Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (32 page)

I thought a good deal, but it seemed better then to reach out for Mulvaney's hand. The demonstration nearly cost me the use of three fingers. Whatever he knows of his weaknesses, Mulvaney is entirely ignorant of his strength.

‘But what do you think?' he repeated, as I was straightening out the crushed fingers.

My reply was drowned in yells and outcries from the nextfire, where ten men were shouting for ‘Orth'ris,'‘Privit Orth'ris,'‘Mistah Or-ther-ris!'‘Deah boy,'‘Cap'n Orth'ris,'‘Field-Marshal Orth'ris,'‘Stanley, you pen'north o' pop, come 'ere to your own comp'ny!' And the cockney, who had been delighting another audience with recondite and Rabelaisian yarns, was shot down among his admirers by the major force.

‘You've crumpled my dress-shirt 'orrid,' said he, ‘an' I shan't sing no more to this 'ere bloomin' drawin'-room.'

Learoyd, roused by the confusion, uncoiled himself, crept behind Ortheris, and slung him aloft on his shoulders.

‘Sing, ye bloomin' hummin' bird!' said he, and Ortheris, beating time on Learoyd's skull, delivered himself, in the raucous voice of the Ratcliffe Highway, of this song: –

My girl she give me the go onst,

When I was a London lad,

An' I went on the drink for a fortnight,

An' then I went to the bad.

The Queen she give me a shillin'

To fight for 'er over the seas;

But Guv'ment built me a fever-trap.

An' Injia give me disease.

Chorus.

Ho! don't you ‘eed what a girl says,

An' don't you go for the beer;

But I was an ass when I was at grass,

An' that is why I'm here.

I fired a shot at a Afghan,

The beggar 'e fired again,

An' I lay on my bed with a 'ole in my 'ed.

An' missed the next campaign!

I up with my gun at a Burman

Who carried a bloomin'
dah,

But the cartridge stuck and the bay'nit bruk,

An' all I got was the scar.

Chorus.

Ho! don't you aim at a Afghan,

When you stand on the sky-line clear;

An' don't you go for a Burman

If none o' your friends is near.

I served my time for a corp'ral.

An' wetted my stripes with pop,

For I went on the bend with a intimate friend,

An' finished the night in the ‘shop.'

I served my time for a sergeant;

The colonel ‘e sez ‘No!

The most you'll see is full CB.'
¹

An'… very next night 'twas so.

Chorus.

Ho! don't you go for a corp'ral

Unless your 'ed is clear;

But I was an ass when I was at grass,

An' that is why I'm 'ere.

I've tasted the luck o' the army

In barrack an' camp an' clink,

An' I lost my tip through the bloomin' trip

Along o' the women an' drink.

I'm down at the heel o' my service,

An, when I am laid on the shelf,

My very wust friend from beginning to end

By the blood of a mouse was myself!

Chorus.

Ho! don't you 'eed what a girl says,

An' don't you go for the beer;

But I was an ass when I was at grass

An' that is why I'm 'ere.

‘Ay, listen to our little man now, singin' an' shoutin' as tho' trouble had niver touched him. D'you remember when he went mad with the home-sickness?' said Mulvaney, recalling a never-to-be-forgotten season when Ortheris waded through the deep waters of affliction and behaved abominably. ‘But he's talkin' bitter truth, though. Eyah!

‘My very worst frind from beginnin' to ind

By the blood ava mouse was mesilf!'

‘Harkout' he continued, jumping to his feet.

‘What did I tell you, sorr?'

Fttl', spttl', whttl' went the rifles of the picket in the darkness, and we heard their feet rushing towards us as Ortheris tumbled past me and into his great-coat. It is an impressive thing, even in peace, to see an armed camp spring to life with clatter of accoutrements, click of Martini levers, and blood curdling speculations as to the fate of missing boots. ‘Pickets dhriven in', said Mulvaney, staring like a buck at bay into the soft, clinging gloom. ‘Stand by an' kape close to us. If 'tis cav'lry, they may blundher into the fires'.

Tr-ra-ra' -ta-ra-la' sung the thrice blessed bugle, and the rush to form square began. There is much rest and peace in the heart of a square if you arrive in time, and are not trodden upon too frequently. The smell of leather belts, fatigue uniform and packed humanity is comforting.

A dull grumble, that seemed to come from every point of the compass, at once, struck our listening ears, and little thrills of excitement ran down the faces of the square. Those who write so learnedly about judging distance by sound should hear cavalry on the move at night. A high-pitched yell on the left told us that the disturbers were friends, the cavalry of the attack, who had missed their direction, in the darkness, and were feeling blindly for some sort of support and camping-ground. The difficulty explained, they jingled on.

‘Double pickets out there; by your arms lie down and sleep the rest', said the major, and the square melted away as the men scrambled for their places by the fire.

When I woke I saw Mulvaney, the night-dew gemming his moustache, leaning on his rifle at picket, lonely as Prometheus on his rock, with I know not what vultures tearing his liver.

¹
Confined to barracks.

THE MARK OF THE BEAST

Your Gods and my Gods–do you or I know which are the stronger?

Native Proverb

East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.

This theory accounts for some of the more unnecessary horrors of life in India; it may be stretched to explain my story.

My friend Strickland of the Police, who knows as much of natives of India as is good for any man, can bear witness to the facts of the case. Dumoise, our doctor, also saw what Strickland and I saw. The inference which he drew from the evidence was entirely incorrect. He is dead now; he died in a rather curious manner, which has been elsewhere described.

When Fleete came to India he owned a little money and some land in the Himalayas, near a place called Dharmsala. Both properties had been left him by an uncle, and he came out to finance them. He was a big, heavy, genial, and inoffensive man. His knowledge of natives was, of course, limited, and he complained of the difficulties of the language.

He rode in from his place in the hills to spend New Year in the station, and he stayed with Strickland. On New Year's Eve there was a big dinner at the club, and the night was excusably wet. When men foregather from the uttermost ends of the Empire they have a right to be riotous. The Frontier had sent down a contingent o' Catch-'em-Alive-O's who had not seen twenty white faces for a year, and were used to ride fifteen miles to dinner at the next Fort at the risk of a Khyberee bullet where their drinks should lie. They profited by their newsecurity, for they tried to play pool with a curled-up hedgehog found in the garden, and one of them carried the marker round the room in his teeth. Half a dozen planters had come in from the south and were talking ‘horse' to the Biggest Liar in Asia, who was trying to cap all their stories at once. Everybody was there, and there was a general closing up of ranks and taking stock of our losses in dead or disabled that had fallen during the past year. It was a very wet night, and I remember that we sang ‘Auld Lang Syne' with our feet in the Polo Championship Cup, and our heads among the stars, and swore that we were all dear friends. Then some of us went away and annexed Burma, and some tried to open up the Soudan and were opened up by Fuzzies in that cruel scrub outside Suakim, and some found stars and medals, and some were married, which was bad, and some did other things which were worse, and the others of us stayed in our chains and strove to make money on insufficient experiences.

Fleete began the night with sherry and bitters, drank champagne steadily up to dessert, then raw, rasping Capri with all the strength of whisky, took Benedictine with his coffee, four or five whiskies and sodas to improve his pool strokes, beer and bones at half-past two, winding up with old brandy. Consequently, when he came out, at half-past three in the morning, into fourteen degrees of frost, he was very angry with his horse for coughing, and tried to leapfrog into the saddle. The horse broke away and went to his stables; so Strickland and I formed a Guard of Dishonour to take Fleete home.

Our road lay through the bazaar, close to a little temple of Hanuman, the Monkey-god, who is a leading divinity worthy of respect. All gods have good points, just as have all priests. Personally, I attach much importance to Hanuman, and am kind to his people – the great grey apes of the hills. One never knows when one may want a friend.

There was a light in the temple, and as we passed we could hear voices of men chanting hymns. In a native temple the priests rise at all hours of the night to do honour to their god. Before we would stop him, Fleete dashed up the steps, pattedtwo priests on the back, and was gravely grinding the ashes of his cigar-butt in to the forehead of the red stone image of Hanuman. Strickland tried to drag him out, but he sat down and said solemnly:

‘Shee that? ‘Mark of the B-beasht!
I
made it. Ishn't it fine?'

In half a minute the temple was alive and noisy, and Strickland, who knew what came of polluting gods, said that things might occur. He, by virtue of his official position, long residence in the country, and weakness for going among the natives, was known to the priests and he felt unhappy. Fleete sat on the ground and refused to move. He said that ‘good old Hanuman' made a very soft pillow.

Then, without any warning, a Silver Man came out of a recess behind the image of the god. He was perfectly naked in that bitter, bitter cold, and his body shone like frosted silver, for he was what the Bible calls ‘a leper as white as snow'. Also he had no face, because he was a leper of some years' standing, and his disease was heavy upon him. We two stooped to haul Fleete up, and the temple was filling and filling with folk who seemed to spring from the earth, when the Silver Man ran in under our arms, making a noise exactly like the mewing of an otter, caught Fleete round the body and dropped his head on Fleete's breast before we could wrench him away. Then he retired to a corner and sat mewing while the crowd blocked all the doors.

The priests were very angry until the Silver Man touched Fleete. That nuzzling seemed to sober them.

At the end of a few minutes' silence one of the priests came to Strickland and said, in perfect English, ‘Take your friend away. He has done with Hanuman but Hanuman has not done with him.' The crowd gave room and we carried Fleete into the road.

Strickland was very angry. He said that we might all three have been knifed, and that Fleete should thank his stars that he had escaped without injury.

Fleete thanked no one. He said that he wanted to go to bed. He was gorgeously drunk.

We moved on, Strickland silent and wrathful, until Fleetewas taken with violent shivering fits and sweating. He said that the smells of the bazaar were overpowering, and he wondered why slaughter-houses were permitted so near English residences. ‘Can't you smell the blood?' said Fleete.

We put him to bed at last, just as the dawn was breaking, and Strickland invited me to have another whisky and soda. While we were drinking he talked of the trouble in the temple, and admitted that it baffled him completely. Strickland hates being mystified by natives, because his business in life is to overmatch them with their own weapons. He has not yet succeeded in doing this, but in fifteen or twenty years he will have made some small progress.

‘They should have mauled us,' he said, ‘instead of mewing at us. I wonder what they meant. I don't like it one little bit.'

I said that the Managing Committee of the temple would in all probability bring a criminal action against us for insulting their religion. There was a section of the Indian Penal Code which exactly met Fleete's offence. Strickland said he only hoped and prayed that they would do this. Before I left I looked into Fleete's room, and saw him lying on his right side, scratching his left breast. Then I went to bed cold, depressed, and unhappy, at seven o'clock in the morning.

At one o'clock I rode over to Strickland's house to inquire after Fleete's head. I imagined that it would be a sore one. Fleete was breakfasting and seemed unwell. His temper was gone, for he was abusing the cook for not supplying him with an underdone chop. A man who can eat raw meat after a wet night is a curiosity. I told Fleete this and he laughed.

‘You breed queer mosquitoes in these parts,' he said. ‘I've been bitten to pieces, but only in one place.'

‘Let's have a look at the bite,' said Strickland. ‘It may have gone down since this morning.'

While the chops were being cooked, Fleete opened his shirt and showed us, just over his left breast, a mark, the perfect double of the black rosettes – the five or six irregular blotches arranged in a circle – on a leopard's hide. Strickland looked and said, ‘It was only pink this morning. It's grown black now.'

Fleete ran to a glass.

‘By Jove!' he said, ‘this is nasty. What is it?'

We could not answer. Here the chops came in, all red and juicy, and Fleete bolted three in a most offensive manner. He ate on his right grinders only, and threw his head over his right shoulder as he snapped the meat. When he had finished, it struck him that he had been behaving strangely, for he said apologetically, ‘I don't think I ever felt so hungry in my life. I've bolted like an ostrich.'