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KIM
KIM RUDYARD KIPLING Chapter I
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to judgment 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 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 colour-
sergeant 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 gang-
foreman 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.'
If the woman had sent Kim up to the local Jadoo-Gher with those
papers he would of course have been taken over by the
Provincial Lodge and sent to the Masonic Orphanage in the Hills;
but what she had heard of magic she distrusted. Kim too held
views of his own. As he reached the years of indiscretion he
learned to avoid missionaries and white men of serious aspect who
asked who he was and what he did. For Kim did nothing with an
immense success. True he knew the wonderful walled city of
Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in
glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al
Raschid dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild as that of the
Arabian Nights but missionaries and secretaries of charitable
societies could not see the beauty of it. His nickname through
the wards was 'Little Friend of all the World'; and very often
being lithe and inconspicuous he executed commissions by night
on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of
fashion. It was intrigue - of course he knew that much as he
had known all evil since he could speak - but what he loved was
the game for its own sake - the stealthy prowl through the dark
gullies and lanes the crawl up a waterpipe the sights and
sounds of the women's world on the flat roofs and the headlong
flight from housetop to housetop under cover of the hot dark.
Then there were holy men ash-smeared fakirs by their brick
shrines under the trees at the riverside with whom he was quite
familiar - greeting them as they returned from begging-tours
and when no one was by eating from the same dish. The woman who
looked after him insisted with tears that he should wear European
clothes - trousers a shirt and a battered hat. Kim found it
easier to slip into Hindu or Mohammedan garb when engaged on
certain businesses. One of the young men of fashion - he who was
found dead at the bottom of a well on the night of the earthquake -
had once given him a complete suit of Hindu kit the costume
of a lowcaste street boy and Kim stored it in a secret place
under some baulks in Nila Ram's timber-yard beyond the Punjab
High Court where the fragrant deodar logs lie seasoning after
they have driven down the Ravi. When there was business or frolic
afoot Kim would use his properties returning at dawn to the
veranda all tired out from shouting at the heels of a marriage
procession or yelling at a Hindu festival. Sometimes there was
food in the house more often there was not and then Kim went
out again to eat with his native friends.
As he drummed his heels against Zam-Zammah he turned now and
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