Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own PeopleKipling, Rudyard
History
Life's Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People
Kipling, Rudyard
India -- History -- British occupation, 1765-1947 -- Fiction; India -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, English
The orphan boy, dependent on the charity of Ephraim and his wife, could
have felt no gratitude, and must have been a ruffian. He begged for
whatever money his protectors would give him, and with that fled
down-country for his life. A week after the death of her children Miriam
left her bed at night and wandered over the country to find them. She
heard them crying behind every bush, or drowning in every pool of water
in the fields, and she begged the cartmen on the Grand Trunk Road not
to steal her little ones from her. In the morning the sun rose and beat
upon her bare head, and she turned into the cool wet crops to lie down
and never came back; though Hyem Benjamin and Ephraim sought her for two
nights.
The look of patient wonder on Ephraim’s face deepened, but he presently
found an explanation. ‘There are so few of us here, and these people are
so many,’ said he, ‘that, it may be, our God has forgotten us.’
In the house on the outskirts of the city old Jackrael Israel and Hester
grumbled that there was no one to wait on them, and that Miriam had been
untrue to her race. Ephraim went out and collected bills, and in the
evenings smoked with Hyem Benjamin till, one dawning, Hyem Benjamin
died, having first paid all his debts to Ephraim. Jackrael Israel and
Hester sat alone in the empty house all day, and, when Ephraim returned,
wept the easy tears of age till they cried themselves asleep.
A week later Ephraim, staggering under a huge bundle of clothes and
cooking-pots, led the old man and woman to the railway station, where
the bustle and confusion made them whimper.
‘We are going back to Calcutta,’ said Ephraim, to whose sleeve Hester
was clinging. ‘There are more of us there, and here my house is empty.’
He helped Hester into the carriage and, turning back, said to me, ‘I
should have been priest of the synagogue if there had been ten of us.
Surely we must have been forgotten by our God.’
The remnant of the broken colony passed out of the station on their
journey south; while a subaltern, turning over the books on the
bookstall, was whistling to himself ‘The Ten Little Nigger Boys.’
But the tune sounded as solemn as the Dead March.
It was the dirge of the Jews in Shushan.
THE LIMITATIONS OF PAMBE SERANG
[Footnote: Copyright, 1891, by MACMILLAN
& Co.]
If you consider the circumstances of the case, it was the only thing
that he could do. But Pambe Serang has been hanged by the neck till he
is dead, and Nurkeed is dead also.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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