Kim (23 page)

‘Hm! Has anyone ever done that same sort of magic to you before?’

‘If it was,’ said Kim ‘do you think I should let it again? I should run away.’

‘And now you are not afraid—eh?’

‘Not now.’

Lurgan Sahib looked at him more closely than ever. ‘I shall ask Mahbub Ali—not now, but some day later,’ he muttered. ‘I am pleased with you—yes; and I am pleased with you—no. You are the first that ever saved himself. I wish I knew what it was that. . . . But you are right. You should not tell that—not even to me.’

He turned into the dusky gloom of the shop, and sat down at the table, rubbing his hands softly. A small, husky sob came from behind a pile of carpets. It was the Hindu child obediently facing towards the wall. His thin shoulders worked with grief.

‘Ah! He is jealous, so jealous. I wonder if he will try to poison me again in my breakfast, and make me cook it twice.’

‘
Kubbee—kubbee nahin
(Never—never. No!)’, came the broken answer.

‘And whether he will kill this other boy?’

‘
Kubbee—kubbee nahin.
’

‘What do
you
think he will do?’ He turned suddenly on Kim.

‘Oah! I do not know. Let him go, perhaps. Why did he want to poison you?’

‘Because he is so fond of me. Suppose you were fond of someone, and you saw someone come, and the man you were fond of was more pleased with him than he was with you, what would you do?’

Kim thought. Lurgan repeated the sentence slowly in the vernacular.

‘I should not poison that man,’ said Kim reflectively, ‘but I should beat that boy—
if
that boy was fond of my man. But first, I would ask that boy if it were true.’

‘Ah! He thinks everyone must be fond of me.’

‘Then I think he is a fool.’

‘Hearest thou?’ said Lurgan Sahib to the shaking shoulders. ‘The Sahib’s son thinks thou art a little fool. Come out, and next time thy heart is troubled, do not try white arsenic quite so openly. Surely the Devil Dasim was lord of our table-cloth that day! It might have made me ill, child, and then a stranger would have guarded the jewels. Come!’

The child, heavy-eyed with much weeping, crept out from behind the bale and flung himself passionately at Lurgan Sahib’s feet, with an extravagance of remorse that impressed even Kim.

‘I will look into the ink-pools—I will faithfully guard the jewels! Oh, my Father and my Mother, send
him
away!’ He indicated Kim with a backward jerk of his bare heel.

‘Not yet—not yet. In a little while he will go away again. But now he is at school—at a new
madrissah
—and thou shalt be his teacher. Play the Play of the Jewels against him. I will keep tally.’

The child dried his tears at once, and dashed to the back of the shop, whence he returned with a copper tray.

‘Give me!’ he said to Lurgan Sahib. ‘Let them come from thy hand, for he may say that I knew them before.’

‘Gently—gently,’ the man replied, and from a drawer under the table dealt a half-handful of clattering trifles into the tray.

‘Now,’ said the child, waving an old newspaper. ‘Look on them as long as thou wilt, stranger. Count and, if need be, handle. One look is enough for
me
.’ He turned his back proudly.

‘But what is the game?’

‘When thou hast counted and handled and art sure that thou canst remember them all, I cover them with this paper, and thou must tell over the tally to Lurgan Sahib.
I
will write mine.’

‘Oah!’ The instinct of competition waked in his breast. He bent over the tray. There were but fifteen stones on it. ‘That is easy,’ he said after a minute. The child slipped the paper over the winking jewels and scribbled in a native account-book.

‘There are under that paper five blue stones—one big, one smaller, and three small,’ said Kim, all in haste. ‘There are four green stones, and one with a hole in it; there is one yellow stone that I can see through, and one like a pipe-stem. There are two red stones, and—and—I made the count fifteen, but two I have forgotten. No! Give me time. One was of ivory, little and brownish; and—and—give me time . . .’

‘One—two’—Lurgan Sahib counted him out up to ten. Kim shook his head.

‘Hear my count!’ the child burst in, trilling with laughter. ‘First, are two flawed sapphires—one of two ruttees and one of four as I should judge. The four-ruttee sapphire is chipped at the edge. There is one Turkestan turquoise, plain with black veins, and there are two inscribed—one with a Name of God in gilt, and the other being cracked across, for it came out of an old ring, I cannot read. We have now all five blue stones. Four flawed emeralds there are, but one is drilled in two places, and one is a little carven——’

‘Their weights?’ said Lurgan Sahib impassively.

‘Three—five—five—and four ruttees as I judge it. There is one piece of old greenish pipe amber, and a cut topaz from Europe. There is one ruby of Burma, of two ruttees, without a flaw, and there is a balas-ruby, flawed, of two ruttees. There is a carved ivory from China representing a rat sucking an egg; and there is last—ah ha!—a ball of crystal as big as a bean set on a gold leaf.’

He clapped his hands at the close.

‘He is thy master,’ said Lurgan Sahib, smiling.

‘Huh! He knew the names of the stones,’ said Kim, flushing. ‘Try again! With common things such as he and I both know.’

They heaped the tray again with odds and ends gathered from the shop, and even the kitchen, and every time the child won, till Kim marvelled.

‘Bind my eyes—let me feel once with my fingers, and even
then
I will leave thee opened-eyed behind,’ he challenged.

Kim stamped with vexation when the lad made his boast good.

‘If it were men—or horses,’ he said, ‘I could do better. This playing with tweezers and knives and scissors is too little.’

‘Learn first—teach later,’ said Lurgan Sahib. ‘Is he thy master?’

‘Truly. But how is it done?’

‘By doing it many times over till it is done perfectly—for it is worth doing.’

The Hindu boy, in highest feather, actually patted Kim on the back.

‘Do not despair,’ he said. ‘I myself will teach thee.’

‘And I will see that thou art well taught,’ said Lurgan Sahib, still speaking in the vernacular, ‘for except my boy here—it was foolish of him to buy so much white arsenic when, if he had asked, I could have given it—except my boy here I have not in a long time met with one better worth teaching. And there are ten days more ere thou canst return to Lucknao where they teach nothing—at the long price. We shall, I think, be friends.’

They were a most mad ten days, but Kim enjoyed himself too much to reflect on their craziness. In the morning they played the Jewel Game—sometimes with veritable stones, sometimes with piles of swords and daggers, sometimes with photographs of natives. Through the afternoons he and the Hindu boy would mount guard in the shop, sitting dumb behind a carpet-bale or a screen and watching Mr Lurgan’s many and very curious visitors. There were small Rajahs, escorts coughing in the veranda, who came to buy curiosities—such as phonographs and mechanical toys. There were ladies in search of necklaces, and men, it seemed to Kim—but his mind may have been vitiated by early training—in search of the ladies; natives from independent and feudatory Courts whose ostensible business was the repair of broken necklaces—rivers of light poured out upon the table—but whose true end seemed to be to raise money for angry Maharanees or young Rajahs. There were Babus to whom Lurgan Sahib talked with austerity and authority, but at the end of each interview he gave them money in coined silver and currency notes. There were occasional gatherings of long-coated theatrical natives who discussed metaphysics in English and Bengali, to Mr Lurgan’s great edification. He was always interested in religions. At the end of the day, Kim and the Hindu boy—whose name varied at Lurgan’s pleasure—were expected to give a detailed account of all that they had seen and heard—their view of each man’s character, as shown in his face, talk, and manner, and their notions of his real errand. After dinner, Lurgan Sahib’s fancy turned more to what might be called dressing-up, in which game he took a most informing interest. He could paint faces to a marvel; with a brush-dab here and a line there changing them past recognition. The shop was full of all manner of dresses and turbans, and Kim was apparelled variously as a young Mohammedan of good family, an oilman, and once—which was a joyous evening—as the son of an Oudh landholder in the fullest of full dress. Lurgan Sahib had a hawk’s eye to detect the least flaw in the make-up; and lying on a worn teak-wood couch, would explain by the half-hour together how such and such a caste talked, or walked, or coughed, or spat, or sneezed, and, since ‘hows’ matter little in this world, the ‘why’ of everything. The Hindu child played this game clumsily. That little mind, keen as an icicle where tally of jewels was concerned, could not temper itself to enter another’s soul; but a demon in Kim woke up and sang with joy as he put on the changing dresses, and changed speech and gesture therewith.

Carried away by enthusiasm, he volunteered to show Lurgan Sahib one evening how the disciples of a certain caste
fakir
, old Lahore acquaintances, begged doles by the roadside; and what sort of language he would use to an Englishman, to a Punjabi farmer going to a fair, and to a woman without a veil. Lurgan Sahib laughed immensely, and begged Kim to stay as he was, immobile for half an hour—cross-legged, ash-smeared, and wild-eyed, in the back room. At the end of that time entered a hulking, obese Babu whose stockinged legs shook with fat, and Kim opened on him with a shower of wayside chaff. Lurgan Sahib—this annoyed Kim—watched the Babu and not the play.

‘I think,’ said the Babu heavily, lighting a cigarette, ‘I am of opeenion that it is most extraordinary and effeecient performance. Except that you had told me I should have opined that—that—that you were pulling my legs. How soon can he become approximately effeecient chain-man? Because
then
I shall indent for him.’

‘That is what he must learn at Lucknow.’

‘Then order him to be jolly-dam’-quick. Good-night, Lurgan.’ The Babu swung out with the gait of a bogged cow.

When they were telling over the day’s list of visitors, Lurgan Sahib asked Kim who he thought the man might be.

‘God knows!’ said Kim cheerily. The tone might almost have deceived Mahbub Ali, but it failed entirely with the healer of sick pearls.

‘That is true. God, He knows; but I wish to know what you think.’

Kim glanced sideways at his companion, whose eye had a way of compelling truth.

‘I—I think he will want me when I come from the school, but’—confidentially, as Lurgan Sahib nodded approval—‘I do not understand how
he
can wear many dresses and talk many tongues.’

‘Thou wilt understand many things later. He is a writer of tales for a certain Colonel. His honour is great only in Simla, and it is noticeable that he has no name, but only a number and a letter—that is a custom among us.’

‘And is there a price upon his head too—as upon Mah—all the others?’

‘Not yet; but if a boy rose up who is now sitting here and went—look, the door is open!—as far as a certain house with a red-painted veranda, behind that which was the old theatre in the Lower Bazar, and whispered through the shutters: “Hurree Chunder Mookerjee bore the bad news of last month”, that boy might take away a belt full of rupees.’

‘How many?’ said Kim promptly.

‘Five hundred—a thousand—as many as he might ask for.’

‘Good. And for how long might such a boy live after the news was told?’ He smiled merrily at Lurgan’s Sahib’s very beard.

‘Ah! That is to be well thought of. Perhaps if he were very clever, he might live out the day—but not the night. By no means the night.’

‘Then what is the Babu’s pay if so much is put upon his head?’

‘Eighty—perhaps a hundred—perhaps a hundred and fifty rupees; but the pay is the least part of the work. From time to time, God causes men to be born—and thou art one of them—who have a lust to go abroad at the risk of their lives and discover news—today it may be of far-off things, tomorrow of some hidden mountain, and the next day of some near-by men who have done a foolishness against the State. These souls are very few; and of these few, not more than ten are of the best. Among these ten I count the Babu, and that is curious. How great, therefore, and desirable must be a business that brazens the heart of a Bengali!’

‘True. But the days go slowly for me. I am yet a boy, and it is only within two months I learned to write Angrezi. Even now I cannot read it well. And there are yet years and years and long years before I can be even a chain-man.’

‘Have patience, Friend of all the World’—Kim started at the title. ‘Would I had a few of the years that so irk thee. I have proved thee in several small ways. This will not be forgotten when I make my report to the Colonel Sahib.’ Then, changing suddenly into English with a deep laugh:

‘By Jove! O’Hara, I think there is a great deal in you; but you must not become proud and you must not talk. You must go back to Lucknow and be a good little boy and mind your book, as the English say, and perhaps, next holidays if you care, you can come back to me!’ Kim’s face fell. ‘Oh, I mean
if you
like. I know where you want to go.’

Four days later a seat was booked for Kim and his small trunk at the rear of a Kalka tonga. His companion was the whale-like Babu, who, with a fringed shawl wrapped round his head, and his fat openwork-stockinged left leg tucked under him, shivered and grunted in the morning chill.

‘How comes it that this man is one of
us
?’ thought Kim considering the jelly back as they jolted down the road; and the reflection threw him into most pleasant day-dreams. Lurgan Sahib had given him five rupees—a splendid sum—as well as the assurance of his protection if he worked. Unlike Mahbub, Lurgan Sahib had spoken most explicitly of the reward that would follow obedience, and Kim was content. If only, like the Babu, he could enjoy the dignity of a letter and a number—and a price upon his head! Some day he would be all that and more. Some day he might be almost as great as Mahbub Ali! The housetops of his search should be half India; he would follow Kings and Ministers, as in the old days he had followed
vakils
and lawyers’ touts across Lahore city for Mahbub Ali’s sake. Meantime, there was the present, and not at all unpleasant, fact of St Xavier’s immediately before him. There would be new boys to condescend to, and there would be tales of holiday adventures to hear. Young Martin, son of the tea-planter at Manipur, had boasted that he would go to war, with a rifle, against the head-hunters. That might be, but it was certain young Martin had not been blown half across the forecourt of a Patiala palace by an explosion of fireworks; nor had he. . . . Kim fell to telling himself the story of his own adventures through the last three months. He could paralyse St Xavier’s—even the biggest boys who shaved—with the recital, were that permitted. But it was, of course, out of the question. There would be a price upon his head in good time, as Lurgan Sahib had assured him; and if he talked foolishly now, not only would that price never be set, but Colonel Creighton would cast him off—and he would be left to the wrath of Lurgan Sahib and Mahbub Ali—for the short space of life that would remain to him.