Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (36 page)

He went down the long line and twisted each hand in pure joy and thankfulness before he began to draw comparisons between the East and the West, and to ask himself if these idle, silent lotos-eaters could belong to the profession with which he had swapped stories, commodities, and political opinions this many a year in smoking-cars and hotel offices. Certainly they were debased and spiritless parodies of the alert, aggressive, joyous, brazen animals whom he knew as the drummers of the West. But perhaps — a twinge in his back reminded him — they had all reached this sink of desolation viâ country bullock-cart.

He thrust his nose into twelve inches of whisky and soda, and it remained there till there was no more; then he dropped into a vacant chair and surveyed the group again.

‘Did some one ask who I was for? I’m for myself, I suppose, as much as any one — travelling for pleasure.’

He had not time to enjoy the absurdity of this, for all five men burst into a shout of laughter, like the laughter of men who have long been estranged from mirth.

‘Pleasure!’ cried one. ‘O Lord! Pleasure! You’ve come to the wrong place.’

‘It’s just as well you’ve come for pleasure. You’d be dead before you did business,’ said another.

‘You might as well try to get blood out of a stone. I’ve been here over a fortnight.’

‘Scot! What for?’ asked Tarvin.

‘We’ve all been here over a week,’ growled a fourth.

‘But what’s your lay? What’s your racket?’

‘Guess you’re an American, ain’t you?’

‘Yes; Topaz, Colorado.’ The statement had no effect upon them. He might as well have spoken in Greek. ‘But what’s the trouble?’

‘Why, the King married two wives yesterday. You can hear the gongs going in the city now. He’s trying to equip a new regiment of cavalry for the service of the Indian Government, and he’s quarrelled with his Political Resident. I’ve been living at Colonel Nolan’s door for three days. He says he can’t do anything without authority from the supreme Government. I’ve tried to catch the King when he goes out pig-shooting. I write every day to the Prime Minister, when I’m not riding around the city on a camel; and here’s a bunch of letters from the firm asking why I don’t collect.’

At the end of ten minutes Tarvin began to understand that these washed-out representatives of half a dozen firms in Calcutta and Bombay were hopelessly besieging this place on their regular spring campaign to collect a little on account from a king who ordered by the ton and paid by the scruple. He had purchased guns, dressing-cases, mirrors, mantelpiece ornaments, crochet work, the iridescent Christmas-tree glass balls, saddlery, mail-phaetons, four-inhands, scent-bottles, surgical instruments, chandeliers, and chinaware by the dozen, gross, or score as his royal fancy prompted. When he lost interest in his purchases he lost interest in paying for them; and as few things amused his jaded fancy more than twenty minutes, it sometimes came to pass that the mere purchase was sufficient, and the costly packing-cases from Calcutta were never opened. The ordered peace of the Indian Empire forbade him to take up arms against his fellow-sovereigns, the only lasting delight that he or his ancestors had known for thousands of years; but there remained a certain modified interest of war in battling with bill-collectors. On one side stood the Political Resident of the State, planted there to teach him good government, and, above all, economy; on the other side — that is to say, at the palace gates — might generally be found a commercial traveller, divided between his contempt for an evasive debtor and his English reverence for a king. Between these two his Majesty went forth to take his pleasure in pig-sticking, in racing, in the drilling of his army, in the ordering of more unnecessaries, and in the fitful government of his womankind, who knew considerably more of each commercial traveller’s claims than even the Prime Minister. Behind these was the Government of India, explicitly refusing to guarantee payment of the King’s debts, and from time to time sending him, on a blue velvet cushion, the jewelled insignia of an imperial order to sweeten the remonstrances of the Political Resident.

‘Well, I hope you make the King pay for it,’ said Tarvin.

‘How’s that?’

‘Why, in my country, when a customer sillies about like that, promising to meet a man one day at, the hotel and not showing up, and then promising to meet him the next day at the store and not paying, a drummer says to himself, “Oh, all right! If you want to pay my board, and my wine, liquor, and cigar bill, while I wait, don’t mind me. I’ll mosey along somehow.” And after the second day he charges up his poker losings to him.’

‘Ah, that’s interesting. But how does he get those items into his account?’

‘They go into the next bill of goods he sells him, of course. He makes the prices right for that.’

‘Oh, we can make prices right enough. The difficulty is to get your money.’

‘But I don’t see how you fellows have the time to monkey around here at this rate,’ urged Tarvin, mystified. ‘Where I come from a man makes his trip on schedule time, and when he’s a day behind he’ll wire to his customer in the town ahead to come down to the station and meet him, and he’ll sell him a bill of goods while the train waits. He could sell him the earth while one of your bullock-carts went a mile. And as to getting your money, why don’t you get out an attachment on the old sinner? In your places I’d attach the whole country on him. I’d attach the palace, I’d attach his crown. I’d get a judgment against him, and I’d execute it too — personally, if necessary. I’d lock the old fellow up and rule Rajputana for him, if I had to; but I’d have his money.’

A compassionate smile ran around the group. ‘That’s because you don’t know,’ said several at once. Then they began to explain voluminously. There was no languor about them now; they all spoke together.

The men in the verandah, though they seemed idle, were no fools, Tarvin perceived after a time. Lying still as beggars at the gate of greatness was their method of doing business. It wasted time, but in the end some sort of payment was sure to be made, especially, explained the man in the yellow coat, if you could interest the Prime Minister in your needs, and through him wake the interests of the King’s women.

A flicker of memory made Tarvin smile faintly, as he thought of Mrs. Mutrie.

The man in the yellow coat went on, and Tarvin learned that the head queen was a murderess, convicted of poisoning her former husband. She had lain crouching in an iron cage awaiting execution when the King first saw her, and the King had demanded whether she would poison him if he married her, so the tale ran. Assuredly, she replied, if he treated her as her late husband had treated her. Thereupon the King had married her, partly to please his fancy, mainly through sheer delight in her brutal answer.

This gipsy without lineage held in less than a year King and State under her feet — feet which women of the household sang spitefully were roughened with travel of shameful roads. She had borne the King one son, in whom all her pride and ambition centred, and, after his birth, she had applied herself with renewed energy to the maintenance of mastery in the State. The supreme Government, a thousand miles away, knew that she was a force to be reckoned with, and had no love for her. The white-haired, soft-spoken Political Resident, Colonel Nolan, who lived in the pink house, a bow-shot from the city gates, was often thwarted by her. Her latest victory was peculiarly humiliating to him, for she had discovered that a rock-hewn canal, designed to supply the city with water in summer, would pass through an orange garden under her window, and had used her influence with the Maharajah against it. The Maharajah had thereupon caused it to be taken around by another way at an expense of a quarter of his year’s revenue, and in the teeth of the almost tearful remonstrance of the Resident.

Sitabhai, the gipsy, behind her silken curtains, had both heard and seen this interview between the Maharajah and his Political, and had laughed.

Tarvin devoured all this eagerly. It fed his purpose; it was grist to his mill, even if it tumbled his whole plan of attack topsy-turvy. It opened up a new world for which he had no measures and standards, and in which he must be frankly and constantly dependent on the inspiration of the next moment. He couldn’t know too much of this world before taking his first step toward the Naulahka, and he was willing to hear all these lazy fellows would tell him. He began to feel as if he should have to go back and learn his A B C’s over again. What pleased this strange being they called King? what appealed to him? what tickled him? above all, what did he fear?

He was thinking much and rapidly.

But he said, ‘No wonder your King is bankrupt if he has such a court to look after.’

‘He’s one of the richest princes in India,’ returned the man in the yellow coat. ‘He doesn’t know himself what he has.’

‘Why doesn’t he pay his debts, then, instead of keeping you mooning about here?’

‘Because he’s a native. He’d spend a hundred thousand pounds on a marriage feast, and delay payment of a bill for two hundred rupees four years.

‘You ought to cure him of that,’ insisted Tarvin. ‘Send a sheriff after the crown jewels.’

‘You don’t know Indian princes. They would pay a bill before they would let the crown jewels go. They are sacred. They are part of the government.’

‘Ah, I’d give something to see the Luck of the State!’ exclaimed a voice from one of the chairs, which Tarvin afterward learned belonged to the agent of a Calcutta firm of jewellers.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, as casually as he knew how, sipping his whisky and soda.

‘The Naulahka. Don’t you know?’

Tarvin was saved the need of an .answer by the man in yellow. ‘Pshaw! All that talk about the Naulahka is invented by the priests.’

‘I don’t think so,’ returned the jeweller’s agent judicially. ‘The King told me when I was last here that he had once shown it to a viceroy. But he is the only foreigner who has ever seen it. The King assured me he didn’t know where it was himself.’

‘Pooh! Do you believe in carved emeralds two inches square?’ asked the other, turning to Tarvin.

‘That’s only the centre-piece,’ said the jeweller; ‘and I wouldn’t mind wagering that it’s a tallowdrop emerald. It isn’t that that staggers me. My wonder is how these chaps, who don’t care anything for water in a stone, could have taken the trouble to get together half a dozen perfect gems, much less fifty. They say that the necklace was begun when William the Conqueror came over.’

‘That gives them a year or two,’ said Tarvin. ‘I would undertake to get a little jewellery together myself if you gave me eight centuries.’

His face was turned a little away from them as he lay back in his chair. His heart was going quickly. He had been through mining-trades, land-speculations, and cattle-deals in his time. He had known moments when the turn of a hair, the wrinkle of an eyelid, meant ruin to him. But they were not moments into which eight centuries were gathered.

They looked at him with a remote pity in their eyes.

‘Five absolutely perfect specimens of the nine precious stones,’ began the jeweller; ‘the ruby, emerald, sapphire, diamond, opal, cat’s-eye, turquoise, amethyst, and —  — ’

‘Topaz?’ asked Tarvin, with the air of a proprietor.

‘No; black diamond — black as night.’

‘But how do you know all these things — how do you get on to them?’ asked Tarvin curiously.

‘Like everything else in a native state — common talk, but difficult to prove. Nobody can as much as guess where that necklace is.’

‘Probably under the foundations of some temple in the city,’ said the yellow-coated man.

Tarvin, in spite of the careful guard he was keeping over himself, could not help kindling at this. He saw himself digging the city up.

‘Where is this city?’ inquired he.

They pointed across the sun-glare, and showed him a rock girt by a triple line of wall. It was exactly like one of the many ruined cities that Tarvin had passed in the bullock-cart. A rock of a dull and angry red surmounted that rock. Up to the foot of the rock ran the yellow sands of the actual desert — the desert that supports neither tree nor shrub, only the wild ass, and somewhere in its heart, men say, the wild camel.

Tarvin stared through the palpitating haze of heat, and saw that there was neither life nor motion about the city. It was a little after noonday, and his Majesty’s subjects were asleep. This solid block of loneliness, then, was the visible end of his journey — the Jericho he had come from Topaz to attack.

And he reflected, ‘Now, if a man should come from New York in a bullock-cart to whistle around the Sauguache Range, I wonder what sort of fool I’d call him!’

He rose and stretched his dusty limbs. ‘What time does it get cool enough to take in the town?’ he asked.

‘Do what to the town? Better be careful. You might find yourself in difficulties with the Resident,’ warned his friendly adviser.

Tarvin could not understand why a stroll through the deadest town he had ever seen should be forbidden. But he held his peace, inasmuch as he was in a strange country, where nothing, save a certain desire for command on the part of the women, was as he had known it. He would take in the town thoroughly. Otherwise he began to fear that its monumental sloth — there was still no sign of life upon the walled rock — would swallow him up, or turn him into a languid Calcutta drummer.

Something must be done at once before his wits were numbed. He inquired the way to the telegraph-office, half doubting, even though he saw the wires, the existence of a telegraph in Rhatore.

‘By the way,’ one of the men called after him, ‘it’s worth remembering that any telegram you send here is handed all round the court and shown to the King.’

Tarvin thanked him, and thought this was worth remembering, as he trudged on through the sand toward a desecrated Mohammedan mosque near the road to the city which was doing duty as a telegraph-office.

A trooper of the State was lying fast asleep on the threshold, his horse picketed to a long bamboo lance driven into the ground. Other sign of life there was none, save a few doves cooing sleepily in the darkness under the arch.