Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling

by Rudyard Kipling

  Scott could walk dizzily by the time Hawkins’s inspection was ended, and he flushed all over when Jim said of his work in the district that it was ‘not half bad’, and volunteered, further, that he had considered Scott his right-hand man through the famine, and would feel it his duty to say as much officially.

  So they came back by rail to the old camp; but there were no crowds near it, the long fires in the trenches were dead and black, and the famine-sheds stood almost empty.

  ‘You see!’ said Jim. ‘There isn’t much more for us to do. Better ride up and see the wife. They’ve pitched a tent for you. Dinner’s at seven. I’ll see you then.’

  Riding at a foot-pace, Faiz Ullah by his stirrup, Scott came to William in the brown-calico riding-habit, sitting at the dining-tent door, her hands in her lap, white as ashes, thin and worn, with no lustre in her hair. There did not seem to be any Mrs Jim on the horizon, and all that William could say was: ‘My word, how pulled down you look!’

  ‘I’ve had a touch of fever. You don’t look very well yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I’m fit enough. We’ve stamped it out. I suppose you know?’

  Scott nodded. ‘We shall all be returned in a few weeks. Hawkins told me.’

  ‘Before Christmas, Mrs Jim says. Sha’n’t you be glad to go back? I can smell the wood-smoke already’; William sniffed. ‘We shall be in time for all the Christmas doings. I don’t suppose even the Punjab Government would be base enough to transfer Jack till the new year?’

  ‘It seems hundreds of years ago – the Punjab and all that – doesn’t it? Are you glad you came?’

  ‘Now it’s all over, yes. It has been ghastly here. You know we had to sit still and do nothing, and Sir Jim was away so much.’

  ‘Do nothing! How did you get on with the milking?’

  ‘I managed it somehow – after you taught me.’

  Then the talk stopped with an almost audible jar. Still no Mrs Jim.

  ‘That reminds me I owe you fifty rupees for the condensed milk. I thought perhaps you’d be coming here when you were transferred to the Khanda district, and I could pay you then; but you didn’t.’

  ‘I passed within five miles of the camp. It was in the middle of a march, you see, and the carts were breaking down every few minutes, and I couldn’t get ’em over the ground till ten o’clock that night. But I wanted to come awfully. You knew I did, didn’t you?’

  ‘I – believe – I – did,’ said William, facing him with level eyes. She was no longer white.

  ‘Did you understand?’

  ‘Why you didn’t ride in? Of course I did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you couldn’t, of course. I knew that.’

  ‘Did you care?’

  ‘If you had come in – but I knew you wouldn’t – but if you had, I should have cared a great deal. You know I should.’

  ‘Thank God I didn’t! Oh, but I wanted to! I couldn’t trust myself to ride in front of the carts, because I kept edging ’em over here, don’t you know?’

  ‘I knew, you wouldn’t,’ said William, contentedly. ‘Here’s your fifty.’

  Scott bent forward and kissed the hand that held the greasy notes. Its fellow patted him awkwardly but very tenderly on the head.

  ‘And you knew, too, didn’t you?’ said William, in a new voice.

  ‘No, on my honour, I didn’t. I hadn’t the – the cheek to expect anything of the kind, except… I say, were you out riding anywhere the day I passed by to Khanda?’

  William nodded, and smiled after the manner of an angel surprised in a good deed.

  ‘Then it was just a speck I saw of your habit in the –’

  ‘Palm-grove on the Southern cart-road. I saw your helmet when you came up from the nullah33 by the temple – just enough to be sure that you were all right. D’you care?’

  This time Scott did not kiss her hand, for they were in the dusk of the dining-tent, and, because William’s knees were trembling under her, she had to sit down in the nearest chair, where she wept long and happily, her head on her arms; and when Scott imagined that it would be well to comfort her, she needed nothing of the kind; she ran to her own tent; and Scott went out into the world, and smiled upon it largely and idiotically. But when Faiz Ullah brought him a drink, he found it necessary to support one hand with the other, or the good whisky and soda would have been spilled abroad. There are fevers and fevers.

  But it was worse – much worse – the strained, eye-shirking talk at dinner till the servants had withdrawn, and worst of all when Mrs Jim, who had been on the edge of weeping from the soup down, kissed Scott and William, and they drank one whole bottle of champagne, hot, because there was no ice, and Scott and William sat outside the tent in the starlight till Mrs Jim drove them in for fear of more fever.

  Apropos of these things and some others William said: ‘Being engaged is abominable, because, you see, one has no official position. We must be thankful that we’ve lots of things to do.’

  ‘Things to do!’ said Jim, when that was reported to him. ‘They’re neither of them any good any more. I can’t get five hours’ work a day out of Scott. He’s in the clouds half the time.’

  ‘Oh, but they’re so beautiful to watch, Jimmy. It will break my heart when they go. Can’t you do anything for him?’

  ‘I’ve given the Government the impression – at least, I hope I have – that he personally conducted the entire famine. But all he wants is to get on to the Luni Canal Works, and William’s just as bad. Have you ever heard ’em talking of barrage and aprons and wastewater? It’s their style of spooning, I suppose.’

  Mrs Jim smiled tenderly. ‘Ah, that’s in the intervals – bless ’em.’

  And so Love ran about the camp unrebuked in broad daylight, while men picked up the pieces and put them neatly away of the Famine in the Eight Districts.

  Morning brought the penetrating chill of the Northern December, the layers of wood-smoke, the dusty grey blue of the tamarisks, the domes of ruined tombs, and all the smell of the white Northern plains, as the mail-train ran on to the mile-long Sutlej Bridge. William, wrapped in a poshteen – silk-embroidered sheepskin jacket trimmed with rough astrakhan – looked out with moist eyes and nostrils that dilated joyously. The South of pagodas and palm-trees, the over-populated Hindu South, was done with. Here was the land she knew and loved, and before her lay the good life she understood, among folk of her own caste and mind.

  They were picking them up at almost every station now – men and women coming in for the Christmas Week, with racquets, with bundles of polo-sticks, with dear and bruised cricket-bats, with fox-terriers and saddles. The greater part of them wore jackets like William’s, for the Northern cold is as little to be trifled with as the Northern heat. And William was among them and of them, her hands deep in her pockets, her collar turned up over her ears, stamping her feet on the platforms as she walked up and down to get warm, visiting from carriage to carriage, and everywhere being congratulated. Scott was with the bachelors at the far end of the train, where they chaffed him mercilessly about feeding babies and milking goats; but from time to time he would stroll up to William’s window, and murmur: ‘Good enough, isn’t it?’ and William would answer with sighs of pure delight: ‘Good enough, indeed.’ The large open names of the home towns were good to listen to. Umballa, Ludianah, Phillour, Jullundur, they rang like the coming marriage-bells in her ears, and William felt deeply and truly sorry for all strangers and outsiders – visitors, tourists, and those fresh-caught for the service of the country.

  It was a glorious return, and when the bachelors gave the Christmas ball, William was, unofficially, you might say, the chief and honoured guest among the stewards, who could make things very pleasant for their friends. She and Scott danced nearly all the dances together, and sat out the rest in the big dark gallery overlooking the superb teak floor, where the uniforms blazed, and the spurs clinked, and the new frocks and four hundred dancers went round and round till the draped flags on the
pillars flapped and bellied to the whirl of it.

  About midnight half a dozen men who did not care for dancing came over from the Club to play ‘Waits’, and – that was a surprise the stewards had arranged – before anyone knew what had happened, the band stopped, and hidden voices broke into ‘Good King Wenceslaus’, and William in the gallery hummed and beat time with her foot:

  Mark my footsteps well, my page,

  Tread thou in them boldly.

  Thou shalt feel the winter’s rage

  Freeze thy blood less coldly!

  ‘Oh, I hope they are going to give us another! Isn’t it pretty, coming out of the dark in that way? Look – look down. There’s Mrs Gregory wiping her eyes!’

  ‘It’s like home, rather,’ said Scott. ‘I remember –’

  ‘H’sh! Listen! – dear.’ And it began again:

  When shepherds watched their flocks by night –

  ‘A-h-h!’ said William, drawing closer to Scott.

  All seated on the ground,

  The Angel of the Lord came down,

  And glory shone around.

  ‘Fear not,’ said he (for mighty dread

  Had seized their troubled mind);

  ‘Glad tidings of great joy I bring

  To you and all mankind.’

  This time it was William that wiped her eyes.

  The Devil and the Deep Sea1

  ‘All supplies very bad and dear, and there are no facilities for even the smallest repairs.’

  Sailing Directions.

  Her nationality was British, but you will not find her house-flag in the list of our mercantile marine. She was a nine-hundred ton, iron, schooner-rigged, screw cargo-boat, differing externally in no way from any other tramp of the sea. But it is with steamers as it is with men. There are those who will for a consideration sail extremely close to the wind; and, in the present state of a fallen world, such people and such steamers have their use. From the hour that the Aglaia first entered the Clyde – new, shiny, and innocent, with a quart of cheap champagne trickling down her cutwater – Fate and her owner, who was also her captain, decreed that she should deal with embarrassed crowned heads, fleeing Presidents, financiers of over-extended ability, women to whom change of air was imperative, and the lesser law-breaking Powers. Her career led her sometimes into the Admiralty Courts, where the sworn statements of her skipper filled his brethren with envy. The mariner cannot tell or act a lie in the face of the sea, or mislead a tempest; but, as lawyers have discovered, he makes up for chances withheld when he returns to shore, an affidavit in either hand.

  The Aglaia figured with distinction in the great Mackinaw salvage case. It was her first slip from virtue, and she learned how to change her name, but not her heart, and to run across the sea. As the Guiding Light she was very badly wanted in a South American port for the little matter of entering harbour at full speed, colliding with a coal-hulk and the State’s only man-of-war, just as that man-of-war was going to coal. She put to sea without explanations, though three forts fired at her for half an hour. As the Julia M‘Gregor she had been concerned in picking up from a raft certain gentlemen who should have stayed in Noumea,2 but who preferred making themselves vastly unpleasant to authority in quite another quarter of the world; and as the Shah-in-Shah she had been overtaken on the high seas, indecently full of munitions of war, by the cruiser of an agitated Power at issue with its neighbour. That time she was very nearly sunk, and her riddled hull gave eminent lawyers of two countries great profit. After a season she reappeared as the Martin Hunt, painted a dull slate colour, with pure saffron funnel, and boats of robin’s-egg blue, engaging in the Odessa trade till she was invited (and the invitation could not well be disregarded) to keep away from Black Sea ports altogether.

  She had ridden through many waves of depression. Freights might drop out of sight, Seamen’s Unions throw spanners and nuts at certificated masters, or stevedores combine till cargo perished on the dockhead; but the boat of many names came and went, busy, alert, and inconspicuous always. Her skipper made no complaint of hard times, and port officers observed that her crew signed and signed again with the regularity of Atlantic liner boatswains. Her name she changed as occasion called; her well-paid crew never; and a large percentage of the profits of her voyages was spent with an open hand on her engine-room. She never troubled the underwriters, and very seldom stopped to talk with a signal-station; for her business was urgent and private.

  But an end came to her tradings, and she perished in this manner. Deep peace brooded over Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australasia, and Polynesia. The Powers dealt together more or less honestly; banks paid their depositors to the hour; diamonds of price came safely to the hands of their owners; republics rested content with their dictators; diplomats found no one whose presence in the least incommoded them; monarchs lived openly with their lawfully wedded wives. It was as though the whole earth had put on its best Sunday bib and tucker; and business was very bad for the Martin Hunt. The great, virtuous calm engulfed her, slate sides, yellow funnel, and all, but cast up in another hemisphere the steam-whaler Haliotis, black and rusty, with a manure-coloured funnel, a litter of dingy white boats, and an enormous stove, or furnace, for boiling blubber on her forward well-deck. There could be no doubt that her trip was successful, for she lay at several ports not too well known, and the smoke of her trying-out3 insulted the beaches.

  Anon she departed, at the speed of the average London four-wheeler, and entered a semi-inland sea, warm, still, and blue, which is, perhaps, the most strictly preserved water in the world. There she stayed for a certain time, and the great stars of those mild skies beheld her playing puss-in-the-corner among islands where whales are never found. All that time she smelt abominably, and the smell, though fishy, was not wholesome. One evening calamity descended upon her from the island of Pygang-Watai, and she fled, while her crew jeered at a fat black-and-brown gunboat puffing far behind. They knew to the last revolution the capacity of every boat, on those seas, that they were anxious to avoid. A British ship with a good conscience does not, as a rule, flee from the man-of-war of a foreign Power, and it is also considered a breach of etiquette to stop and search British ships at sea. These things the skipper of the Haliotis did not pause to prove, but held on at an inspiriting eleven knots an hour till nightfall. One thing only he overlooked.

  The Power that kept an expensive steam-patrol moving up and down those waters (they had dodged the two regular ships of the station with an ease that bred contempt) had newly brought up a third and a fourteen-knot boat with a clean bottom to help the work; and that was why the Haliotis, driving hard from the east to the west, found herself at daylight in such a position that she could not help seeing an arrangement of four flags, a mile and a half behind, which read: ‘Heave to, or take the consequences!’

  She had her choice, and she took it, and the end came when, presuming on her lighter draught, she tried to draw away northward over a friendly shoal. The shell that arrived by way of the Chief Engineer’s cabin was some five inches in diameter, with a practice, not a bursting, charge. It had been intended to cross her bows, and that was why it knocked the framed portrait of the Chief Engineer’s wife – and she was a very pretty girl – on to the floor, splintered his wash-hand stand, crossed the alleyway into the engine-room, and striking on a grating, dropped directly in front of the forward engine, where it burst, neatly fracturing both the bolts that held the connecting-rod to the forward crank.

  What follows is worth consideration. The forward engine had no more work to do. Its released piston-rod, therefore, drove up fiercely, with nothing to check it, and started most of the nuts of the cylinder-cover. It came down again, the full weight of the steam behind it, and the foot of the disconnected connecting-rod, useless as the leg of a man with a sprained ankle, flung out to the right and struck the starboard, or right-hand, cast-iron supporting-column of the forward engine, cracking it clean through about six inches above the base, and wedging the upper por
tion outwards three inches towards the ship’s side. There the connecting-rod jammed. Meantime, the after engine, being as yet unembarrassed, went on with its work, and in so doing brought round at its next revolution the crank of the forward engine, which smote the already jammed connecting-rod, bending it and therewith the piston-rod cross-head – the big cross-piece that slides up and down so smoothly.

  The cross-head jammed sideways in the guides, and, in addition to putting further pressure on the already broken starboard supporting column, cracked the port, or left-hand supporting column in two or three places. There being nothing more that could be made to move, the engines brought up, all standing, with a hiccup that seemed to lift the Haliotis a foot out of the water; and the engine-room staff, opening every steam outlet that they could find in the confusion, arrived on deck somewhat scalded, but calm. There was a sound below of things happening – a rushing, clicking, purring, grunting, rattling noise that did not last for more than a minute. It was the machinery adjusting itself on the spur of the moment, to a hundred altered conditions. Mr Wardrop, one foot on the upper grating, inclined his ear sideways, and groaned. You cannot stop engines working at twelve knots an hour in three seconds without disorganizing them. The Haliotis slid forward in a cloud of steam, shrieking like a wounded horse. There was nothing more to do. The five-inch shell with a reduced charge had settled the situation. And when you are full, all three holds, of strictly preserved pearls; when you have cleaned out the Tanna Bank, the Sea-Horse Bank, and four other banks from one end to the other of the Amanala Sea – when you have ripped out the very heart of a rich Government monopoly so that five years will not repair your wrong-doings – you must smile and take what is in store. But the skipper reflected, as a launch put out from the man-of-war, that he had been bombarded on the high seas, with the British flag – several of them – picturesquely disposed above him, and tried to find comfort in the thought.