An aged egg its yolk;
It might have been a Pears’ balloon
Or Barnum’s latest joke:
I took it for the sun and wept
To watch it through the smoke.
It’s Oh to see the morn ablaze
Above the mango-tope,
When homeward through the dewy cane
The little jackals lope,
And half Bengal heaves into view,
New-washed — with sunlight soap.
It’s Oh for one deep whisky peg
When Christmas winds are blowing,
When all the men you ever knew,
And all you’ve ceased from knowing,
Are “entered for the Tournament,
And everything that’s going.”
But I consort with long-haired things
In velvet collar-rolls,
Who talk about the Aims of Art,
And “theories” and “goals,”
And moo and coo with women-folk
About their blessed souls.
But that they call “psychology”
Is lack of liver pill,
And all that blights their tender souls
Is eating till they’re ill,
And their chief way of winning goals
Consists in sitting still.
It’s Oh to meet an Army man,
Set up, and trimmed and taut,
Who does not spout hashed libraries
Or think the next man’s thought,
And walks as though he owned himself,
And hogs his bristles short.
Hear now, a voice across the seas
To kin beyond my ken,
If ye have ever filled an hour
With stories from my pen,
For pity’s sake send some one here
To bring me news of men!
The ‘buses run to Islington,
To Highgate and Soho,
To Hammersmith and Kew therewith,
And Camberwell also,
But I can only murmur “ ‘Bus”
From Shepherd’s Bush to Bow.
LETTERS ON LEAVE
I
TO Lieutenant John McHail, 151st (Kumharsen) P. N. I.,
Hakaiti via Tharanda, Assam.
Dear Old Man: Your handwriting is worse than ever, but as far as I can see among the loops and fish-hooks, you are lonesome and want to be comforted with a letter. I knew you wouldn’t write to me unless you needed something. You don’t tell me that you have left your regiment, but from what you say about “my battalion,” “my men,” and so forth, it seems as if you were raising military police for the benefit of the Chins. If that’s the case, I congratulate you. The pay is good. Ouless writes to me from some new fort something or other, saying that he has struggled into a billet of Rs. 700 (Military Police), and instead of being chased by writters as he used to be, is ravaging the country round Shillong in search of a wife. I am very sorry for the Mrs. Ouless of the future.
That doesn’t matter. You probably know more about the boys yonder than I do. If you’ll only send me from time to time some record of their movements I’ll try to tell you of things on this side of the water. You say “You don’t know what it is to hear from town.” I say “You don’t know what it is to hear from the dehatNow and again men drift in with news, but I don’t like hot-weather khubber. It’s all of the domestic occurrence kind. Old “Hat” Constable came to see me the other day. You remember the click in his throat before he begins to speak. He sat still, clicking at quarter-hour intervals, and after each click he’d say: “D’ye remember Mistress So-an’- So? Well, she’s dead o’ typhoid at Naogong.”
When it wasn’t “Mistress So-an’-So” it was a man. I stood four clicks and four deaths, and then I asked him to spare me the rest. You seem to have had a bad season, taking it all round, and the women seem to have suffered most. Is that so?
We don’t die in London. We go out of town, and we make as much fuss about it as if we were going to the Neva. Now I understand why the transport is the first thing to break down when our army takes the field. The Englishman is cumbrous in his movements and very particular about his baskets and hampers and trunks — not less than seven of each — for a fifty-mile journey. Leave season began some weeks ago, and there is a burra-choop along the streets that you could shovel with a spade. All the people that say they are everybody have gone — quite two hundred miles away. Some of ‘em are even on the Continent — and the clubs are full of strange folk. I found a Reform man at the Savage a week ago. He didn’t say what his business was, but he was dusty and looked hungry. I suppose he had come in for food and shelter.
Like the rest I’m on leave too. I converted myself into a Government Secretary, awarded myself one month on full pay with the chance of an extension, and went off. Then it rained and hailed, and rained again, and I ran up and down this tiny country in trains trying to find a dry place. After ten days I came back to town, having been stopped by the sea four times. I was rather like a kitten at the bottom of a bucke chasing its own tail. So I’m sitting here under a grey, muggy sky wondering what sort of time they are having at Simla. It’s August now. The rains would be nearly over, all the theatricals would be in full swing, and Jakko Hill would be just Paradise. You’re probably pink with prickly heat. Sit down quietly under the punkah and think of Um- balla station, hot as an oven at four in the morning. Think of the dak-gharry slobbering in the wet, and the first little cold wind that comes round the first corner after the tonga is clear of Kalka. There’s a wind you and I know well. It’s blowing over the grass at Dugshai this very moment, and there’s a smell of hot fir trees all along and along from Solon to Simla, and some happy man is flying up that road with fragments of a tonga-bar in his eye, his pet terrier under his arm, his thick clothes on the back-seat and the certaintj- of a month’s pure joy in front of him. Instead of which you’re being stewed at Hakaiti and I’m sitting in a second-hand atmosphere above a sausage-shop, watching three sparrows playing in a dirty-green tree and pretending that it’s summer. I have a view of very many streets.and a river. Except the advertisements on the walls, there isn’t one speck of colour as far as my eye can reach. The very cat, who is an amiable beast, comes off black under my hand, and I daren’t open the window for fear of smuts. And this is better than a soaked and sobbled country, with the corn-shocks standing like plover’s eggs in green moss and the oats lying flat in moist lumps. We haven’t had any summer, and yesterday I smelt the raw touch of the winter. Just one little whiff to show that the year had turned.’ “Oh, what a happy land is England!”
I cannot understand the white man at home. You remember when we went out together and landed at the Apollo Bunder with all our sorrows before us, and went to Watson’s Hotel and saw the snake-charmers? You said: “It’ll take me all my lifetime to distinguish one nigger from another.” That was eight years ago. Now you don’t call them niggers any more, and you’re supposed — quite wrongly — to have an insight into native character, or else you would never have been allowed to recruit for the Kumharsens. I feel as I felt at Watson’s. They are so deathlily alike, especially the more educated. They all seem to read the same books, and the same newspapers telling ‘em what to admire in the same books, and they all quote the same passages from the same books, and they write books on books about somebody else’s books, and they are penetrated to their boot-heels with a sense of the awful seriousness of their own views of the moment. Above that they seem to be, most curiously and beyond the right of ordinary people, divorced from the knowledge or fear of death. Of course, every man conceives that every man except himself is bound to die (you remember how Hallatt spoke the night before he went out), but these men appear to be like children in that respect.
I can’t explain exactly, but it gives an air of unreality to their most earnest earnestnesses; and when a young man of views and culture and aspirations is in earnest, the trumpets of Jericho are silent beside him. Because they have everythi
ng done for them they know how everything ought to be done; and they are perfectly certain that wood pavements, policemen, shops and gaslight come in the regular course of nature. You can guess with these convictions how thoroughly and cocksurely they handle little trifles like colonial administration, the wants of the army, municipal sewage, housing of the poor, and so forth. Every third common need of average men is, in their mouths, a tendency or a movement or a federation affecting the world. It never seems to occur to ‘em that the human instinct of getting as much as possible for money paid, or, failing money, for threats and fawnings, is about as old as Cain; and the burden of their bat is: “Me an’ a few mates o’ mine are going to make a new world.”
As long as men only write and talk they must think that way, I suppose. It’s compensation for playing with little things. And that reminds me. Do you know the University smile? You don’t by that name, but sometimes young civilians wear it for a very short time when they first come out. Something — I wonder if it’s our brutal chaff, or a billiard- cue, or which? — takes it out of their faces, and when they next differ with you they do so without smiling. But that smile flourishes in London. I’ve met it again and again. It expresses tempered grief, sorrow at your complete inability to march with the march of progress at the Universities, and a chastened contempt. There is one man who wears it as a garment. He is frivolously young — not more than thirty-five or forty — and all these years no one has removed that smile. He knows everything about everything on this earth, and above all he knows all about men under any and every condition of life. He knows all about the aggressive militarism of you and your friends; he isn’t quite sure of the necessity of an army; he is certain that colonial expansion is nonsense; and he is more than certain that the whole step of all our Empire must be regulated by the knowledge and foresight of the workingman. Then he smiles — smiles like a seraph with an M. A. degree. What can you do with a man like that? He has never seen an unmade road in his life; I think he believes that wheat grows on a tree and that beef is dug from a mine. He has never been forty miles from a railway, and he has never been called upon to issue an order to anybody except his well-fed servants. Isn’t it wondrous? And there are battalions and brigades of these men in town removed from the fear of want, living until they are seventy or eighty, sheltered, fed, drained and administered, expending their vast leisure in talking and writing.
But the real fun begins much lower down the line. I’ve been associating generally and very particularly with the men who say that they are the only men in the world who work — and they call themselves the workingman. Now the workingman in America is a nice person. He says he is a man and behaves accordingly. That is to say, he has some notion that he is part and parcel of a great country. At least, he talks that way. But in this town you can see thousands of men meeting publicly on Sundays to cry aloud that everybody may hear that they are poor, downtrodden helots — in fact, “the pore workin’man.” At their clubs and pubs the talk is the same. It’s the utter want of self-respect that revolts. My friend the tobacconist has a cousin, who is, apparently, sound in mind and limb, aged twenty-three, clear-eyed and upstanding. He is a “skibbo” by trade — a painter of sorts. He married at twenty, and he has two children. He can spend three-quarters of an hour talking about his downtrodden condition. He works under another Raj-mistri, who has saved money and started a little shop of his own. He hates that Raj-mistri; he loathes the police; and his views on the lives and customs of the aristocracy are strange. He approves of every form of lawlessness, and he knows that everybody who holds authority is sure to be making a good thing out of it. Of himself as a citizen he never thinks. Of himself as an Ishmael he thinks a good deal. He is entitled to eight hours’ work a day and some time off — said time to be paid for; he is entitled to free education for his children — and he doesn’t want no bloomin’ clergyman to teach ‘em; he is entitled to houses especially built for himself because he pays the bulk of the taxes of the country. He is not going to emigrate, not he; he reserves to himself the right of multiplying as much as he pleases; the streets must be policed for him while he demonstrates, immediately under my window, by the way, for ten consecutive hours, and I am probably a thief because my clothes are better than his. The -proposition is a very simple one. He has no duties to the State, no personal responsibility of any kind, and he’d sooner see his children dead than soldiers of the Queen. The Government owes him everything because he is a pore workin’man. When the Guards tried their Board-school mutiny at the Wellington Barracks my friend was jubilant. “What did I tell you?” he said. “You see the very soldiers won’t stand it.”
“What’s it?”
“Bein’ treated like machines instead of flesh and blood. ‘Course they won’t.”
The popular evening paper wrote that the Guards, with perfect justice, had rebelled against being treated like machines instead of flesh and blood. Then I thought of a certain regiment that lay in Mian Mir for three years and dropped four hundred men out of a thousand. It died of fever and cholera. There were no pretty nursemaids to work with it in the streets, because there were no streets. I saw how the Guards amused themselves and how their sergeants smoked in uniform. I pitied the Guards with their cruel sentry-goes, their three nights out of bed, and their unlimited supply of love and liquor.
Another man, not a workman, told me that the Guards’ riot — it’s impossible, as you know, to call this kick-up of the fatted flunkies of the army a mutiny — was only “a schoolboy’s prank”; and he could not see that if it was what he said it was, the Guards were no regiment and should have been wiped out decently and quietly. There again the futility of a sheltered people cropped up. You mustn’t treat a man like a machine in this country, but you can’t get any work out of a man till he has learned to work like a machine. D has just come home for a few months from the charge of a mountain battery on the frontier. He used to begin work at eight, and he was thankful if he got off at six; most of the time on his feet. When he went to the Black Mountain he was extensively engaged for nearly sixteen hours a day; and that on food at which the “pore workin’man” would have turned up his state-lifted nose. D- on the subject of labour as understood by the white man in his own home is worth hearing. Though coarse — considerably coarse! But D doesn’t know all the hopeless misery of the business. When the small pig, oyster, furniture, carpet, builder or general shopman works his way out of the ruck he turns round and makes his old friends and employes sweat. He knows how near he can go to flaying ‘em alive before they kick; and in this matter he is neither better nor worse than a bunnia or a havildar of our own blessed country. It’s the small employer of labour that skins his servant, exactly as the forty-pound householder works her one white servant to the bone and goes to drop pennies into the plate to convert the heathen in the East.
Just at present, as you have read, the person who calls himself the pore workin’man — the man I saw kicking fallen men in the mud by the docks last winter — has discovered a real, fine, new original notion; and he is working it for all he is worth. He calls it the solidarity of labour bnndobast; but it’s caste — four thousand years old, caste of Menu — with old shetts, mahajuns, guildtolls, excommunication and all the rest of it. All things considered, there isn’t anything much older than caste — it began with the second generation of man on earth — but to read the “advance” papers on the subject you’d imagine it was a revelation from Heaven. The real fun will begin — as it has begun and ended many times before — when the caste of skilled labour — that’s the pore workin’man — are pushed up and knocked about by the lower and unrecognised castes, who will form castes of their own and outcaste on the decision of their own punchayats. How these castes will scuffle and fight among themselves, and how astonished the Englishman will be!
He is naturally lawless because he is a fighting animal; and his amazingly sheltered condition has made him inconsequent. I don’t like inconsequent lawlessness. I’ve seen it down at Bow St
reet, at the docks, by the G. P. O., and elsewhere. Its chief home, of course, is in that queer place called the House of Commons, but no one goes there who isn’t forced by business. It’s shut up at present, and the persons who belong to it are loose all over the face of the country. I don’t think — but I won’t swear — that any of them are spitting at policemen. One man appears to have been poaching, others are advocating various forms of murder and outrage — and nobody seems to care. The residue talk — just heavens, how they talk, and what wonderful fictions they tell! And they firmly believe, being ignorant of the mechanism of Government, that they administer the country. In addition, certain of their newspapers have elaborately worked up a famine in Ireland that could be engineered by two Deputy Commissioners and four average Stunts into a “woe” and a “calamity” that is going to overshadow the peace of the nation — even the Empire. I suppose they have their own sense of proportion, but they manage to keep it to themselves very successfully. What do you, who have seen half a countryside in deadly fear of its life, suppose that this people would do if they were chuk- kered and gabraowed? If they really knew what the fear of death and the dread of injury implied? If they died very swiftly, indeed, and could not count their futile lives enduring beyond next sundown? Some of the men from your — I mean our — part of the world say that they would be afraid and break and scatter and run. But there is no room in the island to run. The sea catches you, midwaist, at the third step. I am curious to see if the cholera, of which these people stand in most lively dread, gets a firm foothold in London. In that case I have a notion that there will be scenes and panics. They live too well here, and have too much to make life worth clinging to — clubs, and shop fronts, and gas, and theatres, and so forth — things that they affect to despise, and whereon and whereby they live like leeches. But I have written enough. It doesn’t exhaust the subject; but you won’t be grateful for other epistles. De Vitre of the Poona Irregular Moguls will have it that they are a tiddy-iddy people. He says that all their visible use is to produce loans for the colonies and men to be used up in developing India. I
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 444