The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition). Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг

O Kate, I don't ask anything for myself--or, at least, I only ask everything--but do think of that a moment sometimes when you are putting your arms around the earth, and trying to lift it up in your soft little hands--you are spoiling more lives than your own. Great Scot, Kate, if you are looking for some misery to set right, you needn't go off this road. Begin on me.'

      She shook her head sadly. 'I must begin where I see my duty, Nick. I don't say that I shall make much impression on the dreadful sum of human trouble, and I don't say it is for every body to do what I'm going to try to do; but it's right for me. I know that, and that's all any of us can know. Oh, to be sure that people are a little better--if only a little better--because you have lived,' she exclaimed, the look of exaltation coming into her eyes; 'to know that you have lessened by the slightest bit the sorrow and suffering that must go on all the same, would be good. Even you must feel that, Nick,' she said, gently laying her hand on his arm as they rode.

      Tarvin compressed his lips. 'Oh yes, I feel it,' he said desperately.

      'But you feel something else. So do I.'

      'Then feel it more. Feel it enough to trust yourself to me. I'll find a future for you. You shall bless everybody with your goodness. Do you think I should like you without it? And you shall begin by blessing me.'

      'I can't! I can't!' she cried in distress.

      'You can't do anything else. You must come to me at last. Do you think I could live if I didn't think that? But I want to save you all that lies between. I don't want you to be driven into my arms, little girl. I want you to come--and come now.'

      For answer to this she only bowed her head on the sleeve of her riding-habit, and began to cry softly. Nick's fingers closed on the hand with which she nervously clutched the pommel of her saddle.

      'You can't, dear?'

      The brown head was shaken vehemently. Tarvin ground his teeth.

      'All right; don't mind:'

      He took her yielding hand into his, speaking gently, as he would have spoken to a child in distress. In the silent moment that lengthened between them Tarvin gave it up--not Kate, not his love, not his changeless resolve to have her for his own, but just the question of her going to India. She could go if she liked. There would be two of them.

      When they reached the Hot Springs he took an immediate opportunity to engage the willing Mrs. Mutrie in talk, and to lead her aside, while Sheriff showed the president the water steaming out of the ground, the baths, and the proposed site of a giant hotel. Kate, willing to hide her red eyes from Mrs. Mutrie's sharp gaze, remained with her father.

      When Tarvin had led the president's wife to the side of the stream that went plunging down past the Springs to find a tomb at last in the canon below, he stopped short in the shelter of a clump of cottonwoods.

      'Do you really want that necklace?' he asked her abruptly.

      She laughed again, gurglingly, amusedly, this time, with the little air of spectacle which she could not help lending to all she did.

      'Want it?' she repeated. 'Of course I want it. I want the moon, too.'

      Tarvin laid a silencing hand upon her arm.

      'You shall have this,' he said positively.

      She ceased laughing, and grew almost pale at his earnestness.

      'What do you mean?' she asked quickly.

      'It would please you? You would be glad of it?' he asked. 'What would you do to get it?'

      'Go back to Omaha on my hands and knees,' she answered with equal earnestness. 'Crawl to India.'

      'All right,' returned Tarvin vigorously. 'That settles it. Listen! I want the Three C.'s to come to Topaz. You want this. Can we trade?'

      'But you can never----'

      'No matter; I'll attend to my part. Can you do yours?'

      'You mean----' she began.

      'Yes,' nodded her companion decisively; 'I do. Can you fix it?'

      Tarvin, fiercely repressed and controlled, stood before her with clenched teeth, and hands that drove the nails into his palms, awaiting her answer.

      She tilted her fair head on one side with deprecation, and regarded him out of the vanishing angle of one eye provocatively, with a lingering, tantalising look of adequacy.

      'I guess what I say to Jim goes,' she said at last with a dreamy smile.

      'Then it's a bargain?'

      'Yes,' she answered.

      'Shake hands on it.'

      They joined hands. For a moment they stood confronted, penetrating each other's eyes.

      'You'll really get it for me?'

      'Yes.'

      'You won't go back on me?'

      'No.'

      He pressed her hand so that she gave a little scream.

      'Ouch! You hurt.'

      'All right,' he said hoarsely, as he dropped her hand. 'It's a trade. I start for India tomorrow.'

V

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      Now, it is not good for the Christian's health to hustle the Aryan brown,

       For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles,

       and he weareth the Christian down;

       And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,

       with the name of the late deceased,

       And the epitaph drear:

       'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'

       —Solo from Libretto of Naulahka.

      Tarvin stood on the platform of the station at Rawut Junction watching the dust cloud that followed the retreating Bombay mail. When it had disappeared, the heated air above the stone ballast began its dance again, and he turned blinking to India.

      It was amazingly simple to come fourteen thousand miles. He had lain still in a ship for a certain time, and then had transferred himself to stretch at full length, in his shirt-sleeves, on the leather-padded bunk of the train which had brought him from Calcutta to Rawut Junction. The journey was long only as it kept him from sight of Kate, and kept him filled with thought of her. But was this what he had come for--the yellow desolation of a Rajputana desert, and the pinched-off perspective of the track? Topaz was cosier when they had got the church, the saloon, the school, and three houses up; the loneliness made him shiver. He saw that they did not mean to do any more of it. It was a desolation which doubled desolateness, because it was left for done. It was final, intended, absolute. The grim solidity of the cut-stone station-house, the solid masonry of the empty platform, the mathematical exactitude of the station name-board looked for no future. No new railroad could help Rawut Junction. It had no ambition. It belonged to the Government. There was no green thing, no curved line, no promise of life that produces, within eyeshot of Rawut Junction. The mauve railroad-creeper on the station had been allowed to die from lack of attention.

      Tarvin was saved from the more positive pangs of home-sickness by a little healthy human rage. A single man, fat, brown, clothed in white gauze, and wearing a black velvet cap on his head, stepped out from the building. This stationmaster and permanent population of Rawut Junction accepted Tarvin as a feature of the landscape: he did not look at him. Tarvin began to sympathise with the South in the war of the rebellion.

      'When does the next train leave for Rhatore?' he asked.

      'There is no train,' returned the man, pausing with precise deliberation between the words. He sent his speech abroad with an air of detachment, irresponsibly,