Page:Pacific Monthly volumes 9 and 10.djvu/163

 ld Baloc

A brave heart and a courteous tongue, they shall carry thee far through the Jungle, Manling.

Now these are the Laws of the Jungle, and many and mighty are they;

But the head and the hoof of the Law, and the haunch and the hump is — OBEY I

The Seonee Cubs who passed under Baloo's hard training had experience of the dogma's of '^Life's Handicap":

Ride with an idle whip, ride with an unused

heel, But, once in a way, there will come a day When the colt must be taught to feel The lash that falls, and the curb that galls,

and the sting of the rowelled steel.

And yet was there ever the truest tenderness in the Old Bear's teaching.

Kipling, who went forth For to admire an' for to see, For to be'old this world so wide,

like a greedily-impressionable bit of blotting paper, soaking up everything on the face of the earth, in "From Sea to Sea" pays a warm tribute to the American girl:

Sweet and comely are the maidens of Devonshire; delicate and of gracious seeming those who live in the pleasant place of London; fascinating for all their demureness, the damsels of France clinging closely to their mothers and with large eyes wondering at the wicked world; excellent in her own place and to those who understand her is the Anglo-Indian "spin" in her second season; hut the girls of America are above and beyond them all. They are clever; they can talk. They are oricrinal, and look you between the brows with unabashed eyes, as a sister might look at her brother. They are self-possessed without parting with any tenderness that is their sex-right; they are superbly independent; they understand.

A word, too, for the "long, elastic, well-built California boy:"

Him I love because he is devoid of fear, carries himself like a man, and has a heart big as his boots.

If I were asked to strike the keynote of all Kipling's teaching, I should say it was "The Sacredness, the Impera- tiveness to each man of his own Day's Work."

A man must throw his whole being into his task, "gettin' shut o' doin' things rather more or less" ; and that

man shall "by the vision splendid be on his way attended." It is the Apotheosis of Work. And surelv has he earned a right to speak on this subject, for literally while his companions slept he was "toiling upward in the night."

Kipling in his own impressionable youth had the inestimable advantage of living in India just at the time when the old order was giving place to the new. Around him was an empire in making, and he saw the raw edges of the work. For years, out of sight of the English press, did he work like a grub of genius in a remote corner, spinning in long, hot and dusty days and hotter nights a golden web out of which only stray strands floated into the world's ken. There is a camaraderie, a sort of free-masonry in work ; had he not himself been a worker it would not have been given to him to meet at first hand all manners of men.

As it is, he gets his facts m days spent in the huts of the hill-country, in the engine-rooms of great liners, in the opium shops of Jahore, in the busy marts of men, far off on lone hill-sides and river-ways, where men, toiling, sweating, planning, fighting, build walls and bridges, lead forlorn hopes, and do things.

And through the best of Kipling's boy-stories shines ever the insistence of the Day's Work. This lesson, though delayed must be learned (be it by a Bear's blows or at the hard hands of a Cape Cod fisher), and to him who throws himself headlong into his task the reward will not be lacking.

Kim, hugging himself in sheer intoxication with the love of life and work, would seem to exclaim with Tommy Atkins:

"Gawd bless this world! Whatever she hath

done — Excep' when awful lonpr — I've found it Rood, So write before I die, *' 'E liked it all/ "

And so it was that, casting aside conventions, with a this-one-thing-I-do intentness, whether hand in hand with Old Lama, childlike seeking The Way, or following "The Great Game" off his own bat, he caught brief, elusive glimpses of the "light that neverwas on sea or land."

Love of en