Free The Best of Ruskin Bond by Ruskin Bond

very silent, almost as though the birds and animals knew that their trust had been violated.
    I remembered the lines of a poem by D. H. Lawrence; and, as I climbed the steep and lonely path to my home, the words beat out their rhythm in my mind: ‘There was room in the world for a mountain lion and me.’

The Man Who Was Kipling
    I was sitting on a bench in the Indian Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, when a tall, stooping, elderly gentleman sat down beside me. I gave him a quick glance, noting his swarthy features, heavy moustache, and horn-rimmed spectacles. There was something familiar and disturbing about his face, and I couldn’t resist looking at him again.
    I noticed that he was smiling at me.
    ‘Do you recognize me?’ he asked, in a soft pleasant v oice.
    ‘Well, you do seem familiar,’ I said. ‘Haven’t we met somewhere?’
    ‘Perhaps. But if I seem familiar to you, that is at least something. The trouble these days is that people don’t
know
me anymore—I’m a familiar, that’s all. Just a name standing for a lot of outmoded ideas.’
    A little perplexed, I asked. ‘What is it you do?’
    ‘I wrote books once. Poems and tales Tell me, whose books do you read?’
    ‘Oh, Maugham, Priestley, Thurber. And among the older lot, Bennett and Wells—’I hesitated, groping for an important name, and I noticed a shadow, a sad shadow, pass across my companion’s face.
    ‘Oh, yes, and Kipling,’ I said, ‘I read a lot of Kipling.’
    His face brightened up at once, and the eyes behind the thick-lensed spectacles suddenly came to life.
    ‘I’m Kipling,’ he said.
    I stared at him in astonishment, and then, realizing that he might perhaps be dangerous, I smiled feebly and said, ‘Oh, yes?’
    ‘You probably don’t believe me. I’m dead, of course.’
    ‘So I thought.’
    ‘And you don’t believe in ghosts?’
    ‘Not as a rule.’
    ‘But you’d have no objection to talking to one, if he came along?’
    ‘I’d have no objection. But how do I know you’re Kipling? How do I know you’re not an imposter?’
    ‘Listen, then:
When my heavens were turned to blood,
When the dark had filled my day,
Furthest, but most faithful, stood
That lone star I cast away.
I had loved myself, and I
Have not lived and dare not die.
    ‘Once,’ he said, gripping me by the arm and looking me straight in the eye. ‘Once in life I watched a star; but I whistled her to go.’
    ‘Your star hasn’t fallen yet,’ I said, suddenly moved, suddenly quite certain that I sat beside Kipling. ‘One day, when there is a new spirit of adventure abroad, we will discover you again.’
    ‘Why have they heaped scorn on me for so long?’
    ‘You were too militant, I suppose—too much of an Empire man. You were too patriotic for your own good.’
    He looked a little hurt. ‘I was never very political,’ he said. ‘I wrote over six hundred poems, and you could only call a dozen of them political, I have been abused for harping on the theme of the White Man’s burden but my only aim was to show off the Empire to my audience—and I believed the Empire was a fine and noble thing. Is it wrong to believe in something? I never went deeply into political issues, that’s true. You must remember, my seven years in India were very youthful years. I was in my twenties, a little immature if you like, and my interest in India was a boy’s interest. Action appealed to me more than anything else. You must understand that.’
    ‘No one has described action more vividly, or India so well. I feel at one with Kim wherever he goes along the Grand Trunk Road, in the temples at Banaras, amongst the Saharanpur fruit gardens, on the snow-covered Himalayas.
Kim
has colour and movement and poetry.’
    He sighed, and a wistful look came into his eyes.
    ‘I’m prejudiced, of course,’ I continued. ‘I’ve spent most of my life in India—not
your
India, but an India that does still have much of the colour and atmosphere that