Stories by English Authors_ Orient (英国作家故事集)

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STORIES

by English Authors, Orient

STORIES

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 brother 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, to-day, 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

roadside water. This is why in 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 the 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

STORIES

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 sees things from the

under side 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 were 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 your telegrams 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? 'T won't be

inconveniencing you, because I know that there's precious few pickings to

be got out of these Central India 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

STORIES

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 apartment. 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 India 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 he 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?"

STORIES

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 lead 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

just 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

STORIES

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 foregathered and personated correspondents of

newspapers, and might, if they blackmailed 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 punka-pulling machines, carriage

couplings, and unbreakable swords and axletrees 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

STORIES

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 copyboys 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 come 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 to 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

STORIES

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 and 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,

STORIES

'The office is open. Let's come along and speak to him as turned us back

from 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

you to 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 India 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

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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 to-

morrow."

"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 fourth. It's a mountaineous country, the women of those

parts are very beautiful."

"But that is provided against in the Contrack," said Carnehan. "Neither

Women 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

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STORIES1STORIESbyEnglishAuthors,OrientSTORIES2THEMANWHOWOULDBEKINGBYRUDYARDKIPLINGTheLaw,asquoted,laysdownafairconductoflife,andonenoteasytofollow.Ihavebeenfellowtoabeggaragainandagainundercircumstanceswhichpreventedeitherofusfindingoutwhethertheotherwasworthy.IhavestilltobebrothertoaPrince,thoughIo...

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Stories by English Authors_ Orient (英国作家故事集)

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