Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (24 page)

The life did not increase his self-respect. He abandoned shaving as a dangerous exercise, and being shaved in a barber’s shop meant exposure of his infirmity. He could not see that his clothes were properly brushed, and since he had never taken any care of his personal appearance he became every known variety of sloven. A blind man cannot deal with cleanliness till he has been some months used to the darkness. If he demand attendance and grow angry at the want of it, he must assert himself and stand upright. Then the meanest menial can see that he is blind and, therefore, of no consequence. A wise man will keep his eyes on the floor and sit still. For amusement he may pick coal lump by lump out of the scuttle with the tongs and pile it in a little heap in the fender, keeping count of the lumps, which must all be put back again, one by one and very carefully. He may set himself sums if he cares to work them out; he may talk to himself or to the cat if she chooses to visit him; and if his trade has been that of an artist, he may sketch in the air with his forefinger; but that is too much like drawing a pig with the eyes shut. He may go to his bookshelves and count his books, ranging them in order of their size; or to his wardrobe and count his shirts, laying them in piles of two or three on the bed, as they suffer from frayed cuffs or lost buttons.

Even this entertainment wearies after a time; and all the times are very, very long.

Dick was allowed to sort a tool-chest where Mr. Beeton kept hammers, taps and nuts, lengths of gas-pipes, oil-bottles, and string.

‘If I don’t have everything just where I know where to look for it, why, then, I can’t find anything when I do want it. You’ve no idea, sir, the amount of little things that these chambers uses up,’ said Mr. Beeton.

Fumbling at the handle of the door as he went out: ‘It’s hard on you, sir, I do think it’s hard on you. Ain’t you going to do anything, sir?’

‘I’ll pay my rent and messing. Isn’t that enough?’

‘I wasn’t doubting for a moment that you couldn’t pay your way, sir; but I ‘ave often said to my wife, “It’s ‘ard on ‘im because it isn’t as if he was an old man, nor yet a middle-aged one, but quite a young gentleman. That’s where it comes so ‘ard.”‘

‘I suppose so,’ said Dick, absently. This particular nerve through long battering had ceased to feel — much.

‘I was thinking,’ continued Mr. Beeton, still making as if to go, ‘that you might like to hear my boy Alf read you the papers sometimes of an evening. He do read beautiful, seeing he’s only nine.’

‘I should be very grateful,’ said Dick. ‘Only let me make it worth his while.’

‘We wasn’t thinking of that, sir, but of course it’s in your own ‘ands; but only to ‘ear Alf sing “A Boy’s best Friend is ‘is Mother!” Ah!’

‘I’ll hear him sing that too. Let him come this evening with the newspapers.’

Alf was not a nice child, being puffed up with many school-board certificates for good conduct, and inordinately proud of his singing. Mr.

Beeton remained, beaming, while the child wailed his way through a song of some eight eight-line verses in the usual whine of a young Cockney, and, after compliments, left him to read Dick the foreign telegrams. Ten minutes later Alf returned to his parents rather pale and scared.

‘‘E said ‘e couldn’t stand it no more,’ he explained.

‘He never said you read badly, Alf?’ Mrs. Beeton spoke.

‘No. ‘E said I read beautiful. Said ‘e never ‘eard any one read like that, but ‘e said ‘e couldn’t abide the stuff in the papers.’

‘P’raps he’s lost some money in the Stocks. Were you readin’ him about Stocks, Alf?’

‘No; it was all about fightin’ out there where the soldiers is gone — a great long piece with all the lines close together and very hard words in it. ‘E give me ‘arf a crown because I read so well. And ‘e says the next time there’s anything ‘e wants read ‘e’ll send for me.’

‘That’s good hearing, but I do think for all the half-crown — put it into the kicking-donkey money-box, Alf, and let me see you do it — he might have kept you longer. Why, he couldn’t have begun to understand how beautiful you read.’

‘He’s best left to hisself — gentlemen always are when they’re downhearted,’ said Mr. Beeton.

Alf’s rigorously limited powers of comprehending Torpenhow’s special correspondence had waked the devil of unrest in Dick. He could hear, through the boy’s nasal chant, the camels grunting in the squares behind the soldiers outside Suakin; could hear the men swearing and chaffing across the cooking pots, and could smell the acrid wood-smoke as it drifted over camp before the wind of the desert.

That night he prayed to God that his mind might be taken from him, offering for proof that he was worthy of this favour the fact that he had not shot himself long ago. That prayer was not answered, and indeed Dick knew in his heart of hearts that only a lingering sense of humour and no special virtue had kept him alive. Suicide, he had persuaded himself, would be a ludicrous insult to the gravity of the situation as well as a weak-kneed confession of fear.

‘Just for the fun of the thing,’ he said to the cat, who had taken Binkie’s place in his establishment, ‘I should like to know how long this is going to last. I can live for a year on the hundred pounds Torp cashed for me. I must have two or three thousand at least in the Bank — twenty or thirty years more provided for, that is to say. Then I fall back on my hundred and twenty a year, which will be more by that time. Let’s consider.

Twenty-five — thirty-five — a man’s in his prime then, they say — forty-five — a middle-aged man just entering politics — fifty-five — ”died at the comparatively early age of fifty-five,” according to the newspapers. Bah! How these Christians funk death! Sixty-five — we’re only getting on in years. Seventy-five is just possible, though. Great hell, cat O! fifty years more of solitary confinement in the dark! You’ll die, and Beeton will die, and Torp will die, and Mai — everybody else will die, but I shall be alive and kicking with nothing to do. I’m very sorry for myself. I should like some one else to be sorry for me. Evidently I’m not going ma before I die, but the pain’s just as bad as ever. Some day when you’re vivisected, cat O! they’ll tie you down on a little table and cut you open — but don’t be afraid; they’ll take precious good care that you don’t die. You’ll live, and you’ll be very sorry then that you weren’t sorry for me. Perhaps Torp will come back or... I wish I could go to Torp and the Nilghai, even though I were in their way.’

Pussy left the room before the speech was ended, and Alf, as he entered, found Dick addressing the empty hearth-rug.

‘There’s a letter for you, sir,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’d like me to read it.’

‘Lend it to me for a minute and I’ll tell you.’

The outstretched hand shook just a little and the voice was not over-steady. It was within the limits of human possibility that — that was no letter from Maisie. He knew the heft of three closed envelopes only too well. It was a foolish hope that the girl should write to him, for he did not realise that there is a wrong which admits of no reparation though the evildoer may with tears and the heart’s best love strive to mend all. It is best to forget that wrong whether it be caused or endured, since it is as remediless as bad work once put forward.

‘Read it, then,’ said Dick, and Alf began intoning according to the rules of the Board School — ’”I could have given you love, I could have given you loyalty, such as you never dreamed of. Do you suppose I cared what you were? But you chose to whistle everything down the wind for nothing. My only excuse for you is that you are so young.” ‘That’s all,’ he said, returning the paper to be dropped into the fire.

‘What was in the letter?’ asked Mrs. Beeton, when Alf returned.

‘I don’t know. I think it was a circular or a tract about not whistlin’ at everything when you’re young.’

‘I must have stepped on something when I was alive and walking about and it has bounced up and hit me. God help it, whatever it is — unless it was all a joke. But I don’t know any one who’d take the trouble to play a joke on me.... Love and loyalty for nothing. It sounds tempting enough.

I wonder whether I have lost anything really?’

Dick considered for a long time but could not remember when or how he had put himself in the way of winning these trifles at a woman’s hands.

Still, the letter as touching on matters that he preferred not to think about stung him into a fit of frenzy that lasted for a day and night. When his heart was so full of despair that it would hold no more, body and soul together seemed to be dropping without check through the darkness.

Then came fear of darkness and desperate attempts to reach the light again. But there was no light to be reached. When that agony had left him sweating and breathless, the downward flight would recommence till the gathering torture of it spurred him into another fight as hopeless as the first. Followed some few minutes of sleep in which he dreamed that he saw. Then the procession of events would repeat itself till he was utterly worn out and the brain took up its everlasting consideration of Maisie and might-have-beens.

At the end of everything Mr. Beeton came to his room and volunteered to take him out. ‘Not marketing this time, but we’ll go into the Parks if you like.’

‘Be damned if I do,’ quoth Dick. ‘Keep to the streets and walk up and down. I like to hear the people round me.’

This was not altogether true. The blind in the first stages of their infirmity dislike those who can move with a free stride and unlifted arms — but Dick had no earthly desire to go to the Parks. Once and only once since Maisie had shut her door he had gone there under Alf’s charge. Alf forgot him and fished for minnows in the Serpentine with some companions. After half an hour’s waiting Dick, almost weeping with rage and wrath, caught a passer-by, who introduced him to a friendly policeman, who led him to a four-wheeler opposite the Albert Hall. He never told Mr. Beeton of Alf’s forgetfulness, but... this was not the manner in which he was used to walk the Parks aforetime.

‘What streets would you like to walk down, then?’ said Mr. Beeton, sympathetically. His own ideas of a riotous holiday meant picnicking on the grass of Green Park with his family, and half a dozen paper bags full of food.

‘Keep to the river,’ said Dick, and they kept to the river, and the rush of it was in his ears till they came to Blackfriars Bridge and struck thence on to the Waterloo Road, Mr. Beeton explaining the beauties of the scenery as he went on.

‘And walking on the other side of the pavement,’ said he, ‘unless I’m much mistaken, is the young woman that used to come to your rooms to be drawed. I never forgets a face and I never remembers a name, except paying tenants, o’ course!’

‘Stop her,’ said Dick. ‘It’s Bessie Broke. Tell her I’d like to speak to her again. Quick, man!’

Mr. Beeton crossed the road under the noses of the omnibuses and arrested Bessie then on her way northward. She recognised him as the man in authority who used to glare at her when she passed up Dick’s staircase, and her first impulse was to run.

‘Wasn’t you Mr. Heldar’s model?’ said Mr. Beeton, planting himself in front of her. ‘You was. He’s on the other side of the road and he’d like to see you.’

‘Why?’ said Bessie, faintly. She remembered — indeed had never for long forgotten — an affair connected with a newly finished picture.

‘Because he has asked me to do so, and because he’s most particular blind.’

‘Drunk?’

‘No. ‘Orspital blind. He can’t see. That’s him over there.’

Dick was leaning against the parapet of the bridge as Mr. Beeton pointed him out — a stub-bearded, bowed creature wearing a dirty magenta-coloured neckcloth outside an unbrushed coat. There was nothing to fear from such an one. Even if he chased her, Bessie thought, he could not follow far. She crossed over, and Dick’s face lighted up. It was long since a woman of any kind had taken the trouble to speak to him.

‘I hope you’re well, Mr. Heldar?’ said Bessie, a little puzzled. Mr. Beeton stood by with the air of an ambassador and breathed responsibly.

‘I’m very well indeed, and, by Jove! I’m glad to see — hear you, I mean, Bess. You never thought it worth while to turn up and see us again after you got your money. I don’t know why you should. Are you going anywhere in particular just now?’

‘I was going for a walk,’ said Bessie.

‘Not the old business?’ Dick spoke under his breath.

‘Lor, no! I paid my premium’ — Bessie was very proud of that word — ’for a barmaid, sleeping in, and I’m at the bar now quite respectable. Indeed I am.’

Mr. Beeton had no special reason to believe in the loftiness of human nature. Therefore he dissolved himself like a mist and returned to his gas-plugs without a word of apology. Bessie watched the flight with a certain uneasiness; but so long as Dick appeared to be ignorant of the harm that had been done to him...

‘It’s hard work pulling the beer-handles,’ she went on, ‘and they’ve got one of them penny-in-the-slot cash-machines, so if you get wrong by a penny at the end of the day — but then I don’t believe the machinery is right. Do you?’

‘I’ve only seen it work. Mr. Beeton.’

‘He’s gone.

‘I’m afraid I must ask you to help me home, then. I’ll make it worth your while. You see.’ The sightless eyes turned towards her and Bessie saw.

‘It isn’t taking you out of your way?’ he said hesitatingly. ‘I can ask a policeman if it is.’

‘Not at all. I come on at seven and I’m off at four. That’s easy hours.’

‘Good God! — but I’m on all the time. I wish I had some work to do too.

Let’s go home, Bess.’

He turned and cannoned into a man on the sidewalk, recoiling with an oath. Bessie took his arm and said nothing — as she had said nothing when he had ordered her to turn her face a little more to the light. They walked for some time in silence, the girl steering him deftly through the crowd.

‘And where’s — where’s Mr. Torpenhow?’ she inquired at last.

‘He has gone away to the desert.’

‘Where’s that?’

Dick pointed to the right. ‘East — out of the mouth of the river,’ said he.

‘Then west, then south, and then east again, all along the under-side of Europe. Then south again, God knows how far.’ The explanation did not enlighten Bessie in the least, but she held her tongue and looked to Dick’s patch till they came to the chambers.