Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (21 page)

‘Where have
you
come from?' said I.

‘From the East,' said he, ‘and I am hoping that you will give him the message on the square – for the sake of my mother as well as your own.'

Englishmen are not usually softened by appeals to the memory of their mothers, but for certain reasons, which will be fully apparent, I saw fit to agree.

‘It's more than a little matter,' said he, ‘and that's why I ask you to do it – and now I know that I can depend on you doing it. A Second-class carriage at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired man asleep in it. You'll be sure to remember. I get out at the next station, and I must hold on there till he comes or sends me what I want.'

‘I'll give the message if I catch him,' I said, ‘and for the sake of your mother as well as mine I'll give you a word of advice. Don't try to run the Central India States just now as the correspondent of the
Backwoodsman.
There's a real one knocking about here, and it might lead to trouble.'

‘Thank you,' said he simply, ‘and when will the swine be gone? I can't starve because he's ruining my work. I wanted toget hold of the Degumber Rajah down here about his father's widow, and give him a jump.' ‘What did he do to his father's widow, then?'‘Filled her up with red pepper and slippered her to death as she hung from a beam. I found that out myself, and I'm the only man that would dare going into the State to get hush-money for it. They'll try to poison me, same as they did in Chortumna when I went on the loot there. But you'll give the man at Marwar Junction my message?'

He got out at a little roadside station, and I reflected. I had heard, more than once, of men personating correspondents of newspapers and bleeding small Native States with threats of exposure, but I had never met any of the caste before. They lead a hard life, and generally die with great suddenness. The Native States have a wholesome horror of English newspapers, which may throw light on their peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke correspondents with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in-hand barouches. They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk or diseased from one end of the year to the other. Native States were created by Providence in order to supply picturesque scenery, tigers and tall-writing. They are the dark places of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty; touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with Princes and Politicals, drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and devoured what I could get, from a plate made of leaves, and drank the running water, and slept under the same rug as my servant. It was all in the day's work.

Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon the proper date, as I had promised, and the night Mail set me down at Marwar Junction, where a funny little, happy-go-lucky, native-managed railway runs to Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail fromDelhi makes a short halt at Marwar. She arrived as I got in, and I had just time to hurry to her platform and go down the carriages. There was only one Second-class on the train. I slipped the window and looked down upon a flaming red beard, half covered by a railway rug. That was my man, fast asleep, and I dug him gently in the ribs. He woke with a grunt and I saw his face in the light of the lamps. It was a great and shining face.

‘Tickets again?' said he.

‘No,' said I. ‘I am to tell you that he is gone South for the week. He is gone South for the week.'

The train had begun to move out. The red man rubbed his eyes. ‘He has gone South for the week,' he repeated. ‘Now that's just like his impidence. Did he say that I was to give you anything? – ‘Cause I won't.'

‘He didn't,' I said and dropped away, and watched the red lights the out in the dark. It was horribly cold because the wind was blowing off the sands. I climbed into my own train – not an Intermediate carriage this time – and went to sleep.

If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept it as a memento of a rather curious affair. But the consciousness of having done my duty was my only reward.

Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my friends could not do any good if they foregathered and personated correspondents of newspapers, and might, if they ‘stuck up' one of the little rat-trap states of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves into serious difficulties. I, therefore, took some trouble to describe them as accurately as I could remember to people who would be interested in deporting them: and succeeded, so I was later informed, in having them headed back from the Degumber borders.

Then I became respectable, and returned to an office where there were no kings and no incidents except the daily manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back-slum of a perfectly inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for commands sit down andsketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve or twenty-four leading articles on Seniority
versus
Selection; missionaries wish to know why they have not been permitted to escape from their regular vehicles of abuse and swear at a brother missionary under special patronage of the editorial We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent punkah-pulling machines, carriage couplings and unbreakable swords and axle trees call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their disposal; tea-companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the office pens; secretaries of ball-committees clamour to have the glories of their last dance more fully expounded; strange ladies rustle in and say: ‘I want a hundred ladies' cards printed
at once,
please,' which is manifestly part of an Editor's duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employment as a proof-reader. And, all the time, the telephone bell is ringing madly, and kings are being killed on the Continent, and empires are saying ‘You're another,' and Mister Gladstone is calling down brimstone upon the British Dominions, and the little black copy-boys are whining like tired bees for more copy to feed the racing machines, and most of the paper is as blank as Modred's shield.

That is the amusing part of the year. There are other six months wherein none ever come to call, and the thermometer walks inch by inch to the top of the glass, and the office is darkened to just above reading-light, and the press machines are red-hot of touch, and nobody writes anything but accounts of amusements in the Hill-stations or obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and women whom you knew intimately, and the prickly heat covers you as with a garment, and you sit down and write: ‘A slight increase of sickness is reported from the Khuda Jhanta Khan District. The outbreak is purely sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the District authorities is now almost at an end. It is, however, with deep regret we record the death, &c.'

Then the sickness really breaks out, and the less recording and reporting the better for the peace of the subscribers. But the Empires and the Kings continue to divert themselves as selfishly as before, and the Foreman thinks that a daily paper really ought to come out once in twenty-four hours, and all the people at the Hill Stations in the middle of their amusements say: ‘Good gracious! Why can't the paper be sparkling? I'm sure there's plenty going on up here.'

That is the dark half of the moon, and as the advertisements say ‘must be experienced to be appreciated'.

It was in that season, and a remarkably evil season, that the paper began running the last issue of the week on Saturday night, which is to say Sunday morning. This was a great convenience, for immediately after the paper was put to bed, the dawn would lower the thermometer from 96°to almost 84° for half an hour, and in that chill – you have no idea how cold is 84° on the grass until you begin to pray for it – a very tired man could set off to sleep ere the heat roused him.

One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty to put the paper to bed alone. A king or courtier, or a courtezan, or a community was going to the or get a new constitution, or do something that was important on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram. It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as a June night can be, and the
loo
,the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that the rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew that was only pretence. It was a shade cooler in the press-room than the office, so I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and the all but naked compositors wiped the sweat from their foreheads and called for water. The thing that was keeping us back, whatever it was, would not come off, though the
loo
dropped, and the last type was set, and the whole round earth stood still in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the event. I drowsed, and wondered, whether the telegraph was a blessing, and whetherthis dying man or struggling people, was aware of the inconvenience the delay was causing. There was no special reason beyond the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands crept up to three o'clock, and the machines spun their fly-wheels two and three times to see that all was in order, before I said the word that would set them off, I could have shrieked aloud.

Then the roar and rattle of the wheels shivered the quiet into little bits. I rose to go away, but two men in white clothes stood in front of me. The first one said: ‘It's him!' the second one said: ‘So it is!' and they both laughed almost as loudly as the machinery roared, and mopped their foreheads. ‘We see there was a light burning across the road and we were sleeping in that ditch there for coolness, and I said to my friend here: “The office is open. Let's come along and speak to him as turned us back from the Degumber State,”' said the smaller of the two. He was the man I had met in Mhow train, and his fellow was the red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. There was no mistaking the eyebrows of the one or the beard of the other.

I was not pleased, because I wished to go to sleep, not to squabble with loafers. ‘What do you want?' I asked.

‘Half an hour's talk with you, cool and comfortable, in the office?' said the red-bearded man. ‘We'd
like
some drink – the Contrack doesn't begin yet, Peachey, so you needn't look – but what we really want is advice. We don't want money. We ask you as a favour, because you did us a bad turn about Degumber.'

I led from the press-room to the stifling office with the maps on the walls, and the red-haired man rubbed his hands. ‘That's something like,' said he. ‘This was the proper shop to come to. Now, Sir, let me introduce to you Brother Peachey Carnehan, that's him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is
me
,and the less said about our professions the better, for we have been most things in our time. Soldier, sailor, compositor, photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher, and correspondents of the
Backwoodsman,
when we thought the paper wanted one. Carnehan is sober, and so am I. Look at us first and see that's sure. It willsave you cutting into my talk. We'll take one of your cigars apiece, and you shall see us light it.'

I watched the test. The men were absolutely sober, so I gave them each a tepid peg.

Well
and
good,' said Carnehan of the eyebrows, wiping the froth from his moustache. ‘Let me talk now, Dan. We have been all over India, mostly on foot. We have been boiler fitters, engine drivers, petty contractors and all that, and we have decided that India isn't big enough for such as us.'

They certainly were too big for the office. Dravot's beard seemed to fill half the room and Carnelian's shoulders the other half, as they sat on the big table. Carnehan continued: ‘The country isn't half worked out because they that governs it won't let you touch it. They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can't lift a spade nor chip a rock, nor look for oil nor anything like that without all the Government saying: “Leave it alone and let us govern”. Therefore, such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away some other place where a man isn't crowded and can to his own. We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that.
Therefore
,we are going away to be Kings.'

‘Kings in our own right,' muttered Dravot.

‘Yes, of course,' I said. ‘You've been tramping in the sun, and it's a very warm night, and hadn't you better sleep over the notion? Come to-morrow.'

‘Neither drunk nor sunstruck,' said Dravot. ‘We have slept over the notion half a year, and require to see Books and Atlases, and we have decided that there is only one place now in the world that two strong men can Sar-a
-whack.
They call it Kafiristan. By my reckoning it's the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than three hundred miles from Peshawar. They have two-and-thirty heathen idols there, and we'll be the thirty-third. It's a mountaineous country, and the women of those parts are very beautiful.'

‘But that is provided against in the Contrack,' said Carnehan. ‘Neither Women nor Liquor, Daniel.'