Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (148 page)

One day there was a dinner-party, at the house of Tods’ Mamma, and the Legal Member came. Tods was in bed, but he kept awake till he heard the bursts of laughter from the men over the coffee. Then he paddled out in his little red flannel dressing-gown and his night-suit, and took refuge by the side of his father, knowing that he would not be sent back. “See the miseries of having a family!” said Tods’ father, giving Tods three prunes, some water in a glass that had been used for claret, and telling him to sit still. Tods sucked the prunes slowly, knowing that he would have to go when they were finished, and sipped the pink water like a man of the world, as he listened to the conversation. Presently, the Legal Member, talking “shop,” to the Head of a Department, mentioned his Bill by its full name — ”The Sub-Montane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment.” Tods caught the one native word, and lifting up his small voice said: — ”Oh, I know ALL about that! Has it been murramutted yet, Councillor Sahib?”

“How much?” said the Legal Member.

“Murramutted — mended. — Put theek, you know — made nice to please Ditta Mull!”

The Legal Member left his place and moved up next to Tods.

“What do you know about Ryotwari, little man?” he said.

“I’m not a little man, I’m Tods, and I know ALL about it. Ditta Mull, and Choga Lall, and Amir Nath, and — oh, lakhs of my friends tell me about it in the bazars when I talk to them.”

“Oh, they do — do they? What do they say, Tods?”

Tods tucked his feet under his red flannel dressing-gown and said: — ”I must fink.”

The Legal Member waited patiently. Then Tods, with infinite compassion:

“You don’t speak my talk, do you, Councillor Sahib?”

“No; I am sorry to say I do not,” said the Legal’ Member.

“Very well,” said Tods. “I must fink in English.”

He spent a minute putting his ideas in order, and began very slowly, translating in his mind from the vernacular to English, as many Anglo-Indian children do. You must remember that the Legal Member helped him on by questions when he halted, for Tods was not equal to the sustained flight of oratory that follows.

“Ditta Mull says: — ’This thing is the talk of a child, and was made up by fools.’ But I don’t think you are a fool, Councillor Sahib,” said Todds, hastily. “You caught my goat. This is what Ditta Mull says: — ’I am not a fool, and why should the Sirkar say I am a child? I can see if the land is good and if the landlord is good. If I am a fool, the sin is upon my own head. For five years I take my ground for which I have saved money, and a wife I take too, and a little son is born.’ Ditta Mull has one daughter now, but he SAYS he will have a son, soon. And he says: ‘At the end of five years, by this new bundobust, I must go. If I do not go, I must get fresh seals and takkus-stamps on the papers, perhaps in the middle of the harvest, and to go to the law-courts once is wisdom, but to go twice is Jehannum.’ That is QUITE true,” explained Tods, gravely. “All my friends say so. And Ditta Mull says: — ’Always fresh takkus and paying money to vakils and chaprassis and law-courts every five years or else the landlord makes me go. Why do I want to go? Am I fool? If I am a fool and do not know, after forty years, good land when I see it, let me die! But if the new bundobust says for FIFTEEN years, then it is good and wise. My little son is a man, and I am burnt, and he takes the ground or another ground, paying only once for the takkus-stamps on the papers, and his little son is born, and at the end of fifteen years is a man too. But what profit is there in five years and fresh papers? Nothing but dikh, trouble, dikh. We are not young men who take these lands, but old ones — not jais, but tradesmen with a little money — and for fifteen years we shall have peace. Nor are we children that the Sirkar should treat us so.”

Here Tods stopped short, for the whole table were listening. The Legal Member said to Tods: “Is that all?”

“All I can remember,” said Tods. “But you should see Ditta Mull’s big monkey. It’s just like a Councillor Sahib.”

“Tods! Go to bed,” said his father.

Tods gathered up his dressing-gown tail and departed.

The Legal Member brought his hand down on the table with a crash — ”By Jove!” said the Legal Member, “I believe the boy is right. The short tenure IS the weak point.”

He left early, thinking over what Tods had said. Now, it was obviously impossible for the Legal Member to play with a bunnia’s monkey, by way of getting understanding; but he did better. He made inquiries, always bearing in mind the fact that the real native — not the hybrid, University-trained mule — is as timid as a colt, and, little by little, he coaxed some of the men whom the measure concerned most intimately to give in their views, which squared very closely with Tods’ evidence.

So the Bill was amended in that clause; and the Legal Member was filled with an uneasy suspicion that Native Members represent very little except the Orders they carry on their bosoms. But he put the thought from him as illiberal. He was a most Liberal Man.

After a time the news spread through the bazars that Tods had got the Bill recast in the tenure clause, and if Tods’ Mamma had not interfered, Tods would have made himself sick on the baskets of fruit and pistachio nuts and Cabuli grapes and almonds that crowded the verandah. Till he went Home, Tods ranked some few degrees before the Viceroy in popular estimation. But for the little life of him Tods could not understand why.

In the Legal Member’s private-paper-box still lies the rough draft of the Sub-Montane Tracts Ryotwari Revised Enactment; and, opposite the twenty-second clause, pencilled in blue chalk, and signed by the Legal Member, are the words “Tods’ Amendment.”

IN THE PRIDE OF HIS YOUTH.

     “Stopped in the straight when the race was his own!

     Look at him cutting it — cur to the bone!”

     “Ask ere the youngster be rated and chidden,

     What did he carry and how was he ridden?

     Maybe they used him too much at the start;

     Maybe Fate’s weight-cloths are breaking his heart.”

                                       Life’s Handicap.

When I was telling you of the joke that The Worm played off on the Senior Subaltern, I promised a somewhat similar tale, but with all the jest left out. This is that tale:

Dicky Hatt was kidnapped in his early, early youth — neither by landlady’s daughter, housemaid, barmaid, nor cook, but by a girl so nearly of his own caste that only a woman could have said she was just the least little bit in the world below it. This happened a month before he came out to India, and five days after his one-and-twentieth birthday. The girl was nineteen — six years older than Dicky in the things of this world, that is to say — and, for the time, twice as foolish as he.

Excepting, always, falling off a horse there is nothing more fatally easy than marriage before the Registrar. The ceremony costs less than fifty shillings, and is remarkably like walking into a pawn-shop. After the declarations of residence have been put in, four minutes will cover the rest of the proceedings — fees, attestation, and all. Then the Registrar slides the blotting-pad over the names, and says grimly, with his pen between his teeth: — ”Now you’re man and wife;” and the couple walk out into the street, feeling as if something were horribly illegal somewhere.

But that ceremony holds and can drag a man to his undoing just as thoroughly as the “long as ye both shall live” curse from the altar-rails, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, and “The Voice that breathed o’er Eden” lifting the roof off. In this manner was Dicky Hatt kidnapped, and he considered it vastly fine, for he had received an appointment in India which carried a magnificent salary from the Home point of view. The marriage was to be kept secret for a year. Then Mrs. Dicky Hatt was to come out and the rest of life was to be a glorious golden mist. That was how they sketched it under the Addison Road Station lamps; and, after one short month, came Gravesend and Dicky steaming out to his new life, and the girl crying in a thirty-shillings a week bed-and-living room, in a back street off Montpelier Square near the Knightsbridge Barracks.

But the country that Dicky came to was a hard land, where “men” of twenty-one were reckoned very small boys indeed, and life was expensive. The salary that loomed so large six thousand miles away did not go far. Particularly when Dicky divided it by two, and remitted more than the fair half, at 1-6, to Montpelier Square. One hundred and thirty-five rupees out of three hundred and thirty is not much to live on; but it was absurd to suppose that Mrs. Hatt could exist forever on the 20 pounds held back by Dicky, from his outfit allowance. Dicky saw this, and remitted at once; always remembering that Rs. 700 were to be paid, twelve months later, for a first-class passage out for a lady. When you add to these trifling details the natural instincts of a boy beginning a new life in a new country and longing to go about and enjoy himself, and the necessity for grappling with strange work — which, properly speaking, should take up a boy’s undivided attention — you will see that Dicky started handicapped. He saw it himself for a breath or two; but he did not guess the full beauty of his future.

As the hot weather began, the shackles settled on him and ate into his flesh. First would come letters — big, crossed, seven sheet letters — from his wife, telling him how she longed to see him, and what a Heaven upon earth would be their property when they met. Then some boy of the chummery wherein Dicky lodged would pound on the door of his bare little room, and tell him to come out and look at a pony — the very thing to suit him. Dicky could not afford ponies. He had to explain this. Dicky could not afford living in the chummery, modest as it was. He had to explain this before he moved to a single room next the office where he worked all day. He kept house on a green oil-cloth table-cover, one chair, one charpoy, one photograph, one tooth-glass, very strong and thick, a seven-rupee eight-anna filter, and messing by contract at thirty-seven rupees a month. Which last item was extortion. He had no punkah, for a punkah costs fifteen rupees a month; but he slept on the roof of the office with all his wife’s letters under his pillow. Now and again he was asked out to dinner where he got both a punkah and an iced drink. But this was seldom, for people objected to recognizing a boy who had evidently the instincts of a Scotch tallow-chandler, and who lived in such a nasty fashion. Dicky could not subscribe to any amusement, so he found no amusement except the pleasure of turning over his Bank-book and reading what it said about “loans on approved security.” That cost nothing. He remitted through a Bombay Bank, by the way, and the Station knew nothing of his private affairs.

Every month he sent Home all he could possibly spare for his wife — and for another reason which was expected to explain itself shortly and would require more money.

About this time, Dicky was overtaken with the nervous, haunting fear that besets married men when they are out of sorts. He had no pension to look to. What if he should die suddenly, and leave his wife unprovided for? The thought used to lay hold of him in the still, hot nights on the roof, till the shaking of his heart made him think that he was going to die then and there of heart-disease. Now this is a frame of mind which no boy has a right to know. It is a strong man’s trouble; but, coming when it did, it nearly drove poor punkah-less, perspiring Dicky Hatt mad. He could tell no one about it.

A certain amount of “screw” is as necessary for a man as for a billiard-ball. It makes them both do wonderful things. Dicky needed money badly, and he worked for it like a horse. But, naturally, the men who owned him knew that a boy can live very comfortably on a certain income — pay in India is a matter of age, not merit, you see, and if their particular boy wished to work like two boys, Business forbid that they should stop him! But Business forbid that they should give him an increase of pay at his present ridiculously immature age! So Dicky won certain rises of salary — ample for a boy — not enough for a wife and child — certainly too little for the seven-hundred-rupee passage that he and Mrs. Hatt had discussed so lightly once upon a time. And with this he was forced to be content.

Somehow, all his money seemed to fade away in Home drafts and the crushing Exchange, and the tone of the Home letters changed and grew querulous. “Why wouldn’t Dicky have his wife and the baby out? Surely he had a salary — a fine salary — and it was too bad of him to enjoy himself in India. But would he — could he — make the next draft a little more elastic?” Here followed a list of baby’s kit, as long as a Parsee’s bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his wife and the little son he had never seen — which, again, is a feeling no boy is entitled to — enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half-man letters, saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and would the little wife wait yet a little longer? But the little wife, however much she approved of money, objected to waiting, and there was a strange, hard sort of ring in her letters that Dicky didn’t understand. How could he, poor boy?

Later on still — just as Dicky had been told — apropos of another youngster who had “made a fool of himself,” as the saying is — that matrimony would not only ruin his further chances of advancement, but would lose him his present appointment — came the news that the baby, his own little, little son, had died, and, behind this, forty lines of an angry woman’s scrawl, saying that death might have been averted if certain things, all costing money, had been done, or if the mother and the baby had been with Dicky. The letter struck at Dicky’s naked heart; but, not being officially entitled to a baby, he could show no sign of trouble.

How Dicky won through the next four months, and what hope he kept alight to force him into his work, no one dare say. He pounded on, the seven-hundred-rupee passage as far away as ever, and his style of living unchanged, except when he launched into a new filter. There was the strain of his office-work, and the strain of his remittances, and the knowledge of his boy’s death, which touched the boy more, perhaps, than it would have touched a man; and, beyond all, the enduring strain of his daily life. Gray-headed seniors, who approved of his thrift and his fashion of denying himself everything pleasant, reminded him of the old saw that says: