Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

  He slipped out noiselessly as a cat, on the Umballa road, hailed a passing cart and jingled away, while Kim, tongue-tied, twiddled the brass betel-box in his hands.

  The record of a boy’s education interests few save his parents, and, as you know, Kim was an orphan. It is written in the books of St. Xavier’s in Partibus that a report of Kim’s progress was forwarded at the end of each term to Colonel Creighton and to Father Victor, from whose hands duly came the money for his schooling. It is further recorded in the same books that he showed a great aptitude for mathematical studies as well as mapmaking, and carried away a prize (The Life of Lord Lawrence237 tree-calf, two vols., nine rupees, eight annas) for proficiency therein; and the same term played in St. Xavier’s eleven against the Alighur 238 Mohammedan College, his age being fourteen years and ten months. He was also revaccinated (from which we may assume that there had been another epidemic of smallpox at Lucknow) about the same time. Pencil notes on the edge of an old muster-roll record that he was punished several times for ‘conversing with improper persons,’ and it seems that he was once sentenced to heavy pains for ‘absenting himself for a day in the company of a street beggar.’ That was when he got over the gate and pleaded with the lama through a whole day down the banks of the Gumti to accompany him on the Road next holidays—for one month—for a little week; and the lama set his face as a flint against it, averring that the time had not yet come. Kim’s business, said the old man as they ate cakes together, was to get all the wisdom of the Sahibs and then he would see. The Hand of Friendship must in some way have averted the Whip of Calamity, for six weeks later Kim seems to have passed an examination in elementary surveying ‘with great credit,’ his age being fifteen years and eight months. From this date the record is silent. His name does not appear in the year’s batch of those who entered for the subordinate Survey of India, but against it stand the words ‘removed on appointment.’

  Several times in those three years, cast up at the Temple of the Tirthankars in Benares the lama, a little thinner and a shade yellower, if that were possible, but gentle and untainted as ever. Sometimes it was from the South that he came—from south of Tuticorin,239 whence the wonderful fireboats go to Ceylon where are priests who know Pali;240 sometimes it was from the wet green West and the thousand cotton-factory chimneys that ring Bombay; and once from the North, where he had doubled back eight hundred miles to talk for a day with the Keeper of the Images in the Wonder House. He would stride to his cell in the cool, cut marble—the priests of the Temple were good to the old man,—wash off the dust of travel, make prayer, and depart for Lucknow, well accustomed now to the ways of the rail, in a third-class carriage. Returning, it was noticeable, as his friend the Seeker pointed out to the head-priest, that he ceased for a while to mourn the loss of his River, or to draw wondrous pictures of the Wheel of Life, but preferred to talk of the beauty and wisdom of a certain mysterious chela whom no man of the Temple had ever seen. Yes, he had followed the traces of the Blessed Feet throughout all India. (The Curator has still in his possession a most marvellous account of his wanderings and meditations.) There remained nothing more in life but to find the River of the Arrow. Yet it was shown to him in his dreams that it was a matter not to be undertaken with any hope of success unless that seeker had with him the one chela appointed to bring the event to a happy issue, and versed in great wisdom—such wisdom as white-haired Keepers of Images possess. For example, (here came out the snuff-gourd, and the kindly Jain priests made haste to be silent):

  ‘Long and long ago, when Devadatta was King of Benares—let all listen to the Jâtaka!241—an elephant was captured for a time by the king’s hunters and, ere he broke free, beringed with a grievous leg-iron. This he strove to remove with hate and frenzy in his heart, and hurrying up and down the forests, besought his brother-elephants to wrench it asunder. One by one, with their strong trunks, they tried and failed. At the last they gave it as their opinion that the ring was not to be broken by any bestial power. And in a thicket, new-born, wet with the moisture of birth, lay a day-old calf of the herd whose mother had died. The fettered elephant, forgetting his own agony, said: “If I do not help this suckling it will perish under our feet.” So he stood above the young thing, making his legs buttresses against the uneasily moving herd; and he begged milk of a virtuous cow, and the calf throve, and the ringed elephant was the calf’s guide and defence. Now the days of an elephant—let all listen to the Jâtaka!—are thirty-five years to his full strength, and through thirty-five Rains the ringed elephant befriended the younger, and all the while the fetter ate into the flesh.

  ‘Then one day the young elephant saw the half-buried iron, and turning to the elder said: “What is this ?” “It is even my sorrow,” said he who had befriended him. Then that other put out his trunk and in the twinkling of an eyelash abolished the ring, saying: “The appointed time has come.” So the virtuous elephant who had waited temperately and done kind acts was relieved, at the appointed time, by the very calf whom he had turned aside to cherish—let all listen to the Jâtaka!—for the Elephant was Ananda, and the Calf that broke the ring was none other than The Lord Himself....’

  Then he would shake his head benignly, and over the ever-clicking rosary point out how free that elephant-calf was from the sin of pride. He was as humble as a chela who, seeing his master sitting in the dust outside the Gates of Learning, overleapt the gates (though they were locked) and took his master to his heart in the presence of the proud-stomached city. Rich would be the reward of such a master and such a chela when the time came for them to seek freedom together!

  So did the lama speak, coming and going across India as softly as a bat. A sharp-tongued old woman in a house among the fruit-trees behind Saharunpore honoured him as the woman who honoured the prophet,242 but his chamber was by no means upon the wall. In an apartment of the forecourt overlooked by cooing doves he would sit, while she laid aside her useless veil and chattered of spirits and fiends of Kulu, of grandchildren unborn, and of the free-tongued brat who had talked to her in the resting-place. Once, too, he strayed alone from the Grand Trunk Road below Umballa to the very village whose priest had tried to drug him; but the kind Heaven that guards lamas sent him at twilight through the crops, absorbed and unsuspicious, to the Rissaldar’s door. Here was like to have been a grave misunderstanding, for the old soldier asked him why the Friend of the Stars had gone that way only six days before.

  ‘That may not be,’ said the lama. ‘He has gone back to his own people.’

  ‘He sat in that corner telling a hundred merry tales five nights ago,’ his host insisted. ‘True, he vanished somewhat suddenly in the dawn after foolish talk with my grand-daughter. He grows apace, but he is the same Friend of the Stars as brought me true word of the war. Have ye parted?’

  ‘Yes—and no,’ the lama replied. ‘We—we have not altogether parted, but the time is not ripe that we should take the Road together. He acquires wisdom in another place. We must wait.’

  ‘All one—but if it were not the boy how did he come to speak so continually of thee?’

  ‘And what said he?’ asked the lama eagerly.

  ‘Sweet words—an hundred thousand—that thou art his father and mother and such all. Pity that he does not take the Queen’s service. He is fearless.’

  This news amazed the lama, who did not then know how religiously Kim kept to the contract made with Mahbub Ali and per-force ratified by Colonel Creighton....

  ‘There is no holding the young pony from the game,’ said the horse-dealer when the Colonel pointed out that vagabonding over India in holiday time was absurd. ‘If permission be refused to go and come as he chooses, he will make light of the refusal. Then who is to catch him? Colonel Sahib, only once in a thousand years is a horse born so well fitted for the game as this our colt. And we need men.’

  Chapter X

  Your tiercel’s too long at hack, Sire. He’s no eyass243

  But a passage-hawk that footed ere we caught hi
m,

  Dangerously free o’ the air. Faith! were he mine

  (As mine’s the glove he binds to for his tirings)

  I’d fly him with a make-hawk. He’s in yarak244

  Plumed to the very point—so manned, so weathered ...

  Give him the firmament God made him for,

  And what shall take the air of him?

  Gow’s Watch.

  Lurgan Sahib did not use as direct speech, but his advice tallied with Mahbub’s; and the upshot was good for Kim. He knew better now than to leave Lucknow city in native garb, and if Mahbub were anywhere within reach of a letter, it was to Mahbub’s camp he headed, and made his change under the Pathan’s wary eye. Could the little Survey paint-box that he used for map-tinting in term-time have found a tongue to tell of holiday doings, he might have been expelled. Once Mahbub and he went together as far as the beautiful city of Bombay, with three truck-loads of tram-horses, and Mahbub nearly melted when Kim proposed a sail in a dhow‡ across the Indian Ocean to buy Gulf Arabs,§ which, he understood from a hanger-on of the dealer Abdul Rahman, fetched better prices than mere Kabulis.

  He dipped his hand into the dish with that great trader when Mahbub and a few co-religionists were invited to a big Haj dinner. They came back by way of Karachill by sea, when Kim took his first experience of sea-sickness on the fore-hatch of a coasting-steamer, well persuaded he had been poisoned. The Babu’s famous drug-box proved useless, though Kim had restocked it at Bombay. Mahbub had business at Q,uetta,245 and there Kim, as Mahbub admitted, earned his keep, and perhaps a little over, by spending four curious days as scullion in the house of a fat Commissariat sergeant, from whose office-box, in an auspicious moment, he removed a little vellum ledger which he copied out—it seemed to deal entirely with cattle and camel sales—by moonlight, lying behind an outhouse, all through one hot night. Then he returned the ledger to its place, and, at Mahbub’s word, left that service unpaid, rejoining him six miles down the road, the clean copy in his bosom.

  ‘That soldier is a small fish,’ Mahbub Ali explained, ‘but in time we shall catch the larger one. He only sells oxen at two prices—one for himself and one for the Government—which I do not think is a sin.’

  ‘Why could not I take away the little book and be done with it?’

  ‘Then he would have been frightened, and he would have told his master. Then we should miss, perhaps, a great number of new rifles which seek their way up from Quetta to the North. The Game is so large that one sees but a little at a time.’

  ‘Oho!’ said Kim, and held his tongue. That was in the monsoon holidays, after he had taken the prize for mathematics. The Christmas holidays he spent—deducting ten days for private amusements—with Lurgan Sahib, where he sat for the most part in front of a roaring wood-fire—Jakko road was four feet deep in snow that year—and—the small Hindu had gone away to be married—helped Lurgan to thread pearls. He made Kim learn whole chapters of the Koran by heart, till he could deliver them with the very roll and cadence of a mullah. Moreover, he told Kim the names and properties of many native drugs, as well as the runes proper to recite when you administer them. And in the evenings he wrote charms on parchment—elaborate pentagrams crowned with the names of devils—Murra, and Awan the Companion of Kings—all fantastically written in the corners. More to the point, he advised Kim as to the care of his own body, the cure of fever-fits, and simple remedies of the Road. A week before it was time to go down, Colonel Creighton Sahib—this was unfair—sent Kim a written examination-paper that concerned itself solely with rods and chains and links and angles.

  Next holidays he was out with Mahbub, and here, by the way, he nearly died of thirst, plodding through the sand on a camel to the mysterious city of Bikanir,246 where the wells are four hundred feet deep, and lined throughout with camel-bone. It was not an amusing trip from Kim’s point of view, because—in defiance of the contract—the Colonel ordered him to make a map of that wild, walled city; and since Mohammedan horse-boys and pipe-tenders are not expected to drag Survey-chains round the capital of an independent Native State, Kim was forced to pace all his distances by means of a bead rosary. He used the compass for bearings as occasion served—after dark chiefly, when the camels had been fed—and by the help of his little Survey paint-box of six colour-cakes and three brushes, he achieved something not remotely unlike the city of Jeysulmir.247 Mahbub laughed a great deal, and advised him to make up a written report as well; and in the back of the big account-book that lay under the flap of Mahbub’s pet saddle Kim fell to work.

  ‘It must hold everything that thou hast seen or touched or considered. Write as though the Jang-i-Lat Sahib himself had come by stealth with a vast army outsetting to war.’

  ‘How great an army?’

  ‘Oh, halfalakh248 of men.’

  ‘Folly! Remember how few and bad were the wells in the sand. Not a thousand thirsty men could come near by here.’

  ‘Then write that down—also all the old breaches in the walls—and whence the firewood is cut—and what is the temper and disposition of the King. I stay here till all my horses are sold. I will hire a room by the gateway, and thou shalt be my accountant. There is a good lock to the door.’

  The report in its unmistakable St. Xavier’s running script, and the brown, yellow, and lake-daubed map, was on hand a few years ago (a careless clerk filed it with the rough notes of E.23’s second Seistan249 survey), but by now the pencil characters must be almost illegible. Kim translated it, sweating under the light of an oil-lamp, to Mahbub, the second day of their return-journey. The Pathan rose and stooped over his dappled saddle-bags.

  ‘I knew it would be worthy a dress of honour, and so I made one ready,’ he said smiling. ‘Were I Amir of Afghanistan (and some day we may see him), I would fill thy mouth with gold.’ He laid the garments formally at Kim’s feet. There was a gold-embroidered Peshawur turban-cap, rising to a cone, and a big turban-cloth ending in a fringe of gold. There was a Delhi embroidered waistcoat to slip over a milky white shirt, fastening to the right, ample and flowing; green pyjamas with twisted silk waist-string; and that nothing might be lacking, russia-leather slippers, smelling divinely, with arrogantly curled tips.

  ‘Upon a Wednesday, and in the morning, to put on new clothes is auspicious,’ said Mahbub solemnly. ‘But we must not forget the wicked folk in the world. So!’

  He capped all the splendour, that was taking Kim’s delighted breath away, with a mother-of-pearl, nickel-plated, self-extracting .450 revolver.

  ‘I had thought of a smaller bore, but reflected that this takes Government bullets. A man can always come by those—especially across the Border. Stand up and let me look.’ He clapped Kim on the shoulder. ‘May you never be tired, Pathan! Oh, the hearts to be broken! Oh, the eyes under the eyelashes, looking sideways!’

  Kim turned about, pointed his toes, stretched, and felt mechanically for the moustache that was just beginning. Then he stooped towards Mahbub’s feet to make proper acknowledgment with fluttering, quick-patting hands; his heart too full for words. Mahbub forestalled and embraced him.

  ‘My son,’ said he, ‘what need of words between us? But is not the little gun a delight? All six cartridges come out at one twist. It is borne in the bosom next the skin, which, as it were, keeps it oiled. Never put it elsewhere, and please God, thou shalt some day kill a man with it.’

  ‘Hai mai!’ said Kim ruefully. ‘If a Sahib kills a man he is hanged in the jail.’

  ‘True: but one pace beyond the Border, men are wiser. Put it away; but fill it first. Of what use is a gun unfed?’

  ‘When I go back to the madrissah I must return it. They do not allow little guns. Thou wilt keep it for me?’

  ‘Son, I am wearied of that madrissah, where they take the best years of a man to teach him what he can only learn upon the Road. The folly of the Sahibs has neither top nor bottom. No matter. Maybe thy written report shall save thee further bondage; and God He knows we need men more and more in the Game.’
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  They marched, jaw-bound against blowing sand, across the salt desert to Jodhpur, where Mahbub and his handsome nephew Habib Ullah did much trading; and then sorrowfully, in European clothes, which he was fast outgrowing, Kim went second-class to St. Xavier’s. Three weeks later, Colonel Creighton, pricing Tibetan ghost-daggers at Lurgan’s shop, faced Mahbub Ali openly mutinous. Lurgan Sahib operated as support in reserve.

  ‘The pony is made—finished—mouthed and paced, Sahib! From now on, day by day, he will lose his manners if he is kept at tricks. Drop the rein on his back and let go,’ said the horse-dealer. ‘We need him.’

  ‘But he is so young, Mahbub—not more than sixteen—is he ?’

  ‘When I was fifteen, I had shot my man and begot my man, Sahib.’

  ‘You impenitent old heathen!’ Creighton turned to Lurgan. The black beard nodded assent to the wisdom of the Afghan’s dyed scarlet.

  ‘I should have used him long ago,’ said Lurgan. ‘The younger the better. That is why I always have my really valuable jewels watched by a child. You sent him to me to try. I tried him in every way: he is the only boy I could not make to see things.’

  ‘In the crystal—in the ink-pool?’ demanded Mahbub.

  ‘No. Under my hand, as I told you. That has never happened before. It means that he is strong enough—but you think it skittles, 250 Colonel Creighton—to make any one do anything he wants. And that is three years ago. I have taught him a good deal since, Colonel Creighton. I think you waste him now.’