Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (40 page)

Tarvin pulled at his cigar musingly for some seconds. ‘Dear girl, I’m not afraid.’

She sighed, and turned her face away toward the desert. ‘I wish you were,’ she said hopelessly.

‘Fear is not for legislators,’ he retorted oracularly.

She turned back to him with a sudden motion.

Legislators! O Nick, are you —  — ?’

‘I’m afraid I am — by a majority of 1518.’ He handed her the cable-despatch.

‘Poor father!’

‘Well, I don’t know.’

‘Oh! Well, I congratulate you, of course.’

‘Thanks.’

‘But I’m not sure it will be a good thing for you.’

‘Yes; that’s the way it had struck me. If I spend my whole term out here, like as not my constituents won’t be in a mood to advance my political career when I get back.’

‘All the more reason —  — ’

‘No; the more reason for fixing the real thing first. I can make myself solid in politics any time. But there isn’t but one time to make myself solid with you, Kate. It’s here. It’s now.’ He rose and bent over her. ‘Do you think I can postpone that, dear? I can adjourn it from day to day, and I do cheerfully, and you shan’t hear any more of it until you’re ready to. But you like me, Kate. I know that. And I — well, I like you. There isn’t but one end to that sort of thing.’ He took her hand. ‘Good-bye. I’ll come and take you for a look at the city tomorrow.’

Kate gazed long after his retreating figure, and then took herself into the house, where a warm, healthful chat with Mrs. Estes, chiefly about the children at Bangor, helped her to a sane view of the situation she must face with the reappearance of Tarvin. She saw that he meant to stay, and if she didn’t mean to go, it was for her to find the brave way of adjusting the fact to her hopes. His perversity complicated an undertaking which she had never expected to find simple in itself; and it was finally only because she trusted all that he said implicitly that she was able to stay herself upon his promise to ‘behave.’ Liberally interpreted, this really meant much from Tarvin; perhaps it meant all that she need ask.

When all was said, there remained the impulse to flight; but she was ashamed to find, when he came in the morning, that a formidable pang of home-sickness drew her toward him, and made his definite and cheerful presence a welcome sight. Mrs. Estes had been kind. The two women had made friends, and found each other’s heart with instant sympathy. But a home face was different, and perhaps Nick’s was even more different. At all events, she willingly let him carry out his plan of showing her the city.

In their walk about it Tarvin did not spare her the advantage of his ten days’ residence in Rhatore preceding her coming; he made himself her guide, and stood on rocks overlooking things and spouted his second-hand history with an assurance that the oldest Political Resident might have envied. He was interested in the problems of the State, if not responsible for their solution. Was he not a member of a governing body? His ceaseless and fruitful curiosity about all new things had furnished him, in ten days, with much learning about Rhatore and Gokral Seetarun, enabling him to show to Kate, with eyes scarcely less fresh than her own, the wonders of the narrow, sand-choked streets, where the footfalls of camels and men alike fell dead. They lingered by the royal menagerie of starved tigers, and the cages of the two tame hunting leopards, hooded like hawks, that slept, and yawned, and scratched on their two bedsteads by the main gate of the city; and he showed her the ponderous door of the great gate itself, studded with foot-long spikes against the attacks of that living battering-ram, the elephant. He led her through the long lines of dark shops planted in and among the ruins of palaces, whose builders had been long since forgotten, and about the straggling barracks, past knots of fantastically attired soldiers, who hung their day’s marketing from the muzzle of the Brown Bess or flint-lock; and then he showed her the mausoleum of the kings of Gokral Seetarun, under the shadow of the great temple where the children of the Sun and Moon went to worship, and where the smooth, black stone bull glared across the main square at the cheap bronze statue of Colonel Nolan’s predecessor-an offensively energetic and very plain Yorkshireman. Lastly, they found beyond the walls the clamouring caravansary of traders by the gateway of the Three Gods, whence the caravans of camels filed out with their burdens of glistening rock-salt for the railroad, and where by day and by night cloaked and jaw-bound riders of the desert, speaking a tongue that none could understand, rode in from God knows what fastness beyond the white hillocks of Jeysulmir.

As they went along, Tarvin asked her about Topaz. How had she left it? How was the dear old town looking? Kate said she had only left it three days after his departure.

‘Three days! Three days is a long time in the life of a growing town.’

Kate smiled. ‘I didn’t see any changes,’ she said.

‘No? Peters was talking about breaking ground for his new brick saloon on G Street the day after I left; Parsons was getting in a new dynamo for the city’s electric light plant; they were just getting to work on the grading of Massachusetts Avenue, and they had planted the first tree in my twenty-acre plot. Kearney, the druggist, was putting in a plate-glass window, and I shouldn’t wonder if Maxim had got his new post-office boxes from Meriden before you left. Didn’t you notice?’

Kate shook her head. ‘I was thinking of something else just then.’

‘Pshaw! I’d like to know. But no matter. I suppose it is asking too much to expect a woman to play her own hand, and keep the run of improvements in the town,’ he mused. ‘Women aren’t built that way. And yet I used to run a political canvass and a business or two, and something else in that town.’ He glanced humorously at Kate, who lifted a warning hand. ‘Forbidden subject? All right. I will be good. But they had to get up early in the morning to do anything to it without letting me into it. What did your father and mother say at the last?’

‘Don’t speak of that,’ begged Kate.

‘Well, I won’t.’

‘I wake up at night, and think of mother. It’s dreadful. At the last I suppose I should have stayed behind and shirked if some one had said the right word — or the wrong one — as I got on board the train, and waved my handkerchief to them.’

‘Good heaven! Why didn’t I stay!’ he groaned.

‘You couldn’t have said it, Nick,’ she told him quietly.

‘You mean your father could. Of course he could, and if he had happened to be some one else he would. When I think of that I want to —  — !’

‘Don’t say anything against father, please,’ she said, with a tightening of the lips.

‘Oh, dear child!’ he murmured contritely, ‘I didn’t mean that. But I have to say something against somebody. Give me somebody to curse, and I’ll be quiet.’

‘Nick!’

‘Well, I’m not a block of wood,’ he growled.

‘No; you are only a very foolish man.’

Tarvin smiled. ‘Now you’re shouting.’

She asked him about the Maharaj Kunwar, to change the subject, and Tarvin told her that he was a little brick. But he added that the society of Rhatore wasn’t all as good.

‘You ought to see Sitabhai!’

He went on to tell her about the Maharajah and the people of the palace with whom she would come in contact. They talked of the strange mingling of impassiveness and childishness in the people, which had already impressed Kate, and spoke of their primitive passions and simple ideas — simple as the massive strength of the Orient is simple.

‘They aren’t what we should call cultured. They don’t know Ibsen a little bit, and they don’t go in for Tolstoi for sour apples,’ said Tarvin, who did not read three newspapers a day at Topaz for nothing. ‘If they really knew the modern young woman, I suppose her life wouldn’t be worth an hour’s purchase. But they’ve got some rattling good old-fashioned ideas, all the same — the sort I used to hear once upon a time at my dear old mother’s knee, away back in the State of Maine. Mother believed in marriage, you know; and that’s where she agreed with me and with the fine old-style natives of India. The venerable, ramshackle, tumble-down institution of matrimony is still in use here, you know.’

‘But I never said I sympathised with Nora, Nick,’ exclaimed Kate, leaping all the chasms of connection.

‘Well, then, that’s where you are solid with the Indian Empire. The Doll’s House glanced right off this blessed old-timey country. You wouldn’t know where it had been hit.’

‘But I don’t agree with all your ideas either,’ she felt bound to add.

‘I can think of one,’ retorted Tarvin, with a shrewd smile. ‘But I’ll convert you to my views there.’

Kate stopped short in the street along which they were walking. ‘I trusted you, Nick!’ she said reproachfully.

He stopped, and gazed ruefully at her for a moment. ‘O Lord!’ he groaned. ‘I trusted myself! But I’m always thinking of it. What can you expect? But I tell you what, Kate, this shall be the end — last, final, ultimate. I’m done. From this out I’m a reformed man. I don’t promise not to think, and I’ll have to go on feeling, just the same. But I’ll be quiet. Shake on it.’ He offered his hand, and Kate took it.

They walked on for some moments in silence until Tarvin said mournfully, ‘You didn’t see Heckler just before you came away, did you?’

She shook her head.

‘No; Jim and you never did get along much together. But I wish I knew what he’s thinking about me. Didn’t hear any rumour, any report, going around about what had become of me, I suppose?’

‘They thought in town that you had gone to San Francisco to see some of the Western directors of the Colorado and California Central, I think. They thought that because the conductor of your train brought back word that you said you were going to Alaska, and they didn’t believe that. I wish you had a better reputation for truth-telling at Topaz, Nick.’

‘So do I, Kate; so do I,’ exclaimed Tarvin heartily. ‘But if I had, how would I ever get the right thing believed? That’s just what I wanted them to think — that I was looking after their interests. But where would I be if I had sent that story back? They would have had me working a land-grab in Chile before night. That reminds me — don’t mention that I’m here in writing home, please. Perhaps they’ll figure that out, too, by the rule of contraries, if I give them the chance. But I don’t want to give them the chance.’

‘I’m not likely to mention it,’ said Kate, flushing.

A moment later she recurred to the subject of her mother. In the yearning for home that came upon her anew in the midst of all the strangeness through which Tarvin was taking her, the thought of her mother, patient, alone, looking for some word from her, hurt her as if for the first time. The memory was for the moment intolerable to her; but when Tarvin asked her why she had come at all if she felt that way, she answered with the courage of better moments — ’Why do men go to war?’

Kate saw little of Tarvin during the next few days. Mrs. Estes made her known at the palace, and she had plenty to occupy her mind and heart. There she stepped bewilderedly into a land where it was always twilight — a labyrinth of passages, courtyards, stairs, and hidden ways, all overflowing with veiled women, who peered at her and laughed behind her back, or childishly examined her dress, her helmet, and her gloves. It seemed impossible that she should ever know the smallest part of the vast warren, or distinguish one pale face from another in the gloom, as the women led her through long lines of lonely chambers where the wind sighed alone under the glittering ceilings, to hanging gardens two hundred feet above the level of the ground, but still jealously guarded by high walls, and down again by interminable stairways, from the glare and the blue of the flat roofs to silent subterranean chambers hewn against the heat of the summer sixty feet into the heart of the living rock.. At every step she found women and children, and yet more women and children. The palace was reported to hold within its walls four thousand living, and no man knew how many buried, dead.

There were many women — how many she did not know — worked upon by intrigues she could not comprehend, who refused her ministrations absolutely. They were not ill, they said, and the touch of the white woman meant pollution. Others there were who thrust their children before her and bade her bring colour and strength back to these pale buds born in the darkness; and terrible, fierce-eyed girls who leaped upon her out of the dark, overwhelming her with passionate complaints that she did not and dared not understand. Monstrous and obscene pictures glared at her from the walls of the little rooms, and the images of shameless gods mocked her from their greasy niches above the doorways. The heat and the smell of cooking, faint fumes of incense, and the indescribable taint of overcrowded humanity, caught her by the throat. But what she heard and what she guessed sickened her more than any visible horror. Plainly it was one thing to be stirred to generous action by a vivid recital of the state of the women of India, another to face the unutterable fact in the isolation of the women’s apartments of the palace of Rhatore.

Tarvin meanwhile was going about spying out the land on a system which he had contrived for himself. It was conducted on the principle of exhaustion of the possibilities in the order of their importance — every movement which he made having the directest, though not always the most obvious, relation to the Naulahka.

He was free to come and go through the royal gardens, where innumerable and very seldom paid gardeners fought with water-skin and well-wheel against the destroying heat of the desert. He was welcomed in the Maharajah’s stables, where eight hundred horses were littered down nightly, and was allowed to watch them go out for their morning exercise, four hundred at a time, in a whirlwind of dust. In the outer courts of the palace it was open to him to come and go as he chose — to watch the toilets of the elephants when the Maharajah went out in state, to laugh with the quarter-guard, and to unearth dragon-headed, snake-throated pieces of artillery, invented by native artificers, who, here in the East, had dreamed of the mitrailleuse. But Kate could go where he was forbidden to venture. He knew the life of a white woman to be as safe in Rhatore as in Topaz; but on the first day she disappeared, untroubled and unquestioning, behind the darkness of the veiled door leading to the apartments of the women of the palace, he found his hand going instinctively to the butt of his revolver.