Produced by Donald Lainson
PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS
By Rudyard Kipling
CONTENTS
LESPETH
THREE AND AN EXTRA
THROWN AWAY
MISS YOUGHAL'S SAIS
YOKED WITH AN UNBELIEVER
FALSE DAWN
THE RESCUE OF PLUFFLES
CUPID'S ARROWS
HIS CHANCE IN LIFE
WATCHES OF THE NIGHT
THE OTHER MAN
CONSEQUENCES
THE CONVERSION OF AURELIAN MCGOGGIN
A GERM DESTROYER
KIDNAPPED
THE ARREST OF LIEUTENANT GOLIGHTLY
THE HOUSE OF SUDDHOO
HIS WEDDED WIFE
THE BROKEN LINK HANDICAPPED.
BEYOND THE PALE
IN ERROR
A BANK FRAUD
TOD'S AMENDMENT
IN THE PRIDE OF HIS YOUTH
PIG
THE ROUT OF THE WHITE HUSSARS
THE BRONCKHORST DIVORCE-CASE
VENUS ANNODOMINI
THE BISARA OF POORER
THE GATE OF A HUNDRED SORROWS
THE STORY OF MUHAMMID DIN
ON THE STRENGTH OF A LIKENESS
WRESSLEY OF THE FOREIGN OFFICE
BY WORD OF MOUTH
TO BE HELD FOR REFERENCE
PLAIN TALES FROM THE HILLS
LISPETH.
Look, you have cast out Love! What Gods are these You bid me please? The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
The Convert.
She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his wife. Oneyear their maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their onlypoppy-field just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarth side; so, nextseason, they turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Missionto be baptized. The Kotgarth Chaplain christened her Elizabeth, and"Lispeth" is the Hill or pahari pronunciation.
Later, cholera came into the Kotgarth Valley and carried off Sonoo andJadeh, and Lispeth became half-servant, half-companion to the wife ofthe then Chaplain of Kotgarth. This was after the reign of the Moravianmissionaries, but before Kotgarth had quite forgotten her title of"Mistress of the Northern Hills."
Whether Christianity improved Lispeth, or whether the gods of her ownpeople would have done as much for her under any circumstances, I do notknow; but she grew very lovely. When a Hill girl grows lovely, she isworth traveling fifty miles over bad ground to look upon. Lispeth had aGreek face--one of those faces people paint so often, and see so seldom.She was of a pale, ivory color and, for her race, extremely tall. Also,she possessed eyes that were wonderful; and, had she not been dressed inthe abominable print-cloths affected by Missions, you would, meeting heron the hill-side unexpectedly, have thought her the original Diana ofthe Romans going out to slay.
Lispeth took to Christianity readily, and did not abandon it when shereached womanhood, as do some Hill girls. Her own people hated herbecause she had, they said, become a memsahib and washed herself daily;and the Chaplain's wife did not know what to do with her. Somehow,one cannot ask a stately goddess, five foot ten in her shoes, to cleanplates and dishes. So she played with the Chaplain's children and tookclasses in the Sunday School, and read all the books in the house, andgrew more and more beautiful, like the Princesses in fairy tales. TheChaplain's wife said that the girl ought to take service in Simla as anurse or something "genteel." But Lispeth did not want to take service.She was very happy where she was.
When travellers--there were not many in those years--came to Kotgarth,Lispeth used to lock herself into her own room for fear they might takeher away to Simla, or somewhere out into the unknown world.
One day, a few months after she was seventeen years old, Lispeth wentout for a walk. She did not walk in the manner of English ladies--a mileand a half out, and a ride back again. She covered between twenty andthirty miles in her little constitutionals, all about and about, betweenKotgarth and Narkunda. This time she came back at full dusk, steppingdown the breakneck descent into Kotgarth with something heavy in herarms. The Chaplain's wife was dozing in the drawing-room when Lispethcame in breathing hard and very exhausted with her burden. Lispeth putit down on the sofa, and said simply:
"This is my husband. I found him on the Bagi Road. He has hurt himself.We will nurse him, and when he is well, your husband shall marry him tome."
This was the first mention Lispeth had ever made of her matrimonialviews, and the Chaplain's wife shrieked with horror. However, the man onthe sofa needed attention first. He was a young Englishman, and his headhad been cut to the bone by something jagged. Lispeth said she had foundhim down the khud, so she had brought him in. He was breathing queerlyand was unconscious.
He was put to bed and tended by the Chaplain, who knew something ofmedicine; and Lispeth waited outside the door in case she could beuseful. She explained to the Chaplain that this was the man she meantto marry; and the Chaplain and his wife lectured her severely on theimpropriety of her conduct. Lispeth listened quietly, and repeated herfirst proposition. It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe outuncivilized Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight.Lispeth, having found the man she worshipped, did not see why she shouldkeep silent as to her choice. She had no intention of being sent away,either. She was going to nurse that Englishman until he was well enoughto marry her. This was her little programme.
After a fortnight of slight fever and inflammation, the Englishmanrecovered coherence and thanked the Chaplain and his wife, andLispeth--especially Lispeth--for their kindness. He was a traveller inthe East, he said--they never talked about "globe-trotters" in thosedays, when the P. & O. fleet was young and small--and had come fromDehra Dun to hunt for plants and butterflies among the Simla hills. Noone at Simla, therefore, knew anything about him. He fancied he musthave fallen over the cliff while stalking a fern on a rotten tree-trunk,and that his coolies must have stolen his baggage and fled. He thoughthe would go back to Simla when he was a little stronger. He desired nomore mountaineering.
He made small haste to go away, and recovered his strength slowly.Lispeth objected to being advised either by the Chaplain or his wife;so the latter spoke to the Englishman, and told him how matters stood inLispeth's heart. He laughed a good deal, and said it was very pretty andromantic, a perfect idyl of the Himalayas; but, as he was engaged to agirl at Home, he fancied that nothing would happen. Certainly he wouldbehave with discretion. He did that. Still he found it very pleasant totalk to Lispeth, and walk with Lispeth, and say nice things to her, andcall her pet names while he was getting strong enough to go away. Itmeant nothing at all to him, and everything in the world to Lispeth. Shewas very happy while the fortnight lasted, because she had found a manto love.
Being a savage by birth, she took no trouble to hide her feelings, andthe Englishman was amused. When he went away, Lispeth walked with him,up the Hill as far as Narkunda, very troubled and very miserable. TheChaplain's wife, being a good Christian and disliking anything inthe shape of fuss or scandal--Lispeth was beyond her managemententirely--had told the Englishman to tell Lispeth that he was comingback to marry her. "She is but a child, you know, and, I fear, at hearta heathen," said the Chaplain's wife. So all the twelve miles up thehill the Englishman, with his arm around Lispeth's waist, was assuringthe girl that he would come back and marry her; and Lispeth made himpromise over and over again. She wept on t
he Narkunda Ridge till he hadpassed out of sight along the Muttiani path.
Then she dried her tears and went in to Kotgarth again, and said to theChaplain's wife: "He will come back and marry me. He has gone to hisown people to tell them so." And the Chaplain's wife soothed Lispethand said: "He will come back." At the end of two months, Lispeth grewimpatient, and was told that the Englishman had gone over the seasto England. She knew where England was, because she had read littlegeography primers; but, of course, she had no conception of the natureof the sea, being a Hill girl. There was an old puzzle-map of the Worldin the House. Lispeth had played with it when she was a child. Sheunearthed it again, and put it together of evenings, and cried toherself, and tried to imagine where her Englishman was. As she had noideas of distance or steamboats, her notions were somewhat erroneous. Itwould not have made the least difference had she been perfectly correct;for the Englishman had no intention of coming back to marry a Hill girl.He forgot all about her by the time he was butterfly-hunting in Assam.He wrote a book on the East afterwards. Lispeth's name did not appear.
At the end of three months, Lispeth made daily pilgrimage to Narkundato see if her Englishman was coming along the road. It gave her comfort,and the Chaplain's wife, finding her happier, thought that she wasgetting over her "barbarous and most indelicate folly." A little laterthe walks ceased to help Lispeth and her temper grew very bad. TheChaplain's wife thought this a profitable time to let her know the realstate of affairs--that the Englishman had only promised his love to keepher quiet--that he had never meant anything, and that it was "wrong andimproper" of Lispeth to think of marriage with an Englishman, who was ofa superior clay, besides being promised in marriage to a girl of his ownpeople. Lispeth said that all this was clearly impossible, because hehad said he loved her, and the Chaplain's wife had, with her own lips,asserted that the Englishman was coming back.
"How can what he and you said be untrue?" asked Lispeth.
"We said it as an excuse to keep you quiet, child," said the Chaplain'swife.
"Then you have lied to me," said Lispeth, "you and he?"
The Chaplain's wife bowed her head, and said nothing. Lispeth wassilent, too for a little time; then she went out down the valley, andreturned in the dress of a Hill girl--infamously dirty, but without thenose and ear rings. She had her hair braided into the long pig-tail,helped out with black thread, that Hill women wear.
"I am going back to my own people," said she. "You have killed Lispeth.There is only left old Jadeh's daughter--the daughter of a pahari andthe servant of Tarka Devi. You are all liars, you English."
By the time that the Chaplain's wife had recovered from the shock of theannouncement that Lispeth had 'verted to her mother's gods, the girl hadgone; and she never came back.
She took to her own unclean people savagely, as if to make up thearrears of the life she had stepped out of; and, in a little time, shemarried a wood-cutter who beat her, after the manner of paharis, and herbeauty faded soon.
"There is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of theheathen," said the Chaplain's wife, "and I believe that Lispeth wasalways at heart an infidel." Seeing she had been taken into the Churchof England at the mature age of five weeks, this statement does not docredit to the Chaplain's wife.
Lispeth was a very old woman when she died. She always had a perfectcommand of English, and when she was sufficiently drunk, could sometimesbe induced to tell the story of her first love-affair.
It was hard then to realize that the bleared, wrinkled creature, so likea wisp of charred rag, could ever have been "Lispeth of the KotgarthMission."