Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (52 page)

‘And the Sahib will not come again?’ said he who had been vaccinated first.

‘That is to be seen,’answered Chinn, warily.

‘Nay, but come as a white man – come as a young man whom we know and love; for, as thou alone knowest, we are a weak people. If we again saw why – thy horse—’ They were picking up their courage.

‘I have no horse. I came on foot – with Bukta, yonder. What is this?’

‘Thou knowest – the Thing that thou has chosen for a night-horse.’ The little men squirmed in fear and awe.

‘Night-horse? Bukta, what is this last tale of children?’

Bukta had been a silent leader in Chinn’s presence since the night of his desertion, and was grateful for a chance-flung question.

‘They know, Sahib,’ he whispered. ‘It is the Clouded Tiger. That that comes from the place where thou didst once sleep. It is thy horse – as it has been these three generations.’

‘My horse! That was a dream of the Bhils!’

‘It is no dream. Do dreams leave the tracks of broad pugs on earth? Why make two faces before dry people? They know of the night-ridings, and they – and they—’

‘Are afraid, and would have them cease.’

Bukta nodded. ‘If thou hast no further need of him. He is thy horse.’

‘The thing leaves a trail, then?’ said Chinn.

‘We have seen it. It is like a village road under the tomb.’

‘Can ye find and follow it for me?’

‘By daylight – if one comes with us, and, above all, stands near by.’

‘I will stand close, and we will see to it that Jan Chinn does not ride any more.’

The Bhils shouted the last words again and again.

From Chinn’s point of view the stalk was nothing more than an ordinary one – down hill, through split and crannied rocks, unsafe, perhaps, if a man did not keep his wits by him, but no worse than twenty others he had undertaken. Yet his men – they refused absolutely to beat, and would only trail – dripped sweat at every move. They showed the marks of enormous pugs that ran, always down hill, to a few hundred feet below Jan Chinn’s tomb, and disappeared in a narrow-moutlied cave. It was an insolently open road, a domestic highway, beaten without thought of concealment.

‘The beggar might be paying rent and taxes,’ Chinn muttered ere he asked whether his friend’s taste ran to cattle or man.

‘Cattle,’ was the answer. ‘Two heifers a week. We drive them for him at the foot of the hill. It is his custom. If we did not, he might seek us.’

‘Blackmail and piracy,’ said Chinn. ‘I can’t say I fancy going into the cave after him. What’s to be done?’

The Bhils fell back as Chinn lodged himself behind a rock with his rifle ready. Tigers, he knew, were shy beasts, but one who had been long cattle-fed in this sumptuous style might prove overbold.

‘He speaks!’ someone whispered from the rear. ‘He knows, too.’

‘Well, of
all
theinfernal cheek!’ said Chinn. There was an angry growl from the cave – a direct challenge.

‘Come out then,’ Chinn shouted. ‘Come out of that! Let’s have a look at you.’

The brute knew well enough that there was some connection between brown nude Bhils and his weekly allowance; but the white helmet in the sunlight annoyed him, and he did not approve of the voice that broke his rest. Lazily as a gorged snake he dragged himself out of the cave, and stood yawning and blinking at the entrance. The sunlight fell upon his flat right side, and Chinn wondered. Never had he seen a tiger marked after this fashion. Except for his head, which was staringly barred, he was dappled – not striped, but dappled like a child’s rocking-horse in rich shades of smoky black on red gold. That portion of his belly and throat which should have been white was orange, and his tail and paws were black.

He looked leisurely for some ten seconds, and then deliberately lowered his head, his chin dropped and drawn in, staring intently at the man. The effect of this was to throw forward the round arch of his skull, with two broad bands across it, while below the bands glared the unwinking eyes; so that, head on, as he stood, he showed something like a diabolically scowling pantomime-mask. It was a piece of natural mesmerism that he had practised many times on his quarry, and though Chinn was by no means a terrified heifer, he stood for a while, held by the extraordinary oddity of the attack. The head – the body seemed to have been packed away behind it – the ferocious,skull-like head, crept nearer, to the switching of an angry tail-tip in the grass. Left and right the Bhils had scattered to let Jan Chinn subdue his own horse.

‘My word!’ he thought. ‘He’s trying to frighten me!’ and fired between the saucer-like eyes, leaping aside upon the shot.

A big coughing mass, reeking of carrion, bounded past him up the hill, and he followed discreetly. The tiger made no attempt to turn into the jungle: he was hunting for sight and breath – nose up, mouth open, the tremendous fore-legs scattering the gravel in spurts.

‘Scuppered!’ said John Chinn, watching the flight. ‘Now if he was a partridge he’d tower. Lungs must be full of blood.’

The brute had jerked himself over a boulder and fallen out of sight the other side. John Chinn looked over with a ready barrel. But the red trail led straight as an arrow even to his grandfather’s tomb, and there, among the smashed spirit bottles and the fragments of the mud image, the life left with a flurry and a grunt.

‘If my worthy ancestor could see that,’ said John Chinn, ‘he’d have been proud of me. Eyes, lower jaw, and lungs. A very nice shot.’ He whistled for Bukta as he drew the tape over the stiffening bulk.

‘Ten – six – eight – by Jove! It’s nearly eleven – call it eleven. Fore-arm, twenty-four – five – seven and a half. A short tail, too; three feet one. But
what
a skin! Oh, Bukta! Bukta! The men with the knives swiftly.’

‘Is he beyond question dead?’ said an awe-stricken voice behind a rock.

‘That was not the way I killed my first tiger,’ said Chinn. ‘I did not think that Bukta would run. I had no second gun.’

‘It – it is the Clouded Tiger,’ said Bukta, unheeding the taunt. ‘He is dead.’

Whether all the Bhils, vaccinated and unvaccinated, of the Satpuras had lain by to see the kill, Chinn could not say; but the whole hill’s flank rustled with little men, shouting, singing, and stampeding. And yet, till he had made the first cut in the splendid skin, not a man would take a knife; and, when the shadows fell, they ran from the red-stained tomb, and nopersuasion would bring them back till dawn. So Chinn spent a second night in the open, guarding the carcass from jackals, and thinking about his ancestor.

He returned to the lowlands to the triumphal chant of an escorting army three hundred strong, the Mahratta vaccinator close at his elbow, and the rudely dried skin a trophy before him. When that army suddenly and noiselessly disappeared, as quail in high corn, he argued he was near civilisation, and a turn in the road brought him upon the camp of a wing of his own corps. He left the skin on a cart-tail for the world to see, and sought the Colonel.

‘They’re perfectly right,’ he explained earnestly. ‘There isn’t an ounce of vice in ’em. They were only frightened. I’ve vaccinated the whole boiling, and they like it awfully. What are – what are we doing here, sir?’

‘That’s what I’m trying to find out,’ said the Colonel. ‘I don’t know yet whether we’re a piece of a brigade or a police force. However, I think we’ll call ourselves a police force. How did you manage to get a Bhil vaccinated?’

‘Well, sir,’ said Chinn, ‘I’ve been thinking it over, and, as far as I can make out, I’ve got a sort of hereditary influence over ’em’.

‘So I know, or I wouldn’t have sent you; but
what,
exactly?’

‘It’s rather rummy. It seems, from what I can make out, that I’m my own grandfather reincarnated, and I’ve been disturbing the peace of the country by riding a pad-tiger of nights. If I hadn’t done that, I don’t think they’d have objected to the vaccination; but the two together were more than they could stand. And so, sir, I’ve vaccinated ’em, and shot my tiger-horse as a sort o’ proof of good faith. You never saw such a skin in your life.’

The Colonel tugged his moustache thoughtfully. ‘Now, how the deuce,’ said he, ‘am I to include that in my report?’

Indeed, the official version of the Bhils’ anti-vaccinationstampede said nothing about Lieutenant John Chinn, hisgodship. But Bukta knew, and the corps knew, and every Bhilin the Satpura hills knew.

And now Bukta is zealous that John Chinn shall swiftly bewedded and impart his powers to a son; for if the Chinn succession fails, and the little Bhils are left to their own imaginings, there will be fresh trouble in the Satpuras.

WIRLEESS

It’s a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn’t it?’ said Mr Shaynor, coughing heavily. ‘Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell me – storms, hills, or anything; but if that’s true we shall know before morning.’

‘Of course it’s true,’ I answered, stepping behind the counter. ‘Where’s old Mr Cashell?’

‘He’s had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you’d very likely drop in.’

‘Where’s his nephew?’

‘Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here and the batteries electrified all the water-supply and’ – he giggled – ‘the ladies got shocked when they took their baths.’

‘I never heard of that.’

‘The hotel wouldn’t exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what young Mr Cashell tells me, they’re trying to signal from here to Poole, and they’re using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor’s nephew and all that (and it will be in the papers, too), it doesn’t matter how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?’

‘Very much. I’ve never seen this game. Aren’t you going to bed?’

‘We don’t close till ten on Saturdays. There’s a good deal of influenza in town, too, and there’ll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning. I generally sleep in the chair here. It’s warmer than jumping out of bed every time. Bitter cold, isn’t it?’

‘Freezing hard. I’m sorry your cough’s worse.’

‘Thank you. I don’t mind cold so much. It’s this wind that fair cuts me to pieces.’ He coughed again, hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for ammoniated quinine. ‘We’ve just run out of it in bottles, madam,’ said Mr Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, ‘but if you will wait two minutes, I’ll make it up for you, madam.’

I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor had ripened into friendship. It was Mr Cashell who revealed to me the purpose and power of Apothecaries’ Hall that time a fellow-chemist had made an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and when error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.

‘A disgrace to our profession,’ said the thin mild-eyed man, hotly, after studying the evidence. ‘You couldn’t do a better service to the profession than report him to Apothecaries’ Hall.’

I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such an apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack. I conceived great respect for Apothecaries’Hall and esteem for Mr Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr Shaynor came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr Cashell. ‘They forget,’ said he, ‘that first and foremost the compounder is a medicine-man. On him depends the physician’s reputation. He holds it literally in the hollow of his hand, sir.’

Mr Shaynor’s manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the romance of drugs – their discovery, preparation, packing, and export – but it led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of physicians, we met.

Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes – of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern counties, and of his red-headed father, a small jobbing master at Kirby Moors, who died when he was achild; of the examinations he had passed (Apothecaries’ Hall is a hard master in this respect); of his dreams of a shop in London; of his hate for the price-cutting co-operative stores; and, most interesting, of his mental attitude toward customers.

‘There’s a way you get into,’ he told me, ‘of serving them quite carefully, and, I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I’ve been reading Christie’s “New Commercial Plants” all this autumn, and that needs keeping your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn’t a prescription, of course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christie in my head, and at the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny wrong at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general run of ’em in my sleep, almost.’

For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr Cashell’s unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he should, as I have said, invite me to see the result.

The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr Shaynor and I stamped on the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars – red, green, and blue – of the sort that led Rosamond to parting with her shoes, blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond-cream in the air. Mr Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked cayenne-pepper jujubes for our stomach’s sake. The brutal east wind had cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our window-frame.

‘They ought to take these poultry in – all knocked about like that,’ said Mr Shaynor. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel perishing? See that old hare! The wind’s nearly blowing the fur off him.’

I saw the belly-fur of the dead beast blown apart in ridgesand streaks as the wind caught it, showing bluish skin underneath. ‘Bitter cold,’ said Mr Shaynor, shuddering. ‘Fancy going out on a night like this! Oh, here’s young Mr Cashell.’

The door of the inner office behind the dispensary opened, and an energetic, spade-bearded man stepped forth, rubbing his hands.

‘I want a bit of tin-foil, Shaynor,’ he said. ‘Good-evening. My uncle told me you might be coming.’ This to me, as I began the first of a hundred questions.

‘I’ve everything in order,’ he replied. ‘We’re only waiting until Poole calls us up. Excuse me a minute. You can come in whenever you like – but I’d better be with the instruments. Give me that tin-foil. Thanks.’

While we were talking, a girl – evidently no customer – had come into the shop, and the face and bearing of Mr Shaynor changed. She leaned confidently across the counter.

‘But I can’t,’ I heard him whisper uneasily – the flush on his cheek was dull red, and his eyes shone like a drugged moth’s. ‘I can’t. I tell you I’m alone in the place.’

‘No, you aren’t. Who’s
that?
Let him look after it for half an hour. A brisk walk will do you good. Ah, come now, John.’

‘But he isn’t—’

‘I don’t care. I want you to; we’ll only go round by the church. If you don’t—’

He crossed to where I stood in the shadow of the dispensary counter, and began some sort of broken apology about a lady-friend.

‘Yes,’ she interrupted. ‘You take the shop for half an hour – to oblige
me,
won’t you?’

She had a singularly rich and promising voice that well matched her outline.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it – but you’d better wrap yourself up Mr Shaynor.’

‘Oh, a brisk walk ought to help me. We’re only going round by St Agnes Church.’ I heard him cough grievously as they went out together.

I refilled the stove, and, after profligate expenditure of Mr Cashell’s coal, drove much warmth into the shop. I exploredmany of the glass-knobbed drawers that lined the walls, tasted some disconcerting drugs, and, by the aid of a few cardamoms, ground ginger, chloric-ether, and dilute alcohol, manufactured a new and wildish drink, of which I bore a glassful to young Mr Cashell, busy in the back office. He laughed shortly when I told him that Mr Shaynor had stepped out – but a frail coil of wire held all his attention, and he had no word for me bewildered among the batteries and rods. The noise of the sea on the beach began to make itself heard as the traffic in the street ceased. Then briefly, but very lucidly, he gave me the names and uses of the mechanism that crowded the tables and the floor.

‘When do you expect to get the messages from Poole?’ I demanded, sipping my liquor out of a graduated glass.

‘About midnight, if everything is in order. We’ve got our installation-pole fixed to the roof of the house. I shouldn’t advise you to turn on a tap or anything tonight. We’ve connected up with the plumbing, and all the water will be electrified.’ He repeated to me the history of the agitated ladies at the hotel at the time of the first installation.

‘But what
is
it?’ I asked. ‘Electricity is out of my beat altogether.’

‘Ah, if you knew
that
you’d know something nobody knows. It’s just It – what we call Electricity, but the magic – the manifestations – the Hertzian waves – are all revealed by
this.
The coherer, we call it.’

He picked up a glass tube not much thicker than a thermometer, in which, almost touching, were two tiny silver plugs and between them an infinitesimal pinch of metallic dust. ‘That’s all,’ he said, proudly, as though himself responsible for the wonder. ‘That is the thing that will reveal to us the powers – whatever the powers may be – at work – through space – a long distance away.’

Just then Mr Shaynor returned alone and stood coughing his heart out on the mat.

‘Serves you right for being such a fool,’ said young Mr Cashell, as annoyed as myself at the interruption. ‘Never mind – we’ve all the night before us to see wonders.’

Shaynor clutched the counter, his handkerchief to his lips. When he brought it away I saw two bright red stains.

‘I – I’ve got a bit of a rasped throat from smoking cigarettes,’ he panted. ‘I think I’ll try a cubeb.’

‘Better take some of this. I’ve been compounding while you’ve been away.’ I handed him the brew.

‘’Twon’t make me drunk, will it? I’m almost a teetotaller. My word! That’s grateful and comforting.’

He set down the empty glass to cough afresh.

‘Brr! But it was cold out there! I shouldn’t care to be lying in my grave a night like this. Don’t
you
ever have a sore throat from smoking?’ He pocketed his handkerchief after a furtive peep.

‘Oh, yes, sometimes,’ I replied, wondering, while I spoke, into what agonies of terror I should fall if ever I saw those bright-red danger-signals under my nose. Young Mr Cashell among the batteries coughed slightly to show that he was quite ready to continue his scientific explanations, but I was thinking still of the girl with the rich voice and the significantly cut mouth, at whose command I had taken charge of the shop. It flashed across me that she distantly resembled the seductive shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertisement whose charms were unholily heightened by the glare from the red bottle in the window. Turning to make sure, I saw Mr Shaynor’s eyes bent in the same direction, and by instinct recognized that the flamboyant thing was to him a shrine. ‘What do you take for your – cough?’ I asked.

‘Well, I’m the wrong side of the counter to believe much in patent medicines. But there are asthma cigarettes and there are pastilles. To tell you the truth, if you don’t object to the smell, which is very like incense, I believe, though I’m not a Roman Catholic, Blaudet’s Cathedral Pastilles relieve me as much as anything.’

‘Let’s try.’ My chances of raiding chemists’ shops are few, and I make the most of them. We unearthed the pastilles – brown, gummy cones of benzoin – and set them alight under the toilet-water advertisement, where they fumed in thin blue spirals.

‘Of course,’ said Mr Shaynor, to my question, ‘what one uses in the shop for one’s self comes out of one’s own pocket. Why, stock-taking in our business is nearly the same as with jewellers – and I can’t say more than that. But one gets them’– he pointed to the pastille-box – ‘at trade prices.’ Evidently this censing of the gay, seven-tinted wench was an established ritual which cost something.

‘And when do we shut up shop?’

‘We stay like this all night. The guv – old Mr Cashell – doesn’t believe in locks and shutters as compared with electric light. Besides it brings trade. I’ll just sit here in the chair by the stove and doze off, if you don’t mind. Electricity isn’t my prescription.’

The energetic young Mr Cashell snorted within and Shaynor settled himself up in his chair over which he had thrown a staring red, black, and yellow Austrian jute blanket, rather like a tablet-cover. I cast about, amid patent-medicine pamphlets, for something to read, but finding little, returned to the manufacture of the new drink. The Italian warehouse took down its game and went to bed. Across the street blank shutters flung back the gas-light in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in goose-flesh under the scouring of the savage wind, and we could hear, long ere he passed, the policeman flapping his arms to keep himself warm. Within, the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the pastilles and a score of drug and perfume and soap scents. Our electric lights, set low down in the windows before the tun-bellied Rosamond jars, flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke into kaleidoscopic lights on the faceted knobs of the drug-drawers, the cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They flushed the white tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the nickel-silver counter-rails and turned the polished mahogany counter-panels to the likeness of intricate grained marbles – slabs of porphyry and malachite. Mr Shaynor unlocked a drawer and took out a meagre bundle of letters. From my place by the stove, I could see the scalloped edges of the paper with a flaring monogram in the corner and couldeven smell the reek of chypre. At each page he turned toward the toilet-water lady of the advertisement and devoured her with luminous eyes. He had drawn the Austrian blanket over his shoulders and among those warring lights he looked more than ever the incarnation of a drugged moth – a tiger moth as I thought.