by
Rudyard Kipling

“Brother to a Prince and friend to a beggar if he is worthy.”

The Law, as said, sets a good way to live, and it is not easy to follow. I have been a friend to a beggar again and again in situations which kept either of us from finding out whether the other was worth trusting. I have not yet been brother to a Prince, though I once came close to being related to what might have been a real King, and was promised that the Kingdom would be mine later — army, courts, money, and rules all complete. But today I am very afraid that my King is dead, and if I want a crown I must go and look for it myself.

The start of everything was in a train on the way to Mhow from Ajmir. There was not enough money in the Budget, which meant travelling, not Second-class, which is only half the price of First-Class, but in Intermediate, which is very bad indeed. There are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and the people are either Intermediate, which means Eurasian, or native, which for a long night journey is nasty, or Loafer, which is amusing though drunk. Intermediates do not buy from refreshment rooms. They carry their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets from the native sweet sellers, and drink the roadside water. This is why in hot weather Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and in all kinds of weather are very properly looked down on.

My Intermediate carriage was empty until I reached Nasirabad, when the big man with black eyebrows came in without a coat, and, as people in Intermediates usually do, talked for a while. He was a traveler and a man with no home like me, but he had a good taste for whisky. He told stories of things he had seen and done, of far-off corners of the Empire that he had gone into, and of adventures where he put his life in danger for food for a few days.

“If India was full of men like you and me, not knowing, like the crows, where they’d get their food for the next day, it isn’t seventy millions of tax money the country would be paying — it’s seven hundred millions,” he said; and as I looked at his mouth and chin I felt I should agree with him.

We talked politics, — the politics of lazy people that sees things from the under side where the thin wood and plaster is not made smooth, — and we talked about the post because my friend wanted to send a telegram back from the next station to Ajmir, the turning-off place from the Bombay to the Mhow line as you travel west.

My friend had no money except eight annas which he wanted for dinner, and I had no money at all, because of the problem in the Budget mentioned before. Also, I was going into a wild place where, though I would get in touch with the Treasury again, there were no telegraph offices. So I was not able to help him in any way.

“We might threaten a station master, and make him send a telegram and let us pay later,” said my friend, “but that would mean people asking questions about you and about me, and I am very busy these days. Did you say you were travelling back along this line within a few days?”

“In ten,” I said.

“Can’t you make it eight?” he said. “My business is very important.”

“I can send your telegrams within ten days if that will help you,” I said.

“I couldn’t trust a telegram to reach him, now I think of it. It’s this way. He leaves Delhi on the 23rd for Bombay. That means he’ll be passing through Ajmir on the night of the 23rd.”

“But I’m going into the Indian Desert,” I said.

“All right,” said he. “You’ll be changing at Marwar Junction to go into Jodhpore area, — you must do that, — and he’ll be coming through Marwar Junction in the early morning of the 24th on the Bombay Mail train. Can you be at Marwar Junction at that time? It won’t bother you, because I know that there is very little to get out of these Central India States — even though you pretend to be a reporter for the ‘Backwoodsman.’”

“Have you ever tried that trick?” I asked.

“Again and again, but the officials find you, and then you get taken to the Border before you have time to hurt them. But about my friend here. I must give him a spoken message to tell him what has happened to me, or else he won’t know where to go. I would think it very kind of you if you were to come out of Central India in time to meet him at Marwar Junction, and say to him, ‘He has gone South for the week.’ He’ll know what that means. He’s a big man with a red beard, and a very important man he is. You’ll find him sleeping like a gentleman with all his luggage around him in a Second-class apartment. But do not be afraid. Pull down the window and say, ‘He has gone South for the week,’ and he will understand. It only shortens your stay in those parts by two days. I ask you as a stranger who is going to the West,” he said, firmly.

“Where have you come from?” I said.

“From the East,” he said, “and I hope that you will give him the message in the Square — for my Mother and your own.”

Englishmen do not usually change their minds because of requests to think of their mothers; but for some reasons, which will be very clear later, I decided to agree.

“It’s very important,” he said, “and that’s why I asked you to do it — and now I know that I can count on you to do it. A Second-class train carriage at Marwar Junction, and a red-haired man asleep in it. You’ll be sure to remember. I get out at the next station, and I must wait there till he comes or sends me what I want.”

“I’ll give the message if I meet him,” I said, “and for your Mother and mine I’ll give you some advice. Don’t try to run the Central India States just now as the reporter for the ‘Backwoodsman.’ There’s a real one around here, and it might cause trouble.”

“Thank you,” said he, simply; “and when will the pig be gone? I can’t starve because he’s spoiling my work. I wanted to meet the Degumber Rajah down here about the wife of his dead father, and give him a scare.”

“What did he do to his father’s widow, then?”

“Filled her with red pepper and hit her with a slipper until she died while she hung from a beam. I found that out myself, and I am the only man who would dare to go into the State to get money to keep quiet about it. They will try to poison me, just like they did in Chortumna when I went there to steal. But you will give the man at Marwar Junction my message?”

He got out at a little roadside station, and I thought. I had heard, more than once, of men pretending to be newspaper reporters and taking money from small Native States by threatening to make their secrets known, but I had never met any of that kind before. They lead a hard life, and generally die very suddenly. The Native States have a strong fear of English newspapers, which may show their strange ways of ruling, and do their best to make reporters drink too much champagne, or make them crazy with four-horse carriages.

They do not understand that nobody cares at all about how Native States are run, as long as harsh rule and crime are not too bad, and the ruler is not drugged, drunk, or sick all year long. They are the dark places of the world, full of cruelty you cannot imagine, next to the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on the other side, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did business with several Kings, and in eight days went through many changes of life. Sometimes I wore formal clothes and spent time with Princes and officials, drinking from crystal and eating from silver. Sometimes I lay on the ground and ate what I could get, from a plate made of leaves, and drank the running water, and slept under the same rug as my servant. It was all part of the day’s work.

Then I went to the Great Indian Desert on the right date, as I had promised, and the night Mail train dropped me at Marwar Junction, where a small, simple railway run by local people goes to Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail from Delhi makes a short stop at Marwar. She arrived just as I arrived, and I had just time to hurry to her platform and walk along the carriages. There was only one Second-class on the train. I opened the window and looked down at a bright red beard, half covered by a blanket. That was my man, fast asleep, and I poked him gently in the ribs. He woke with a grunt, and I saw his face in the light of the lamps. It was a great and shining face.

“Tickets again?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I have to tell you that he has gone South for the week. He has gone South for the week!”

The train had started to move away. The red man rubbed his eyes. “He has gone South for the week,” he said again. “Now that’s just like him being rude. Did he say that I should give you anything? Because I won’t.”

“He didn’t,” I said, and stepped away, and watched the red lights go out in the dark. It was very cold because the wind was blowing off the sands. I climbed into my own train — not an Intermediate carriage this time — and went to sleep.

If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept it as a reminder of a quite strange event. But the feeling that I had done my duty was my only reward.

Later on I thought that two men like my friends could not do anything good if they met and pretended to be newspaper reporters, and might, if they tried to get money by threats from one of the small, bad States of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves into big trouble. I therefore took some trouble to describe them as well as I could remember to people who wanted to send them out of the country; and I succeeded, as I was told later, in making them turn back from the Degumber borders.

Then I became respectable, and returned to an office where there were no Kings and no events outside the daily making of a newspaper. A newspaper office seems to attract every possible kind of person, which hurts discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and ask that the Editor will at once leave all his work to write about a Christian prize-giving in a back slum of a village that no one can reach; Colonels who have been passed over for command sit down and plan a set of ten, twelve, or twenty-four main articles about Seniority versus Selection; missionaries want to know why they have not been allowed to get away from their usual ways of abuse, and curse a brother missionary under special protection of the editorial We; stuck theatrical companies come up to explain that they cannot pay for their ads, but on their return from New Zealand or Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent punka-pulling machines, carriage couplings, and unbreakable swords and axles come with plans in their pockets and hours to spare; tea companies come in and work out their plans with the office pens; secretaries of dance committees demand to have the best parts of their last dance more fully described; strange ladies come in and say, “I want a hundred lady’s cards printed at once, please,” which is clearly part of an Editor’s duty; and every bad ruffian that ever walked the Grand Trunk Road decides to ask for a job as a proofreader. And, all the time, the telephone bell is ringing like crazy, and Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Empires are saying, “You’re another,” and Mister Gladstone is shouting curses at the British Dominions, and the little black copyboys are crying, “kaa-pi chay-ha-yeh” (“Copy wanted”), like tired bees, and most of the paper is as blank as Modred’s shield.

But that is the fun part of the year. There are six other months when no one ever comes to visit, and the thermometer goes up little by little to the top of the glass, and the office is made dark to just above reading light, and the printing machines are red-hot to touch, and nobody writes anything except stories of fun in the Hill-stations or death notices. Then the telephone becomes a soft ringing fear, because it tells you about the sudden deaths of men and women that you knew very well, and the prickly heat covers you like a piece of clothing, and you sit down and write: “A small increase of illness is reported from the Khuda Janta Khan District. The outbreak is only happening here and there in its nature, and, thanks to the active efforts of the District authorities, is now almost over. It is, however, with deep sadness we record the death,” etc.

Then the sickness really breaks out, and the less writing and reporting, the better for the calm of the subscribers. But the Empires and the Kings continue to enjoy themselves as selfishly as before, and the Foreman thinks that a daily paper really should come out every day, and all the people at the Hill-stations in the middle of their fun say, “Good gracious! why can’t the paper be lively? I’m sure there’s plenty going on up here.”

That is the dark half of the moon, and, as the ads say, “you have to see it to really enjoy it.”

It was in that season, and a very bad season, that the paper began printing the last issue of the week on Saturday night, that is Sunday morning, like a London paper. This was a great help, for immediately after the paper was finished the dawn would lower the temperature from 96 degrees to almost 84 degrees for half an hour, and in that cold — you have no idea how cold 84 degrees is on the grass until you begin to pray for it — a very tired man could fall asleep before the heat woke him.

One Saturday night it was my nice job to finish the paper all alone. A King or a court helper or a lady at court or a Community was going to die or get a new set of laws, or do something that was important on the other side of the world, and the paper would stay open till the last possible minute to get the telegram.

It was a pitch-black night, as hot and hard to breathe as a June night can be, and the loo, the red-hot wind from the west, was blowing loudly among the very dry trees and pretending that the rain was close behind. Now and again a drop of almost boiling water would fall on the dust with the plop of a frog, but all our tired world knew that was only pretending. It was a little cooler in the press-room than in the office, so I sat there, while the type ticked and clicked, and the night-jars hooted at the windows, and the almost naked printers wiped the sweat from their foreheads and called for water.

The thing that was stopping us, whatever it was, would not go away, though the loo dropped and the last type was set, and the whole round earth stood still in the heavy heat, keeping quiet, to wait for the event. I felt sleepy, and wondered if the telegraph was a good thing, and if this dying man, or people who were struggling, might know about the trouble the delay was causing. There was no special reason beyond the heat and worry to cause tension, but, as the clock hands moved slowly up to three o’clock and the machines turned their wheels two and three times to make sure that all was in order, before I said the word that would start them, I could have screamed out loud.

Then the loud noise of the wheels broke the quiet into little pieces. I stood up to go away, but two men in white clothes stood in front of me. The first one said, “It’s him!” The second said, “Yes, it is!” And they both laughed almost as loudly as the machines made noise, and wiped their foreheads. “We saw there was a light burning across the road, and we were sleeping in that ditch there to keep cool, and I said to my friend here, ‘The office is open. Let’s come along and speak to him who sent us back from Degumber State,’” said the smaller of the two. He was the man I had met in the Mhow train, and his friend was the red-bearded man of Marwar Junction. You could not mistake the eyebrows of the one or the beard of the other.

I was not pleased, because I wanted to go to sleep, not to argue with lazy men. “What do you want?” I asked.

“A talk with you for half an hour, cool and comfortable, in the office,” said the red-bearded man. “We’d like a drink, — the contract doesn’t start yet, Peachey, so you don’t need to look, — but what we really want is advice. We don’t want money. We ask you for a favour, because we found out you did something bad to us about Degumber State.”

I led from the press-room to the very hot office with the maps on the walls, and the red-haired man rubbed his hands. “That’s good,” he said. “This was the right place to come to. Now, Sir, let me introduce you to Brother Peachey Carnehan, that’s him, and Brother Daniel Dravot, that is me, and it is better not to say much about our jobs, for we have done many things in our time — soldier, sailor, printer, photographer, proofreader, street-preacher, and reporters for the ‘Backwoodsman’ when we thought the paper needed one. Carnehan is not drunk, and neither am I. Look at us first, and make sure of that. It will stop you from interrupting me. We’ll take one of your cigars each, and you shall see us light them.”

I watched the test. The men were not drunk at all, so I gave each of them a warm whisky and soda.

“All right,” said Carnehan with the eyebrows, wiping the foam from his mustache. “Let me talk now, Dan. We have been all over India, mostly on foot. We have been boiler fixers, train drivers, small contractors, and all that, and we have decided that India isn’t big enough for people like us.”

They were really too big for the office. Dravot’s beard seemed to fill half the room and Carnehan’s shoulders the other half, as they sat on the big table. Carnehan continued: “The country is not much used because the people who run it won’t let you touch it. They spend all their time just running it, and you can’t lift a spade, or break a rock, or look for oil, or anything like that, without all the Government saying, ‘Leave it alone, and let us govern.’ So, the way it is, we will leave it alone, and go away to some other place where a man isn’t crowded and can do well for himself. We are not little men, and we are afraid of nothing except Drink, and we have signed a contract about that. So we are going away to be Kings.”

“Kings on our own,” said Dravot quietly.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “You’ve been walking in the sun, and it’s a very warm night, and shouldn’t you sleep on the idea? Come tomorrow.”

“Neither drunk nor sick from the sun,” said Dravot. “We have thought about the idea for half a year, and need to see books and maps, and we have decided that there is only one place now in the world where two strong men can Sar-a-whack. They call it Kafiristan. I think it’s in the top right corner of Afghanistan, no more than three hundred miles from Peshawar. They have thirty-two false gods there, and we’ll be the thirty-third and thirty-fourth. It’s a country full of mountains, the women of that area are very beautiful.”

“But that is in the contract,” said Carnehan. “No women and no liquor, Daniel.”

“And that’s all we know, except that no one has gone there, and they fight, and in any place where they fight a man who knows how to train men can always be a King. We will go to those places and say to any King we find, ‘Do you want to defeat your enemies?’ and we will show him how to train men; for that we know better than anything else. Then we will get rid of that King and take his Throne and start a line of kings.”

“You’ll be killed before you’re fifty miles across the Border,” I said. “You have to travel through Afghanistan to get to that country. It’s full of mountains and high tops and big ice, and no Englishman has been through it. The people are very cruel, and even if you reached them you couldn’t do anything.”

“That’s better,” said Carnehan. “If you could think we are a little more crazy, we would be happier. We have come to you to learn about this country, to read a book about it, and to be shown maps. We want you to tell us that we are fools and to show us your books.” He turned to the bookshelves.

“Are you serious?” I said.