The Project Gutenberg EBook of Kim, by Rudyard Kipling
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Title: Kim
Author: Rudyard Kipling
Posting Date: January 15, 2009 [EBook #2226]
Release Date: June, 2000
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK KIM ***
Produced by Patricia Franks, Karyl Basmajian, Nancy K.
Smith, Dave Bruchie.
Kim
by
Rudyard Kipling
JTABLE 4 15 1
Chapter 1
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to judgment Day,
Be gentle when 'the heathen' pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!
Buddha at Kamakura.
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on
her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher--the Wonder House, as
the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that
'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze
piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.
There was some justification for Kim--he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy
off the trunnions--since the English held the Punjab and Kim was
English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the
vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain
sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the
small boys of the bazar; Kim was white--a poor white of the very
poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium,
and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where
the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's
sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel's family and had
married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an
Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and
Delhi Railway, and his Regiment went home without him. The wife died
of cholera in Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell to drink and loafing up and
down the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies and
chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O'Hara
drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned
the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India. His estate
at death consisted of three papers--one he called his 'ne varietur'
because those words were written below his signature thereon, and
another his 'clearance-certificate'. The third was Kim's
birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious
opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was
Kim to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of
magic--such magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in
the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher--the Magic House, as we name the
Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim's
horn would be exalted between pillars--monstrous pillars--of beauty and
strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the
finest Regiment in the world, would attend to Kim--little Kim that
should have been better off than his father. Nine hundred first-class
devils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim,
if they had not forgotten O'Hara--poor O'Hara that was gang-foreman on
the Ferozepore line. Then he would weep bitterly in the broken rush
chair on the veranda. So it came about after his death that the woman
sewed parchment, paper, and birth-certificate into a leather
amulet-case which she strung round Kim's neck.
'And some day,' she said, confusedly remembering O'Hara's prophecies,
'there will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the
Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and' dropping into
English--'nine hundred devils.'
'Ah,' said Kim, 'I shall remember. A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse
will come, but first, my father said, will come the two men making
ready the ground for these matters. That is how my father said they
always did; and it is always so when men work magic.'
If the woman had sent Kim up to the local Jadoo-Gher with those papers,
he would, of course, have been taken over by the Provincial Lodge, and
sent to the Masonic Orphanage in the Hills; but what she had heard of
magic she distrusted. Kim, too, held views of his own. As he reached
the years of indiscretion, he learned to avoid missionaries and white
men of serious aspect who asked who he was, and what he did. For Kim
did nothing with an immense success. True, he knew the wonderful
walled city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was
hand in glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al
Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian
Nights, but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could
not see the beauty of it. His nickname through the wards was 'Little
Friend of all the World'; and very often, being lithe and
inconspicuous, he executed commissions by night on the crowded
housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion. It was
intrigue,--of course he knew that much, as he had known all evil since
he could speak,--but what he loved was the game for its own sake--the
stealthy prowl through the dark gullies and lanes, the crawl up a
waterpipe, the sights and sounds of the women's world on the flat
roofs, and the headlong flight from housetop to housetop under cover of
the hot dark. Then there were holy men, ash-smeared fakirs by their
brick shrines under the trees at the riverside, with whom he was quite
familiar--greeting them as they returned from begging-tours, and, when
no one was by, eating from the same dish. The woman who looked after
him insisted with tears that he should wear European clothes--trousers,
a shirt and a battered hat. Kim found it easier to slip into Hindu or
Mohammedan garb when engaged on certain businesses. One of the young
men of fashion--he who was found dead at the bottom of a well on the
night of the earthquake--had once given him a complete suit of Hindu
kit, the costume of a lowcaste street boy, and Kim stored it in a
secret place under some baulks in Nila Ram's timber-yard, beyond the
Punjab High Court, where the fragrant deodar logs lie seasoning after
they have driven down the Ravi. When there was business or frolic
afoot, Kim would use his properties, returning at dawn to the veranda,
all tired out from shouting at the heels of a marriage procession, or
yelling at a Hindu festival. Sometimes there was food in the house,
more often there was not, and then Kim went out again to eat with his
native friends.
As he drummed his heels against Zam-Zammah he turned now and again from
his king-of-the-castle game with little Chota Lal and Abdullah the
sweetmeat-seller's son, to make a rude remark to the native policeman
on guard over rows of shoes at the Museum door. The big Punjabi grinned
tolerantly: he knew Kim of old. So did the water-carrier, sluicing
water on the dry road from his goat-skin bag. So did Jawahir Singh,
the Museum carpenter, bent over new packing-cases. So did everybody in
sight except the peasants from the country, hurrying up to the Wonder
House to view the things that men made in their own province and
elsewhere. The Museum was given up to Indian arts and manufactures,
and anybody who sought wisdom could ask the Curator to explain.