Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (888 page)

Then he became egotistical, this ragged ruffian who conceived that he knew the road to illimitable wealth and told the story of his life, interspersed with anecdotes that would blister the paper they were written on. But through all his ravings, he stuck to his hundred-and-fifty-million theory, and though the listener dissented from him and the brutal cruelty with which his views were stated, an unscientific impression remained not to be shaken off. Across the Border one feels that the country is being used, exploited, “made to sit up,” so to speak. In our territories the feeling is equally strong of wealth “just round the corner,” as the loafer said, of a people wrapped up in cotton wool and ungetatable. Will any man, who really knows something of a little piece of India and has not the fear of running counter to custom before his eyes, explain how this impression is produced, and why it is an erroneous one?

Nasirabad marked the end of the Englishman’s holiday, and there was sorrow in his heart. “Come back again,” said Ram Baksh, cheerfully, “and bring a gun with you. Then I’ll take you to Gungra, and I’ll drive you myself. ‘Drive you just as well as I’ve driven these four days past.” An amicable open-minded soul was Ram Baksh. May his tongas never grow less!

“This ‘ere Burma fever is a bad thing to have. It’s pulled me down awful; an’ now I am going to Peshawar. Are you the Station-master?” It was Thomas — white-cheeked, sunken-eyed, drawn-mouthed Thomas — travelling from Nasirabad to Peshawar on pass; and with him was a Corporal new to his stripes and doing station duty. Every Thomas is interesting, except when he is too drunk to speak. This Thomas was an enthusiast. He had volunteered, from a Home-going regiment shattered by Burma fever, into a regiment at Peshawar, had broken down at Nasirabad on his way up with his draft, and was now journeying into the unknown to pick up another medal. “There’s sure to be something on the Frontier,” said this gaunt, haggard boy — he was little more, though he reckoned four years’ service and considered himself somebody. “When there’s anything going, Peshawar’s the place to be in, they tell me; but I hear we shall have to march down to Calcutta in no time.” The Corporal was a little man and showed his friend off with great pride: “Ah, you should have come to
us
,” said he; “we’re the regiment, we are.” “Well, I went with the rest of our men,” said Thomas. “There’s three hundred of us volunteered to stay on, and we all went for the same regiment. Not but what I’m saying yours is a good regiment,” he added with grave courtesy. This loosed the Corporal’s tongue, and he descanted on the virtues of the regiment and the merits of the officers. It has been written that Thomas is devoid of
esprit de corps
, because of the jerkiness of the arrangements under which he now serves. If this be true, he manages to conceal his feelings very well; for he speaks most fluently in praise of his own regiment; and, for all his youth, has a keen appreciation of the merits of his officers. Go to him when his heart is opened, and hear him going through the roll of the subalterns, by a grading totally unknown in the Army List, and you will pick up something worth the hearing. Thomas, with the Burma fever on him, tried to cut in, from time to time, with stories of his officers and what they had done “when we was marchin’ all up and down Burma,” but the little Corporal went on gayly.

They made a curious contrast — these two types. The lathy, town-bred Thomas with hock-bottle shoulders, a little education, and a keen desire to get more medals and stripes; and the little, deep-chested, bull-necked Corporal brimming over with vitality and devoid of any ideas beyond the “regiment.” And the end of both lives, in all likelihood, would be a nameless grave in some cantonment burying-ground with, if the case were specially interesting and the Regimental Doctor had a turn for the pen, an obituary notice in the Indian Medical Journal. It was an unpleasant thought.

From the Army to the Navy is a perfectly natural transition, but one hardly to be expected in the heart of India. Dawn showed the railway carriage full of riotous boys, for the Agra and Mount Abu schools had broken up for holidays. Surely it was natural enough to ask a child — not a boy, but a child — whether he was going home for the holidays; and surely it was a crushing, a petrifying thing to hear in a clear treble tinged with icy scorn: “No. I’m on leave. I’m a midshipman.” Two “officers of Her Majesty’s Navy” — mids of a man-o’-war at Bombay — were going up-country on ten days’ leave. They had not travelled much more than twice round the world; but they should have printed the fact on a label. They chattered like daws, and their talk was as a whiff of fresh air from the open sea, while the train ran eastward under the Aravalis. At that hour their lives were bound up in and made glorious by the hope of riding a horse when they reached their journey’s end. Much had they seen “cities and men,” and the artless way in which they interlarded their conversation with allusions to “one of those shore-going chaps, you see,” was delicious. They had no cares, no fears, no servants, and an unlimited stock of wonder and admiration for everything they saw, from the “cute little well-scoops” to a herd of deer grazing on the horizon. It was not until they had opened their young hearts with infantile abandon that the listener could guess from the incidental
argot
where these pocket-Ulysseses had travelled. South African, Norwegian, and Arabian words were used to help out the slang of shipboard, and a copious vocabulary of shipboard terms, complicated with modern Greek. As free from self-consciousness as children, as ignorant as beings from another planet of the Anglo-Indian life into which they were going to dip for a few days, shrewd and observant as befits men of the world who have authority, and neat-handed and resourceful as —  — blue-jackets, they were a delightful study, and accepted freely and frankly the elaborate apologies tendered to them for the unfortunate mistake about the “holidays.” The roads divided and they went their way; and there was a shadow after they had gone, for the Globe-trotter said to his wife, “What I like about Jeypore” — accent on the first syllable, if you please — ”is its characteristic easternness.” And the Globe-trotter’s wife said: “Yes. It is purely Oriental.”

This was Jeypore with the gas-jets and the water-pipes as was shown at the beginning of these trivial letters; and the Globe-trotter and his wife had not been to Amber. Joyful thought! They had not seen the soft splendours of Udaipur, the nightmare of Chitor, the grim power of Jodhpur, and the virgin beauties of Boondi — fairest of all places that the Englishman had set eyes on. The Globe-trotter was great in the matter of hotels and food, but he had not lain under the shadow of a tonga in soft warm sand, eating cold pork with a pocket-knife, and thanking Providence who put sweet-water streams where wayfarers wanted them. He had not drunk out the brilliant cold-weather night in the company of a King of Loafers, a grimy scallawag with a six days’ beard and an unholy knowledge of native States. He had attended service in cantonment churches; but he had not known what it was to witness the simple, solemn ceremonial in the dining room of a far-away Residency, when all the English folk within a hundred-mile circuit bowed their heads before the God of the Christians. He had blundered about temples of strange deities with a guide at his elbow; but he had not known what it was to attempt conversation, with a temple dancing-girl (
not
such an one as Edwin Arnold invented), and to be rewarded for a misturned compliment with a deftly heaved bunch of marigold buds in his respectable bosom. Yet he had undoubtedly lost much, and the measure of his loss was proven in his estimate of the Orientalism of Jeypore.

But what had he who sat in judgment upon him gained? One perfect month of loaferdom, to be remembered above all others and the night of the visit to Chitor, to be remembered even when the month is forgotten. Also the sad knowledge that of all the fair things seen, the inept pen gives but a feeble and blurred picture.

Let those who have read to the end, pardon a hundred blemishes.

FROM SEA TO SEA

FROM SEA TO SEA

March-September, 1889

No. I

OF FREEDOM AND THE NECESSITY OF USING HER. THE MOTIVE AND THE SCHEME THAT WILL COME TO NOTHING. A DISQUISITION UPON THE OTHERNESS OF THINGS AND THE TORMENTS OF THE DAMNED.

When all the world is young, lad, And all the trees are green, And every goose a swan, lad, And every lass a queen, — Then hey for boot and horse, lad, And o’er the world away — Young blood must have its course, lad, And every dog its day.

After seven years it pleased Necessity, whom we all serve, to turn to me and say: “Now you need do Nothing Whatever. You are free to enjoy yourself. I will take the yoke of bondage from your neck for one year. What do you choose to do with my gift?” And I considered the matter in several lights. At first I held notions of regenerating Society; but it appeared that this would demand more than a year, and perhaps Society would not be grateful after all. Then I would fain enter upon one monumental “bust”; but I reflected that this at the outside could endure but three months, while the headache would last for nine. Then came by the person that I most hate, — a Globe-trotter. He, sitting in my chair, discussed India with the unbridled arrogance of five weeks on a Cook’s ticket. He was from England and had dropped his manners in the Suez Canal. “I assure you,” said he, “that you who live so close to the actual facts of things cannot form dispassionate judgments of their merits. You are too near. Now I — ” he waved his hand modestly and left me to fill the gaps.

I considered him, from his new helmet to his deck-shoes, and I perceived that he was but an ordinary man. I thought of India, maligned and silent India, given up to the ill-considered wanderings of such as he — of the land whose people are too busy to reply to the libels upon their life and manners. It was my destiny to avenge India upon nothing less than three-quarters of the world. The idea necessitated sacrifices, — painful sacrifices, — for I had to become a Globe-trotter, with a helmet and deck-shoes. In the interests of our little world I would endure these things and more. I would deliver “brawling judgments all day long; on all things unashamed.” I would go toward the rising sun till I reached the heart of the world and once more smelt London asphalt.

The Indian public never gave me a brief. I took it, appointing myself Commissioner in General for Our Own Sweet Selves. Then all the aspects of life changed, as, they say, the appearance of his room grows strange to a dying man when he sees it upon the last morning, and knows that it will confront him no more. I had wilfully stepped aside from the current of our existence, and had no part in any of Our interests. Up-country the peach was beginning to bud, and men said that by cause of the heavy snows in the Hills the hot weather would be a short one. That was nothing to me. The punkahs and their pullers sat together in the verandah, and the public buildings spawned thermantidotes. The copper-smith sang in the garden and the early wasp hummed low down by the door-handle, and they prophesied of the hot weather to come. These things were no concern of mine. I was dead, and looked upon the old life as a dead man — without interest and without concern.

It was a strange life; I had lived it for seven years or one day, I could not be certain which. All that I knew was that I could watch men going to their offices, while I slept luxuriously; could go out at any hour of the day and sit up to any hour of the night, secure that each morning would bring no toil. I understood with what emotions the freed convict regards the prison he has quitted — insight which had hitherto been denied me; and I further saw how intense is the selfishness of the irresponsible man. Some said that the coming year would be one of scarcity and distress because unseasonable rains were falling. I was grieved. I feared that the Rains might break the railway line to the sea, and so delay my departure. Again, the season would be a sickly one. I fancied that Necessity might repent of her gift and for mere jest wipe me off the face of the earth ere I had seen anything of what lay upon it. There was trouble on the Afghan frontier; perhaps an army-corps would be mobilised, and perhaps many men would die, leaving folk to mourn for them at the hill-stations. My dread was that a Russian man-of-war might intercept the steamer which carried my precious self between Yokohama and San Francisco. Let Armageddon be postponed, I prayed, for my sake, that my personal enjoyments may not be interfered with. War, famine, and pestilence would be so inconvenient to me. And I abased myself before Necessity, the great Goddess, and said ostentatiously: “It is naught, it is naught, and you needn’t look at me when I wander about.” Surely we are only virtuous by compulsion of earning our daily bread.

So I looked upon men with new eyes, and pitied them very much indeed. They worked. They had to. I was an aristocrat. I could call upon them at inconvenient hours and ask them why they worked, and whether they did it often. Then they grunted, and the envy in their eyes was a delight to me. I dared not, however, mock them too pointedly, lest Necessity should drag me back by the collar to take my still warm place by their side. When I had disgusted all who knew me, I fled to Calcutta, which, I was pained to see, still persisted in being a city and transacting commerce after I had formally cursed it one year ago. That curse I now repeat, in the hope that the unsavoury capital will collapse. One must begin to smoke at five in the morning — which is neither night nor day — on coming across the Howrah Bridge, for it is better to get a headache from honest nicotine than to be poisoned by evil smells. And a man, who otherwise was a nice man, though he worked with his hands and his head, asked me why the scandal of the Simla Exodus was allowed to continue. To him I made answer: “It is because this sewer is unfit for human habitation. It is because you are all one gigantic mistake, — you and your monuments and your merchants and everything about you. I rejoice to think that scores of lakhs of rupees have been spent on public offices at a place called Simla, that scores and scores will be spent on the Delhi-Kalka line, in order that civilised people may go there in comfort. When that line is opened, your big city will be dead and buried and done with, and I hope it will teach you a lesson. Your city will rot, Sir.” And he said: “When people are buried here, they turn into adipocere in five days if the weather is rainy. They saponify, you know.” I said: “Go and saponify, for I hate Calcutta.” But he took me to the Eden Gardens instead, and begged me for my own sake not to go round the world in this prejudiced spirit. I was unhappy and ill, but he vowed that my spleen was due to my “Simla way of looking at things.”