Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling Page B

have made you dearer than my own heart to me,
Sahib
. You are an Englishman. I am only a black girl’ – she was fairer than bar-gold in the Mint, – ‘and the widow of a black man.’
    Then she sobbed and said – ‘But on my soul and my Mother’s soul, I love you. There shall no harm come to you, whatever happens to me.’
    Trejago argued with the child, and tried to soothe her, but she seemed quite unreasonably disturbed. Nothing would satisfy her save that all relations between them should end. He was to go away at once. And he went. As he dropped out of the window, she kissed his forehead twice, and he walked home wondering.
    A week, and then three weeks, passed without a sign from Bisesa.Trejago, thinking that the rupture had lasted quite long enough, went down to Amir Nath’s Gully for the fifth time in the three weeks, hoping that his rap at the sill of the shifting grating would be answered. He was not disappointed.
    There was a young moon, and one stream of light fell down into Amir Nath’s Gully, and struck the grating which was drawn away as he knocked. From the black dark, Bisesa held out her arms into the moonlight. Both hands had been cut off at the wrists, and the stumps were nearly healed.
    Then, as Bisesa bowed her head between her arms and sobbed, someone in the room grunted like a wild beast, and something sharp – knife, sword, or spear – thrust at Trejago in his
boorka
. The stroke missed his body, but cut into one of the muscles of the groin, and he limped slightly from the wound for the rest of his days.
    The grating went into its place. There was no sign whatever from inside the house – nothing but the moonlight strip on the high wall, and the blackness of Amir Nath’s Gully behind.
    The next thing Trejago remembers, after raging and shouting like a madman between those pitiless walls, is that he found himself near the river as the dawn was breaking, threw away his
boorka
and went home bareheaded.
    What was the tragedy – whether Bisesa had, in a fit of causeless despair, told everything, or the intrigue had been discovered and she tortured to tell; whether Durga Charan knew his name and what became of Bisesa – Trejago does not know to this day. Something horrible had happened, and the thought of what it must have been comes upon Trejago in the night now and again, and keeps him company till the morning. One special feature of the case is that he does not know where lies the front of Durga Charan’s house. It may open on to a courtyard common to two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the gates of Jitha Megji’s
bustee
. Trejago cannot tell. He cannot get Bisesa – poor little Bisesa – back again. He has lost her in the City where each man’s house is as guarded and as unknowable as the grave; and the grating that opens into Amir Nath’s Gully has been walled up.
    But Trejago pays his calls regularly, and is reckoned a very decent sort of man.
    There is nothing peculiar about him, except a slight stiffness, caused by a riding-strain, in the right leg.

A Wayside Comedy 1
    Because to every purpose there is time and judgment, therefore the misery of man is great upon him.
    Ecclesiastes
viii. 6.
    Fate and the Government of India have turned the Station of Kashima into a prison; and, because there is no help for the poor souls who are now lying there in torment, I write this story, praying that the Government of India may be moved to scatter the European population to the four winds.
    Kashima is bounded on all sides by the rock-tipped circle of the Dosehri hills. In spring, it is ablaze with roses. In summer, the roses die and the hot winds blow from the hills. In autumn, the white mists from the
jhils
2 cover the place as with water, and in winter, the frosts nip everything young and tender to earth-level. There is but one view in Kashima – a stretch of perfectly flat pasture and plough-land,