1888
'YOKED WITH AN UNBELIEVER'
by Rudyard Kipling
Electronically Enhanced Text (c) Copyright 1996, World Library(R)
'YOKED WITH AN UNBELIEVER'
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I am dying for you, and you are dying for another.
-Punjabi Proverb.
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WHEN the Gravesend tender left the P. & O. steamer for Bombay and
went back to catch the train to Town, there were many people in it
crying. But the one who wept most, and most openly, was Miss Agnes
Laiter. She had reason to cry, because the only man she ever loved- or
ever could love, so she said- was going out to India; and India, as
every one knows, is divided equally between jungle, tigers, cobras,
cholera, and sepoys.
Phil Garron, leaning over the side of the steamer in the rain,
felt very unhappy too; but he did not cry. He was sent out to 'tea.'
What 'tea' meant he had not the vaguest idea, but fancied that he
would have to ride on a prancing horse over hills covered with
tea-vines, and draw a sumptuous salary for doing so; and he was very
grateful to his uncle for getting him the berth. He was really going
to reform all his slack, shiftless ways, save a large proportion of
his magnificent salary yearly, and, in a very short time, return to
marry Agnes Laiter. Phil Garron had been lying loose on his friends'
hands for three years, and, as he had nothing to do, he naturally fell
in love. He was very nice; but he was not strong in his views and
opinions and principles, and though he never came to actual grief
his friends were thankful when he said good-bye, and went out to
this mysterious 'tea' business near Darjiling. They said, 'God bless
you, dear boy! Let us never see your face again,'- or at least that
was what Phil was given to understand.
When he sailed, he was very full of a great plan to prove himself
several hundred times better than any one had given him credit for- to
work like a horse, and triumphantly marry Agnes Laiter. He had many
good points besides his good looks; his only fault being that he was
weak, the least little bit in the world weak. He had as much notion of
economy as the Morning Sun; and yet you could not lay your hand on any
one item, and say, 'Herein Phil Garron is extravagant or reckless.'
Nor could you point out any particular vice in his character; but he
was 'unsatisfactory' and as workable as putty.
Agnes Laiter went about her duties at home- her family objected to
the engagement- with red eyes, while Phil was sailing to Darjiling-
a 'port on the Bengal Ocean,' as his mother used to tell her
friends. He was popular enough on board ship, made many
acquaintances and a moderately large liquor-bill, and sent off huge
letters to Agnes Laiter at each port. Then he fell to work on this
plantation, somewhere between Darjiling and Kangra, and, though the
salary and the horse and the work were not quite all he had fancied,
he succeeded fairly well, and gave himself much unnecessary credit for
his perseverance.
In the course of time, as he settled more into collar, and his
work grew fixed before him, the face of Agnes Laiter went out of his
mind and only came when he was at leisure, which was not often. He
would forget all about her for a fortnight, and remember her with a
start, like a schoolboy who has forgotten to learn his lesson. She did
not forget Phil, because she was of the kind that never forgets. Only,
another man- a really desirable young man- presented himself before
Mrs. Laiter; and the chance of a marriage with Phil was as far off
as ever; and his letters were so unsatisfactory; and there was a
certain amount of domestic pressure brought to bear on the girl; and
the young man really was an eligible person as incomes go; and the end
of all things was that Agnes married him, and wrote a tempestuous
whirlwind of a letter to Phil in the wilds of Darjiling, and said
she should never know a happy moment all the rest of her life. Which
was a true prophecy.
Phil received that letter, and held himself ill-treated. This was
two years after he had come out; but by dint of thinking fixedly of
Agnes Laiter, and looking at her photograph, and patting himself on
the back for being one of the most constant lovers in history, and
warming to the work as he went on, he really fancied that he had
been very hardly used. He sat down and wrote one final letter- a
really pathetic 'world without end, amen,' epistle; explaining how
he would be true to Eternity, and that all women were very much alike,
and he would hide his broken heart, etc. etc.; but if, etc. etc., at
any future time, etc. etc., he could afford to wait, etc. etc.,
unchanged affections, etc. etc., return to her old love, etc. etc.,
for eight closely written pages. From an artistic point of view, it
was very neat work, but an ordinary Philistine, who knew the state
of Phil's real feelings,- not the ones he rose to as he went on
writing,- would have called it the thoroughly mean and selfish work of
a thoroughly mean and selfish weak man. But this verdict would have
been incorrect. Phil paid for the postage, and felt every word he
had written for at least two days and a half. It was the last
flicker before the light went out.
That letter made Agnes Laiter very unhappy, and she cried and put it
away in her desk, and became Mrs. Somebody Else for the good of her
family. Which is the first duty of every Christian maid.
Phil went his ways, and thought no more of his letter, except as
an artist thinks of a neatly touched-in sketch. His ways were not bad,
but they were not altogether good until they brought him across
Dunmaya, the daughter of a Rajput ex-Subadar-Major of our Native Army.
The girl had a strain of Hill blood in her, and, like the
Hill-women, was not a purdah-nashin or woman who lives behind
the veil. Where Phil met her, or how he heard of her, does not matter.
She was a good girl and handsome, and, in her way, very clever and
shrewd; though, of course, a little hard. It is to be remembered
that Phil was living very comfortably, denying himself no small
luxury, never putting by a penny, very satisfied with himself and
his good intentions, was dropping all his English correspondents one
by one, and beginning more and more to look upon India as his home.
Some men fall this way; and they are of no use afterwards. The climate
where he was stationed was good, and it really did not seem to him
that there was any reason to return to England.
He did what many planters have done before him- that is to say, he
made up his mind to marry a Hill-girl and settle down. He was
seven-and-twenty then, with a long life before him, but no spirit to
go through with it. So he married Dunmaya by the forms of the
English Church, and some fellow-planters said he was a fool, and
some said he was a wise man. Dunmaya was a thoroughly honest girl,
and, in spite of her reverence for an Englishman, had a reasonable
estimate of her husband's weaknesses. She managed him tenderly, and
became, in less than a year, a very passable imitation of an English
lady in dress and carriage. It is curious to think that a Hill-man
after a lifetime's education is a Hill-man still; but a Hill-woman can
in six months master most of the ways of her English sisters. There
was a coolie-woman once. But that is another story. Dunmaya dressed by
preference in black and yellow and looked well.
Meantime Phil's letter lay in Agnes Laiter's desk, and now and again
she would think of poor, resolute, hardworking Phil among the cobras
and tigers of Darjiling, toiling in the vain hope that she might
come back to him. Her husband was worth ten Phils, except that he
had rheumatism of the heart. Three years after he was married,- and
after he had tried Nice and Algeria for his complaint,- he went to
Bombay, where he died, and set Agnes free. Being a devout woman, she
looked on his death and the place of it as a direct interposition of
Providence, and when she had recovered from the shock, she took out
and re-read Phil's letter with the 'etc. etc.,' and the big dashes,
and the little dashes, and kissed it several times. No one knew her in
Bombay; she had her husband's income, which was a large one, and
Phil was close at hand. It was wrong and improper, of course, but
she decided, as heroines do in novels, to find her old lover, to offer
him her hand and her gold, and with him spend the rest of her life
in some spot far from unsympathetic souls. She sat for two months,
alone in Watson's Hotel, elaborating this decision, and the picture
was a pretty one. Then she set out in search of Phil Garron, Assistant
on a tea plantation with a more than usually unpronounceable name.
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* * * * * * *
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She found him. She spent a month over it, for his plantation was not
in the Darjiling district at all, but nearer Kangra. Phil was very
little altered, and Dunmaya was very nice to her.
Now the particular sin and shame of the whole business is that Phil,
who really is not worth thinking of twice, was and is loved by
Dunmaya, and more than loved by Agnes, the whole of whose life he
seems to have spoilt.
Worst of all, Dunmaya is making a decent man of him; and he will
ultimately be saved from perdition through her training.
Which is manifestly unfair.
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THE END
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