by Ruskin Bond
Antlers heavier or finer
I had never yet set eyes on.
I took aim, and hit it neatly
(As I thought) behind the shoulder.
Like a log it fell, completely
Hidden by a jutting boulder.
As I started to retrieve it,
At the height of my ambition,
Up it jumped, if you'll believe it,
In the very same position.
And I saw to my amazement
That both horns had one tine wanting,
Which—I knew my rifle's ways—meant
That I must have held it slanting.
Once again I aimed, and shot it
(As I thought) behind the shoulder.
Once again I must have got it,
For it fell behind the boulder.
But I lay and rubbed my eyes, Sir,
For again I must have missed. I'm
Jiggered if it didn't rise, Sir,
And with four tines missing this time.
Well, Sir, in succession eight—or
Rather seven times I downed it.
Seven times, a moment later,
Perched on the same rock I found it.
And it made its reappearance,
Still with antlers one tine shorter,
With such dogged perseverance
That I thought of giving quarter.
But by then its cup was full, it
Had no horns left to diminish,
And my eighth and final bullet
Brought the struggle to a finish.
Though it really scarcely mattered,
As the horns would be past praying for,
Irrecoverably scattered,—
Still, I thought a look worth staying for.
But when I had made my way there,
Zounds! My riches were embarrassing,
For, instead of one, I found there
Seven buck and one doe barasingh.
There you are, Sir. That's the best of them.
As you see, instead of twelve, it
Has fourteen tines. All the rest of them
Were, I must confess, on velvet.
VI
Risky work, Sir, tiger-stalking,
Said the Major, monstrous risky.
(Thirsty weather this for talking.
Thank you. Mine's another whisky).
Mirzapur, when I was sent there,
Stank of tiger; you could wind 'em
Almost anywhere you went there;
That's till I and W—thinned 'em.
Through the deep-cut nullahs creeping
I had tracked and killed a couple, and
The horizon now was sweeping
For another on the upland.
At my glasses' range extreme I
Searched each hillock, bush and boulder,
While my rifle hung, to free my
Hands, suspended from my shoulder.
Having nearly boxed the compass, I
Looked behind me, and, Great Cæsar!
I confess I gave a jump as I
Saw the tables turned on me, Sir.
Three feet off was a terrific
Tiger in the act of springing,
And my sole and sure specific
Useless at my back was swinging.
Oh, of course you guess the sequel,—
Seeing me (he thought) receding
To the middle of next week, well
Over me the brute went speeding.
With a bullet in his occiput
He was greeted as he landed.
Coming here, I lost the box I put
His skin in,—at least my man did!
First published in The Pioneer, Allahabad, 1917
George and Ranji
BY RUSKIN BOND
When I heard that my cousin George had again escaped from the mental hospital in a neighbouring town, I knew it wouldn't be long before he turned up at my doorstep. It usually happens at the approach of the cricket season. No problem, I thought. I'll just bundle him into a train and take him back to the hospital.
Cousin George had been there, off and on, for a few years. He wasn't the violent type and was given a certain amount of freedom—with the result that he occasionally wandered off by himself, sometimes, to try and take in a Test match. You see, George did not suffer from the delusion that he was Napoleon or Ghengis Khan, he was convinced that he was the great Ranji, Prince of Cricketers, and that he had just been selected to captain India—quite forgetting that Ranji had actually played for England!
So when George turned up on my front step I wan't surprised to find him carrying a cricket bat in one hand and a protective box in the other.
"Aren't you ready?" he asked. "The match starts at 11."
"There's plenty of time." I said, recalling that the train left at 11.15. "Why don't you come in and relax while I get ready?"
George sat down and asked for a glass of beer. I brought him one and he promptly emptied it over a pot of ferns.
"They look thirsty," he said. I dressed hurriedly, anxious to get moving before he started practising his latest cuts on my cutglass decanter. Then, arm in arm, we walked to the gate and hailed an auto rickshaw.
"Railway station," I whispered to the driver.
"Ferozeshah Koda," said George in rising tones, naming Delhi's famous cricket ground. No matter. I thought, I'll straighten out the driver as we go along, I bundled George into the rickshaw and we were soon heading in the direction of the Kotla.
"Railway station," I said again, in tones that could not be denied.
"Kotla," said cousin George, just as firmly.
The scooter driver kept right on course for the cricket ground. Apparently George had made a better impression on him.
"Look," I said, tapping the driver on the shoulder. "This is my cousin and he's not quite right in the head. He's just escaped from a mental asylum and if I'm to get him back there tonight, we must catch the 11.15 train."
The scooter driver slowed down and looked from cousin George to me and back again. George gave him a winning smile and looking in my direction, tapped his forehead significantly. The driver nodded in sympathy and kept straight on for the Kotla.
Well, I've always believed that the dividing line between sanity and insanity is a very thin one, but I had never realised it was quite so thin—too thin for my own comfort! Who was crazy, George, me or the driver?
We had almost reached the Kotla and I had no intention of watching over cousin George through a whole day's play. He gets excited at cricket matches—which is strange considering how dull they can be. On one occasion, he broke through the barriers and walked up to the wicket with his bat, determined to bat at No 3 (Ranji's favourite position, apparently) and assaulted an umpire who tried to escort him from the ground. On another occasion he streaked across the ground, wearing nothing but his protective box.
But it was I who confirmed the driver's worst fears by jumping off the rickshaw as it slowed down, and making my getaway. I've never been able to discover if cousin George had any money with him, or if the rickshaw driver got paid. Rickshaw drivers are inclined at times to be violent, but then so are inmates of mental hospitals. Anyway, George seems to have no memory of the incident.
Three days later, I received word from the hospital that he had returned of his own accord, boasting that he had hit a century—so presumably, he had participated in the match in some form or another.
All's well that ends well, or so I like to think. Cousin George was not usually a violent man, but I have a funny feeling about the rickshaw driver. I never saw him again in Delhi, and unless he had moved elsewhere, I'm afraid his disappearance might well be connected with cousin George's rickshaw ride. After all, the Jamuna is very near the Kotla.
The Zigzag Walk
BY RUSKIN BOND
Uncle Ken always maintained that the best way to succeed in life was to zigzag. "If you keep going off in new directions," he declared, "you will meet new career op
portunities!"
Well, opportunities certainly came Uncle Ken's way, but he was not a success in the sense that Dale Carnegie or Deepak Chopra would have defined a successful man…
In a long life devoted to "muddling through" with the help of the family, Uncle Ken's many projects had included a chicken farm (rather like the one operated by Ukridge in Wodehouse's Love Among the Chickens) and a mineral water bottling project. For this latter enterprise, he bought a thousand old soda-water bottles and filled them with sulphur water from the springs five miles from Dehra. It was good stuff, taken in small quantities, but drunk one bottle at a time it proved corrosive—"sulphur and brimstone" as one irate customer described it—and angry buyers demonstrated in front of the house, throwing empty bottles over the wall into grandmother's garden.
Grandmother was furious—more with Uncle Ken than with the demonstrators—and made him give everyone's money back.
"You have to be healthy and strong to take sulphur water," he explained later.
"I thought it was supposed to make you healthy and strong," I said.
Grandfather remarked that it did not compare with plain soda-water, which he took with his whisky "Why don't you just bottle soda-water?" he said, "there's a much bigger demand for it."
But Uncle Ken believed that he had to be original in all things.
"The secret to success is to zigzag," he said.
"You certainly zigzagged round the garden when your customers were throwing their bottles back at you," said Grandmother.
Uncle Ken also invented the zigzag walk.
The only way you could really come to know a place well, was to walk in a truly haphazard way To make a zigzag walk you take the first turning to the left, the first to the right, then the first to the left and so on. It can be quite fascinating provided you are in no hurry to reach your destination. The trouble was that Uncle Ken used this zigzag method even when he had a train to catch.
When Grandmother asked him to go to the station to meet Aunt Mabel and her children, who were arriving from Lucknow, he zigzagged through town, taking in the botanical gardens in the west and the limestone factories to the east, finally reaching the station by way of the goods yard, in order as he said, "to take it by surprise".
Nobody was surprised, least of all Aunt Mabel who had taken a tonga and reached the house while Uncle Ken was still sitting on the station platform, waiting for the next train to come in. I was sent to fetch him.
"Let's zigzag home again," he said.
"Only on one condition, we eat chaat every 15 minutes," I said.
So we went home by way of all the most winding bazaars, and in north-Indian towns they do tend to zigzag, stopping at numerous chaat and halwai shops, until Uncle Ken had finished his money We got home very late and were scolded by everyone; but as Uncle Ken told me, we were pioneers and had to expect to be misunderstood and even maligned. Posterity would recognise the true value of zigzagging.
"The zigzag way," he said, "is the diagonal between heart and reason."
In our more troubled times, had he taken to preaching on the subject, he might have acquired a large following of dropouts. But Uncle Ken was the original dropout. He would have not tolerated others.
Had he been a space traveller he would have gone from star to star, zigzagging across the Milky Way.
Uncle Ken would not have succeeded in getting anywhere very fast, but I think he did succeed in getting at least one convert (myself) to see his point: "When you zigzag, you are not choosing what to see in this world but you are giving the world a chance to see you!"
The Decline of the Drama
BY STEPHEN LEACOCK
Coming up home the other night in my car (the Guy Street car), I heard a man who was hanging onto a strap say: "The drama is just turning into a bunch of talk." This set me thinking; and I was glad that it did, because I am being paid by this paper to think once a week, and it is wearing. Some days I never think from morning till night.
This decline of the drama is a thing on which I feel deeply and bitterly; for I am, or I have been, something of an actor myself. I have only been in amateur work, I admit, but still I have played some mighty interesting parts. I have acted in Shakespeare as a citizen, I have been a fairy in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and I was once one end (choice of ends) of a camel in a pantomime. I have had other parts too, such as "A Voice Speaks From Within," or "A Noise Is Heard Without," or a "Bell Rings From Behind," and a lot of things like that. I played as A Noise for seven nights, before crowded houses where people were being turned away from the door; and I have been a Groan and a Sigh and a Tumult, and once I was a "Vision Passes Before the Sleeper."
So when I talk of acting and of the spirit of the Drama, I speak of what I know.
Naturally, too, I was brought into contact, very often into quite intimate personal contact, with some of the greatest actors of the day. I don't say it in any way of boasting, but merely because to those of us who love the stage all dramatic souvenirs are interesting. I remember, for example, that when Wilson Barrett played "The Bat" and had to wear the queer suit with the scales, it was I who put the glue on him.
And I recall a conversation with Sir Henry Irving one night when he said to me, "Fetch me a glass of water, will you?" and I said, "Sir Henry, it is not only a pleasure to get it but it is to me, as a humble devotee of the art that you have ennobled, a high privilege. I will go further—" "Do," he said. Henry was like that, quick, sympathetic, what we call in French "vibrant."
Forbes Robertson I shall never forget: he owes me 50 cents. And as for Martin Harvey—I simply cannot call him Sir John, we are such dear old friends—he never comes to this town without at once calling in my services to lend a hand in his production. No doubt everybody knows that splendid play in which he appears, called "The Breed of the Treshams."
There is a torture scene in it, a most gruesome thing. Harvey, as the hero, has to be tortured, not on the stage itself, but off the stage in a little room at the side. You can hear him howling as he is tortured. Well, it was I who was torturing him. We are so used to working together that Harvey didn't want to let anybody do it but me.
So naturally I am a keen friend and student of the Drama: and I hate to think of it going all to pieces.
The trouble with it is that it is becoming a mere mass of conversation and reflection: nothing happens in it; the action is all going out of it and there is nothing left but thought. When actors begin to think, it is time for a change. They are not fitted for it.
Now in my day—I mean when I was at the apogee of my reputation (I think that is the word—it may be apologee—I forget)—things were very different. What we wanted was action—striking, climatic, catastrophic action, in which things not only happened, but happened suddenly and all in a lump.
And we always took care that the action happened in some place that was worth while, not simply in an ordinary room with ordinary furniture, the way it is in the new drama. The scene was laid in a lighthouse (top story), or in a mad house (at midnight), or in a power house, or a dog house, or a bath house, in short, in some place with a distinct local color and atmosphere.
I remember in the case of the first play I ever wrote (I write plays, too) the manager to whom I submitted it asked me at once, the moment he glanced at it, "Where is the action of this laid?" "It is laid," I answered, "in the main sewer of a great city." "Good, good," he said; "keep it there."
In the case of another play the manager said to me, "What are you doing for atmosphere?" "The opening act," I said, "is in a steam laundry." "Very good," he answered as he turned over the pages, "and have you brought in a condemned cell?" I told him that I had not. "That's rather unfortunate," he said, "because we are especially anxious to bring in a condemned cell. Three of the big theaters have got them this season, and I think we ought to have it in. Can you do it?" "Yes," I said, "I can, if it's wanted. I'll look through the cast, and no doubt I can find one at least of them that ought to be put to death." "Yes, Yes
," said the manager enthusiastically, "I am sure you can."
But I think of all the settings that we used, the lighthouse plays were the best. There is something about a lighthouse that you don't get in a modern drawing room. What it is, I don't know; but there's a difference. I always have liked a lighthouse play, and never have enjoyed acting so much, have never thrown myself into acting so deeply, as in a play of that sort.
There is something about a lighthouse—the way you see it in the earlier scenes—with the lantern shining out over the black waters that suggests security, fidelity, faithfulness, to a trust. The stage used generally to be dim in the first part of a lighthouse play, and you could see the huddled figures of the fishermen and their wives on the foreshore pointing out to the sea (the back of the stage).
"See," one cried with his arm extended, "there is lightning in yon sky." (I was the lightning and that my cue for it): "God help all the poor souls at sea to-night!" Then a woman cried, "Look! Look! a boat upon the reef!" And as she said it I had to rush round and work the boat to make it go up and down properly. Then there was more lightning, and some one screamed out, "Look! See! There's a woman in the boat!"
There wasn't really; it was me; but in the darkness it was all the same, and of course the heroine herself couldn't be there yet because she had to be downstairs getting dressed to be drowned. Then they all cried out, "Poor soul! she's doomed," and all the fishermen ran up and down making a noise.
Fishermen in those plays used to get fearfully excited; and what with the excitement and the darkness and the bright beams of the lighthouse falling on the wet oilskins, and the thundering of the sea upon the reef—ah! me, those were plays! That was acting! And to think that there isn't a single streak of lightning in any play on the boards this year!
And then the kind of climax that a play like this used to have! The scene shifted right at the moment of the excitement, and lo! we are in the tower, the top story of the lighthouse, interior scene. All is still and quiet within, with the bright light of the reflectors flooding the little room, and the roar of the storm heard like muffled thunder outside.
The lighthouse keeper trims his lamps. How firm and quiet and rugged he looks. The snows of sixty winters are on his head, but his eye is clear and his grip strong. Hear the howl of the wind as he opens the door and steps forth upon the iron balcony, eighty feet above the water, and peers out upon the storm.