Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [14]
22. Maugham, Choice of Kipling’s Prose, p. xix.
23. Henry James, Letters, Volume IV, 1895-1916, edited by Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 210.
A Note on the Notes
When Kim appeared, Kipling’s father called it “so Indian, so remote, and in appearance so uncaring for the ordinary reader” (A. W. Baldwin, “John Lockwood Kipling,” in The Age of Kipling: The Man, His Work, and His World, edited by John Gross; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972, p. 23). He meant that Kipling, carried away by his insider’s knowledge, filled the novel with hundreds of obscure references to Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim beliefs; place names, tribes, and castes; tools and trades; military history and social customs; a multitude of Hindi words; and many allusions to the King James Bible and Shakespeare. T. H. White, author of The Once and Future King, told his friend David Garnett: “Did you know that I was born in India and could speak Hindustani before I could speak English? You probably have to be like that to understand Kim properly” (The White/Garnett Letters, edited by David Garnett; London: Jonathan Cape, 1968, p. 85). The turn-of-the-century British audience was far more familiar than we are with Kipling’s distant, exotic, and alien world. The extensive annotations in this edition will help the modern reader to understand the contexts and catch the flavor of the novel.
Chapter I
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when ‘the heathen’ pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!1
Buddha at Kamakura.
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah2 on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore3 Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon,’ hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.
There was some justification for Kim,—he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions,4—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white—a poor white of the very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and pretended to keep a secondhand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim’s mother’s sister; but his mother had been nurse-maid in a Colonel’s family and had married Kimball O’Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and Delhi Railway, and his Regiment went home without him. The wife died of cholera in Ferozepore,5 and O‘Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O’Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites do in India. His estate at death consisted of three papers—one he called his ‘ne varietur’6 because those words were written below his signature thereon, and another his ‘clearance-certificate.’7 The third was Kim’s birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic—such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher—the Magic House, as we name the Masonic Lodge.8 It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim’s horn would be exalted between pillars—monstrous pillars—of beauty and strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest Regiment in the world, would attend to Kim,—little Kim that should have been better off than his father. Nine hundred first-class devils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green