Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling Read Free Book Online Page A

fifty shillings, and is remarkably like walking into a pawn-shop. After the declarations of residence have been put in, four minutes will cover the rest of the proceedings – fees, attestation, and all. Then the Registrar slides the blotting-pad over the names, and says grimly with his pen between his teeth, ‘Now you’re man and wife’; and the couple walk out into the street feeling as if something were horribly illegal somewhere.
    But that ceremony holds and can drag a man to his undoing just as thoroughly as the ‘long as ye both shall live’ curse from the altar-rails, with the bridesmaids giggling behind, and ‘The Voice that breathed o’er Eden’ lifting the roof off. In this manner was Dicky Hatt kidnapped, and he considered it vastly fine, for he had received an appointment in India which carried a magnificent salary from the Home point of view. The marriage was to be kept secret for a year. Then Mrs Dicky Hatt was to come out, and the rest of life was to be a glorious golden mist. Thatwas how they sketched it under the Addison Road Station lamps; and, after one short month, came Gravesend 3 and Dicky steaming out to his new life, and the girl crying in a thirty-shillings a week bed-and-living-room, in a back street off Montpelier Square near the Knightsbridge Barracks.
    But the country that Dicky came to was a hard land where men of twenty-one were reckoned very small boys indeed, and life was expensive. The salary that loomed so large six thousand miles away did not go far. Particularly when Dicky divided it by two, and remitted more than the fair half, at 1–, 4 to Montpelier Square. One hundred and thirty-five rupees out of three hundred and thirty is not much to live on; but it was absurd to suppose that Mrs Hatt could exist forever on the £20 held back by Dicky from his outfit allowance. Dicky saw this and remitted at once; always remembering that Rs. 700 were to be paid, twelve months later, for a first-class passage out for a lady. When you add to these trifling details the natural instincts of a boy beginning a new life in a new country and longing to go about and enjoy himself, and the necessity for grappling with strange work – which, properly speaking, should take up a boy’s undivided attention – you will see that Dicky started handicapped. He saw it himself for a breath or two; but he did not guess the full beauty of his future.
    As the hot weather began, the shackles settled on him and ate into his flesh. First would come letters – big, crossed, seven-sheet letters – from his wife, telling him how she longed to see him, and what a Heaven upon earth would be their property when they met. Then some boy of the chummery wherein Dicky lodged would pound on the door of his bare little room, and tell him to come out to look at a pony – the very thing to suit him. Dicky could not afford ponies. He had to explain this. Dicky could not afford living in the chummery, modest as it was. He had to explain this before he moved to a single room next the office where he worked all day. He kept house on a green oilcloth table-cover, one chair, one bedstead, one photograph, one tooth-glass very strong and thick, a seven-rupee eight-anna filter, and messing by contract at thirty-seven rupees a month. Which last item was extortion. He had no punkah, for a punkah costs fifteen rupees a month; but he slept on the roof of the office with all his wife’s letters under his pillow. Now and again he was asked out to dinner, where he got both a punkah and an iced drink. But this was seldom, for people objected to recognizing a boy who had evidently the instincts of a Scotch tallow-chandler, and who lived in such a nasty fashion. Dicky could not subscribe to any amusement, so he found no amusement except the pleasure of turning over his Bank-bookand reading what it said about ‘loans on approved security’. That cost nothing. He remitted through a