Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [147]
Kim looked up, over weary to smile, shaking his head in denial. ‘Do not jest,’ said the lama. ‘That time is done. We are here upon great matters. A sickness of soul took me in the Hills, and him a sickness of the body. Since then I have lived upon his strength—eating him.’
‘Children together—young and old,’ she sniffed, but forbore to make any new jokes. ‘May this present hospitality restore ye! Hold awhile and I will come to gossip of the high good Hills.’
At evening time—her son-in-law was returned, so she did not need to go on inspection round the farm—she won to the meat of the matter, explained low-voicedly by the lama. The two old heads nodded wisely together. Kim had reeled to a room with a cot in it, and was dozing soddenly. The lama had forbidden him to set blankets or get food.
‘I know—I know. Who but I?’ she cackled. ‘We who go down to the burning-ghats clutch at the hands of those coming up from the River of Life with full water-jars—yes, brimming water-jars. I did the boy wrong. He lent thee his strength? It is true that the old eat the young daily. Stands now we must restore him.’
‘Thou hast many times acquired merit—’
‘My merit. What is it? Old bag of bones making curries for men who do not ask “Who cooked this?” Now if it were stored up for my grandson—’
‘He that had the belly-pain?’
‘To think the Holy One remembers that! I must tell his mother. It is most singular honour! “He that had the belly-pain”—straightway the Holy One remembered. She will be proud.’
‘My chela is to me as is a son to the unenlightened.’
‘Say grandson, rather. Mothers have not the wisdom of our years. If a child cries they say the heavens are falling. Now a grandmother is far enough separated from the pain of bearing and the pleasure of giving the breast to consider whether a cry is wickedness pure or the wind. And since thou speakest once again of wind, when last the Holy One was here, maybe I offended in pressing for charms.’
‘Sister,’ said the lama, using that form of address a Buddhist monk may sometimes employ towards a nun, ‘if charms comfort thee—’
‘They are better than ten thousand doctors.’
‘I say, if they comfort thee, I who was Abbot of Such-zen, will make as many as thou mayest desire. I have never seen thy face—’
‘That even the monkeys who steal our loquats count for a gain. Hee! hee!’
‘But as he who sleeps there said,’—he nodded at the shut door of the guest-chamber across the forecourt,—‘thou hast a heart of gold.... And he is in the spirit my very “grandson” to me.’
‘Good! I am the Holy One’s cow.’ This was pure Hinduism, but the lama never heeded. ‘I am old. I have borne sons in the body. Oh, once I could please men! Now I can cure them.’ He heard her armlets tinkle as though she bared arms for action. ‘I will take over the boy and dose him, and stuff him, and make him all whole. Hai! hai! We old people know something yet.’
Wherefore when Kim, aching in every bone, opened his eyes, and would go to the cook-house to get his master’s food, he found strong coercion about him, and a veiled old figure at the door, flanked by the grizzled manservant, who told him very precisely the things that he was on no account to do.
‘Thou must have? Thou shalt have nothing. What? A locked box in which to keep holy books? Oh, that is another matter. Heavens forbid I should come between a priest and his prayers! It shall be brought, and thou shalt keep the key.’
They pushed the coffer under his cot, and Kim shut away Mahbub’s pistol, the oilskin packet of letters, and the locked books and diaries, with a groan of relief. For some absurd reason their weight on his shoulders was nothing to their weight on his poor mind. His neck ached under it of nights.
‘Thine is a sickness uncommon in youth these days: since young folk have given up tending their betters. The remedy is sleep, and certain drugs,’ said the Sahiba; and he was glad to give himself up to the blankness