Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling Read Free Book Online Page B

Bombay Bank, by the way, and the Station knew nothing of his private affairs.
    Every month he sent Home all he could possibly spare for his wife and for another reason which was expected to explain itself shortly, and would require more money.
    About this time Dicky was overtaken with the nervous, haunting fear that besets married men when they are out of sorts. He had no pension to look to. What if he should die suddenly, and leave his wife unprovided for? The thought used to lay hold of him in the still, hot nights on the roof, till the shaking of his heart made him think that he was going to die then and there of heart-disease. Now this is a frame of mind which no boy has a right to know. It is a strong man’s trouble; but, coming when it did, it nearly drove poor punkah-less, perspiring Dicky Hatt mad. He could tell no one about it.
    A certain amount of ‘screw’ 5 is as necessary for a man as for a billiard-ball. It makes them both do wonderful things. Dicky needed money badly, and he worked for it like a horse. But, naturally, the men who owned him knew that a boy can live very comfortably on a certain income – pay in India is a matter of age not merit, you see, and, if their particular boy wished to work like two boys, Business forbid that they should stop him. But Business forbid that they should give him an increase of pay at his present ridiculously immature age. So Dicky won certain rises of salary – ample for a boy – not enough for a wife and a child – certainly too little for the seven-hundred-rupee passage that he and Mrs Hatt had discussed so lightly once upon a time. And with this he was forced to be content.
    Somehow, all his money seemed to fade away in Home drafts and the crushing Exchange, and the tone of the Home letters changed and grew querulous. ‘Why wouldn’t Dicky have his wife and the baby out? Surely he had a salary – a fine salary – and it was too bad of him to enjoy himself in India. But would he – could he – make the next draft a little more elastic?’ Here followed a list of baby’s kit, as long as a Parsee’s bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his wife and the little son he had never seen – which, again, is a feeling no boy is entitled to – enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half-man letters, saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and would the little wife wait yet a little longer? But the little wife, however much she approved of money, objected to waiting, and there was a strange, hard sort of ring in her letters that Dicky didn’t understand. How could he, poor boy?
    Later on still – just as Dicky had been told –
àpropos
of anotheryoungster who had ‘made a fool of himself’ as the saying is – that matrimony would not only ruin his further chances of advancement, but would lose him his present appointment – came the news that the baby, his own little, little son, had died and, behind this, forty lines of an angry woman’s scrawl, saying the death might have been averted if certain things, all costing money, had been done, or if the mother and the baby had been with Dicky. The letter struck at Dicky’s naked heart; but, not being officially entitled to a baby, he could show no sign of trouble.
    How Dicky won through the next four months, and what hope he kept alight to force him into his work, no one dare say. He pounded on, the seven-hundred-rupee passage as far away as ever, and his style of living unchanged, except when he launched into a new filter. There was the strain of his office-work, and the strain of his remittances, and the knowledge of his boy’s death, which touched the boy more, perhaps, than it would have touched a man; and, beyond all, the enduring strain of his daily life. Grey-headed seniors who approved of his thrift and his fashion of denying himself everything pleasant, reminded him of the old saw that says