The Naulahka

The Naulahka
A Story of West and East

1892

Rudyard Kipling
and
Wolcott Balestier

I
There was a strife 'twixt man and maid-- Oh that was at the birth o' time!
But what befell 'twixt man and maid, Oh that's beyond the grip o'
rhyme. 'Twas: 'Sweet, I must not bide wi' you,' And: 'Love, I canna
bide alone'; For baith were young, and baith were true, And baith were
hard as the nether stone. Auchinleck's Ride.
NICHOLAS TARVIN sat in the moonlight on the unrailed bridge that
crossed the irrigating ditch above Topaz, dangling his feet over the
stream. A brown, sad-eyed little woman sat beside him, staring quietly
at the moon. She was tanned with the tan of the girl who does not mind
wind and rain and sun, and her eyes were sad with the settled
melancholy of eyes that know big mountains, and seas of plain, and
care, and life. The women of the West shade such eyes under their
hands at sunset in their cabin-doors, scanning those hills or those
grassless, treeless plains for the homecoming of their men. A hard life
is always hardest for the woman.

Kate Sheriff had lived with her face to the West and with her
smouldering eyes fixed upon the wilderness since she could walk. She
had advanced into the wilderness with the railroad. Until she had gone
away to school, she had never lived where the railroad ran both ways.
She had often stayed long enough at the end of a section with her
family to see the first glimmering streaks of the raw dawn of
civilisation, usually helped out by the electric light; but in the new and
still newer lands to which her father's civil engineering orders called
them from year to year there were not even arc lamps. There was a
saloon under a tent, and there was the section-house, where they lived,
and where her mother had sometimes taken to board the men employed
by her husband. But it was not these influences alone that had produced
the young woman of twenty-three who sat near Tarvin, and who had
just told him gently that she liked him, but that she had a duty
elsewhere.
This duty, as she conceived it, was, briefly, to spend her life in the East
in the effort to better the condition of the women of India. It had come
to her as an inspiration and a command two years before, toward the
end of her second year at the St. Louis school, where she went to tie up
the loose ends of the education she had given herself in lonely camps.
Kate's mission had been laid on her one April afternoon, warmed and
sunned with the first breath of spring. The green trees, the swelling
buds, and the sunlight outside had tempted her from the prospect of a
lecture on India by a Hindu woman; and it was finally because it was a
school duty not to be escaped that she listened to Pundita Ramabai's
account of the sad case of her sisters at home. It was a heart-breaking
story, and the girls, making the offerings begged of them in strange
accents, went from it stilled and awed to the measure of their natures,
and talked it over in the corridors in whispers, until a nervous giggle
broke the tension, and they began chattering again.
Kate made her way from the hall with the fixed, inward-looking eye,
the flaming cheek, and airborne limbs of one on whom the mantle of
the Spirit has descended. She went quickly out into the school-garden,
away from everybody, and paced the flower-bordered walks, exalted,

rich, sure, happy. She had found herself. The flowers knew it, the
tender-leaved trees overhead were aware, the shining sky had word.
Her head was high; she wanted to dance, and, much more, she wanted
to cry. A pulse in her forehead went beat, beat; the warm blood sang
through her veins; she stopped every little while to take a deep draught
of the good air. In those moments she dedicated herself.
All her life should take breath from this hour; she vowed it to the
service this day revealed to her, as once to the prophets--vowed all her
strength and mind and heart. The angel of the Lord had laid a command
upon her. She obeyed joyfully.
And now, after two years spent in fitting herself for her calling, she
returned to Topaz, a capable and instructed nurse, on fire for her work
in India, to find that Tarvin wished her to stay at Topaz and marry him.
'You can call it what you like,' Tarvin told her, while she gazed at the
moon; 'you can call it duty, or you can call it woman's sphere, or