Kipling Kim

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4553-5394-1
Verlag: Seltzer Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 919 Seiten

According to Wikipedia: 'Kim is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author Rudyard Kipling. It was first published serially in McClure's Magazine from December 1900 to October 1901 as well as in Cassell's Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901. The story unfolds against the backdrop of The Great Game, the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. It is set after the Second Afghan War which ended in 1881, but before the Third, probably in the period 1893 to 1898. The novel is notable for its detailed portrait of the people, culture, and varied religions of India. 'The book presents a vivid picture of India, its teeming populations, religions, and superstitions, and the life of the bazaars and the road.'

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kipling, Rudyard

Leseproben

Chapter II

 And whoso will, from Pride released; Contemning neither creed nor priest, May feel the Soul of all the East. About him at Kamakura.

Buddha at Kamakura.

 They entered the fort-like railway station, black in the end of  night; the electrics sizzling over the goods-yard where they  handle the heavy Northern grain-traffic.

'This is the work of devils!' said the lama, recoiling from the  hollow echoing darkness, the glimmer of rails between the masonry  platforms, and the maze of girders above. He stood in a gigantic  stone hall paved, it seemed, with the sheeted dead third-class  passengers who had taken their tickets overnight and were  sleeping in the waiting-rooms. All hours of the twenty-four are  alike to Orientals, and their passenger traffic is regulated  accordingly.

'This is where the fire-carriages come. One stands behind that  hole' -Kim pointed to the ticket-office - 'who will give thee a  paper to take thee to Umballa.'

'But we go to Benares,' he replied petulantly.

'All one. Benares then. Quick: she comes!'

'Take thou the purse.'

The lama, not so well used to trains as he had pretended, started  as the 3.25a.m. south-bound roared in. The sleepers sprang to  life, and the station filled with clamour and shoutings, cries of  water and sweetmeat vendors, shouts of native policemen, and  shrill yells of women gathering up their baskets, their families,  and their husbands.

'It is the train - only the te-rain. It will not come here.  Wait!' Amazed at the lama's immense- simplicity (he had handed  him a small bag full of rupees), Kim asked and paid for a ticket  to Umballa. A sleepy clerk grunted and flung out a ticket to the  next station, just six miles distant.

'Nay,' said Kim, scanning it with a grin. 'This may serve for  farmers, but I live in the city of Lahore. It was cleverly done,  Babu. Now give the ticket to Umballa.'

The Babu scowled and dealt the proper ticket.

'Now another to Amritzar,' said Kim, who had no notion of  spending Mahbub Ali's money on anything so crude as a paid ride  to Umballa. 'The price is so much. The small money in return is  just so much. I know the ways of the te-rain ... Never did yogi  need chela as thou dost,' he went on merrily to the bewildered  lama. 'They would have flung thee out at Mian Mir but for me.  This way! Come!' He returned the money, keeping only one anna in  each rupee of the price of the Umballa ticket as his commission -  the immemorial commission of Asia.

The lama jibbed at the open door of a crowded third-class  carriage. 'Were it not better to walk?' said he weakly.

A burly Sikh artisan thrust forth his bearded head. 'Is he  afraid? Do not be afraid. I remember the time when I was afraid  of the te-rain. Enter! This thing is the work of the Government.'

'I do not fear,' said the lama. 'Have ye room within for two?'

'There is no room even for a mouse,' shrilled the wife of a well- to-do cultivator - a Hindu Jat from the rich Jullundur, district.  Our night trains are not as well looked after as the day ones,  where the sexes are very strictly kept to separate carriages.

'Oh, mother of my son, we can make space,' said the blueturbaned  husband. 'Pick up the child. It is a holy man, see'st thou?'

'And my lap full of seventy times seven bundles! Why not bid him  sit on my knee, Shameless? But men are ever thus!' She looked  round for approval. An Amritzar courtesan near the window sniffed  behind her head drapery.

'Enter! Enter!' cried a fat Hindu money-lender, his folded  account-book in a cloth under his arm. With an oily smirk: 'It is  well to be kind to the poor.'

'Ay, at seven per cent a month with a mortgage on the unborn  calf,' said a young Dogra, soldier going south on leave; and they  all laughed.

'Will it travel to Benares?' said the lama.

'Assuredly. Else why should we come? Enter, or we are left,'  cried Kim.

'See!' shrilled the Amritzar girl. 'He has never entered a train.  Oh, see!'

'Nay, help,' said the cultivator, putting out a large brown hand  and hauling him in. 'Thus is it done, father.'

'But - but - I sit on the floor. It is against the Rule to sit on  a bench,' said the lama. 'Moreover, it cramps me.'

'I say,' began the money-lender, pursing his lips, 'that there is  not one rule of right living which these te-rains do not cause as  to break. We sit, for example, side by side with all castes and  peoples.'

'Yea, and with most outrageously shameless ones,' said the wife,  scowling at the Amritzar girl making eyes at the young sepoy.

'I said we might have gone by cart along the road,' said the  husband, 'and thus have saved some money.'

'Yes - and spent twice over what we saved on food by the way.  That was talked out ten thousand times.'

'Ay, by ten thousand tongues,' grunted he.

'The Gods help us poor women if we may not speak. Oho! He is of  that sort which may not look at or reply to a woman.' For the  lama, constrained by his Rule, took not the faintest notice of  her. 'And his disciple is like him?'

'Nay, mother,' said Kim most promptly. 'Not when the woman is  well-looking and above all charitable to the hungry.'

'A beggar's answer,' said the Sikh, laughing. 'Thou hast brought  it on thyself, sister!' Kim's hands were crooked in supplication.

'And whither goest thou?' said the woman, handing him the half of  a cake from a greasy package.

'Even to Benares.'

'Jugglers belike?' the young soldier suggested. 'Have ye any  tricks to pass the time? Why does not that yellow man answer?'

 'Because,' said Kim stoutly, 'he is holy, and thinks upon matters  hidden from thee.'

'That may be well. We of the Ludhiana Sikhs' - he rolled it out  sonorously -'do not trouble our heads with doctrine. We fight.'

'My sister's brother's son is naik (corporal] in that regiment,'  said the Sikh craftsman quietly. 'There are also some Dogra  companies there.' The soldier glared, for a Dogra is of other  caste than a Sikh, and the banker tittered.

'They are all one to me, ' said the Amritzar girl.

'That we believe,' snorted the cultivator's wife malignantly.

'Nay, but all who serve the Sirkar with weapons in their hands  are, as it were, one brotherhood. There is one brotherhood of the  caste, but beyond that again' - she looked round timidly -'the  bond of the Pulton - the Regiment -eh?'

'My brother is in a Jat regiment,' said the cultivator. 'Dogras  be good men.'

'Thy Sikhs at least were of that opinion,' said the soldier, with  a scowl at the placid old man in the corner. 'Thy Sikhs thought  so when our two companies came to help them at the Pirzai Kotal  in the face of eight Afridi standards on the ridge not three  months gone.'

He told the story of a Border action in which the Dogra companies  of the Ludhiana Sikhs had acquitted themselves well. The Amritzar  girl smiled; for she knew the talc was to win her approval.

'Alas!' said the cultivator's wife at the end. 'So their villages  were burnt and their little children made homeless?'

'They had marked our dead. They paid a great payment after we of  the Sikhs had schooled them. So it was. Is this Amritzar?'

'Ay, and here they cut our tickets,' said the banker, fumbling at  his belt.

The lamps were paling in the dawn when the half-caste guard came  round. Ticket-collecting is a slow business in the East, where  people secrete their tickets in all sorts of curious places. Kim  produced his and was told to get out.

'But I go to Umballa,' he protested. 'I go with this holy man.'

'Thou canst go to Jehannum for aught I care. This ticket is only

Kim burst into a flood of tears, protesting that the lama was his  father and his mother, that he was the prop of the lama's  declining years, and that the lama would die without his care.  All the carriage bade the guard be merciful - the banker was  specially eloquent here - but the guard hauled Kim on to the  platform. The lama blinked - he could not overtake the situation  and Kim lifted up his voice and wept outside the carriage  window.

'I am very poor. My father is dead - my mother is dead. O  charitable ones, if I am left here, who shall tend that old man?'

'What - what is this?' the lama repeated. 'He must go to Benares.  He must come with me. He is my chela. If there is money to be  paid -'

'Oh, be silent,' whispered Kim; 'are we Rajahs to throw away good  silver when the world is so...