The Man Who Would Be King

by Rudyard Kipling

  But first it is necessary to explain something about the Supreme Government which is above all and below all and behind all. Gentlemen come from England, spend a few weeks in India, walk round this great Sphinx of the Plains, and write books upon its ways and its works, denouncing or praising it as their own ignorance prompts. Consequently all the world knows how the Supreme Government conducts itself. But no one, not even the Supreme Government, knows everything about the administration of the Empire. Year by year England sends out fresh drafts for the first fighting-line, which is officially called the Indian Civil Service. These die, or kill themselves by overwork, or are worried to death, or broken in health and hope in order that the land may be protected from death and sickness, famine and war, and may eventually become capable of standing alone. It will never stand alone, but the idea is a pretty one, and men are willing to die for it, and yearly the work of pushing and coaxing and scolding and petting the country into good living goes forward. If an advance be made all credit is given to the native, while the Englishmen stand back and wipe their foreheads. If a failure occurs the Englishmen step forward and take the blame. Overmuch tenderness of this kind has bred a strong belief among many natives that the native is capable of administering the country, and many devout Englishmen believe this also, because the theory is stated in beautiful English with all the latest political colours.

  There are other men who, though uneducated, see visions and dream dreams, and they, too, hope to administer the country in their own way – that is to say, with a garnish of Red Sauce. Such men must exist among two hundred million people, and, if they are not attended to, may cause trouble and even break the great idol called Pax Britannica,4 which, as the newspapers say, lives between Peshawur and Cape Comorin.5 Were the Day of Doom to dawn tomorrow, you would find the Supreme Government ‘taking measures to allay popular excitement’, and putting guards upon the graveyards that the Dead might troop forth orderly. The youngest Civilian would arrest Gabriel on his own responsibility if the Archangel could not produce a Deputy-Commissioner’s permission to ‘make music or other noises’ as the licence says.

  Whence it is easy to see that mere men of the flesh who would create a tumult must fare badly at the hands of the Supreme Government. And they do. There is no outward sign of excitement; there is no confusion; there is no knowledge. When due and sufficient reasons have been given, weighed and approved, the machinery moves forward, and the dreamer of dreams and the seer of visions is gone from his friends and following. He enjoys the hospitality of Government; there is no restriction upon his movements within certain limits; but he must not confer any more with his brother dreamers. Once in every six months the Supreme Government assures itself that he is well and takes formal acknowledgment of his existence. No one protests against his detention, because the few people who know about it are in deadly fear of seeming to know him; and never a single newspaper ‘takes up his case’ or organises demonstrations on his behalf, because the newspapers of India have got behind that lying proverb which says the Pen is mightier than the Sword, and can walk delicately.

  So now you know as much as you ought about Wali Dad, the educational mixture, and the Supreme Government.

  Lalun has not yet been described. She would need, so Wali Dad says, a thousand pens of gold, and ink scented with musk. She has been variously compared to the Moon, the Dil Sagar Lake, a spotted quail, a gazelle, the Sun on the Desert of Kutch, the Dawn, the Stars, and the young bamboo. These comparisons imply that she is beautiful exceedingly according to the native standards, which are practically the same as those of the West. Her eyes are black and her hair is black, and her eyebrows are black as leeches; her mouth is tiny and says witty things; her hands are tiny and have saved much money; her feet are tiny and have trodden on the naked hearts of many men. But, as Wali Dad sings: ‘Lalun is Lalun, and when you have said that, you have only come to the Beginnings of Knowledge.’

  The little house on the City wall was just big enough to hold Lalun, and her maid, and a pussy-cat with a silver collar. A big pink-and-blue cut-glass chandelier hung from the ceiling of the reception room. A petty Nawab had given Lalun the horror, and she kept it for politeness’ sake. The floor of the room was of polished chunam,6 white as curds. A latticed window of carved wood was set in one wall; there was a profusion of squabby pluffy cushions and fat carpets everywhere, and Lalun’s silver hookah, studded with turquoises, had a special little carpet all to its shining self. Wali Dad was nearly as permanent a fixture as the chandelier. As I have said, he lay in the window-seat and meditated on Life and Death and Lalun – ’specially Lalun. The feet of the young men of the City tended to her doorways and then – retired, for Lalun was a particular maiden, slow of speech, reserved of mind, and not in the least inclined to orgies which were nearly certain to end in strife. ‘If I am of no value, I am unworthy of this honour,’ said Lalun. ‘If I am of value, they are unworthy of Me.’ And that was a crooked sentence.

  In the long hot nights of latter April and May all the City seemed to assemble in Lalun’s little white room to smoke and to talk. Shiahs7 of the grimmest and most uncompromising persuasion; Sufis8 who had lost all belief in the Prophet and retained but little in God; wandering Hindu priests passing southward on their way to the Central India fairs and other affairs; Pundits in black gowns, with spectacles on their noses and undigested wisdom in their insides; bearded headmen of the wards; Sikhs with all the details of the latest ecclesiastical scandal in the Golden Temple;9 red-eyed priests from beyond the Border, looking like trapped wolves and talking like ravens; MA’s of the University, very superior and very voluble – all these people and more also you might find in the white room. Wali Dad lay in the window-seat and listened to the talk.

  ‘It is Lalun’s salon,’ said Wali Dad to me, ‘and it is electic10 – is not that the word? Outside of a Freemasons’ Lodge I have never seen such gatherings. There I dined once with a Jew – a Yahoudi!’ He spat into the City Ditch with apologies for allowing national feelings to overcome him. ‘Though I have lost every belief in the world,’ said he, ‘and try to be proud of my losing, I cannot help hating a Jew. Lalun admits no Jews here.’

  ‘But what in the world do all these men do?’ I asked.

  ‘The curse of our country,’ said Wali Dad. ‘They talk. It is like the Athenians – always hearing and telling some new thing.11 Ask the Pearl and she will show you how much she knows of the news of the City and the Province. Lalun knows everything.’

  ‘Lalun,’ I said at random – she was talking to a gentleman of the Kurd persuasion who had come in from God-knows-where – ‘when does the 175th Regiment go to Agra?’

  ‘It does not go at all,’ said Lalun, without turning her head. ‘They have ordered the 118th to go in its stead. That Regiment goes to Lucknow in three months, unless they give a fresh order.’

  ‘That is so,’ said Wali Dad, without a shade of doubt. ‘Can you, with your telegrams and your newspapers, do better? Always hearing and telling some new thing,’ he went on. ‘My friend, has your God ever smitten a European nation for gossiping in the bazars? India has gossiped for centuries – always standing in the bazars until the soldiers go by. Therefore – you are here to-day instead of starving in your own country, and I am not a Mohammedan – I am a Product – a Demnition Product.12 That also I owe to you and yours: that I cannot make an end to my sentence without quoting from your authors.’ He pulled at the hookah and mourned, half feelingly, half in earnest, for the shattered hopes of his youth. Wali Dad was always mourning over something or other – the country of which he despaired, or the creed in which he had lost faith, or the life of the English which he could by no means understand.

  Lalun never mourned. She played little songs on the sitar,13 and to hear her sing, ‘O Peacock, cry again,’ was always a fresh pleasure. She knew all the songs that have ever been sung, from the war-songs of the South, that make the old men angry with the young men and the young men angry with the State, to the love
-songs of the North, where the swords whinny-whicker like angry kites14 in the pauses between the kisses, and the Passes fill with armed men, and the Lover is torn from his Beloved and cries Ai! Ai! Ai! evermore. She knew how to make up tobacco for the pipe so that it smelt like the Gates of Paradise and wafted you gently through them. She could embroider strange things in gold and silver, and dance softly with the moonlight when it came in at the window. Also she knew the hearts of men, and the heart of the City, and whose wives were faithful and whose untrue, and more of the secrets of the Government Offices than are good to be set down in this place. Nasiban, her maid, said that her jewelry was worth ten thousand pounds, and that, some night, a thief would enter and murder her for its possession; but Lalun said that all the City would tear that thief limb from limb, and that he, whoever he was, knew it.

  So she took her sitar and sat in the window-seat, and sang a song of old days that had been sung by a girl of her profession in an armed camp on the eve of a great battle – the day before the Fords of the Jumna ran red and Sivaji15 fled fifty miles to Delhi with a Toorkh stallion at his horse’s tail and another Lalun on his saddle-bow. It was what men call a Mahratta laonee,16 and it said:

  ‘Their warrior forces Chimnajee

  Before the Peishwa led,

  The Children of the Sun and Fire

  Behind him turned and fled.’

  And the chorus said:

  ‘With them there fought who rides so free

  With sword and turban red,

  The warrior-youth who earns his fee

  At peril of his head.’

  ‘At peril of his head,’ said Wali Dad in English to me. ‘Thanks to your Government, all our heads are protected, and with the educational facilities at my command’ – his eyes twinkled wickedly – ‘I might be a distinguished member of the local administration. Perhaps, in time, I might even be a member of a Legislative Council.’

  ‘Don’t speak English,’ said Lalun, bending over her sitar afresh. The chorus went out from the City wall to the blackened wall of Fort Amara which dominates the City. No man knows the precise extent of Fort Amara. Three kings built it hundreds of years ago, and they say that there are miles of underground rooms beneath its walls. It is peopled with many ghosts, a detachment of Garrison Artillery, and a Company of Infantry. In its prime it held ten thousand men and filled its ditches with corpses.

  ‘At peril of his head,’ sang Lalun again and again.

  A head moved on one of the ramparts – the grey head of an old man – and a voice, rough as shark-skin on a sword-hilt, sent back the last line of the chorus and broke into a song that I could not understand, though Lalun and Wali Dad listened intently.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘A consistent man,’ said Wali Dad. ‘He fought you in ’46, when he was a warrior-youth; refought you in ’57, and he tried to fight you in ’71,17 but you had learned the trick of blowing men from guns too well. Now he is old; but he would still fight if he could.’

  ‘Is he a Wahabi,18 then? Why should he answer to a Mahratta laonee if he be Wahabi – or Sikh?’ said I.

  ‘I do not know,’ said Wali Dad. ‘He has lost, perhaps, his religion. Perhaps he wishes to be a King. Perhaps he is a King. I do not know his name.’

  ‘That is a lie, Wali Dad. If you know his career you must know his name.’

  ‘That is quite true. I belong to a nation of liars. I would rather not tell you his name. Think for yourself.’

  Lalun finished her song, pointed to the Fort, and said simply: ‘Khem Singh.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Wali Dad. ‘If the Pearl chooses to tell you, the Pearl is a fool.’

  I translated to Lalun, who laughed. ‘I choose to tell what I choose to tell. They kept Khem Singh in Burma,’ said she. ‘They kept him there for many years until his mind was changed in him. So great was the kindness of the Government. Finding this, they sent him back to his own country that he might look upon it before he died. He is an old man, but when he looks upon this his country his memory will come. Moreover, there be many who remember him.’

  ‘He is an Interesting Survival,’ said Wali Dad, pulling at the pipe. ‘He returns to a country now full of educational and political reform, but, as the Pearl says, there are many who remember him. He was once a great man. There will never be any more great men in India. They will all, when they are boys, go whoring after strange gods,19 and they will become citizens – “fellow-citizens” – “illustrious fellow-citizens”. What is it that the native papers call them?’

  Wali Dad seemed to be in a very bad temper. Lalun looked out of the window and smiled into the dust-haze. I went away thinking about Khem Singh, who had once made history with a thousand followers, and would have been a princeling but for the power of the Supreme Government aforesaid.

  The Senior Captain Commanding Fort Amara was away on leave, but the Subaltern, his Deputy, had drifted down to the Club, where I found him and inquired of him whether it was really true that a political prisoner had been added to the attractions of the Fort. The Subaltern explained at great length, for this was the first time that he had held command of the Fort, and his glory lay heavy upon him.

  ‘Yes,’ said he, ‘a man was sent in to me about a week ago from down the line – a thorough gentleman, whoever he is. Of course I did all I could for him. He had his two servants and some silver cooking-pots, and he looked for all the world like a native officer. I called him Subadar Sahib.20 Just as well to be on the safe side, y’know. “Look here, Subadar Sahib,” I said, “you’re handed over to my authority, and I’m supposed to guard you. Now I don’t want to make your life hard, but you must make things easy for me. All the Fort is at your disposal, from the flagstaff to the dry Ditch, and I shall be happy to entertain you in any way I can, but you mustn’t take advantage of it. Give me your word that you won’t try to escape, Subadar Sahib, and I’ll give you my word that you shall have no heavy guard put over you.” I thought the best way of getting at him was by going at him straight, y’know; and it was, by Jove! The old man gave me his word, and moved about the Fort as contented as a sick crow. He’s a rummy chap – always asking to be told where he is and what the buildings about him are. I had to sign a slip of blue paper when he turned up, acknowledging receipt of his body and all that, and I’m responsible, y’know, that he doesn’t get away. Queer thing, though, looking after a Johnnie old enough to be your grandfather, isn’t it? Come to the Fort one of these days and see him.’

  For reasons which will appear, I never went to the Fort while Khem Singh was then within its walls. I knew him only as a grey head seen from Lalun’s window – a grey head and a harsh voice. But natives told me that, day by day, as he looked upon the fair lands round Amara, his memory came back to him and, with it, the old hatred against the Government that had been nearly effaced in far-off Burma. So he raged up and down the West face of the Fort from morning till noon and from evening till the night, devising vain things in his heart, and croaking war-songs when Lalun sang on the City wall. As he grew more acquainted with the Subaltern he unburdened his old heart of some of the passions that had withered it. ‘Sahib,’ he used to say, tapping his stick against the parapet, ‘when I was a young man I was one of twenty thousand horsemen who came out of the City and rode round the plain here. Sahib, I was the leader of a hundred, then of a thousand, then of five thousand, and now!’ – he pointed to his two servants. ‘But from the beginning to to-day I would cut the throats of all the Sahibs in the land if I could. Hold me fast, Sahib, lest I get away and return to those who would follow me. I forgot them when I was in Burma, but now that I am in my own country again, I remember everything.’

  ‘Do you remember that you have given me your Honour not to make your tendance a hard matter?’ said the Subaltern.

  ‘Yes, to you, only to you, Sahib,’ said Khem Singh. ‘To you because you are of a pleasant countenance. If my turn comes again, Sahib, I will not hang you nor cut your throat.’

  ‘
Thank you,’ said the Subaltern gravely, as he looked along the line of guns that could pound the City to powder in half an hour. ‘Let us go into our own quarters, Khem Singh. Come and talk with me after dinner.’

  Khem Singh would sit on his own cushion at the Subaltern’s feet, drinking heavy, scented aniseed brandy in great gulps, and telling strange stories of Fort Amara, which had been a palace in the old days, of Begums and Ranees tortured to death – in the very vaulted chamber that now served as a messroom; would tell stories of Sobraon21 that made the Subaltern’s cheeks flush and tingle with pride of race, and of the Kuka rising from which so much was expected and the foreknowledge of which was shared by a hundred thousand souls. But he never told tales of ’57 because, as he said, he was the Subaltern’s guest, and ’57 is a year that no man, Black or White, cares to speak of. Once only, when the aniseed brandy had slightly affected his head, he said: ‘Sahib, speaking now of a matter which lay between Sobraon and the affair of the Kukas, it was ever a wonder to us that you stayed your hand at all, and that, having stayed it, you did not make the land one prison. Now I hear from without that you do great honour to all men of our country and by your own hands are destroying the Terror of your Name which is your strong rock and defence. This is a foolish thing. Will oil and water mix? Now in ’57 –’

  ‘I was not born then, Subadar Sahib,’ said the Subaltern, and Khem Singh reeled to his quarters.

  The Subaltern would tell me of these conversations at the Club, and my desire to see Khem Singh increased. But Wali Dad, sitting in the window-seat of the house on the City wall, said that it would be a cruel thing to do, and Lalun pretended that I preferred the society of a grizzled old Sikh to hers.

  ‘Here is tobacco, here is talk, here are many friends and all the news of the City, and, above all, here is myself. I will tell you stories and sing you songs, and Wali Dad will talk his English nonsense in your ears. Is that worse than watching the caged animal yonder? Go to-morrow then, if you must, but to-day such-and-such an one will be here, and he will speak of wonderful things.’