The Kipling Reader. Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг

shook some of the dust out of his fur and sneezed. 'It is all over,' he said. 'The widow will never come out again.' And the red ants that live between the grass stems heard him, and began to troop down one after another to see if he had spoken the truth.

      Rikki-tikki curled himself up in the grass and slept where he was—slept and slept till it was late in the afternoon, for he had done a hard day's work.

      'Now,' he said, when he awoke, 'I will go back to the house. Tell the Coppersmith, Darzee, and he will tell the garden that Nagaina is dead.'

      The Coppersmith is a bird who makes a noise exactly like the beating of a little hammer on a copper pot; and the reason he is always making it is because he is the town-crier to every Indian garden, and tells all the news to everybody who cares to listen. As Rikki-tikki went up the path, he heard his 'attention' notes like a tiny dinner-gong; and then the steady 'Ding-dong-lock! Nag is dead—dong! Nagaina is dead! Ding-dong-tock!' That set all the birds in the garden singing, and the frogs croaking; for Nag and Nagaina used to eat frogs as well as little birds.

      When Rikki got to the house, Teddy and Teddy's mother (she looked very white still, for she had been fainting) and Teddy's father came out and almost cried over him; and that night he ate all that was given him till he could I eat no more, and went to bed on Teddy's shoulder, where Teddy's mother saw him when she came to look late at night.

      'He saved our lives and Teddy's life,' she said to her husband.

       'Just think, he saved all our lives.'

      Rikki-tikki woke up with a jump, for all the mongooses are light sleepers.

      'Oh, it's you,' said he. 'What are you bothering for? All the cobras are dead; and if they weren't, I'm here.'

      Rikki-tikki had a right to be proud of himself; but he did not grow too proud, and he kept that garden as a mongoose should keep it, with tooth and jump and spring and bite, till never a cobra dared show its head inside the walls.

DARZEE'S CHAUNT.

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      (SUNG IN HONOUR OF RIKKI-TIKKI-TAVI.)

      Singer and tailor am I—

       Doubled the joys that I know—

       Proud of my lilt through the sky,

       Proud of the house that I sew—

       Over and under, so weave I my music—so weave I the house that I sew.

      Sing to your fledglings again,

       Mother, oh lift up your head!

       Evil that plagued us is slain,

       Death in the garden lies dead.

       Terror that hid in the roses is impotent—flung on the dung-hill

       and dead!

      Who hath delivered us, who?

       Tell me his nest and his name.

       Rikki, the valiant, the true,

       Tikki, with eyeballs of flame,

       Rik-tikki-tikki, the ivory-fanged, the hunter with eyeballs of flame.

      Give him the Thanks of the Birds,

       Bowing with tail-feathers spread!

       Praise him with nightingale words—

       Nay, I will praise him instead.

       Hear! I will sing you the praise of the bottle-tailed Rikki, with

       eyeballs of red!

      (Here Rikki-tikki interrupted, and the rest of the song is lost.)

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR PART I

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      I have done one braver thing

       Than all the worthies did;

       And yet a braver thence doth spring,

       Which is to keep that hid.

       THE UNDERTAKING.

      'Is it officially declared yet?'

      'They've gone as far as to admit extreme local scarcity, and they've started relief-works in one or two districts, the paper says.'

      'That means it will be declared as soon as they can make sure of the men and the rolling-stock. Shouldn't wonder if it were as bad as the Big Famine.'

      'Can't be,' said Scott, turning a little in the long cane chair. 'We've had fifteen-anna crops in the north, and Bombay and Bengal report more than they know what to do with. They'll be able to check it before it gets out of hand. It will only be local.'

      Martyn picked up the Pioneer from the table, read through the telegrams once more, and put up his feet on the chair-rests. It was a hot, dark, breathless evening, heavy with the smell of the newly-watered Mall. The flowers in the Club gardens were dead and black on their stalks, the little lotus-pond was a circle of caked mud, and the tamarisk-trees were white with the dust of days. Most of the men were at the bandstand in the public gardens—from the Club verandah you could hear the native Police band hammering stale waltzes—or on the polo-ground or in the high-walled fives-court, hotter than a Dutch oven. Half a dozen grooms, squatted at the heads of their ponies, waited their masters' return. From time to time a man would ride at a foot-pace into the Club compound, and listlessly loaf over to the whitewashed barracks beside the main building. These were supposed to be chambers. Men lived in them, meeting the same faces night after night at dinner, and drawing out their office-work till the latest possible hour, that they might escape that doleful company.

      'What are you going to do?' said Martyn, with a yawn. 'Let's have a swim before dinner.'

      'Water's hot,' said Scott. 'I was at the bath to-day.'

      'Play you game o' billiards—fifty up.'

      'It's a hundred and five in the hall now. Sit still and don't be so abominably energetic.'

      A grunting camel swung up to the porch, his badged and belted rider fumbling a leather pouch.

      'Kubber-kargaz—ki—yektraaa,' the man whined, handing down the newspaper extra—a slip printed on one side only, and damp from the press. It was pinned on the green baize-board, between notices of ponies for sale and fox-terriers missing.

      Martyn rose lazily, read it, and whistled. 'It's declared!' he cried.

       'One, two, three—eight districts go under the operation of the

       Famine Code ek dum. They've put Jimmy Hawkins in charge.'

      'Good business!' said Scott, with the first sign of interest he had shown. 'When in doubt hire a Punjabi. I worked under Jimmy when I first came out and he belonged to the Punjab. He has more bundobust than most men.'

      'Jimmy's a Jubilee Knight now,' said Martyn. 'He was a good chap, even though he is a thrice-born civilian and went to the Benighted Presidency. What unholy names these Madras districts rejoice in—all ungas or rungas or pillays or polliums.'

      A dog-cart drove up, and a man entered, mopping his head. He was editor of the one daily paper at the capital of a province of twenty-five million natives and a few hundred white men, and as his staff was limited to himself and one assistant, his office hours ran variously from ten to twenty a day.

      'Hi, Raines; you're supposed to know everything,' said Martyn, stopping him. 'How's this Madras "scarcity" going to turn out?'

      'No one knows as yet. There's a message as long as your arm coming in on the telephone. I've left my cub to fill it out. Madras has owned she can't manage it alone, and Jimmy seems