Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [146]
‘Send him here, mother’—the twinkle returned to Kim’s eye for a flash—‘and I will try.’
‘I’ll send him, but to chase him off is an ill turn. At least he had the sense to fish the Holy One out of the brook; thus, as the Holy One did not say, acquiring merit.’
‘He is a very wise hakim. Send him, mother.’
‘Priest praising priest? A miracle! If he is any friend of thine (ye squabbled at your last meeting) I’ll hale him here with horse-ropes and—and give him a caste-dinner afterwards, my son.... Get up and see the world! This lying abed is the mother of seventy devils ... my son! my son!’
She trotted forth to raise a typhoon off the cookhouse, and almost on her shadow rolled in the Babu, robed as to the shoulders like a Roman emperor, jowled like Titus, 359 bare-headed, with new patent-leather shoes, in highest condition of fat, exuding joy and salutations.
‘By Jove, Mister O’Hara, but I am jolly-glad to see you. I will kindly shut the door. It is a pity you are sick. Are you very sick?’
‘The papers—the papers from the kilta. The maps and the murasla!’ He held out the key impatiently; for the present need on his soul was to get rid of the loot.
‘You are quite right. That is correct Departmental view to take. You have got everything?’
‘All that was hand-written in the kilta I took. The rest I threw down the hill.’ He could hear the key’s grate in the lock, the sticky pull of the slow-rending oilskin, and a quick shuffling of papers. He had been annoyed out of all reason by the knowledge that they lay below him through the sick idle days—a burden incommunicable. For that reason the blood tingled through his body, when Hurree, skipping elephantinely, shook hands again.
‘This is fine! This is finest! Mister O’Hara! You have—ha! ha!—swiped the whole bag of tricks—locks, stocks, and barrels. They told me it was eight months’ work gone up the spouts! By Jove, how they beat me! .... Look, here is the letter from Hilás!’ He intoned a line or two of Court Persian, which is the language of authorised and unauthorised diplomacy. ’Mister Rajah Sahib has just about put his foot in the holes. He will have to explain offeecially how the deuce-an‘-all he is writing love-letters to the Czar. And they are very clever maps ... and there is three or four Prime Ministers of these parts implicated by the correspondence. By Gad, sar! The British Government will change the succession in Hilás and Bunár, and nominate new heirs to the throne. “Trea-son most base”360 ... but you do not understand? Eh?’
‘Are they in thy hands?’ said Kim. It was all he cared for.
‘Just you jolly-well bet yourself they are.’ He stowed the entire trove about his body, as only Orientals can. ‘They are going up to the office too. The old lady thinks I am a permanent fixture here, but I shall go away with these straight off—immediately. Mr. Lurgan will be proud man. You are offeecially subordinate to me, but I shall embody your name in my verbal report. It is a pity we are not allowed written reports. We Bengalis excel in thee exact science.’ He tossed back the key and showed the box empty.
‘Good. That is good. I was very tired. My Holy One was sick, too. And did he fall into—’
‘Oah yess. I am his good friend, I tell you. He was behaving very strange when I came down after you, and I thought perhaps he might have the papers. I followed him on his meditations, and to discuss ethnological points also. You see, I am verree small person here nowadays, in comparison with all his charms. By Jove, O’Hara, do you know, he is afflicted with infirmity of fits. Yess, I tell you. Cataleptic, too, if not also epileptic. I found him in such a state under a tree in articulo mortem,361 and he jumped up and walked into a brook and he was nearly drowned but for me. I pulled him out.’
‘Because I was not there!’ said Kim. ‘He might have died.’
‘Yes, he might have died, but he is dry now, and asserts he has undergone transfiguration.’ The Babu tapped his forehead knowingly. ‘I took notes of his statements for Royal Society—in posse.362 You must make haste and be quite well and come back to Simla, and I will tell you all my tale at Lurgan