Kim

and he says old lady is pukka [thorough] old lady and would not

condescend to such ungentlemanly things. I do not care. I have got

the papers, and I was very glad of moral support from Mahbub. I tell

you, I am fearful man, but, somehow or other, the more fearful I am the

more dam'-tight places I get into. So I was glad you came with me to

Chini, and I am glad Mahbub was close by. The old lady she is

sometimes very rude to me and my beautiful pills.'

'Allah be merciful!' said Kim on his elbow, rejoicing. 'What a beast

of wonder is a Babu! And that man walked alone--if he did walk--with

robbed and angry foreigners!'

'Oah, thatt was nothing, after they had done beating me; but if I lost

the papers it was pretty-jolly serious. Mahbub he nearly beat me too,

and he went and consorted with the lama no end. I shall stick to

ethnological investigations henceforwards. Now good-bye, Mister

O'Hara. I can catch 4.25 p.m. to Umballa if I am quick. It will be

good times when we all tell thee tale up at Mr Lurgan's. I shall

report you offeecially better. Good-bye, my dear fallow, and when next

you are under thee emotions please do not use the Mohammedan terms with

the Tibetan dress.'

He shook hands twice--a Babu to his boot-heels--and opened the door.

With the fall of the sunlight upon his still triumphant face he

returned to the humble Dacca quack.

'He robbed them,' thought Kim, forgetting his own share in the game.

'He tricked them. He lied to them like a Bengali. They give him a

chit [a testimonial]. He makes them a mock at the risk of his life--I

never would have gone down to them after the pistol-shots--and then he

says he is a fearful man ... And he is a fearful man. I must get into

the world again.'

At first his legs bent like bad pipe-stems, and the flood and rush of

the sunlit air dazzled him. He squatted by the white wall, the mind

rummaging among the incidents of the long dooli journey, the lama's

weaknesses, and, now that the stimulus of talk was removed, his own

self-pity, of which, like the sick, he had great store. The unnerved

brain edged away from all the outside, as a raw horse, once rowelled,

sidles from the spur. It was enough, amply enough, that the spoil of

the kilta was away--off his hands--out of his possession. He tried to

think of the lama--to wonder why he had tumbled into a brook--but the

bigness of the world, seen between the forecourt gates, swept linked

thought aside. Then he looked upon the trees and the broad fields,

with the thatched huts hidden among crops--looked with strange eyes

unable to take up the size and proportion and use of things--stared for

a still half-hour. All that while he felt, though he could not put it

into words, that his soul was out of gear with its surroundings--a

cog-wheel unconnected with any machinery, just like the idle cog-wheel

of a cheap Beheea sugar-crusher laid by in a corner. The breezes

fanned over him, the parrots shrieked at him, the noises of the

populated house behind--squabbles, orders, and reproofs--hit on dead

ears.

'I am Kim. I am Kim. And what is Kim?' His soul repeated it again

and again.

He did not want to cry--had never felt less like crying in his

life--but of a sudden easy, stupid tears trickled down his nose, and

with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up

anew on the world without. Things that rode meaningless on the eyeball

an instant before slid into proper proportion. Roads were meant to be

walked upon, houses to be lived in, cattle to be driven, fields to be

tilled, and men and women to be talked to. They were all real and

true--solidly planted upon the feet--perfectly comprehensible--clay of

his clay, neither more nor less. He shook himself like a dog with a

flea in his ear, and rambled out of the gate. Said the Sahiba, to whom

watchful eyes reported this move: 'Let him go. I have done my share.

Mother Earth must do the rest. When the Holy One comes back from

meditation, tell him.'

There stood an empty bullock-cart on a little knoll half a mile away,

with a young banyan tree behind--a look-out, as it were, above some

new-ploughed levels; and his eyelids, bathed in soft air, grew heavy as

he neared it. The ground was good clean dust--no new herbage that,

living, is half-way to death already, but the hopeful dust that holds

the seeds of all life. He felt it between his toes, patted it with his

palms, and joint by joint, sighing luxuriously, laid him down full

length along in the shadow of the wooden-pinned cart. And Mother Earth

was as faithful as the Sahiba. She breathed through him to restore the

poise he had lost lying so long on a cot cut off from her good

currents. His head lay powerless upon her breast, and his opened hands

surrendered to her strength. The many-rooted tree above him, and even

the dead manhandled wood beside, knew what he sought, as he himself did

not know. Hour upon hour he lay deeper than sleep.

Towards evening, when the dust of returning kine made all the horizons

smoke, came the lama and Mahbub Ali, both afoot, walking cautiously,

for the house had told them where he had gone.

'Allah! What a fool's trick to play in open country!' muttered the

horse-dealer. 'He could be shot a hundred times--but this is not the

Border.'

'And,' said the lama, repeating a many-times-told tale, 'never was such

a chela. Temperate, kindly, wise, of ungrudging disposition, a merry

heart upon the road, never forgetting, learned, truthful, courteous.

Great is his reward!'

'I know the boy--as I have said.'

'And he was all those things?'

'Some of them--but I have not yet found a Red Hat's charm for making

him overly truthful. He has certainly been well nursed.'

'The Sahiba is a heart of gold,' said the lama earnestly. 'She looks

upon him as her son.'

'Hmph! Half Hind seems that way disposed. I only wished to see that

the boy had come to no harm and was a free agent. As thou knowest, he

and I were old friends in the first days of your pilgrimage together.'

'That is a bond between us.' The lama sat down. 'We are at the end of

the pilgrimage.'

'No thanks to thee thine was not cut off for good and all a week back.

I heard what the Sahiba said to thee when we bore thee up on the cot.'

Mahbub laughed, and tugged his newly dyed beard.

'I was meditating upon other matters that tide. It was the hakim from

Dacca broke my meditations.'

'Otherwise'--this was in Pushtu for decency's sake--'thou wouldst have

ended thy meditations upon the sultry side of Hell--being an unbeliever

and an idolater for all thy child's simplicity. But now, Red Hat, what

is to be done?'

'This very night,'--the words came slowly, vibrating with

triumph--'this very night he will be as free as I am from all taint of

sin--assured as I am, when he quits this body, of Freedom from the

Wheel of Things. I have a sign'--he laid his hand above the torn chart

in his bosom--'that my time is short; but I shall have safeguarded him

throughout the years. Remember, I have reached Knowledge, as I told

thee only three nights back.'

'It must be true, as the Tirah priest said when I stole his cousin's

wife, that I am a Sufi [a free-thinker]; for here I sit,' said Mahbub

to himself, 'drinking in blasphemy unthinkable ... I remember the

tale. On that, then, he goes to Fannatu l'Adn [the Gardens of Eden].

But how? Wilt thou slay him or drown him in that wonderful river from