The Man Who Would Be King | Page 3

cruelty, touching the Railway and the Telegraph on one side, and, on
the other, the days of Harun-al-Raschid. When I left the train I did
business with divers Kings, and in eight days passed through many
changes of life. Sometimes I wore dress-clothes and consorted with
Princes and Politicals, drinking from crystal and eating from silver.
Sometimes I lay out upon the ground and devoured what I could get,
from a plate made of a flapjack, and drank the running water, and slept
under the same rug as my servant. It was all in a day’s work.
Then I headed for the Great Indian Desert upon the proper date, as I
had promised, and the night Mail set me down at Marwar Junction,
where a funny little, happy-go-lucky, native managed railway runs to
Jodhpore. The Bombay Mail from Delhi makes a short halt at Marwar.
She arrived as I got in, and I had just time to hurry to her platform and
go down the carriages. There was only one second-class on the train. I
slipped the window and looked down upon a flaming red beard, half
covered by a railway rug. That was my man, fast asleep, and I dug him
gently in the ribs. He woke with a grunt and I saw his face in the light
of the lamps. It was a great and shining face.
“Tickets again?” said he.
“No,” said I. “I am to tell you that he is gone South for the week. He is
gone South for the week!”
The train had begun to move out. The red man rubbed his eyes. “He has
gone South for the week,” he repeated. “Now that’s just like his

impudence. Did he say that I was to give you anything?—’Cause I
won’t.”
“He didn’t,” I said and dropped away, and watched the red lights die
out in the dark. It was horribly cold because the wind was blowing off
the sands. I climbed into my own train—not an Intermediate Carriage
this time—and went to sleep.
If the man with the beard had given me a rupee I should have kept it as
a memento of a rather curious affair. But the consciousness of having
done my duty was my only reward.
Later on I reflected that two gentlemen like my friends could not do
any good if they foregathered and personated correspondents of
newspapers, and might, if they “stuck up” one of the little rat-trap states
of Central India or Southern Rajputana, get themselves into serious
difficulties. I therefore took some trouble to describe them as accurately
as I could remember to people who would be interested in deporting
them; and succeeded, so I was later informed, in having them headed
back from the Degumber borders.
Then I became respectable, and returned to an Office where there were
no Kings and no incidents except the daily manufacture of a newspaper.
A newspaper office seems to attract every conceivable sort of person,
to the prejudice of discipline. Zenana-mission ladies arrive, and beg
that the Editor will instantly abandon all his duties to describe a
Christian prize-giving in a back-slum of a perfectly inaccessible village;
Colonels who have been overpassed for commands sit down and sketch
the outline of a series of ten, twelve, or twenty-four leading articles on
Seniority versus Selection; missionaries wish to know why they have
not been permitted to escape from their regular vehicles of abuse and
swear at a brother-missionary under special patronage of the editorial
We; stranded theatrical companies troop up to explain that they cannot
pay for their advertisements, but on their return from New Zealand or
Tahiti will do so with interest; inventors of patent punkah-pulling
machines, carriage couplings and unbreakable swords and axle-trees
call with specifications in their pockets and hours at their disposal;
tea-companies enter and elaborate their prospectuses with the office

pens; secretaries of ball-committees clamor to have the glories of their
last dance more fully expounded; strange ladies rustle in and say:—“I
want a hundred lady’s cards printed at once, please,” which is
manifestly part of an Editor’s duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever
tramped the Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for
employment as a proof-reader. And, all the time, the telephone-bell is
ringing madly, and Kings are being killed on the Continent, and
Empires are saying, “You’re another,” and Mister Gladstone is calling
down brimstone upon the British Dominions, and the little black
copy-boys are whining, “kaa-pi chayha-yeh” (copy wanted) like tired
bees, and most of the paper is as blank as Modred’s shield.
But that is the amusing part of the year. There are other six months
wherein none ever come to call, and the thermometer walks inch by
inch up to the top of the glass, and the office is