Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling

by Rudyard Kipling

  And an hour later Tallantire met on the bank a woman in a gingham riding-habit and a sun-hat who cried out to him for her husband – her boy and her darling – while Khoda Dad Khan threw himself face-down on the sand and covered his eyes.

  II

  The very simplicity of the notion was its charm. What more easy to win a reputation for far-seeing statesmanship, originality, and, above all, deference to the desires of the people, than by appointing a child of the country to the rule of that country? Two hundred millions of the most loving and grateful folk under Her Majesty’s dominion would laud the fact, and their praise would endure for ever. Yet he was indifferent to praise or blame, as befitted the Very Greatest of All the Viceroys.3 His administration was based upon principle, and the principle must be enforced in season and out of season. His pen and tongue had created the New India, teeming with possibilities – loud-voiced, insistent, a nation among nations – all his very own. Wherefore the Very Greatest of All the Viceroys took another step in advance, and with it counsel of those who should have advised him on the appointment of a successor to Yardley-Orde. There was a gentleman and a member of the Bengal Civil Service who had won his place and a university degree to boot in fair and open competition with the sons of the English. He was cultured, of the world, and, if report spoke truly, had wisely and, above all, sympathetically ruled a crowded district in South-Eastern Bengal. He had been to England and charmed many drawing-rooms there. His name, if the Viceroy recollected aright, was Mr Grish Chunder Dé, MA. In short, did anybody see any objection to the appointment, always on principle, of a man of the people to rule the people? The district in South-Eastern Bengal might with advantage, he apprehended, pass over to a younger civilian of Mr G. C. Dé’s nationality (who had written a remarkably clever pamphlet on the political value of sympathy in administration); and Mr G. C. Dé could be transferred northward to Kot-Kumharsen. The Viceroy was averse, on principle, to interfering with appointments under control of the Provincial Governments. He wished it to be understood that he merely recommended and advised in this instance. As regarded the mere question of race, Mr Grish Chunder Dé was more English than the English, and yet possessed of that peculiar sympathy and insight which the best among the best Service in the world could only win to at the end of their service.

  The stern, black-bearded kings who sit about the Council-board of India divided on the step, with the inevitable result of driving the Very Greatest of All the Viceroys into the borders of hysteria, and a bewildered obstinacy pathetic as that of a child.

  ‘The principle is sound enough,’ said the weary-eyed Head of the Red Provinces in which Kot-Kumharsen lay, for he too held theories. ‘The only difficulty is –’

  ‘Put the screw on the district officials; brigade Dé with a very strong Deputy Commissioner on each side of him; give him the best assistant in the Province; rub the fear of God into the people beforehand; and if anything goes wrong, say that his colleagues didn’t back him up. All these lovely little experiments recoil on the District-Officer in the end,’ said the Knight of the Drawn Sword4 with a truthful brutality that made the Head of the Red Provinces shudder. And on a tacit understanding of this kind the transfer was accomplished, as quietly as might be for many reasons.

  It is sad to think that what goes for public opinion in India did not generally see the wisdom of the Viceroy’s appointment. There were not lacking indeed hireling organs, notoriously in the pay of a tyrannous bureaucracy, who more than hinted that His Excellency was a fool, a dreamer of dreams, a doctrinaire, and, worst of all, a trifler with the lives of men. ‘The Viceroy’s Excellence Gazette’, published in Calcutta, was at pains to thank ‘Our beloved Viceroy for once more and again thus gloriously vindicating the potentialities of the Bengali nations for extended executive and administrative duties in foreign parts beyond our ken. We do not at all doubt that our excellent fellow-townsman, Mr Grish Chunder Dé, Esq., MA, will uphold the prestige of the Bengali, notwithstanding what underhand intrigue and peshbundi5 may be set on foot to insidiously nip his fame and blast his prospects among the proud civilians,6 some of which will now have to serve under a despised native and take orders too. How will you like that, Misters? We entreat our beloved Viceroy still to substantiate himself superiorly to race-prejudice and colour-blindness, and to allow the flower of this now our Civil Service all the full pays and allowances granted to his more fortunate brethren.’

  III

  ‘When does this man take over charge? I’m alone just now, and I gather that I’m to stand fast under him.’

  ‘Would you have cared for a transfer?’ said Bullows keenly. Then, laying his hand on Tallantire’s shoulder: ‘We’re all in the same boat; don’t desert us. And yet, why the devil should you stay, if you can get another charge?’

  ‘It was Orde’s,’ said Tallantire simply.

  ‘Well, it’s Dé’s now. He’s a Bengali of the Bengalis, crammed with code and case law; a beautiful man so far as routine and deskwork go, and pleasant to talk to. They naturally have always kept him in his own home district, where all his sisters and his cousins and his aunts7 lived, somewhere south of Dacca. He did no more than turn the place into a pleasant little family preserve, allowed his subordinates to do what they liked, and let everybody have a chance at the shekels. Consequently he’s immensely popular down there.’

  ‘I’ve nothing to do with that. How on earth am I to explain to the district that they are going to be governed by a Bengali? Do you – does the Government, I mean – suppose that the Khusru Kheyl will sit quiet when they once know? What will the Mahomedan heads of villages say? How will the police – Muzbi Sikhs and Pathans – how will they work under him? We couldn’t say anything if the Government appointed a sweeper; but my people will say a good deal, you know that. It’s a piece of cruel folly!’

  ‘My dear boy, I know all that, and more. I’ve represented it, and have been told that I am exhibiting “culpable and puerile prejudice”. By Jove, if the Khusru Kheyl don’t exhibit something worse than that I don’t know the Border! The chances are that you will have the district alight on your hands, and I shall have to leave my work and help you pull through. I needn’t ask you to stand by the Bengali man in every possible way. You’ll do that for your own sake.’

  ‘For Orde’s. I can’t say that I care twopence personally.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass. It’s grievous enough, God knows, and the Government will know later on; but that’s no reason for your sulking. You must try to run the district; you must stand between him and as much insult as possible; you must show him the ropes; you must pacify the Khusru Kheyl, and just warn Curbar of the Police to look out for trouble by the way. I’m always at the end of a telegraph-wire, and willing to peril my reputation to hold the district together. You’ll lose yours, of course. If you keep things straight, and he isn’t actually beaten with a stick when he’s on tour, he’ll get all the credit. If anything goes wrong, you’ll be told that you didn’t support him loyally.’

  ‘I know what I’ve got to do,’ said Tallantire wearily, ‘and I’m going to it. But it’s hard.’

  ‘The work is with us, the event is with Allah – as Orde used to say when he was more than usually in hot water.’ And Bullows rode away.

  That two gentlemen in Her Majesty’s Bengal Civil Service should thus discuss a third, also in that service, and a cultured and affable man withal, seems strange and saddening. Yet listen to the artless babble of the Blind Mullah of Jagai, the priest of the Khusru Kheyl, sitting upon a rock overlooking the Border. Five years before, a chance-hurled shell from a screw-gun8 battery had dashed earth in the face of the Mullah, then urging a rush of Ghazis9 against half a dozen British bayonets. So he became blind, and hated the English none the less for the little accident. Yardley-Orde knew his failing, and had many times laughed at him therefor.

  ‘Dogs you are,’ said the Blind Mullah to the listening tribesmen round the fire. ‘Whipped dogs! Because you listened to Orde Sahib and called h
im father and behaved as his children, the British Government have proven how they regard you. Orde Sahib ye know is dead.’

  ‘Ai! ai! ai!’ said half a dozen voices.

  ‘He was a man. Comes now in his stead, whom think ye? A Bengali of Bengal – an eater of fish from the South.’

  ‘A lie!’ said Khoda Dad Khan. ‘And but for the small matter of thy priesthood, I’d drive my gun butt-first down thy throat.’

  ‘Oho, art thou there, lickspittle of the English? Go in tomorrow across the Border to pay service to Orde Sahib’s successor, and thou shalt slip thy shoes at the tent-door of a Bengali, as thou shalt hand thy offering to a Bengali’s black fist. This I know; and in my youth, when a young man spoke evil to a Mullah holding the doors of Heaven and Hell, the gun-butt was not rammed down the Mullah’s gullet. No!’

  The Blind Mullah hated Khoda Dad Khan with Afghan hatred, both being rivals for the headship of the tribe; but the latter was feared for bodily as the other for spiritual gifts. Khoda Dad Khan looked at Orde’s ring and grunted, ‘I go in tomorrow because I am not an old fool, preaching war against the English. If the Government, smitten with madness, have done this, then…’

  ‘Then,’ croaked the Mullah, ‘thou wilt take out the young men and strike at the four villages within the Border?’

  ‘Or wring thy neck, black raven of Jehannum,10 for a bearer of ill-tidings.’

  Khoda Dad Khan oiled his long locks with great care, put on his best Bokhara belt, a new turban-cap, and fine green shoes, and accompanied by a few friends came down from the hills to pay a visit to the new Deputy Commissioner of Kot-Kumharsen. Also he bore tribute – four or five priceless gold mohurs of Akbar’s11 time in a white handkerchief. These the Deputy Commissioner would touch and remit. The little ceremony used to be a sign that, so far as Khoda Dad Khan’s personal influence went, the Khusru Kheyl would be good boys – till the next time; especially if Khoda Dad Khan happened to like the new Deputy Commissioner. In Yardley-Orde’s consulship his visit concluded with a sumptuous dinner and perhaps forbidden liquors; certainly with some wonderful tales and great good-fellowship. Then Khoda Dad Khan would swagger back to his hold, vowing that Orde Sahib was one prince and Tallantire Sahib another, and that whosoever went a-raiding into British territory would be flayed alive. On this occasion he found the Deputy Commissioner’s tents looking much as usual. Regarding himself as privileged he strode through the open door to confront a suave, portly Bengali in English costume writing at a table. Unversed in the elevating influence of education, and not in the least caring for university degrees, Khoda Dad Khan promptly set the man down for a Babu – the native clerk of the Deputy Commissioner – a hated and despised animal.

  ‘Ugh!’ said he cheerfully. ‘Where’s your master, Babujee?’

  ‘I am the Deputy Commissioner,’ said the gentleman in English.

  Now he overvalued the effects of university degrees, and stared Khoda Dad Khan in the face. But if from your earliest infancy you have been accustomed to look on battle, murder, and sudden death, if spilt blood affects your nerves as much as red paint, and, above all, if you have faithfully believed that the Bengali was the servant of all Hindustan, and that all Hindustan was vastly inferior to your own large, lustful self, you can endure, even though uneducated, a very large amount of looking over. You can even stare down a graduate of an Oxford college if the latter has been born in a hothouse, of stock bred in a hothouse, and fearing physical pain as some men fear sin; especially if your opponent’s mother has frightened him to sleep in his youth with horrible stories of devils inhabiting Afghanistan, and dismal legends of the black North. The eyes behind the gold spectacles sought the floor. Khoda Dad Khan chuckled, and swung out to find Tallantire hard by. ‘Here,’ said he roughly, thrusting the coins before him, ‘touch and remit. That answers for my good behaviour. But, O Sahib, has the Government gone mad to send a black Bengali dog to us? And am I to pay service to such an one? And are you to work under him? What does it mean?’

  ‘It is an order,’ said Tallantire. He had expected something of this kind. ‘He is a very clever S-sahib.’

  ‘He a Sahib! He’s a kala admi – a black man – unfit to run at the tail of a potter’s donkey. All the peoples of the earth have harried Bengal. It is written. Thou knowest when we of the North wanted women or plunder whither went we? To Bengal – where else? What child’s talk is this of Sahibdom – after Orde Sahib too! Of a truth the Blind Mullah was right.’

  ‘What of him?’ asked Tallantire uneasily. He mistrusted that old man with his dead eyes and his deadly tongue.

  ‘Nay, now, because of the oath that I sware to Orde Sahib when we watched him die by the river yonder, I will tell. In the first place, is it true that the English have set the heel of the Bengali on their own neck, and that there is no more English rule in the land?’

  ‘I am here,’ said Tallantire, ‘and I serve the Maharanee of England.’

  ‘The Mullah said otherwise, and further that because we loved Orde Sahib the Government sent us a pig to show that we were dogs, who till now have been held by the strong hand. Also that they were taking away the white soldiers, that more Hindustanis might come, and that all was changing.’

  This is the worst of ill-considered handling of a very large country. What looks so feasible in Calcutta, so right in Bombay, so unassailable in Madras, is misunderstood by the North, and entirely changes its complexion on the banks of the Indus. Khoda Dad Khan explained as clearly as he could that, though he himself intended to be good, he really could not answer for the more reckless members of his tribe under the leadership of the Blind Mullah. They might or they might not give trouble, but they certainly had no intention whatever of obeying the new Deputy Commissioner. Was Tallantire perfectly sure that in the event of any systematic border-raiding the force in the district could put it down promptly?

  ‘Tell the Mullah if he talks any more fool’s talk,’ said Tallantire curtly, ‘that he takes his men on to certain death, and his tribe to blockade, trespass-fine, and blood-money. But why do I talk to one who no longer carries weight in the counsels of the tribe?’

  Khoda Dad Khan pocketed that insult. He had learned something that he much wanted to know, and returned to his hills to be sarcastically complimented by the Mullah, whose tongue raging round the camp-fires was deadlier flame than ever dung-cake fed.

  IV

  Be pleased to consider here for a moment the unknown district of Kot-Kumharsen. It lay cut lengthways by the Indus under the line of the Khusru hills – ramparts of useless earth and tumbled stone. It was seventy miles long by fifty broad, maintained a population of something less than two hundred thousand, and paid taxes to the extent of forty thousand pounds a year on an area that was by rather more than half sheer, hopeless waste. The cultivators were not gentle people, the miners for salt were less gentle still, and the cattle-breeders least gentle of all. A police-post in the top right-hand corner and a tiny mud fort in the top left-hand corner prevented as much salt-smuggling and cattle-lifting as the influence of the civilians could not put down; and in the bottom right-hand corner lay Jumala, the district headquarters – a pitiful knot of lime-washed barns facetiously rented as houses, reeking with frontier fever, leaking in the rain, and ovens in the summer.

  It was to this place that Grish Chunder Dé was travelling, there formally to take over charge of the district. But the news of his coming had gone before. Bengalis were as scarce as poodles among the simple Borderers, who cut each other’s heads open with their long spades and worshipped impartially at Hindu and Mahomedan shrines. They crowded to see him, pointing at him, and diversely comparing him to a gravid milch-buffalo, or a broken-down horse, as their limited range of metaphor prompted. They laughed at his police-guard, and wished to know how long the burly Sikhs were going to lead Bengali apes. They inquired whether he had brought his women with him, and advised him explicitly not to tamper with theirs. It remained for a wrinkled hag by the roadside to slap her lean breasts
as he passed, crying, ‘I have suckled six that could have eaten six thousand of him. The Government shot them, and made this That a king!’ Whereat a blue-turbaned huge-boned plough-mender shouted, ‘Have hope, mother o’ mine! He may yet go the way of thy wastrels.’ And the children, the little brown puff-balls, regarded curiously. It was generally a good thing for infancy to stray into Orde Sahib’s tent, where copper coins were to be won for the mere wishing, and tales of the most authentic, such as even their mothers knew but the first half of. No! This fat black man could never tell them how Pir Prith hauled the eye-teeth out of ten devils; how the big stones came to lie all in a row on top of the Khusru hills, and what happened if you shouted through the village-gate to the grey wolf at even ‘Badl Khas is dead.’ Meantime Grish Chunder Dé talked hastily and much to Tallantire, after the manner of those who are ‘more English than the English’ – of Oxford and ‘home’, with much curious book-knowledge of bump-suppers, cricket-matches, hunting-runs, and other unholy sports of the alien. ‘We must get these fellows in hand,’ he said once or twice uneasily; ‘get them well in hand, and drive them on a tight rein. No use, you know, being slack with your district.’

  And a moment later Tallantire heard Debendra Nath Dé, who brotherliwise had followed his kinsman’s fortune and hoped for the shadow of his protector as a pleader, whisper in Bengali, ‘Better are dried fish at Dacca than drawn swords at Delhi. Brother of mine, these men are devils, as our mother said. And you will always have to ride upon a horse!’