Kim

‘Oh, be silent,’ whispered Kim; ‘are we Rajahs to throw away good silver when the world is so charitable?’

The Amritzar girl stepped out with her bundles, and it was on her that Kim kept his watchful eye. Ladies of that persuasion, he knew, were generous.

‘A ticket — a little tikkut to Umballa—O Breaker of Hearts!’ She laughed. ‘Hast thou no charity?’

‘Does the holy man come from the North?’

‘From far and far in the North he comes,’ cried Kim. ‘From among the hills.’

‘There is snow among the pine trees in the North—in the hills there is snow. My mother was from Kulu. Get thee a ticket. Ask him for a blessing.’

‘Ten thousand blessings,’ shrilled Kim. ‘O Holy One, a woman has given us in charity so that I can come with thee—a woman with a golden heart. I run for the tikkut.’

The girl looked up at the lama, who had mechanically followed Kim to the platform. He bowed his head that he might not see her, and muttered in Tibetan as she passed on with the crowd.

‘Light come—light go,’ said the cultivator’s wife viciously.

‘She has acquired merit,’ returned the lama. ‘Beyond doubt it was a nun.’

‘There be ten thousand such nuns in Amritzar alone. Return, old man, or the train may depart without thee,’ cried the banker.

‘Not only was it sufficient for the ticket, but for a little food also,’ said Kim, leaping to his place. ‘Now eat, Holy One. Look. Day comes!’

Golden, rose, saffron, and pink, the morning mists smoked away across the flat green levels. All the rich Punjab lay out in the splendour of the keen sun. The lama flinched a little as the telegraph-posts swung by.

‘Great is the speed of the train,’ said the banker, with a patronising grin. ‘We have gone farther since Lahore than thou couldst walk in two days: at even, we shall enter Umballa.’

‘And that is still far from Benares,’ said the lama wearily, mumbling over the cakes that Kim offered. They all unloosed their bundles and made their morning meal. Then the banker, the cultivator, and the soldier prepared their pipes and wrapped the compartment in choking, acrid smoke, spitting and coughing and enjoying themselves. The Sikh and the cultivator’s wife chewed pan; the lama took snuff and told his beads, while Kim, cross-legged, smiled over the comfort of a full stomach.

‘What rivers have ye by Benares?’ said the lama of a sudden to the carriage at large.

‘We have Gunga,’ returned the banker, when the little titter had subsided.

‘What others?’

‘What other than Gunga?’

‘Nay, but in my mind was the thought of a certain River of healing.’

‘That is Gunga. Who bathes in her is made clean and goes to the gods. Thrice have I made pilgrimage to Gunga,’ He looked round proudly.

‘There was need,’ said the young sepoy drily, and the travellers’ laugh turned against the banker.

‘Clean—to return again to the Gods,’ the lama muttered. ‘And to go forth on the round of lives anew—still tied to the Wheel.’ He shook his head testily. ‘But maybe there is a mistake. Who, then, made Gunga in the beginning?’

‘The Gods. Of what known faith art thou?’ the banker said, appalled.

‘I follow the Law—the Most Excellent Law. So it was the Gods that made Gunga. What like of Gods were they?’

The carriage looked at him in amazement. It was inconceivable that any one should be ignorant of Gunga.

‘What—what is thy God?’ said the moneylender at last.

‘Hear!’ said the lama, shifting the rosary to his hand. ‘Hear: for I speak of Him now! O people of Hind, listen!’

He began in Urdu the tale of the Lord Buddha, but, borne by his own thoughts, slid into Tibetan and long-droned texts from a Chinese book of the Buddha’s life. The gentle, tolerant folk looked on reverently. All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers, and visionaríes: as it has been from the beginning and will continue to the end.

‘Um!’ said the soldier of the Loodhiana Sikhs. ‘There was a Mohammedan regiment lay next to us at the Pirzai Kotal, and a priest of theirs,—he was, as I remember, a naik,—when the fit was on him, spake prophecies. But the mad all are in God’s keeping. His officers overlooked much in that man.’

The lama fell back on Urdu, remembering that he was in a strange land. ‘Hear the tale of the Arrow which our Lord loosed from the bow,’ he said.

This was much more to their taste, and they listened curiously while he, told it. ‘Now, O people of Hind, I go to seek that River.

Know ye aught that may guide me, for we be all men and women in evil case.’

‘There is Gunga—and Gunga alone—who washes away sin,’ ran the murmur round the carriage.

‘Though past question we have good Gods Jullundur-way,’ said the cultivator’s wife, looking out of window. ‘See how they have blessed the crops.’

‘To search every river in the Punjab is no small matter,’ said her husband. ‘For me, a stream that leaves good silt on my land suffices, and I thank Bhumia, the God of the Homestead.’ He shrugged one knotted, bronzed shoulder.

‘Think you our Lord came so far north?’ said the lama, turning to Kim.

‘It may be,’ Kim replied soothingly, as he spat red pan-juice on the floor.

‘The last of the Great Ones,’ said the Sikh with authority, ‘was Sikander Julkarn (Alexander the Great). He paved the streets of Jullunder and built a great tank near Umballa. That pavement holds to this day; and the tank is there also. I never heard of thy God.’

‘Let thy hair grow long and talk Punjabi,’ said the young soldier jestingly to Kim, quoting a Northern proverb. ‘That is all that makes a Sikh.’ But he did not say this very loud.

The lama sighed and shrunk into himself, a dingy, shapeless mass. In the pauses of their talk they could hear the low droning—‘Om mane pudme hum! Om mane pudme hum!’—and the thick click of the wooden rosary beads.

‘It irks me,’ he said at last. ‘The speed and the clatter irk me. Moreover, my chela, I think that may be we have overpassed that River.’

‘Peace, peace,’ said Kim. ‘Was not the River near Benares? We are yet far from the place.’

‘But—if our Lord came north, it may be any one of these little ones that we have run across.’

‘I do not know.’

‘But thou wast sent to me—wast thou sent to me?—for the merit I had acquired over yonder at Suchzen. From beside the cannon didst thou come—bearing two faces—and two garbs.’

‘Peace. One must not speak of these things here,’ whispered Kim. ‘There was but one of me. Think again and thou wilt remember. A boy—a Hindu boy—by the great green cannon.’

‘But was there not also an Englishman with a white beard—holy among images—who himself made more sure my assurance of the River of the Arrow?’

‘He—we—went to the Ajaib-Gher in Lahore to pray before the gods there,’ Kim explained to the openly listening company. ‘And the Sahib of the Wonder House talked to him—yes, this is truth—as a brother. He is a very holy man, from far beyond the hills. Rest thou. In time we come to Umballa.’

‘But my River—the River of my healing?’