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
‘You want money?’ she said with a little laugh. ‘I HAVE money. Look!’
She ran to her own room and fetched out a small bag of rupees. ‘Of all
that you give me, I keep back some. See! One hundred and seven rupees.
Can you want more money than that? Take it. It is my pleasure if you use
it.’ She spread out the money on the table and pushed it towards him,
with her quick, little, pale yellow fingers.
Georgie Porgie never referred to economy in the household again.
Three months later, after the dispatch and receipt of several mysterious
letters which Georgina could not understand, and hated for that reason,
Georgie Porgie said that he was going away and she must return to her
father’s house and stay there.
Georgina wept. She would go with her God from the world’s end to the
world’s end. Why should she leave him? She loved him.
‘I am only going to Rangoon,’ said Georgie Porgie. ‘I shall be back in
a month, but it is safer to stay with your father. I will leave you two
hundred rupees.’
‘If you go for a month, what need of two hundred? Fifty are more than
enough. There is some evil here. Do not go, or at least let me go with
you.’
Georgie Porgie does not like to remember that scene even at this date.
In the end he got rid of Georgina by a compromise of seventy-five
rupees. She would not take more. Then he went by steamer and rail to
Rangoon.
The mysterious letters had granted him six months’ leave. The actual
flight and an idea that he might have been treacherous hurt severely
at the time, but as soon as the big steamer was well out into the blue,
things were easier, and Georgina’s face, and the queer little stockaded
house, and the memory of the rushes of shouting dacoits by night, the
cry and struggle of the first man that he had ever killed with his own
hand, and a hundred other more intimate things, faded and faded out of
Georgie Porgie’s heart, and the vision of approaching England took its
place. The steamer was full of men on leave, all rampantly jovial souls
who had shaken off the dust and sweat of Upper Burma and were as merry
as schoolboys. They helped Georgie Porgie to forget.
Then came England with its luxuries and decencies and comforts, and
Georgie Porgie walked in a pleasant dream upon pavements of which he had
nearly forgotten the ring, wondering why men in their senses ever left
Town. He accepted his keen delight in his furlough as the reward of
his services. Providence further arranged for him another and greater
delight--all the pleasures of a quiet English wooing, quite different
from the brazen businesses of the East, when half the community
stand back and bet on the result, and the other half wonder what Mrs.
So-and-So will say to it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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