“And what order was in the Service letter?” Stalky murmured.
“Only an order for our Sahib to write a report on some new cattle sickness. But all orders come in the same make of envelope. We could not tell what order it might have been.”
“When he opened the letter — my son — made he no sign? A cough? An oath?” Strickland asked.
“None, Sahib. I watched his hands. They did not shake. Afterward he wiped his face, but he was sweating before from the heat.”
“Did he know? Did he know who the Hajji was?” said the Infant in English.
“I am a poor man. Who can say what a Sahib of that get knows or does not know? But the Hajji is right. The breed should not be lost. It is not very hot for little children in Dupe, and as regards nurses, my sister’s cousin at Jull — ”
“H’m! That is the boy’s own concern. I wonder if his Chief ever knew?” said Strickland.
“Assuredly,” said Imam Din. “On the night before our Sahib went down to the sea, the Great Sahib — the Man with the Stone Eyes — dined with him in his camp, I being in charge of the table. They talked a long while and the Great Sahib said: ‘What didst thou think of That One?’ (We do not say Ibn Makarrah yonder.) Our Sahib said: ‘Which one?’ The Great Sahib said: ‘That One which taught thy man-eaters to grow cotton for thee. He was in thy District three months to my certain knowledge, and I looked by every runner that thou wouldst send me in his head.’ Our Sahib said: ‘If his head had been needed, another man should have been appointed to govern my District, for he was my friend.’ The Great Sahib laughed and said: ‘If I had needed a lesser man in thy place be sure I would have sent him, as, if I had needed the head of That One, be sure I would have sent men to bring it to me. But tell me now, by what means didst thou twist him to thy use and our profit in this cotton-play?’ Our Sahib said: ‘By God, I did not use that man in any fashion whatever. He was my friend.’ The Great Sahib said: ‘Toh Vac! (Bosh!) Tell!’ Our Sahib shook his head as he does — as he did when a child — and they looked at each other like sword-play men in the ring at a fair. The Great Sahib dropped his eyes first and he said: ‘So be it. I should perhaps have answered thus in my youth. No matter. I have made treaty with That One as an ally of the State. Some day he shall tell me the tale.’ Then I brought in fresh coffee, and they ceased. But I do not think That One will tell the Great Sahib more than our Sahib told him.”
“Wherefore?” I asked.
“Because they are both Great Ones, and I have observed in my life that Great Ones employ words very little between each other in their dealings; still less when they speak to a third concerning those dealings. Also they profit by silence.... Now I think that the mother has come down from the room, and I will go rub his feet till he sleeps.”
His ears had caught Agnes’s step at the stair-head and presently she passed us on her way to the music room humming the Magnificat.
THE NEW KNIGHTHOOD
Who gives him the Bath?
“I,” said the wet,
Rank Jungle-sweat,
“I’ll give him the Bath!”
Who’ll sing the psalms?
“We,” said the Palms.
“Ere the hot wind becalms,
We’ll sing the psalms.”
Who lays on the sword?
“I,” said the Sun,
“Before he has done,
I’ll lay on the sword.”
Who fastens his belt?
“I,” said Short-Rations,
“I know all the fashions
Of tightening a belt!”
Who buckles his spur?
“I,” said his Chief,
Exacting and brief,
“I’ll give him the spur.”
Who’ll shake his hand?
“I,” said the Fever,
“And I’m no deceiver,
I’ll shake his hand.”
Who brings him the wine?
“I,” said Quinine,
“It’s a habit of mine,
I’ll come with his wine.”
Who’ll put him to proof?
“I,” said All Earth,
“Whatever he’s worth,
I’ll put to the proof.”
Who’ll choose him for Knight?
“I,” said his Mother,
“Before any other,
My very own knight!”
And after this fashion, adventure to seek,
Was Sir Galahad made — as it might be last week!
THE PUZZLER
I had not seen Penfentenyou since the Middle Nineties, when he was Minister of Ways and Woodsides in De Thouar’s first Administration. Last summer, though he nominally held the same portfolio, he was his Colony’s Premier in all but name, and the idol of his own province, which is two and a half times the size of England. Politically, his creed was his growing country; and he came over to England to develop a Great Idea in her behalf.
Believing that he had put it in train, I made haste to welcome him to my house for a week.
That he was chased to my door by his own Agent-General in a motor; that they turned my study into a Cabinet Meeting which I was not invited to attend; that the local telegraph all but broke down beneath the strain of hundred word coded cables; and that I practically broke into the house of a stranger to get him telephonic facilities on a Sunday, are things I overlook. What I objected to was his ingratitude, while I thus tore up England to help him. So I said: “Why on earth didn’t you see your Opposite Number in Town instead of bringing your office work here?”
“Eh? Who?” said he, looking up from his fourth cable since lunch.
“See the English Minister for Ways and Woodsides.”
“I saw him,” said Penfentenyou, without enthusiasm.
It seemed that he had called twice on the gentleman, but without an appointment — (“I thought if I wasn’t big enough, my business was”) — and each time had found him engaged. A third party intervening, suggested that a meeting might be arranged if due notice were given.
“Then,” said Penfentenyou, “I called at the office at ten o’clock.”
“But they’d be in bed,” I cried.
“One of the babies was awake. He told me that — that ‘my sort of questions “‘ — he slapped the pile of cables — ”were only taken between 11 and 2 P.M. So I waited.”
“And when you got to business?” I asked.
He made a gesture of despair. “It was like talking to children. They’d never heard of it.”
“And your Opposite Number?”
Penfentenyou described him.
“Hush! You mustn’t talk like that!” I shuddered. “He’s one of the best of good fellows. You should meet him socially.”
“I’ve done that too,” he said. “Have you?”
“Heaven forbid!” I cried; “but that’s the proper thing to say.”
“Oh, he said all the proper things. Only I thought as this was England that they’d more or less have the hang of all the — general hang-together of my Idea. But I had to explain it from the beginning.”
“Ah! They’d probably mislaid the papers,” I said, and I told him the story of a three-million pound insurrection caused by a deputy Under-Secretary sitting upon a mass of green-labelled correspondence instead of reading it.
“I wonder it doesn’t happen every week,” the answered. “D’you mind my having the Agent-General to dinner again tonight? I’ll wire, and he can motor down.”
The Agent-General arrived two hours later, a patient and expostulating person, visibly torn between the pulling Devil of a rampant Colony, and the placid Baker of a largely uninterested England. But with Penfentenyou behind him he had worked; for he told us that Lord Lundie — the Law Lord was the final authority on the legal and constitutional aspects of the Great Idea, and to him it must be referred.
“Good Heavens alive!” thundered Penfentenyou. “I told you to get that settled last Christmas.”
“It was the middle of the house-part
y season,” said the Agent-General mildly. “Lord Lundie’s at Credence Green now — he spends his holidays there. It’s only forty miles off.”
“Shan’t I disturb his Holiness?” said Penfentenyou heavily. “Perhaps ‘my sort of questions,”‘ he snorted, “mayn’t be discussed except at midnight.”
“Oh, don’t be a child,” I said.
“What this country needs,” said Penfentenyou, “is — ” and for ten minutes he trumpeted rebellion.
“What you need is to pay for your own protection,” I cut in when he drew breath, and I showed him a yellowish paper, supplied gratis by Government, which is called Schedule D. To my merciless delight he had never seen the thing before, and I completed my victory over him and all the Colonies with a Brassey’s “Naval Annual” and a “Statesman’s Year Book.”
The Agent-General interposed with agent-generalities (but they were merely provocateurs) about Ties of Sentiment.
“They be blowed!” said Penfentenyou. “What’s the good of sentiment towards a Kindergarten?”
“Quite so. Ties of common funk are the things that bind us together; and the sooner you new nations realize it the better. What you need is an annual invasion. Then you’d grow up.”
“Thank you! Thank you!” said the Agent-General. “That’s what I am always trying to tell my people.”
“But, my dear fool,” Penfentenyou almost wept, “do you pretend that these banana-fingered amateurs at home are grown up?”
“You poor, serious, pagan man,” I retorted, “if you take ‘em that way, you’ll wreck your Great Idea.”
“Will you take him to Lord Lundie’s to-morrow?” said the Agent-General promptly.
“I suppose I must,” I said, “if you won’t.”
“Not me! I’m going home,” said the Agent-General, and departed. I am glad that I am no colony’s Agent-General.
Penfentenyou continued to argue about naval contributions till 1.15 A.M., though I was victor from the first.
At ten o’clock I got him and his correspondence into the motor, and he had the decency to ask whether he had been unpolished over-night. I replied that I waited an apology. This he made excuse for renewed arguments, and used wayside shows as illustrations of the decadence of England.
For example we burst a tyre within a mile of Credence Green, and, to save time, walked into the beautifully kept little village. His eye was caught by a building of pale-blue tin, stencilled “Calvinist Chapel,” before whose shuttered windows an Italian organ-grinder with a petticoated monkey was playing “Dolly Grey-”
“Yes. That’s it!” snapped the egoist. “That’s a parable of the general situation in England. And look at those brutes!” A huge household removals van was halted at a public-house. The men in charge were drinking beer from blue and white mugs. It seemed to me a pretty sight, but Penfentenyou said it represented Our National Attitude.
Lord Lundie’s summer resting-place we learned was a farm, a little out of the village, up a hill round which curled a high hedged road. Only an initiated few spend their holidays at Credence Green, and they have trained the householders to keep the place select. Penfentenyou made a grievance of this as we walked up the lane, followed at a distance by the organ-grinder.
“Suppose he is having a house-party,” he said: “Anything’s possible in this insane land.”
Just at that minute we found ourselves opposite an empty villa. Its roof was of black slate, with bright unweathered ridge-tiling; its walls were of blood-coloured brick, cornered and banded with vermiculated stucco work, and there was cobalt, magenta, and purest apple-green window-glass on either side of the front door. The whole was fenced from the road by a low, brick-pillared, flint wall, topped with a cast-iron Gothic rail, picked out in blue and gold.
Tight beds of geranium, calceolaria, and lobelia speckled the glass-plat, from whose centre rose one of the finest araucarias (its other name by the way is “monkey-puzzler”), that it has ever been my lot to see. It must have been full thirty feet high, and its foliage exquisitely answered the iron railings. Such bijou ne plus ultras, replete with all the amenities, do not, as I pointed out to Penfentenyou, transpire outside of England.
A hedge, swinging sharp right, flanked the garden, and above it on a slope of daisy-dotted meadows we could see Lord Lundie’s tiled and half-timbered summer farmhouse. Of a sudden we heard voices behind the tree — the fine full tones of the unembarrassed English, speaking to their equals — that tore through the hedge like sleet through rafters.
“That it is not called ‘monkey-puzzler’ for nothing, I willingly concede” — this was a rich and rolling note — ”but on the other hand — ”
“I submit, me lud, that the name implies that it might, could, would, or should be ascended by a monkey, and not that the ascent is a physical impossibility. I believe one of our South American spider monkeys wouldn’t hesitate... By Jove, it might be worth trying, if — ”
This was a crisper voice than the first. A third, higher-pitched, and full of pleasant affectations, broke in.
“Oh, practical men, there is no ape here. Why do you waste one of God’s own days on unprofitable discussion? Give me a match!”
“I’ve a good mind to make you demonstrate in your own person. Come on, Bubbles! We’ll make Jimmy climb!”
There was a sound of scuffling, broken by squeaks from Jimmy of the high voice. I turned back and drew Penfentenyou into the side of the flanking hedge. I remembered to have read in a society paper that Lord Lundie’s lesser name was “Bubbles.”
“What are they doing?” Penfentenyou said sharply. “Drunk?”
“Just playing! Superabundant vitality of the Race, you know. We’ll watch ‘em,” I answered. The noise ceased.
“My deliver,” Jimmy gasped. “The ram caught in the thicket, and — I’m the only one who can talk Neapolitan! Leggo my collar!” He cried aloud in a foreign tongue, and was answered from the gate.
“It’s the Calvinistic organ-grinder,” I whispered. I had already found a practicable break at the bottom of the hedge. “They’re going to try to make the monkey climb, I believe.”
“Here — let me look!” Penfentenyou flung himself down, and rooted till he too broke a peep-hole. We lay side by side commanding the entire garden at ten yards’ range.
“You know ‘em?” said Penfentenyou, as I made some noise or other.
“By sight only. The big fellow in flannels is Lord Lundie; the light-built one with the yellow beard painted his picture at the last Academy: He’s a swell R.A., James Loman.”
“And the brown chap with the hands?”
“Tomling, Sir Christopher Tomling, the South American engineer who built the — ”
“San Juan Viaduct. I know,” said Penfentenyou. “We ought to have had him with us.... Do you think a monkey would climb the tree?”
The organ-grinder at the gate fenced his beast with one arm as Jimmy-talked.
“Don’t show off your futile accomplishments,” said Lord Lundie. “Tell him it’s an experiment. Interest him!”
“Shut up, Bubbles. You aren’t in court,” Jimmy replied. “This needs delicacy. Giuseppe says — ”
“Interest the monkey,” the brown engineer interrupted. “He won’t climb for love. Cut up to the house and get some biscuits, Bubbles — sugar ones and an orange or two. No need to tell our womenfolk.”
The huge white figure lobbed off at a trot which would not have disgraced a boy of seventeen. I gathered from something Jimmy let fall that the three had been at Harrow together.
“That Tomling has a head on his Shoulders,” muttered Penfentenyou. “Pity we didn’t get him for the Colony. But the question is, will the monkey climb?”
“Be quick, Jimmy. Tell the man we’ll give him five bob for the loan of the beast. Now run the organ under the tree, and we’ll dress it when Bubbles comes back,” Sir Christopher cried.
“I’ve often wondered,” said Penfentenyou, “whether it would puzzle a monkey?” He had forgo
tten the needs of his Growing Nation, and was earnestly parting the white-thorn stems with his fingers.
* * * * * * * * * *
Giuseppe and Jimmy did as they were told, the monkey following them with a wary and malignant eye.
“Here’s a discovery,” said Jimmy. “The singing part of this organ comes off the wheels.” He spoke volubly to the proprietor. “Oh, it’s so as Giuseppe can take it to his room o’ nights. And play it. D’you hear that? The organ-grinder, after his day’s crime, plays his accursed machine for love. For love, Chris! And Michael Angelo was one of ‘em!”
“Don’t jaw! Tell him to take the beast’s petticoat off,” said Sir Christopher Tomling.
Lord Lundie returned, very little winded, through a gap higher up the hedge.
“They’re all out, thank goodness!” he cried, “but I’ve raided what I could. Macrons glaces, candied fruit, and a bag of oranges.”
“Excellent!” said the world-renowned contractor.
“Jimmy, you’re the light-weight; jump up on the organ and impale these things on the leaves as I hand ‘em!”
“I see,” said Jimmy, capering like a springbuck. “Upward and onward, eh? First, he’ll reach out for — how infernal prickly these leaves are! — this biscuit. Next we’ll lure him on — (that’s about the reach of his arm) — with the marron glare, and then he’ll open out this orange. How human! How like your ignoble career, Bubbles!”
With care and elaboration they ornamented that tree’s lower branches with sugar-topped biscuits, oranges, bits of banana, and marrons glares till it looked very ape’s path to Paradise.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 426