Chapter 12
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?
The sleek-barrelled swell before storm — grey, foamless, enormous, and growing?
Stark calm on the lap of the Line — or the crazy-eyed hurricane blowing?
His Sea in no showing the same — his Sea and the same ’neath all showing — His Sea that his being fulfils?
So and no otherwise — so and no otherwise hill-men desire their Hills!
The Sea and the Hills.
‘I have found my heart again,’ said E23, under cover of the platform’s tumult. ‘Hunger and fear make men dazed, or I might have thought of this escape before. I was right. They come to hunt for me. Thou hast saved my head.’
A group of yellow-trousered Punjab policemen, headed by a hot and perspiring young Englishman, parted the crowd about the carriages. Behind them, inconspicuous as a cat, ambled a small fat person who looked like a lawyer’s tout.
‘See the young Sahib reading from a paper. My description is in his hand,’ said E23. ‘They go carriage by carriage, like fisher-folk netting a pool.’
When the procession reached their compartment, E23 was counting his beads with a steady jerk of the wrist; while Kim jeered at him for being so drugged as to have lost the ringed fire-tongs which are the Saddhu’s distinguishing mark. The lama, deep in meditation, stared straight before him; and the farmer, glancing furtively, gathered up his belongings.
‘Nothing here but a parcel of holy-bolies,’ said the Englishman aloud, and passed on amid a ripple of uneasiness; for native police mean extortion to the native all India over.
‘The trouble now,’ whispered E23, ‘lies in sending a wire as to the place where I hid that letter I was sent to find. I cannot go to the tar-office in this guise.’
‘Is it not enough I have saved thy neck?’
‘Not if the work be left unfinished. Did never the healer of sick pearls tell thee so? Comes another Sahib! Ah!’
This was a tallish, sallowish District Superintendent of Police — belt, helmet, polished spurs and all — strutting and twirling his dark moustache.
‘What fools are these Police Sahibs!’ said Kim genially.
E23 glanced up under his eyelids. ‘It is well said,’ he muttered in a changed voice. ‘I go to drink water. Keep my place.’
He blundered out almost into the Englishman’s arms, and was bad-worded in clumsy Urdu.
‘Tum mut? You drunk? You mustn’t bang about as though Delhi station belonged to you, my friend.’
E23, not moving a muscle of his countenance, answered with a stream of the filthiest abuse, at which Kim naturally rejoiced. It reminded him of the drummer-boys and the barrack-sweepers at Umballa in the terrible time of his first schooling.
‘My good fool,’ the Englishman drawled. ‘Nickle-jao! Go back to your carriage.’
Step by step, withdrawing deferentially, and dropping his voice, the yellow Saddhu clomb back to the carriage, cursing the D.S.P. to remotest posterity by — here Kim almost jumped — by the curse of the
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