the man who would be king
by
Rudyard Kipling
The Law, as
quoted, lays down a fair conduct of life, and one not easy to follow. I
have been fellow to a beggar again and again under circumstances which
prevented either of us finding out whether the other was worthy. I have
still to be broth to a Prince, though I once came near to kinship with
what might have been a veritable King, and was promised the reversion of a
Kingdom—army, law-courts, revenue, and policy all complete. But, today, I
greatly fear that my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go hunt it
for myself.
The beginning of everything was in a
railway train upon the road to Mhow from Ajmir. There had been a Deficit
in the Budget, which necessitated travelling, not Second-class, which is
only half as dear as First-class, but by Intermediate, which is very awful
indeed. There are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and the
population are either Intermediate, which is Eurasian, or native, which
for a long night journey is nasty, or Loafer, which is amusing though
intoxicated. Intermediates do not buy from refreshment-rooms. They carry
their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets from the native
sweetmeat-sellers, and drink the road-side water. That is why in the hot
weather Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and in all
weathers are most properly looked down upon.
My particular Intermediate happened to be
empty till I reached Nasirabad, when a big black-browed gentleman in
shirt-sleeves entered, and, following the custom of Intermediates, passed
the time of day. He was a wanderer and a vagabond like myself, but with an
educated taste for whisky. He told tales of things he had seen and done,
of out-of-the-way corners of the Empire into which he had penetrated, and
of adventures in which he risked his life for a few days’ food.
‘If India was filled with men like you and
me, not knowing more than the crows where they’d get their next day’s
rations, it isn’t seventy millions of revenue the land would be
paying—it’s seven hundred millions,’ said he; and as I looked at his mouth
and chin I was disposed to agree with him.
We talked politics—the politics of
Loaferdom, that see things from the underside where the lath and plaster
is not smoothed off—and we talked postal arrangements because my friend
wanted to send a telegram back from the next station to Ajmir, the
turning-off place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as you travel westward.
My friend had no money beyond eight annas, which he wanted for dinner, and
I had no money at all, owing to the hitch in the Budget before mentioned.
Further, I was going into a wilderness where, though I should resume touch
with the Treasury, there were no telegraph offices. I was, therefore,
unable to help him in any way.
‘We might threaten a Station-master, and
make him send a wire on tick,’ said my friend, ‘but that’d mean inquiries
for you and for me, and I’ve got my hands full these days. Did you
say you are travelling back along this line within any days?’
‘Within ten,’ I said.
‘Can’t you make it eight?’ said he. ‘Mine
is rather urgent business.’
‘I can send you telegram within ten days if
that will serve you,’ I said.
‘I couldn’t trust the wire to fetch him now
I think of it. It’s this way. He leaves Delhi on the 23rd for
Bombay. That means he’ll be running through Ajmir about the night of the
23rd.’
‘But I’m going into the Indian Desert,’ I
explained.
‘Well and good,’ said he. ‘You’ll be
changing at Marwar Junction to get into Jodhpore territory—you must do
that—and he’ll be coming through Marwar Junction in the early morning of
the 24th by the Bombay Mail. Can you be at Marwar Junction on
that time? ‘Twon’t be inconveniencing you because I know that there’s
precious few pickings to be got out of these Central Indian States—even
though you pretend to be correspondent of the Backwoodsman.’
‘Have you ever tried that trick?’ I
asked.
‘Again and again, but the Residents find
you out, and then you get escorted to the Border before you’ve time to get
your knife into them. But about my friend here. I must give him a
word o’ mouth to tell him what’s come to me or else he won’t know where to
go. I would take it more than kind of you if you was to come out of
Central India in time to catch him at Marwar Junction, and say to him: “He
has gone South for the week.” He’ll know what that means. He’s a big man
with a red beard, and a great swell he is. You’ll find him sleeping like a
gentleman with all his luggage round him in a Second-class compartment.
But don’t you be afraid. Slip down the window, and say: “He has gone South
for the week,” and he’ll tumble. It’s only cutting your time of stay in
those parts by two days. I ask you as a stranger—going to the West.’ He
said with emphasis.
‘Where have you come from?’ said
I.
‘From the East,’ said he, ‘and I am hoping
that you will give him the message on the Square—for the sake of my Mother
as well as your own.’
Englishmen are not usually softened by
appeals to the memory of their mothers, but for certain reasons, which
will be fully apparent, I saw fit to agree.
‘It’s more than a little matter,’ said he,
‘and that’s why I asked you to do it—and now I know that I can depend on
you doing it. A Second-class carriage at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired
man asleep in it. You’ll be sure to remember. I get out at the next
station, and I must hold on there till he comes or sends me what I
want.’
‘I’ll give the message if I catch him,’ I
said, ‘and for the sake of your Mother as well as mine I’ll give you a
word of advice. Don’t try to run the Central Indian States just now as the
correspondent of the Backwoodsman. There’s a real one knocking
about here, and it might lead to trouble.’
‘Thank you,’ said he simply, ‘and when will
the swine be gone? I can’t starve because he’s ruining my work. I wanted
to get hold of the Degumber Rajah down here about his father’s widow, and
give him a jump.’
‘What did you do to his father’s widow,
then?’
‘Filled her up with red pepper and
slippered her to death as she hung from a beam. I found that out myself,
and I’m the only man that would dare going into the State to get
hush-money for it. They’ll try to poison me, same as they did in Chortumna
when I went on the loot there. But you’ll give the man at Marwar Junction
my message?’
He got out at a little roadside station,
and I reflected. I had heard, more than once, of men personating
correspondents of newspapers and bleeding small Native States with threats
of exposure, but I had never met any of the caste before. They led a hard
life, and generally die with great suddenness. The Native States have a
wholesome horror of English newspapers which may throw light on their
peculiar methods of government, and do their best to choke correspondents
with champagne, or drive them out of their mind with four-in-hand
barouches. They do not understand that nobody cares a straw for the
internal administration of Native States so long as oppression and crime
are kept within decent limits, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or
diseased from one end of the year to the other. They are the dark places
of the earth, full of unimaginable cruelty, touching the Railway and the
Telegraph on one side, and, on the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid.
When I left the train I did business with divers Kings, and in eight days
passed through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and
consorted with Princes and Politicals, drinking from crystal and eating
from silver. Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and devoured what I could
get, from a plate made of leaves, and drank the running water, and slept
under the same rug as my servant. It was all in the day’s work.
Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert
upon the proper date, as I had promised, and the night Mail set me down at
Marwar Junction, where a funny, little, happy-go-lucky, native-managed
railway runs to Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail from Delhi makes a short halt at
Marwar. She arrived as I got in, and I had just time to hurry to her
platform and go down the carriages. There was only one Second-class on the
train. I slipped the window and looked down upon a flaming red beard, half
covered by a railway rug. That was my man, fast asleep, and I dug him
gently in the ribs. He woke with a grunt, and I saw his face in the light
of the lamps. It was a great and shining face.
‘Tickets again?’ said he.
‘No,’ said I. ‘I am to tell you that he is
gone South for the week. He has gone South for the week!’
The train had begun to move out. The red
man rubbed his eyes. ‘He has gone South for the week,’ he repeated. ‘Now
that’s just like his impidence. Did he say that I was to give you
anything? ‘Cause I won’t.’
‘He didn’t,’ I said, and dropped away, and
watched the red lights die out in the dark. It was horribly cold because
the wind was blowing off the sands. I climbed into my own train—not an
Intermediate Carriage this time—and went to sleep.
If the man with the beard had given me a
rupee I should have kept it as a memento of a rather curious affair. But
the consciousness of having done my duty was my only reward.
Later on I reflected that two gentlemen
like my friends could not do any good if they forgathered and personated
correspondents of newspapers, and might, if they black-mailed one of the
little rat-trap states of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get
themselves into serious difficulties. I therefore took some trouble to
describe them as accurately as I could remember to people who would be
interested in deporting them; and succeeded, so I was later informed, in
having them headed back from the Degumber borders.
Then I became respectable, and returned to
an Office where there were no Kings and no incidents outside the daily
manufacture of a newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every
conceivable sort of person, to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission
ladies arrive, and beg that the Editor will instantly abandon all his
duties to describe a Christian prize-giving in a back-slum of a perfectly
inaccessible village; Colonels who have been overpassed for command sit
down and sketch the outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-four
leading articles on Seniority versus Selection; Missionaries wish
to know why they have not been permitted to escape from their regular
vehicles of abuse and swear at a brother-missionary under special
patronage of the editorial We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to
explain that they cannot pay for their advertisements, but on their return
from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent
punkah-pulling machines, carriage couplings, and unbreakable swords and
axle-trees, call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their
disposal; tea-companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the
office pens; secretaries of ball-committees clamour to have the glories of
their last dance more fully described; strange ladies rustle in and say,
‘I want a hundred lady’s cards printed at once, please,’ which is
manifestly part of an Editor’s duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever
tramped the Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employment
as a proof-reader. And, all the time, the telephone-bell is ringing madly,
and Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Empires are saying,
‘You’re another,’ and Mister Gladstone is calling down brimstone upon the
British Dominions, and the little black copy-boys are whining, ‘kaa-pi
chay-ha-yeh’ (copy wanted) like tired bees, and most of the paper is
as blank as Modred’s shield.
But that is the amusing part of the year.
There are six other months when none ever comes to call, and the
thermometer walks inch by inch up to the top of the glass, and the office
is darkened to just above reading-light, and the press-machines are
red-hot of touch, and nobody writes anything but accounts of amusements in
the Hill-stations or obituary notices. Then the telephone becomes a
tinkling terror, because it tells you of the sudden deaths of men and
women that you knew intimately, and the prickly-heat covers you with a
garment, and you sit down and write: ‘A slight increase of sickness is
reported from the Khuda Janta Khan District. The outbreak is purely
sporadic in its nature, and, thanks to the energetic efforts of the
District authorities, is now almost at an end. It is, however, with deep
regret we record the death, etc.’
Then the sickness really breaks out, and
the less recording and reporting the better for the peace of the
subscribers. But the Empires and the Kings continue to divert themselves
as selfishly as before, and the Foreman thinks that a daily paper really
ought to come out once in twenty-four hours, and all the people at the
Hill-stations in the middle of their amusements say: ‘Good gracious! Why
can’t the paper be sparkling? I’m sure there’s plenty going on up
here.’
That is the dark half of the moon, and, as
the advertisements say, ‘must be experienced to be appreciated’.
It was in that season, and a remarkably
evil season, that the paper began running the last issue of the week on
Saturday night, which is to say Sunday morning, after the custom of a
London paper. This was a great convenience, for immediately after the
paper was put to bed, the dawn would lower the thermometer from 96 degrees
to almost 84 degrees for half an hour, and in that chill—you have no idea
how cold is 84 degrees on the grass until you begin to pray for it—a very
tired man could get off to sleep ere the heat roused him.
One Saturday night it was my pleasant duty
to put the paper to bed alone. A King or courtier or a courtesan or a
Community was going to die or get a new Constitution, or do something that
was important on the other side of the world, and the paper was to be held
open till the latest possible minute in order to catch the telegram.
It was a pitchy black night, as stifling as
a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the
westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees and pretending that the
rain was on its heels. Now and again a spot of almost boiling water would
fall on the dust with the flop of a frog, but all our weary world knew
that was only pretence. It was a shade cooler in the press-room than the
office, so I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the
night-jars hooted at the windows, and the all but naked compositors wiped
the sweat from their foreheads, and called for water. The thing that was
keeping us back, whatever it was, would not come off, though the
loo dropped and the last type was set, and the whole round earth
stood still in the choking heat, with its finger on its lip, to wait the
event. I drowsed, and wondered whether the telegraph was a blessing, and
whether this dying man, or struggling people, might be aware of the
inconvenience the delay was causing. There was no special reason beyond
the heat and worry to make tension, but, as the clock-hands crept up to
three o’clock, and the machines spun their fly-wheels two or three times
to see that all was in order before I said the word that would set them
off, I could have shrieked aloud.
Then the roar and rattle of the wheels
shivered the quiet into little bits. I rose to go away, but two men in
white clothes stood in front of me. The first one said: ‘It’s him!’ The
second said: ‘So it is!’ And they both laughed almost as loudly as the
machinery roared, and mopped their foreheads. ‘We seed there was a light
burning across the road, and we were sleeping in that ditch there for
coolness, and I said to my friend here, The office is open. Let’s come
along and speak to him as turned us back from the Degumber State,’ said
the smaller of the two. He was the man I had met in the Mhow train, and
his fellow was the red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. There was no
mistaking the eyebrows of the one or the beard of the other.
I was not pleased, because I wished to go
to sleep, not to squabble with loafers. ‘What do you want?’ I asked.
‘Half an hour’s talk with you, cool and
comfortable, in the office,’ said the red-bearded man. ‘We’d like
some drink—the Contrack doesn’t begin yet, Peachey, so you needn’t
look—but what we really want is advice. We don’t want money. We ask you as
a favour, because we found out you did us a bad turn about Degumber
State.’
I led from the press-room to the stifling
office with the maps on the walls, and the red-haired man rubbed his
hands. ‘That’s something like,’ said he. ‘This was the proper shop to come
to. Now, Sir, let me introduce to you Brother Peachey Carnehan, that’s
him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is me, and the less said about
our professions the better, for we have been most things in our time.
Soldier, sailor, compositor, photographer, proof-reader, street-preacher,
and correspondents of the Backwoodsman when we thought the paper
wanted one. Carnehan is sober, and so am I. Look at us first, and see
that’s sure. It will save you cutting into my talk. We’ll take one of your
cigars apiece, and you shall see us light up.’
I watched the test. The men were absolutely
sober, so I gave them each a tepid whisky and soda.
‘Well and good,’ said Carnehan of
the eyebrows, wiping the froth from his moustache. ‘Let me talk now, Dan.
We have been all over India, mostly on foot. We have been boiler-fitters,
engine-drivers, petty contractors, and all that, and we have decided that
Indian isn’t big enough for such as us.’
They certainly were too big for the office.
Dravot’s beard seemed to fill half the room and Carnehan’s shoulders the
other half, as they sat on the big table. Carnehan continued: ‘The country
isn’t half worked out because they that governs it won’t let you touch it.
They spend all their blessed time in governing it, and you can’t lift a
spade, nor chip a rock, nor look for oil, nor anything like that, without
all the Government saying, “Leave it alone, and let us govern.” Therefore,
such as it is, we will let it alone, and go away to some other
place where a man isn’t crowded and can come to his own. We are not little
men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink, and we have
signed a Contrack on that. Therefore, we are going away to be
Kings.’
‘Kings in our own right,’ muttered
Dravot.
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘You’ve been
tramping in the sun, and it’s a very warm night, and hadn’t you better
sleep over the notion? Come tomorrow.’
‘Neither drunk nor sunstruck,’ said Dravot.
‘We have slept over the notion half a year, and require to see Books and
Atlases, and we have decided that there is only one place now in the world
that two strong men can Sar-a-whack. They call it Kafiristan. By my
reckoning it’s the top right-hand corner of Afghanistan, not more than
three hundred miles from Peshawar. They have two-and-thirty heathen idols
there, and we’ll be the thirty-third and thirty-fourth. It’s a mountainous
country, and the women of those parts are very beautiful.’
‘But that is provided against in the
Contrack,’ said Carnehan. ‘Neither Woman nor Liqu-or, Daniel.’
‘And that’s all we know, except that no one
has gone there, and they fight, and in any place where they fight a man
who knows how to drill men can always be a King. We shall go to those
parts and say to any King we find—“D’you want to vanquish your foes?” and
we will show him how to drill men; for that we know better than anything
else. Then we will subvert that King and seize his Throne and establish a
Dy-nasty.’
‘You’ll be cut to pieces before you’re
fifty miles across the Border,’ I said. ‘You have to travel through
Afghanistan to get to that country. It’s one mass of mountains and peaks
and glaciers, and no Englishman has been through it. The people are utter
brutes, and even if you reached them you couldn’t do anything.’
‘That’s more like,’ said Carnehan. ‘If you
could think us a little more mad we would be more pleased. We have come to
you to know about this country, to read a book about it, and to be shown
maps. We want you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your books.’
He turned to the bookcases.
‘Are you at all in earnest?’ I said.
‘A little,’ said Dravot sweetly. ‘As big a
map as you have got, even if it’s all blank where Kafiristan is, and any
books you’ve got. We can read, though we aren’t very educated.’
I uncased the big
thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map of India, and two smaller Frontier maps,
hauled down volume INF-KAN of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the
men consulted them.
‘See here!’ said Dravot, his thumb on the
map. ‘Up to Jagdallak, Peachey and me know the road. We was there with
Roberts’ Army. We’ll have to turn off to the right at Jagdallak through
Laghmann territory. Then we get among the hills—fourteen thousand
feet—fifteen thousand—it will be cold work there, but it don’t look very
far on the map.’
I handed him wood on the Sources of the
Oxus. Carnehan was deep in the Encyclopaedia.
‘They’re a mixed lot,’ said Dravot
reflectively; ‘and it won’t help us to know the names of their tribes. The
more tribes the more they’ll fight, and the better for us. From Jagdallak
to Ashang H’mm!’
‘But all the information about the country
is as sketchy and inaccurate as can be,’ I protested. ‘No one knows
anything about it really. Here’s the file of United Services’
Institute. Read what Bellew says.’
‘Blow Bellew,!’ said Carnehan. ‘Dan,
they’re a stinkin’ lot of heathens, but this book here says they think
they’re related to us English.’
I smoked while the men poured over Raverty,
Wood, the maps, and the Encyclopaedia.
‘There is no use your waiting,’ said Dravot
politely. ‘It’s about four o’clock now. We’ll go before six o’clock if you
want to sleep, and we won’t steal any of the papers. Don’t you sit up.
We’re two harmless lunatics, and if you come tomorrow evening down to the
Serai, we’ll say good-bye to you.’
‘You are two fools,’ I answered.
‘You’ll be turned back at the Frontier or cut up the minute you set foot
in Afghanistan. Do you want any money or a recommendation down-country? I
can help you to the chance of work next week.’
‘Next week we shall be hard at work
ourselves, thank you,’ said Dravot. ‘It isn’t so easy being a King as it
looks. When we’ve got our Kingdom in going order we’ll let you know, and
you can come up and help us to govern it.’
“Would two lunatics make a contrack like
that?” said Carnehan, with subdued pride, showing me a greasy half-sheet
of notepaper on which was written the following. I copied it, then and
there, as a curiosity—
This Contract between me and you
persuing witnesseth in the name of God—Amen and so forth.
(One) That me
and you will settle this matter together; i.e. to be Kings of
Kafiristan.
(Two) That you and me will not, while this matter is being
settled, look at any Liquor, nor any Woman black, white, or brown, so as
to get mixed up with one or the other harmful.
(Three) That we conduct
ourselves with Dignity and Discretion, and if one of us gets into trouble
the other will stay by him.
Signed by you and me this
day,
Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan
Daniel Dravot
Both Gentlemen at
Large
‘There was no need for the last article,’
said Carnehan, blushing modestly; ‘but it looks regular. Now you know the
sort of men that loafers are—we are loafers, Dan, until we get out
of India—and do you think that we would sign a Contrack like that
unless we was in earnest? We have kept away from the two things that make
life worth having.’
‘You won’t enjoy your lives much longer if
you are going to try this idiotic adventure. Don’t set the office on
fire,’ I said, ‘and go away before nine o’clock.
I left them still poring over the maps and
making notes on the back of the ‘Contrack’. ‘Be sure to come down to the
Serai tomorrow,’ were their parting words.
The Kumharsen Serai is the great
four-square sink of humanity where the strings of camels and horses from
the North load and unload. All the nationalities of Central Asia may be
found there, and most of the folk of India proper. Balkh and Bokhara there
meet Bengal and Bombay, and try to draw eye-teeth. You can buy ponies,
turquoises, Persian pussy-cats, saddle-bags, fat-tailed sheep and musk in
the Kumharsen Serai, and get many strange things for nothing. In the
afternoon I went down to see whether my friends intended to keep their
word or were lying there drunk.
A priest attired in fragments of ribbons
and rags stalked up to me, gravely twisting a child’s paper whirligig.
Behind him was his servant bending undre a load of a crate of mud toys.
The two were loading up two camels, and the inhabitants of the Serai
watched them with shrieks of laughter.
‘The priest is mad,’ said a horse-dealer to
me. ‘He is going up to Kabul to sell toys to the Amir. He will either be
raised to honor or have his head cut off. He came in here this morning and
has been behaving madly ever since.’
‘The witless are under the protection of
God,’ stammered a flat-cheeked Usbeg in broken Hindi. ‘They foretell
future events.’
‘Would they could have foretold that my
caravan would have been cut up by the Shinwaris almost within shadow of
the Pass!’ grunted the Eusufzai agent of a Rajputana trading-house whose
goods had been diverted into the hands of other robbers just across the
Border, and whose misfortunes were the laughing-stock of the basar. ‘Ohé,
priest, whence come you and whither do you go?’
‘From Roum have I come,’ shouted the
priest5, waving his whirligig; ‘from Roum, blown by the breath of a
hundred devils across the sea! O thieves, robbers, liars, the blessing of
Pir Khan on pigs, dogs, and perjurers! Who will take the Protected of God
to the North to sell charms that are never still to the Amir? The camels
shall not gall, the sons shall not fall sick, and the wives shall remain
faithful while they are away, of the men who give me place in their
caravan. Who will assist me to slipper the King of the Roos with a golden
slipper with a silver heel? The protection of Pir Khan be upon his
labours!’ He spread out the skirts of his gaberdine and pirouetted between
the lines of tethered horses.
‘There starts a caravan from Peshawar to
Kabul in twenty days, Huzrut,’ said the Eusufzai trader. ‘My camels
go therewith. Do thou also go and bring us good luck.’
‘I will go even now!’ shouted the priest.
‘I will depart upon my winged camels, and be at Peshawar in a day! Ho!
Hazar Mir Khan,’ he yelled to his servant, ‘drive out the camels, but let
me first mount my own.’
He leaped on the back of his beast as it
knelt, and, turning round to me, cried: ‘Come thou also, Sahib, a little
along the road, and I will sell thee a charm—an amulet that shall make
thee King of Kafiristan.’
Then the light broke upon me, and I
followed the two camels out of the Serai till we reached open road and the
priest halted.
‘What d’you think o’ that?’ said he in
English. ‘Carnehan can’t talk their patter, so I’ve made him my servant.
He makes a handsome servant. ‘Tisn’t for nothing that I’ve been knocking
about the country for fourteen years. Didn’t I do that talk neat? We’ll
hitch on to a caravan at Peshawar till we get to Jagdallak, and then we’ll
see if we can get donkeys for our camels, and strike into Kafiristan.
Whirligigs for the Amir, O Lor! Put your hand under the camel-bags and
tell me what you feel.’
I felt the butt of a Martini, and another
and another.
‘Twenty of ‘em,’ said Dravot placidly.
‘Twenty of ‘em and ammunition to correspond, under the whirligigs and the
mud dolls.’
‘Heaven help you if you are caught with
those things!’ I said. ‘A Martini is worth her weight in silver among the
Pathans.’
‘Fifteen hundred rupees of capital—every
rupee we could beg, borrow, or steal—are invested on these two camels,’
said Dravot. ‘We won’t get caught. We’re going through the Khaiber with a
regular caravan. Who’d touch a poor mad priest?’
‘Have you got everything you want?’ I
asked, overcome with astonishment.
‘Not yet, but we shall soon. Give us a
memento of your kindness, Brother. You did me a service, yesterday,
and that time in Marwar. Half my Kingdom shall you have, as the saying
is.’ I slipped a small charm compass from my watch-chain and handed it up
to the priest.
‘Good-bye,’ said Dravot, giving me hand
cautiously. ‘It’s the last time we’ll shake hands with an Englishman these
many days. Shake hands with him, Carnehan,’ he cried, as the second camel
passed me.
Carnehan leaned down and shook hands. Then
the camels passed away along the dusty road, and I was left alone to
wonder. My eye could detect no failure in disguises. The scene in the
Serai proved that they were complete to the native mind. There was just
the chance, therefore, that Carnehan and Dravot would be able to wander
through Afghanistan without detection. But, beyond, they would find
death—certain and awful death.
Ten days later a native correspondent
giving me the news of the day from Peshawar, wound up his letter with:
‘There has been much laughter here on account of a certain mad priest who
is going in his estimation to sell petty gauds and insignificant trinkets
which he ascribes as great charms to H.H. the Amir of Bukhara. He passed
through Peshawar and associated himself to the Second Summer caravan that
goes to Kabul. The merchants are pleased because through superstition they
imagine that such mad fellows bring good fortune.’
The two, then, were beyond the Border. I
would have prayed for them, but, that night, a real King died in Europe,
and demanded an obituary notice.
The wheel of the world swings through the
same phases again and again. Summer passed and winter thereafter, and came
and passed again. The daily paper continued and I with it, and upon the
third summer there fell a hot night, a night-issue, and a strained waiting
for something to be telegraphed from the other side of the world, exactly
as had happened before. A few great men had died in the past two years,
the machines worked with more clatter, and some of the trees in the office
garden were a few feet taller. But that was all the difference.
I passed over to the press-room, and went
through just such a scene as I have already described. The nervous tension
was stronger than it had been two years before, and I felt the heat more
acutely. At three o’clock I cried, ‘Print off,’ and turned to go when
there crept to my chair what was left of a man. He was bent into a circle,
his head was sunk between his shoulders, and he moved his feet one over
the other like a bar. I could hardly see whether he walked or crawled—this
rag-wrapped, whining cripple who addressed me by name, crying that he was
come back. ‘Can you give me a drink?’ he whimpered. ‘For the Lord’s sake
give me a drink!’
I went back to the office, the man
following with groans of pain, and I turned on the lamp.
‘Don’t you know me?’ he gasped, dropping
into a chair, and he turned his drawn face, surmounted by a shock of grey
hair, to the light.
I looked at him intently. Once before had I
seen eyebrows that met over the nose in an inch-broad black band, but for
the life of me I could not tell where.
‘I don’t know you,’ I said, handing him the
whisky. ‘What can I do for you?’
He took a gulp of the spirit raw, and
shivered in spite of the suffocating heat.
‘I’ve come back,’ he repeated; ‘and I was
the King of Kafiristan—me and Dravot—crowned Kings we was! In this office
we settled it—you setting there and giving us the books. I am
Peachey—Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan, and you’ve been setting here ever
since—O Lord!’
I was more than a little astonished, and
expressed my feelings accordingly.
‘It’s true,’ said Carnehan, with a dry
cackle, nursing his feet, which were wrapped in rags. ‘True as gospel.
Kings we were, with crowns upon our heads—me and Dravot—poor Dan—oh, poor,
poor Dan, that would never take advice, not though I begged of him!’
‘Take the whisky,’ I said, ‘and take your
own time. Tell me all you can recollect of everything from beginning to
end. You got across the Border on your camels, Dravot dressed as a mad
priest and you his servant. Do you remember that?’
‘I ain’t mad—yet, but I shall be that way
soon. Of course I remember. Keep looking at me, or maybe my words will go
all to pieces. Keep looking at me in my eyes and don’t say anything.’
I leaned forward and looked into his face
as steadily as I could. He dropped one hand upon the table and I grasped
it by the wrist. It was twisted like a bird’s claw, and upon the back was
a ragged red diamond-shaped scar.
‘No, don’t look there. Look at me,’
said Carnehan. ‘That comes afterwards, but for the Lord’s sake don’t
distrack me. We left with that caravan, me and Dravot playing all sorts of
antics to amuse the people we were with. Dravot used to make us laugh in
the evenings when all the people was cooking their dinners—cooking their
dinners, and . . . what did they do then? They lit little fires with
sparks that went into Dravot’s beard, and we all laughed—fit to die.
Little red fires they was, going into Dravot’s big red beard—so funny.’
His eyes left mine and he smiled foolishly.
‘You went as far as Jagdallak with that
caravan,’ I said at a venture, ‘after you had lit those fires. To
Jagdallak, where you turned off to try to get into Kafiristan.’
‘No, we didn’t neither. What are you
talking about? We turned off before Jagdallak, because we heard the roads
was good. But they wasn’t good enough for our two camels—mine and
Dravot’s. When we left the caravan, Dravot took off all his clothes and
mine too, and said we would be heathen, because the Kafirs didn’t allow
Mohammedans to talk to them. So we dressed betwixt and between, and such a
sight as Daniel Dravot I never saw yet nor expect to see again. He burned
half his beard, and slung a sheep-skin over his shoulder, and shaved his
head into patters. He shaved mine, too, and made me wear outrageous things
to look like a heathen. That was in a most mountaineous country, and our
camels couldn’t go along any more because of the mountains. They were tall
and black, and coming home I saw them fight like wild goats—there are lots
of goats in Kafiristan. And these mountains, they never keep still, no
more than the goats. Always fighting they are, and don’t let you sleep at
night.’
‘Take some more whisky,’ I said very
slowly. ‘What did you and Daniel Dravot do when the camels could go no
farther because of the rough roads that led into Kafiristan?’
‘What did which do? There was a party
called Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan that was with Dravot. Shall I tell you
about him? He died out there in the cold. Slap from the bridge fell old
Peachy, turning and twisting in the air like a penny whirligig that you
can sell to the Amir—No; they was two for three ha’pence, those
whirligigs, or I am much mistaken and woful sore . . . And then these
camels were no use, and Peachey said to Dravot—“For the Lord’s sake let’s
get out of this before our heads are chopped off,” and with that they
killed the camels all among the mountains, not having anything in
particular to teat, but first they took off the boxes with the guns and
the ammunition, till two men came along driving four mules. Dravot up and
dances in front of them, singing—“Sell me four mules.” Says the first
man—“If you are rich enough to buy, you are rich enough to rob”; but
before ever he could put his hand to his knife, Dravot breaks his neck
over his knee, and the other party runs away. So Carnehan loaded the mules
with the rifles that was taken off the camels, and together we starts
forward into those bitter cold mountaineous parts, and never a road
broader than the back of your hand.’
He paused for a moment, while I asked him
if he could remember the nature of the country through which he had
journeyed.
‘I am telling you as straight as I can, but
my head isn’t as good as it might be. They drove nails through it to make
me hear better how Dravot died. The country was mountaineous and the mules
were most contrary, and the inhabitants was dispersed and solitary. They
went up and up, and down and down, and that other party, Carnehan, was
imploring of Dravot not to sing and whistle so loud, for fear of bringing
down the tremenjus avalanches. But Dravot says that if a King couldn’t
sing it wasn’t worth being King, and whacked the mules over the rump, and
never took no heed for ten cold days. We came to a big level valley all
among the mountains, and the mules were near dead, so we killed them, not
having anything in special for them or us to eat. We sat upon the boxes,
and played odd and even with the cartridges that was jolted out.
‘Then ten men with bows and arrows ran down
that valley, chasing twenty men with bows and arrows, and the row was
tremenjus. They was fair men—fairer than you or me—with yellow hair and
remarkable well built. Says Dravot, unpacking the guns—“This is the
beginning of the business. We’ll fight for the ten men,” and with that he
first two rifles at the twenty men, and drops one of them at two hundred
yards from the rock where he was sitting. The other men began to run, but
Carnehan and Dravot sits on the boxes picking them off at all ranges, up
and down the valley. Then we goes up to the ten men that had run across
the snow too, and they fires a footy little arrow at us. Dravot he shoots
above their heads and they all falls down flat. Then he walks over them
and kicks them, and then he lifts them up and shakes hands all round to
make them friendly like. He calls them and gives them the boxes to carry,
and waves his hand for all the world as though he was King already. They
takes the boxes and him across the valley and up the hill into a pine wood
on the top, where there was half-a-dozen big stone idols. Dravot he goes
to the biggest—a fellow they call Imbra—and lays a rifle and a cartridge
at his feet, rubbing his nose respectful with his own nose, patting him on
the head, and saluting in front of it. He turns round to the men and nods
his head, and says—“That’s all right. I’m in the know too, and all these
old jim-jams are my friends.” Then he opens his mouth and points down it,
and when the first man brings him food, he says—“No”; and when the second
man brings him food, he says—“No”; but when one of the old priests and the
boss of the village brings him food, he says—“Yes,” very haughty, and eats
it slow. That was how we came to our first village, without any trouble,
just as though we had tumbled from the skies. But we tumbled from one of
those damned rope-bridges, you see, and—you couldn’t expect a man to laugh
much after that?’
‘Take some more whisky and go on,’ I said.
‘That was the first village you came into. How did you get to be
King?’
‘I wasn’t King,’ said Carnehan. ‘Dravot he
was the King, and a handsome man he looked with the gold crown on his head
and all. Him and the other party stayed in that village, and every morning
Dravot sat by the side of old Imbra, and the people came and worshipped.
That was Dravot’s order. Then a lot of men came into the valley, and
Carnehan and Dravot picks them off with the rifles before they knew where
they was, and runs down into the valley and up again the other side and
finds another village, same as the first one, and the people all falls
down flat on their faces, and Dravot says—“Now what is the trouble between
you two villages?” and the people points to a woman, as fair as you or me,
that was carried off, and Dravot takes her back to the first village and
counts up the dead—eight there was. For each dead man Dravot pours a
little milk on the ground and waves his arms like a whirligig, and “That’s
all right,” says he. Then he and Carnehan takes the big boss of each
village by the arm and walks them down into the valley, and shows them how
to scratch a line with a spear right down the valley, and gives each a sod
of turf form both sides of the line. Then all the people comes down and
shouts like the devil and all, and Dravot says—“Go and dig the land, and
be fruitful and multiply,” which they did, though they didn’t understand.
Then we asks the names of things in their lingo—bread and water and fire
and idols and such, and Dravot leads the priest of each village up to the
idol, and says he must sit there and judge the people, and if anything
goes wrong he is to be shot.
‘Next week they was all turning up the land
in the village as quiet as bees and much prettier, and the priests heard
all the complaints and told Dravot in dumb show what it was about. “That’s
just the beginning,” says Dravot. “They think we’re Gods.” He and Carnehan
picks out twenty good men and shows them how to click off a rifle, and
form fours, and advance in line, and they was very pleased to do so, and
clever to see the hang of it. Then he takes out his pipe and is
baccy-pouch and leaves one at one village, and one at the other, and off
we two goes to see what was to be done in the next valley. That was all
rock, and there was a little village there, and Carnehan says—“Send ‘em to
the old valley to plant,” and takes ‘em there, and gives ‘em some land
that wasn’t took before. They were a poor lot, and we blooded ‘em with a
kid before letting ‘em into the new Kingdom. That was to impress the
people, and then they settled down quiet, and Carnehan went back to Dravot
who had got into another valley, all snow and ice and most mountaineous.
There was no people there and the Army got afraid, so Dravot shoots one of
them, and goes on till he finds some people in a village, and the Army
explains that unless the people wants to be killed they had better not
shoot their little matchlocks; for they had matchlocks. We makes friends
with the priest, and I stays there alone with two of the Army, teaching
the men how to drill, and a thundering big Chief comes across the snow
with kettle-drums and horns twanging, because he heard there was a new God
kicking about. Carnehan sights for the brown of the men half a mile across
the snow and wings one of them. Then he sends a message to the Chief that,
unless he wished to be killed, he must come and shake hands with me and
leave his arms behind. The Chief comes alone first, and Carnehan shakes
hands with him and whirls his arms about, same as Dravot used, and very
much surprised that Chief was, and strokes my eyebrows. Then Carnehan goes
alone to the Chief, and asks him in dumb show if he had an enemy he hated.
“I have,” says the Chief. So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and
sets the two of the Army to show them drill, and at the end of two weeks
the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the
Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chief’s men
rushes into a village and takes it, we three Martinis firing into the
brown of the enemy. So we took that village too, and I gives the Chief a
rag from my coat and says, “Occupy till I come”; which was scriptural. By
way of a reminder, when me and the Army was eighteen hundred yards away, I
drops a bullet near him standing on the snow, and all the people falls
flat on their faces. Then I sends a letter to Dravot wherever he be by
land or by sea.’
At the risk of throwing the creature out of
train I interrupted—‘How could you write a letter up yonder?’
‘The letter?--Oh!--The letter! Keep looking
at me between the eyes, please. It was a string-talk letter, that we’d
learned the way of it from a blind beggar in the Punjab.’
I remember that there had once come to the
office a blind man with a knotted twig and a piece of string which he
wound round the twig according to some cipher of his own. He could, after
the lapse of days or hours, repeat the sentence which he had reeled up. He
had reduced the alphabet to eleven primitive sounds, and tried to teach me
the method, but I could not understand.
‘I sent that letter to Dravot,’ said
Carnehan; ‘and told him to come back because this Kingdom was growing too
big for me to handle, and then I struck for the first valley, to see how
the priests were working. They called the village we took along with the
Chief, Bashkai, and the first village we took, Er-Heb. The priests at
Er-Heb was doing all right, but they had a lot of pending cases about land
to show me, and some men from another village had been firing arrows at
night. I went out and looked for that village, and fired four rounds at it
from a thousand yards. That used all the cartridges I cared to spend, and
I waited for Dravot, who had been away two or three months, and I kept my
people quiet.
‘One morning I heard the devil’s own noise
of drums and horns, and Dan Dravot marches down the hill with his Army and
a tail of hundreds of men, and, which was the most amazing, a great gold
crown on his head. “My Gord, Carnehan,” says Daniel, “this is a tremenjus
business, and we’ve got the whole country as far as it’s worth having. I
am the son of Alexander by Queen Semiramis, and you’re my younger brother
and a God too! It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever seen. I’ve been marching
and fighting for six weeks with the Army, and every footy little village
for fifty miles has come in rejoiceful; and more than that, I’ve got the
key of the whole show, as you’ll see, and I’ve got a crown for you! I told
‘em to make two of ‘em at a place called Shu, where the gold lies in the
rock like suet in mutton. Gold I’ve seen, and turquoise I’ve kicked out of
the cliffs, and there’s garnets in the sands of the river, and here’s a
chunk of amber that a man brought me. Call up all he priests and, here,
take your crown.”
‘One of the men opens a black hair bag, and
I slips the crown on It was too small and too heavy, but I wore it for the
glory. Hammered gold it was—five pound weight, like a hoop of a
barrel.
‘”Peachey,” says Dravot, “we don’t want to
fight no more. The Craft’s the trick, so help me!” and he brings forward
that same Chief that I left at Bashkai—Billy Fish we called him
afterwards, because he was so like Billy Fish that drove the big
tank-engine at Mach on the Bolan in the old days. “Shake hands with him,”
says Dravot, and I shook hands and nearly dropped, for Billy Fish gave me
the Grip. I said nothing, but tried him with the Fellow Craft Grip. He
answers all right, and I tried the Master’s Grip, but that was a slip. “A
Fellow Craft he is!” I says to Dan, “Does he know the word? -- “He does,”
says Dan, “and all the priests know. It’s a miracle! The Chiefs and the
priests can work a Fellow Craft Lodge in a way that’s very like ours, and
they’ve cut the marks on the rocks, but they don’t know the Third Degree,
and they’ve come to find out. It’s Gord’s Truth. I’ve known these long
years that the Afghans knew up to the Fellow Craft Degree, but this is a
miracle. A God and a Grand-Master of the Craft am I, and a Lodge in the
Third Degree I will open, and we’ll raise the head priests and the Chiefs
of the Village.”
‘”It’s against all the law,” says I,
“holding a Lodge without warrant from any one; and you know we never held
office in any Lodge.”
‘”It’s a master-stroke o’ policy,” says
Dravot. “It means running the country as easy as a four-wheeled bogie on a
down grade. We can’t stop to inquire now, or they’ll turn against us. I’ve
forty Chiefs at my heel, and passed and raised according to their merit
they shall be. Billet these men on the villages, and see that we run up a
Lodge of some kind. The temple of Imbra will do for the Lodge-room. The
women must make aprons as you show them. I’ll hold a levee of Chiefs
tonight and Lodge tomorrow.”
‘I was fair run off my legs, but I wasn’t
such a fool as not to see what a pull this Craft business gave us. I
showed the priests’ families how to make aprons of the degrees, but for
Dravot’s apron the blue border and marks was made of turquoise lumps on
white hide, not cloth. We took a great square stone in the temple for the
Master’s chair, and little stones for the officers’ chairs, and painted
the black pavement with white squares, and did what we could to make
things regular.
‘At the levee which was held that night on
the hillside with big bonfires, Dravot gives out that him and me were Gods
and sons of Alexander, and Past Grand-Masters in the Craft, and was come
to make Kafiristan a country where every man should eat in peace and drink
in quiet, and especially obey us. Then the Chiefs come round to shake
hands, and they were so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands
with old friends. We gave them names according as they was like men we had
known in India—Billy Fish, Holly Dilworth, Pikky Kergan, that was
Bazar-master when I was at Mhow, and so on, and so on.
‘The most amazing miracles was at
Lodge next night. One of the old priests was watching us continuous, and I
felt uneasy, for I knew we’d have to fudge the Ritual, and I didn’t know
what the man knew. The old priest was a stranger come in from beyond the
village of Bashkai. The minute Dravot puts on that Master’s apron that the
girls had made for him, the priest fetches a whoop and a howl, and tries
to overturn the stone that Dravot was sitting on. “It’s all up now,” I
says. “That comes of meddling with the Craft without warrant!” Dravot
never winked an eye, not when ten priests took and tilted over the
Grand-Master’s chair—which was to say the stone of Imbra. The priests
begins rubbing the bottom end of it to clear away the black dirt, and
presently he shows all the other priests the Master’s Mark, same as was on
Dravot’s apron, cut into the stone. Not even the priests of the temple of
Imbra knew it was there. The old chap falls flat on his face at Dravot’s
feet and kisses ‘em. “Luck again,” says Dravot, across the Lodge to me;
“they say it’s the Missing Mark that no one could understand the why of.
We’re more than safe now.” Then he bangs the butt of his gun for a gavel
and says: “By virtue of the authority vested in me by my own right hand
and the help of Peachey, I declare myself Grand-Master of all Freemasonry
in Kafiristan in this the Mother Lodge o’ the country, and King of
Kafiristan equally with Peachey!” At that he puts on his crown and I puts
on mine—I was doing Senior Warden—and we opens the Lodge in most ample
form. It was an amazing miracle! The priests moved in Lodge through the
first two degrees almost without telling, as if the memory was coming back
to them. After than, Peachey and Dravot raised such as was worthy—high
priests and Chiefs of far-off villages. Billy Fish was the first, and I
can tell you we scared the soul out of him. It was not in any way
according to Ritual, but it served our turn. We didn’t raise more than ten
of the biggest men, because we didn’t want to make the Degree common. And
they was clamouring to be raised.
‘”In another six months,” says Dravot,
“we’ll hold another Communication, and see how you are working.” Then he
asks them about their villages, and learns that they was fighting one
against the other, and were sick and tired of it. And when they weren’t
doing that they was fighting with the Mohammedans. “You can fight those
when they come into our country,” says Dravot. “Tell off every tenth man
of your tribes for a Frontier guard, and send two hundred at a time to
this valley to be drilled. Nobody is going to be shot or speared any more
so long as he does well, and I know that you won’t cheat me, because
you’re white people—sons of Alexander—and not like common, black
Mohammedans. You are my people, and by God,” says he, running off
into English at the end—“I’ll make a damned fine Nation of you, or I’ll
die in the making!”
‘I can’t tell all we did for the next six
months, because Dravot did a lot I couldn’t see the hang of, and he
learned their lingo in a way I never could. My work was to help the people
plough, and now and again go out with some of the Army and see what the
other villages were doing, and make ‘em throw rope-bridges across the
ravines which cut up the country horrid. Dravot was very kind to me, but
when he walked up and down in the pine wood pulling that bloody red beard
of his with both fists I knew he was thinking plans I would not advise
about, and I just waited for orders.
‘But Dravot never showed me disrespect
before the people. They were afraid of me and the Army, but they loved
Dan. He was the best of friends with the priests and the Chiefs; but
anyone could come across the hills with a complaint, and Dravot would hear
him out fair, and call four priests together and say what was to be done.
He used to call in Billy Fish from Bashkai, and Pikky Kergan from Shu, and
an old Chief we called Kafuzelum—it was like enough to his real name—and
hold councils with ‘em when there was any fighting to be done in small
villages. That was his Council of War, and the four preists of Bashkai,
Shu, Khawak, and Madora was his Privy Council. Between the lot of ‘em they
sent me, with forty men and twenty rifles and sixty men carrying
turquoises, into the Ghorband country to buy those hand-made Martini
rifles, that come out of the Amir’s workshops at Kabul, from one of the
Amir’s Herati regiments that would have sold the very teeth out of their
mouths for turquoises.
‘I stayed in Ghorband a month, and gave the
Governor there the pick of my baskets for hush-money, and bribed the
Colonel of the regiment some more, and, between the two and the
tribespeople, we got more than a hundred hand-made Martinis, a hundred
good Kohat Jezails that’ll throw to six hundred yards, and forty man-loads
of very bad ammunition for the rifles. I came back with what I had, and
distributed ‘em among the men that the Chiefs sent in to me to drill.
Dravot was too busy to attend to those things, but the old Army that we
first made helped me, and we turned out five hundred men that could drill,
and two hundred that knew how to hold arms pretty straight. Even those
cork-screwed, hand-made guns was a miracle to them. Dravot talked big
about powder-shops and factories, walking up and down in the pine wood
when the winter was coming on.
‘”I won’t make a Nation,” says he. “I’ll
make an Empire! These men aren’t niggers; they’re English! Look at their
eyes—look at their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit on
chairs in their own houses. They’re the Lost Tribes, or something like it,
and they’ve grown to be English. I’ll take a census in the spring if the
priests don’t get frightened. There must be a fair two million of ‘em in
these hills. The villages are full o’ little children. Two million
people—two hundred and fifty thousand fighting men—and all English! They
only want the rifles and a little drilling. Two hundred and fifty thousand
men, ready to cut in on Russia’s right flank when she tries for India!
Peachey, man,” he says, chewing his bard in great hunks, “we shall be
Emperors—Emperors of the Earth! Rajah Brooke will be a suckling to us.
I’ll treat with the Viceroy on equal terms. I’ll ask him to send me twelve
picked English—to help us govern a bit. There’s Mackray,
Sergeant-pensioner at Segowli—many’s the good dinner he’s given me, and
his wife a pair of trousers. There’s Donkin, the Warder of Tounghoo Jail;
there’s hundreds that I could lay my hands on if I was in India. The
Viceroy shall do it for me. I’ll send a man through in the spring for
those men, and I’ll write for a dispensation from the Grand Lodge for what
I’ve done as Grand-Master. That—and all the Sniders that’ll be thrown out
when the native troops in India take up the Martini. They’ll be worn
smooth, but they’ll do for fighting in these hills. Twelve English, a
hundred thousand Sniders run through the Amir’s country in driblets—I’d be
content with twenty thousand in one year—and we’d be an Empire. When
everything was shipshape I’d hand over the crown—this crown that I’m
wearing now—to Queen Victoria on my knees, and she’d say: ‘Rise up, Sir
Daniel Dravot.’ Oh, it’s big! It’s big, I tell you! But there’s so much to
be done in every place—Bashkai, Khawak, Shu, and everywhere else.”
‘”What is it?” I says. “There are no more
men coming in to be drilled this autumn. Look at those fat, black clouds.
They’re bringing the snow.”
‘”It isn’t that,” says Daniel, putting his
hand very hard on my shoulder; “and I don’t wish to say anything that’s
against you, for no other living man would have followed me and made me
what I am as you have done. You’re a first-class Commander-in-Chief, and
the people know you, but—it’s a big country, and somehow you can’t help
me, Peachey, in the way I want to be helped.”
‘”Go to your blasted priests, then!” I
said, and I was sorry when I made that remark, but it did hurt me sore to
find Daniel talking so superior when I’d drilled all the men, and done all
he told me.
‘”Don’t let’s quarrel, Peachey,” says
Daniel without cursing. “You’re a King too, and the half of this Kingdom
is yours; but can’t you see, Peachey, we want cleverer men than us
now—three or four of ‘em, that we can scatter about for our Deputies. It’s
a hugeous great State, and I can’t always tell the right thing to do, and
I haven’t time for all I want to do, and here’s the winter coming on and
all.” He put half his beard into his mouth, all red like the gold of his
crown.
‘”I’m sorry, Daniel,” says I. “I’ve done
all I could. I’ve drilled the men and shown the people how to stack their
oats better; and I’ve brought in those tinware rifles from Ghorband—but I
know what you’re driving at. I take it Kings always feel oppressed that
way.”
‘”There’s another thing too,” says Dravot,
walking up and down. “The winter’s coming and these people won’t be giving
much trouble, and if they do we can’t move about. I want a wife.”
‘”For God’s sake leave the women alone!” I
says. “We’ve both got all the work we can, though I am a fool.
Remember the Contrack, and keep clear o’ women.”
‘”The Contrack only lasted till such time
as we was Kings; and Kings we have been these months past,” says Dravot,
weighting his crown in his hand. “You go get a wife too, Peachey—a nice,
strappin’, plump girl that’ll keep you warm in the winter. They’re
prettier than English girls, and we can take the pick of ‘em. Boil ‘em
once or twice in hot water and they’ll come out like chicken and
ham.”
‘”Don’t tempt me!” I says. “I will not have
any dealings with a woman not till we are a dam’ side more settled than we
are now. I’ve been doing the work o’ two men, and you’ve been doing the
work o’ three. Let’s lie off a bit, and see if we can get some better
tobacco from Afghan country and run in some good liquor; but no
women.”
‘”Who’s talking o’ women?” says
Dravot. “I said wife—a Queen to breed a King’s son for the King. A
Queen out of the strongest tribe, that’ll make them your blood-brothers,
and that’ll lie by your side and tell you all the people thinks about you
and their own affairs. That’s what I mena.”
‘”Do you remember that Bengali woman I kept
at Mogul Serai when I was a plate-layer?” says I. “A fat lot o’ good she
was to me. She taught me the lingo and one or two other things; but what
happened? She ran away with the Station-master’s servant and half my
month’s pay. Then she turned up at Dadur Junction in tow of a half-caste,
and had the impidence to say I was her husband—all among the drivers in
the running-shed too!”
‘”We’ve done with that,” says Dravot;
“these women are whiter than you or me, and a Queen I will have for the
winter months.”
‘”For the last time o’ asking, Dan, do
not,” I says. “It’ll only bring us harm. The Bible says that Kings
ain’t to waste their strength on women, ‘specially when they’ve got a new
raw Kingdom to work over.”
‘”For the last time of answering I will,”
said Dravot, and he went away through the pine-trees looking like a big
red devil, the sun being on his crown and beard and all.
‘But getting a wife was not as easy as Dan
thought. He put it before the Council, and there was no answer till Billy
Fish said that he’d better ask the girls. Dravot damned them all around.
“What’s wrong with me?” he shouts, standing by the idol Imbra. “Am I a dog
or am I not enough of a man for your wenches? Haven’t I put the shadow of
my hand over this country? Who stopped the last Afghan raid?” It was me
really, but Dravot was too angry to remember. “Who bought your guns? Who
repaired the bridges? Who’s the Grand-Master of the sign cut in the
stone?” says he, and he thumped his hand on the block that he used to sit
on in Lodge, and at Council, which opened like Lodge always. Billy Fish
said nothing and no more did the others. “Keep your hair on, Dan,” said I;
“and ask the girls. That’s how it’s done at Home, and these people are
quite English.”
‘”The marriage of the King is a matter of
State,” says Dan, in a white-hot rage, for he could feel, I hope, that he
was going against his better mind. He walked out of the Council-room, and
the others sat still, looking at the ground.
‘”Billy Fish,” says I to the Chief of
Bashkai, “what’s the difficulty here? A straight answer to a true
friend.”
‘”You know,” says Billy Fish. “How should a
man tell you who knows everything? How can daughters of men marry Gods or
Devils? It’s not proper.”
‘I remembered something like that in the
Bible; but if, after seeing us as long as they had, they still believed we
were Gods, it wasn’t for me to undeceive them.
‘”A God can do anything,” says I. “If the
King is fond of a girl he’ll not let her die.”—“She’ll have to,” said
Billy Fish. “There are all sorts of Gods and Devils in these mountains,
and now and again a girl marries one of them and isn’t seen any more.
Besides, you two know the Mark cut in the stone. Only the Gods know that.
We thought you were men till you showed the sign of the Master.”
‘I wished then that we had explained about
the loss of the genuine secrets of a Master-Mason at the first go-off; but
I said nothing. All that night there was a blowing of horns in a little
dark temple half-way down the hill, and I heard a girl crying fit to die.
One of the priests told us that she was being prepared to marry the
King.
‘”I’ll have no nonsense of that kind,” says
Dan. “I don’t want to interfere with your customs, but I’ll take my own
wife.”—“The girl’s a bit afraid,” says the priest. “She thinks she’s going
to die, and they are a-heartening of her up down in the temple.”
‘”Hearten her very tender, then,” says
Dravot, “or I’ll hearten you with the butt of a gun so you’ll never want
to be heartened again.” He licked his lips, did Dan, and stayed up walking
about more than half the night, thinking of the wife that he was going to
get in the morning. I wasn’t any means comfortable, for I knew that
dealings with a woman in foreign parts, though you was a crowned King
twenty times over, could not but be risky. I got up very early in the
morning while Dravot was asleep, and I saw the priests talking together in
whispers, and the Chiefs talking together too, and they looked at me out
of the corners of their eyes.
‘”What is up, Fish?” I say to the Bashkai
man, who was wrapped up in his furs and looking splendid to behold.
‘”I can’t rightly say,” says he, “but if
you can make the King drop all this nonsense about marriage, you’ll be
doing him and me and yourself a great service.”
‘”That I do believe,” says I. “But sure,
you know, Billy, as well as me, having fought against and for us, that the
King and me are nothing more than two of the finest men that God Almighty
ever made. Nothing more, I do assure you.”
‘”That may be,” says Billy Fish, “and yet I
should be sorry if it was.” He sinks his head upon his great fur cloak for
a minute and thinks. “King,” says he, “be you man or God or Devil, I’ll
stick by you today. I have twenty of my men with me, and they will follow
me. We’ll go to Bashkai until the storm blows over.”
‘A little snow had fallen in the night, and
everything was white except the greasy fat clouds that blew down and down
from the north. Dravot came out with his crown on his head, swinging his
arms and stamping his feet, and looking more pleased than Punch.
‘”For the last time, drop it, Dan,” says I
in a whisper, “Billy Fish here says that there will be a row.”
‘”A row amongst my people!” says Dravot.
“Not much, Peachey, you’re a fool not to get a wife too. Where’s the
girl?” says he with a voice as loud as the braying of a jackass. “Call up
all the Chiefs and priests, and let the Emperor see if his wife suits
him.”
‘There was no need to call anyone. They
were all there leaning on their guns and spears round the clearing in the
centre of the pine wood. A lot of priests went down to the little temple
to bring up the girl, and the horns blew fit to wake the dead. Billy Fish
saunters round and gets as close to Daniel as he could, and behind him
stood his twenty men with matchlocks. Not a man of them under six feet. I
was next to Dravot, and behind me was twenty men of the regular Army. Up
comes the girl, and a strapping wench she was, covered with silver and
turquoises, but white as death, and looking back every minute at the
priests.
‘”She’ll do,” said Dan, looking her over.
“What’s to be afraid of, lass? Come and kiss me.” He puts his arm round
her. She shuts her eyes, gives a bit of a squeak, and down goes her face
in the side of Dan’s flaming red beard.
‘”The slut’s bitten me!” says he, clapping
his hand to his neck, and, sure enough, his hand was red with blood. Billy
Fish and two of his matchlock-men catches hold of Dan by the shoulders and
drags him into the Bashkai lot, while the priests howls in their
lingo—“Neither God nor Devil but a man!” I was all taken aback, for a
priest cut at me in front, and the Army behind began firing into the
Bashkai men.
‘”God A’mighty!” says Dan. “What is the
meaning o’ this?”
‘”Come back! Come away!” says Billy Fish.
“Ruin and Mutiny is the matter. We’ll break for Bashkai if we can.”
‘I tried to give some sort of orders to my
men—the men of the Regular Army—but it was no use, so I fired into the
brown of ‘em with an English Martini and drilled three beggars in a line.
The valley was full of shouting, howling creatures, and every soul was
shrieking, “Not a God or a Devil but only a man!” The Bashkai troops stuck
to Billy Fish for all they were worth, but their matchlocks wasn’t half as
good as the Kabul breech-loaders, and four of them dropped. Dan was
bellowing like a bull, for he was very wrathy; and Billy Fish had a hard
job to prevent him running out at the crowd.
‘”We can’t stand,” says Billy Fish. “Make a
run for it down the valley! The whole place is against us.” The
matchlock-men ran, and we went down the valley in spite of Dravot. He was
swearing horribly and crying out he was King. The priests rolled great
stones on us, and the regular Army fired hard, and there wasn’t more than
six men, not counting Dan, Billy Fish, and Me, that came down to the
bottom of the valley alive.
‘Then they stopped firing and the horns in
the temple blew again. “Come away—for God’s sake come away!” says Billy
Fish. “They’ll send runners out to all the villages before ever we get to
Bashkai. I can protect you there, but I can’t do anything now.”
‘My own notion is that Dan began to go mad
in his head from that hour. He stared up and down like a stuck pig. Then
he was all for walking back alone and killing the priests with his bare
hands; which he could have done. “An Emperor am I,” says Daniel, “and next
year I shall be a Knight of the Queen.”
‘”All right, Dan,” says I, “but come along
now while there’s time.”
‘”It’s your fault,” says he, “for not
looking after yo9ur Army better. There was mutiny in the midst, and you
didn’t know—you damned engine-driving, plate-laying,
missionary’s-pass-hunting hound!” He sat upon a rock and called me every
foul name he could lay tongue to. I was too heart-sick to care, though it
was all his foolishness that brought the smash.
‘”I’m sorry, Dan,” says I, “but there’s no
accounting for natives. This business is our Fifty-Seven. Maybe we’ll make
something out of it yet, when we’ve got to Bashkai.”
‘”Let’s get to Bashkai, then,” says Dan,
“and, by God, when I come back here again I’ll sweep the valley so there
isn’t a bug in a blanket left!”
‘We walked all that day, and all that night
Dan was stumping up and down on the snow, chewing his beard and muttering
to himself.
‘”There’s no hope o’ getting clear,” said
Billy Fish. “The priests will have sent runners to the villages to say
that you are only men. Why didn’t you stick on as Gods till things was
more settled? I’m a dead man,” says Billy Fish, and he throws himself down
on the snow and begins to pray to his Gods.
‘Next morning we was in a cruel bad
country—all up and down, no level ground at all, and no food either. The
six Bashkai men looked at Billy Fish hungry-way as if they wanted to ask
something, but they said never a word. At noon we came to the top of a
flat mountain all covered with snow, and when we climbed up into it,
behold, there was an Army in position waiting in the middle!
‘”The runners have been very quick,” says
Billy Fish, with a little bit of a laugh. “They are waiting for us.”
‘Three or four men began to fire from the
enemy’s side, and a chance shot took Daniel in the calf of the leg. That
brought him to his senses. He looks across the snow at the Army, and sees
the rifles that we had brought into the country.
‘”We’re done for,” says he. “They are
Englishmen, these people—and it’s by blasted nonsense that has brought you
to this. Get back, Billy Fish, and take your men away; you’ve done what
you could, and now cut for it. Carnehan,” says he, “shake hands with me
and go along with Billy. Maybe they won’t kill you. I’ll go and meet ‘em
alone. It’s me that did it. Me, the King!”
“Go!” says I. “Go to Hell, Dan! I’m with
you here. Billy Fish, you clear out, and we two will meet these
folk.”
‘”I’m a Chief,” says Billy Fish, quite
quiet. “I stay with you. My men can go.”
‘The Bashkai fellows didn’t wait for a
second word, but ran off, and Dan and Me and Billy Fish walked across to
where the drums were drumming and the horns were horning. It was
cold—awful cold. I’ve got that cold in the back of my head now. There’s a
lump of it there.’
The punkah-coolies had gone to sleep. Two
kerosene lamps were blazing in the office, and the perspiration poured
down my face and splashed on the blotter as I leaned forward. Carnehan was
shivering, and I feared that his mind might go. I wiped my face, took a
fresh grip of the piteously mangled hands, and said: ‘What happened after
that?’
The momentary shift of my eyes had broken
the clear current.
‘What was you pleased to say?’ whined
Carnehan. ‘They took them without any sound. Not a little whisper all
along the snow, not though the King knocked down the first man that set
hand on him—not though old Peachey fired his last cartridge into the brown
of ‘em. Not a single solitary sound did those swines make. They just
closed up tight, and I tell you their furs stunk. There was a man called
Billy Fish, a good friend of us all, and they cut his throat, Sir, then
and there, like a pig; and the King kicks up the bloody snow and says:
“We’ve had a dashed fine run for our money. What’s coming next?” But
Peachey, Peachey Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt two
friends, he lost his head, Sir. No, he didn’t neither. The King lost his
head, so he did, all along o’ one of those cunning rope-bridges. Kindly
let me have the paper-cutter, Sir. It tilted this way. They marched him a
mile across that snow to a rope-bridge over a ravine with a river at the
bottom. You may have seen such. They prodded him behind like an ox. “Damn
your eyes!” says the King. “D’you suppose I can’t die like a gentleman?”
He turns to Peachey—Peachey that was crying like a child. “I’ve brought
you to this, Peachey,” says he. “Brought you out of your happy life to be
killed in Kafiristan, where you was late Commander-in-Chief of the
Emperor’s forces. Say you forgive me, Peachey.”—“I do,” says Peachey.
“Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.”—“Shake hands, Peachey,” says he.
“I’m going now.” Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he
was plumb in the middle of those dizzy looking ropes—“Cut, you beggars,”
he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and round and
round, twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to fall till he
struck the water, and I could see his body caught on a rock with the gold
crown close beside.
‘But do you know what they did to Peachey
between two pine-trees? They crucified him, Sir, as Peachey’s hand will
show. They used wooden pegs for his hands and his feet; and he didn’t die.
He hung there and screamed, and they took him down next day, and said it
was a miracle that he wasn’t dead. They took him down—poor old Peachey
that hadn’t done them any harm—that hadn’t done them any—‘
He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly,
wiping his eyes with the back of his scarred hands and moaning like a
child for some ten minutes.
‘They was cruel enough to feed him up in
the temple, because they said he was more of a God than old Daniel that
was a man. Then they turned him out on the snow, and told him to go home,
and Peachey came home in about a year, begging along the roads quite safe;
for Daniel Dravot he walked before and said, “Come along, Peachey. It’s a
big thing we’re doing.” The mountains they danced at night, and the
mountains they tried to fall on Peachey’s head, but Dan he held up his
hand, and Peachey came along bent double. He never let go of Dan’s hand,
and he never let go of Dan’s head. They gave it to him as a present in the
temple, to remind him not to come again, and though the crown was pure
gold, and Peachey was starving, never would Peachey sell the same. You
knew Dravot, Sir! You knew Right Worshipful Brother Dravot! Look at him
now!’
He fumbled in the mass of rags round his
bent waist; brought out a black horsehair bag embroidered with silver
thread, and shook therefrom on to my table—the dried withered head of
Daniel Dravot! The morning sun that had long been paling the lamps struck
the red beard and blind sunken eyes; struck, too, a heavy circlet of gold
studded with raw turquoises, that Carnehan placed tenderly on the battered
temples.
‘You be’old now,’ said Carnehan, ‘the
Emperor in his ‘abit as he lived—the King of Kafiristan with his crown
upon his head. Poor old Daniel that was a monarch once!’
I shuddered, for, in spite of defacements
manifold, I recognized the head of the man of Marwar Junction. Carnehan
rose to go. I attempted to stop him. He was not fit to walk abroad. ‘Let
me take away the whisky, and give me a little money,’ he gasped. ‘I was a
King once. I’ll go to the Deputy Commissioner and ask to be set in the
Poorhouse till I get my health. No, thank you, I can’t wait till you get a
carriage for me. I’ve urgent private affairs—in the south—at Marwar.’
He shambled out of the office and departed
in the direction of the Deputy Commissioner’s house. That day at noon I
had occasion to go down the blinding hot Mall, and I saw a crooked man
crawling along the white dust of the roadside, his hat in his hand,
quavering dolorously after the fashion of street-singers at Home. There
was not a soul in sight, and he was out of all possible earshot of houses.
And he sang through his nose, turning his head from right to left:
‘The Son of Man goes forth to war,
A
golden crown to gain;
His blood-red banner streams afar--
Who
follows in his train?’
I waited to hear no more, but put the poor
wretch into my carriage and drove him off to the nearest missionary for
eventual transfer to the Asylum. He repeated the hymn twice while he was
with me whom he did not in the least recognize, and I left him singing it
to the missionary.
Two days later I inquired after his welfare
of the Superintendent of the Asylum.
‘He was admitted suffering from sunstroke.
He died early yesterday morning,’ said the Superintendent. ‘Is it true
that he was half an hour bare-headed in the sun at mid-day?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but do you happen to know
if he had anything upon him by any chance when he died?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ said the
Superintendent.
And there the matter rests.
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