Rudyard Kipling

“ I murmured. "For a surety it is a matter of life and death this day." The sais ran to his head with a fragment of chupatti, saved from his all too scanty rations; the man loved him. And Tiglath swung round to the left in the portico; round and round swung he, till the near ear touched the muzzle of the shot-gun that waited its coming. He never flinched; he pressed his fate. The coachwan threw down the reins as, with four ounces of No. 5 shot behind the hollow of the root of the ear, Tiglath fell. ”

“ Trewinnard stepped forward with a gesture habitual to him when he wished to explain. Mrs. Reiver had never asked for explanations. She had told him that all his ways were perfect. Therefore he loved her.
Mrs. Mallowe tore up the papers one by one, saying as she did so: "You were going to cross swords with Hatchett. Do you know your own strength? Oh, Harold, Harold, it is too pitiable! I thought—I thought——" Then the great anger that had been growing in her broke out, and she cried: "Oh, you fool! You blind, blind, blind, trumpery fool! Why do I help you? ”

“ The hall was crammed with billycocks waiting for "We was shopmates." The great heart beat healthily. I went to my beer the equal of Shakespeare and Molière at the wings in a first night. What would my public say? Could anything live after the abandon of "We was shopmates"? What if the redcoats did not muster in their usual strength. O my friends, never in your songs and dramas forget the redcoat. He has sympathy and enormous boots.
I believed in the redcoat; in the great heart of the people: above all in myself. ”

“ And yet so great is the perversity of the American girl that she can, scorning tennis and the allurements of boating, work herself nearly to death over the skittles of archæology and foreign tongues, to the sorrow of all her friends.
Late that evening the contemptuous courtesy of the hotel allotted me a room in a cottage of quarter-inch planking, destitute of the most essential articles of toilette furniture. Ten shillings a day was the price of this shelter, for Chautauqua is a paying institution. ”

“ Some people say that the Supreme Government is the Devil. It is more like the Deep Sea. Anything that you throw into it disappears for weeks, and comes to light hacked and furred at the edges, crusted with weeds and shells and almost unrecognisable. The bold man who would dare to give it a file of love-letters would be amply rewarded. It would overlay them with original comments [Pg 172] and marginal notes, and work them piecemeal into D.O. dockets. Few things, from a setter or a whirlpool to a sausage-machine or a hatching hen, are more interesting and peculiar than the Supreme Government. ”

“ He knows everything about everything on this earth, and above all he knows all about men under any and every condition of life. He knows all about the aggressive militarism of you and your friends; he isn't quite sure of the necessity of an army; he is certain that colonial expansion is nonsense; and he is more than certain that the whole step of all our Empire must be regulated by the knowledge and foresight of the workingman. ”

“ The halls give wisdom and not too lively entertainment for sixpence—ticket good for four pen'orth of refreshments, chiefly inky porter—and the people who listen are respectable folk living under very grey skies who derive all the light side of their life, the food for their imagination and the crystallised expression of their views on Fate and Nemesis, from the affable ladies and gentlemen singers. ”

“ There was a pause, and Ram Buksh got himself fearfully entangled among Boards and Committees, but he valued them as a bower-bird values shells and red rags. "See!" said the Englishman to the Government of India, "he is blind on that side—blind by birth, training, instinct and associations. Five-sixths of him is poor stock raised off poor soil, and he'll die on the least provocation. You've no right to let him kill himself." ”

“ The wonder was not that men died like sheep, but that they did not die like flies; for their lives and their surroundings, their deaths, were part of a huge conspiracy against cleanliness. And the people loved to have it so. They huddled together in frowsy clusters, while Death mowed his way through them till the scythe blunted against the unresisting flesh, and he had to get a new one. They died by fever, tens of thousands in a month; they died [Pg 94] by cholera a thousand in a week; they died of smallpox, scores in the mohulla, and by dysentery by tens in a house ”

“ The pure air of fancy feeds us both; keep to that. If you are trammelled by the bitter, bornée truth, you are lost. You die the death of Zola. Invention is the only test of creation." "Of course," said I. "Zola's a bold, bad man. Not a patch on you." I hadn't caught his name, but I fancied that would prevent him flinging himself about on my sofa, which is a cheap one. "I don't say that altogether," he said. "He has his strong points. But he is deficient in imaginative constructiveness. You, I see from what you have said, will belong to the Neo-Gynekalistic school." ”

“ Trewinnard swallowed the shame—he felt dimly that he was not doing Mrs. Reiver any great wrong by untruth—and told and told and continued to tell, for the snare of this form of open-heartedness is that no man, unless he be a consummate liar, knows where to stop. The office door of all others must be either open wide or shut tight with a shaprassi to keep off callers.
Mrs. Mallowe made no sign to show that she felt Trewinnard's desertion till a piece of information that could only have come from one quarter ran about Simla like quicksilver. She met Trewinnard at a dinner. ”

“ By the way, if you stand long enough between the mounted sentries—the men who look like reflectors stolen from Christmas trees—you will presently meet every human being you ever knew in India. When I am not happy—that is to say, once a day—I run off and play on the pavement in front of the Horse-Guards, and watch the expressions on the gentlemen's faces as they come out. ”

“ Hordene told the story of the gift, which Guj heard out to the end. "Now, that's a nice sort of yarn to tell in a messroom, isn't it? They'd call it jumps or insanity," said Guj. "There's no reason in it. It doesn't lead up to anything. It only killed poor Marish and made you stick me with the mare; and yet it's true. Are you mad or drunk, or am I? That's the only explanation." "Can't be drunk for nine months on end, and madness would show in that time," said Hordene.
"All right," said Guj recklessly, going to the window. "I'll lay that ghost." He leaned out into the night and shouted: "Jale! ”

“ From sleepy, quiet little Musquash we rattled through the coal and iron districts of Pennsylvania, her coke ovens flaring into the night and her clamorous foundries waking the silence of the woods in which they lay. Twenty years hence woods and cornfields will be gone, and from Pittsburg to Shenango all will be smoky black as Bradford and Beverly: for each factory is drawing to itself a small town, and year by year the demand for rails increases. ”

“ Smooth-cut lawns of velvet grass, studded with tennis-courts, surrounded the hotel and ran down to the blue waters, which were dotted with rowboats. Young men in wonderful blazers, and maidens in more wonderful tennis costumes; women attired with all the extravagance of unthinking Chicago or the grace of Washington (which is Simla) filled the grounds, and the neat French nurses and exquisitely dressed little children ran about together. There was pickerel-fishing for such as enjoyed it ”

“ Are all men such fools?" "That woman is bad form," said Mrs. Hauksbee, "but she speaks the truth. I wonder what these soldiers have to say." Gunner Barnabas and Private Shacklock stopped, saluted, and hoped I would take no offence if they gave it as their opinion that I had not "got them down quite right." I gasped.
A spurred Hussar succeeded, his wife on his arm. It was Captain Gadsby and Minnie, and close behind them swaggered Jack Mafflin, the Brigadier-General in his arms. "Had the cheek to try to describe our life, had you?" said Gadsby carelessly. "Ha-hmm! S'pose he understood, Minnie?" ”

“ Hordene cursed the red-haired Guj in his heart for finding out the mare's peculiarity. Then he cursed the dead man Jale for his ridiculous interference with a free gift. "If it was given—it was given," said Hordene, "and he has no right to come messing about after it." When Guj and he next met, he enquired tenderly after Thurinda. The red-haired subaltern, impassive as usual, answered: "I've shot her." "Well—you know your own affairs best," said Hordene. "You've given yourself away," said Guj. "What makes you think I shot a sound horse? ”

“ Reiver came attired in some sort of '98 costume, with her hair pulled up to the top of her head, showing the clear outline on the back of the neck like the Récamier engravings. Mrs. Hauksbee had chosen to be loud, not to say vulgar, that evening, and went as The Black Death—a curious arrangement of barred velvet, black domino and flame-coloured satin puffery coming up to the neck and the wrists, with one of those shrieking keel-backed cicalas in the hair. The scream of the creature made people jump. ”

“ But we never slackened speed; we beat the foam to left and right with clanking of chains, rattling of bow-ports, and savage noises of ripping and rending from the cut-water ploughing up to the luminous sea-beasts. ”

“ I don't think some men ought to be allowed to fall in love any more than they ought to be allowed to taste whisky. She said she cared for me. Used to say that about a thousand times a day, with a kiss in between. I think about those things now, and they make me nearly as drunk as the whisky does. Do you know anything about that love-making business? I stole a copy of Cleopatra off a book-stall in Kearney Street, and that priest-chap says a very true thing about it. You can't stop when it's once started, and when it's all over you can't give it up at the word of command. ”

“ The housemaid must stand with her eyes on the ground while the young whelp sticks his hands under the tail of his dressing-gown and explains her duty to her. This makes me ill and sick—sick for Kadir Baksh, who rose from the earth when I called him, who knew the sequence of my papers and the ordering of my paltry garments, and, I verily believed, loved me not altogether for the sake of lucre. He said he would come with me to Belait because, "though the sahib says he will never return to India, yet I know, and all the other nauker log know, that return is his fate." ”

“ There is a freemasonry, the freemasonry of the public schools, stronger than any that the Craft knows. The Thing drank whisky raw, which in itself is not calculated to slake thirst, and I waited at its side because I knew, by virtue of the one sentence above recorded, that it once belonged to my caste. Indeed, so small is the world when one begins to travel round it, that, for aught I [Pg 13] knew, I might even have met the Thing in that menagerie of carefully-trained wild beasts, Decent Society. ”

“ It's blowing over the grass at Dugshai this very moment, and there's a smell of hot fir trees all along and along from Solon to Simla, and some happy man is flying up that road with fragments of a tonga-bar in his eye, his pet terrier under his arm, his thick clothes on the back-seat and the certainty of a month's pure joy in front of him. Instead of which you're being stewed at Hakaiti and I'm sitting in a second-hand atmosphere above a sausage-shop, watching three sparrows playing in a dirty-green tree and pretending that it's summer. ”

“ He has known of the actualities of life—Death, Power, Responsibility, Honour—the Good accomplished, the effacement of Wrong for forty years.
There remains to him a seat in a penny 'bus.
If I do not take him from that.
I rap my heels on the knife-board. I sing "tra la la." I am also well disposed to larmes.
He courbes himself underneath an ulstaire and he damns the fog to eternity.
He wills not that I leave him. He desires that I come to dinner.
I am grave. I think upon Lady Wollobie—shorn of chaprassies—at the Clob. Not in Bayswater. ”

“ Some day a man will rise up from Bermondsey, Battersea or Bow, and he will be coarse, but clearsighted, hard but infinitely and tenderly humorous, speaking the people's tongue, steeped in their lives and telling them in swinging, urging, dinging verse what it is that their inarticulate lips would express. ”

“ Trewinnard had been spoilt by over-much petting, and the devil of vanity that rides nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand made him behave as he did. He had been too long one woman's property; and that belief will sometimes drive a man to throw the best things in the world behind him, from rank perversity. Perhaps he only meant to stray temporarily and then return, but in arranging for this excursion he misunderstood both Mrs. Mallowe and Mrs. Reiver. ”

“ The Japanese are really the politest nation in the world. When the hotel proprietor returned with a policeman he did not at once thrust the man on Griffiths' notice. He put him in the verandah and let him clank his sword gently once or twice.
"Little chap's brought a blacksmith," said Griffiths, but when he saw the policeman his face became ugly. The policeman came into the room and tried to assist. Have you ever seen a four-foot policeman in white cotton gloves and a stand-up collar lunging percussating compensator look with a five-foot sword? ”

“ Everybody is anxious that I should see as many sides of American life as possible. Here in the East they demand of me what I thought of their West. I dare not answer that it is as far from their notions and motives as Hindustan from Hoboken—that the West, to this poor thinking, is an America which has no kinship with its neighbour. ”

“ The red steer's mother had been caught in a hailstorm five years ago. Till she went the way of all cow-flesh she missed no opportunity of telling her son to beware of the hot day and the cold wind that does not know its own mind. "When it blows five ways at once," said she, "and makes your horns feel creepy, get away, my son. ”