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

was played by his brother princes, but which to him appeared no part of a Rajput’s education. Sometimes, when he was tired (and on rare occasions when he escaped to Sitabhai’s wing it was observable that he returned very tired indeed), he would listen long and intently to the stories of battle and siege which Kate read to him, and would scandalise her at the end of the tale by announcing, with flashing eye—

      ‘When I am king I will make my army do all those things.’

      It was not in Kate’s nature—she would have thought it in the highest degree wrong—to refrain from some little attempt at religious instruction. But here the child retreated into the stolidity of the East, and only said—

      ‘All these things are very good for you, Kate, but all my gods are very good for me; and if my father knew, he would be angry.’

      ‘And what do you worship?’ asked Kate, pitying the young pagan from the bottom of her heart.

      ‘My sword and my horse,’ answered the Maharaj Kunwar; and he half drew the jewelled sabre that was his, inseparable companion, returning it with a resolute clank that closed the discussion.

      But it was impossible, he discovered, to evade the long man Tarvin as he evaded Kate. He resented being called ‘bub,’ nor did he approve of ‘little man.’ But Tarvin could drawl the word ‘Prince’ with a quiet deference that made the young Rajput almost suspect himself the subject of a jest. And yet Tarvin Sahib treated him as a man, and allowed him, under due precautions, to handle his mighty ‘gun,’ which was not a gun, but a pistol. And once, when the Prince had coaxed the keeper of the horse into allowing him to bestride an unmanageable mount, Tarvin, riding up, had picked him out of the depths of the velvet saddle, set him on his own saddle-bow, and, in the same cloud of dust, shown him how, in his own country, they laid the reins on one side or the other of the neck of their cattle-ponies to guide them in pursuit of a steer broken from the herd.

      The trick of being lifted from his saddle, appealing to the ‘circus’ latent in the boy breast even of an Eastern prince, struck the Maharaj as so amusing that he insisted on exhibiting it before Kate; and as Tarvin was a necessary figure in the performance, he allured him into helping him with it one day before the house of the missionary. Mr. and Mrs. Estes came out upon the verandah with Kate and watched the exhibition, and the missionary pursued it with applause and requests for a repetition, which, having been duly given, Mrs. Estes asked Tarvin if he would not stay to dinner with them since he was there. Tarvin glanced doubtfully at Kate for permission, and, by a process of reasoning best known to lovers, construed the veiling of her eyes and the turning of her head into assent.

      After dinner, as they sat on the verandah in the starlight, ‘Do you really mind?’ he asked.

      ‘What?’ asked she, lifting her sober eyes and letting them fall upon him.

      ‘My seeing you sometimes. I know you don’t like it; but it will help me to look after you. You must see by this time that you need looking after.’

      ‘Oh no.’

      ‘Thank you,’ said Tarvin, almost humbly.

      ‘I mean I don’t need looking after.’

      ‘But you don’t dislike it?’

      ‘It’s good of you,’ she said impartially.

      ‘Well, then, it will be bad of you not to like it.’

      Kate had to smile. ‘I guess I like it,’ she replied.

      ‘And you will let me come once in a while? You can’t think what the rest-house is. Those drummers will kill me yet. And the coolies at the dam are not in my set.’

      ‘Well, since you’re here. But you ought not to be here. Do me a real kindness, and go away, Nick.’

      ‘Give me an easier one.’

      ‘But why are you here? You can’t show any rational reason.’

      ‘Yes; that’s what the British Government says. But I brought my reason along.’

      He confessed his longing for something homely and natural and American after a day’s work under a heathen and raging sun; and when he put it in this light, Kate responded on another side. She had been brought up with a sense of responsibility for making young men feel at home; and he certainly felt at home when she was able to produce, two or three evenings later, a Topaz paper sent her by her father. Tarvin pounced on it, and turned the flimsy four pages inside out, and then back again.

      He smacked his lips. ‘Oh, good, good, good!’ he murmured relishingly. ‘Don’t the advertisements look nice? What’s the matter with Topaz?’ cried he, holding the sheet from him at arm’s length, and gazing ravenously up and down its columns. ‘Oh, she’s all right.’ The cooing, musical sing-song in which he uttered this consecrated phrase was worth going a long way to hear. ‘Say, we’re coming on, aren’t we? We’re not lagging nor loafing, nor fooling our time away, if we haven’t got the Three C.’s yet. We’re keeping up with the procession. Hi-yi! look at the “Rustler Rootlets”—just about a stickful.! Why, the poor old worm-eaten town is going sound, sound asleep in her old age, isn’t she? Think of taking a railroad there! Listen to this:—

      “Milo C. Lambert, the owner of ‘Lambert’s Last Ditch,’ has a car-load of good ore on the dump, but, like all the rest of us, don’t find it pays to ship without a railroad line nearer than fifteen miles. Milo says Colorado won’t be good enough for him after he gets his ore away.”

      ‘I should think not. Come to Topaz, Milo! And this:—

      “When the Three C.’s comes into the city in the fall we shan’t be hearing this talk about hard times. Meantime it’s an injustice to the town, which all honest citizens should resent and do their best to put down, to speak of Rustler as taking a back seat to any town of its age in the State. As a matter of fact, Rustler was never more prosperous. With mines which produced last year ore valued at a total of $1,200,000, with six churches of different denominations, with a young but prosperous and growing academy which is destined to take a front rank among American schools, with a record of new buildings erected during the past year equal if not superior to any town in the mountains, and with a population of lively and determined business men, Rustler bids fair in the coming year to be worthy of her name.”

      ‘Who said “afraid”? We’re not hurt. Hear us whistle. But I’m sorry Heckler let that into his correspondence,’ he added, with a momentary frown. ‘Some of our Topaz citizens might miss the fun of it, and go over to Rustler to wait for the Three C.’s. Coming in the fall, is it? Oh, dear! Oh, dear, dear, dear! This is the way they amuse themselves while they dangle their legs over Big Chief Mountain and wait for it:—

      ‘“Our merchants have responded to the recent good feeling which has pervaded the town since word came that President Mutrie, on his return to Denver, was favourably considering the claims of Rustler. Robbins has his front windows prettily decorated and filled with fancy articles. His store seems to be the most popular for the youngsters who have a nickel or two to spend.”

      ‘I should murmur! Won’t you like to see the Three C.’s come sailing into Topaz one of these fine mornings, little girl?’ asked Tarvin suddenly, as he seated himself on the sofa beside her, and opened out the paper so that she could look over his shoulder.

      ‘Would you like it, Nick?’

      ‘Would I!’

      ‘Then, of course, I should. But I think you will be better off if it doesn’t. It will make you too rich. See father.’

      ‘Well, I’d put on the brakes if I found myself getting real rich. I’ll stop just after I’ve passed the Genteel Poverty Station. Isn’t it good to see the old heading again—Heckler’s name as large as life just under “oldest paper in Divide County,” and Heckler’s fist sticking out all over a rousing editorial on the prospects of the town? Homelike, isn’t it? He’s got two columns