Watches Of The Night
What is in the Brahmin's books that is in the Brahmin's heart.
Neither you nor I knew there was so much evil in the world.
Hindu Proverb.
This began in a practical joke; but it has gone far enough now, and
is getting serious.
Platte, the Subaltern, being poor, had a Waterbury watch and a
plain leather guard.
The Colonel had a Waterbury watch also, and for guard, the lip-
strap of a curb-chain. Lip-straps make the best watch guards.
They are strong and short. Between a lip-strap and an ordinary
leather guard there is no great difference; between one Waterbury
watch and another there is none at all. Every one in the station
knew the Colonel's lip-strap. He was not a horsey man, but he
liked people to believe he had been on once; and he wove fantastic
stories of the hunting-bridle to which this particular lip-strap
had belonged. Otherwise he was painfully religious.
Platte and the Colonel were dressing at the Club--both late for
their engagements, and both in a hurry. That was Kismet. The two
watches were on a shelf below the looking-glass--guards hanging
down. That was carelessness. Platte changed first, snatched a
watch, looked in the glass, settled his tie, and ran. Forty
seconds later, the Colonel did exactly the same thing; each man
taking the other's watch.
You may have noticed that many religious people are deeply
suspicious. They seem--for purely religious purposes, of course--
to know more about iniquity than the Unregenerate. Perhaps they
were specially bad before they became converted! At any rate, in
the imputation of things evil, and in putting the worst
construction on things innocent, a certain type of good people may
be trusted to surpass all others. The Colonel and his Wife were of
that type. But the Colonel's Wife was the worst. She manufactured
the Station scandal, and--TALKED TO HER AYAH! Nothing more need be
said. The Colonel's Wife broke up the Laplace's home. The
Colonel's Wife stopped the Ferris-Haughtrey engagement. The
Colonel's Wife induced young Buxton to keep his wife down in the
Plains through the first year of the marriage. Whereby little Mrs.
Buxton died, and the baby with her. These things will be
remembered against the Colonel's Wife so long as there is a
regiment in the country.
But to come back to the Colonel and Platte. They went their
several ways from the dressing-room. The Colonel dined with two
Chaplains, while Platte went to a bachelor-party, and whist to
follow.
Mark how things happen! If Platte's sais had put the new saddle-
pad on the mare, the butts of the territs would not have worked
through the worn leather, and the old pad into the mare's withers,
when she was coming home at two o'clock in the morning. She would
not have reared, bolted, fallen into a ditch, upset the cart, and
sent Platte flying over an aloe-hedge on to Mrs. Larkyn's well-kept
lawn; and this tale would never have been written. But the mare
did all these things, and while Platte was rolling over and over on
the turf, like a shot rabbit, the watch and guard flew from his
waistcoat--as an Infantry Major's sword hops out of the scabbard
when they are firing a feu de joie--and rolled and rolled in the
moonlight, till it stopped under a window.
Platte stuffed his handkerchief under the pad, put the cart
straight, and went home.
Mark again how Kismet works! This would not happen once in a
hundred years. Towards the end of his dinner with the two
Chaplains, the Colonel let out his waistcoat and leaned over the
table to look at some Mission Reports. The bar of the watch-guard
worked through the buttonhole, and the watch--Platte's watch--slid
quietly on to the carpet. Where the bearer found it next morning
and kept it.
Then the Colonel went home to the wife of his bosom; but the driver
of the carriage was drunk and lost his way. So the Colonel
returned at an unseemly hour and his excuses were not accepted. If
the Colonel's Wife had been an ordinary "vessel of wrath appointed
for destruction," she would have known that when a man stays away
on purpose, his excuse is always sound and original. The very
baldness of the Colonel's explanation proved its truth.
See once more the workings of Kismet! The Colonel's watch which
came with Platte hurriedly on to Mrs. Larkyn's lawn, chose to stop
just under Mrs. Larkyn's window, where she saw it early in the
morning, recognized it, and picked it up. She had heard the crash
of Platte's cart at two o'clock that morning, and his voice calling
the mare names. She knew Platte and liked him. That day she
showed him the watch and heard his story. He put his head on one
side, winked and said:--"How disgusting! Shocking old man! with
his religious training, too! I should send the watch to the
Colonel's Wife and ask for explanations."
Mrs. Larkyn thought for a minute of the Laplaces--whom she had
known when Laplace and his wife believed in each other--and
answered:--"I will send it. I think it will do her good. But
remember, we must NEVER tell her the truth."
Platte guessed that his own watch was in the Colonel's possession,
and thought that the return of the lip-strapped Waterbury with a
soothing note from Mrs. Larkyn, would merely create a small trouble
for a few minutes. Mrs. Larkyn knew better. She knew that any
poison dropped would find good holding-ground in the heart of the
Colonel's Wife.
The packet, and a note containing a few remarks on the Colonel's
calling-hours, were sent over to the Colonel's Wife, who wept in
her own room and took counsel with herself.
If there was one woman under Heaven whom the Colonel's Wife hated
with holy fervor, it was Mrs. Larkyn. Mrs. Larkyn was a frivolous
lady, and called the Colonel's Wife "old cat." The Colonel's Wife
said that somebody in Revelations was remarkably like Mrs. Larkyn.
She mentioned other Scripture people as well. From the Old
Testament. [But the Colonel's Wife was the only person who cared
or dared to say anything against Mrs. Larkyn. Every one else
accepted her as an amusing, honest little body.] Wherefore, to
believe that her husband had been shedding watches under that
"Thing's" window at ungodly hours, coupled with the fact of his
late arrival on the previous night, was . . . . .
At this point she rose up and sought her husband. He denied
everything except the ownership of the watch. She besought him,
for his Soul's sake, to speak the truth. He denied afresh, with
two bad words. Then a stony silence held the Colonel's Wife, while
a man could draw his breath five times.
The speech that followed is no affair of mine or yours. It was
made up of wifely and womanly jealousy; knowledge of old age and
sunken cheeks; deep mistrust born of the text that says even little
babies' hearts are as bad as they make them; rancorous hatred of
Mrs. Larkyn, and the tenets of the creed of the Colonel's Wife's
upbringing.
Over and above all, was the damning lip-strapped Waterbury, ticking
away in the palm of her shaking, withered hand. At that hour, I
think, the Colonel's Wife realized a little of the restless
suspicions she had injected into old Laplace's mind, a little of
poor Miss Haughtrey's misery, and some of the canker that ate into
Buxton's heart as he watched his wife dying before his eyes. The
Colonel stammered and tried to explain. Then he remembered that
his watch had disappeared; and the mystery grew greater. The
Colonel's Wife talked and prayed by turns till she was tired, and
went away to devise means for "chastening the stubborn heart of her
husband." Which translated, means, in our slang, "tail-twisting."
You see, being deeply impressed with the doctrine of Original Sin,
she could not believe in the face of appearances. She knew too
much, and jumped to the wildest conclusions.
But it was good for her. It spoilt her life, as she had spoilt the
life of the Laplaces. She had lost her faith in the Colonel, and--
here the creed-suspicion came in--he might, she argued, have erred
many times, before a merciful Providence, at the hands of so
unworthy an instrument as Mrs. Larkyn, had established his guilt.
He was a bad, wicked, gray-haired profligate. This may sound too
sudden a revulsion for a long-wedded wife; but it is a venerable
fact that, if a man or woman makes a practice of, and takes a
delight in, believing and spreading evil of people indifferent to
him or her, he or she will end in believing evil of folk very near
and dear. You may think, also, that the mere incident of the watch
was too small and trivial to raise this misunderstanding. It is
another aged fact that, in life as well as racing, all the worst
accidents happen at little ditches and cut-down fences. In the
same way, you sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of
Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces
over all the mean worry of housekeeping. But that is another
story.
Her belief only made the Colonel's Wife more wretched, because it
insisted so strongly on the villainy of men. Remembering what she
had done, it was pleasant to watch her unhappiness, and the penny-
farthing attempts she made to hide it from the Station. But the
Station knew and laughed heartlessly; for they had heard the story
of the watch, with much dramatic gesture, from Mrs. Larkyn's lips.
Once or twice Platte said to Mrs. Larkyn, seeing that the Colonel
had not cleared himself:--"This thing has gone far enough. I move
we tell the Colonel's Wife how it happened." Mrs. Larkyn shut her
lips and shook her head, and vowed that the Colonel's Wife must
bear her punishment as best she could. Now Mrs. Larkyn was a
frivolous woman, in whom none would have suspected deep hate. So
Platte took no action, and came to believe gradually, from the
Colonel's silence, that the Colonel must have "run off the line"
somewhere that night, and, therefore, preferred to stand sentence
on the lesser count of rambling into other people's compounds out
of calling hours. Platte forgot about the watch business after a
while, and moved down-country with his regiment. Mrs. Larkyn went
home when her husband's tour of Indian service expired. She never
forgot.
But Platte was quite right when he said that the joke had gone too
far. The mistrust and the tragedy of it--which we outsiders cannot
see and do not believe in--are killing the Colonel's Wife, and are
making the Colonel wretched. If either of them read this story,
they can depend upon its being a fairly true account of the case,
and can "kiss and make friends."
Shakespeare alludes to the pleasure of watching an Engineer being
shelled by his own Battery. Now this shows that poets should not
write about what they do not understand. Any one could have told
him that Sappers and Gunners are perfectly different branches of
the Service. But, if you correct the sentence, and substitute
Gunner for Sapper, the moral comes just the same.
-THE END-
Rudyard Kipling's short story: Watches Of The Night
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