Book: The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition

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Government ordered him to Simla after he had come out of the
desert;
and he went up meaning to try for a post then vacant. That season,
Mrs. Reiver--perhaps you will remember her--was in the height of
her
power, and many men lay under her yoke. Everything bad that
could
be said has already been said about Mrs. Reiver, in another tale.

Moriarty was heavily-built and handsome, very quiet and
nervously
anxious to please his neighbors when he wasn't sunk in a brown
study. He started a good deal at sudden noises or if spoken to
without warning; and, when you watched him drinking his glass of
water at dinner, you could see the hand shake a little. But all
this was put down to nervousness, and the quiet, steady, "sip-sip-
sip, fill and sip-sip-sip, again," that went on in his own room when
he was by himself, was never known. Which was miraculous,
seeing
how everything in a man's private life is public property out here.

Moriarty was drawn, not into Mrs. Reiver's set, because they were
not his sort, but into the power of Mrs. Reiver, and he fell down in
front of her and made a goddess of her. This was due to his
coming
fresh out of the jungle to a big town. He could not scale things
properly or see who was what.

Because Mrs. Reiver was cold and hard, he said she was stately
and
dignified. Because she had no brains, and could not talk cleverly,
he said she was reserved and shy. Mrs. Reiver shy! Because she
was
unworthy of honor or reverence from any one, he reverenced her
from
a distance and dowered her with all the virtues in the Bible and
most of those in Shakespeare.

This big, dark, abstracted man who was so nervous when a pony
cantered behind him, used to moon in the train of Mrs. Reiver,
blushing with pleasure when she threw a word or two his way. His
admiration was strictly platonic: even other women saw and
admitted
this. He did not move out in Simla, so he heard nothing against his
idol: which was satisfactory. Mrs. Reiver took no special notice of
him, beyond seeing that he was added to her list of admirers, and
going for a walk with him now and then, just to show that he was
her
property, claimable as such. Moriarty must have done most of the
talking, for Mrs. Reiver couldn't talk much to a man of his stamp;
and the little she said could not have been profitable. What
Moriarty believed in, as he had good reason to, was Mrs. Reiver's
influence over him, and, in that belief, set himself seriously to
try to do away with the vice that only he himself knew of.

His experiences while he was fighting with it must have been
peculiar, but he never described them. Sometimes he would hold
off
from everything except water for a week. Then, on a rainy night,
when no one had asked him out to dinner, and there was a big fire
in
his room, and everything comfortable, he would sit down and
make a
big night of it by adding little nip to little nip, planning big
schemes of reformation meanwhile, until he threw himself on his
bed
hopelessly drunk. He suffered next morning.

One night, the big crash came. He was troubled in his own mind
over
his attempts to make himself "worthy of the friendship" of Mrs.

Reiver. The past ten days had been very bad ones, and the end of
it
all was that he received the arrears of two and three-quarter years
of sipping in one attack of delirium tremens of the subdued kind;
beginning with suicidal depression, going on to fits and starts and
hysteria, and ending with downright raving. As he sat in a chair in
front of the fire, or walked up and down the room picking a
handkerchief to pieces, you heard what poor Moriarty really
thought
of Mrs. Reiver, for he raved about her and his own fall for the
most
part; though he ravelled some P. W. D. accounts into the same
skein
of thought. He talked, and talked, and talked in a low dry whisper
to himself, and there was no stopping him. He seemed to know
that
there was something wrong, and twice tried to pull himself
together
and confer rationally with the Doctor; but his mind ran out of
control at once, and he fell back to a whisper and the story of his
troubles. It is terrible to hear a big man babbling like a child of
all that a man usually locks up, and puts away in the deep of his
heart. Moriarty read out his very soul for the benefit of any one
who was in the room between ten-thirty that night and
two-forty-five
next morning.

From what he said, one gathered how immense an influence Mrs.
Reiver
held over him, and how thoroughly he felt for his own lapse. His
whisperings cannot, of course, be put down here; but they were
very
instructive as showing the errors of his estimates.

. . . . . . . . .

When the trouble was over, and his few acquaintances were
pitying
him for the bad attack of jungle-fever that had so pulled him down,
Moriarty swore a big oath to himself and went abroad again with
Mrs.

Reiver till the end of the season, adoring her in a quiet and
deferential way as an angel from heaven. Later on he took to
riding--not hacking, but honest riding--which was good proof that
he
was improving, and you could slam doors behind him without his
jumping to his feet with a gasp. That, again, was hopeful.

How he kept his oath, and what it cost him in the beginning,
nobody
knows. He certainly managed to compass the hardest thing that a
man
who has drank heavily can do. He took his peg and wine at dinner,
but he never drank alone, and never let what he drank have the
least
hold on him.

Once he told a bosom-friend the story of his great trouble, and how
the "influence of a pure honest woman, and an angel as well" had
saved him. When the man--startled at anything good being laid to
Mrs. Reiver's door--laughed, it cost him Moriarty's friendship.

Moriarty, who is married now to a woman ten thousand times
better
than Mrs. Reiver--a woman who believes that there is no man on
earth
as good and clever as her husband--will go down to his grave
vowing
and protesting that Mrs. Reiver saved him from ruin in both
worlds.

That she knew anything of Moriarty's weakness nobody believed
for a
moment. That she would have cut him dead, thrown him over, and
acquainted all her friends with her discovery, if she had known of
it, nobody who knew her doubted for an instant.

Moriarty thought her something she never was, and in that belief
saved himself. Which was just as good as though she had been
everything that he had imagined.

But the question is, what claim will Mrs. Reiver have to the credit
of Moriarty's salvation, when her day of reckoning comes?

A BANK FRAUD.

He drank strong waters and his speech was coarse;
He purchased raiment and forebore to pay;
He struck a trusting junior with a horse,
And won Gymkhanas in a doubtful way.

Then, 'twixt a vice and folly, turned aside
To do good deeds and straight to cloak them, lied.

THE MESS ROOM.

If Reggie Burke were in India now, he would resent this tale being
told; but as he is in Hong-Kong and won't see it, the telling is
safe. He was the man who worked the big fraud on the Sind and
Sialkote Bank. He was manager of an up-country Branch, and a
sound
practical man with a large experience of native loan and insurance
work. He could combine the frivolities of ordinary life with his
work, and yet do well. Reggie Burke rode anything that would let
him get up, danced as neatly as he rode, and was wanted for every
sort of amusement in the Station.

As he said himself, and as many men found out rather to their
surprise, there were two Burkes, both very much at your service.

"Reggie Burke," between four and ten, ready for anything from a
hot-
weather gymkhana to a riding-picnic; and, between ten and four,
"Mr.

Reginald Burke, Manager of the Sind and Sialkote Branch Bank."
You
might play polo with him one afternoon and hear him express his
opinions when a man crossed; and you might call on him next
morning
to raise a two-thousand rupee loan on a five hundred pound
insurance-policy, eighty pounds paid in premiums. He would
recognize you, but you would have some trouble in recognizing
him.

The Directors of the Bank--it had its headquarters in Calcutta and
its General Manager's word carried weight with the Government--
picked their men well. They had tested Reggie up to a fairly
severe
breaking-strain. They trusted him just as much as Directors ever
trust Managers. You must see for yourself whether their trust was
misplaced.

Reggie's Branch was in a big Station, and worked with the usual
staff--one Manager, one Accountant, both English, a Cashier, and
a
horde of native clerks; besides the Police patrol at nights outside.

The bulk of its work, for it was in a thriving district, was hoondi
and accommodation of all kinds. A fool has no grip of this sort of
business; and a clever man who does not go about among his
clients,
and know more than a little of their affairs, is worse than a fool.

Reggie was young-looking, clean-shaved, with a twinkle in his eye,
and a head that nothing short of a gallon of the Gunners' Madeira
could make any impression on.

One day, at a big dinner, he announced casually that the Directors
had shifted on to him a Natural Curiosity, from England, in the
Accountant line. He was perfectly correct. Mr. Silas Riley,
Accountant, was a MOST curious animal--a long, gawky,
rawboned
Yorkshireman, full of the savage self-conceit that blossom's only
in
the best county in England. Arrogance was a mild word for the
mental attitude of Mr. S. Riley. He had worked himself up, after
seven years, to a Cashier's position in a Huddersfield Bank; and all
his experience lay among the factories of the North. Perhaps he
would have done better on the Bombay side, where they are happy
with
one-half per cent. profits, and money is cheap. He was useless for
Upper India and a wheat Province, where a man wants a large head
and
a touch of imagination if he is to turn out a satisfactory balance-
sheet.

He was wonderfully narrow-minded in business, and, being new to
the
country, had no notion that Indian banking is totally distinct from
Home work. Like most clever self-made men, he had much
simplicity
in his nature; and, somehow or other, had construed the ordinarily
polite terms of his letter of engagement into a belief that the
Directors had chosen him on account of his special and brilliant
talents, and that they set great store by him. This notion grew and
crystallized; thus adding to his natural North-country conceit.

Further, he was delicate, suffered from some trouble in his chest,
and was short in his temper.

You will admit that Reggie had reason to call his new Accountant
a
Natural Curiosity. The two men failed to hit it off at all. Riley
considered Reggie a wild, feather-headed idiot, given to Heaven
only
knew what dissipation in low places called "Messes," and totally
unfit for the serious and solemn vocation of banking. He could
never get over Reggie's look of youth and "you-be-damned" air;
and
he couldn't understand Reggie's friends--clean-built, careless men
in the Army--who rode over to big Sunday breakfasts at the Bank,
and
told sultry stories till Riley got up and left the room. Riley was
always showing Reggie how the business ought to be conducted,
and
Reggie had more than once to remind him that seven years' limited
experience between Huddersfield and Beverly did not qualify a
man to
steer a big up-country business. Then Riley sulked and referred to
himself as a pillar of the Bank and a cherished friend of the
Directors, and Reggie tore his hair. If a man's English
subordinates fail him in this country, he comes to a hard time
indeed, for native help has strict limitations. In the winter Riley
went sick for weeks at a time with his lung complaint, and this
threw more work on Reggie. But he preferred it to the everlasting
friction when Riley was well.

One of the Travelling Inspectors of the Bank discovered these
collapses and reported them to the Directors. Now Riley had been
foisted on the Bank by an M. P., who wanted the support of Riley's
father, who, again, was anxious to get his son out to a warmer
climate because of those lungs. The M. P. had an interest in the
Bank; but one of the Directors wanted to advance a nominee of his
own; and, after Riley's father had died, he made the rest of the
Board see that an Accountant who was sick for half the year, had
better give place to a healthy man. If Riley had known the real
story of his appointment, he might have behaved better; but
knowing
nothing, his stretches of sickness alternated with restless,
persistent, meddling irritation of Reggie, and all the hundred ways
in which conceit in a subordinate situation can find play. Reggie
used to call him striking and hair-curling names behind his back as
a relief to his own feelings; but he never abused him to his face,
because he said: "Riley is such a frail beast that half of his
loathsome conceit is due to pains in the chest."

Late one April, Riley went very sick indeed. The doctor punched
him
and thumped him, and told him he would be better before long.
Then
the doctor went to Reggie and said:--"Do you know how sick your
Accountant is?" "No!" said Reggie--"The worse the better,
confound
him! He's a clacking nuisance when he's well. I'll let you take
away the Bank Safe if you can drug him silent for this
hot-weather."

But the doctor did not laugh--"Man, I'm not joking," he said. "I'll
give him another three months in his bed and a week or so more to
die in. On my honor and reputation that's all the grace he has in
this world. Consumption has hold of him to the marrow."

Reggie's face changed at once into the face of "Mr. Reginald
Burke,"
and he answered:--"What can I do?"

"Nothing," said the doctor. "For all practical purposes the man is
dead already. Keep him quiet and cheerful and tell him he's going
to recover. That's all. I'll look after him to the end, of
course."

The doctor went away, and Reggie sat down to open the evening
mail.

His first letter was one from the Directors, intimating for his
information that Mr. Riley was to resign, under a month's notice,
by
the terms of his agreement, telling Reggie that their letter to
Riley would follow and advising Reggie of the coming of a new
Accountant, a man whom Reggie knew and liked.

Reggie lit a cheroot, and, before he had finished smoking, he had
sketched the outline of a fraud. He put away--"burked"--the
Directors letter, and went in to talk to Riley, who was as
ungracious as usual, and fretting himself over the way the bank
would run during his illness. He never thought of the extra work
on
Reggie's shoulders, but solely of the damage to his own prospects
of
advancement. Then Reggie assured him that everything would be
well,
and that he, Reggie, would confer with Riley daily on the
management
of the Bank. Riley was a little soothed, but he hinted in as many
words that he did not think much of Reggie's business capacity.

Reggie was humble. And he had letters in his desk from the
Directors that a Gilbarte or a Hardie might have been proud of!

The days passed in the big darkened house, and the Directors'
letter
of dismissal to Riley came and was put away by Reggie, who,
every
evening, brought the books to Riley's room, and showed him what
had
been going forward, while Riley snarled. Reggie did his best to
make statements pleasing to Riley, but the Accountant was sure
that
the Bank was going to rack and ruin without him. In June, as the
lying in bed told on his spirit, he asked whether his absence had
been noted by the Directors, and Reggie said that they had written
most sympathetic letters, hoping that he would be able to resume
his
valuable services before long. He showed Riley the letters: and
Riley said that the Directors ought to have written to him direct.

A few days later, Reggie opened Riley's mail in the half-light of
the room, and gave him the sheet--not the envelope--of a letter to
Riley from the Directors. Riley said he would thank Reggie not to
interfere with his private papers, specially as Reggie knew he was
too weak to open his own letters. Reggie apologized.

Then Riley's mood changed, and he lectured Reggie on his evil
ways:
his horses and his bad friends. "Of course, lying here on my back,
Mr. Burke, I can't keep you straight; but when I'm well, I DO hope
you'll pay some heed to my words." Reggie, who had dropped
polo,
and dinners, and tennis, and all to attend to Riley, said that he
was penitent and settled Riley's head on the pillow and heard him
fret and contradict in hard, dry, hacking whispers, without a sign
of impatience. This at the end of a heavy day's office work, doing
double duty, in the latter half of June.

When the new Accountant came, Reggie told him the facts of the
case,
and announced to Riley that he had a guest staying with him.
Riley
said that he might have had more consideration than to entertain
his
"doubtful friends" at such a time. Reggie made Carron, the new
Accountant, sleep at the Club in consequence. Carron's arrival
took
some of the heavy work off his shoulders, and he had time to
attend
to Riley's exactions--to explain, soothe, invent, and settle and
resettle the poor wretch in bed, and to forge complimentary letters
from Calcutta. At the end of the first month, Riley wished to send
some money home to his mother. Reggie sent the draft. At the
end
of the second month, Riley's salary came in just the same. Reggie
paid it out of his own pocket; and, with it, wrote Riley a beautiful
letter from the Directors.

Riley was very ill indeed, but the flame of his life burnt
unsteadily. Now and then he would be cheerful and confident
about
the future, sketching plans for going Home and seeing his mother.

Reggie listened patiently when the office work was over, and
encouraged him.

At other times Riley insisted on Reggie's reading the Bible and
grim
"Methody" tracts to him. Out of these tracts he pointed morals
directed at his Manager. But he always found time to worry
Reggie
about the working of the Bank, and to show him where the weak
points
lay.

This in-door, sick-room life and constant strains wore Reggie
down a
good deal, and shook his nerves, and lowered his billiard-play by
forty points. But the business of the Bank, and the business of the
sick-room, had to go on, though the glass was 116 degrees in the
shade.

At the end of the third month, Riley was sinking fast, and had
begun
to realize that he was very sick. But the conceit that made him
worry Reggie, kept him from believing the worst. "He wants some
sort of mental stimulant if he is to drag on," said the doctor.

"Keep him interested in life if you care about his living." So
Riley, contrary to all the laws of business and the finance,
received a 25-per-cent, rise of salary from the Directors. The
"mental stimulant" succeeded beautifully. Riley was happy and
cheerful, and, as is often the case in consumption, healthiest in
mind when the body was weakest. He lingered for a full month,
snarling and fretting about the Bank, talking of the future, hearing
the Bible read, lecturing Reggie on sin, and wondering when he
would
be able to move abroad.

But at the end of September, one mercilessly hot evening, he rose
up
in his bed with a little gasp, and said quickly to Reggie:--"Mr.

Burke, I am going to die. I know it in myself. My chest is all
hollow inside, and there's nothing to breathe with. To the best of
my knowledge I have done nowt"--he was returning to the talk of
his
boyhood--"to lie heavy on my conscience. God be thanked, I have
been preserved from the grosser forms of sin; and I counsel YOU,
Mr.

Burke . . . ."

Here his voice died down, and Reggie stooped over him.

"Send my salary for September to my mother. . . . done great
things
with the Bank if I had been spared . . . . mistaken policy . . . .

no fault of mine."

Then he turned his face to the wall and died.

Reggie drew the sheet over Its face, and went out into the
verandah,
with his last "mental stimulant"--a letter of condolence and
sympathy from the Directors--unused in his pocket.

"If I'd been only ten minutes earlier," thought Reggie, "I might
have heartened him up to pull through another day."

TOD'S AMENDMENT.

The World hath set its heavy yoke
Upon the old white-bearded folk
Who strive to please the King.

God's mercy is upon the young,
God's wisdom in the baby tongue
That fears not anything.
The Parable of Chajju Bhagat.

Now Tods' Mamma was a singularly charming woman, and every
one in
Simla knew Tods. Most men had saved him from death on
occasions.

He was beyond his ayah's control altogether, and perilled his life
daily to find out what would happen if you pulled a Mountain
Battery
mule's tail. He was an utterly fearless young Pagan, about six
years old, and the only baby who ever broke the holy calm of the
supreme Legislative Council.

It happened this way: Tods' pet kid got loose, and fled up the hill,
off the Boileaugunge Road, Tods after it, until it burst into the
Viceregal Lodge lawn, then attached to "Peterhoff." The Council
were sitting at the time, and the windows were open because it was
warm. The Red Lancer in the porch told Tods to go away; but
Tods
knew the Red Lancer and most of the Members of Council
personally.

Moreover, he had firm hold of the kid's collar, and was being
dragged all across the flower-beds. "Give my salaam to the long
Councillor Sahib, and ask him to help me take Moti back!" gasped
Tods. The Council heard the noise through the open windows;
and,
after an interval, was seen the shocking spectacle of a Legal
Member
and a Lieutenant-Governor helping, under the direct patronage of a
Commander-in-Chief and a Viceroy, one small and very dirty boy
in a
sailor's suit and a tangle of brown hair, to coerce a lively and
rebellious kid. They headed it off down the path to the Mall, and
Tods went home in triumph and told his Mamma that ALL the
Councillor
Sahibs had been helping him to catch Moti. Whereat his Mamma
smacked Tods for interfering with the administration of the
Empire;
but Tods met the Legal Member the next day, and told him in
confidence that if the Legal Member ever wanted to catch a goat,
he,
Tods, would give him all the help in his power. "Thank you,
Tods,"
said the Legal Member.

Tods was the idol of some eighty jhampanis, and half as many
saises.

He saluted them all as "O Brother." It never entered his head that
any living human being could disobey his orders; and he was the
buffer between the servants and his Mamma's wrath. The working
of
that household turned on Tods, who was adored by every one from
the
dhoby to the dog-boy. Even Futteh Khan, the villainous loafer khit
from Mussoorie, shirked risking Tods' displeasure for fear his co-
mates should look down on him.

So Tods had honor in the land from Boileaugunge to Chota Simla,
and
ruled justly according to his lights. Of course, he spoke Urdu, but
he had also mastered many queer side-speeches like the chotee
bolee
of the women, and held grave converse with shopkeepers and Hill-
coolies alike. He was precocious for his age, and his mixing with
natives had taught him some of the more bitter truths of life; the
meanness and the sordidness of it. He used, over his bread and
milk, to deliver solemn and serious aphorisms, translated from the
vernacular into the English, that made his Mamma jump and vow
that
Tods MUST go home next hot weather.

Just when Tods was in the bloom of his power, the Supreme
Legislature were hacking out a Bill, for the Sub-Montane Tracts, a
revision of the then Act, smaller than the Punjab Land Bill, but
affecting a few hundred thousand people none the less. The Legal
Member had built, and bolstered, and embroidered, and amended
that
Bill, till it looked beautiful on paper. Then the Council began to
settle what they called the "minor details." As if any Englishman
legislating for natives knows enough to know which are the minor
and
which are the major points, from the native point of view, of any
measure! That Bill was a triumph of "safe guarding the interests
of
the tenant." One clause provided that land should not be leased on
longer terms than five years at a stretch; because, if the landlord
had a tenant bound down for, say, twenty years, he would squeeze
the
very life out of him. The notion was to keep up a stream of
independent cultivators in the Sub-Montane Tracts; and
ethnologically and politically the notion was correct. The only
drawback was that it was altogether wrong. A native's life in India
implies the life of his son. Wherefore, you cannot legislate for
one generation at a time. You must consider the next from the
native point of view. Curiously enough, the native now and then,
and in Northern India more particularly, hates being over-protected
against himself. There was a Naga village once, where they lived
on
dead AND buried Commissariat mules . . . . But that is another
story.

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