Rudyard Kipling : The Complete Novels and Stories. Редьярд Джозеф Киплинг

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

      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, like the phonograph

      ‘No train? Where’s your time-table? Where’s your railroad guide? Where’s your Pathfinder?’

      ‘No train at all of any kind whatever.’

      ‘Then what the devil are you here for?’

      ‘Sir, I am the stationmaster of this station, and it is prohibited using profane language to employees of this company.’

      ‘Oh, are you? Is it? Well, see here, my friend—you stationmaster of the steep-edge of the Jumping-off-place, if you want to save your life you will tell me how I get to Rhatore—quick!’

      The man was silent.

      ‘Well, what do I do, anyway?’ shouted the West.

      ‘What do I know?’ answered the East.

      Tarvin stared at the brown being in white, beginning at his patent-leather shoes, surmounted by open-work socks, out of which the calf of his leg bulged, and ending with the velvet smokingcap on his head. The passionless regard of the Oriental, borrowed from the purple hills behind his station, made him wonder for one profane, faithless, and spiritless moment whether Topaz and Kate were worth all they were costing.

      ‘Ticket, please,’ said the baboo.

      The gloom darkened. This thing was here to take tickets, and would do it though men loved, and fought, and despaired and died at his feet.

      ‘See here,’ cried Tarvin, ‘you shiny-toed fraud; you agate-eyed pillar of alabaster——’ But he did not go on; speech failed in a shout of rage and despair. The desert swallowed all impartially; and the baboo, turning with awful quiet, drifted through the door of the station-house, and locked it behind him.

      Tarvin