Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [27]
‘I said we might have gone by cart along the road,’ said the husband, ‘and thus saved some money.’
‘Yes—and spent twice over what we saved on food by the way.
That was talked out ten thousand times.’
‘Ay, by ten thousand tongues,’ grunted he.
‘The Gods help us poor women if we may not speak. Oho! He is of that sort which may not look at or reply to a woman.’ For the lama, constrained by his Rule, took not the faintest notice of her. ‘And his disciple is like him?’
‘Nay, mother,’ said Kim most promptly. ‘Not when the woman is well-looking and above all charitable to the hungry.’
‘A beggar’s answer,’ said the Sikh laughing. ‘Thou hast brought it on thyself, sister!’ Kim’s hands were crooked in supplication.
‘And whither goest thou?’ said the woman, handing him the half of a cake from a greasy package.
‘Even to Benares.’
‘Jugglers belike?’ the young soldier suggested. ‘Have ye any tricks to pass the time? Why does not that yellow man answer?’
‘Because,’ said Kim stoutly, ‘he is holy, and thinks upon matters hidden from thee.’
‘That may be well. We of the Ludhiana79 Sikhs’—he rolled it out sonorously—‘do not trouble our heads with doctrine. We fight.’80 ‘My sister’s brother’s son is naik [corporal] in that regiment,’ said the Sikh craftsman quietly. ‘There are also some Dogra companies there.’ The soldier glared, for a Dogra is of other caste than a Sikh, and the banker tittered.
‘They are all one to me,’ said the Amritzar girl.
‘That we believe,’ snorted the cultivator’s wife malignantly.
‘Nay, but all who serve the Sirkar81 with weapons in their hands are, as it were, one brotherhood. There is one brotherhood of the caste, but beyond that again’—she looked round timidly—‘the bond of the Pulton—the Regiment—eh?’
‘My brother is in a Jat regiment,’ said the cultivator. ‘Dogras be good men.’
‘Thy Sikhs at least were of that opinion,’ said the soldier, with a scowl at the placid old man in the corner. ‘Thy Sikhs thought so when our two companies came to help them at the Pirzai Kotal in the face of eight Afridi82 standards on the ridge not three months gone.’
He told the story of a Border action in which the Dogra companies of the Ludhiana Sikhs had acquitted themselves well. The Amritzar girl smiled; for she knew the tale was to win her approval.
‘Alas!’ said the cultivator’s wife at the end. ‘So their villages were burnt and their little children made homeless?’
‘They had marked83 our dead. They paid a great payment after we of the Sikhs had schooled them. So it was. Is this Amritzar?’
‘Ay, and here they cut our tickets,’ said the banker, fumbling at his belt.
The lamps were paling in the dawn when the half-caste guard came round. Ticket-collecting is a slow business in the East, where people secrete their tickets in all sorts of curious places. Kim produced his and was told to get out.
‘But I go to Umballa,’ he protested. ‘I go with this holy man.’
‘Thou canst go to Jehannum84 for aught I care. This ticket is only to Amritzar. Out!’
Kim burst into a flood of tears, protesting that the lama was his father and his mother, that he was the prop of the lama’s declining years, and that the lama would die without his care. All the carriage bade the guard be merciful,—the banker was specially eloquent here,—but the guard hauled Kim on to the platform. The lama blinked—he could not overtake the situation—and Kim lifted up his voice and wept outside the carriage window.
‘I am very poor. My father is dead—my mother is dead. O charitable ones, if I am left here, who shall tend that old man?’
‘What—what is this?’ the lama repeated. ‘He must go to Benares. He must come with me. He is my chela. If there is money to be paid—’
‘Oh, be silent,’ whispered Kim; ‘are we Rajahs to throw away good silver when the world is so charitable?’
The Amritzar girl stepped out with her bundles and it was on her that Kim kept his watchful eye. Ladies of that persuasion, he knew, were generous.
‘A ticket—a little tikkut to Umballa—O Breaker of Hearts!’ She laughed. ‘Hast thou no charity?’
‘Does the holy man come from the North?’