Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

by Rudyard Kipling

  He lifted the switch and we listened. Our passengers on the lower deck at once, but not less than five at a time, explained themselves to Vincent. They had been taken from the bosom of their families, stripped of their possessions, given food without finger-bowls, and cast into captivity in a noisome dungeon.

  ‘But look here,’ said Arnott aghast; ‘they’re saying what isn’t true. My lower deck isn’t noisome, and I saw to the finger-bowls myself.’

  ‘My people talk like that sometimes in Little Russia,’ said Dragomiroff. ‘We reason with them. We never kill. No!’

  ‘But it’s not true,’ Arnott insisted. ‘What can you do with people who don’t tell facts? They’re mad!’

  ‘Hsh!’ said Pirolo, his hand to his ear. ‘It is such a little time since all the Planet told lies.’

  We heard Vincent silkily sympathetic. Would they, he asked, repeat their assertions in public — before a vast public? Only let Vincent give them a chance, and the Planet, they vowed, should ring with their wrongs. Their aim in life — two women and a man explained it together — was to reform the world. Oddly enough, this also had been Vincent’s life-dream. He offered them an arena in which to explain, and by their living example to raise the Planet to loftier levels. He was eloquent on the moral uplift of a simple, old-world life presented in its entirety to a deboshed civilisation.

  Could they — would they — for three months certain, devote themselves under his auspices, as missionaries, to the elevation of mankind at a place called Earl’s Court, which he said, with some truth, was one of the intellectual centres of the Planet? They thanked him, and demanded (we could hear his chuckle of delight) time to discuss and to vote on the matter. The vote, solemnly managed by counting heads — one head, one vote — was favourable. His offer, therefore, was accepted, and they moved a vote of thanks to him in two speeches — one by what they called the ‘proposer’ and the other by the ‘seconder.’

  Vincent threw over to us, his voice shaking with gratitude:

  ‘I’ve got ‘em! Did you hear those speeches? That’s Nature, dear men. Art can’t teach that. And they voted as easily as lying. I’ve never had a troupe of natural liars before. Bless you, dear men! Remember, you’re on my free lists for ever, anywhere — all of you. Oh, Gerolstein will be sick — sick!’

  ‘Then you think they’ll do?’ said De Forest.

  ‘Do? The Little Village’ll go crazy! I’ll knock up a series of old-world plays for ‘em. Their voices will make you laugh and cry. My God, dear men, where do you suppose they picked up all their misery from, on this sweet earth? I’ll have a pageant of the world’s beginnings, and Mosenthal shall do the music. I’ll — ’

  ‘Go and knock up a village for ‘em by to-night. We’ll meet you at No. 15 West Landing Tower,’ said De Forest. ‘Remember the rest will be coming along to-morrow.’

  ‘Let ‘em all come!’ said Vincent. ‘You don’t know how hard it is nowadays even for me, to find something that really gets under the public’s damned iridium-plated hide. But I’ve got it at last. Good-bye!’

  ‘Well,’ said De Forest when we had finished laughing, ‘if any one understood corruption in London I might have played off Vincent against Gerolstein, and sold my captives at enormous prices. As it is, I shall have to be their legal adviser to-night when the contracts are signed. And they won’t exactly press any commission on me, either.’

  ‘Meantime,’ said Takahira, ‘we cannot, of course, confine members of Leopold Vincent’s last-engaged company. Chairs for the ladies, please, Arnott.’

  ‘Then I go to bed,’ said De Forest. ‘I can’t face any more women!’ And he vanished.

  When our passengers were released and given another meal (finger-bowls came first this time) they told us what they thought of us and the Board; and, like Vincent, we all marvelled how they had contrived to extract and secrete so much bitter poison and unrest out of the good life God gives us. They raged, they stormed, they palpitated, flushed and exhausted their poor, torn nerves, panted themselves into silence, and renewed the senseless, shameless attacks.

  ‘But can’t you understand,’ said Pirolo pathetically to a shrieking woman, ‘that if we’d left you in Chicago you’d have been killed?’

  ‘No, we shouldn’t. You were bound to save us from being murdered.’

  ‘Then we should have had to kill a lot of other people.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. We were preaching the Truth. You can’t stop us. We shall go on preaching in London; and then you’ll see!’

  ‘You can see now,’ said Pirolo, and opened a lower shutter.

  We were closing on the Little Village, with her three million people spread out at ease inside her ring of girdling Main-Traffic lights — those eight fixed beams at Chatham, Tonbridge, Redhill, Dorking, Woking, St. Albans, Chipping Ongar, and Southend.

  Leopold Vincent’s new company looked, with small pale faces, at the silence, the size, and the separated houses.

  Then some began to weep aloud, shamelessly — always without shame.

  * * *

  MACDONOUGH’S SONG

  Whether the State can loose and bind

  In Heaven as well as on Earth:

  If it be wiser to kill mankind

  Before or after the birth —

  These are matters of high concern

  Where State-kept schoolmen are;

  But Holy State (we have lived to learn)

  Endeth in Holy War.

  Whether The People be led by the Lord,

  Or lured by the loudest throat:

  If it be quicker to die by the sword

  Or cheaper to die by vote —

  These are the things we have dealt with once,

  (And they will not rise from their grave)

  For Holy People, however it runs,

  Endeth in wholly Slave.

  Whatsoever, for any cause,

  Seeketh to take or give,

  Power above or beyond the Laws,

  Suffer it not to live!

  Holy State or Holy King —

  Or Holy People’s Will —

  Have no truck with the senseless thing.

  Order the guns and kill!

  Saying — after — me: —

  Once there was The People — Terror gave it birth;

  Once there was The People and it made a Hell of Earth.

  Earth arose and crushed it. Listen, O ye slain!

  Once there was The People — it shall never be again!

  * * *

  Friendly Brook

  (March 1914)

  The valley was so choked with fog that one could scarcely see a cow’s length across a field. Every blade, twig, bracken-frond, and hoof-print carried water, and the air was filled with the noise of rushing ditches and field-drains, all delivering to the brook below. A week’s November rain on water-logged land had gorged her to full flood, and she proclaimed it aloud.

  Two men in sackcloth aprons were considering an untrimmed hedge that ran down the hillside and disappeared into mist beside those roarings. They stood back and took stock of the neglected growth, tapped an elbow of hedge-oak here, a mossed beech-stub there, swayed a stooled ash back and forth, and looked at each other.

  ‘I reckon she’s about two rod thick,’ said Jabez the younger, ‘an’ she hasn’t felt iron since — when has she, Jesse?’

  ‘Call it twenty-five year, Jabez, an’ you won’t be far out.’

  ‘Umm!’ Jabez rubbed his wet handbill on his wetter coat-sleeve. ‘She ain’t a hedge. She’s all manner o’ trees. We’ll just about have to — ’ He paused, as professional etiquette required.

  ‘Just about have to side her up an’ see what she’ll bear. But hadn’t we best — ?’ Jesse paused in his turn, both men being artists and equals.

  ‘Get some kind o’ line to go by.’ Jabez ranged up and down till he found a thinner place, and with clean snicks of the handbill revealed the original face of the fence. Jesse took over the dripping stuff as it fell forward,
and, with a grasp and a kick, made it to lie orderly on the bank till it should be faggoted.

  By noon a length of unclean jungle had turned itself into a cattle-proof barrier, tufted here and there with little plumes of the sacred holly which no woodman touches without orders.

  ‘Now we’ve a witness-board to go by!’ said Jesse at last.

  ‘She won’t be as easy as this all along,’ Jabez answered. ‘She’ll need plenty stakes and binders when we come to the brook.’

  ‘Well, ain’t we plenty?’ Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead of them that plunged downhill into the fog. ‘I lay there’s a cord an’ a half o’ firewood, let alone faggots, ‘fore we get anywheres anigh the brook.’

  ‘The brook’s got up a piece since morning,’ said Jabez. ‘Sounds like’s if she was over Wickenden’s door-stones.’

  Jesse listened, too. There was a growl in the brook’s roar as though she worried something hard.

  ‘Yes. She’s over Wickenden’s door-stones,’ he replied. ‘Now she’ll flood acrost Alder Bay an’ that’ll ease her.’

  ‘She won’t ease Jim Wickenden’s hay none if she do,’ Jabez grunted. ‘I told Jim he’d set that liddle hay-stack o’ his too low down in the medder. I told him so when he was drawin’ the bottom for it.’

  ‘I told him so, too,’ said Jesse. ‘I told him ‘fore ever you did. I told him when the County Council tarred the roads up along.’ He pointed uphill, where unseen automobiles and road-engines droned past continually. ‘A tarred road, she shoots every drop o’ water into a valley same’s a slate roof. ‘Tisn’t as ‘twas in the old days, when the waters soaked in and soaked out in the way o’ nature. It rooshes off they tarred roads all of a lump, and naturally every drop is bound to descend into the valley. And there’s tar roads both two sides this valley for ten mile. That’s what I told Jim Wickenden when they tarred the roads last year. But he’s a valley-man. He don’t hardly ever journey uphill.’

  ‘What did he say when you told him that?’ Jabez demanded, with a little change of voice.

  ‘Why? What did he say to you when you told him?’ was the answer.

  ‘What he said to you, I reckon, Jesse.’

  ‘Then, you don’t need me to say it over again, Jabez.’

  ‘Well, let be how ‘twill, what was he gettin’ after when he said what he said to me?’ Jabez insisted.

  ‘I dunno; unless you tell me what manner o’ words he said to you.’

  Jabez drew back from the hedge — all hedges are nests of treachery and eavesdropping — and moved to an open cattle-lodge in the centre of the field.

  ‘No need to go ferretin’ around,’ said Jesse. ‘None can’t see us here ‘fore we see them.’

  ‘What was Jim Wickenden gettin’ at when I said he’d set his stack too near anigh the brook?’ Jabez dropped his voice. ‘He was in his mind.’

  ‘He ain’t never been out of it yet to my knowledge,’ Jesse drawled, and uncorked his tea-bottle.

  ‘But then Jim says: “I ain’t goin’ to shift my stack a yard,” he says. “The Brook’s been good friends to me, and if she be minded,” he says, “to take a snatch at my hay, I ain’t settin’ out to withstand her.” That’s what Jim Wickenden says to me last — last June-end ‘twas,’ said Jabez.

  ‘Nor he hasn’t shifted his stack, neither,’ Jesse replied. ‘An’ if there’s more rain, the brook she’ll shift it for him.’

  ‘No need tell me! But I want to know what Jim was gettin’ at?’

  Jabez opened his clasp-knife very deliberately; Jesse as carefully opened his. They unfolded the newspapers that wrapped their dinners, coiled away and pocketed the string that bound the packages, and sat down on the edge of the lodge manger. The rain began to fall again through the fog, and the brook’s voice rose.

  * * *

  ‘But I always allowed Mary was his lawful child, like,’ said Jabez, after Jesse had spoken for a while.

  ‘‘Tain’t so.... Jim Wickenden’s woman she never made nothing. She come out o’ Lewes with her stockin’s round her heels, an’ she never made nor mended aught till she died. He had to light fire an’ get breakfast every mornin’ except Sundays, while she sowed it abed. Then she took an’ died, sixteen, seventeen, year back; but she never had no childern.’

  ‘They was valley-folk,’ said Jabez apologetically. ‘I’d no call to go in among ‘em, but I always allowed Mary — ’

  ‘No. Mary come out o’ one o’ those Lunnon Childern Societies. After his woman died, Jim got his mother back from his sister over to Peasmarsh, which she’d gone to house with when Jim married. His mother kept house for Jim after his woman died. They do say ‘twas his mother led him on toward adoptin’ of Mary — to furnish out the house with a child, like, and to keep him off of gettin’ a noo woman. He mostly done what his mother contrived. ‘Cardenly, twixt ‘em, they asked for a child from one o’ those Lunnon societies — same as it might ha’ been these Barnardo children — an’ Mary was sent down to ‘em, in a candle-box, I’ve heard.’

  ‘Then Mary is chance-born. I never knowed that,’ said Jabez. ‘Yet I must ha’ heard it some time or other ...’

  ‘No. She ain’t. ‘Twould ha’ been better for some folk if she had been. She come to Jim in a candle-box with all the proper papers — lawful child o’ some couple in Lunnon somewheres — mother dead, father drinkin’. And there was that Lunnon society’s five shillin’s a week for her. Jim’s mother she wouldn’t despise week-end money, but I never heard Jim was much of a muck-grubber. Let be how ‘twill, they two mothered up Mary no bounds, till it looked at last like they’d forgot she wasn’t their own flesh an’ blood. Yes, I reckon they forgot Mary wasn’t their’n by rights.’

  ‘That’s no new thing,’ said Jabez. ‘There’s more’n one or two in this parish wouldn’t surrender back their Bernarders. You ask Mark Copley an’ his woman an’ that Bernarder cripple-babe o’ theirs.’

  ‘Maybe they need the five shillin’,’ Jesse suggested.

  ‘It’s handy,’ said Jabez. ‘But the child’s more. “Dada” he says, an’ “Mumma” he says, with his great rollin’ head-piece all hurdled up in that iron collar. He won’t live long — his backbone’s rotten, like. But they Copleys do just about set store by him — five bob or no five bob.’

  ‘Same way with Jim an’ his mother,’ Jesse went on. ‘There was talk betwixt ‘em after a few years o’ not takin’ any more week-end money for Mary; but let alone she never passed a farden in the mire ‘thout longin’s, Jim didn’t care, like, to push himself forward into the Society’s remembrance. So naun came of it. The week-end money would ha’ made no odds to Jim — not after his uncle willed him they four cottages at Eastbourne an’ money in the bank.’

  ‘That was true, too, then? I heard something in a scadderin’ word-o’-mouth way,’ said Jabez.

  ‘I’ll answer for the house property, because Jim he requested my signed name at the foot o’ some papers concernin’ it. Regardin’ the money in the bank, he nature-ally wouldn’t like such things talked about all round the parish, so he took strangers for witnesses.’

  ‘Then ‘twill make Mary worth seekin’ after?’

  ‘She’ll need it. Her Maker ain’t done much for her outside nor yet in.’

  ‘That ain’t no odds.’ Jabez shook his head till the water showered off his hat-brim. ‘If Mary has money, she’ll be wed before any likely pore maid. She’s cause to be grateful to Jim.’

  ‘She hides it middlin’ close, then,’ said Jesse. ‘It don’t sometimes look to me as if Mary has her natural rightful feelin’s. She don’t put on an apron o’ Mondays ‘thout being druv to it — in the kitchen or the hen-house. She’s studyin’ to be a school-teacher. She’ll make a beauty! I never knowed her show any sort o’ kindness to nobody — not even when Jim’s mother was took dumb. No! ‘Twadn’t no stroke. It stifled the old lady in the throat here. First she couldn’t shape her words no shape; then she clucked, like, an’ lastly she couldn’t more than suck do
wn spoon-meat an’ hold her peace. Jim took her to Doctor Harding, an’ Harding he bundled her off to Brighton Hospital on a ticket, but they couldn’t make no stay to her afflictions there; and she was bundled off to Lunnon, an’ they lit a great old lamp inside her, and Jim told me they couldn’t make out nothing in no sort there; and, along o’ one thing an’ another, an’ all their spyin’s and pryin’s, she come back a hem sight worse than when she started. Jim said he’d have no more hospitalizin’, so he give her a slate, which she tied to her waist-string, and what she was minded to say she writ on it.’

  ‘Now, I never knowed that! But they’re valley-folk,’ Jabez repeated.

  ‘‘Twadn’t particular noticeable, for she wasn’t a talkin’ woman any time o’ her days. Mary had all three’s tongue.... Well, then, two years this summer, come what I’m tellin’ you. Mary’s Lunnon father, which they’d put clean out o’ their minds, arrived down from Lunnon with the law on his side, sayin’ he’d take his daughter back to Lunnon, after all. I was working for Mus’ Dockett at Pounds Farm that summer, but I was obligin’ Jim that evenin’ muckin’ out his pig-pen. I seed a stranger come traipsin’ over the bridge agin’ Wickenden’s door-stones. ‘Twadn’t the new County Council bridge with the handrail. They hadn’t given it in for a public right o’ way then. ‘Twas just a bit o’ lathy old plank which Jim had throwed acrost the brook for his own conveniences. The man wasn’t drunk — only a little concerned in liquor, like — an’ his back was a mask where he’d slipped in the muck comin’ along. He went up the bricks past Jim’s mother, which was feedin’ the ducks, an’ set himself down at the table inside — Jim was just changin’ his socks — an’ the man let Jim know all his rights and aims regardin’ Mary. Then there just about was a hurly-bulloo? Jim’s fust mind was to pitch him forth, but he’d done that once in his young days, and got six months up to Lewes jail along o’ the man fallin’ on his head. So he swallowed his spittle an’ let him talk. The law about Mary was on the man’s side from fust to last, for he showed us all the papers. Then Mary come downstairs — she’d been studyin’ for an examination — an’ the man tells her who he was, an’ she says he had ought to have took proper care of his own flesh and blood while he had it by him, an’ not to think he could ree-claim it when it suited. He says somethin’ or other, but she looks him up an’ down, front an’ backwent, an’ she just tongues him scadderin’ out o’ doors, and he went away stuffin’ all the papers back into his hat, talkin’ most abusefully. Then she come back an’ freed her mind against Jim an’ his mother for not havin’ warned her of her upbringin’s, which it come out she hadn’t ever been told. They didn’t say naun to her. They never did. I’d ha’ packed her off with any man that would ha’ took her — an’ God’s pity on him!’