Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) - Rudyard Kipling [82]
When Mahbub Ali came to his camp in the dawn, no one thought it worth while to tell him any news of the night. No one, at least, but one small horseboy, newly advanced to the great man’s service, whom Mahbub called to his tiny tent to assist in some packing.
‘It is all known to me,’ whispered Kim, bending above saddlebags. ‘Two Sahibs came up on a te rain. I was running to and fro in the dark on this side of the trucks as the te-rain moved up and down slowly. They fell upon two men sitting under this truck—Hajji, what shall I do with this lump of tobacco? Wrap it in paper and put it under the salt-bag? Yes—and struck them down. But one man struck at a Sahib with a fakir’s buck’s horn’ (Kim meant the conjoined blackbuck horns, which are a fakir’s sole temporal weapon)—‘the blood came. So the other Sahib, first smiting his own man senseless, smote the stabber with a short gun which had rolled from the first man’s hand. They all raged as though mad together.’
Mahbub smiled with heavenly resignation. ‘No! That is not so much dewanee [madness, or a case for the civil court—the word can be punned upon both ways] as nizamut [a criminal case]. A gun, sayest thou? Ten good years in jail.’
‘Then they both lay still, but I think they were nearly dead when they were put on the te-rain. Their heads moved thus. And there is much blood on the line. Come and see?’
‘I have seen blood before. Jail is the sure place—and assuredly they will give false names, and assuredly no man will find them for a long time. They were unfriends of mine. Thy fate and mine seem on one string. What a tale for the healer of pearls! Now swiftly with the saddlebags and the cooking-platter. We will take out the horses and away to Simla.’
Swiftly,—as Orientals understand speed,—with long explanations, with abuse and windy talk, carelessly, amid a hundred checks for little things forgotten, the untidy camp broke up and led the half-dozen stiff and fretful horses along the Kalka road in the fresh of the rain-swept dawn. Kim, regarded as Mahbub Ali’s favourite by all who wished to stand well with the Pathan, was not called upon to work. They strolled on by the easiest of stages, halting every few hours at a wayside shelter. Very many Sahibs travel along the Kalka road; and, as Mahbub Ali says, every young Sahib must needs esteem himself a judge of a horse, and, though he be over head in debt to the money-lender, must make as if to buy. That was the reason that Sahib after Sahib, rolling along in a stage-carriage, would stop and open talk. Some would even descend from their vehicles and feel the horses’ legs; asking inane questions, or, through sheer ignorance of the vernacular, grossly insulting the imperturbable trader.
‘When first I dealt with Sahibs, and that was when Colonel Soady Sahib was Governor of Fort Abazai and flooded the Commissioner’s camping-ground for spite,’ Mahbub confided to Kim as the boy filled his pipe under a tree, ‘I did not know how greatly they were fools, and this made me wroth. As thus—’ and he told Kim a tale of an expression, misused in all innocence, that doubled Kim up with mirth. ‘Now I see, however,’—he exhaled smoke slowly,—‘that it is with them as with all men—in certain matters they are wise, and in others most foolish. Very foolish it is to use the wrong word to a stranger; for though the heart may be clean of offence, how is the stranger to know that? He is more like to search truth with a dagger.’
‘True. True talk,’ said Kim solemnly. ‘Fools speak of a cat when a woman is brought to bed, for instance. I have heard them.’
‘Therefore, in one situate as thou art, it particularly behoves thee to remember this with both kinds of faces. Among Sahibs, never forgetting thou art a Sahib; among the folk of Hind, always remembering thou art—’ He paused, with a puzzled smile.
‘What am I? Mussalman, Hindu, Jain, or Buddhist? That is a hard knot.’
‘Thou art beyond question an unbeliever, and therefore thou wilt be damned.