Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated)

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘“No,” I ses. “If this was Eastbourne beach like, he’d be half-a-crown apiece to us ‘fore the coroner; but now we’d only lose a day havin’ to ‘tend the inquest. I lay he fell into the brook.”

  ‘“I lay he did,” ses Jim. “I wonder if he saw mother.” He turns him over, an’ opens his coat and puts his fingers in the waistcoat pocket an’ starts laughin’. “He’s seen mother, right enough,” he ses. “An’ he’s got the best of her, too. She won’t be able to crow no more over me ‘bout givin’ him money. I never give him more than a sovereign. She’s give him two!” an’ he trousers ‘em, laughin’ all the time. “An’ now we’ll pook him back again, for I’ve done with him,” he ses.

  ‘So we pooked him back into the middle of the brook, an’ we saw he went round the elber ‘thout balkin’, an’ we walked quite a piece beside of him to set him on his ways. When we couldn’t see no more, we went home by the high road, because we knowed the brook ‘u’d be out acrost the medders, an’ we wasn’t goin’ to hunt for Jim’s little rotten old bridge in that dark — an’ rainin’ Heavens’ hard, too. I was middlin’ pleased to see light an’ vittles again when we got home. Jim he pressed me to come insides for a drink. He don’t drink in a generality, but he was rid of all his troubles that evenin’, d’ye see? “Mother,” he ses so soon as the door ope’d, “have you seen him?” She whips out her slate an’ writes down — ”No.” “Oh, no,” ses Jim. “You don’t get out of it that way, mother. I lay you have seen him, an’ I lay he’s bested you for all your talk, same as he bested me. Make a clean breast of it, mother,” he ses. “He got round you too.” She was goin’ for the slate again, but he stops her. “It’s all right, mother,” he ses. “I’ve seen him sense you have, an’ he won’t trouble us no more.” The old lady looks up quick as a robin, an’ she writes, “Did he say so?” “No,” ses Jim, laughin’. “He didn’t say so. That’s how I know. But he bested you, mother. You can’t have it in at me for bein’ soft-hearted. You’re twice as tender-hearted as what I be. Look!” he ses, an’ he shows her the two sovereigns. “Put ‘em away where they belong,” he ses. “He won’t never come for no more; an’ now we’ll have our drink,” he ses, “for we’ve earned it.”

  ‘Nature-ally they weren’t goin’ to let me see where they kep’ their monies. She went upstairs with it — for the whisky.’

  ‘I never knowed Jim was a drinkin’ man — in his own house, like,’ said Jabez.

  ‘No more he isn’t; but what he takes he likes good. He won’t tech no publican’s hogwash acrost the bar. Four shillin’s he paid for that bottle o’ whisky. I know, because when the old lady brought it down there wasn’t more’n jest a liddle few dreenin’s an’ dregs in it. Nothin’ to set before neighbours, I do assure you.’

  ‘“Why, ‘twas half full last week, mother,” he ses. “You don’t mean,” he ses, “you’ve given him all that as well? It’s two shillin’s worth,” he ses. (That’s how I knowed he paid four.) “Well, well, mother, you be too tender-’carted to live. But I don’t grudge it to him,” he ses. “I don’t grudge him nothin’ he can keep.” So, ‘cardenly, we drinked up what little sup was left.’

  ‘An’ what come to Mary’s Lunnon father?’ said Jabez after a full minute’s silence.

  ‘I be too tired to go readin’ papers of evenin’s; but Dockett he told me, that very week, I think, that they’d inquested on a man down at Robertsbridge which had poked and poked up agin’ so many bridges an’ banks, like, they couldn’t make naun out of him.’

  ‘An’ what did Mary say to all these doin’s?’

  ‘The old lady bundled her off to the village ‘fore her Lunnon father come, to buy week-end stuff (an’ she forgot the half o’ it). When we come in she was upstairs studyin’ to be a school-teacher. None told her naun about it. ‘Twadn’t girls’ affairs.’

  ‘Reckon she knowed?’ Jabez went on.

  ‘She? She must have guessed it middlin’ close when she saw her money come back. But she never mentioned it in writing so far’s I know. She were more worritted that night on account of two-three her chickens bein’ drowned, for the flood had skewed their old hen-house round on her postes. I cobbled her up next mornin’ when the brook shrinked.’

  ‘An’ where did you find the bridge? Some fur down-stream, didn’t ye?’

  ‘Just where she allus was. She hadn’t shifted but very little. The brook had gulled out the bank a piece under one eend o’ the plank, so’s she was liable to tilt ye sideways if you wasn’t careful. But I pooked three-four bricks under her, an’ she was all plumb again.’

  ‘Well, I dunno how it looks like, but let be how ‘twill,’ said Jabez, ‘he hadn’t no business to come down from Lunnon tarrifyin’ people, an’ threatenin’ to take away children which they’d hobbed up for their lawful own — even if ‘twas Mary Wickenden.’

  ‘He had the business right enough, an’ he had the law with him — no gettin’ over that,’ said Jesse. ‘But he had the drink with him, too, an’ that was where he failed, like.’

  ‘Well, well! Let be how ‘twill, the brook was a good friend to Jim. I see it now. I allus did wonder what he was gettin’ at when he said that, when I talked to him about shiftin’ the stack. “You dunno everythin’,” he ses. “The Brook’s been a good friend to me,” he ses, “an’ if she’s minded to have a snatch at my hay, I ain’t settin’ out to withstand her.”‘

  ‘I reckon she’s about shifted it, too, by now,’ Jesse chuckled. ‘Hark! That ain’t any slip off the bank which she’s got hold of.’

  The Brook had changed her note again. It sounded as though she were mumbling something soft.

  MARY POSTGATE

  Of Miss Mary Postgate, Lady McCausland wrote that she was ‘thoroughly conscientious, tidy, companionable, and ladylike. I am very sorry to part with her, and shall always be interested in her welfare.’

  Miss Fowler engaged her on this recommendation, and to her surprise, for she had had experience of companions, found that it was true. Miss Fowler was nearer sixty than fifty at the time, but though she needed care she did not exhaust her attendant’s vitality. On the contrary, she gave out, stimulatingly and with reminiscences. Her father had been a minor Court official in the days when the Great Exhibition of 1851 had just set its seal on Civilisation made perfect. Some of Miss Fowler’s tales, none the less, were not always for the young. Mary was not young, and though her speech was as colourless as her eyes or her hair, she was never shocked. She listened unflinchingly to every one; said at the end, ‘How interesting!’ or ‘How shocking!’ as the case might be, and never again referred to it, for she prided herself on a trained mind, which ‘did not dwell on these things.’ She was, too, a treasure at domestic accounts, for which the village tradesmen, with their weekly books, loved her not. Otherwise she had no enemies; provoked no jealousy even among the plainest; neither gossip nor slander had ever been traced to her; she supplied the odd place at the Rector’s or the Doctor’s table at half an hour’s notice; she was a sort of public aunt to very many small children of the village street, whose parents, while accepting everything, would have been swift to resent what they called ‘patronage’; she served on the Village Nursing Committee as Miss Fowler’s nominee when Miss Fowler was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis, and came out of six months’ fortnightly meetings equally respected by all the cliques.

  And when Fate threw Miss Fowler’s nephew, an unlovely orphan of eleven, on Miss Fowler’s hands, Mary Postgate stood to her share of the business of education as practised in private and public schools. She checked printed clothes-lists, and unitemised bills of extras; wrote to Head and House masters, matrons, nurses and doctors, and grieved or rejoiced over half-term reports. Young Wyndham Fowler repaid her in his holidays by calling her ‘Gatepost,’ ‘Postey,’ or ‘Packthread,’ by thumping her between her narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the garden, her large mouth open, her large nose high in air, at a stiff-necked shamble very like a camel’s. Later on he fill
ed the house with clamour, argument, and harangues as to his personal needs, likes and dislikes, and the limitations of ‘you women,’ reducing Mary to tears of physical fatigue, or, when he chose to be humorous, of helpless laughter. At crises, which multiplied as he grew older, she was his ambassadress and his interpretress to Miss Fowler, who had no large sympathy with the young; a vote in his interest at the councils on his future; his sewing-woman, strictly accountable for mislaid boots and garments; always his butt and his slave.

  And when he decided to become a solicitor, and had entered an office in London; when his greeting had changed from ‘Hullo, Postey, you old beast,’ to Mornin’, Packthread,’ there came a war which, unlike all wars that Mary could remember, did not stay decently outside England and in the newspapers, but intruded on the lives of people whom she knew. As she said to Miss Fowler, it was ‘most vexatious.’ It took the Rector’s son who was going into business with his elder brother; it took the Colonel’s nephew on the eve of fruit-farming in Canada; it took Mrs. Grant’s son who, his mother said, was devoted to the ministry; and, very early indeed, it took Wynn Fowler, who announced on a postcard that he had joined the Flying Corps and wanted a cardigan waistcoat.

  ‘He must go, and he must have the waistcoat,’ said Miss Fowler. So Mary got the proper-sized needles and wool, while Miss Fowler told the men of her establishment — two gardeners and an odd man, aged sixty — that those who could join the Army had better do so. The gardeners left. Cheape, the odd man, stayed on, and was promoted to the gardener’s cottage. The cook, scorning to be limited in luxuries, also left, after a spirited scene with Miss Fowler, and took the housemaid with her. Miss Fowler gazetted Nellie, Cheape’s seventeen-year-old daughter, to the vacant post; Mrs. Cheape to the rank of cook, with occasional cleaning bouts; and the reduced establishment moved forward smoothly.

  Wynn demanded an increase in his allowance. Miss Fowler, who always looked facts in the face, said, ‘He must have it. The chances are he won’t live long to draw it, and if three hundred makes him happy — ’

  Wynn was grateful, and came over, in his tight-buttoned uniform, to say so. His training centre was not thirty miles away, and his talk was so technical that it had to be explained by charts of the various types of machines. He gave Mary such a chart.

  ‘And you’d better study it, Postey,’ he said. ‘You’ll be seeing a lot of ‘em soon.’ So Mary studied the chart, but when Wynn next arrived to swell and exalt himself before his womenfolk, she failed badly in cross-examination, and he rated her as in the old days.

  ‘You look more or less like a human being,’ he said in his new Service voice. ‘You must have had a brain at some time in your past. What have you done with it? Where d’you keep it? A sheep would know more than you do, Postey. You’re lamentable. You are less use than an empty tin can, you dowey old cassowary.’

  ‘I suppose that’s how your superior officer talks to you?’ said Miss Fowler from her chair.

  ‘But Postey doesn’t mind,’ Wynn replied. ‘Do you, Packthread?’

  ‘Why? Was Wynn saying anything? I shall get this right next time you come,’ she muttered, and knitted her pale brows again over the diagrams of Taubes, Farmans, and Zeppelins.

  In a few weeks the mere land and sea battles which she read to Miss Fowler after breakfast passed her like idle breath. Her heart and her interest were high in the air with Wynn, who had finished ‘rolling’ (whatever that might be) and had gone on from a ‘taxi’ to a machine more or less his own. One morning it circled over their very chimneys, alighted on Vegg’s Heath, almost outside the garden gate, and Wynn came in, blue with cold, shouting for food. He and she drew Miss Fowler’s bath-chair, as they had often done, along the Heath foot-path to look at the bi-plane. Mary observed that ‘it smelt very badly.’

  ‘Postey, I believe you think with your nose,’ said Wynn. ‘I know you don’t with your mind. Now, what type’s that?’

  ‘I’ll go and get the chart,’ said Mary.

  ‘You’re hopeless! You haven’t the mental capacity of a white mouse,’ he cried, and explained the dials and the sockets for bomb-dropping till it was time to mount and ride the wet clouds once more.

  ‘Ah!’ said Mary, as the stinking thing flared upward. ‘Wait till our Flying Corps gets to work! Wynn says it’s much safer than in the trenches.’

  ‘I wonder,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘Tell Cheape to come and tow me home again.’

  ‘It’s all downhill. I can do it,’ said Mary, ‘if you put the brake on.’ She laid her lean self against the pushing-bar and home they trundled.

  ‘Now, be careful you aren’t heated and catch a chill,’ said overdressed Miss Fowler.

  ‘Nothing makes me perspire,’ said Mary. As she bumped the chair under the porch she straightened her long back. The exertion had given her a colour, and the wind had loosened a wisp of hair across her forehead. Miss Fowler glanced at her.

  ‘What do you ever think of, Mary?’ she demanded suddenly.

  ‘Oh, Wynn says he wants another three pairs of stockings — as thick as we can make them.’

  ‘Yes. But I mean the things that women think about. Here you are, more than forty — ’

  ‘Forty-four,’ said truthful Mary.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well?’ Mary offered Miss Fowler her shoulder as usual.

  ‘And you’ve been with me ten years now.’

  ‘Let’s see,’ said Mary. ‘Wynn was eleven when he came. He’s twenty now, and I came two years before that. It must be eleven.’

  ‘Eleven! And you’ve never told me anything that matters in all that while. Looking back, it seems to me that I’ve done all the talking.’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m not much of a conversationalist. As Wynn says, I haven’t the mind. Let me take your hat.’

  Miss Fowler, moving stiffly from the hip, stamped her rubber-tipped stick on the tiled hall floor. ‘Mary, aren’t you anything except a companion? Would you ever have been anything except a companion?’

  Mary hung up the garden hat on its proper peg. ‘No,’ she said after consideration. ‘I don’t imagine I ever should. But I’ve no imagination, I’m afraid.’

  She fetched Miss Fowler her eleven-o’clock glass of Contrexéville.

  That was the wet December when it rained six inches to the month, and the women went abroad as little as might be. Wynn’s flying chariot visited them several times, and for two mornings (he had warned her by postcard) Mary heard the thresh of his propellers at dawn. The second time she ran to the window, and stared at the whitening sky. A little blur passed overhead. She lifted her lean arms towards it.

  That evening at six o’clock there came an announcement in an official envelope that Second Lieutenant W. Fowler had been killed during a trial flight. Death was instantaneous. She read it and carried it to Miss Fowler.

  ‘I never expected anything else,’ said Miss Fowler; ‘but I’m sorry it happened before he had done anything.’

  The room was whirling round Mary Postgate, but she found herself quite steady in the midst of it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s a great pity he didn’t die in action after he had killed somebody.’

  ‘He was killed instantly. That’s one comfort,’ Miss Fowler went on.

  ‘But Wynn says the shock of a fall kills a man at once — whatever happens to the tanks,’ quoted Mary.

  The room was coming to rest now. She heard Miss Fowler say impatiently, ‘But why can’t we cry, Mary?’ and herself replying, ‘There’s nothing to cry for. He has done his duty as much as Mrs. Grant’s son did.’

  ‘And when he died, she came and cried all the morning,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘This only makes me feel tired — terribly tired. Will you help me to bed, please, Mary? — And I think I’d like the hot-water bottle.’

  So Mary helped her and sat beside, talking of Wynn in his riotous youth.

  ‘I believe,’ said Miss Fowler suddenly, ‘that old people and young people slip from under a stroke like this. T
he middle-aged feel it most.’

  ‘I expect that’s true,’ said Mary, rising. ‘I’m going to put away the things in his room now. Shall we wear mourning?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Miss Fowler. ‘Except, of course, at the funeral. I can’t go. You will. I want you to arrange about his being buried here. What a blessing it didn’t happen at Salisbury!’

  Every one, from the Authorities of the Flying Corps to the Rector, was most kind and sympathetic. Mary found herself for the moment in a world where bodies were in the habit of being despatched by all sorts of conveyances to all sorts of places. And at the funeral two young men in buttoned-up uniforms stood beside the grave and spoke to her afterwards.

  ‘You’re Miss Postgate, aren’t you?’ said one. ‘Fowler told me about you. He was a good chap — a first-class fellow — a great loss.’

  ‘Great loss!’ growled his companion. ‘We’re all awfully sorry.’

  ‘How high did he fall from?’ Mary whispered.

  ‘Pretty nearly four thousand feet, I should think, didn’t he? You were up that day, Monkey?’

  ‘All of that,’ the other child replied. ‘My bar made three thousand, and I wasn’t as high as him by a lot.’

  ‘Then that’s all right,’ said Mary. ‘Thank you very much.’

  They moved away as Mrs. Grant flung herself weeping on Mary’s flat chest, under the lych-gate, and cried, ‘I know how it feels! I know how it feels!’

  ‘But both his parents are dead,’ Mary returned, as she fended her off. ‘Perhaps they’ve all met by now,’ she added vaguely as she escaped towards the coach.

  ‘I’ve thought of that too,’ wailed Mrs. Grant; ‘but then he’ll be practically a stranger to them. Quite embarrassing!’