‘Hmm! Maybe you’re right. But, as you know, there is no Survey work for him at present.’
‘Let him out—let him go,’ Mahbub interrupted. ‘Who expects any colt to carry heavy weight at first? Let him run with the caravans—like our white camel-colts—for luck. I would take him myself, but——’
‘There is a little business where he would be most useful—in the South,’ said Lurgan, with peculiar suavity, dropping his heavy blued eyelids.
‘E.23 has that in hand,’ said Creighton quickly. ‘He must not go down there. Besides, he knows no Turki.’251
‘Only tell him the shape and the smell of the letters we want and he will bring them back,’ Lurgan insisted.
‘No. That is a man’s job,’ said Creighton.
It was a wry-necked matter of unauthorised and incendiary correspondence between a person who claimed to be the ultimate authority in all matters of the Mohammedan religion throughout the world, and a younger member of a royal house who had been brought to book for kidnapping women within British territory. The Moslem Archbishop had been emphatic and over-arrogant; the young prince was merely sulky at the curtailment of his privileges, but there was no need he should continue a correspondence which might some day compromise him. One letter indeed had been procured, but the finder was later found dead by the roadside in the habit of an Arab trader, as E.23, taking up the work, duly reported.
These facts, and a few others not to be published, made both Mahbub and Creighton shake their heads.
‘Let him go out with his Red Lama,’ said the horse-dealer with visible effort. ‘He is fond of the old man. He can learn his paces by the rosary at least.’
‘I have had some dealings with the old man—by letter,’ said Colonel Creighton, smiling to himself. ‘Whither goes he?’
‘Up and down the land,252 as he has these three years. He seeks a River of Healing. God’s curse upon all——’ Mahbub checked himself. ‘He beds down at the Temple of the Tirthankars or at Buddh Gaya when he is in from the Road. Then he goes to see the boy at the madrissah, as we know, for the boy was punished for it twice or thrice. He is quite mad, but a peaceful man. I have met him. The Babu also has had dealings with him. We have watched him for three years. Red Lamas are not so common in Hind that one loses track.’
‘Babus are very curious,’ said Lurgan meditatively. ‘Do you know what Hurree Babu really wants? He wants to be made a member of the Royal Society by taking ethnological notes. I tell you, I tell him about the lama everything which Mahbub and the boy have told me. Hurree Babu goes down to Benares—at his own expense, I think.’
‘I don’t,’ said Creighton briefly. He had paid Hurree’s travelling expenses, out of a most lively curiosity to learn what the lama might be.
‘And he applies to the lama for information on lamaism, and devil-dances, and spells and charms, several times in these few years. Holy Virgin! I could have told him all that yee-ars ago. I think Hurree Babu is getting too old for the Road. He likes better to collect manners and customs information. Yes, he wants to be an F.R.S.’
‘Hurree thinks well of the boy, doesn’t he?’
‘Oh, very indeed—we have had some pleasant evenings at my little place—but I think it would be waste to throw him away with Hurree on the Ethnological side.’
‘Not for a first experience. How does that strike you, Mahbub? Let the boy run with the lama for six months. After that we can see. He will get experience.’
‘He has it already, Sahib—as a fish controls the water he swims in. But for every reason it will be well to loose him from the school.’
‘Very good, then,’ said Creighton, half to himself. ‘He can go with the lama, and if Hurree Babu cares to keep an eye on them so much the better. He won’t lead the boy into any danger as Mahbub would. Curious—his wish to be an F.R.S. Very human, too. He is best on the Ethnological side—Hurree.’
No money and no preferment would have drawn Creighton from his work on the Indian Survey, but deep in his heart also lay the ambition to write ‘F.R.S.’253 after his name. Honours of a sort he knew could be obtained by ingenuity and the help of friends, but, to the best of his belief, nothing save work—papers representing a life of it—took a man into the Society which he had bombarded for years with monographs on strange Asiatic cults and unknown customs. Nine men out of ten would flee from a Royal Society soiree in extremity of boredom; but Creighton was the tenth, and at times his soul yearned for the crowded rooms in easy London where silver-haired, bald-headed gentlemen who know nothing of the Army move among spectroscopic experiments, the lesser plants of the frozen tundras, electric flight-measuring machines, and apparatus for slicing into fractional millimetres the left eye of the female mosquito. By all right and reason, it was the Royal Geographical that should have appealed to him, but men are as chancy as children in their choice of playthings. So Creighton smiled, and thought the better of Hurree Babu, moved by like desire.
He dropped the ghost-dagger and looked up at Mahbub.
‘How soon can we get the colt from the stable?’ said the horse-dealer, reading his eyes.
‘Hmm! If I withdraw him by order now—what will he do, think you? I have never before assisted at the teaching of such an one.’
‘He will come to me,’ said Mahbub promptly. ‘Lurgan Sahib and I will prepare him for the Road.’
‘So be it, then. For six months he shall run at his choice. But who will be his sponsor?’
Lurgan slightly inclined his head. ‘He will not tell anything, if that is what you are afraid of, Colonel Creighton.’
‘It’s only a boy, after all.’
‘Ye-es; but first, he has nothing to tell; and secondly, he knows what would happen. Also, he is very fond of Mahbub, and of me a little.’
‘Will he draw pay?’ demanded the practical horse-dealer.
‘Food and water allowance only. Twenty rupees a month.’
One advantage of the Secret Service is that it has no worrying audit. That Service is ludicrously starved, of course, but the funds are administered by a few men who do not call for vouchers or present itemised accounts. Mahbub’s eyes lighted with almost a Sikh’s love of money. Even Lurgan’s impassive face changed. He considered the years to come when Kim would have been entered and made to the Great Game that never ceases day and night, throughout India. He foresaw honour and credit in the mouths of a chosen few, coming to him from his pupil. Lurgan Sahib had made E.23 what E.23 was, out of a bewildered, impertinent, lying, little North-West Province man.
But the joy of these masters was pale and smoky beside the joy of Kim when St. Xavier’s Head called him aside, with word that Colonel Creighton had sent for him.
‘I understand, O’Hara, that he has found you a place as an assistant chain-man in the Canal Department: that comes of taking up mathematics. It is great luck for you, for you are only sixteen; but of course you understand that you do not become pukka [permanent] till you have passed the autumn examination. So you must not think you are going out into the world to enjoy yourself, or that your fortune is made. There is a great deal of hard work before you. Only, if you succeed in becoming pukka, you can rise, you know, to four hundred and fifty a month.’Whereat the Principal gave him much good advice as to his conduct, and his manners, and his morals; and others, his elders, who had not been wafted into billets, talked as only Anglo-Indian254 lads can, of favouritism and corruption. Indeed, young Cazalet, whose father was a pensioner at Chunar, hinted very broadly that Colonel Creighton’s interest in Kim was directly patemal;255 and Kim, instead of retaliating, did not even use language. He was thinking of the immense fun to come, of Mahbub’s letter of the day before, all neatly written in English, making appointment for that afternoon in a house the very name of which would have crisped the Principal’s hair with horror....
Said Kim to Mahbub in Lucknow railway station that evening, above the luggage-scales: ‘I feared lest, at the last, the roof would fall upon me and cheat me. Is it indeed all finished
, 0 my father?’
Mahbub snapped his fingers to show the utterness of that end, and his eyes blazed like red coals.
‘Then where is the pistol that I may wear it?’
‘Softly! A half-year, to run without heel-ropes. I begged that much from Colonel Creighton Sahib. At twenty rupees a month. Old Red Hat knows that thou art coming.’
‘I will pay thee dustoorie (commission) on my pay for three months,’ said Kim gravely. ‘Yea, two rupees a month. But first we must get rid of these.’ He plucked his thin linen trousers and dragged at his collar. ’I have brought with me all that I need on the Road. My trunk has gone up to Lurgan Sahib’s.’
‘Who sends his salaams to thee—Sahib.’
‘Lurgan Sahib is a very clever man. But what dost thou do?’
‘I go North again, upon the Great Game. What else? Is thy mind still set on following old Red Hat?’
‘Do not forget he made me that I am—though he did not know it. Year by year, he sent the money that taught me.’
‘I would have done as much—had it struck my thick head,’ Mahbub growled. ‘Come away. The lamps are lit now, and none will mark thee in the bazar. We go to Huneefa’s house.’
On the way thither, Mahbub gave him much the same sort of advice as his mother gave to Lemuel, and curiously enough, Mahbub was exact to point out how Huneefa and her likes destroyed kings.
‘And I remember,’ he quoted maliciously, ‘one who said, “Trust a snake before an harlot, and an harlot before a Pathan, Mahbub Ali.” Now, excepting as to Pathans, of whom I am one, all that is true. Most true is it in the Great Game, for it is by means of women that all plans come to ruin 256 and we lie out in the dawning with our throats cut. So it happened to such a one.’ He gave the reddest particulars.
‘Then why——?’ Kim paused before a filthy staircase that climbed to the warm darkness of an upper chamber, in the ward that is behind Azim Ullah’s tobacco-shop. Those who know it call it The Bird-cage—it is so full of whisperings and whistlings and chirrupings.
The room, with its dirty cushions and half-smoked hookahs, smelt abominably of stale tobacco. In one corner lay a huge and shapeless woman clad in greenish gauzes, and decked, brow, nose, ear, neck, wrist, arm, waist, and ankle, with heavy native jewellery. When she turned it was like the clashing of copper pots. A lean cat in the balcony outside the window mewed hungrily. Kim checked, bewildered, at the door-curtain.
‘Is that the new stuff, Mahbub?’ said Huneefa lazily, scarce troubling to remove the mouthpiece from her lips. ‘0 Buktanoos!‘257—like most of her kind, she swore by the Djinns258—‘O Buktanoos! He is very good to look upon.’
‘That is part of the selling of the horse,’ Mahbub explained to Kim, who laughed.
‘I have heard that talk since my Sixth Day,’ he replied, squatting by the light. ‘Whither does it lead?’
‘To protection. To-night we change thy colour. This sleeping under roofs has blanched thee like an almond. But Huneefa has the secret of a colour that catches. No painting of a day or two. Also, we fortify thee against the chances of the Road. That is my gift to thee, my son. Take out all metals on thee and lay them here. Make ready, Huneefa.’
Kim dragged forth his compass, Survey paint-box, and the new-filled medicine-box. They had all accompanied his travels, and boylike he valued them immensely.
The woman rose slowly and moved with her hands a little spread before her. Then Kim saw that she was blind. ‘No, no,’ she muttered, ‘the Pathan speaks truth—my colour does not go in a week or a month, and those whom I protect are under strong guard.’
‘When one is far off and alone, it would not be well to grow blotched and leprous of a sudden,’ said Mahbub. ‘When thou wast with me I could oversee the matter. Besides, a Pathan is a fair-skin. Strip to the waist now and look how thou art whitened.’ Huneefa felt her way back from an inner room. ‘It is no matter, she cannot see.’ He took a pewter bowl from her ringed hand.
The dye-stuff showed blue and gummy. Kim experimented on the back of his wrist, with a dab of cotton-wool; but Huneefa heard him.
‘No, no,’ she cried, ‘the thing is not done thus, but with the proper ceremonies. The colouring is the least part. I give thee the full protection of the Road.’
‘Jadoo? [magic],’ said Kim, with a half start. He did not like the white, sightless eyes. Mahbub’s hand on his neck bowed him to the floor, nose within an inch of the boards.
‘Be still. No harm comes to thee, my son. I am thy sacrifice!’
He could not see what the woman was about, but heard the clish-clash of her jewellery for many minutes. A match lit up the darkness; he caught the well-known purr and fizzle of grains of incense. Then the room filled with smoke—heavy, aromatic, and stupefying. Through growing drowse he heard the names of devils—of Zulbazan, Son of Eblis, who lives in bazars and paraos, making all the sudden lewd wickedness of wayside halts; of Dulhan, invisible about mosques, the dweller among the slippers of the Faithful, who hinders folk from their prayers; and Musboot, Lord of lies and panic. Huneefa, now whispering in his ear, now talking as from an immense distance, touched him with horrible soft fingers, but Mahbub’s grip never shifted from his neck till, relaxing with a sigh, the boy lost his senses.
‘Allah! How he fought! We should never have done it but for the drugs. That was his white blood, I take it,’ said Mahbub testily. ‘Go on with the dawut [invocation]. Give him full Protection.’
‘0 Hearer! Thou that hearest with ears, be present. Listen, O Hearer!’ Huneefa moaned, her dead eyes turned to the west. The dark room filled with moanings and snortings.
From the outer balcony, a ponderous figure raised a round bullet head and coughed nervously.
‘Do not interrupt this ventriloquial necromanciss, my friend,’ it said in English. ‘I opine that it is very disturbing to you, but no enlightened observer is jolly-well upset.’
‘. . . I will lay a plot for their ruin! O Prophet, bear with the unbelievers. Let them alone awhile!’ Huneefa’s face, turned to the northward, worked horribly, and it was as though voices from the ceiling answered her.
Hurree Babu returned to his note-book, balanced on the window-sill, but his hand shook. Huneefa, in some sort of drugged ecstasy, wrenched herself to and fro as she sat cross-legged by Kim’s still head, and called upon devil after devil, in the ancient order of the ritual, binding them to avoid the boy’s every action.
‘With Him are the keys of the Secret Things! None knoweth them beside Himself. He knoweth that which is in the dry land and in the sea!’ Again broke out the unearthly whistling responses.
‘I—I apprehend it is not at all malignant in its operation?’ said the Babu, watching the throat-muscles quiver and jerk as Huneefa spoke with tongues. ‘It—it is not likely that she has killed the boy? If so, I decline to be witness at the trial.... What was the last hypothetical devil mentioned?’
‘Babuji,’259 said Mahbub in the vernacular. ‘I have no regard for the devils of Hind, but the Sons of Eblis are far otherwise, and whether they be jumalee [well-affected] or jullalee [terrible] they love not Kafirs.’260
‘Then you think I had better go?’ said Hurree Babu, half rising. ‘They are, of course, dematerialised phenomena. Spencer 261 says——’
Huneefa’s crisis passed, as these things must, in a paroxysm of howling, with a touch of froth at the lips. She lay spent and motionless beside Kim, and the crazy voices ceased.
‘Wah! That work is done. May the boy be better for it; and Huneefa is surely a mistress of dawut. Help haul her aside, Babu. Do not be afraid.’
‘How am I to fear the absolutely non-existent?’ said Hurree Babu, talking English to reassure himself. It is an awful thing still to dread the magic that you contemptuously investigate—to collect folk-lore for the Royal Society with a lively belief in all Powers of Darkness.
Mahbub chuckled. He had been out with Hurree on the Road ere now. ‘Let us finish the colouring,’ said he. ‘The boy is well protected i
f—if the Lords of the Air have ears to hear. I am a Sufi [free-thinker], but when one can get blind-sides of a woman, a stallion, or a devil, why go round to invite a kick? Set him upon the way, Babu, and see that old Red Hat does not lead him beyond our reach. I must get back to my horses.’
‘All raight,’ said Hurree Babu. ‘He is at present curious spectacle.’
About third cockcrow,262 Kim woke after a sleep of thousands of years. Huneefa, in her corner, snored heavily, but Mahbub was gone.
‘I hope you were not frightened,’ said an oily voice at his elbow. ‘I superintended entire operation, which was most interesting from ethnological point of view. It was high-class dawut.’
‘Huh!’ said Kim, recognising Hurree Babu, who smiled ingratiatingly.
‘And also I had honour to bring down from Lurgan your present costume. I am not in the habit offeecially of carrying such gauds to subordinates, but‘—he giggled—‘your case is noted as exceptional on the books. I hope Mr. Lurgan will note my action.’
Kim yawned and stretched himself. It was good to turn and twist within loose clothes once again.
‘What is this?’ He looked curiously at the heavy duffle-stuff loaded with the scents of the far North.
‘Oho! That is inconspicuous dress of chela attached to service of lamaistic lama. Complete in every particular,’ said Hurree Babu, rolling into the balcony to clean his teeth at a goglet.263 ‘I am of opeenion it is not your old gentleman’s precise releegion, but rather sub-variant of same. I have contributed rejected notes to Asiatic Quarterly Review on these subjects. Now it is curious that the old gentleman himself is totally devoid of releegiosity He is not a dam’ particular.’
‘Do you know him?’
Hurree Babu held up his hand to show he was engaged in the prescribed rites that accompany tooth-cleaning and such things among decently bred Bengalis. Then he recited in English an Arya-Somaj264 prayer of a theistical nature, and stuffed his mouth with pan and betel.
‘Oah yes. I have met him several times at Benares, and also at Buddh Gaya, to interrogate him on releegious points and devil-worship. He is pure agnostic—same as me.’
Kim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Page 23