Rudyard Kipling : The Complete Novels and Stories. Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг
over, snored!’
‘I gave her the charm. What is an old man to do?’
‘“To abstain from action is well—except when we acquire merit.”’
‘Ah, chela, if thou desertest me, I am all alone.’
‘He found his milk-teeth easily at any rate,’ said the old lady. ‘But all priests are alike.’
Kim coughed severely. Being young, he did not approve of her flippancy. ‘To importune the wise out of season is to invite calamity.’
‘There is a talking mynah’—the thrust came back with the well-remembered snap of the jewelled forefinger—‘over the stables which has picked up the very tone of the family-priest. Maybe I forget honour to my guests, but if ye had seen him double his fists into his belly, which was like a half-grown gourd, and cry: “Here is the pain!” ye would forgive. I am half minded to take the hakim’s medicine. He sells it cheap, and certainly it makes him fat as Shiv’s own bull. He does not deny remedies, but I doubted for the child because of the inauspicious colour of the bottles.’
The lama, under cover of the monologue, had faded out into the darkness towards the room prepared.
‘Thou hast angered him, belike,’ said Kim.
‘Not he. He is wearied, and I forgot, being a grandmother. (None but a grandmother should ever oversee a child. Mothers are only fit for bearing.) To-morrow, when he sees how my daughter’s son is grown, he will write the charm. Then, too, he can judge of the new hakim’s drugs.’
‘Who is the hakim, Maharanee?’
‘A wanderer, as thou art, but a most sober Bengali from Dacca—a master of medicine. He relieved me of an oppression after meat by means of a small pill that wrought like a devil unchained. He travels about now, vending preparations of great value. He has even papers, printed in Angrezi, telling what things he has done for weak-backed men and slack women. He has been here four days; but hearing ye were coming (hakims and priests are snake and tiger the world over) he has, as I take it, gone to cover.’
While she drew breath after this volley, the ancient servant, sitting unrebuked on the edge of the torch-light, muttered: ‘This house is a cattle-pound, as it were, for all charlatans and—priests. Let the boy stop eating mangoes … but who can argue with a grandmother?’ He raised his voice respectfully: ‘Sahiba, the hakim sleeps after his meat. He is in the quarters behind the dovecot.’
Kim bristled like an expectant terrier. To outface and down-talk a Calcutta-taught Bengali, a voluble Dacca drug-vendor, would be a good game. It was not seemly that the lama, and incidentally himself, should be thrown aside for such an one. He knew those curious bastard English advertisements at the backs of native newspapers. St. Xavier’s boys sometimes brought them in by stealth to snigger over among their mates; for the language of the grateful patient recounting his symptoms is most simple and revealing. The Oorya, not unanxious to play off one parasite against the other, slunk away towards the dovecot.
‘Yes,’ said Kim, with measured scorn. ‘Their stock-in-trade is a little coloured water and a very great shamelessness. Their prey are broken-down kings and overfed Bengalis. Their profit is in children—who are not born.’
The old lady chuckled. ‘Do not be envious. Charms are better, eh? I never gainsaid it. See that thy Holy One writes me a good amulet by the morning.’
‘None but the ignorant deny’—a thick, heavy voice boomed through the darkness, as a figure came to rest squatting—‘None but the ignorant deny the value of charms. None but the ignorant deny the value of medicines.’
‘A rat found a piece of turmeric. Said he: “I will open a grocer’s shop,”’ Kim retorted.
Battle was fairly joined now, and they heard the old lady stiffen to attention.
‘The priest’s son knows the names of his nurse and three Gods. Says he: “Hear me, or I will curse you by the three million Great Ones.”’ Decidedly this invisible had an arrow or two in his quiver. He went on: ‘I am but a teacher of the alphabet. I have learned all the wisdom of the Sahibs.’
‘The Sahibs never grow old. They dance and they play like children when they are grandfathers. A strong-backed breed,’ piped the voice inside the palanquin.
‘I have, too, our drugs which loosen humours of the head in hot and angry men. Siná well compounded when the moon stands in the proper House; yellow earths I have—arplan from China that makes a man renew his youth and astonish his household; saffron from Kashmir, and the best salep of Kabul. Many people have died before——’
‘That I surely believe,’ said Kim.
‘They knew the value of my drugs. I do not give my sick the mere ink in which a charm is written, but hot and rending drugs which descend and wrestle with the evil.’
‘Very mightily they do so,’ sighed the old lady.
The voice launched into an immense tale of misfortune and bankruptcy, studded with plentiful petitions to the Government. ‘But for my fate, which overrules all, I had been now in Government employ. I bear a degree from the great school at Calcutta—whither, maybe, the son of this house shall go.’
‘He shall indeed. If our neighbour’s brat can in a few years be made an F.A.’ (First Arts—she used the English word, of which she had heard so often), ‘how much more shall children clever as some that I know bear away prizes at rich Calcutta.’
‘Never,’ said the voice, ‘have I seen such a child! Born in an auspicious hour, and—but for that colic which, alas! turning into black cholers, may carry him off like a pigeon—destined to many years, he is enviable.’
‘Hai mai!’ said the old lady. ‘To praise children is inauspicious, or I could listen to this talk. But the back of the house is unguarded, and even in this soft air men think themselves to be men and women we know…. The child’s father is away too, and I must be chowkedar (watchman) in my old age. Up! Up! Take up the palanquin. Let the hakim and the young priest settle between them whether charms or medicine most avail. Ho! worthless people, fetch tobacco for the guests, and—round the homestead go I!’
The palanquin reeled off, followed by straggling torches and a horde of dogs. Twenty villages knew the Sahiba—her failings, her tongue, and her large charity. Twenty villages cheated her after immemorial custom, but no man would have stolen or robbed within her jurisdiction for any gift under Heaven. None the less, she made great parade of her formal inspections, the riot of which could be heard half-way to Mussoorie.
Kim relaxed, as one augur must when he meets another. The hakim, still squatting, slid over his hookah with a friendly foot, and Kim pulled at the good weed. The hangers-on expected grave professional debate, and perhaps a little free doctoring.
‘To discuss medicine before the ignorant is of one piece with teaching the peacock to sing,’ said the hakim.
‘True courtesy,’ Kim echoed, ‘is very often inattention.’
These, be it understood, were company-manners, designed to impress.
‘Hi! I have an ulcer on my leg,’ cried a scullion. ‘Look at it!’
‘Get hence! Remove!’ said the hakim. ‘Is it the habit of the place to pester honoured guests? Ye crowd in like buffaloes.’
‘If the Sahiba knew——’ Kim began.
‘Ai! Ai! Come away. They are meat for our mistress. When her young Shaitan’s colics are cured perhaps we poor people may be suffered to——’
‘The mistress fed thy wife when thou wast in jail for breaking the money-lender’s head. Who speaks against her?’ The old servitor curled his white moustaches savagely in the young moonlight. ‘I