Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [120]
The palanquin reeled off, followed by straggling torches and a horde of dogs. Twenty villages knew the Sahiba—her failings, her tongue, and her large charity. Twenty villages cheated her after immemorial custom, but no man would have stolen or robbed within her jurisdiction for any gift under heaven. None the less, she made great parade of her formal inspections, the riot of which could be heard half-way to Mussoorie.306
Kim relaxed, as one augur must when he meets another. The hakim, still squatting, slid over his hookah with a friendly foot, and Kim pulled at the good weed. The hangers-on expected grave professional debate, and perhaps a little free doctoring.
‘To discuss medicine before the ignorant is of one piece with teaching the peacock to sing,’ said the hakim.
‘True courtesy,’ Kim echoed, ‘is very often inattention.’
These, be it understood, were company-manners, designed to impress.
‘Hi! I have an ulcer on my leg,’ cried a scullion. ‘Look at it!’
‘Get hence! Remove!’ said the hakim. ‘Is it the habit of the place to pester honoured guests? Ye crowd in like buffaloes.’
‘If the Sahiba knew—’ Kim began.
‘Ai! Ai! Come away. They are meat for our mistress. When her young Shaitan’s colics are cured perhaps we poor people may be suffered to—’
‘The mistress fed thy wife when thou wast in jail for breaking the money-lender’s head. Who speaks against her?’ The old servitor curled his white moustaches savagely in the young moonlight. ‘I am responsible for the honour of this house. Go!’ and he drove the underlings before him.
Said the hakim, hardly more than shaping the words with his lips: ‘How do you do, Mister O’Hara? I am jolly glad to see you again.’
Kim’s hand clenched about the pipe-stem. Anywhere on the open road, perhaps, he would not have been astonished; but here, in this quiet backwater of life, he was not prepared for Hurree Babu, It annoyed him, too, that he bad been hoodwinked.
‘Ah ha! I told you at Lucknow—resurgam—I shall rise again and you shall not know me. How much did you bet—eh?’
He chewed leisurely upon a few cardamom seeds, but he breathed uneasily.
‘But why come here, Babuji?’
‘Ah! Thatt is the question,307 as Shakespeare hath it. I come to congratulate you on your extraordinary effeecient performance at Delhi. Oah! I tell you we are all proud of you. It was verree neat and handy. Our mutual friend, he is old friend of mine. He has been in some dam’-tight places. Now he will be in some more. He told me; I tell Mr. Lurgan; and he is pleased you graduate so nicely. All the Department is pleased.’
For the first time in his life, Kim thrilled to the clean pride (it can be a deadly pitfall, none the less) of Departmental praise—ensnaring praise from an equal of work appreciated by fellow-workers. Earth has nothing on the same plane to compare with it. But, cried the Oriental in him, Babus do not travel far to retail compliments.
‘Tell thy tale, Babu,’ he said authoritatively.
‘Oah, it is nothing. Onlee I was at Simla when the wire came in about what our mutual friend said he had hidden, and old Creighton—’ He looked to see how Kim would take this piece of audacity.
‘The Colonel Sahib,’ the boy from St. Xavier’s corrected.
‘Of course. He found me at a loose string, and I had to go down to Chitor to find that beastly letter. I do not like the South—too much railway travel; but I drew good travelling allowance. Ha! Ha! I meet our mutual at Delhi on the way back. He lies quiett just now, and says Saddhu-disguise suits him to the ground. Well, there I hear what you have done so well, so quickly, upon the instantaneous spur of the moment. I tell our mutual you take the bally bun,308 by Jove! It was splendid. I come to tell you so.’
‘Umm!’
The frogs were busy in the ditches, and the moon slid to her setting. Some happy servant had gone out to commune with the night and to beat upon a drum.