THE COLLECTED WORKS OF RUDYARD KIPLING (Illustrated Edition). Rudyard KiplingЧитать онлайн книгу.
said the soldier, with a scowl at the placid old man in the corner. 'Thy Sikhs thought so when our two companies came to help them at the Pirzai Kotal in the face of eight Afreedee standards on the ridge not three months gone.'
He told the story of a border action in which the Dogra companies of the Loodhiana Sikhs had acquitted themselves well. The Amritzar girl smiled; for she knew the tale was to win her approval.
'Alas!' said the cultivator's wife at the end. 'So their villages were burnt and their little children made homeless?'
'They had marked our dead. They paid a great payment after we of the Sikhs had schooled them. So it was. Is this Amritzar?'
'Ay, and here they cut our tickets,' said the banker, fumbling at his belt.
The lamps were paling in the dawn when the half-caste guard came round. Ticket-collecting is a slow business in the East, where people secrete their tickets in all sorts of curious places. Kim produced his and was told to get out.
'But I go to Umballa,' he protested. 'I go with this holy man.'
'Thou canst go to Jehannum for aught I care. This ticket is only to Amritzar. Out!'
Kim burst into a flood of tears, protesting that the lama was his father and his mother, that he was the prop of the lama's declining years, and that the lama would die without his care. All the carriage bade the guard be merciful,—the banker was specially eloquent here,—but the guard hauled Kim on to the platform. The lama blinked, he could not overtake the situation, and Kim lifted up his voice and wept outside the carriage window.
'I am very poor. My father is dead—my mother is dead. Oh, charitable ones, if I am left here, who shall tend that old man?'
'What—what is this?' the lama repeated. 'He must go to Benares. He must come with me. He is my chela. If there is money to be paid—'
'Oh, be silent,' whispered Kim; 'are we Rajahs to throw away good silver when the world is so charitable?'
The Amritzar girl stepped out with her bundles, and it was on her that Kim kept his watchful eye. Ladies of that persuasion, he knew, were generous.
'A ticket—a little tikkut to Umballa—O Breaker of Hearts!' She laughed. 'Hast thou no charity?'
'Does the holy man come from the North?'
'From far and far in the North he comes,' cried Kim. 'From among the hills.'
'There is snow among the pine trees in the North—in the hills there is snow. My mother was from Kulu. Get thee a ticket. Ask him for a blessing.'
'Ten thousand blessings,' shrilled Kim. 'O Holy One, a woman has given us in charity so that I can come with thee—a woman with a golden heart. I run for the tikkut.'
The girl looked up at the lama, who had mechanically followed Kim to the platform. He bowed his head that he might not see her, and muttered in Tibetan as she passed on with the crowd.
'Light come—light go,' said the cultivator's wife viciously.
'She has acquired merit,' returned the lama. 'Beyond doubt it was a nun.'
'There be ten thousand such nuns in Amritzar alone. Return, old man, or the train may depart without thee,' cried the banker.
'Not only was it sufficient for the ticket, but for a little food also,' said Kim, leaping to his place. 'Now eat, Holy One. Look. Day comes!'
Golden, rose, saffron, and pink, the morning mists smoked away across the flat green levels. All the rich Punjab lay out in the splendour of the keen sun. The lama flinched a little as the telegraph-posts swung by.
'Great is the speed of the train,' said the banker, with a patronising grin. 'We have gone farther since Lahore than thou couldst walk in two days: at even, we shall enter Umballa.'
'And that is still far from Benares,' said the lama wearily, mumbling over the cakes that Kim offered. They all unloosed their bundles and made their morning meal. Then the banker, the cultivator, and the soldier prepared their pipes and wrapped the compartment in choking, acrid smoke, spitting and coughing and enjoying themselves. The Sikh and the cultivator's wife chewed pan; the lama took snuff and told his beads, while Kim, cross-legged, smiled over the comfort of a full stomach.
'What rivers have ye by Benares?' said the lama of a sudden to the carriage at large.
'We have Gunga,' returned the banker, when the little titter had subsided.
'What others?'
'What other than Gunga?'
'Nay, but in my mind was the thought of a certain River of healing.'
'That is Gunga. Who bathes in her is made clean and goes to the gods. Thrice have I made pilgrimage to Gunga.' He looked round proudly.
'There was need,' said the young sepoy drily, and the travellers' laugh turned against the banker.
'Clean—to return again to the Gods,' the lama muttered. 'And to go forth on the round of lives anew—still tied to the Wheel.' He shook his head testily. 'But maybe there is a mistake. Who, then, made Gunga in the beginning?'
'The Gods. Of what known faith art thou?' the banker said, appalled.
'I follow the Law—the Most Excellent Law. So it was the Gods that made Gunga. What like of Gods were they?'
The carriage looked at him in amazement. It was inconceivable that any one should be ignorant of Gunga.
'What—what is thy God?' said the money-lender at last.
'Hear!' said the lama, shifting the rosary to his hand. 'Hear: for I speak of Him now! O people of Hind, listen!'
He began in Urdu the tale of the Lord Buddha, but, borne by his own thoughts, slid into Tibetan and long-droned texts from a Chinese book of the Buddha's life. The gentle, tolerant folk looked on reverently. All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaries: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end.
'Um!' said the soldier of the Loodhiana Sikhs. 'There was a Mohammedan regiment lay next to us at the Pirzai Kotal, and a priest of theirs,—he was, as I remember, a naik,—when the fit was on him, spake prophecies. But the mad all are in God's keeping. His officers overlooked much in that man.'
The lama fell back on Urdu, remembering that he was in a strange land. 'Hear the tale of the Arrow which our Lord loosed from the bow,' he said.
This was much more to their taste, and they listened curiously while he told it. 'Now, O people of Hind, I go to seek that River. Know ye aught that may guide me, for we be all men and women in evil case.'
'There is Gunga—and Gunga alone—who washes away sin,' ran the murmur round the carriage.
'Though past question we have good Gods Jullundur-way,' said the cultivator's wife, looking out of window. 'See how they have blessed the crops.'
'To search every river in the Punjab is no small matter,' said her husband. 'For me, a stream that leaves good silt on my land suffices, and I thank Bhumia, the God of the Homestead.' He shrugged one knotted, bronzed shoulder.
Think you our Lord came so far north?' said the lama, turning to Kim.
'It may be,' Kim replied soothingly, as he spat red pan-juice on the floor.
'The last of the Great Ones,' said the Sikh with authority, 'was Sikander Julkarn (Alexander the Great). He paved the streets of Jullundur and built a great tank near Umballa. That pavement holds to this day; and the tank is there also. I never heard of thy God.'
'Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi,' said the young soldier jestingly to Kim, quoting a Northern proverb. 'That is all that makes a Sikh.' But he did not say this very loud.
The lama sighed and shrank into himself, a dingy, shapeless mass. In the pauses of their talk they