Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [73]
‘But whither shall I send my letters?’ wailed Kim, clutching at the robe, all forgetful that he was a Sahib.
‘To the Temple of the Tirthankars at Benares. That is the place I have chosen till I find my River. Do not weep; for, look you, all Desire is Illusion and a new binding upon the Wheel. Go up to the Gates of Learning. Let me see thee go.... Dost thou love me? Then go, or my heart cracks.190 ... I will come again. Surely I will come again.’
The lama watched the ticca-gharri rumble into the compound, and strode off, snuffing between each long stride.
‘The Gates of Learning’ shut with a clang.
The country born and bred boy has his own manners and customs, which do not resemble those of any other land; and his teachers approach him by roads which an English master would not understand. Therefore you would scarcely be interested in Kim’s experiences as a St. Xavier’s boy among two or three hundred precocious youths, most of whom had never seen the sea. He suffered the usual penalties for breaking out of bounds when there was cholera in the city. This was before he had learned to write fair English, and so was obliged to find a bazar letter-writer. He was, of course, indicted for smoking and for the use of abuse more full-flavoured than even St. Xavier’s had ever heard. He learned to wash himself with the Levitical191 scrupulosity of the native-born, who in his heart considers the Englishman rather dirty. He played the usual tricks on the patient coolies pulling the punkahs192 in the sleeping-rooms where the boys threshed through the hot nights telling tales till the dawn; and quietly he measured himself against his self-reliant mates.
They were sons of subordinate officials in the Railway, Telegraph, and Canal Services; of warrant-officers, sometimes retired and sometimes acting as commanders-in-chief to a feudatory Rajah’s army; of captains of the Indian Marine, Government pensioners, planters, Presidency193 shopkeepers, and missionaries. A few were cadets of the old Eurasian houses that have taken strong root in Dhurrumtollahll—Pereiras, De Souzas, and D’Silvas. Their parents could well have educated them in England, but they loved the school that had served their own youth, and generation followed sallow-hued generation at St. Xavier’s. Their homes ranged from Howrah of the railway people to abandoned cantonments like Monghyr and Chunar;194 lost tea-gardens Shillong195 way; villages where their fathers were large landholders in Oudh or the Deccan; 196 Mission-stations a week from the nearest railway line; seaports a thousand miles south, facing the brazen Indian surf; and cinchona 197-plantations south of all. The mere story of their adventures, which to them were no adventures, on their road to and from school would have crisped a Western boy’s hair. They were used to jogging off alone through a hundred miles of jungle, where there was always the delightful chance of being delayed by tigers; but they would no more have bathed in the English Channel in an English August than their brothers across the world would have lain still while a leopard snuffed at their palanquin. There were boys of fifteen who had spent a day and a half on an islet in the middle of a flooded river, taking charge, as by right, of a camp of frantic pilgrims returning from a shrine. There were seniors who had requisitioned a chance-met Rajah’s elephant in the name of St. Francis Xavier, when the Rains once blotted out the cart-track that led to their father’s estate, and had all but lost the huge beast in a quicksand. There was a boy, who, he said, and none doubted, had helped his father to beat off with rifles from the veranda a rush of Akas198 in the days when those head-hunters were bold against lonely plantations.
And every tale was told in the even, passionless voice of the native-born, mixed with quaint reflections, borrowed unconsciously from native foster-mothers, and turns of speech that showed they had been that instant translated from the vernacular. Kim watched, listened, and approved. This was not insipid, single-word