KIM
Joseph Rudyard Kipling
Jan 1939 · YouHui Culture Publishing Company
eBook
187
Pages
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Chapter 1
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgement Day,
Be gentle when `the heathen' pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!
Buddha at Kamakura.
He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick
platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher - the Wonder House, as the natives call the
Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that fire-breathing dragon, hold the
Punjab, a for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.
There was some justification for Kim - he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy off the
trunnions - since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. Though he was
burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his
mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of
perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white - a poor white of the
very poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium, and
pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where the cheap cabs
wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's sister; but his mother had been
nursemaid in a Colonel's family and had married Kimball O'Hara, a young coloursergeant
of the Mavericks, an Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind,
Punjab, and Delhi Railway, and his Regiment went home without him. The wife died
of cholera in Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down the line
with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies and chaplains, anxious for the child,
tried to catch him, but O'Hara drifted away, till he came across the woman who took
opium and learned the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India. His estate
at death consisted of three papers - one he called his ne varietur because those words
were written below his signature thereon, and another his clearance-certificate. The
third was Kim's birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious
opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim to part
with them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic - such magic as men practised
over yonder behind the Museum, in the big blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher - the Magic
House, as we name the Masonic Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day,
and Kim's horn would be exalted between pillars - monstrous pillars - of beauty and
strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest Regiment in
the world, would attend to Kim - little Kim that should have been better off than his
father. Nine hundred first-class devils, whose God was a Red Bull on a green field,
would attend to Kim, if they had not forgotten O'Hara - poor O'Hara that was gangforeman
on the Ferozepore line. Then he would weep bitterly in the broken rush chair
on the veranda. So it came about after his death that the woman sewed parchment,
paper, and birth-certificate into a leather amulet-case which she strung round Kim's
neck.
`And some day,' she said, confusedly remembering O'Hara's prophecies, `there will
come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall
horse, yes, and' - dropping into English - `nine hundred devils.'
`Ah,' said Kim, `I shall remember. A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse will come,
but first, my father said, will come the two men making ready the ground for these matters. That is how my father said they always did; and it is always so when men work magic.'
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