Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (597 page)

They brought a card — the housemaid with the fan-teeth held it gingerly between black finger and blacker thumb — and it carried the name Mr. R. H. Hoffer in old Gothic letters. A hasty rush through the file of bills showed me that I owed nothing to any Mr. Hoffer, and assuming my sweetest smile, I bade Fan of the Teeth show him up. Enter stumblingly an entirely canary-coloured young person about twenty years of age, with a suspicious bulge in the bosom of his coat. He had grown no hair on his face; his eyes were of a delicate water-green, and his hat was a brown billycock, which he fingered nervously. As the room was blue with tobacco- smoke (and Latakia at that) he coughed even more nervously, and began seeking for me. I hid behind the writing-table and took notes. What I most noted was the bulge in his bosom. When a man begins to bulge as to that portion of his anatomy, hit him in the eye, for reasons which will be apparent later on.

He saw me and advanced timidly. I invited him seductively to the only other chair, and “What’s the trouble?” said I.

“I wanted to see you,” said he.

“I am me,” said I.

“I — I — I thought you would be quite otherwise,” said he.

“I am, on the contrary, completely this way,” said I. “Sit still, take your time and tell me all about it.”

He wriggled tremulously for three minutes, and coughed again. I surveyed him, and waited developments. The bulge under the bosom crackled. Then I frowned. At the end of three minutes he began.

“I wanted to see what you were like,” said he.

I inclined my head stiffly, as though all London habitually climbed the storeys on the same errand and rather wearied me.

Then he delivered himself of a speech which he had evidently got by heart. He flushed painfully in the delivery.

“I am flattered,” I said at the conclusion. “It’s beastly gratifying. What do you want?”

“Advice, if you will be so good,” said the young man.

“Then you had better go somewhere else,” said I.

The young man turned pink. “But I thought, after I had read your works — all your works, on my word — I had hoped that you would understand me, and I really have come for advice.” The bulge crackled more ominously than ever.

“I understand perfectly,” said I. “You are oppressed with vague and nameless longings, are you not?”

“I am, terribly,” said he.

“You do not wish to be as other men are? You desire to emerge from the common herd, to make your mark, and so forth?”

“Yes,” said he in an awestricken whisper. “That is my desire.”

“Also,” said I, “you love, excessively, in several places at once cooks, housemaids, governesses, schoolgirls, and the aunts of other people.”

“But one only,” said he, and the pink deepened to beetroot.

“Consequently,” said I, “you have written much — you have written verses.”

“It was to teach me to write prose, only to teach me to write prose,” he murmured. “You do it yourself, because I have bought your works — all your works.”

He spoke as if he had purchased dunghills en bloc.

“We will waive that question,” I said loftily. “Produce the verses.”

“They — they aren’t exactly verses,” said the young man, plunging his hand into his bosom.

“I beg your pardon, I meant will you be good enough to read your five-act tragedy.”

“How — how in the world did you know?” said the young man, more impressed than ever.

He unearthed his tragedy, the title of which I have given, and began to read. I felt as though I were walking in a dream; having been till then ignorant of the fact that earth held young men who held five-act tragedies in their insides. The young man gave me the whole of the performance, from the preliminary scene, where nothing more than an eruption of Vesuvius occurs to mar the serenity of the manager, till the very end, where the Roman sentry of Pompeii is slowly banked up with ashes in the presence of the audience, and dies murmuring through his helmet-vizor: “S.P. Q.R.R.I.P.R.S.V.P.,” or words to that effect.

For three hours and one-half he read to me. And then I made a mistake.

“Sir,” said I, “who’s your Ma and Pa?”

“I haven’t got any,” said he, and his lower lip quivered.

“Where do you live?” I said.

“At the back of Tarporley Mews,” said he.

“How?” said I.

“On eleven shillings a week,” said he.

“I was pretty well educated, and if you don’t stay too long they will let you read the books in the Holywell Street stalls.”

“And you wasted your money buying my books,” said I with a lump the size of a bolster in my throat.

“I got them second-hand, four and sixpence,” said he, “and some I borrowed.”

Then I collapsed. I didn’t weep, but I took the tragedy and put it in the fire, and called myself every name that I knew.

This caused the young man to sob audibly, partly from emotion and partly from lack of food.

I took off my hat to him before I showed him out, and we went to a restaurant and I arranged things generally on a financial basis.

Would that I could let the tale stop here. But I cannot.

Three days later a man came to see me on business, an objectionable man of uncompromising truth. Just before he departed he said: “D’ you know anything about the struggling author of a tragedy called ‘The Betrayal of Confidences’?”

“Yes,” said I. “One of the few poor souls who in the teeth of grinding poverty keep alight.”

“At the back of Tarporley Mews,” said he. “On eleven shillings a week.”

“On the mischief!” said I.

“He didn’t happen to tell you that he considered you the finest, subtlest, truest, and so forth of all the living so forths, did he?”

“He may have said something out of the fulness of an overladen heart. You know how unbridled is the enthusiasm of”

“Young gentlemen who buy your books with their last farthing. You didn’t soak it all in by any chance, give him a good meal and half a sovereign as well, did you?”

“I own up,” I said. “I did all that and more. But how do you know?”

“Because he victimised me in the same way a fortnight ago.”

“Thank you for that,” I said, “but I burned his disgusting manuscripts. And he wept.”

“There, unless he keeps a duplicate, you have scored one.”

But considering the matter impartially, it seems to me that the game is not more than “fifteen all” in any light.

It makes me blush to think about it.

THE NEW DISPENSATION — I

LONDON IN A FOG NOVEMBER

THINGS have happened — but that is neither here nor there. What I urgently require is a servant — a nice, fat Mussulman khitmatgar, who is not above doing bearer’s work on occasion. Such a man I would go down to Southampton or Tilbury to meet, would usher tenderly into a first-class carriage (I always go third myself), and wrap in the warmest of flannel. He should be “Jenab “ and I-would be “O Turn.” When he died, as he assuredly would in this weather, I would bury him in my best back garden and write mortuary verses for publication in the Koh-i-Nur, or whatever vernacular paper he might read. I want, in short, a servant; and this is why I am writing to you.

The English, who, by the way, are unmitigated barbarians, maintain cotton-print housemaids to do work which is the manifest portion of a man. Besides which, no properly constructed person cares to see a white woman waiting upon his needs, filling coal-scuttles (these are very mysterious beasts) and tidying rooms. The young homebred Englishman does not object, and one of the most tantalising sights in the world is that of the young man of the house — the son newly introduced to shaving-water and great on the subject of maintaining authority — it is tantalising, I say, to see this young cub hectoring a miserable little slavey for not having lighted a fire or put his slippers in their proper place. The next time a big, bold man from the frontier comes home I shall hire him to kick a few young gentlemen of my acquaintance all round their own drawing-rooms while I lecture on my theory that this sort of thing accounts for the perceptible lack of chivalry in the modern Englishman. Now, if you or I or anybody else raved over and lectured at Kadir Baksh, or Ram Singh, or Jagesa on the necessity of obeying orders and the beauty of reverencing our noble selves, our men would laugh; or if the lecture struck them as too long-winded would ask us if our livers were out of order and recommend dawai. The housemaid must stand with her eyes on the ground while the young whelp sticks his hands under the tail of his dressing-gown and explains her duty to her. This makes me ill and sick — sick for Kadir Baksh, who rose from the earth when I called him, who knew the sequence of my papers and the ordering of my paltry garments, and, I verily believed, loved me not altogether for the sake of lucre. He said he would come with me to Belait because, “though the sahib says he will never return to India, yet I know, and all the other nauker log know, that return is his fate.”

Being a fool, I left Kadir Baksh behind, and now I am alone with housemaids, who will under 110 circumstances sleep on the mat outside the door. Even as I write, one of these persons is cleaning up my room. Kadir Baksh would have done his work without noise. She tramps and scuffles; and, what is much worse, snuffles horribly. Kadir Baksh would have saluted me cheerfully and began some sort of a yarn of the “It hath reached me, O Auspicious King!” order, and perhaps we should have debated over the worthlessness of Dunni, the sals,, or the chances of a little cold-weather expedition, or the wisdom of retaining a fresh chaprassi — some intimate friend of Kadir Baksh. But now I have no horses and no chaprassisj and this smutty-faced girl glares at me across the room as though she expected I was going to eat her.

She must have a soul of her own — a life of her own — and perhaps a few amusements. I can’t get at these things. She says: “Ho, yuss,” and “Ho, no,” and if I hadn’t heard her chattering to the lift-boy on the stairs I should think that her education stopped at these two phrases. Now, I knew all about Kadir Baksh, his hopes and his savings — his experiences in the past, and the health of the little ones. He was a man — a human man remarkably like myself, and he knew that as well as I. A housemaid is of course not a man, but she might at least be a woman. My wanderings about this amazing heathen city have brought me into contact with very many English mem sahibs who seem to be eaten up with the fear of letting their servants get “above their position,” or “presume,” or do something which would shake the foundations of the four-mile cab radius. They seem to carry on a sort of cat-and-mouse war when the husband is at office and they have nothing much to do. Later, at places where their friends assemble, they recount the campaign, and the other women purr approvingly and say: “You did quite right, my dear. It is evident that she forgets her place.”

All this is edifying to^the stranger, and gives him a great idea of the dignity that has to be bolstered and buttressed, eight hours of the twenty-four, against the incendiary attacks of an eighteen-pound including-beer-money sleeps-in-a-garret-at-the-top-of-the-house servant-girl. There is a fine-crusted, slave-holding instinct in the hearts of a good many deepbosomed matrons — a “throw back” to the times when we trafficked in black ivory. At tea-tables and places where they eat muffins it is called dignity. Now, your Kadir Baksh or my Kadir Baksh, who is a downtrodden and oppressed heathen (the young gentlemen who bullyrag white women assure me that we are in the habit of kicking our dependents and beating them with umbrellas daily), would ask for his chits, and probably say something sarcastic ere he drifted out of the compound gate, if you nagged or worried his noble self. He does not know much about the meaner forms of dignity, but he is entirely sound on the subject of izzat; and the fact of his cracking an azure and Oriental jest with you in the privacy of your dressing-room, or seeing you at your incoherent worst when you have an attack of fever, does not in the least affect his general deportment in public, where he knows that the honour of his sahib is his own honour, and dons a new kummerbund on the strength of it.

I have tried to deal with those housemaids in every possible way. To sling a blunt “Annie” or “Mary” or “Jane” at a girl whose only fault is that she is a heavy-handed incompetent, strikes me as rather an insult, seeing that the girl may have a brother, and that if you had a sister who was a servant you would object to her being howled at upstairs and downstairs by her given name. But only ladies’ maids are entitled to their surnames. They are not nice people as a caste, and they regard the housemaids as the chamar regards the mehter. Consequently, I have to call these girls by their Christian names, and cock my feet up on a chair when they are cleaning the grate, and pass them in the halls in the morning as though they didn’t exist. Now, the morning salutation of your Kadir Baksh or my Kadir is a performance which Turveydrop might envy. These persons don’t understand a nod; they think it as bad as a wink, I believe. Respect and courtesy are lost upon them, and I suppose I must gather my dressing-gown into a tail and swear at them in the bloodless voice affected by the British female who — have I mentioned this? — is a highly composite heathen when she comes in contact with her sister clay downstairs.