Kim

Rudyard Kipling

Description

“Kim” is a novel by English author Rudyard Kipling, originally published as a serial in McClure's Magazine between December 1900 and October 1901. The story revolves around the young Kim and aged priest Lama who together venture off on a mutual quest, although for very different reasons. Though now a controversial novel, “Kim” is considered Kipling's greatest literary accomplishment and offers poignant insights into the religious, social, and political issues of the time. Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was an English novelist, journalist, poet, and short-story writer most famous for his stories set in and related to colonial India. He innovated the art of short story writing and was one of the most popular writers in the U.K. during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Other notable works by this author include: “The Jungle Book” (1894), “The White Man's Burden” (1899), and “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888). Read & Co. Classics is republishing this classic story now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Informations

• Publié par: Read Books Ltd.
• Date de parution: 24 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781528791984
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

KIM
By
RUDYARD KIPLING

First published in 1901



Copyright © 2020 Read & Co. Classics
This edition is published by Read & Co. Classics, an imprint of Read & Co.
This book is copyright and may not be reproduced or copied in any way without the express permission of the publisher in writing.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Read & Co. is part of Read Books Ltd. For more information visit www.readandcobooks.co.uk


Contents
Rud yard Kipling
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV




Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay, India. Amongst his family members he could number not only the famous painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, but also Stanley Baldwin, a future Prime Minister. Kipling lived in India until the age of six, when his family took him back to England fo r schooling.
In 1872, Kipling began boarding with the Holloway family in Southsea. Between 1878 and 1882, Kipling attended the United Services College at Westward Ho! in northern Devon. Nearsighted and physically frail, he was teased and bullied at school however. Because of this, Kipling took solace in reading, and developed his life-long love of literature. Near the end of his stay at the school, it was decided that he lacked the academic ability to get into Oxford University on a scholarship, and so Kipling's father secured a job for him in Lahore, Punjab (now Pakistan), working as the assistant editor of the Civil & Milit ary Gazette .
Between 1882 and 1886, Kipling wrote profusely. His first volume of poetry, Departmental Ditties , was published in 1886. He followed this with a vast amount of short stories: in 1888, he published six collections of short stories: Soldiers Three , The Story of the Gadsbys , In Black and White , Under the Deodars , The Phantom Rickshaw , and Wee Wi llie Winkie .
Following a dispute over pay, Kipling was discharged from The Pioneer in early 1889. Following this, he returned to London, the literary centre of the British Empire, where he was already gaining a considerable reputation.
Over the next two years, he published a novel, The Light that Failed , had a nervous breakdown, and met an American writer and publishing agent, Wolcott Balestier, with whom he collaborated on a novel, Th e Naulahka .
In 1892, Kipling married Caroline Balestier, the sister of an American friend, and the couple moved to Vermont in the United States, where her family lived. Their two daughters were born there, and Kipling also wrote his famous The Jungle Book (1894) whilst residing in Vermont. In 1896, a quarrel with his wife's family prompted Kipling to move back to England and he settled with his own family in Sussex. His son John was b orn in 1897.
By now Kipling had become an immensely popular writer and poet for children and adults. His subsequent publications included Stalky and Co. (1899), Kim (1901) and Puck of Pook's Hill (1906). Despite having turned down many honours in his lifetime, including a knighthood and the poet laureateship, in 1907, he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature – the first English author to be s o honoured.
In 1915, his son, John, went missing in action during the Battle of Loos (the largest British offensive mounted in 1915 on the Western Front). Having played a major role in getting the chronically short-sighted John accepted for military service, Kipling had great difficulty accepting his son's death and subsequently wrote an account of his regiment, The Irish Guards in the Great War . He also joined the Imperial War Graves Commission and selected the biblical phrase inscribed on many British war memorials: “Their Name Liveth For Evermore”.
Kipling kept writing until the early thirties, but at a slower pace and with much less success t han before.
He died in 1936, at the age of seventy, and is buried at Westmin ster Abbey.
Today, Kipling's reputation is a complex one: as the literary critic Douglas K err puts it:
"He is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with."


KIM
CHAPTER I
O ye who tread the Narrow Way
By Tophet-flare to Judgment Day,
Be gentle when 'the heathen' pray
To Buddha at Kamakura!
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 conqu eror's loot.
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.
'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 hund red devils.'
'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.'
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 hea