Kim
Rudyard Kipling
Chapter 11 Page 1
Give the man who is not made To his trade Swords to fling and catch again, Coins to ring and snatch again, Men to harm and cure again, Snakes to charm and lure again - He'll be hurt by his own blade, By his serpents disobeyed, By his clumsiness bewrayed,' By the people mocked to scorn - So 'tis not with juggler born! Pinch of dust or withered flower, Chance-flung fruit or borrowed staff, Serve his need and shore his power, Bind the spell, or loose the laugh! But a man who, etc.
The Juggler's Song, op. 15
Followed a sudden natural reaction.
'Now am I alone - all alone,' he thought. 'In all India is no one so alone as I! If I die today, who shall bring the news -and to whom? If I live and God is good, there will be a price upon my head, for I am a Son of the Charm - I, Kim.'
A very few white people, but many Asiatics, can throw themselves into a mazement as it were by repeating their own names over and over again to themselves, letting the mind go free upon speculation as to what is called personal identity. When one grows older, the power, usually, departs, but while it lasts it may descend upon a man at any moment.
'Who is Kim - Kim - Kim?'
A long-haired Hindu bairagi (holy man), who had just bought a ticket, halted before him at that moment and stared intently.
'I also have lost it,' he said sadly. 'It is one of the Gates to the Way, but for me it has been shut many years.'
'What is the talk?' said Kim, abashed.
'Thou wast wondering there in thy spirit what manner of thing thy soul might be. The seizure came of a sudden. I know. Who should know but I? Whither goest thou?'
'Toward Kashi (Benares).'
'There are no Gods there. I have proved them. I go to Prayag (Allahabad) for the fifth time - seeking the Road to Enlightenment. Of what faith art thou?'
'I too am a Seeker,' said Kim, using one of the lama's pet words. 'Though'- he forgot his Northern dress for the moment - 'though Allah alone knoweth what I seek.'
The old fellow slipped the bairagi's crutch under his armpit and sat down on a patch of ruddy leopard's skin as Kim rose at the call for the Benares train.
'Go in hope, little brother,' he said. 'It is a long road to the feet of the One; but thither do we all travel.'
Kim did not feel so lonely after this, and ere he had sat out twenty miles in the crowded compartment, was cheering his neighbours with a string of most wonderful yarns about his own and his master's magical gifts.
Benares struck him as a peculiarly filthy city, though it was pleasant to find how his cloth was respected. At least one-third of the population prays eternally to some group or other of the many million deities, and so reveres every sort of holy man. Kim was guided to the Temple of the Tirthankars, about a mile outside the city, near Sarnath, by a chance-met Punjabi farmer - a Kamboh from Jullundur-way who had appealed in vain to every God of his homestead to cure his small son, and was trying Benares as a last resort.
'Thou art from the North?' he asked, shouldering through the press of the narrow, stinking streets much like his own pet bull at home.
'Ay, I know the Punjab. My mother was a pahareen, but my father came from Amritzar - by Jandiala,' said Kim, oiling his ready tongue for the needs of the Road.
'Jandiala - Jullundur? Oho! Then we be neighbours in some sort, as it were.' He nodded tenderly to the wailing child in his arms. 'Whom dost thou serve?'
'They are all most holy and - most greedy,' said the Jat with bitterness. 'I have walked the pillars and trodden the temples till my feet are flayed, and the child is no whit better. And the mother being sick too ... Hush, then, little one ... We changed his name when the fever came. We put him into girl's clothes. There was nothing we did not do, except - I said to his mother when she bundled me off to Benares -she should have come with me - I said Sakhi Sarwar Sultan would serve us best. We know His generosity, but these down-country Gods are strangers.'
The child turned on the cushion of the huge corded arms and looked at Kim through heavy eyelids.
'And was it all worthless?' Kim asked, with easy interest.
'All worthless - all worthless,' said the child, lips cracking with fever.
'The Gods have given him a good mind, at least' said the father proudly. 'To think he should have listened so cleverly. Yonder is thy Temple. Now I am a poor man - many priests have dealt with me - but my son is my son, and if a gift to thy master can cure him - I am at my very wits' end.'
Kim considered for a while, tingling with pride. Three years ago he would have made prompt profit on the situation and gone his way without a thought; but now, the very respect the Jat paid him proved that he was a man. Moreover, he had tasted fever once or twice already, and knew enough to recognize starvation when he saw it.
'Call him forth and I will give him a bond on my best yoke, so that the child is cured.'
Kim halted at the carved outer door of the temple. A white-clad Oswal banker from Ajmir, his sins of usury new wiped out, asked him what he did.
'I am chela to Teshoo Lama, an Holy One from Bhotiyal -within there. He bade me come. I wait. Tell him.'
'Do not forget the child,' cried the importunate Jat over his shoulder, and then bellowed in Punjabi; 'O Holy One - O disciple of the Holy One - O Gods above all the Worlds -behold affliction sitting at the gate!' That cry is so common in Benares that the passers never turned their heads.
The Oswal, at peace mankind, carried the message into the darkness behind him, and the easy, uncounted Eastern minutes slid by; for the lama was asleep in his cell, and no priest would wake him. When the click of his rosary again broke the hush of the inner court where the calm images of the Arhats stand, a novice whispered, 'Thy chela is here,' and the old man strode forth, forgetting the end of that prayer.
He fumbled in his waist-belt and drew out a small silver coin.
'What is now?' The lama's eyes turned to Kim. It was noticeable he spoke far clearer Urdu than long ago, under ZamZammah; but fatwould allow no private talk.
'It is no more than a fever,' said Kim. 'The child is not well fed.'
'He sickens at everything, and his mother is not here.'
'If it be permitted, I may cure, Holy One.'
'What! Have they made thee a healer? Wait here,' said the lama, and he sat down by the Jat upon the lowest step of the temple, while Kim, looking out of the corner of his eyes, slowly opened the little betel-box. He had dreamed dreams at school of returning to the lama as a Sahib - of chaffing the old man before he revealed himself - boy's dreams all. There was more drama in this abstracted, brow- puckered search through the tabloid-bottles, with a pause here and there for thought and a muttered invocation between whiles. Quinine he had in tablets, and dark brown meat-lozenges - beef most probably, but that was not his business. The little thing would not eat, but it sucked at a lozenge greedily, and said it liked the salt taste.
'Take then these six.' Kim handed them to the man. 'Praise the Gods, and boil three in milk; other three in water. After he has drunk the milk give him this' (it was the half of a quinine pill), 'and wrap him warm. Give him the water of the other three, and the other half of this white pill when he wakes. Meantime, here is another brown medicine that he may suck at on the way home.'
'Gods, what wisdom!' said the Kamboh, snatching.
It was as much as Kim could remember of his own treatment in a bout of autumn malaria - if you except the patter that he added to impress the lama.
'Now go! Come again in the morning.'
'They are alike, these Jats,' said Kim softly. 'The Jat stood on his dunghill and the King's elephants went by. "O driver," said he, "what will you sell those little donkeys for?"'
The Jat burst into a roar of laughter, stifled with apologies to the lama. 'It is the saying of my own country the very talk of it. So are we Jats all. I will come tomorrow with the child; and the blessing of the Gods of the Homesteads - who are good little Gods - be on you both ... Now, son, we grow strong again. Do not spit it out, little Princeling! King of my Heart, do not spit it out, and we shall be strong men, wrestlers and club-wielders, by morning.'
He moved away, crooning and mumbling. The lama turned to Kim, and all the loving old soul of him looked out through his narrow eyes.
'To heal the sick is to acquire merit; but first one gets knowledge. That was wisely done, O Friend of all the World.'
'I was made wise by thee, Holy One,' said Kim, forgetting the little play just ended; forgetting St Xavier's; forgetting his white blood; forgetting even the Great Game as he stooped, Mohammedan-fashion, to touch his master's feet in the dust of the Jain temple. 'My teaching I owe to thee. I have eaten thy bread three years. My time is finished. I am loosed from the schools. I come to thee.'
'Herein is my reward. Enter! Enter! And is all well?' They passed to the inner court, where the afternoon sun sloped golden across. 'Stand that I may see. So!' He peered critically. 'It is no longer a child, but a man, ripened in wisdom, walking as a physician. I did well - I did well when I gave thee up to the armed men on that black night. Dost thou remember our first day under Zam-Zammah?'
'Ay,' said Kim. 'Dost thou remember when I leapt off the carriage the first day I went to -'
'The Gates of Learning? Truly. And the day that we ate the cakes together at the back of the river by Nucklao. Aha! Many times hast thou begged for me, but that day I begged for thee.'
'Good reason,' quoth Kim. 'I was then a scholar in the Gates of Learning, and attired as a Sahib. Do not forget, Holy One,' he went on playfully. 'I am still a Sahib - by thy favour.'
'True. And a Sahib in most high esteem. Come to my cell, chela.'
'How is that known to thee?'
The lama smiled. 'First by means of letters from the kindly priest whom we met in the camp of armed men; but he is now gone to his own country, and I sent the money to his brother.' Colonel Creighton, who had succeeded to the trusteeship when Father Victor went to England with the Mavericks, was hardly the Chaplain's brother. 'But I do not well understand Sahibs' letters. They must be interpreted to me. I chose a surer way. Many times when I returned from my Search to this Temple, which has always been a nest to me, there came one seeking Enlightenment - a man from Leh - that had been, he said, a Hindu, but wearied of all those Gods.' The lama pointed to the Arhats.
'Very fat; but I perceived in a little his mind was wholly given up to useless things - such as devils and charms and the form and fashion of our tea-drinkings in the monasteries, and by what road we initiated the novices. A man abounding in questions; but he was a friend of thine, chela. He told me that thou wast on the road to much honour as a scribe. And I see thou art a physician.'
'Yes, that am I - a scribe, when I am a Sahib, but it is set aside when I come as thy disciple. I have accomplished the years appointed for a Sahib.'
'As it were a novice?' said the lama, nodding his head. 'Art thou freed from the schools? I would not have thee unripe.'
'I am all free. In due time I take service under the Government as a scribe -'
'Not as a warrior. That is well.'
'But first I come to wander with thee. Therefore I am here. Who begs for thee, these days?' he went on quickly. The ice was thin.
'Very often I beg myself; but, as thou knowest, I am seldom here, except when I come to look again at my disciple. From one end to another of Hind have I travelled afoot and in the te-rain. A great and a wonderful land! But here, I put in, is as though I were in my own Bhotiyal.'
He looked round the little clean cell complacently. A low cushion gave him a seat, on which he had disposed himself in the cross- legged attitude of the Bodhisat emerging from meditation; a black teak-wood table, not twenty inches high, set with copper tea-cups, was before him. In one corner stood a tiny altar, also of heavily carved teak, bearing a copper-gilt image of the seated Buddha and fronted by a lamp, an incense-holder, and a pair of copper flower- pots.
'The Keeper of the Images in the Wonder House acquired merit by giving me these a year since,' he said, following Kim's eye. 'When one is far from one's own land such things carry remembrance; and we must reverence the Lord for that He showed the Way. See!' He pointed to a curiously-built mound of coloured rice crowned with a fantastic metal ornament. 'When I was Abbot in my own place - before I came to better knowledge I made that offering daily. It is the Sacrifice of the Universe to the Lord. Thus do we of Bhotiyal offer all the world daily to the Excellent Law. And I do it even now, though I know that the Excellent One is beyond all pinchings and pattings.' He snuffed from his gourd.
'It is well done, Holy One,' Kim murmured, sinking at ease on the cushions, very happy and rather tired.
'And also,' the old man chuckled, 'I write pictures of the Wheel of Life. Three days to a picture. I was busied on it - or it may be I shut my eyes a little - when they brought word of thee. It is good to have thee here: I will show thee my art - not for pride's sake, but because thou must learn. The Sahibs have not all this world's wisdom.'