Kim (33 page)

‘Will they kill thee?’

‘Oah, thatt is nothing. I am good enough Herbert Spencerian, I trust, to meet little thing like death, which is all in my fate, you know. But—but they may beat me.’

‘Why?’

Hurree Babu snapped his fingers with irritation. ‘Of
course
I shall affeeliate myself to their camp in supernumerary capacity as perhaps interpreter, or person mentally impotent and hungree, or some such thing. And then I must pick up what I can, I suppose. That is as easy for me as playing Mister Doctor to the old lady. Onlee—onlee—you see, Mister O’Hara, I am unfortunately Asiatic, which is serious detriment in some respects. And
all
-so I am Bengali—a fearful man.’

‘God made the Hare and the Bengali. What shame?’ said Kim, quoting the proverb.

‘It was process of Evolution, I think, from Primal Necessity, but the fact remains in all the
cui bono
. I am, oh, awfully fearful!—I remember once they wanted to cut off my head on the road to Lhassa. (No, I have never reached to Lhassa.) I sat down and cried, Mister O’Hara, anticipating Chinese tortures. I do not suppose these two gentlemen will torture me, but I like to provide for possible contingency with European assistance in emergency.’ He coughed and spat out the cardamoms. ‘It is purely unoffeecial indent, to which you can say “No, Babu”. If you have no pressing engagement with your old man—perhaps you might divert him; perhaps I can seduce his fancies—I should like you to keep in Departmental touch with me till I find those sporting coves. I have great opeenion of you since I met my friend at Delhi. And also I will embody your name in my offeecial report when matter is finally adjudicated. It will be a great feather in your cap. That is why I come really.’

‘Humph! The end of the tale, I think, is true; but what of the fore-part?’

‘About the Five Kings? Oah! there is ever so much truth in it. A lots more than you would suppose,’ said Hurree earnestly. ‘You come—eh? I go from here straight into the Doon. It is verree verdant and painted meads. I shall go to Mussoorie—to good old Musoorie Pahar, as the gentlemen and ladies say. Then by Rampur into Chini. That is the only way they can come. I do not like waiting in the cold, but we must wait for them. I want to walk with them to Simla. You see, one Russian is a Frenchman, and I know my French pretty well. I have friends in Chandernagore.’

‘
He
would certainly rejoice to see the Hills again,’ said Kim meditatively. ‘All his speech these ten days past has been of little else. If we go together——’

‘Oah! We can be quite strangers on the road, if your lama prefers. I shall just be four or five miles ahead. There is no hurry for Hurree—that is an Europe pun, ha! ha!—and you come after. There is plenty of time; they will plot and survey and map, of course. I shall go tomorrow, and you the next day, if you choose. Eh? You go think on it till morning. By Jove, it is near morning now.’ He yawned ponderously, and with never a civil word lumbered off to his sleeping-place. But Kim slept little, and his thoughts ran in Hindustani:

‘Well is the Game called great! I was four days a scullion at Quetta, waiting on the wife of the man whose book I stole. And that was part of the Great Game! From the South—God knows how far—came up the Mahratta, playing the Great Game in fear of his life. Now I shall go far and far into the North playing the Great Game. Truly, it runs like a shuttle throughout all Hind. And my share and my joy’—he smiled to the darkness—‘I owe to the lama here. Also to Mahbub Ali—also to Creighton Sahib, but chiefly to the Holy One. He is right—a great and a wonderful world—and I am Kim—Kim—Kim—alone—one person—in the middle of it all. But I will see these strangers with their levels and chains. . . .’

‘What was the upshot of last night’s babble?’ said the lama, after his orisons.

‘There came a strolling seller of drugs—a hanger-on of the Sahiba’s. Him I abolished by arguments and prayers, proving that our charms are worthier than his coloured waters.’

‘Alas, my charms! Is the virtuous woman still bent upon a new one?’

‘Very strictly.’

‘Then it must be written, or she will deafen me with her clamour.’ He fumbled at his pencase.

‘In the Plains,’ said Kim, ‘are always too many people. In the Hills, as I understand, there are fewer.’

‘Oh! the Hills, and the snows upon the Hills.’ The lama tore off a tiny square of paper fit to go in an amulet. ‘But what dost thou know of the Hills?’

‘They are very close.’ Kim thrust open the door and looked at the long, peaceful line of the Himalayas flushed in morning-gold. ‘Except in the dress of a Sahib, I have never set foot among them.’

The lama snuffed the wind wistfully.

‘If we go North,’—Kim put the question to the waking sunrise—‘would not much mid-day heat be avoided by walking among the lower hills at least? . . . Is the charm made, Holy One?’

‘I have written the names of seven silly devils—not one of whom is worth a grain of dust in the eye. Thus do foolish women drag us from the Way!’

Hurree Babu came out from behind the dovecote washing his teeth with ostentatious ritual. Full-fleshed, heavy-haunched, bull-necked, and deep-voiced, he did not look like ‘a fearful man’. Kim signed almost imperceptibly that matters were in good train, and when the morning toilet was over, Hurree Babu, in flowery speech, came to do honour to the lama. They ate, of course, apart, and afterwards the old lady, more or less veiled behind a window, returned to the vital business of green-mango colics in the young. The lama’s knowledge of medicine was, of course, sympathetic only. He believed that the dung of a black horse, mixed with sulphur, and carried in a snake-skin, was a sound remedy for cholera; but the symbolism interested him far more than the science. Hurree Babu deferred to these views with enchanting politeness, so that the lama called him a courteous physician. Hurree Babu replied that he was no more than an inexpert dabbler in the mysteries; but at least—he thanked the Gods therefore—he knew when he sat in the presence of a master. He himself had been taught by the Sahibs, who do not consider expense, in the lordly halls of Calcutta; but, as he was ever first to acknowledge, there lay a wisdom behind earthly wisdom—the high and lonely lore of meditation. Kim looked on with envy. The Hurree Babu of his knowledge—oily, effusive, and nervous—was gone; gone, too, was the brazen drug-vendor of overnight. There remained—polished, polite, attentive—a sober, learned son of experience and adversity, gathering wisdom from the lama’s lips. The old lady confided to Kim that these rare levels were beyond her. She liked charms with plenty of ink that one could wash off in water, swallow, and be done with. Else what was the use of the Gods? She liked men and women, and she spoke of them—of kinglets she had known in the past; of her own youth and beauty; of the depredations of leopards and the eccentricities of love Asiatic; of the incidence of taxation, rack-renting, funeral ceremonies, her son-in-law (this by allusion, easy to be followed), the care of the young, and the age’s lack of decency. And Kim, as interested in the life of this world as she soon to leave it, squatted with his feet under the hem of his robe, drinking all in, while the lama demolished one after another every theory of body-curing put forward by Hurree Babu.

At noon the Babu strapped up his brass-bound drug-box, took his patent-leather shoes of ceremony in one hand, a gay blue-and-white umbrella in the other, and set off northwards to the Doon, where, he said, he was in demand among the lesser kings of those parts.

‘We will go in the cool of the evening,
chela
,’ said the lama. ‘That doctor, learned in physic and courtesy, affirms that the people among these lower hills are devout, generous, and much in need of a teacher. In a very short time—so says the
hakim
—we come to cool air and the smell of pines.’

‘Ye go to the Hills? And by Kulu road? Oh, thrice happy!’ shrilled the old lady. ‘But that I am a little pressed with the care of the homestead I would take palanquin . . . but that would be shameless, and my reputation would be cracked. Ho! Ho! I know the road—every march of the road I know. Ye will find charity throughout—it is not denied to the well-looking. I will give orders for provision. A servant to set you forth upon your journey? No. . . . Then I will at least cook ye good food.’

‘What a woman is the Sahiba!’ said the white-bearded Oorya, when a tumult rose by the kitchen quarters. ‘She has never forgotten a friend: she has never forgotten an enemy in all her years. And her cookery—wah!’ He rubbed his slim stomach.

There were cakes, there were sweetmeats, there was cold fowl stewed to rags with rice and prunes—enough to burden Kim like a mule.

‘I am old and useless,’ she said. ‘None now love me—and none respect—but there are few to compare with me when I call on the Gods and squat to my cooking-pots. Come again, O people of good will. Holy One and disciple, come again. The room is always prepared; the welcome is always ready. . . . See the women do not follow thy
chela
too openly.
I
know the women of Kulu. Take heed,
chela
, lest he run away when he smells his Hills again. . . .
Hai!
Do not tilt the rice-bag upside down. . . . Bless the household, Holy One, and forgive thy servant her stupidities.’

She wiped her red old eyes on a corner of her veil, and clucked throatily.

‘Women talk,’ said the lama at last, ‘but that is a woman’s infirmity. I gave her a charm. She is upon the Wheel and wholly given over to the shows of this life, but none the less,
chela
, she is virtuous, kindly, hospitable—of a whole and zealous heart. Who shall say she does not acquire merit?’

‘Not I, Holy One,’ said Kim, reslinging the bountiful provision on his shoulders. ‘In my mind—behind my eyes—I have tried to picture such an one altogether freed from the Wheel—desiring nothing, causing nothing—a nun, as it were.’

‘And, O imp?’ The lama almost laughed aloud.

‘I cannot make the picture.’

‘Nor I. But there are many, many millions of lives before her. She will get wisdom a little, it may be, in each one.’

‘And will she forget how to make stews with saffron upon that road?’

‘Thy mind is set on things unworthy. But she has skill. I am refreshed all over. When we reach the lower hills I shall be yet stronger. The
hakim
spoke truly to me this morn when he said a breath from the snows blows away twenty years from the life of a man. We will go up into the Hills—the high hills—up to the sound of snow-waters and the sound of the trees—for a little while. The
hakim
said that at any time we may return to the Plains, for we do no more than skirt the pleasant places. The
hakim
is full of learning; but he is in no way proud. I spoke to him—when thou wast talking to the Sahiba—of a certain dizziness that lays hold upon the back of my neck in the night, and he said it rose from excessive heat—to be cured by cool air. Upon consideration, I marvelled that I had not thought of such a simple remedy.’

‘Didst thou tell him of thy Search?’ said Kim, a little jealously. He preferred to sway the lama by his own speech—not through the wiles of Hurree Babu.

‘Assuredly. I told him of my dream, and of the manner by which I had acquired merit by causing thee to be taught wisdom.’

‘Thou didst not say I was a Sahib?’

‘What need? I have told thee many times we be but two souls seeking escape. He said—and he is just herein—that the River of Healing will break forth even as I dreamed—at my feet, if need be. Having found the Way, seest thou, that shall free me from the Wheel, need I trouble to find a way about the mere fields of earth—which are illusion? That were senseless. I have my dreams, night upon night repeated; I have the
Jâtaka
; and I have thee, Friend of all the World. It was written in thy horoscope that a Red Bull on a green field—I have not forgotten—should bring thee to honour. Who but I saw that prophecy accomplished? Indeed, I was the instrument. Thou shalt find me my River, being in return the instrument. The Search is sure!’

He set his ivory-yellow face, serene and untroubled, towards the beckoning Hills; his shadow shouldering far before him in the dust.

Who hath desired the Sea—the immense and contemptuous surges?
The shudder, the stumble, the swerve ere the star-stabbing bowsprit emerges—
The orderly clouds of the Trades and the ridged roaring sapphire thereunder—
Unheralded cliff-lurking flaws and the head-sails’ low-volleying thunder?
His Sea in no wonder the same—his Sea and the same in each wonder—
        His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise—so and no otherwise Hill-men desire their Hills!
            — The Sea and the Hills

‘Who goes
to the hills goes to his mother.’

They had crossed the Siwaliks and the half-tropical Doon, left Mussoorie behind them, and headed north along the narrow hill-roads. Day after day they struck deeper into the huddled mountains, and day after day Kim watched the lama return to a man’s strength. Among the terraces of the Doon he had leaned on the boy’s shoulder, ready to profit by wayside halts. Under the great ramp to Mussoorie he drew himself together as an old hunter faces a well-remembered bank, and where he should have sunk exhausted swung his long draperies about him, drew a deep double-lungful of the diamond air, and walked as only a hillman can. Kim, plains-bred and plains-fed, sweated and panted astonished. ‘This is
my
country,’ said the lama. ‘Beside Such-zen, this is flatter than a rice-field’ and with steady, driving strokes from the loins he strode upwards. But it was on the steep downhill marches, three thousand feet in three hours, that he went utterly away from Kim, whose back ached with holding back, and whose big toe was nigh cut off by his grass sandal-string. Through the speckled shadow of the great deodar-forests; through oak feathered and plumed with ferns; birch, ilex, rhododendron, and pine, out on to the bare hillsides’ slippery sunburnt grass, and back into the woodlands’ coolth again, till oak gave way to bamboo and palm of the valley, the lama swung untiring.