Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [111]
‘Cease, Holy One! In mercy, cease!’ cried the Jat. ‘Do not curse the household. I saw nothing! I heard nothing! I am thy cow!’ and he made to grab at Kim’s bare foot beating rhythmically on the carriage floor.
‘But since thou hast been permitted to aid me in the matter of a pinch of flour and a little opium and such trifles as I have honoured by using in my art, so will the Gods return a blessing,’ and he gave it at length, to the man’s immense relief. It was one that he had learned from Lurgan Sahib.
The lama stared through his spectacles as he had not stared at the business of disguisement.
‘Friend of the Stars,’ he said at last, ‘thou hast acquired great wisdom. Beware that it does not give birth to pride. No man having the Law before his eyes speaks hastily of any matter which he has seen or encountered.’
‘No—no—no, indeed,’ cried the farmer, fearful lest the master should be minded to improve on the pupil. E.23, with relaxed mouth, gave himself up to the opium that is meat, tobacco, and medicine to the spent Asiatic.
So, in a silence of awe and great miscomprehension, they slid into Delhi about lamp-lighting time.
Chapter XII
Who hath desired the Sea—the sight of salt-water unbounded?
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the
comber291 wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm—grey, foamless,
caormous, and growing?
Stark calm on the lap of the Line292—or the crazy-eyed
hurricane blowing?
His Sea in no showing the same—his Sea and the same ’neath
all showing—
His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise—so and no otherwise hill-men desire
their Hills!
The Sea and the Hills.
I have found my heart again,’ said E.23, under cover of the platform’s tumult. ‘Hunger and fear make men dazed, or I might have thought of this escape before. I was right. They come to hunt for me. Thou hast saved my head.’
A group of yellow-trousered Punjab policemen, headed by a hot and perspiring young Englishman, parted the crowd about the carriages. Behind them, inconspicuous as a cat, ambled a small fat person who looked like a lawyer’s tout.
‘See the young Sahib reading from a paper. My description is in his hand,’ said E.23. ‘They go carriage by carriage, like fisher-folk netting a pool.’
When the procession reached their compartment, E.23 was counting his beads with a steady jerk of the wrist; while Kim jeered at him for being so drugged as to have lost the ringed firetongs which are the Saddhu’s distinguishing mark. The lama, deep in meditation, stared straight before him; and the farmer, glancing furtively, gathered up his belongings.
‘Nothing here but a parcel of holy-bolies,’ said the Englishman aloud, and passed on amid a ripple of uneasiness; for native police mean extortion to the native all India over.
‘The trouble now,’ whispered E.23, ‘lies in sending a wire as to the place where I hid that letter I was sent to find. I cannot go to the tar-office293 in this guise.’
‘Is it not enough I have saved thy neck?’
‘Not if the work be left unfinished. Did never the healer of sick pearls tell thee so? Comes another Sahib! Ah!’
This was a tallish, sallowish District Superintendent of Police,—belt, helmet, polished spurs and all,—strutting and twirling his dark moustache.
‘What fools are these Police Sahibs!’ said Kim genially.
E.23 glanced up under his eyelids. ‘It is well said,’ he muttered in a changed voice. ‘I go to drink water. Keep my place.’
He blundered out almost into the Englishman’s arms, and was bad-worded in clumsy Urdu.
‘Tum mut? You drunk? You mustn’t bang about as though Delhi station belonged to you, my friend.’
E.23, not moving a muscle of his countenance, answered with a stream of the filthiest abuse, at which Kim naturally rejoiced. It reminded him of the drummer-boys and the barrack-sweepers at Umballa in the terrible time of his first schooling.
‘My good fool,’ the Englishman drawled. ‘Nickle-jao! Go back to your carriage.