Kim

here, maybe I offended in pressing for charms.'

'Sister,' said the lama, using that form of address a Buddhist monk may

sometimes employ towards a nun, 'if charms comfort thee--'

'They are better than ten thousand doctors.'

'I say, if they comfort thee, I who was Abbot of Such-zen, will make as

many as thou mayest desire. I have never seen thy face--'

'That even the monkeys who steal our loquats count for again. Hee!

hee!'

'But as he who sleeps there said,'--he nodded at the shut door of the

guest-chamber across the forecourt--'thou hast a heart of gold... And

he is in the spirit my very "grandson" to me.'

'Good! I am the Holy One's cow.' This was pure Hinduism, but the lama

never heeded. 'I am old. I have borne sons in the body. Oh, once I

could please men! Now I can cure them.' He heard her armlets tinkle

as though she bared arms for action. 'I will take over the boy and

dose him, and stuff him, and make him all whole. Hai! hai! We old

people know something yet.'

Wherefore when Kim, aching in every bone, opened his eyes, and would go

to the cook-house to get his master's food, he found strong coercion

about him, and a veiled old figure at the door, flanked by the grizzled

manservant, who told him very precisely the things that he was on no

account to do.

'Thou must have? Thou shalt have nothing. What? A locked box in

which to keep holy books? Oh, that is another matter. Heavens forbid

I should come between a priest and his prayers! It shall be brought,

and thou shalt keep the key.'

They pushed the coffer under his cot, and Kim shut away Mahbub's

pistol, the oilskin packet of letters, and the locked books and

diaries, with a groan of relief. For some absurd reason their weight

on his shoulders was nothing to their weight on his poor mind. His

neck ached under it of nights.

'Thine is a sickness uncommon in youth these days: since young folk

have given up tending their betters. The remedy is sleep, and certain

drugs,' said the Sahiba; and he was glad to give himself up to the

blankness that half menaced and half soothed him.

She brewed drinks, in some mysterious Asiatic equivalent to the

still-room--drenches that smelt pestilently and tasted worse. She

stood over Kim till they went down, and inquired exhaustively after

they had come up. She laid a taboo upon the forecourt, and enforced it

by means of an armed man. It is true he was seventy odd, that his

scabbarded sword ceased at the hilt; but he represented the authority

of the Sahiba, and loaded wains, chattering servants, calves, dogs,

hens, and the like, fetched a wide compass by those parts. Best of

all, when the body was cleared, she cut out from the mass of poor

relations that crowded the back of the buildings--house-hold dogs, we

name them--a cousin's widow, skilled in what Europeans, who know

nothing about it, call massage. And the two of them, laying him east

and west, that the mysterious earth-currents which thrill the clay of

our bodies might help and not hinder, took him to pieces all one long

afternoon--bone by bone, muscle by muscle, ligament by ligament, and

lastly, nerve by nerve. Kneaded to irresponsible pulp, half hypnotized

by the perpetual flick and readjustment of the uneasy chudders that

veiled their eyes, Kim slid ten thousand miles into slumber--thirty-six

hours of it--sleep that soaked like rain after drought.

Then she fed him, and the house spun to her clamour. She caused fowls

to be slain; she sent for vegetables, and the sober, slow-thinking

gardener, nigh as old as she, sweated for it; she took spices, and

milk, and onion, with little fish from the brooks--anon limes for

sherbets, fat quails from the pits, then chicken-livers upon a skewer,

with sliced ginger between.

'I have seen something of this world,' she said over the crowded trays,

'and there are but two sorts of women in it--those who take the

strength out of a man and those who put it back. Once I was that one,

and now I am this. Nay--do not play the priestling with me. Mine was

but a jest. If it does not hold good now, it will when thou takest the

road again. Cousin,'--this to the poor relation, never wearied of

extolling her patroness's charity--'he is getting a bloom on the skin

of a new-curried horse. Our work is like polishing jewels to be thrown

to a dance-girl--eh?'

Kim sat up and smiled. The terrible weakness had dropped from him like

an old shoe. His tongue itched for free speech again, and but a week

back the lightest word clogged it like ashes. The pain in his neck (he

must have caught it from the lama) had gone with the heavy dengue-aches

and the evil taste in the mouth. The two old women, a little, but not

much, more careful about their veils now, clucked as merrily as the

hens that had entered pecking through the open door.

'Where is my Holy One?' he demanded.

'Hear him! Thy Holy One is well,' she snapped viciously. 'Though that

is none of his merit. Knew I a charm to make him wise, I'd sell my

jewels and buy it. To refuse good food that I cooked myself--and go

roving into the fields for two nights on an empty belly--and to tumble

into a brook at the end of it--call you that holiness? Then, when he

has nearly broken what thou hast left of my heart with anxiety, he

tells me that he has acquired merit. Oh, how like are all men! No,

that was not it--he tells me that he is freed from all sin. I could

have told him that before he wetted himself all over. He is well

now--this happened a week ago--but burn me such holiness! A babe of

three would do better. Do not fret thyself for the Holy One. He keeps

both eyes on thee when he is not wading our brooks.'

'I do not remember to have seen him. I remember that the days and

nights passed like bars of white and black, opening and shutting. I

was not sick: I was but tired.'

'A lethargy that comes by right some few score years later. But it is

done now.'

'Maharanee,' Kim began, but led by the look in her eye, changed it to

the title of plain love--'Mother, I owe my life to thee. How shall I

make thanks? Ten thousand blessings upon thy house and--'

'The house be unblessed!' (It is impossible to give exactly the old

lady's word.) 'Thank the Gods as a priest if thou wilt, but thank me,

if thou carest, as a son. Heavens above! Have I shifted thee and

lifted thee and slapped and twisted thy ten toes to find texts flung at

my head? Somewhere a mother must have borne thee to break her heart.

What used thou to her--son?'

'I had no mother, my mother,' said Kim. 'She died, they tell me, when

I was young.'

'Hai mai! Then none can say I have robbed her of any right if--when

thou takest the road again and this house is but one of a thousand used

for shelter and forgotten, after an easy-flung blessing. No matter. I

need no blessings, but--but--' She stamped her foot at the poor

relation. 'Take up the trays to the house. What is the good of stale

food in the room, O woman of ill-omen?'

'I ha--have borne a son in my time too, but he died,' whimpered the

bowed sister-figure behind the chudder. 'Thou knowest he died! I only

waited for the order to take away the tray.'

'It is I that am the woman of ill-omen,' cried the old lady penitently.

'We that go down to the chattris [the big umbrellas above the

burning-ghats where the priests take their last dues] clutch hard at

the bearers of the chattis [water-jars--young folk full of the pride of

life, she meant; but the pun is clumsy]. When one cannot dance in the