Indian Tales by Rudyard Kipling
R >>
Rudyard Kipling >> Indian Tales
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 |
32 |
33 |
34 |
35 |
36 |
37 E-text prepared by S.R.Ellison, Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
INDIAN TALES
BY RUDYARD KIPLING
CONTENTS
"The Finest Story in the World"
With the Main Guard
Wee Willie Winkie
The Rout of the White Hussars
At Twenty-two
The Courting of Dinah Shadd
The Story of Muhammad Din
In Flood Time
My Own True Ghost Story
The Big Drunk Draf'
By Word of Mouth
The Drums of the Fore and Aft
The Sending of Dana Da
On the City Wall
The Broken-link Handicap
On Greenhow Hill
To Be Filed for Reference
The Man Who Would Be King
The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney
His Majesty the King
The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
In the House of Suddhoo
Black Jack
The Taking of Lungtungpen
The Phantom Rickshaw
On the Strength of a Likeness
Private Learoyd's Story
Wressley of the Foreign Office
The Solid Muldoon
The Three Musketeers
Beyond the Pale
The God from the Machine
The Daughter of the Regiment
The Madness of Private Ortheris
L'Envoi
"THE FINEST STORY IN THE WORLD"
"Or ever the knightly years were gone
With the old world to the grave,
I was a king in Babylon
And you were a Christian slave,"
--_W.E. Henley_.
His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was a
widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day
to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered from aspirations.
I met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his
given name, and he called the marker "Bullseyes." Charlie explained, a
little nervously, that he had only come to the place to look on, and since
looking on at games of skill is not a cheap amusement for the young, I
suggested that Charlie should go back to his mother.
That was our first step toward better acquaintance. He would call on me
sometimes in the evenings instead of running about London with his
fellow-clerks; and before long, speaking of himself as a young man must,
he told me of his aspirations, which were all literary. He desired to make
himself an undying name chiefly through verse, though he was not above
sending stories of love and death to the drop-a-penny-in-the-slot
journals. It was my fate to sit still while Charlie read me poems of many
hundred lines, and bulky fragments of plays that would surely shake the
world. My reward was his unreserved confidence, and the self-revelations
and troubles of a young man are almost as holy as those of a maiden.
Charlie had never fallen in love, but was anxious to do so on the first
opportunity; he believed in all things good and all things honorable, but,
at the same time, was curiously careful to let me see that he knew his way
about the world as befitted a bank clerk on twenty-five shillings a week.
He rhymed "dove" with "love" and "moon" with "June," and devoutly believed
that they had never so been rhymed before. The long lame gaps in his plays
he filled up with hasty words of apology and description and swept on,
seeing all that he intended to do so clearly that he esteemed it already
done, and turned to me for applause.
I fancy that his mother did not encourage his aspirations, and I know that
his writing-table at home was the edge of his washstand. This he told me
almost at the outset of our acquaintance; when he was ravaging my
bookshelves, and a little before I was implored to speak the truth as to
his chances of "writing something really great, you know." Maybe I
encouraged him too much, for, one night, he called on me, his eyes flaming
with excitement, and said breathlessly:
"Do you mind--can you let me stay here and write all this evening? I won't
interrupt you, I won't really. There's no place for me to write in at my
mother's."
"What's the trouble?" I said, knowing well what that trouble was.
"I've a notion in my head that would make the most splendid story that was
ever written. Do let me write it out here. It's _such_ a notion!"
There was no resisting the appeal. I set him a table; he hardly thanked
me, but plunged into the work at once. For half an hour the pen scratched
without stopping. Then Charlie sighed and tugged his hair. The scratching
grew slower, there were more erasures, and at last ceased. The finest
story in the world would not come forth.
"It looks such awful rot now," he said, mournfully. "And yet it seemed so
good when I was thinking about it. What's wrong?"
I could not dishearten him by saying the truth. So I answered: "Perhaps
you don't feel in the mood for writing."
"Yes I do--except when I look at this stuff. Ugh!"
"Read me what you've done," I said.
"He read, and it was wondrous bad, and he paused at all the specially
turgid sentences, expecting a little approval; for he was proud of those
sentences, as I knew he would be.
"It needs compression," I suggested, cautiously.
"I hate cutting my things down. I don't think you could alter a word here
without spoiling the sense. It reads better aloud than when I was writing
it."
"Charlie, you're suffering from an alarming disease afflicting a numerous
class. Put the thing by, and tackle it again in a week."
"I want to do it at once. What do you think of it?"
"How can I judge from a half-written tale? Tell me the story as it lies in
your head."
Charlie told, and in the telling there was everything that his ignorance
had so carefully prevented from escaping into the written word. I looked
at him, and wondering whether it were possible that he did not know the
originality, the power of the notion that had come in his way? It was
distinctly a Notion among notions. Men had been puffed up with pride by
notions not a tithe as excellent and practicable. But Charlie babbled on
serenely, interrupting the current of pure fancy with samples of horrible
sentences that he purposed to use. I heard him out to the end. It would be
folly to allow his idea to remain in his own inept hands, when I could do
so much with it. Not all that could be done indeed; but, oh so much!
"What do you think?" he said, at last. "I fancy I shall call it 'The Story
of a Ship.'"
"I think the idea's pretty good; but you won't be able to handle it for
ever so long. Now I"----
"Would it be of any use to you? Would you care to take it? I should be
proud," said Charlie, promptly.
There are few things sweeter in this world than the guileless, hot-headed,
intemperate, open admiration of a junior. Even a woman in her blindest
devotion does not fall into the gait of the man she adores, tilt her
bonnet to the angle at which he wears his hat, or interlard her speech
with his pet oaths. And Charlie did all these things. Still it was
necessary to salve my conscience before I possessed myself of Charlie's
thoughts.
"Let's make a bargain. I'll give you a fiver for the notion," I said.
Charlie became a bank-clerk at once.
"Oh, that's impossible. Between two pals, you know, if I may call you so,
and speaking as a man of the world, I couldn't. Take the notion if it's
any use to you. I've heaps more."
He had--none knew this better than I--but they were the notions of other
men.
"Look at it as a matter of business--between men of the world," I
returned. "Five pounds will buy you any number of poetry-books. Business
is business, and you may be sure I shouldn't give that price unless"----
"Oh, if you put it _that_ way," said Charlie, visibly moved by the thought
of the books. The bargain was clinched with an agreement that he should at
unstated intervals come to me with all the notions that he possessed,
should have a table of his own to write at, and unquestioned right to
inflict upon me all his poems and fragments of poems. Then I said, "Now
tell me how you came by this idea."
"It came by itself," Charlie's eyes opened a little.
"Yes, but you told me a great deal about the hero that you must have read
before somewhere."
"I haven't any time for reading, except when you let me sit here, and on
Sundays I'm on my bicycle or down the river all day. There's nothing wrong
about the hero, is there?"
"Tell me again and I shall understand clearly. You say that your hero went
pirating. How did he live?"
"He was on the lower deck of this ship-thing that I was telling you
about."
"What sort of ship?"
"It was the kind rowed with oars, and the sea spurts through the oar-holes
and the men row sitting up to their knees in water. Then there's a bench
running down between the two lines of oars and an overseer with a whip
walks up and down the bench to make the men work."
"How do you know that?"
"It's in the tale. There's a rope running overhead, looped to the upper
deck, for the overseer to catch hold of when the ship rolls. When the
overseer misses the rope once and falls among the rowers, remember the
hero laughs at him and gets licked for it. He's chained to his oar of
course--the hero."
"How is he chained?"
"With an iron band round his waist fixed to the bench he sits on, and a
sort of handcuff on his left wrist chaining him to the oar. He's on the
lower deck where the worst men are sent, and the only light comes from the
hatchways and through the oar-holes. Can't you imagine the sunlight just
squeezing through between the handle and the hole and wobbling about as
the ship moves?"
"I can, but I can't imagine your imagining it."
"How could it be any other way? Now you listen to me. The long oars on the
upper deck are managed by four men to each bench, the lower ones by three,
and the lowest of all by two. Remember, it's quite dark on the lowest deck
and all the men there go mad. When a man dies at his oar on that deck he
isn't thrown overboard, but cut up in his chains and stuffed through the
oar-hole in little pieces."
"Why?" I demanded, amazed, not so much at the information as the tone of
command in which it was flung out.
"To save trouble and to frighten the others. It needs two overseers to
drag a man's body up to the top deck; and if the men at the lower deck
oars were left alone, of course they'd stop rowing and try to pull up the
benches by all standing up together in their chains."
"You've a most provident imagination. Where have you been reading about
galleys and galley-slaves?"
"Nowhere that I remember. I row a little when I get the chance. But,
perhaps, if you say so, I may have read something."
He went away shortly afterward to deal with booksellers, and I wondered
how a bank clerk aged twenty could put into my hands with a profligate
abundance of detail, all given with absolute assurance, the story of
extravagant and bloodthirsty adventure, riot, piracy, and death in unnamed
seas. He had led his hero a desperate dance through revolt against the
overseers, to command of a ship of his own, and ultimate establishment of
a kingdom on an island "somewhere in the sea, you know"; and, delighted
with my paltry five pounds, had gone out to buy the notions of other men,
that these might teach him how to write. I had the consolation of knowing
that this notion was mine by right of purchase, and I thought that I could
make something of it.
When next he came to me he was drunk--royally drunk on many poets for the
first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled
over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations. Most of all was he
drunk with Longfellow.
"Isn't it splendid? Isn't it superb?" he cried, after hasty greetings.
"Listen to this--
"'Wouldst thou,'--so the helmsman answered,
'Know the secret of the sea?
Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery.'"
By gum!
"'Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery,'"
he repeated twenty times, walking up and down the room and forgetting me.
"But _I_ can understand it too," he said to himself. "I don't know how to
thank you for that fiver, And this; listen--
"'I remember the black wharves and the ships
And the sea-tides tossing free,
And the Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea.'"
I haven't braved any dangers, but I feel as if I knew all about it."
"You certainly seem to have a grip of the sea. Have you ever seen it?"
"When I was a little chap I went to Brighton once; we used to live in
Coventry, though, before we came to London. I never saw it,
"'When descends on the Atlantic
The gigantic
Storm-wind of the Equinox.'"
He shook me by the shoulder to make me understand the passion that was
shaking himself.
"When that storm comes," he continued, "I think that all the oars in the
ship that I was talking about get broken, and the rowers have their chests
smashed in by the bucking oar-heads. By the way, have you done anything
with that notion of mine yet?"
"No. I was waiting to hear more of it from you. Tell me how in the world
you're so certain about the fittings of the ship. You know nothing of
ships."
"I don't know. It's as real as anything to me until I try to write it
down. I was thinking about it only last night in bed, after you had loaned
me 'Treasure Island'; and I made up a whole lot of new things to go into
the story."
"What sort of things?"
"About the food the men ate; rotten figs and black beans and wine in a
skin bag, passed from bench to bench."
"Was the ship built so long ago as _that_?"
"As what? I don't know whether it was long ago or not. It's only a notion,
but sometimes it seems just as real as if it was true. Do I bother you
with talking about it?"
"Not in the least. Did you make up anything else?"
"Yes, but it's nonsense." Charlie flushed a little.
"Never mind; let's hear about it."
"Well, I was thinking over the story, and after awhile I got out of bed
and wrote down on a piece of paper the sort of stuff the men might be
supposed to scratch on their oars with the edges of their handcuffs. It
seemed to make the thing more lifelike. It _is_ so real to me, y'know."
"Have you the paper on you?"
"Ye-es, but what's the use of showing it? It's only a lot of scratches.
All the same, we might have 'em reproduced in the book on the front page."
"I'll attend to those details. Show me what your men wrote."
He pulled out of his pocket a sheet of note-paper, with a single line of
scratches upon it, and I put this carefully away.
"What is it supposed to mean in English?" I said.
"Oh, I don't know. Perhaps it means 'I'm beastly tired.' It's great
nonsense," he repeated, "but all those men in the ship seem as real as
people to me. Do do something to the notion soon; I should like to see it
written and printed."
"But all you've told me would make a long book."
"Make it then. You've only to sit down and write it out."
"Give me a little time. Have you any more notions?"
"Not just now. I'm reading all the books I've bought. They're splendid."
When he had left I looked at the sheet of note-paper with the inscription
upon it. Then I took my head tenderly between both hands, to make certain
that it was not coming off or turning round. Then ... but there seemed to
be no interval between quitting my rooms and finding myself arguing with a
policeman outside a door marked _Private_ in a corridor of the British
Museum. All I demanded, as politely as possible, was "the Greek antiquity
man." The policeman knew nothing except the rules of the Museum, and it
became necessary to forage through all the houses and offices inside the
gates. An elderly gentleman called away from his lunch put an end to my
search by holding the note-paper between finger and thumb and sniffing at
it scornfully.
"What does this mean? H'mm," said he. "So far as I can ascertain it is an
attempt to write extremely corrupt Greek on the part"--here he glared at
me with intention--"of an extremely illiterate--ah--person." He read
slowly from the paper, "_Pollock, Erckmann, Tauchnitz, Henniker_"-four
names familiar to me.
"Can you tell me what the corruption is supposed to mean--the gist of the
thing?" I asked.
"I have been--many times--overcome with weariness in this particular
employment. That is the meaning." He returned me the paper, and I fled
without a word of thanks, explanation, or apology.
I might have been excused for forgetting much. To me of all men had been
given the chance to write the most marvelous tale in the world, nothing
less than the story of a Greek galley-slave, as told by himself. Small
wonder that his dreaming had seemed real to Charlie. The Fates that are so
careful to shut the doors of each successive life behind us had, in this
case, been neglectful, and Charlie was looking, though that he did not
know, where never man had been permitted to look with full knowledge since
Time began. Above all, he was absolutely ignorant of the knowledge sold to
me for five pounds; and he would retain that ignorance, for bank-clerks do
not understand metempsychosis, and a sound commercial education does not
include Greek. He would supply me--here I capered among the dumb gods of
Egypt and laughed in their battered faces--with material to make my tale
sure--so sure that the world would hail it as an impudent and vamped
fiction. And I--I alone would know that it was absolutely and literally
true. I--I alone held this jewel to my hand for the cutting and polishing.
Therefore I danced again among the gods till a policeman saw me and took
steps in my direction.
It remained now only to encourage Charlie to talk, and here there was no
difficulty. But I had forgotten those accursed books of poetry. He came to
me time after time, as useless as a surcharged phonograph--drunk on Byron,
Shelley, or Keats. Knowing now what the boy had been in his past lives,
and desperately anxious not to lose one word of his babble, I could not
hide from him my respect and interest. He misconstrued both into respect
for the present soul of Charlie Mears, to whom life was as new as it was
to Adam, and interest in his readings; and stretched my patience to
breaking point by reciting poetry--not his own now, but that of others. I
wished every English poet blotted out of the memory of mankind. I
blasphemed the mightiest names of song because they had drawn Charlie from
the path of direct narrative, and would, later, spur him to imitate them;
but I choked down my impatience until the first flood of enthusiasm should
have spent itself and the boy returned to his dreams.
"What's the use of my telling you what _I_ think, when these chaps wrote
things for the angels to read?" he growled, one evening. "Why don't you
write something like theirs?"
"I don't think you're treating me quite fairly," I said, speaking under
strong restraint.
"I've given you the story," he said, shortly, replunging into "Lara."
"But I want the details."
"The things I make up about that damned ship that you call a galley?
They're quite easy. You can just make 'em up yourself. Turn up the gas a
little, I want to go on reading."
I could have broken the gas globe over his head for his amazing stupidity.
I could indeed make up things for myself did I only know what Charlie did
not know that he knew. But since the doors were shut behind me I could
only wait his youthful pleasure and strive to keep him in good temper. One
minute's want of guard might spoil a priceless revelation; now and again
he would toss his books aside--he kept them in my rooms, for his mother
would have been shocked at the waste of good money had she seen them--and
launched into his sea dreams, Again I cursed all the poets of England. The
plastic mind of the bank-clerk had been overlaid, colored and distorted by
that which he had read, and the result as delivered was a confused tangle
of other voices most like the muttered song through a City telephone in
the busiest part of the day.
He talked of the galley--his own galley had he but known it--with
illustrations borrowed from the "Bride of Abydos." He pointed the
experiences of his hero with quotations from "The Corsair," and threw in
deep and desperate moral reflections from "Cain" and "Manfred," expecting
me to use them all. Only when the talk turned on Longfellow were the
jarring cross-currents dumb, and I knew that Charlie was speaking the
truth as he remembered it.
"What do you think of this?" I said one evening, as soon as I understood
the medium in which his memory worked best, and, before he could
expostulate, read him the whole of "The Saga of King Olaf!"
He listened open-mouthed, flushed, his hands drumming on the back of the
sofa where he lay, till I came to the Song of Einar Tamberskelver and the
verse:
"Einar then, the arrow taking
From the loosened string,
Answered: 'That was Norway breaking
'Neath thy hand, O King.'"
He gasped with pure delight of sound.
"That's better than Byron, a little," I ventured.
"Better? Why it's _true!_ How could he have known?"
I went back and repeated:
"What was that?' said Olaf, standing
On the quarter-deck,
'Something heard I like the stranding
Of a shattered wreck?'"
"How could he have known how the ships crash and the oars rip out and go
_z-zzp_ all along the line? Why only the other night.... But go back
please and read 'The Skerry of Shrieks' again."
"No, I'm tired. Let's talk. What happened the other night?"
"I had an awful nightmare about that galley of ours. I dreamed I was
drowned in a fight. You see we ran alongside another ship in harbor. The
water was dead still except where our oars whipped it up. You know where I
always sit in the galley?" He spoke haltingly at first, under a fine
English fear of being laughed at,
"No. That's news to me," I answered, meekly, my heart beginning to beat.
"On the fourth oar from the bow on the right side on the upper deck. There
were four of us at that oar, all chained. I remember watching the water
and trying to get my handcuffs off before the row began. Then we closed up
on the other ship, and all their fighting men jumped over our bulwarks,
and my bench broke and I was pinned down with the three other fellows on
top of me, and the big oar jammed across our backs."
"Well?" Charlie's eyes were alive and alight. He was looking at the wall
behind my chair.
"I don't know how we fought. The men were trampling all over my back, and
I lay low. Then our rowers on the left side--tied to their oars, you
know--began to yell and back water. I could hear the water sizzle, and we
spun round like a cockchafer and I knew, lying where I was, that there was
a galley coming up bow-on, to ram us on the left side. I could just lift
up my head and see her sail over the bulwarks. We wanted to meet her bow
to bow, but it was too late. We could only turn a little bit because the
galley on our right had hooked herself on to us and stopped our moving.
Then, by gum! there was a crash! Our left oars began to break as the other
galley, the moving one y'know, stuck her nose into them. Then the
lower-deck oars shot up through the deck planking, butt first, and one of
them jumped clean up into the air and came down again close to my head."
"How was that managed?"
"The moving galley's bow was plunking them back through their own
oar-holes, and I could hear the devil of a shindy in the decks below. Then
her nose caught us nearly in the middle, and we tilted sideways, and the
fellows in the right-hand galley unhitched their hooks and ropes, and
threw things on to our upper deck--arrows, and hot pitch or something that
stung, and we went up and up and up on the left side, and the right side
dipped, and I twisted my head round and saw the water stand still as it
topped the right bulwarks, and then it curled over and crashed down on the
whole lot of us on the right side, and I felt it hit my back, and I woke."
"One minute, Charlie. When the sea topped the bulwarks, what did it look
like?" I had my reasons for asking. A man of my acquaintance had once gone
down with a leaking ship in a still sea, and had seen the water-level
pause for an instant ere it fell on the deck.
"It looked just like a banjo-string drawn tight, and it seemed to stay
there for years," said Charlie.
Exactly! The other man had said: "It looked like a silver wire laid down
along the bulwarks, and I thought it was never going to break." He had
paid everything except the bare life for this little valueless piece of
knowledge, and I had traveled ten thousand weary miles to meet him and
take his knowledge at second hand. But Charlie, the bank-clerk on
twenty-five shillings a week, he who had never been out of sight of a
London omnibus, knew it all. It was no consolation to me that once in his
lives he had been forced to die for his gains. I also must have died
scores of times, but behind me, because I could have used my knowledge,
the doors were shut.
"And then?" I said, trying to put away the devil of envy.
"The funny thing was, though, in all the mess I didn't feel a bit
astonished or frightened. It seemed as if I'd been in a good many fights,
because I told my next man so when the row began. But that cad of an
overseer on my deck wouldn't unloose our chains and give us a chance. He
always said that we'd all be set free after a battle, but we never were;
we never were." Charlie shook his head mournfully.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
31 |
32 |
33 |
34 |
35 |
36 |
37
