Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1063 page)

But she ain’t!

The Return of the Children

                  
“They” — Traffics and Discoveries

Neither the harps  nor  the  crowns  amused,  nor  the  cherubs’ dove-winged races —
Holding  hands  forlornly  the  Children  wandered  beneath  the Dome,
Plucking the splendid robes  of the  passers-by,  and with pitiful! faces
Begging what Princes and Powers refused: — ”Ah, please will you let us go home?”

Over the  jewelled floor, nigh weeping,  ran to  them Mary the Mother,
Kneeled  and  caressed and made promise  with  kisses,  and  drew them along to the gateway —
Yea, the all-iron unbribeable Door which Peter must guard and none other.
Straightway She took the Keys from his keeping, and opened and freed them straightway.

Then, to Her Son, Who had seen and smiled,  She said:  “On the night that I bore Thee,
What didst Thou care for a love beyond mine or a heaven that was not my arm?
Didst Thou  push from the  nipple,  0  Child,  to  hear the  angels adore Thee
When we two lay in the breath of the kine?” And He said — “Thou hast done no harm.”

So through the Void the Children ran homeward merrily hand in hand,
Looking neither to left nor right where the  breathless  Heavens stood  still.
And the Guards of the Void resheathed their swords, for they heard the Command:
“Shall I that have suffered the Children to come to Me hold them against their will? “

The Rhyme of the Three Captains

This ballad appears to refer to one of the exploits of the notorious Paul Jones, the American pirate. It is founded on fact.

... At the close of a winter day,
Their anchors down, by London town, the Three Great Captains lay;
And one was Admiral of the North from Solway Firth to Skye,
And one was Lord of the Wessex coast and all the lands thereby,
And one was Master of the Thames from Limehouse to Blackwall,
And he was Captain of the Fleet — the bravest of them all.
Their good guns guarded their great gray sides that were thirty foot in the sheer,
When there came a certain trading-brig with news of a privateer.
Her rigging was rough with the clotted drift that drives in a Northern breeze,
Her sides were clogged with the lazy weed that spawns in the Eastern seas.
Light she rode in the rude tide-rip, to left and right she rolled,
And the skipper sat on the scuttle-butt and stared at an empty hold.
“I ha’ paid Port dues for your Law,” quoth he, “and where is the Law ye boast
If I sail unscathed from a heathen port to be robbed on a Christian coast?
Ye have smoked the hives of the Laccadives as we burn the lice in a bunk,
We tack not now to a Gallang prow or a plunging Pei-ho junk;
I had no fear but the seas were clear as far as a sail might fare
Till I met with a lime-washed Yankee brig that rode off Finisterre.
There were canvas blinds to his bow-gun ports to screen the weight he bore,
And the signals ran for a merchantman from Sandy Hook to the Nore.
He would not fly the Rovers’ flag — the bloody or the black,
But now he floated the Gridiron and now he flaunted the Jack.
He spoke of the Law as he crimped my crew — he swore it was only a loan;
But when I would ask for my own again, he swore it was none of my own.
He has taken my little parrakeets that nest beneath the Line,
He has stripped my rails of the shaddock-frails and the green unripened pine;
He has taken my bale of dammer and spice I won beyond the seas,
He has taken my grinning heathen gods — and what should he want o’ these?
My foremast would not mend his boom, my deckhouse patch his boats;
He has whittled the two, this Yank Yahoo, to peddle for shoe-peg oats.
I could not fight for the failing light and a rough beam-sea beside,
But I hulled him once for a clumsy crimp and twice because he lied.
Had I had guns (as I had goods) to work my Christian harm,
I had run him up from his quarter-deck to trade with his own yard-arm;
I had nailed his ears to my capstan-head, and ripped them off with a saw,
And soused them in the bilgewater, and served them to him raw;
I had flung him blind in a rudderless boat to rot in the rocking dark,
I had towed him aft of his own craft, a bait for his brother shark;
I had lapped him round with cocoa husk, and drenched him with the oil,
And lashed him fast to his own mast to blaze above my spoil;
I had stripped his hide for my hammock-side, and tasselled his beard i’ the mesh,
And spitted his crew on the live bamboo that grows through the gangrened flesh;
I had hove him down by the mangroves brown, where the mud-reef sucks and draws,
Moored by the heel to his own keel to wait for the land-crab’s claws!
He is lazar within and lime without, ye can nose him far enow,
For he carries the taint of a musky ship — the reek of the slaver’s dhow!”
The skipper looked at the tiering guns and the bulwarks tall and cold,
And the Captains Three full courteously peered down at the gutted hold,
And the Captains Three called courteously from deck to scuttle-butt: —
“Good Sir, we ha’ dealt with that merchantman or ever your teeth were cut.
Your words be words of a lawless race, and the Law it standeth thus:
He comes of a race that have never a Law, and he never has boarded us.
We ha’ sold him canvas and rope and spar — we know that his price is fair,
And we know that he weeps for the lack of a Law as he rides off Finisterre.
And since he is damned for a gallows-thief by you and better than you,
We hold it meet that the English fleet should know that we hold him true.”
The skipper called to the tall taffrail: — “And what is that to me?
Did ever you hear of a Yankee brig that rifled a Seventy-three?
Do I loom so large from your quarter-deck that I lift like a ship o’ the Line?
He has learned to run from a shotted gun and harry such craft as mine.
There is never a Law on the Cocos Keys to hold a white man in,
But we do not steal the niggers’ meal, for that is a nigger’s sin.
Must he have his Law as a quid to chaw, or laid in brass on his wheel?
Does he steal with tears when he buccaneers? ‘Fore Gad, then, why does he steal?”
The skipper bit on a deep-sea word, and the word it was not sweet,
For he could see the Captains Three had signalled to the Fleet.
But three and two, in white and blue, the whimpering flags began: —
“We have heard a tale of a — foreign sail, but he is a merchantman.”
The skipper peered beneath his palm and swore by the Great Horn Spoon: —
“‘Fore Gad, the Chaplain of the Fleet would bless my picaroon!”
By two and three the flags blew free to lash the laughing air: —
“We have sold our spars to the merchantman — we know that his price is fair.”
The skipper winked his Western eye, and swore by a China storm: —
“They ha’ rigged him a Joseph’s jury-coat to keep his honour warm.”
The halliards twanged against the tops, the bunting bellied broad,
The skipper spat in the empty hold and mourned for a wasted cord.
Masthead — masthead, the signal sped by the line o’ the British craft;
The skipper called to his Lascar crew, and put her about and laughed: —
“It’s mainsail haul, my bully boys all — we’ll out to the seas again —
Ere they set us to paint their pirate saint, or scrub at his grapnel-chain.
It’s fore-sheet free, with her head to the sea, and the swing of the unbought brine —
We’ll make no sport in an English court till we come as a ship o’ the Line:
Till we come as a ship o’ the Line, my lads, of thirty foot in the sheer,
Lifting again from the outer main with news of a privateer;
Flying his pluck at our mizzen-truck for weft of Admiralty,
Heaving his head for our dipsey-lead in sign that we keep the sea.
Then fore-sheet home as she lifts to the foam — we stand on the outward tack,
We are paid in the coin of the white man’s trade — the bezant is hard, ay, and black.
The frigate-bird shall carry my word to the Kling and the Orang-Laut
How a man may sail from a heathen coast to be robbed in a Christian port;
How a man may be robbed in Christian port while Three Great Captains there
Shall dip their flag to a slaver’s rag — to show that his trade is fair!”

The Rhyme of the Three Sealers

      Away by the lands of the Japanee
      Where the paper lanterns glow
     And the crews of all the shipping drink
      In the house of Blood Street Joe,
     At twilight, when the landward breeze
      Brings up the harbour noise,
     And ebb of Yokohama Bay
      Swigs chattering through the buoys,
     In Cisco’s Dewdrop Dining-Rooms
      They tell the tale anew
     Of a hidden sea and a hidden fight,
     When the
Baltic
ran from the
Northern Light
      And the
Stralsund
fought the two.

Now this is the Law of the Muscovite, that he proves with shot and steel,
When ye come by his isles in the Smoky Sea ye must not take the seal,
Where the gray sea goes nakedly between the weed-hung shelves,
And the little blue fox he is bred for his skin
  and the seal they breed for themselves;
For when the
matkas
seek the shore to drop their pups aland,
The great man-seal haul out of the sea, a-roaring, band by band;
And when the first September gales have slaked their rutting-wrath,
The great man-seal haul back to the sea and no man knows their path.
Then dark they lie and stark they lie — rookery, dune, and floe,
And the Northern Lights come down o’ nights to dance with the houseless snow;
And God Who clears the grounding berg and steers the grinding floe,
He hears the cry of the little kit-fox and the wind along the snow.
But since our women must walk gay and money buys their gear,
The sealing-boats they filch that way at hazard year by year.
English they be and Japanee that hang on the Brown Bear’s flank,
And some be Scot, but the worst of the lot, and the boldest thieves, be Yank!

It was the sealer
Northern Light
, to the Smoky Seas she bore,
With a stovepipe stuck from a starboard port and the Russian flag at her fore.
(
Baltic
,
Stralsund
, and
Northern Light
—
  oh! they were birds of a feather —
Slipping away to the Smoky Seas, three seal-thieves together!)
And at last she came to a sandy cove and the Baltic lay therein,
But her men were up with the herding seal to drive and club and skin.
There were fifteen hundred skins abeach, cool pelt and proper fur,
When the
Northern Light
drove into the bight
  and the sea-mist drove with her.
The
Baltic
called her men and weighed — she could not choose but run —
For a stovepipe seen through the closing mist, it shows like a four-inch gun.
(And loss it is that is sad as death to lose both trip and ship
And lie for a rotting contraband on Vladivostock slip.)
She turned and dived in the sea-smother as a rabbit dives in the whins,
And the
Northern Light
sent up her boats to steal the stolen skins.
They had not brought a load to side or slid their hatches clear,
When they were aware of a sloop-of-war, ghost-white and very near.
Her flag she showed, and her guns she showed — three of them, black, abeam,
And a funnel white with the crusted salt, but never a show of steam.

There was no time to man the brakes, they knocked the shackle free,
And the Northern Light stood out again, goose-winged to open sea.
(For life it is that is worse than death, by force of Russian law
To work in the mines of mercury that loose the teeth in your jaw.)
They had not run a mile from shore — they heard no shots behind —
When the skipper smote his hand on his thigh and threw her up in the wind:
“Bluffed — raised out on a bluff,” said he, “for if my name’s Tom Hall,
You must set a thief to catch a thief — and a thief has caught us all!
By every butt in Oregon and every spar in Maine,
The hand that spilled the wind from her sail was the hand of Reuben Paine!
He has rigged and trigged her with paint and spar,
  and, faith, he has faked her well —
But I’d know the
Stralsund
’s deckhouse yet from here to the booms o’ Hell.
Oh, once we ha’ met at Baltimore, and twice on Boston pier,
But the sickest day for you, Reuben Paine, was the day that you came here —
The day that you came here, my lad, to scare us from our seal
With your funnel made o’ your painted cloth, and your guns o’ rotten deal!
Ring and blow for the
Baltic
now, and head her back to the bay,
And we’ll come into the game again — with a double deck to play!”

They rang and blew the sealers’ call — the poaching cry of the sea —
And they raised the
Baltic
out of the mist, and an angry ship was she:
And blind they groped through the whirling white and blind to the bay again,
Till they heard the creak of the
Stralsund
’s boom
  and the clank of her mooring chain.
They laid them down by bitt and boat, their pistols in their belts,
And:  “Will you fight for it, Reuben Paine, or will you share the pelts?”

A dog-toothed laugh laughed Reuben Paine, and bared his flenching-knife.
“Yea, skin for skin, and all that he hath a man will give for his life;
But I’ve six thousand skins below, and Yeddo Port to see,
And there’s never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty-Three:
So go in peace to the naked seas with empty holds to fill,
And I’ll be good to your seal this catch, as many as I shall kill!”

Answered the snap of a closing lock and the jar of a gun-butt slid,
But the tender fog shut fold on fold to hide the wrong they did.
The weeping fog rolled fold on fold the wrath of man to cloak,
And the flame-spurts pale ran down the rail as the sealing-rifles spoke.
The bullets bit on bend and butt, the splinter slivered free
(Little they trust to sparrow-dust that stop the seal in his sea!),
The thick smoke hung and would not shift, leaden it lay and blue,
But three were down on the
Baltic
’s deck and two of the
Stralsund
’s crew.
An arm’s-length out and overside the banked fog held them bound,
But, as they heard or groan or word, they fired at the sound.
For one cried out on the Name of God, and one to have him cease,
And the questing volley found them both and bade them hold their peace;
And one called out on a heathen joss and one on the Virgin’s Name,
And the schooling bullet leaped across and showed them whence they came.
And in the waiting silences the rudder whined beneath,
And each man drew his watchful breath slow taken ‘tween the teeth —
Trigger and ear and eye acock, knit brow and hard-drawn lips —
Bracing his feet by chock and cleat for the rolling of the ships.
Till they heard the cough of a wounded man that fought in the fog for breath,
Till they heard the torment of Reuben Paine that wailed upon his death: