단락을 클릭하면 어휘·문법 해설이 오른쪽에 표시됩니다.
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when "the heathen" pray
To Buddha at Kamakura! He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on
her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher—the Wonder House, as the
natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that
"fire-breathing dragon", hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze
piece is always first of the conqueror's loot.
해설 보기 →There was some justification for Kim—he had kicked Lala Dinanath's boy
off the trunnions—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was
English. Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the
vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain
sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the
small boys of the bazar; Kim was white—a poor white of the very
poorest. The half-caste woman who looked after him (she smoked opium,
and pretended to keep a second-hand furniture shop by the square where
the cheap cabs wait) told the missionaries that she was Kim's mother's
sister; but his mother had been nursemaid in a Colonel's family and had
married Kimball O'Hara, a young colour-sergeant of the Mavericks, an
Irish regiment. He afterwards took a post on the Sind, Punjab, and
Delhi Railway, and his Regiment went home without him. The wife died of
cholera in Ferozepore, and O'Hara fell to drink and loafing up and down
the line with the keen-eyed three-year-old baby. Societies and
chaplains, anxious for the child, tried to catch him, but O'Hara
drifted away, till he came across the woman who took opium and learned
the taste from her, and died as poor whites die in India. His estate at
death consisted of three papers—one he called his "ne varietur"
because those words were written below his signature thereon, and
another his "clearance-certificate". The third was Kim's
birth-certificate. Those things, he was used to say, in his glorious
opium-hours, would yet make little Kimball a man. On no account was Kim
to part with them, for they belonged to a great piece of magic—such
magic as men practised over yonder behind the Museum, in the big
blue-and-white Jadoo-Gher—the Magic House, as we name the Masonic
Lodge. It would, he said, all come right some day, and Kim's horn would
be exalted between pillars—monstrous pillars—of beauty and strength. The Colonel himself, riding on a horse, at the head of the finest
Regiment in the world, would attend to Kim—little Kim that should have
been better off than his father. Nine hundred first-class devils, whose
God was a Red Bull on a green field, would attend to Kim, if they had
not forgotten O'Hara—poor O'Hara that was gang-foreman on the
Ferozepore line. Then he would weep bitterly in the broken rush chair
on the veranda. So it came about after his death that the woman sewed
parchment, paper, and birth-certificate into a leather amulet-case
which she strung round Kim's neck.
해설 보기 →"And some day," she said, confusedly remembering O'Hara's prophecies,
"there will come for you a great Red Bull on a green field, and the
Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and" dropping into English—"nine
hundred devils."
해설 보기 →"Ah," said Kim, "I shall remember. A Red Bull and a Colonel on a horse
will come, but first, my father said, will come the two men making
ready the ground for these matters. That is how my father said they
always did; and it is always so when men work magic."
해설 보기 →If the woman had sent Kim up to the local Jadoo-Gher with those papers,
he would, of course, have been taken over by the Provincial Lodge, and
sent to the Masonic Orphanage in the Hills; but what she had heard of
magic she distrusted. Kim, too, held views of his own. As he reached
the years of indiscretion, he learned to avoid missionaries and white
men of serious aspect who asked who he was, and what he did. For Kim
did nothing with an immense success. True, he knew the wonderful walled
city of Lahore from the Delhi Gate to the outer Fort Ditch; was hand in
glove with men who led lives stranger than anything Haroun al Raschid
dreamed of; and he lived in a life wild as that of the Arabian Nights,
but missionaries and secretaries of charitable societies could not see
the beauty of it. His nickname through the wards was "Little Friend of
all the World"; and very often, being lithe and inconspicuous, he
executed commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and
shiny young men of fashion. It was intrigue,—of course he knew that
much, as he had known all evil since he could speak,—but what he loved
was the game for its own sake—the stealthy prowl through the dark
gullies and lanes, the crawl up a waterpipe, the sights and sounds of
the women's world on the flat roofs, and the headlong flight from
housetop to housetop under cover of the hot dark. Then there were holy
men, ash-smeared faquirs by their brick shrines under the trees at
the riverside, with whom he was quite familiar—greeting them as they
returned from begging-tours, and, when no one was by, eating from the
same dish. The woman who looked after him insisted with tears that he
should wear European clothes—trousers, a shirt and a battered hat. Kim
found it easier to slip into Hindu or Mohammedan garb when engaged on
certain businesses. One of the young men of fashion—he who was found
dead at the bottom of a well on the night of the earthquake—had once
given him a complete suit of Hindu kit, the costume of a lowcaste
street boy, and Kim stored it in a secret place under some baulks in
Nila Ram's timber-yard, beyond the Punjab High Court, where the
fragrant deodar logs lie seasoning after they have driven down the
Ravi. When there was business or frolic afoot, Kim would use his
properties, returning at dawn to the veranda, all tired out from
shouting at the heels of a marriage procession, or yelling at a Hindu
festival. Sometimes there was food in the house, more often there was
not, and then Kim went out again to eat with his native friends.
해설 보기 →As he drummed his heels against Zam-Zammah he turned now and again from
his king-of-the-castle game with little Chota Lal and Abdullah the
sweetmeat-seller's son, to make a rude remark to the native policeman
on guard over rows of shoes at the Museum door. The big Punjabi grinned
tolerantly: he knew Kim of old. So did the water-carrier, sluicing
water on the dry road from his goat-skin bag. So did Jawahir Singh, the
Museum carpenter, bent over new packing-cases. So did everybody in
sight except the peasants from the country, hurrying up to the Wonder
House to view the things that men made in their own province and
elsewhere. The Museum was given up to Indian arts and manufactures, and
anybody who sought wisdom could ask the Curator to explain.
해설 보기 →"Off! Off! Let me up!" cried Abdullah, climbing up Zam-Zammah's wheel. "Thy father was a pastry-cook, Thy mother stole the ghi," sang Kim. "All Mussalmans fell off Zam-Zammah long ago!"
해설 보기 →"Let me up!" shrilled little Chota Lal in his gilt-embroidered cap. His father was worth perhaps half a million sterling, but India is the
only democratic land in the world.
해설 보기 →