Actions and Reactions
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Rudyard Kipling >> Actions and Reactions
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"We ought to have been in yesterday," the woman interrupted.
"Yes. We ought to have been in yesterday. Have you slept there
overnight?" said the man peevishly.
"No; I assure you we haven't," said Lord Lundie.
"Then go away. Go quite away," cried the woman.
They went--in single file down the path. They went silently,
restrapping the organ on its wheels, and rechaining the monkey to
the organ.
"Damn it all!" said Penfentenyou. "They do face the music, and
they do stick by each other in private life!"
"Ties of Common Funk," I answered. Giuseppe ran to the gate and
fled back to the possible world. Lord Lundie and Sir Christopher,
constrained by tradition, paced slowly.
Then it came to pass that the woman, who walked behind them,
lifted up her eyes, and beheld the tree which they had dressed.
"Stop!" she called; and they stopped. "Who did that?"
There was no answer. The Eternal Bad Boy in every man hung its
head before the Eternal Mother in every woman.
"Who put these disgusting things there?" she repeated.
Suddenly Penfentenyou, Premier of his Colony in all but name,
left Jimmy and me, and appeared at the gate. (If he is not turned
out of office, that is how he will appear on the Day of
Armageddon.)
"Well done you!" he cried zealously, and doffed his hat to the
woman. "Have you any children, madam?" he demanded.
"Yes, two. They should have been here to-day. The firm promised
--"
"Then we're not a minute too soon. That monkey escaped. It was a
very dangerous beast. 'Might have frightened your children into
fits. All the organ-grinder's fault! A most lucky thing these
gentlemen caught it when they did. I hope you aren't badly
mauled, Sir Christopher?" Shaken as I was (I wanted to get away
and laugh) I could not but admire the scoundrel's consummate tact
in leading his second highest trump. An ass would have introduced
Lord Lundie and they would not have believed him.
It took the trick. The couple smiled, and gave respectful thanks
for their deliverance by such hands from such perils.
"Not in the least," said Lord Lundie. "Anybody--any father would
have done as much, and pray don't apologize your mistake was
quite natural." A furniture man sniggered here, and Lord Lundie
rolled an Eye of Doom on their ranks. "By the way, if you have
trouble with these persons--they seem to have taken as much as is
good for them--please let me know. Er--Good morning!"
They turned into the lane.
"Heavens!" said Jimmy, brushing himself down. "Who's that real
man with the real head?" and we hurried after them, for they were
running unsteadily, squeaking like rabbits as they ran. We
overtook them in a little nut wood half a mile up the road, where
they had turned aside, and were rolling. So we rolled with them,
and ceased not till we had arrived at the extremity of
exhaustion.
"You--you saw it all, then?" said Lord Lundie, rebuttoning his
nineteen-inch collar.
"I saw it was a vital question from the first," responded
Penfentenyou, and blew his nose.
"It was. By the way, d'you mind telling me your name?"
Summa. Penfentenyou's Great Idea has gone through, a little
chipped at the edges, but in fine and far-reaching shape. His
Opposite Number worked at it like a mule--a bewildered mule,
beaten from behind, coaxed from in front, and propped on either
soft side by Lord Lundie of the compressed mouth and the searing
tongue.
Sir Christopher Tomling has been ravished from the Argentine,
where, after all, he was but preparing trade-routes for hostile
peoples, and now adorns the forefront of Penfentenyou's Advisory
Board. This was an unforeseen extra, as was Jimmy's gratis
full-length--(it will be in this year's Academy) of Penfentenyou,
who has returned to his own place.
Now and again, from afar off, between the slam and bump of his
shifting scenery, the glare of his manipulated limelight, and the
controlled rolling of his thunder-drums, I catch his voice,
lifted in encouragement and advice to his fellow-countrymen. He
is quite sound on Ties of Sentiment, and--alone of Colonial
Statesmen ventures to talk of the Ties of Common Funk.
Herein I have my reward.
THE PUZZLER
The Celt in all his variants from Builth to Ballyhoo,
His mental processes are plain--one knows what he will do,
And can logically predicate his finish by his start:
But the English--ah, the English!--they are quite a race apart.
Their psychology is bovine, their outlook crude and rare;
They abandon vital matters to be tickled with a straw;
But the straw that they were tickled with--the chaff that
they were fed with--
They convert into a weaver's beam to break their foeman's head
with.
For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State,
They arrive at their conclusions--largely inarticulate.
Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none;
But sometimes, in a smoking-room, one learns why things were
done.
In telegraphic sentences, half swallowed at the ends,
They hint a matter's inwardness--and there the matter ends.
And while the Celt is talking from Valencia to Kirkwall,
The English--ah, the English!--don't say anything at all!
LITTLE FOXES
A TALE OF THE GIHON HUNT
A fox came out of his earth on the banks of the Great River
Gihon, which waters Ethiopia. He saw a white man riding through
the dry dhurra-stalks, and, that his destiny might be fulfilled,
barked at him.
The rider drew rein among the villagers round his stirrup.
"What," said he, "is that?"
"That," said the Sheikh of the village, "is a fox, O Excellency
Our Governor."
"It is not, then, a jackal?"
"No jackal, but Abu Hussein the father of cunning."
"Also," the white man spoke half aloud, "I am Mudir of this
Province."
"It is true," they cried. "Ya, Saart el Mudir" (O Excellency Our
Governor).
The Great River Gihon, well used to the moods of kings, slid
between his mile-wide banks toward the sea, while the Governor
praised God in a loud and searching cry never before heard by the
river.
When he had lowered his right forefinger from behind his right
ear, the villagers talked to him of their crops--barley, dhurrah,
millet, onions, and the like. The Governor stood in his stirrups.
North he looked up a strip of green cultivation a few hundred
yards wide that lay like a carpet between the river and the tawny
line of the desert. Sixty miles that strip stretched before him,
and as many behind. At every half-mile a groaning water-wheel
lifted the soft water from the river to the crops by way of a
mud-built aqueduct. A foot or so wide was the water-channel; five
foot or more high was the bank on which it ran, and its base was
broad in proportion. Abu Hussein, misnamed the Father of Cunning,
drank from the river below his earth, and his shadow was long in
the low sun. He could not understand the loud cry which the
Governor had cried.
The Sheikh of the village spoke of the crops from which the
rulers of all lands draw revenue; but the Governor's eyes were
fixed, between his horse's ears, on the nearest water-channel.
"Very like a ditch in Ireland," he murmured, and smiled, dreaming
of a razor-topped bank in distant Kildare.
Encouraged by that smile, the Sheikh continued. "When crops fail
it is necessary to remit taxation. Then it is a good thing, O
Excellency Our Governor, that you come and see the crops which
have failed, and discover that we have not lied."
"Assuredly." The Governor shortened his reins. The horse cantered
on, rose at the embankment of the water-channel, changed leg
cleverly on top, and hopped down in a cloud of golden dust.
Abu Hussein from his earth watched with interest. He had never
before seen such things.
"Assuredly," the Governor repeated, and came back by the way he
had gone. "It is always best to see for one's self."
An ancient and still bullet-speckled stern-wheel steamer, with a
barge lashed to her side, came round the river bend. She whistled
to tell the Governor his dinner was ready, and the horse, seeing
his fodder piled on the barge, whinnied back.
"Moreover," the Sheikh added, "in the days of the Oppression the
Emirs and their creatures dispossessed many people of their
lands. All up and down the river our people are waiting to return
to their lawful fields."
"Judges have been appointed to settle that matter," said the
Governor. "They will presently come in steamers and hear the
witnesses."
"Wherefore? Did the Judges kill the Emirs? We would rather be
judged by the men who executed God's judgment on the Emirs. We
would rather abide by your decision, O Excellency Our Governor."
The Governor nodded. It was a year since he had seen the Emirs
stretched close and still round the reddened sheepskin where lay
El Mahdi, the Prophet of God. Now there remained no trace of
their dominion except the old steamer, once part of a Dervish
flotilla, which was his house and office. She sidled into the
shore, lowered a plank, and the Governor followed his horse
aboard.
Lights burned on her till late, dully reflected in the river that
tugged at her mooring-ropes. The Governor read, not for the first
time, the administration reports of one John Jorrocks, M.F.H.
"We shall need," he said suddenly to his Inspector, "about ten
couple. I'll get 'em when I go home. You'll be Whip, Baker?"
The Inspector, who was not yet twenty-five, signified his assent
in the usual manner, while Abu Hussein barked at the vast desert
moon.
"Ha!" said the Governor, coming out in his pyjamas, "we'll be
giving you capivi in another three months, my friend."
* * * * *
It was four, as a matter of fact, ere a steamer with a melodious
bargeful of hounds anchored at that landing. The Inspector leaped
down among them, and the homesick wanderers received him as a
brother.
"Everybody fed 'em everything on board ship, but they're real
dainty hounds at bottom," the Governor explained. "That's Royal
you've got hold of--the pick of the bunch--and the bitch that's
got, hold of you--she's a little excited--is May Queen. Merriman,
out of Cottesmore Maudlin, you know."
"I know. 'Grand old betch with the tan eyebrows,"' the Inspector
cooed. "Oh, Ben! I shall take an interest in life now. Hark to
'em! O hark!"
Abu Hussein, under the high bank, went about his night's work. An
eddy carried his scent to the barge, and three villages heard the
crash of music that followed. Even then Abu Hussein did not know
better than to bark in reply.
"Well, what about my Province?" the Governor asked.
"Not so bad," the Inspector answered, with Royal's head between
his knees. "Of course, all the villages want remission of taxes,
but, as far as I can see, the whole country's stinkin' with
foxes. Our trouble will be choppin' 'em in cover. I've got a list
of the only villages entitled to any remission. What d'you call
this flat-sided, blue-mottled beast with the jowl?"
"Beagle-boy. I have my doubts about him. Do you think we can get
two days a week?"
"Easy; and as many byes as you please. The Sheikh of this village
here tells me that his barley has failed, and he wants a fifty
per cent remission."
"We'll begin with him to-morrow, and look at his crops as we go.
Nothing like personal supervision," said the Governor.
They began at sunrise. The pack flew off the barge in every
direction, and, after gambols, dug like terriers at Abu Hussein's
many earths. Then they drank themselves pot-bellied on Gihon
water while the Governor and the Inspector chastised them with
whips. Scorpions were added; for May Queen nosed one, and was
removed to the barge lamenting. Mystery (a puppy, alas!) met a
snake, and the blue-mottled Beagle-boy (never a dainty hound) ate
that which he should have passed by. Only Royal, of the Belvoir
tan head and the sad, discerning eyes, made any attempt to uphold
the honour of England before the watching village.
"You can't expect everything," said the Governor after breakfast.
"We got it, though--everything except foxes. Have you seen May
Queen's nose?" said the Inspector.
"And Mystery's dead. We'll keep 'em coupled next time till we get
well in among the crops. I say, what a babbling body-snatcher
that Beagle-boy is! Ought to be drowned!"
"They bury people so damn casual hereabouts. Give him another
chance," the Inspector pleaded, not knowing that he should live
to repent most bitterly.
"Talkin' of chances," said the Governor, "this Sheikh lies about
his barley bein' a failure. If it's high enough to hide a hound
at this time of year, it's all right. And he wants a fifty per
cent remission, you said?"
"You didn't go on past the melon patch where I tried to turn
Wanderer. It's all burned up from there on to the desert. His
other water-wheel has broken down, too," the Inspector replied.
"Very good. We'll split the difference and allow him twenty-five
per cent off. Where'll we meet to-morrow?"
"There's some trouble among the villages down the river about
their land-titles. It's good goin' ground there, too," the
Inspector said.
The next meet, then, was some twenty miles down the river, and
the pack were not enlarged till they were fairly among the
fields. Abu Hussein was there in force--four of him. Four
delirious hunts of four minutes each--four hounds per fox--ended
in four earths just above the river. All the village looked on.
"We forgot about the earths. The banks are riddled with 'em.
This'll defeat us," said the Inspector.
"Wait a moment!" The Governor drew forth a sneezing hound. "I've
just remembered I'm Governor of these parts."
"Then turn out a black battalion to stop for us. We'll need 'em,
old man."
The Governor straightened his back. "Give ear, O people!" he
cried. "I make a new Law!"
The villagers closed in. He called:--
"Henceforward I will give one dollar to the man on whose land Abu
Hussein is found. And another dollar"--he held up the coin--"to
the man on whose land these dogs shall kill him. But to the man
on whose land Abu Hussein shall run into a hole such as is this
hole, I will give not dollars, but a most unmeasurable beating.
Is it understood?"
"Our Excellency," a man stepped forth, "on my land Abu Hussein
was found this morning. Is it not so, brothers?"
None denied. The Governor tossed him over four dollars without a
word.
"On my land they all went into their holes," cried another.
"Therefore I must be beaten."
"Not so. The land is mine, and mine are the beatings."
This second speaker thrust forward his shoulders already bared,
and the villagers shouted.
"Hullo! Two men anxious to be licked? There must be some swindle
about the land," said the Governor. Then in the local vernacular:
"What are your rights to the beating?"
As a river-reach changes beneath a slant of the sun, that which
had been a scattered mob changed to a court of most ancient
justice. The hounds tore and sobbed at Abu Hussein's hearthstone,
all unnoticed among the legs of the witnesses, and Gihon, also
accustomed to laws, purred approval.
"You will not wait till the Judges come up the river to settle
the dispute?" said the Governor at last.
"No!" shouted all the village save the man who had first asked to
be beaten. "We will abide by Our Excellency's decision. Let Our
Excellency turn out the creatures of the Emirs who stole our land
in the days of the Oppression."
"And thou sayest?" the Governor turned to the man who had first
asked to be beaten.
"I say 1 will wait till the wise Judges come down in the steamer.
Then I will bring my many witnesses," he replied.
"He is rich. He will bring many witnesses," the village Sheikh
muttered.
"No need. Thy own mouth condemns thee!" the Governor cried. "No
man lawfully entitled to his land would wait one hour before
entering upon it. Stand aside!" The man, fell back, and the
village jeered him.
The second claimant stooped quickly beneath the lifted
hunting-crop. The village rejoiced.
"Oh, Such an one; Son of such an one," said the Governor,
prompted by the Sheikh, "learn, from the day when I send the
order, to block up all the holes where Abu Hussein may hide
on--thy--land!"
The light flicks ended. The man stood up triumphant. By that
accolade had the Supreme Government acknowledged his title before
all men.
While the village praised the perspicacity of the Governor, a
naked, pock-marked child strode forward to the earth, and stood
on one leg, unconcerned as a young stork.
"Hal" he said, hands behind his back. "This should be blocked up
with bundles of dhurra stalks--or, better, bundles of thorns."
"Better thorns," said the Governor. "Thick ends innermost."
The child nodded gravely and squatted on the sand.
"An evil day for thee, Abu Hussein," he shrilled into the mouth
of the earth. "A day of obstacles to thy flagitious returns in
the morning."
"Who is it?" the Governor asked the Sheikh. "It thinks."
"Farag the Fatherless. His people were slain in the days of the
Oppression. The man to whom Our Excellency has awarded the land
is, as it were, his maternal uncle."
"Will it come with me and feed the big dogs?" said the Governor.
The other peering children drew back. "Run!" they cried. "Our
Excellency will feed Farag to the big dogs."
"I will come," said Farag. "And I will never go." He threw his
arm round Royal's neck, and the wise beast licked his face.
"Binjamin, by Jove!" the Inspector cried.
"No!" said the Governor. "I believe he has the makings of a James
Pigg!"
Farag waved his hand to his uncle, and led Royal on to the barge.
The rest of the pack followed.
* * * * *
Gihon, that had seen many sports, learned to know the Hunt barge
well. He met her rounding his bends on grey December dawns to
music wild and lamentable as the almost forgotten throb of
Dervish drums, when, high above Royal's tenor bell, sharper even
than lying Beagle-boy's falsetto break, Farag chanted deathless
war against Abu Hussein and all his seed. At sunrise the river
would shoulder her carefully into her place, and listen to the
rush and scutter of the pack fleeing up the gang-plank, and the
tramp of the Governor's Arab behind them. They would pass over
the brow into the dewless crops where Gihon, low and shrunken,
could only guess what they were about when Abu Hussein flew down
the bank to scratch at a stopped earth, and flew back into the
barley again. As Farag had foretold, it was evil days for Abu
Hussein ere he learned to take the necessary steps and to get
away crisply. Sometimes Gihon saw the whole procession of the
Hunt silhouetted against the morning-blue, bearing him company
for many merry miles. At every half mile the horses and the
donkeys jumped the water-channels--up, on, change your leg, and
off again like figures in a zoetrope, till they grew small along
the line of waterwheels. Then Gibon waited their rustling return
through the crops, and took them to rest on his bosom at ten
o'clock. While the horses ate, and Farag slept with his head on
Royal's flank, the Governor and his Inspector worked for the good
of the Hunt and his Province.
After a little time there was no need to beat any man for
neglecting his earths. The steamer's destination was telegraphed
from waterwheel to waterwheel, and the villagers stopped out and
put to according. If an earth were overlooked, it meant some
dispute as to the ownership of the land, and then and there the
Hunt checked and settled it in this wise: The Governor and the
Inspector side by side, but the latter half a horse's length to
the rear; both bare-shouldered claimants well in front; the
villagers half-mooned behind them, and Farag with the pack, who
quite understood the performance, sitting down on the left.
Twenty minutes were enough to settle the most complicated case,
for, as the Governor said to a judge on the steamer, "One gets at
the truth in a hunting-field a heap quicker than in your
lawcourts."
"But when the evidence is conflicting?" the Judge suggested.
"Watch the field. They'll throw tongue fast enough if you're
running a wrong scent. You've never had an appeal from one of my
decisions yet."
The Sheikhs on horseback--the lesser folk on clever donkeys--the
children so despised by Farag soon understood that villages which
repaired their waterwheels and channels stood highest in the
Governor's favour. He bought their barley, for his horses.
"Channels," he said, "are necessary that we may all jump them.
They are necessary, moreover, for the crops. Let there be many
wheels and sound channels--and much good barley."
"Without money," replied an aged Sheikh, "there are no
waterwheels."
"I will lend the money," said the Governor.
"At what interest, O Our Excellency?"
"Take you two of May Queen's puppies to bring up in your village
in such a manner that they do not eat filth, nor lose their hair,
nor catch fever from lying in the sun, but become wise hounds."
"Like Ray-yal--not like Bigglebai?" (Already it was an insult
along the River to compare a man to the shifty anthropophagous
blue-mottled harrier.)
"Certainly, like Ray-yal--not in the least like Bigglebai. That
shall be the interest on the loan. Let the puppies thrive and the
waterwheel be built, and I shall be content," said the Governor.
"The wheel shall be built, but, O Our Excellency, if by God's
favour the pups grow to be well-smelters, not filth-eaters, not
unaccustomed to their names, not lawless, who will do them and me
justice at the time of judging the young dogs?"
"Hounds, man, hounds! Ha-wands, O Sheikh, we call them in their
manhood."
"The ha-wands when they are judged at the Sha-ho. I have
unfriends down the river to whom Our Excellency has also
entrusted ha-wands to bring up."
"Puppies, man! Pah-peaz we call them, O Sheikh, in their
childhood."
"Pah-peat. My enemies may judge my pah-peaz unjustly at the
Sha-ho. This must be thought of."
"I see the obstacle. Hear now! If the new waterwheel is built in
a month without oppression, thou, O Sheikh, shalt be named one of
the judges to judge the pah-peaz at the Sha-ho. Is it
understood?"
"Understood. We will build the wheel. I and my seed are
responsible for the repayment of the loan. Where are my pah-peaz?
If they eat fowls, must they on any account eat the feathers?"
"On no account must they eat the feathers. Farag in the barge
will tell thee how they are to live."
There is no instance of any default on the Governor's personal
and unauthorized loans, for which they called him the Father of
Waterwheels. But the first puppyshow at the capital needed
enormous tact and the presence of a black battalion
ostentatiously drilling in the barrack square to prevent trouble
after the prize-giving.
But who can chronicle the glories of the Gihon Hunt--or their
shames? Who remembers the kill in the market-place, when the
Governor bade the assembled sheikhs and warriors observe how the
hounds would instantly devour the body of Abu Hussein; but how,
when he had scientifically broken it up, the weary pack turned
from it in loathing, and Farag wept because he said the world's
face had been blackened? What men who have not yet ridden beyond
the sound of any horn recall the midnight run which
ended--Beagleboy leading--among tombs; the hasty whip-off, and
the oath, taken Abo e bones, to forget the worry? The desert run,
when Abu Hussein forsook the cultivation, and made a six-mile
point to earth in a desolate khor--when strange armed riders on
camels swooped out of a ravine, and instead of giving battle,
offered to take the tired hounds home on their beasts. Which they
did, and vanished.
Above all, who remembers the death of Royal, when a certain
Sheikh wept above the body of the stainless hound as it might
have been his son's--and that day the Hunt rode no more? The
badly-kept log-book says little of this, but at the end of their
second season (forty-nine brace) appears the dark entry: "New
blood badly wanted. They are beginning to listen to beagle-boy."
* * * * *
The Inspector attended to the matter when his leave fell due.
"Remember," said the Governor, "you must get us the best blood in
England--real, dainty hounds--expense no object, but don't trust
your own judgment. Present my letters of introduction, and take
what they give you.
The Inspector presented his letters in a society where they make
much of horses, more of hounds, and are tolerably civil to men
who can ride. They passed him from house to house, mounted him
according to his merits, and fed him, after five years of goat
chop and Worcester sauce, perhaps a thought too richly.
The seat or castle where he made his great coup does not much
matter. Four Masters of Foxhounds were at table, and in a mellow
hour the Inspector told them stories of the Gihon Hunt. He ended:
"Ben said I wasn't to trust my own judgment about hounds, but I
think there ought to be a special tariff for Empire-makers."
As soon as his hosts could speak, they reassured him on this
point.
"And now tell us about your first puppy-show all over again,"
said one.
"And about the earth-stoppin'. Was that all Ben's own invention?"
said another.
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