‘This man is cut and bruised all over. I go about to cure him,’ Kim retorted. ‘None interfered between thy babe and me.’
‘I am rebuked,’ said the Kamboh meekly. ‘I am thy debtor for the life of my son. Thou art a miracle-worker——I know it.’
‘Show me the cuts.’ Kim bent over the Mahratta’s neck, his heart nearly choking him; for this was the Great Game with a vengeance. ‘Now, tell thy tale swiftly, brother, while I say a charm.’
‘I came from the South, where my work lay. One of us they slew by the roadside. Hast thou heard?’ Kim shook his head. He, of course, knew nothing of E.23’s predecessor, slain down South in the habit of an Arab trader. ‘Having found a certain letter which I was sent to seek, I came away. I escaped from the city and ran to Mhow. So sure was I that none knew, I did not change my face. At Mhow282 a woman brought charge against me of theft of jewellery in that city which I had left. Then I saw the cry was out against me. I ran from Mhow by night, bribing the police, who had been bribed to hand me over without question to my enemies in the South. Then I lay in old Chitor283 city a week, a penitent in a temple, but I could not get rid of the letter which was my charge. I buried it under the Queen’s Stone, at Chitor, in the place known to us all.’
Kim did not know, but not for worlds would he have broken the thread.
‘At Chitor, look you, I was all in Kings’ country; for Kotah to the east is beyond the Queen’s law, and east again lie Jaipur and Gwalior.284 Neither love spies, and there is no justice. I was hunted like a wet jackal; but I broke through at Bandakui,285 where I heard there was a charge against me of murder in the city I had left—of the murder of a boy. They have both the corpse and the witnesses waiting.’
‘But cannot the Government protect?’
‘We of the Game are beyond protection. If we die, we die. Our names are blotted from the book. That is all. At Bandakui, where lives one of Us, I thought to slip the scent by changing my face, and so made me a Mahratta. Then I came to Agra, 286 and would have turned back to Chitor to recover the letter. So sure I was I had slipped them. Therefore I did not send a tar [telegram] to any one saying where the letter lay. I wished the credit of it all.’
Kim nodded. He understood that feeling well.
‘But at Agra, walking in the streets, a man cried a debt against me, and approaching with many witnesses, would hale me to the courts then and there. Oh, they are clever in the South! He recognised me as his agent for cotton. May he burn in Hell for it!’
‘And wast thou?’
‘0 fool! I was the man they sought for the matter of the letter! I ran into the Fleshers’287 Ward and came out by the House of the Jew, who feared a riot and pushed me forth. I came afoot to Somna Road—I had only money for my tikkut to Delhi—and there, while I lay in a ditch with a fever, one sprang out of the bushes and beat me and cut me and 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,288 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.23, 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 E.23. ‘What is thy scheme?’
‘This comes next,’ said Kim, plucking the thin body-shirt. E.23 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 E.23, labouring literally for the dear life, as he slid out of his body-wrappings and stood clear in the loincloth 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. E.23 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.’289 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; and E.23, 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. Sir 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 murrain290 will come among the buffaloes, and a fire in thy thatch, and rats in thy corn-bin, 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 fakir 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 does 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. E.23, 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
comber291 wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm—grey, foamless,
caormous, and growing?
Stark calm on the lap of the Line292—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 E.23, 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 E.23. ‘They go carriage by carriage, like fisher-folk netting a pool.’
When the procession reached their compartment, E.23 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 firetongs 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 E.23, ‘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-office293 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.
‘What fools are these Police Sahibs!’ said Kim genially.
E.23 glanced up under his eyelids. ‘It is well said,’ he muttered in a changed voice. ‘I go to drink water. Keep my place.’
He blundered out almost into the Englishman’s arms, and was bad-worded in clumsy Urdu.
‘Tum mut? You drunk? You mustn’t bang about as though Delhi station belonged to you, my friend.’
E.23, not moving a muscle of his countenance, answered with a stream of the filthiest abuse, at which Kim naturally rejoiced. It reminded him of the drummer-boys and the barrack-sweepers at Umballa in the terrible time of his first schooling.
‘My good fool,’ the Englishman drawled. ‘Nickle-jao! Go back to your carriage.’
Step by step, withdrawing deferentially, and dropping his voice, the yellow Saddhu clomb back to the carriage, cursing the D.S.P. to remotest posterity by—here Kim almost jumped—by the curse of the Queen’s Stone, by the writing under the Queen’s Stone and by an assortment of Gods with wholly new names.
‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’—the Englishman flushed angrily,—‘but it’s some piec
e of blasted impertinence. Come out of that!’
E.23, affecting to misunderstand, gravely produced his ticket, which the Englishman wrenched angrily from his hand.
‘Oh, zoolum!294 What oppression!’ growled the Jat from his corner. ‘All for the sake of a jest too.’ He had been grinning at the freedom of the Saddhu’s tongue. ‘Thy charms do not work well to-day, Holy One!’
The Saddhu followed the policeman, fawning and supplicating. The ruck of passengers, busy with their babies and their bundles, had not noticed the affair. Kim slipped out behind him; for it flashed through his head that he had heard this angry, stupid Sahib discoursing loud personalities to an old lady near Umballa three years ago.
‘It is well,’ the Saddhu whispered, jammed in the calling, shouting, bewildered press—a Persian greyhound between his feet and a cadgeful of yelling hawks under charge of a Rajput falconer in the small of his back. ‘He has gone now to send word of the letter which I hid. They told me he was in Peshawur. I might have known that he is like the crocodile—always at the other ford. He has saved me from present calamity, but I owe my life to thee.’
‘Is he also one of Us?’ Kim ducked under a Mewar295 camel-driver’s greasy armpit and cannoned off a covey of jabbering Sikh matrons.
‘Not less than the greatest. We are both fortunate! I will make report to him of what thou hast done. I am safe under his protection.’
He bored through the edge of the crowd besieging the carriages, and squatted by the bench near the telegraph-office.
‘Return, or they take thy place! Have no fear for the work, brother—or my life. Thou hast given me a breathing-space, and Strickland Sahib has pulled me to land. We may work together at the Game yet. Farewell!’
Kim hurried to his carriage: elated, bewildered, but a little nettled in that he had no key to the secrets about him.
‘I am only a beginner at the Game, that is sure. I could not have leaped into safety as did the Saddhu. He knew it was darkest under the lamp. I could not have thought to tell news under pretence of cursing ... and how clever was the Sahib! No matter, I saved the life of one.... Where is the Kamboh gone, Holy One?’ he whispered, as he took his seat in the now crowded compartment.
Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 26
