Rudyard Kipling - Rudyard Kipling - The Complete Novels and Stories

‘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 to-morrow,’ 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.