Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (108 page)

‘Oah yes, hawa-dilli’ (a heart-lifter), said Kim, feeling at his neck.

‘Huneefa she makes them for two rupees twelve annas with  —  oh, all sorts of exorcisms. They are quite common, except they are partially black enamel, and there is a paper inside each one full of names of local saints and such things. Thatt is Huneefa’s look-out, you see? Huneefa makes them onlee for us, but in case she does not, when we get them we put in, before issue, one small piece of turquoise. Mr. Lurgan, he gives, them. There is no other source of supply; but it was me invented all this. It is strictly unoffeecial of course, but convenient for subordinates. Colonel Creighton he does not know. He is European. The turquoise is wrapped in the paper. . . . Yes, that is road to railway station. . . . Now suppose you go with the lama, or with me, I hope, some day, or with Mahbub. Suppose we get into a dam-tight place. I am a fearful man  —  most fearful  —  but I tell you I have been in dam-tight places more than hairs on my head. You say: “I am Son of the Charm.” Verree good.’

‘I do not understand quite. We must not be heard talking English here.’

‘That is all raight. I am only Babu showing off my English to you. All we Babus talk English to show off,’ said Hurree, flinging his shoulder-cloth jauntily. ‘As I was about to say, “Son of the Charm” means that you may be member of the Sat Bhai  —  the Seven Brothers, which is Hindi and Tantric. It is popularly supposed to be extinct society, but I have written notes to show it is still extant. You see it is all my invention. Verree good. Sat Bhai has many members, and perhaps before they jolly-well-cut-your-throat they may give you just a chance for life. That is useful, anyhow. And, moreover, these foolish natives  —  if they are not too excited  —  they always stop to think before they kill a man who says he belongs to any specific organisation. You see? You say then when you are in tight place, “I am Son of the Charm,” and you get  —  perhaps  —  ah  —  your second wind. That is only in extreme instances, or to open negotiations with a stranger. Can you quite see? Verree good. But suppose now, I, or any one of the Department, come to you dressed quite different. You would not know me at all unless I choose, I bet you. Some day I will prove it. I come as Ladakhi trader  —  oh anything  —  and I say to you: “You want to buy precious stones?” You say: “Do I look like a man who buys precious stones?” Then I say: “Even verree poor man can buy a turquoise or tarkeean.”‘

‘That is kichree  —  vegetable curry,’ said Kim.

‘Of course it is. You say: “Let me see the tarkeean.” Then I say: “It was cooked by a woman, and perhaps it is bad for your caste.” Then you say: “There is no caste when men go to  —  look for tarkeean.” You stop a little between those words, “to  —  look.” That is thee whole secret. The little stop before the words.’

Kim repeated the test-sentence.

‘That is all right. Then I will show you my turquoise if there is time, and then you know who I am, and then we exchange views and documents and those-all things. And so it is with any other man of us. We talk sometimes about turquoises and sometimes about tarkeean, but always with that little stop in the words. It is verree easy. First, “Son of the Charm,” if you are in a tight place. Perhaps that may help you  —  perhaps not. Then what I have told you about the tarkeean, if you want to transact offeecial business with a strange man. Of course, at present, you have no offeecial business. You are  —  ah ha!  —  supernumerary on probation. Quite unique specimen. If you were Asiatic of birth you might be employed right off; but this half-year of leave is to make you de-Englishised, you see? The lama, he expects you, because I have demi-offeecially informed him you have passed all your examinations, and will soon obtain Government appointment. Oh ho! You are on acting-allowance you see: so if you are called upon to help Sons of the Charm mind you jolly well try. Now I shall say good-bye, my dear fellow, and I hope you  —  ah  —  will come out top-side all raight.’

Hurree Babu stepped back a pace or two into the crowd at the entrance of Lucknow station and  —  was gone. Kim drew a deep breath and hugged himself all over. The nickel-plated revolver he could feel in the bosom of his sad-coloured robe, the amulet was on his neck; begging-gourd, rosary, and ghost-dagger (Mr. Lurgan had forgotten nothing) were all to hand, with medicine, paint-box, and compass, and in a worn old purse-belt embroidered with porcupine quill-patterns lay a month’s pay. Kings could be no richer. He bought sweetmeats in a leaf-cup from a Hindu trader, and ate them with glad rapture till a policeman ordered him off the steps.

CHAPTER XI

Give the man who is not made
To his trade
Swords to fling and catch again,
Coins to ring and snatch again,
Men to harm and cure again,
Snakes to charm and lure again  — 
He’ll be hurt by his own blade,
By his serpents disobeyed,
By his clumsiness bewrayed,
By the people mocked to scorn.
So ‘tis not with juggler born.
Pinch of dust or withered flower,
Chance-flung fruit or borrowed staff,
Serve his need and shore his power,
Bind the spell, or loose the laugh!
‘But a man who, etc.,’ Op. 15.

FOLLOWED a sudden natural reaction.

‘Now am I alone  —  all alone,’ he thought. ‘In all India is no one so alone as I! If I die to-day, who shall bring the news  —  and to whom? If I live and God is good, there will be a price upon my head, for I am a Son of the Charm  —  I, Kim.’

A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.

‘Who is Kim  —  Kim  —  Kim?’

He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room, rapt from all other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils contracted to pin-points. In a minute  —  in another half second  —  he felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle; but here, as always happens, his mind dropped away from those heights with the rush of a wounded bird, and passing his hand before his eyes, he shook his head.

A long-haired Hindu bairagi (holy man), who had just bought a ticket, halted before him at that moment and stared intently.

‘I also have lost it,’ he said sadly. ‘It is one of the Gates to the Way, but for me it has been shut many years.’

‘What is the talk?’ said Kim, abashed.

‘Thou wast wondering there in thy spirit what manner of thing thy soul might be. The seizure came of a sudden. I know. Who should know but I? Whither goest thou?’

‘Toward Kashi’(Benares).

‘There are no Gods there. I have proved them. I go to Prayag (Allahabad) for the fifth time  —  seeking the road to Enlightenment. Of what faith art thou?’

‘I too am a Seeker,’ said Kim, using one of the lama’s pet words. ‘Though’  —  he forgot his Northern dress for the moment  —  ’though Allah alone knoweth what I seek.’

The old fellow slipped the bairagi’s crutch under his armpit and sat down on a patch of ruddy leopard’s skin as Kim rose at the call for the Benares train.

‘Go in hope, little brother,’ he said. ‘It is a long road to the feet of the One; but thither do we all travel.’

Kim did not feel so lonely after this, and ere he had sat out twenty miles in the crowded compartment, was cheering his neighbours with a string of most wonderful yarns about his own and his master’s magical gifts.

Benares struck him as a peculiarly filthy city, though it was pleasant to find how his cloth was respected. At least one-third of the population prays eternally to some group or other of the many million deities, and so revere every sort of holy man. Kim was guided to the Temple of the Tirthankers, about a mile outside the city, near Sarnath, by a chance-met Punjabi farmer  —  a Kamboh from Jullundur-way who had appealed in vain to every God of his homestead to cure his small son, and was trying Benares as a last resort.

‘Thou art from the North?’ he asked, shouldering through the press of the narrow, stinking streets much like his own pet bull at home.

‘Ay, I know the Punjab. My mother was a Pahareen, but my father came from Amritzar  —  by Jandiala,’ said Kim, oiling his ready tongue for the needs of the Road.

‘Jandiala  —  Jullundur? Oho! Then we be neighbours in some sort, as it were.’ He nodded tenderly to the wailing child in his arms. ‘Whom dost thou serve?’

‘A most holy man at the Temple of the Tirthankers.’

‘They are all most holy and  —  most greedy,’ said the Jat with bitterness. ‘I have walked the pillars and trodden the temples till my feet are flayed, and the child is no whit better. And the mother being sick too. . . . Hush, then, little one. . . . We changed his name when the fever came. We put him into girl’s clothes. There was nothing we did not do, except  —  I said to his mother when she bundled me off to Benares  —  she should have come with me  —  I said Sakhi Sarwar Sultan would serve us best. We know His generosity, but these down-country Gods are strangers.’

The child turned on the cushion of the huge corded arms and looked at Kim through heavy eyelids.

‘And was it all worthless?’ Kim asked, with easy interest.

‘All worthless  —  all worthless,’ said the child, lips cracking with fever.

‘The Gods have given him a good mind, at least,’ said the father proudly. ‘To think he should have listened so cleverly. Yonder is thy temple. Now I am a poor man,  —  many priests have dealt with me,  —  but my son is my son, and if a gift to thy master can cure him  —  I am at my very wits’ end.’

Kim considered for a while, tingling with pride. Three years ago he would have made prompt profit on the situation and gone his way without a thought; but now, the very respect the Jat paid him proved that he was a man. Moreover, he had tasted fever once or twice already, and knew enough to recognise starvation when he saw it.

‘Call him forth and I will give him a bond on my best yoke, so that the child is cured.’

Kim halted at the carved outer door of the temple. A white-clad Oswal banker from Ajmir, his sins of usury new wiped out, asked him what he did.

‘I am chela to Teshoo Lama, an Holy One from Bhotiyal  —  within there. He bade me come. I wait. Tell him.’

‘Do not forget the child,’ cried the importunate Jat over his shoulder, and then bellowed in Punjabi: ‘O Holy One  —  O disciple of the Holy One  —  O Gods above all the Worlds  —  behold affliction sitting at the gate!’ That cry is so common in Benares that the passers never turned their heads.

The Oswal, at peace with mankind, carried the message into the darkness behind him, and the easy, uncounted Eastern minutes slid by; for the lama was asleep in his cell, and no priest would wake him. When the click of his rosary again broke the hush of the inner court where the calm images of the Arhats stand, a novice whispered, ‘Thy chela is here,’ and the old man strode forth, forgetting the end of that prayer.

Hardly had the tall figure shown in the doorway than the Jat ran before him, and, lifting up the child, cried: ‘Look upon this, Holy One; and if the Gods will, he lives  —  he lives!’

He fumbled in his waist-belt and drew out a small silver coin.

‘What is now?’ The lama’s eyes turned to Kim. It was noticeable he spoke far clearer Urdu than long ago, under Zam-Zammah; but the father would allow no private talk.

‘It is no more than a fever,’ said Kim. ‘The child is not well fed.’

‘He sickens at everything, and his mother is not here.’

‘If it be permitted, I may cure, Holy One.’

‘What! Have they made thee a healer? Wait here,’ said the lama, and he sat down by the Jat upon the lowest step of the temple, while Kim, looking out of the corner of his eyes, slowly opened the little betel-box. He had dreamed dreams at school of returning to the lama as a Sahib  —  of chaffing the old man before he revealed himself  —  boy’s dreams all. There was more drama in this abstracted, brow-puckered search through the tabloid-bottles, with a pause here and there for thought and a muttered invocation between whiles. Quinine he had in tablets, and dark brown meat-lozenges  —  beef most probably, but that was not his business. The little thing would not eat, but it sucked at a lozenge greedily, and said it liked the salt taste.

‘Take then these six.’ Kim handed them to the man. ‘Praise the Gods, and boil three in milk; other three in water. After he has drunk the milk give him this (it was the half of a quinine pill), and wrap him warm. Give him the water of the other three, and the other half of this white pill when he wakes. Meantime, here is another brown medicine that he may suck at on the way home.’

‘Gods, what wisdom!’ said the Kamboh, snatching.

It was as much as Kim could remember of his own treatment in a bout of autumn malaria  —  if you except the patter that he added to impress the lama.

‘Now go! Come again in the morning.’

‘But the price  —  the price,’ said the Jat, and threw back his sturdy shoulders. ‘My son is my son. Now that he will be whole again, how shall I go back to his mother and say I took help by the wayside and did not even give a bowl of curds in return?’

‘They are alike, these Jats,’ said Kim softly. ‘The Jat stood on his dunghill and the King’s elephants went by. “O driver,” said he, “what will you sell those little donkeys for?”‘

The Jat burst into a roar of laughter, stifled with apologies to the lama. ‘It is the saying of my own country  —  the very talk of it. So are we Jats all. I will come to-morrow with the child; and the blessing of the Gods of the Homesteads  —  who are good little Gods  —  be on you both. . . . Now, son, we grow strong again. Do not spit it out, little Princeling! King of my Heart, do not spit it out, and we shall be strong men, wrestlers and club-wielders, by morning.’

He moved away, crooning and mumbling. The lama turned to Kim, and all the loving old soul of him looked out through his narrow eyes.

‘To heal the sick is to acquire merit; but first one gets knowledge. That was wisely done, O Friend of all the World.’

‘I was made wise by thee, Holy One,’ said Kim, forgetting the little play just ended; forgetting St. Xavier’s; forgetting his white blood; forgetting even the Great Game as he stooped, Mohammedan fashion, to touch his master’s feet in the dust of the Jain temple. ‘My teaching I owe to thee. I have eaten thy bread three years. My time is finished. I am loosed from the schools. I come to thee.’