Kim
Delight, aided by a smooth-faced Kashmiri pundit, searched him from
head to foot most thoroughly.
About the same hour Kim heard soft feet in Mahbub’s deserted stall. The
horse-trader, curiously enough, had left his door unlocked, and his men
were busy celebrating their return to India with a whole sheep of
Mahbub’s bounty. A sleek young gentleman from Delhi, armed with a bunch
of keys which the Flower had unshackled from the senseless one’s belt,
went through every single box, bundle, mat, and saddle-bag in Mahbub’s
possession even more systematically than the Flower and the pundit were
searching the owner.
“And I think.” said the Flower scornfully an hour later, one rounded
elbow on the snoring carcass, “that he is no more than a pig of an
Afghan horse-dealer, with no thought except women and horses. Moreover,
he may have sent it away by now—if ever there were such a thing.”
“Nay—in a matter touching Five Kings it would be next his black heart,”
said the pundit. “Was there nothing?”
The Delhi man laughed and resettled his turban as he entered. “I
searched between the soles of his slippers as the Flower searched his
clothes. This is not the man but another. I leave little unseen.”
“They did not say he was the very man,” said the pundit thoughtfully.
“They said, ‘Look if he be the man, since our counsels are troubled.’”
“That North country is full of horse-dealers as an old coat of lice.
There is Sikandar Khan, Nur Ali Beg, and Farrukh Shah all heads of
kafilas [caravans]—who deal there,” said the Flower.
“They have not yet come in,” said the pundit. “Thou must ensnare them
later.”
Phew!” said the Flower with deep disgust, rolling Mahbub’s head from
her lap. “I earn my money. Farrukh Shah is a bear, Ali Beg a
swashbuckler, and old Sikandar Khan—yaie! Go! I sleep now. This swine
will not stir till dawn.”
When Mahbub woke, the Flower talked to him severely on the sin of
drunkenness. Asiatics do not wink when they have outmanoeuvred an
enemy, but as Mahbub Ali cleared his throat, tightened his belt, and
staggered forth under the early morning stars, he came very near to it.
“What a colt’s trick!” said he to himself. “As if every girl in
Peshawur did not use it! But ’twas prettily done. Now God He knows how
many more there be upon the Road who have orders to test me—perhaps
with the knife. So it stands that the boy must go to Umballa—and by
rail—for the writing is something urgent. I abide here, following the
Flower and drinking wine as an Afghan coper should.”
He halted at the stall next but one to his own. His men lay there heavy
with sleep. There was no sign of Kim or the lama.
“Up!” He stirred a sleeper. “Whither went those who lay here last
even—the lama and the boy? Is aught missing?”
“Nay,” grunted the man, “the old madman rose at second cockcrow saying
he would go to Benares, and the young one led him away.”
“The curse of Allah on all unbelievers!” said Mahbub heartily, and
climbed into his own stall, growling in his beard.
But it was Kim who had wakened the lama—Kim with one eye laid against a
knot-hole in the planking, who had seen the Delhi man’s search through
the boxes. This was no common thief that turned over letters, bills,
and saddles—no mere burglar who ran a little knife sideways into the
soles of Mahbub’s slippers, or picked the seams of the saddle-bags so
deftly. At first Kim had been minded to give the alarm—the long-drawn
_cho-or—choor!_ (thief! thief!) that sets the serai ablaze of nights;
but he looked more carefully, and, hand on amulet, drew his own
conclusions.
“It must be the pedigree of that made-up horse-lie,” said he, “the
thing that I carry to Umballa. Better that we go now. Those who search
bags with knives may presently search bellies with knives. Surely there
is a woman behind this. Hai! Hai! in a whisper to the light-sleeping
old man. “Come. It is time—time to go to Benares.”
The lama rose obediently, and they passed out of the serai like
shadows.
CHAPTER II
And whoso will, from Pride released;
Contemning neither creed nor priest,
May feel the Soul of all the East.
About him at Kamakura.
They entered the fort-like railway station, black in the end of night;
the electrics sizzling over the goods-yard where they handle the heavy
Northern grain-traffic.
“This is the work of devils!” said the lama, recoiling from the hollow
echoing darkness, the glimmer of rails between the masonry platforms,
and the maze of girders above. He stood in a gigantic stone hall paved,
it seemed, with the sheeted dead third-class passengers who had taken
their tickets overnight and were sleeping in the waiting-rooms. All
hours of the twenty-four are alike to Orientals, and their passenger
traffic is regulated accordingly.
“This is where the fire-carriages come. One stands behind that
hole”—Kim pointed to the ticket-office—“who will give thee a paper to
take thee to Umballa.”
“But we go to Benares,” he replied petulantly.
“All one. Benares then. Quick: she comes!”
“Take thou the purse.”
The lama, not so well used to trains as he had pretended, started as
the 3.25 a.m. south-bound roared in. The sleepers sprang to life, and
the station filled with clamour and shoutings, cries of water and
sweetmeat vendors, shouts of native policemen, and shrill yells of
women gathering up their baskets, their families, and their husbands.
“It is the train—only the _te-rain_. It will not come here. Wait!”
Amazed at the lama’s immense simplicity (he had handed him a small bag
full of rupees), Kim asked and paid for a ticket to Umballa. A sleepy
clerk grunted and flung out a ticket to the next station, just six
miles distant.
“Nay,” said Kim, scanning it with a grin. “This may serve for farmers,
but I live in the city of Lahore. It was cleverly done, Babu. Now give
the ticket to Umballa.”
The Babu scowled and dealt the proper ticket.
“Now another to Amritzar,” said Kim, who had no notion of spending
Mahbub Ali’s money on anything so crude as a paid ride to Umballa. “The
price is so much. The small money in return is just so much. I know the
ways of the _te-rain_ ... Never did _yogi_ need _chela_ as thou dost,”
he went on merrily to the bewildered lama. “They would have flung thee
out at Mian Mir but for me. This way! Come!” He returned the money,
keeping only one anna in each rupee of the price of the Umballa ticket
as his commission—the immemorial commission of Asia.
The lama jibbed at the open door of a crowded third-class carriage.
“Were it not better to walk?” said he weakly.
A burly Sikh artisan thrust forth his bearded head. “Is he afraid? Do
not be afraid. I remember the time when I was afraid of the train.
Enter! This thing is the work of the Government.”
“I do not fear,” said the lama. “Have ye room within for two?”
“There is no room even for a mouse,” shrilled the wife of a well-to-do
cultivator—a Hindu Jat from the rich Jullundur, district. Our night
trains are not as well looked after as the day ones, where the sexes
are very strictly kept to separate carriages.
“Oh, mother of my son, we can make space,” said the blueturbaned
husband. “Pick up the child. It is a holy man, see’st thou?”
“And my lap full of seventy times seven bundles! Why not bid him sit on
my knee, Shameless? But men are ever thus!” She looked round for
approval. An Amritzar courtesan near the window sniffed behind her head
drapery.
“Enter! Enter!” cried a fat Hindu money-lender, his folded account-book
in a cloth under his arm. With an oily smirk: “It is well to be kind to
the poor.”
“Ay, at seven per cent a month with a mortgage on the unborn calf,”
said a young Dogra soldier going south on leave; and they all laughed.
“Will it travel to Benares?” said the lama.
“Assuredly. Else why should we come? Enter, or we are left,” cried Kim.
“See!” shrilled the Amritzar girl. “He has never entered a train. Oh,
see!”
“Nay, help,” said the cultivator, putting out a large brown hand and
hauling him in. “Thus is it done, father.”
“But—but—I sit on the floor. It is against the Rule to sit on a bench,”
said the lama. “Moreover, it cramps me.”
“I say,” began the money-lender, pursing his lips, “that there is not
one rule of right living which these _te-rains_ do not cause us to
break. We sit, for example, side by side with all castes and peoples.”
“Yea, and with most outrageously shameless ones,” said the wife,
scowling at the Amritzar girl making eyes at the young sepoy.
“I said we might have gone by cart along the road,” said the husband,
“and thus have saved some money.”
“Yes—and spent twice over what we saved on food by the way. That was
talked out ten thousand times.”
“Ay, by ten thousand tongues,” grunted he.
“The Gods help us poor women if we may not speak. Oho! He is of that
sort which may not look at or reply to a woman.” For the lama,
constrained by his Rule, took not the faintest notice of her. “And his
disciple is like him?”
“Nay, mother,” said Kim most promptly. “Not when the woman is
well-looking and above all charitable to the hungry.”
“A beggar’s answer,” said the Sikh, laughing. “Thou hast brought it on
thyself, sister!” Kim’s hands were crooked in supplication.
“And whither goest thou?” said the woman, handing him the half of a
cake from a greasy package.
“Even to Benares.”
“Jugglers belike?” the young soldier suggested. “Have ye any tricks to
pass the time? Why does not that yellow man answer?”
“Because,” said Kim stoutly, “he is holy, and thinks upon matters
hidden from thee.”
“That may be well. We of the Ludhiana Sikhs”—he rolled it out
sonorously—“do not trouble our heads with doctrine. We fight.”
“My sister’s brother’s son is _naik_ (corporal) in that regiment,” said
the Sikh craftsman quietly. “There are also some Dogra companies
there.” The soldier glared, for a Dogra is of other caste than a Sikh,
and the banker tittered.
“They are all one to me,” said the Amritzar girl.
“That we believe,” snorted the cultivator’s wife malignantly.
“Nay, but all who serve the Sirkar with weapons in their hands are, as
it were, one brotherhood. There is one brotherhood of the caste, but
beyond that again”—she looked round timidly—“the bond of the
_Pulton_—the Regiment—eh?”
“My brother is in a Jat regiment,” said the cultivator. “Dogras be good
men.”
“Thy Sikhs at least were of that opinion,” said the soldier, with a
scowl at the placid old man in the corner. “_Thy_ Sikhs thought so when
our two companies came to help them at the Pirzai Kotal in the face of
eight Afridi standards on the ridge not three months gone.”
He told the story of a Border action in which the Dogra companies of
the Ludhiana Sikhs had acquitted themselves well. The Amritzar girl
smiled; for she knew the talk was to win her approval.
“Alas!” said the cultivator’s wife at the end. “So their villages were
burnt and their little children made homeless?”
“They had marked our dead. They paid a great payment after we of the
Sikhs had schooled them. So it was. Is this Amritzar?”
“Ay, and here they cut our tickets,” said the banker, fumbling at his
belt.
The lamps were paling in the dawn when the half-caste guard came round.
Ticket-collecting is a slow business in the East, where people secrete
their tickets in all sorts of curious places. Kim produced his and was
told to get out.
“But I go to Umballa,” he protested. “I go with this holy man.”
“Thou canst go to Jehannum for aught I care. This ticket is only—”
Kim burst into a flood of tears, protesting that the lama was his
father and his mother, that he was the prop of the lama’s declining
years, and that the lama would die without his care. All the carriage
bade the guard be merciful—the banker was specially eloquent here—but