Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (63 page)

‘And to-morrow I go back to my home,' said Jan Chinn to his faithful few, whom neither spirits, over-eating, nor swollen glands could conquer. It is hard for children and savages to behave reverently at all times to the idols of their make-belief, and they had frolicked excessively with Jan Chinn. But the reference to his home cast a gloom on the people.

‘And the Sahib will not come again?' said he who had been vaccinated first.

‘That is to be seen,'answered Chinn, warily.

‘Nay, but come as a white man – come as a young man whom we know and love; for, as thou alone knowest, we are a weak people. If we again saw why – thy horse—' They were picking up their courage.

‘I have no horse. I came on foot – with Bukta, yonder. What is this?'

‘Thou knowest – the Thing that thou has chosen for a night-horse.' The little men squirmed in fear and awe.

‘Night-horse? Bukta, what is this last tale of children?'

Bukta had been a silent leader in Chinn's presence since the night of his desertion, and was grateful for a chance-flung question.

‘They know, Sahib,' he whispered. ‘It is the Clouded Tiger. That that comes from the place where thou didst once sleep. It is thy horse – as it has been these three generations.'

‘My horse! That was a dream of the Bhils!'

‘It is no dream. Do dreams leave the tracks of broad pugs on earth? Why make two faces before dry people? They know of the night-ridings, and they – and they—'

‘Are afraid, and would have them cease.'

Bukta nodded. ‘If thou hast no further need of him. He is thy horse.'

‘The thing leaves a trail, then?' said Chinn.

‘We have seen it. It is like a village road under the tomb.'

‘Can ye find and follow it for me?'

‘By daylight – if one comes with us, and, above all, stands near by.'

‘I will stand close, and we will see to it that Jan Chinn does not ride any more.'

The Bhils shouted the last words again and again.

From Chinn's point of view the stalk was nothing more than an ordinary one – down hill, through split and crannied rocks, unsafe, perhaps, if a man did not keep his wits by him, but no worse than twenty others he had undertaken. Yet his men – they refused absolutely to beat, and would only trail – dripped sweat at every move. They showed the marks of enormous pugs that ran, always down hill, to a few hundred feet below Jan Chinn's tomb, and disappeared in a narrow-moutlied cave. It was an insolently open road, a domestic highway, beaten without thought of concealment.

‘The beggar might be paying rent and taxes,' Chinn muttered ere he asked whether his friend's taste ran to cattle or man.

‘Cattle,' was the answer. ‘Two heifers a week. We drive them for him at the foot of the hill. It is his custom. If we did not, he might seek us.'

‘Blackmail and piracy,' said Chinn. ‘I can't say I fancy going into the cave after him. What's to be done?'

The Bhils fell back as Chinn lodged himself behind a rock with his rifle ready. Tigers, he knew, were shy beasts, but one who had been long cattle-fed in this sumptuous style might prove overbold.

‘He speaks!' someone whispered from the rear. ‘He knows, too.'

‘Well, of
all
theinfernal cheek!' said Chinn. There was an angry growl from the cave – a direct challenge.

‘Come out then,' Chinn shouted. ‘Come out of that! Let's have a look at you.'

The brute knew well enough that there was some connection between brown nude Bhils and his weekly allowance; but the white helmet in the sunlight annoyed him, and he did not approve of the voice that broke his rest. Lazily as a gorged snake he dragged himself out of the cave, and stood yawning and blinking at the entrance. The sunlight fell upon his flat right side, and Chinn wondered. Never had he seen a tiger marked after this fashion. Except for his head, which was staringly barred, he was dappled – not striped, but dappled like a child's rocking-horse in rich shades of smoky black on red gold. That portion of his belly and throat which should have been white was orange, and his tail and paws were black.

He looked leisurely for some ten seconds, and then deliberately lowered his head, his chin dropped and drawn in, staring intently at the man. The effect of this was to throw forward the round arch of his skull, with two broad bands across it, while below the bands glared the unwinking eyes; so that, head on, as he stood, he showed something like a diabolically scowling pantomime-mask. It was a piece of natural mesmerism that he had practised many times on his quarry, and though Chinn was by no means a terrified heifer, he stood for a while, held by the extraordinary oddity of the attack. The head – the body seemed to have been packed away behind it – the ferocious,skull-like head, crept nearer, to the switching of an angry tail-tip in the grass. Left and right the Bhils had scattered to let Jan Chinn subdue his own horse.

‘My word!' he thought. ‘He's trying to frighten me!' and fired between the saucer-like eyes, leaping aside upon the shot.

A big coughing mass, reeking of carrion, bounded past him up the hill, and he followed discreetly. The tiger made no attempt to turn into the jungle: he was hunting for sight and breath – nose up, mouth open, the tremendous fore-legs scattering the gravel in spurts.

‘Scuppered!' said John Chinn, watching the flight. ‘Now if he was a partridge he'd tower. Lungs must be full of blood.'

The brute had jerked himself over a boulder and fallen out of sight the other side. John Chinn looked over with a ready barrel. But the red trail led straight as an arrow even to his grandfather's tomb, and there, among the smashed spirit bottles and the fragments of the mud image, the life left with a flurry and a grunt.

‘If my worthy ancestor could see that,' said John Chinn, ‘he'd have been proud of me. Eyes, lower jaw, and lungs. A very nice shot.' He whistled for Bukta as he drew the tape over the stiffening bulk.

‘Ten – six – eight – by Jove! It's nearly eleven – call it eleven. Fore-arm, twenty-four – five – seven and a half. A short tail, too; three feet one. But
what
a skin! Oh, Bukta! Bukta! The men with the knives swiftly.'

‘Is he beyond question dead?' said an awe-stricken voice behind a rock.

‘That was not the way I killed my first tiger,' said Chinn. ‘I did not think that Bukta would run. I had no second gun.'

‘It – it is the Clouded Tiger,' said Bukta, unheeding the taunt. ‘He is dead.'

Whether all the Bhils, vaccinated and unvaccinated, of the Satpuras had lain by to see the kill, Chinn could not say; but the whole hill's flank rustled with little men, shouting, singing, and stampeding. And yet, till he had made the first cut in the splendid skin, not a man would take a knife; and, when the shadows fell, they ran from the red-stained tomb, and nopersuasion would bring them back till dawn. So Chinn spent a second night in the open, guarding the carcass from jackals, and thinking about his ancestor.

He returned to the lowlands to the triumphal chant of an escorting army three hundred strong, the Mahratta vaccinator close at his elbow, and the rudely dried skin a trophy before him. When that army suddenly and noiselessly disappeared, as quail in high corn, he argued he was near civilisation, and a turn in the road brought him upon the camp of a wing of his own corps. He left the skin on a cart-tail for the world to see, and sought the Colonel.

‘They're perfectly right,' he explained earnestly. ‘There isn't an ounce of vice in 'em. They were only frightened. I've vaccinated the whole boiling, and they like it awfully. What are – what are we doing here, sir?'

‘That's what I'm trying to find out,' said the Colonel. ‘I don't know yet whether we're a piece of a brigade or a police force. However, I think we'll call ourselves a police force. How did you manage to get a Bhil vaccinated?'

‘Well, sir,' said Chinn, ‘I've been thinking it over, and, as far as I can make out, I've got a sort of hereditary influence over 'em'.

‘So I know, or I wouldn't have sent you; but
what,
exactly?'

‘It's rather rummy. It seems, from what I can make out, that I'm my own grandfather reincarnated, and I've been disturbing the peace of the country by riding a pad-tiger of nights. If I hadn't done that, I don't think they'd have objected to the vaccination; but the two together were more than they could stand. And so, sir, I've vaccinated 'em, and shot my tiger-horse as a sort o' proof of good faith. You never saw such a skin in your life.'

The Colonel tugged his moustache thoughtfully. ‘Now, how the deuce,' said he, ‘am I to include that in my report?'

Indeed, the official version of the Bhils' anti-vaccinationstampede said nothing about Lieutenant John Chinn, hisgodship. But Bukta knew, and the corps knew, and every Bhilin the Satpura hills knew.

And now Bukta is zealous that John Chinn shall swiftly bewedded and impart his powers to a son; for if the Chinn succession fails, and the little Bhils are left to their own imaginings, there will be fresh trouble in the Satpuras.

WIRLEESS

It's a funny thing, this Marconi business, isn't it?' said Mr Shaynor, coughing heavily. ‘Nothing seems to make any difference, by what they tell me – storms, hills, or anything; but if that's true we shall know before morning.'

‘Of course it's true,' I answered, stepping behind the counter. ‘Where's old Mr Cashell?'

‘He's had to go to bed on account of his influenza. He said you'd very likely drop in.'

‘Where's his nephew?'

‘Inside, getting the things ready. He told me that the last time they experimented they put the pole on the roof of one of the big hotels here and the batteries electrified all the water-supply and' – he giggled – ‘the ladies got shocked when they took their baths.'

‘I never heard of that.'

‘The hotel wouldn't exactly advertise it, would it? Just now, by what young Mr Cashell tells me, they're trying to signal from here to Poole, and they're using stronger batteries than ever. But, you see, he being the guvnor's nephew and all that (and it will be in the papers, too), it doesn't matter how they electrify things in this house. Are you going to watch?'

‘Very much. I've never seen this game. Aren't you going to bed?'

‘We don't close till ten on Saturdays. There's a good deal of influenza in town, too, and there'll be a dozen prescriptions coming in before morning. I generally sleep in the chair here. It's warmer than jumping out of bed every time. Bitter cold, isn't it?'

‘Freezing hard. I'm sorry your cough's worse.'

‘Thank you. I don't mind cold so much. It's this wind that fair cuts me to pieces.' He coughed again, hard and hackingly, as an old lady came in for ammoniated quinine. ‘We've just run out of it in bottles, madam,' said Mr Shaynor, returning to the professional tone, ‘but if you will wait two minutes, I'll make it up for you, madam.'

I had used the shop for some time, and my acquaintance with the proprietor had ripened into friendship. It was Mr Cashell who revealed to me the purpose and power of Apothecaries' Hall that time a fellow-chemist had made an error in a prescription of mine, had lied to cover his sloth, and when error and lie were brought home to him had written vain letters.

‘A disgrace to our profession,' said the thin mild-eyed man, hotly, after studying the evidence. ‘You couldn't do a better service to the profession than report him to Apothecaries' Hall.'

I did so, not knowing what djinns I should evoke; and the result was such an apology as one might make who had spent a night on the rack. I conceived great respect for Apothecaries'Hall and esteem for Mr Cashell, a zealous craftsman who magnified his calling. Until Mr Shaynor came down from the North his assistants had by no means agreed with Mr Cashell. ‘They forget,' said he, ‘that first and foremost the compounder is a medicine-man. On him depends the physician's reputation. He holds it literally in the hollow of his hand, sir.'

Mr Shaynor's manners had not, perhaps, the polish of the grocery and Italian warehouse next door, but he knew and loved his dispensary work in every detail. For relaxation he seemed to go no farther afield than the romance of drugs – their discovery, preparation, packing, and export – but it led him to the ends of the earth, and on this subject, and the Pharmaceutical Formulary, and Nicholas Culpepper, most confident of physicians, we met.

Little by little I grew to know something of his beginnings and his hopes – of his mother, who had been a school-teacher in one of the northern counties, and of his red-headed father, a small jobbing master at Kirby Moors, who died when he was achild; of the examinations he had passed (Apothecaries' Hall is a hard master in this respect); of his dreams of a shop in London; of his hate for the price-cutting co-operative stores; and, most interesting, of his mental attitude toward customers.

‘There's a way you get into,' he told me, ‘of serving them quite carefully, and, I hope, politely, without stopping your own thinking. I've been reading Christie's “New Commercial Plants” all this autumn, and that needs keeping your mind on it, I can tell you. So long as it isn't a prescription, of course, I can carry as much as half a page of Christie in my head, and at the same time I could sell out all that window twice over, and not a penny wrong at the end. As to prescriptions, I think I could make up the general run of 'em in my sleep, almost.'

For reasons of my own, I was deeply interested in Marconi experiments at their outset in England; and it was of a piece with Mr Cashell's unvarying thoughtfulness that, when his nephew the electrician appropriated the house for a long-range installation, he should, as I have said, invite me to see the result.

The old lady went away with her medicine, and Mr Shaynor and I stamped on the tiled floor behind the counter to keep ourselves warm. The shop, by the light of the many electrics, looked like a Paris-diamond mine, for Mr Cashell believed in all the ritual of his craft. Three superb glass jars – red, green, and blue – of the sort that led Rosamond to parting with her shoes, blazed in the broad plate-glass windows, and there was a confused smell of orris, Kodak films, vulcanite, tooth-powder, sachets, and almond-cream in the air. Mr Shaynor fed the dispensary stove, and we sucked cayenne-pepper jujubes for our stomach's sake. The brutal east wind had cleared the streets, and the few passers-by were muffled to their puckered eyes. In the Italian warehouse next door some gay feathered birds and game, hung upon hooks, sagged to the wind across the left edge of our window-frame.