Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (43 page)

‘What is it?’ asked the Maharaj sharply.

‘You’ve got a carriage and ten troopers,’ replied Tarvin. ‘You’ve only got to go there and find out.’

He drew a letter from his breast-pocket, glancing with liking at the two-cent American stamp, and scribbled a note to Kate on the envelope, which ran thus: —

‘Keep the little fellow with you today. There’s a wicked look about things this morning. Find something for him to do; get up games for him; do anything, but keep him away from the palace. I got your note. All right. I understand.’

He called the Maharaj to him, and handed him the note. ‘Take this to Miss Kate, like a little man, and say I sent you,’ he said.

‘My son is not an orderly,’ said the King surlily.

‘Your son is not very well, and I’m the first to speak the truth to you about him, it seems to me,’ said Tarvin. ‘Gently on that colt’s mouth — you.’ The Foxhall colt was dancing between his grooms.

‘You’ll be thrown,’ said the Maharaj Kunwar, in an ecstasy of delight. ‘He throws all his grooms.’

At that moment a shutter in the courtyard clicked distinctly three times in the silence.

One of the grooms passed to the off side of the plunging colt deftly. Tarvin put his foot into the stirrup to spring up, when the saddle turned completely round. Some one let go of the horse’s head, and Tarvin had just time to kick his foot free as the animal sprang forward.

‘I’ve seen slicker ways of killing a man than that,’ he said quietly. ‘Bring my friend back,’ he added to one of the grooms; and when the Foxhall colt was under his hands again he cinched him up as the beast had not been girt since he had first felt the bit. ‘Now,’ he said, and leaped into the saddle, as the King clattered out of the courtyard.

The colt reared on end, landed stiffly on his forefeet, and lashed out. Tarvin, sitting him with the cow-boy seat, said quietly to the child, who was still watching his movements, ‘Run along, Maharaj. Don’t hang around here. Let me see you started for Miss Kate.’

The boy obeyed, with a regretful glance at the prancing horse. Then the Foxhall colt devoted himself to unseating his rider. He refused to quit the courtyard, though Tarvin argued with him, first behind the saddle, and then between the indignant ears. Accustomed to grooms who slipped off at the first sign of rebellion, the Foxhall colt was wrathful. Without warning, he dashed through the archway, wheeled on his haunches, and bolted in pursuit of the Maharajah’s mare. Once in the open, sandy country, he felt that he had a field worthy of his powers. Tarvin also saw his opportunity. The Maharajah, known in his youth as a hard rider among a nation of perhaps the hardest riders on earth, turned in his saddle and watched the battle with interest.

‘You ride like a Rajput,’ he shouted, as Tarvin flew past him. ‘Breathe him on a straight course in the open.’

‘Not till he’s learned who’s boss,’ replied Tarvin, and he wrenched the colt around.

‘Shabash! Shabash! Oh, well done! Well done!’ cried the Maharajah, as the colt answered the bit. ‘Tarvin Sahib, I’ll make you colonel of my regular cavalry.’

‘Ten million irregular devils!’ said Tarvin impolitely. ‘Come back, you brute! Back!’

The horse’s head was bowed on his lathering chest under the pressure of the curb; but before obeying he planted his forefeet, and bucked as viciously as one of Tarvin’s own broncos. ‘Both feet down and chest extended,’ he murmured gaily to himself, as the creature see-sawed up and down. He was in his element, and dreamed himself back in Topaz.

‘Maro! Maro!’ exclaimed the King. ‘Hit him hard! Hit him well!’

‘Oh, let him have his little picnic,’ said Tarvin easily. ‘I like it.’

When the colt was tired he was forced to back for ten yards. ‘Now we’ll go on,’ said Tarvin, and fell into a trot by the side of the Maharajah. ‘That river of yours is full of gold,’ he said, after a moment’s silence, as if continuing an uninterrupted conversation.

‘When I was a young man,’ said the King, ‘I rode pig here. We chased them with the sword in the springtime. That was before the English came. Over there, by that pile of rock, I broke my collar-bone.’

‘Full of gold, Maharajah Sahib. How do you propose to get it out?’

Tarvin knew something already of the King’s discursiveness; he did not mean to give way to it.

‘What do I know?’ answered the King solemnly. ‘Ask the agent sahib.’

‘But, look here, who does run this State, you or Colonel Nolan?’

‘You know,’ returned the Maharajah. ‘You have seen.’ He pointed north and south. ‘There,’ he said, ‘is one railway line; yonder is another. I am a goat between two wolves.’

‘Well, anyway, the country between is your own. Surely you can do what you like with that.’

They had ridden some two or three miles beyond the city, parallel with the course of the Amet River, their horses sinking fetlock-deep in the soft sand. The King looked along the chain of shining pools, the white, scrub-tipped hillocks of the desert, and the far distant line of low granite-topped hills, whence the Amet sprang. It was not a prospect to delight the heart of a King.

‘Yes; I am lord of all this country,’ he said. ‘But look you, one-fourth of my revenue is swallowed up by those who collect it; one-fourth those black-faced camel-breeders in the sand there will not pay, and I must not march troops against them; one-fourth I myself, perhaps, receive; but the people who should pay the other fourth do not know to whom it should be sent. Yes; I am a very rich king.’

‘Well, any way you look at it, the river ought to treble your income.’

The Maharajah looked at Tarvin intently.

‘What would the Government say?’ he asked.

‘I don’t quite see where the Government comes in. You can lay out orange-gardens and take canals around them.’ (There was a deep-set twinkle of comprehension in his Majesty’s eye.) ‘Working the river would be much easier. You’ve tried placer-mining here, haven’t you?’

‘There was some washing in the bed of the river one summer. My jails were too full of convicts, and I feared rebellion. But there was nothing to see, except those black dogs digging in the sand. That year I won the Poona cup with a bay pony.’

Tarvin brought his hand down on his thigh with an unguarded smack. What was the use of talking business to this wearied man, who would pawn what the opium had left to him of soul for something to see? He shifted his ground instantly.

‘Yes; that sort of mining is nothing to look at. What you want is a little dam up Gungra way.’

‘Near the hills?’

‘Yes.’

‘No man has ever dammed the Amet,’ said the King. ‘It comes out of the ground, and sinks back into the ground, and when the rain falls it is as big as the Indus.’

‘We’ll have the whole bed of it laid bare before the rains begin — bare for twelve miles,’ said Tarvin, watching the effect on his companion.

‘No man has dammed the Amet,’ was the stony reply.

‘No man has ever tried. Give me all the labour I want, and I will dam the Amet.’

‘Where will the water go?’ inquired the King.

‘I’ll take it, around another way, as you took the canal around the orange-garden, of course.’

‘Ah! Then Colonel Nolan talked to me as if I were a child.’

‘You know why, Maharajah Sahib,’ said Tarvin placidly.

The King was frozen for a moment by this audacity. He knew that all the secrets of his domestic life were common talk in the mouths of the city, for no man can bridle three hundred women; but he was not prepared to find them so frankly hinted at by this irreverent stranger, who was and was not an Englishman.

‘Colonel Nolan will say nothing this time,’ continued Tarvin. ‘Besides, it will help your people.’

‘Who are also his,’ said the King.

The opium was dying out of his brain, and his head fell forward upon his chest.

‘Then I shall begin tomorrow,’ said Tarvin. ‘It will be something to see. I must find the best place to dam the river, and I daresay you can lend me a few hundred convicts.’

‘But why have you come here at all,’ asked the King, ‘to dam my rivers, and turn my State upside down?’

‘Because it’s good for you to laugh, Maharajah Sahib. You know that as well as I do. I will play pachisi with you every night until you are tired, and I can speak the truth — a rare commodity in these parts.’

‘Did you speak truth about the Maharaj Kunwar? Is he indeed not well?’

‘I have told you he isn’t quite strong. But there’s nothing the matter with him that Miss Sheriff can’t put right.’

‘Is that the truth?’ demanded the King. ‘Remember, he has my throne after me.’

‘If I know Miss Sheriff, he’ll have that throne. Don’t you fret, Maharajah Sahib.’

‘You are great friend of hers?’ pursued his companion. ‘You both come from one country?’

‘Yes,’ assented Tarvin; ‘and one town.’

‘Tell me about that town,’ said the King curiously.

Tarvin, nothing loth, told him — told him at length, in detail, and with his own touches of verisimilitude, forgetting in the heat of admiration and affection that the King could understand, at best, not more than one word in ten of his vigorous Western colloquialisms. Half way through his rhapsody the King interrupted.

‘If it was so good, why did you not stay there?’

‘I came to see you,’ said Tarvin quickly. ‘I heard about you there.’

‘Then it is true, what my poets sing to me, that my fame is known in the four corners of the earth? I will fill Bussant Rao’s mouth with gold if it is so.’

‘You can bet your life. Would you like me to go away, though? Say the word!’ Tarvin made as if to check his horse.

The Maharajah remained sunk in deep thought, and when he spoke it was slowly and distinctly, that Tarvin might catch every word. ‘I hate all the English,’ he said. ‘Their ways are not my ways, and they make such trouble over the killing of a man here and there. Your ways are not my ways; but, you do not give so much trouble, and you are a friend of the doctor lady.’

‘Well, I hope I’m a friend of the Maharaj Kunwar’s too,’ said Tarvin.

‘Are you a true friend to him?’ asked the King, eyeing him closely.

‘That’s all right. I’d like to see the man who tried to lay a hand on the little one. He’d vanish, King; he’d disappear; he wouldn’t be. I’d mop up Gokral Seetarun with him.’

‘I have seen you hit that rupee. Do it again.’

Without thinking for a moment of the Foxhall colt, Tarvin drew his revolver, tossed a coin into the air, and fired. The coin fell beside them — a fresh one this time-marked squarely in the centre. The colt plunged furiously, and the Cutch mare curveted. There was a thunder of hoofs behind him. The escort, which, till now, had waited respectfully a quarter of a mile behind, were racing up at full speed, with levelled lances. The King laughed a little contemptuously.

‘They are thinking you have shot me,’ he said. ‘So they will kill you, unless I stop them. Shall I stop them?’

Tarvin thrust out his under jaw with a motion peculiar to himself, wheeled the colt, and waited without answering, his empty hands folded on the pommel of his saddle. The troop swept down in an irregular mob, each man crouching, lance in rest, over his saddle-bow, and the captain of the troop flourishing a long, straight Rajput sword. Tarvin felt rather than saw the lean, venomous lance-heads converging on the breast of the colt. The King drew off a few yards, and watched him where he stood alone in the centre of the plain, waiting. For that single moment, in which he faced death, Tarvin thought to himself that he preferred any customer to a Maharajah.

Suddenly his Highness shouted once, the lance-butts fell as though they had been smitten down, and the troop, opening out, whirled by on each side of Tarvin, each man striving as nearly as might be to brush the white man’s boot.

The white man stared in front of him without turning his head, and the King gave a little grunt of approval.

‘Would you have done that for the Maharaj Kunwar?’ he asked, wheeling his mare in again beside him, .after a pause.

‘No,’ said Tarvin placidly. ‘I should have begun shooting long before.’

‘What! Fifty men?’

‘No; the captain.’

The King shook in his saddle with laughter, and held up his hand. The commandant of the troop trotted up.

‘Ohé, Pertab Singh–Ji, he says he would have shot thee.’ Then, turning to Tarvin, smiling, ‘That is my cousin.’

The burly Rajput captain grinned from ear to ear, and, to Tarvin’s surprise, answered in perfect English — ’That would do for irregular cavalry — to kill the subalterns, you understand — but we are drilled exclusively on English model, and I have my commission from the Queen. Now, in the German army —  — ’

Tarvin looked at him in blank amazement.

‘But you are not connected with the military,’ said Pertab Singh–Ji politely. ‘I have heard how you shoot, and I saw what you were doing. But you must please excuse. When a shot is fired near his Highness it is our order always to come up.’

He saluted, and withdrew to his troop.

The sun was growing unpleasantly hot, and the King and Tarvin trotted back toward the city.

‘How many convicts can you lend me?’ asked Tarvin, as they went,

‘All my jails full, if you want them,’ was the enthusiastic answer. ‘By God, sahib, I never saw anything like that. I would give you anything.’

Tarvin took off his hat, and mopped his forehead, laughing.

‘Very good, then. I’ll ask for something that will cost you nothing.’

The Maharajah grunted doubtfully. People generally demanded of him things he was not willing to part with.

‘That talk is new to me, Tarvin Sahib,’ said he.

‘You’ll see I’m in earnest when I say I only want to look at the Naulahka. I’ve seen all your State diamonds and gold carriages, but I haven’t seen that.’

The Maharajah trotted fifty yards without replying. Then —

‘Do they speak of it where you come from?’

‘Of course. All Americans know that it’s the biggest thing in India. It’s in all the guide-books,’ said Tarvin brazenly.

‘Do the books say where it is? The English people are so wise.’ The Maharajah stared straight in front of him, and almost smiled.

‘No; but they say you know, and I’d like to see it.’