no concern--I who was once Fellow of a College whose buttery-hatch you
have not seen. I was loathsomely drunk. But consider how lightly I am
touched. It is nothing to me. Less than nothing; for I do not even feel
the headache which should be my portion. Now, in a higher life, how
ghastly would have been my punishment, how bitter my repentance! Believe
me, my friend with the neglected education, the highest is as the
lowest--always supposing each degree extreme.”
He turned round on the blanket, put his head between his fists and
continued:--
“On the Soul which I have lost and on the Conscience which I have
killed, I tell you that I CANNOT feel! I am as the gods, knowing good
and evil, but untouched by either. Is this enviable or is it not?”
When a man has lost the warning of “next morning's head,” he must be in
a bad state, I answered, looking at McIntosh on the blanket, with his
hair over his eyes and his lips blue-white, that I did not think the
insensibility good enough.
“For pity's sake, don't say that! I tell you, it IS good and most
enviable. Think of my consolations!”
“Have you so many, then, McIntosh?”
“Certainly; your attempts at sarcasm which is essentially the weapon
of a cultured man, are crude. First, my attainments, my classical and
literary knowledge, blurred, perhaps, by immoderate drinking--which
reminds me that before my soul went to the Gods last night, I sold the
Pickering Horace you so kindly lent me. Ditta Mull the Clothesman has
it. It fetched ten annas, and may be redeemed for a rupee--but still
infinitely superior to yours. Secondly, the abiding affection of Mrs.
McIntosh, best of wives. Thirdly, a monument, more enduring than brass,
which I have built up in the seven years of my degradation.”
He stopped here, and crawled across the room for a drink of water. He
was very shaky and sick.
He referred several times to his “treasure”--some great possession that
he owned--but I held this to be the raving of drink. He was as poor and
as proud as he could be. His manner was not pleasant, but he knew enough
about the natives, among whom seven years of his life had been spent,
to make his acquaintance worth having. He used actually to laugh at
Strickland as an ignorant man--“ignorant West and East”--he said. His
boast was, first, that he was an Oxford Man of rare and shining parts,
which may or may not have been true--I did not know enough to check his
statements--and, secondly, that he “had his hand on the pulse of native
life”--which was a fact. As an Oxford man, he struck me as a prig: he
was always throwing his education about. As a Mahommedan faquir--as
McIntosh Jellaludin--he was all that I wanted for my own ends. He smoked
several pounds of my tobacco, and taught me several ounces of things
worth knowing; but he would never accept any gifts, not even when the
cold weather came, and gripped the poor thin chest under the poor thin
alpaca-coat. He grew very angry, and said that I had insulted him, and
that he was not going into hospital. He had lived like a beast and he
would die rationally, like a man.
As a matter of fact, he died of pneumonia; and on the night of his death
sent over a grubby note asking me to come and help him to die.
The native woman was weeping by the side of the bed. McIntosh, wrapped
in a cotton cloth, was too weak to resent a fur coat being thrown over
him. He was very active as far as his mind was concerned, and his eyes
were blazing. When he had abused the Doctor who came with me so foully
that the indignant old fellow left, he cursed me for a few minutes and
calmed down.
Then he told his wife to fetch out “The Book” from a hole in the wall.
She brought out a big bundle, wrapped in the tail of a petticoat, of old
sheets of miscellaneous note-paper, all numbered and covered with fine
cramped writing. McIntosh ploughed his hand through the rubbish and
stirred it up lovingly.
“This,” he said, “is my work--the Book of McIntosh Jellaludin, showing
what he saw and how he lived, and what befell him and others; being also
an account of the life and sins and death of Mother Maturin. What Mirza
Murad Ali Beg's book is to all other books on native life, will my work
be to Mirza Murad Ali Beg's!”
This, as will be conceded by any one who knows Mirza Ali Beg's book, was
a sweeping statement. The papers did not look specially valuable; but
McIntosh handled them as if they were currency-notes. Then he said
slowly:--“In despite the many weaknesses of your education, you have
been good to me. I will speak of your tobacco when I reach the Gods. I
owe you much thanks for many kindnesses. But I abominate indebtedness.
For this reason I bequeath to you now the monument more enduring than
brass--my one book--rude and imperfect in parts, but oh, how rare in
others! I wonder if you will understand it. It is a gift more honorable
than... Bah! where is my brain rambling to? You will mutilate it
horribly. You will knock out the gems you call 'Latin quotations,' you
Philistine, and you will butcher the style to carve into your own jerky
jargon; but you cannot destroy the whole of it. I bequeath it to you.
Ethel... My brain again!... Mrs. McIntosh, bear witness that I give the
sahib all these papers. They would be of no use to you, Heart of my
heart; and I lay it upon you,” he turned to me here, “that you do not
let my book die in its present form. It is yours unconditionally--the
story of McIntosh Jellaludin, which is NOT the story of McIntosh
Jellaludin, but of a greater man than he, and of a far greater woman.
Listen now! I am neither mad nor drunk! That book will make you famous.”
I said, “thank you,” as the native woman put the bundle into my arms.
“My only baby!” said McIntosh with a smile. He was sinking fast, but
he continued to talk as long as breath remained. I waited for the
end: knowing that, in six cases out of ten the dying man calls for his
mother. He turned on his side and said:--
“Say how it came into your possession. No one will believe you, but my
name, at least, will live. You will treat it brutally, I know you will.
Some of it must go; the public are fools and prudish fools. I was their
servant once. But do your mangling gently--very gently. It is a great
work, and I have paid for it in seven years' damnation.”
His voice stopped for ten or twelve breaths, and then he began mumbling
a prayer of some kind in Greek. The native woman cried very bitterly.
Lastly, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly:--“Not guilty, my
Lord!”
Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died. The native
woman ran into the Serai among the horses and screamed and beat her
breasts; for she had loved him.
Perhaps his last sentence in life told what McIntosh had once gone
through; but, saving the big bundle of old sheets in the cloth, there
was nothing in his room to say who or what he had been.
The papers were in a hopeless muddle.
Strickland helped me to sort them, and he said that the writer was
either an extreme liar or a most wonderful person. He thought the
former. One of these days, you may be able to judge for yourself. The
bundle needed much expurgation and was full of Greek nonsense, at the
head of the chapters, which has all been cut out.
If the things are ever published some one may perhaps remember this
story, now printed as a safeguard to prove that McIntosh Jellaludin and
not I myself wrote the Book of Mother Maturin.
I don't want the Giant's Robe to come true in my case.
End of Project Gutenberg's Plain Tales from the Hills, by Rudyard Kipling