Free Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling Page B

Prayer with a private unofficial prayer for the peace of the soul of The Boy. Then we filled in the grave and went into the verandah – not the house – to lie down to sleep. We were dead-tired.
    When we woke the Major said wearily, ‘We can’t go back till tomorrow. We must give him a decent time to die in. He died early
this
morning, remember. That seems more natural.’ So the Major must have been lying awake all the time, thinking.
    I said, ‘Then why didn’t we bring the body back to cantonments?’
    The Major thought for a minute. ‘Because the people bolted when they heard of the cholera. And the
ekka
has gone!’
    That was strictly true. We had forgotten all about the
ekka-pony
, and he had gone home.
    So we were left there alone, all that stifling day, in the Canal Rest House, testing and re-testing our story of The Boy’s death to see if it was weak in any point. A native appeared in the afternoon, but we said that a
Sahib
was dead of cholera, and he ran away. As the dusk gathered, the Major told me all his fears about The Boy, and awful stories of suicide or nearly-carried-out suicide – tales that made one’s hair crisp. He said that he himself had once gone into the same Valley of the Shadow 10 as The Boy, when he was young and new to the country; so he understood how things fought together in The Boy’s poor jumbled head. He also said that youngsters, in their repentant moments, consider their sins much more serious and ineffaceable than they really are. We talked together all through the evening and rehearsed the story of the death of The Boy. As soon as the moon was up, and The Boy, theoretically, just buried, we struck across country for the Station. We walked from eight till six o’clock in the morning; but though we were dead-tired, we did not forget to go to The Boy’s rooms and put away his revolver with the proper amount of cartridges in the pouch. Also to set his writing-case on the table. We found the Colonel and reported the death, feeling more like murderers than ever. Then we went to bed and slept the clock round; for there was no more in us.
    The tale had credence as long as was necessary; for everyone forgot about The Boy before a fortnight was over. Many people, however, found time to say that the Major had behaved scandalously in not bringing in the body for a regimental funeral. The saddest thing of all was the letter from The Boy’s mother to the Major and me – with big inky blisters all over the sheet. She wrote the sweetest possible things about our great kindness, and the obligation she would be under to us as long as she lived.
    All things considered, she was under an obligation; but not exactly as she meant.

Beyond the Pale 1
    Love heeds not caste nor sleep a broken bed. I went in search of love and lost myself.
    Hindu Proverb
.
    A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black. Then, whatever trouble falls is in the ordinary course of things – neither sudden, alien nor unexpected.
    This is the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society, and paid for it heavily.
    He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the second. He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again.
    Deep away in the heart of the City, behind Jitha Megji’s
bustee
, 2 lies Amir Nath’s Gully, which ends in a dead-wall pierced by one grated window. At the head of the Gully is a big cowbyre, and the walls on either side of the Gully are without windows. Neither Suchet Singh nor Gaur Chand approve of their women-folk looking into the world. If Durga Charan had been of their opinion, he would have been a happier man today, and little Bisesa would have been able to knead her own bread. Her room looked out through the grated window into the narrow dark Gully where the sun never