Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling by Rudyard Kipling
‘I don’t like these people,’ said Punch. ‘But never mind. We’ll go away soon. We have always went away soon from everywhere. I wish we was gone back to Bombay soon.’
The wish bore no fruit. For six days Mamma wept at intervals, and showed the woman in black all Punch’s clothes – a liberty which Punch resented. ‘But p’raps she’s a new white ayah,’ he thought. ‘I’m to call her Antirosa, but she doesn’t call me Sahib. She says just Punch,’ he confided to Judy. ‘What is Antirosa?’
Judy didn’t know. Neither she nor Punch had heard anything of an animal called an aunt. Their world had been Papa and Mamma, who knew everything, permitted everything, and loved everybody – even Punch when he used to go into the garden at Bombay and fill his nails with mould after the weekly nail-cutting, because, as he explained between two strokes of the slipper to his sorely-tried father, his fingers ‘felt so new at the ends’.
In an undefined way Punch judged it advisable to keep both parents between himself and the woman in black and the boy with black hair. He did not approve of them. He liked the grey man, who had expressed a wish to be called ‘Uncleharri’. They nodded at each other when they met, and the grey man showed him a little ship with rigging that took up and down.
‘She is a model of the Brisk – the little Brisk that was sore exposed that day at Navarino.’14 The grey man hummed the last words and fell into a reverie. ‘I’ll tell you about Navarino, Punch, when we go for walks together; and you mustn’t touch the ship, because she’s the Brisk.’
Long before that walk, the first of many, was taken, they roused Punch and Judy in the chill dawn of a February morning to say Goodbye; and of all people in the wide earth to Papa and Mamma – both crying this time. Punch was very sleepy and Judy was cross.
‘Don’t forget us,’ pleaded Mamma. ‘Oh, my little son, don’t forget us, and see that Judy remembers too.’
‘I’ve told Judy to bemember,’ said Punch, wriggling, for his father’s beard tickled his neck. ‘I’ve told Judy – ten – forty – ’leven thousand times. But Ju’s so young – quite a baby – isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ said Papa, ‘quite a baby, and you must be good to Judy, and make haste to learn to write and – and – and – ’
Punch was back in his bed again. Judy was fast asleep, and there was the rattle of a cab below. Papa and Mamma had gone away. Not to Nassick; that was across the sea. To some place much nearer, of course, and equally of course they would return. They came back after dinner-parties, and Papa had come back after he had been to a place called ‘The Snows’, and Mamma with him, to Punch and Judy at Mrs Inverarity’s house in Marine Lines. Assuredly they would come back again. So Punch fell asleep till the true morning, when the black-haired boy met him with the information that Papa and Mamma had gone to Bombay, and that he and Judy were to stay at Downe Lodge ‘for ever’. Antirosa, tearfully appealed to for a contradiction, said that Harry had spoken the truth, and that it behoved Punch to fold up his clothes neatly on going to bed. Punch went out and wept bitterly with Judy, into whose fair head he had driven some ideas of the meaning of separation.
When a matured man discovers that he has been deserted by Providence, deprived of his God, and cast without help, comfort, or sympathy, upon a world which is new and strange to him, his despair, which may find expression in evil living, the writing of his experiences, or the more satisfactory diversion of suicide, is generally supposed to be impressive. A child, under exactly similar circumstances as far as its knowledge goes, cannot very well curse God and die. It howls till its nose is red, its eyes are sore, and its head aches. Punch and Judy, through no fault of their own, had lost all their world. They sat in the hall and cried; the black-haired boy looking on from afar.
The model of the ship availed nothing, though the grey man assured Punch that he might pull the rigging up and down as much as he pleased; and Judy was promised free entry into the kitchen. They wanted Papa and Mamma, gone to Bombay beyond the seas, and their grief while it lasted was without remedy.
When the tears ceased the house was very still. Antirosa had decided that it was better to let the children ‘have their cry out’, and the boy had gone to school. Punch raised his head from the floor and sniffed mournfully. Judy was nearly asleep. Three short years had not taught her how to bear sorrow with full knowledge. There was a distant, dull boom in the air – a repeated heavy thud. Punch knew that sound in Bombay in the monsoon. It was the sea – the sea that must be traversed before anyone could get to Bombay.
‘Quick, Ju!’ he cried. ‘We’re close to the sea. I can hear it! Listen! That’s where they’ve went. P’raps we can catch them if we was in time. They didn’t mean to go without us. They’ve only forgot.’
‘Iss,’ said Judy. ‘They’ve only forgotted. Less go to the sea.’
The hall-door was open and so was the garden-gate.
‘It’s very, very big, this place,’ he said, looking cautiously down the road, ‘and we will get lost. But I will find a man and order him to take me back to my house – like I did in Bombay.’
He took Judy by the hand, and the two ran hatless in the direction of the sound of the sea. Downe Lodge was almost the last of a range of newly-built houses running out, through a field of brick-mounds, to a heath where gipsies occasionally camped and where the Garrison Artillery of Rocklington practised. There were few people to be seen, and the children might have been taken for those of the soldiery who ranged far. Half an hour the wearied little legs tramped across heath, potato-patch, and sand-dune.
‘I’se so tired,’ said Judy, ‘and Mamma will be angry.’
‘Mamma’s never angry. I suppose she is waiting at the sea now while Papa gets tickets. We’ll find them and go along with them. Ju, you mustn’t sit down. Only a little more and we’ll come to the sea. Ju, if you sit down I’ll thmack you!’ said Punch.
They climbed another dune, and came upon the great grey sea at low tide. Hundreds of crabs were scuttling about the beach, but there was no trace of Papa and Mamma, not even of a ship upon the waters – nothing but sand and mud for miles and miles.
And ‘Uncleharri’ found them by chance – very muddy and very forlorn – Punch dissolved in tears, but trying to divert Judy with an ‘ickle trab’, and Judy wailing to the pitiless horizon for ‘Mamma, Mamma!’ – and again ‘Mamma!’
The Second Bag
Ah, well-a-day, for we are souls bereaved!
Of all the creatures under Heaven’s wide cope
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,
And most beliefless, who had most believed.
A. H. Clough.15
All this time not a word about Black Sheep. He came later, and Harry, the black-haired boy, was mainly responsible for his coming.
Judy – who could help loving little Judy? – passed, by special permit, into the kitchen and thence straight to Aunty Rosa’s heart. Harry was Aunty Rosa’s one child, and Punch was the extra boy about the house. There was no special place for him or his little affairs, and he was forbidden to sprawl on sofas and explain his ideas about the manufacture of this world and his hopes for his future. Sprawling was lazy and wore out sofas, and little boys were not expected to talk. They were talked to, and the talking-to was intended for the benefit of their morals. As the unquestioned despot of the house at Bombay, Punch could not quite understand how he came to be of no account in this his new life.
Harry might reach across the table and take what he wanted; Judy might point and get what she wanted. Punch was forbidden to do either. The grey man was his great hope and stand-by for many months after Mamma and Papa left, and he had forgotten to tell Judy to ‘bemember Mamma’.
This lapse was excusable, because in the interval he had been introduced by Aunty Rosa to two very impressive things – an abstraction called God, the intimate friend and ally of Aunty Rosa, generally believed to live behind the kitchen-range because it was hot there – and a dirty brown book filled with unintelligible dots and marks
But the reading was, just then, a much more serious matter than any creed. Aunty Rosa sat him upon a table and told him that A B meant ab.
‘Why?’ said Punch. ‘A is a and B is bee. Why does A B mean ab?’
‘Because I tell you it does,’ said Aunty Rosa, ‘and you’ve got to say it.’
Punch said it accordingly, and for a month, hugely against his will, stumbled through the brown book, not in the least comprehending what it meant. But Uncle Harry, who walked much and generally alone, was wont to come into the nursery and suggest to Aunty Rosa that Punch should walk with him. He seldom spoke, but he showed Punch all Rocklington, from the mud-banks and the sand of the back-bay to the great harbours where ships lay at anchor, and the dock-yards where the hammers were never still, and the marine-store shops, and the shiny brass counters in the Offices where Uncle Harry went once every three months with a slip of blue paper and received sovereigns in exchange; for he held a wound-pension. Punch heard, too, from his lips the story of the battle of Navarino, where the sailors of the Fleet, for three days afterwards, were deaf as posts and could only sign to each other. ‘That was because of the noise of the guns,’ said Uncle Harry, ‘and I have got the wadding of a bullet somewhere inside me now.’
Punch regarded him with curiosity. He had not the least idea what wadding was, and his notion of a bullet was a dockyard cannon-ball bigger than his own head. How could Uncle Harry keep a cannon-ball inside him? He was afraid to ask, for fear Uncle Harry might be angry.
Punch had never known what anger – real anger – meant until one terrible day when Harry had taken his paint-box to paint a boat with, and Punch had protested. Then Uncle Harry had appeared on the scene and, muttering something about ‘strangers’ children’, had with a stick smitten the black-haired boy across the shoulders till he wept and yelled, and Aunty Rosa came in and abused Uncle Harry for cruelty to his own flesh and blood, and Punch shuddered to the tips of his shoes. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he explained to the boy, but both Harry and Aunty Rosa said that it was, and that Punch had told tales, and for a week there were no more walks with Uncle Harry.
But that week brought a great joy to Punch.
He had repeated till he was thrice weary the statement that ‘The Cat lay on the Mat and the Rat came in.’
‘Now I can truly read,’ said Punch, ‘and now I will never read anything in the world.’
He put the brown book in the cupboard where his school-books lived and accidentally tumbled out a venerable volume, without covers, labelled Sharpe’s Magazine. There was the most portentous picture of a Griffin on the first page, with verses below. The Griffin carried off one sheep a day from a German village, till a man came with a ‘falchion’ and split the Griffin open. Goodness only knew what a falchion was, but there was the Griffin and his history was an improvement upon the eternal Cat.
‘This,’ said Punch, ‘means things, and now I will know all about everything in all the world.’ He read till the light failed, not understanding a tithe of the meaning, but tantalized by glimpses of new worlds hereafter to be revealed.
‘What is a “falchion”? What is a “e-wee lamb”? What is a “base ussurper”? What is a “verdant mead”?’ he demanded, with flushed cheeks, at bedtime, of the astonished Aunty Rosa.
‘Say your prayers and go to sleep,’ she replied, and that was all the help Punch then or afterwards found at her hands in the new and delightful exercise of reading.
‘Aunty Rosa only knows about God and things like that,’ argued Punch. ‘Uncle Harry will tell me.’
The next walk proved that Uncle Harry could not help either; but he allowed Punch to talk, and even sat down on a bench to hear about the Griffin. Other walks brought other stories as Punch ranged farther afield, for the house held large store of old books that no one ever opened – from Frank Fairlegh16 in serial numbers, and the earlier poems of Tennyson, contributed anonymously to Sharpe’s Magazine, to ‘62 Exhibition Catalogues, gay with colours and delightfully incomprehensible, and odd leaves of Gulliver’s Travels.
As soon as Punch could string a few pot-hooks together he wrote to Bombay, demanding by return of post ‘all the books in all the world’. Papa could not comply with this modest indent, but sent Grimm’s Fairy Tales and a Hans Andersen. That was enough. If he were only left alone Punch could pass, at any hour he chose, into a land of his own, beyond reach of Aunty Rosa and her God, Harry and his teasements, and Judy’s claims to be played with.
‘Don’t disturve me, I’m reading. Go and play in the kitchen,’ grunted Punch. ‘Aunty Rosa lets you go there.’ Judy was cutting her second teeth and was fretful. She appealed to Aunty Rosa, who descended on Punch.
‘I was reading,’ he explained, ‘reading a book. I want to read.’
‘You’re only doing that to show off,’ said Aunty Rosa. ‘But we’ll see. Play with Judy now, and don’t open a book for a week.’
Judy did not pass a very enjoyable playtime with Punch, who was consumed with indignation. There was a pettiness at the bottom of the prohibition which puzzled him.
‘It’s what I like to do,’ he said, ‘and she’s found out that and stopped me. Don’t cry, Ju – it wasn’t your fault – please don’t cry, or she’ll say I made you.’
Ju loyally mopped up her tears, and the two played in their nursery, a room in the basement and half underground, to which they were regularly sent after the mid-day dinner while Aunty Rosa slept. She drank wine – that is to say, something from a bottle in the cellaret – for her stomach’s sake, but if she did not fall asleep she would sometimes come into the nursery to see that the children were really playing. Now bricks, wooden hoops, ninepins, and chinaware cannot amuse for ever, especially when all Fairyland is to be won by the mere opening of a book, and, as often as not, Punch would be discovered reading to Judy or telling her interminable tales. That was an offence in the eyes of the law, and Judy would be whisked off by Aunty Rosa, while Punch was left to play alone, ‘and be sure that I hear you doing it’.
It was not a cheering employ, for he had to make a playful noise. At last, with infinite craft, he devised an arrangement whereby the table could be supported as to three legs on toy bricks, leaving the fourth clear to bring down on the floor. He could work the table with one hand and hold the book with the other. This he did till an evil day when Aunty Rosa pounced upon him unawares and told him that he was ‘acting a lie’.
‘If you’re old enough to do that,’ she said – her temper was always worst after dinner – ‘you’re old enough to be beaten.’
‘But – I’m – I’m not a animal!’ said Punch aghast. He remembered Uncle Harry and the stick, and turned white. Aunty Rosa had hidden a light cane behind her, and Punch was beaten then and there over the shoulders. It was a revelation to him. The room-door was shut, and he was left to weep himself into repentance and work out his own gospel of life.
Aunty Rosa, he argued, had the power to beat him with many stripes. It was unjust and cruel, and Mamma and Papa would never have allowed it. Unless perhaps, as Aunty Rosa seemed to imply, they had sent secret orders. In which case he was abandoned indeed. It would be discreet in the future to propitiate Aunty Rosa, but then again, even in matters in which he was innocent, he had been accused of wishing to ‘show off’. He had ‘shown off’ before
At this point Harry entered and stood afar off, eyeing Punch, a dishevelled heap in the corner of the room, with disgust.
‘You’re a liar – a young liar,’ said Harry, with great unction, ‘and you’re to have tea down here because you’re not fit to speak to us. And you’re not to speak to Judy again till Mother gives you leave. You’ll corrupt her. You’re only fit to associate with the servant. Mother says so.’
Having reduced Punch to a second agony of tears, Harry departed upstairs with the news that Punch was still rebellious.
Uncle Harry sat uneasily in the dining-room. ‘Damn it all, Rosa,’ said he at last, ‘can’t you leave the child alone? He’s a good enough little chap when I meet him.’
‘He puts on his best manners with you, Henry,’ said Aunty Rosa, ‘but I’m afraid, I’m very much afraid, that he is the Black Sheep of the family.’
Harry heard and stored up the name for future use. Judy cried till she was bidden to stop, her brother not being worth tears; and the evening concluded with the return of Punch to the upper regions and a private sitting at which all the blinding horrors of Hell were revealed to Punch with such store of imagery as Aunty Rosa’s narrow mind possessed.
Most grievous of all was Judy’s round-eyed reproach, and Punch went to bed in the depths of the Valley of Humiliation. He shared his room with Harry and knew the torture in store. For an hour and a half he had to answer that young gentleman’s questions as to his motives for telling a lie, and a grievous lie, the precise quantity of punishment inflicted by Aunty Rosa, and had also to profess his deep gratitude for such religious instruction as Harry thought fit to impart.