It was a hasty onslaught, but the powder was at least all in one place; and it should be none of Tarvin’s fault if the noise and smoke at least did not delight the Maharajah.
A little before five he came with his escort, and Tarvin, touching fire to a many-times-lengthened fuse, bade all men run back. The fire ate slowly the crown of the dam. Then with a dull roar the dam opened out its heart in a sheet of white flame, and the masses of flying earth darkened the smoke above.
The ruin closed on itself for an instant ere the waters of the Amet plunged forward into the gap, made a boiling rapid, and then spread themselves lazily along their accustomed levels.
The rain of things descending pitted the earth of the banks and threw the water in sheets and spurts. Then only the smoke and the blackened flanks of the dam, crumbling each minute as the river sucked them down, remained to tell of the work that had been.
‘And now, Maharajah Sahib, what do I owe you?’ said Tarvin, after he had satisfied himself that none of the more reckless coolies had been killed.
‘That was very fine,’ said the Maharajah. ‘I never saw that before. It is a pity that it cannot come again.’
‘What do I owe you?’ repeated Tarvin.
‘For that? Oh, they were my people. They ate a little grain, and many were from my jails. The powder was from the arsenal. What is the use to talk of paying? Am I a bunnia that I can tell what there is to pay? It was a fine tamasha. By God, there is no dam left at all.’
‘You might let me put it right.’
‘Tarvin Sahib, if you waited one year, or perhaps two years, you would get a bill and besides, if anything was paid, the men who pay the convicts would take it all, and I should not be richer. They were my people, and the grain was cheap, and they have seen the tamasha. Enough. It is not good to talk of payment. Let us return to the city. By God, Tarvin Sahib, you are a quick man. Now there will be no one to play pachisi with me or to make me laugh. And the Maharaj Kunwar will be sorry also. But it is good that a man should marry. Yes, it is good. Why do you go, Tarvin Sahib? Is it an order of the Government?’
‘Yes; the American Government. I am wanted there to help govern my State.’
‘No telegram has come for you,’ said the King simply. ‘But you are so quick.’
Tarvin laughed lightly, wheeled his horse, and was gone, leaving the King interested but unmoved. He had finally learned to accept Tarvin and his ways as a natural phenomenon beyond control. As he drew rein instinctively opposite the missionary’s door and looked for an instant at the city, the sense of the otherness of things daily seen that heralds swift coming change smote the mind of the American, and he shivered. ‘It was a bad dream — a very bad dream,’ he muttered, ‘and the worst of it is not one of the boys in Topaz would ever believe half of it.’ Then the eyes that swept the arid landscape twinkled with many reminiscences. ‘Tarvin, my boy, you’ve played with a kingdom, and for results it lays over monkeying with the buzz-saw. You were left when you sized this State up for a played-out hole in the ground; badly left. If you have been romping around six months after something you hadn’t the sabe to hold when you’d got it you’ve learned that much. . . . Topaz! Poor old Topaz!’ Again his eyes ran round the tawny horizon, and he laughed aloud. The little town under the shadow of Big Chief, ten thousand miles away and all ignorant of the mighty machinery that had moved on its behalf, would have resented that laugh; for Tarvin, fresh from events that had shaken Rhatore to its heart, was almost patronising the child of his ambition.
He brought his hand down on his thigh with a smack, and turned his horse toward the telegraph-office. ‘How in the name of all that’s good and holy,’ said he, ‘am I to clear up this business with the Mutrie? Even a copy of the Naulahka in glass would make her mouth water.’ The horse cantered on steadily, and Tarvin dismissed the matter with a generous sweep of his free hand. ‘If I can stand it she can. But I’ll prepare her by electricity.’
The dove-coloured telegraph-operator and Postmaster–General of the State remembers even today how the Englishman who was not an Englishman, and, therefore, doubly incomprehensible, climbed for the last time up the narrow stairs, sat down in the broken chair, and demanded absolute silence; how, at the end of fifteen minutes’ portentous meditation and fingering of a thin moustache, he sighed heavily as is the custom of Englishmen when they have eaten that which disagrees with them, waved the operator aside, called up the next office, and clicked off a message with a haughty and high-stepping action of the hands. How he lingered long and lovingly over the last click, applied his ear to the instrument as though it could answer, and turning with a large sweet smile said, — ‘Finis, Babu. Make a note of that,’ and swept forth chanting the war-cry of his State.
It is not wealth nor rank nor state,
But get-up-and-git that makes men great.
* * * * *
The bullock-cart creaked down the road to Rawut junction in the first flush of a purple evening, and the low ranges of the Aravallis showed as many coloured cloud banks against the turquoise sky-line. Behind it the red rock of Rhatore burned angrily on the yellow floors of the desert, speckled with the shadows of the browsing camels. Overhead the crane and the wild duck were flocking back to their beds in the reeds, and grey monkeys, family by family, sat on the roadside, their arms round one another’s necks. The evening star came up from behind a jagged peak of rock and brushwood, so that its reflection might swim undisturbed at the bottom of an almost dried reservoir, buttressed with time-yellowed marble and flanked with silver plume-grass. Between the star and the earth wheeled huge fox-headed bats and night-jars hawking for the feather-winged moths. The buffaloes had left their water-holes, and the cattle were lying down for the night. Then villagers in far-away huts began to sing, and the hillsides were studded with home lights. The bullocks grunted as the driver twisted their tails, and the high grass by the roadside brushed with the wash of a wave of the open beach against the slow-turning tyres.
The first breath of a cold-weather night made Kate wrap her rugs about her more closely. Tarvin was sitting at the back of the cart, swinging his legs and staring at Rhatore before the bends of the roads should hide it, The realisation of defeat, remorse, and the torture of an over well-trained conscience were yet to come to Kate. In that hour, luxuriously disposed upon many cushions, she realised nothing more than a woman’s complete contentment with the fact that there was a man in the world to do things for her, though she had not yet learned to lose her interest in how they were done.
The reiterated and passionate farewells of the women in the palace, and the cyclonic sweep of a wedding at which Nick had refused to efface himself as a bridegroom should, but had flung all their world forward on the torrent of his own vitality, had worn her out. The yearning of homesickness — she had seen it in Mrs. Estes’ wet eyes at the missionary’s house an hour before — lay strong upon her, and she would fain have remembered her plunge into the world’s evil as a dream of the night, but —
‘Nick,’ she said, softly.
‘What is it, little woman?’
‘Oh, nothing: I was thinking. Nick, what did you do about the Maharaj Kunwar?’
‘He’s fixed, or I’m mistaken. Don’t worry your head about that. After I’d explained a thing or two to old man Nolan he seemed to think well of inviting that young man to board with him until he starts for the Mayo College. Tumble?’
‘His poor mother! If only I could have — — ’
‘But you couldn’t, little woman. Hi! Look quick, Kate! There she goes! The last of Rhatore.’
A string of coloured lights, high up on the hanging gardens of the palace; was being blotted out behind the velvet blackness of a hill shoulder. Tarvin leaped to his feet, caught the side of the cart, and bowed profoundly after the Oriental manner.
The lights disappeared one by one, even as the glories of a necklace had slidden into a Kabuli grape-box, till there remained only the flare from a window on a topmost bastion — a point of light as red and as re
mote as the blaze of the Black Diamond. That passed too, and the soft darkness rose out of the earth fold upon fold wrapping the man and the woman.
‘After all,’ said Tarvin, addressing the newlighted firmament, ‘that was distinctly a side issue.’
CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS
This 1897 novel follows the adventures of fifteen-year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., who is the arrogant and spoiled son of a railroad tycoon. The novel originally appeared as a serialisation in McClure’s magazine, beginning in the November 1896 edition. The book’s title originates from the ballad “Mary Ambree”, which begins with, “When captains courageous, whom death could not daunt”.
Kipling with his father, John Lockwood
The first edition in book format
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER I
The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet.
“That Cheyne boy’s the biggest nuisance aboard,” said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. “He isn’t wanted here. He’s too fresh.”
A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites: “I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I dell you you should imbort ropes’ ends free under your dariff.”
“Pshaw! There isn’t any real harm to him. He’s more to be pitied than anything,” a man from New York drawled, as he lay at full length along the cushions under the wet skylight. “They’ve dragged him around from hotel to hotel ever since he was a kid. I was talking to his mother this morning. She’s a lovely lady, but she don’t pretend to manage him. He’s going to Europe to finish his education.”
“Education isn’t begun yet.” This was a Philadelphian, curled up in a corner. “That boy gets two hundred a month pocket-money, he told me. He isn’t sixteen either.”
“Railroads, his father, aind’t it?” said the German.
“Yep. That and mines and lumber and shipping. Built one place at San Diego, the old man has; another at Los Angeles; owns half a dozen railroads, half the lumber on the Pacific slope, and lets his wife spend the money,” the Philadelphian went on lazily. “The West don’t suit her, she says. She just tracks around with the boy and her nerves, trying to find out what’ll amuse him, I guess. Florida, Adirondacks, Lakewood, Hot Springs, New York, and round again. He isn’t much more than a second-hand hotel clerk now. When he’s finished in Europe he’ll be a holy terror.”
“What’s the matter with the old man attending to him personally?” said a voice from the frieze ulster.
“Old man’s piling up the rocks. ‘Don’t want to be disturbed, I guess. He’ll find out his error a few years from now. ‘Pity, because there’s a heap of good in the boy if you could get at it.”
“Mit a rope’s end; mit a rope’s end!” growled the German.
Once more the door banged, and a slight, slim-built boy perhaps fifteen years old, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth, leaned in over the high footway. His pasty yellow complexion did not show well on a person of his years, and his look was a mixture of irresolution, bravado, and very cheap smartness. He was dressed in a cherry-coloured blazer, knickerbockers, red stockings, and bicycle shoes, with a red flannel cap at the back of the head. After whistling between his teeth, as he eyed the company, he said in a loud, high voice: “Say, it’s thick outside. You can hear the fish-boats squawking all around us. Say, wouldn’t it be great if we ran down one?”
“Shut the door, Harvey,” said the New Yorker. “Shut the door and stay outside. You’re not wanted here.”
“Who’ll stop me?” he answered, deliberately. “Did you pay for my passage, Mister Martin? ‘Guess I’ve as good right here as the next man.”
He picked up some dice from a checkerboard and began throwing, right hand against left.
“Say, gen’elmen, this is deader’n mud. Can’t we make a game of poker between us?”
There was no answer, and he puffed his cigarette, swung his legs, and drummed on the table with rather dirty fingers. Then he pulled out a roll of bills as if to count them.
“How’s your mamma this afternoon?” a man said. “I didn’t see her at lunch.”
“In her state-room, I guess. She’s ‘most always sick on the ocean. I’m going to give the stewardess fifteen dollars for looking after her. I don’t go down more ‘n I can avoid. It makes me feel mysterious to pass that butler’s-pantry place. Say, this is the first time I’ve been on the ocean.”
“Oh, don’t apologize, Harvey.”
“Who’s apologizing? This is the first time I’ve crossed the ocean, gen’elmen, and, except the first day, I haven’t been sick one little bit. No, sir!” He brought down his fist with a triumphant bang, wetted his finger, and went on counting the bills.
“Oh, you’re a high-grade machine, with the writing in plain sight,” the Philadelphian yawned. “You’ll blossom into a credit to your country if you don’t take care.”
“I know it. I’m an American — first, last, and all the time. I’ll show ‘em that when I strike Europe. Piff! My cig’s out. I can’t smoke the truck the steward sells. Any gen’elman got a real Turkish cig on him?”
The chief engineer entered for a moment, red, smiling, and wet. “Say, Mac,” cried Harvey cheerfully, “how are we hitting it?”
“Vara much in the ordinary way,” was the grave reply. “The young are as polite as ever to their elders, an’ their elders are e’en tryin’ to appreciate it.”
A low chuckle came from a corner. The German opened his cigar-case and handed a skinny black cigar to Harvey.
“Dot is der broper apparatus to smoke, my young friendt,” he said. “You vill dry it? Yes? Den you vill be efer so happy.”
Harvey lit the unlovely thing with a flourish: he felt that he was getting on in grownup society.
“It would take more ‘n this to keel me over,” he said, ignorant that he was lighting that terrible article, a Wheeling “stogie”.
“Dot we shall bresently see,” said the German. “Where are we now, Mr. Mactonal’?”
“Just there or thereabouts, Mr. Schaefer,” said the engineer. “We’ll be on the Grand Bank to-night; but in a general way o’ speakin’, we’re all among the fishing-fleet now. We’ve shaved three dories an’ near scalped the boom off a Frenchman since noon, an’ that’s close sailing’, ye may say.”
“You like my cigar, eh?” the German asked, for Harvey’s eyes were full of tears.
“Fine, full flavor,” he answered through shut teeth. “Guess we’ve slowed down a little, haven’t we? I’ll skip out and see what the log says.”
“I might if I vhas you,” said the German.
Harvey staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail. He was very unhappy; but he saw the deck-steward lashing chairs together, and, since he had boasted before the man that he was never seasick, his pride made him go aft to the second-saloon deck at the stern, which was finished in a turtle-back. The deck was deserted, and he crawled to the extreme end of it, near the flag-pole. There he doubled up in limp agony, for the Wheeling “stogie” joined with the surge and jar of the screw to sieve out his soul. His head swelled; sparks of fire danced before his eyes; his body seemed to lose weight, while his heels wavered in the breeze. He was fainting from seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to the smooth lip of the turtle-back. Then a low, gray mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep.
He was roused by the sound of a dinner-horn such as they used to blow at a summer-school he had once attended in the Adirondacks. Slow
ly he remembered that he was Harvey Cheyne, drowned and dead in mid-ocean, but was too weak to fit things together. A new smell filled his nostrils; wet and clammy chills ran down his back, and he was helplessly full of salt water. When he opened his eyes, he perceived that he was still on the top of the sea, for it was running round him in silver-coloured hills, and he was lying on a pile of half-dead fish, looking at a broad human back clothed in a blue jersey.
“It’s no good,” thought the boy. “I’m dead, sure enough, and this thing is in charge.”
He groaned, and the figure turned its head, showing a pair of little gold rings half hidden in curly black hair.
“Aha! You feel some pretty well now?” it said. “Lie still so: we trim better.”
With a swift jerk he sculled the flickering boat-head on to a foamless sea that lifted her twenty full feet, only to slide her into a glassy pit beyond. But this mountain-climbing did not interrupt blue-jersey’s talk. “Fine good job, I say, that I catch you. Eh, wha-at? Better good job, I say, your boat not catch me. How you come to fall out?”
“I was sick,” said Harvey; “sick, and couldn’t help it.”
“Just in time I blow my horn, and your boat she yaw a little. Then I see you come all down. Eh, wha-at? I think you are cut into baits by the screw, but you dreeft — dreeft to me, and I make a big fish of you. So you shall not die this time.”
“Where am I?” said Harvey, who could not see that life was particularly safe where he lay.
“You are with me in the dory — Manuel my name, and I come from schooner We’re Here of Gloucester. I live to Gloucester. By-and-by we get supper. Eh, wha-at?”
He seemed to have two pairs of hands and a head of cast-iron, for, not content with blowing through a big conch-shell, he must needs stand up to it, swaying with the sway of the flat-bottomed dory, and send a grinding, thuttering shriek through the fog. How long this entertainment lasted, Harvey could not remember, for he lay back terrified at the sight of the smoking swells. He fancied he heard a gun and a horn and shouting. Something bigger than the dory, but quite as lively, loomed alongside. Several voices talked at once; he was dropped into a dark, heaving hole, where men in oilskins gave him a hot drink and took off his clothes, and he fell asleep.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 48