shoe. His tongue itched for free speech again, and but a week
back the lightest word clogged it like ashes. The pain in his neck (he
must have caught it from the lama) had gone with the heavy dengue-aches
and the evil taste in the mouth. The two old women, a little, but not
much, more careful about their veils now, clucked as merrily as the
hens that had entered pecking through the open door.
“Where is my Holy One?” he demanded.
“Hear him! Thy Holy One is well,” she snapped viciously. “Though that
is none of _his_ merit. Knew I a charm to make him wise, I’d sell my
jewels and buy it. To refuse good food that I cooked myself—and go
roving into the fields for two nights on an empty belly—and to tumble
into a brook at the end of it—call you _that_ holiness? Then, when he
has nearly broken what thou hast left of my heart with anxiety, he
tells me that he has acquired merit. Oh, how like are all men! No, that