Plain Tales from the Hills, by

Rudyard Kipling
LISPETH.

Look, you have cast out Love! What Gods are these
You bid me please?
The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so!
To my own Gods I go.
It may be they shall give me greater ease
Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
The Convert.

She was the daughter of Sonoo, a Hill-man, and Jadeh his wife. One year
their maize failed, and two bears spent the night in their only poppy-field
just above the Sutlej Valley on the Kotgarth side; so, next season, they
turned Christian, and brought their baby to the Mission to be baptized.
The Kotgarth Chaplain christened her Elizabeth, and “Lispeth” is the Hill
or pahari pronunciation.
Later, cholera came into the Kotgarth Valley and carried off Sonoo
and Jadeh, and Lispeth became half-servant, half-companion to the wife of
the then Chaplain of Kotgarth. This was after the reign of the Moravian
missionaries, but before Kotgarth had quite forgotten her title of “Mistress
of the Northern Hills.”
Whether Christianity improved Lispeth, or whether the gods of her
own people would have done as much for her under any circumstances, I
do not know; but she grew very lovely. When a Hill girl grows lovely, she is
worth traveling fifty miles over bad ground to look upon. Lispeth had a
Greek face — one of those faces people paint so often, and see so seldom.
She was of a pale, ivory color and, for her race, extremely tall. Also, she
possessed eyes that were wonderful; and, had she not been dressed in the
abominable print-cloths affected by Missions, you would, meeting her on
the hill-side unexpectedly, have thought her the original Diana of the
Romans going out to slay.
Lispeth took to Christianity readily, and did not abandon it when she
reached womanhood, as do some Hill girls. Her own people hated her
because she had, they said, become a memsahib and washed herself daily;
and the Chaplain’s wife did not know what to do with her. Somehow, one
cannot ask a stately goddess, five foot ten in her shoes, to clean plates and
dishes. So she played with the Chaplain’s children and took classes in the
Sunday School, and read all the books in the house, and grew more and
more beautiful, like the Princesses in fairy tales. The Chaplain’s wife said
that the girl ought to take service in Simla as a nurse or something
“genteel.” But Lispeth did not want to take service. She was very happy
where she was.
When travellers — there were not many in those years — came to
Kotgarth, Lispeth used to lock herself into her own room for fear they
might take her away to Simla, or somewhere out into the unknown world.
One day, a few months after she was seventeen years old, Lispeth
went out for a walk. She did not walk in the manner of English ladies — a
mile and a half out, and a ride back again. She covered between twenty and
thirty miles in her little constitutionals, all about and about, between
Kotgarth and Narkunda. This time she came back at full dusk, stepping
down the breakneck descent into Kotgarth with something heavy in her
arms. The Chaplain’s wife was dozing in the drawing-room when Lispeth
came in breathing hard and very exhausted with her burden. Lispeth put it
down on the sofa, and said simply:
“This is my husband. I found him on the Bagi Road. He has hurt
himself. We will nurse him, and when he is well, your husband shall marry
him to me.”
This was the first mention Lispeth had ever made of her matrimonial
views, and the Chaplain’s wife shrieked with horror. However, the man on
the sofa needed attention first. He was a young Englishman, and his head
had been cut to the bone by something jagged. Lispeth said she had found
him down the khud, so she had brought him in. He was breathing queerly
and was unconscious.
He was put to bed and tended by the Chaplain, who knew something
of medicine; and Lispeth waited outside the door in case she could be
useful. She explained to the Chaplain that this was the man she meant to
marry; and the Chaplain and his wife lectured her severely on the
impropriety of her conduct. Lispeth listened quietly, and repeated her first
proposition. It takes a great deal of Christianity to wipe out uncivilized
Eastern instincts, such as falling in love at first sight. Lispeth, having
found the man she worshipped, did not see why she should keep silent as
to her choice. She had no intention of being sent away, either. She was
going to nurse that Englishman until he was well enough to marry her.
This was her little programme.
After a fortnight of slight fever and inflammation, the Englishman
recovered coherence and thanked the Chaplain and his wife, and Lispeth
— especially Lispeth — for their kindness. He was a traveller in the East,
he said — they never talked about “globe-trotters” in those days, when the
P. & O. fleet was young and small — and had come from Dehra Dun to
hunt for plants and butterflies among the Simla hills. No one at Simla,
therefore, knew anything about him. He fancied he must have fallen over
the cliff while stalking a fern on a rotten tree-trunk, and that his coolies
must have stolen his baggage and fled. He thought he would go back to
Simla when he was a little stronger. He desired no more mountaineering.
He made small haste to go away, and recovered his strength slowly.
Lispeth objected to being advised either by the Chaplain or his wife; so the
latter spoke to the Englishman, and told him how matters stood in
Lispeth’s heart. He laughed a good deal, and said it was very pretty and
romantic, a perfect idyl of the Himalayas; but, as he was engaged to a girl
at Home, he fancied that nothing would happen. Certainly he would
behave with discretion. He did that. Still he found it very pleasant to talk
to Lispeth, and walk with Lispeth, and say nice things to her, and call her
pet names while he was getting strong enough to go away. It meant
nothing at all to him, and everything in the world to Lispeth. She was very
happy while the fortnight lasted, because she had found a man to love.
Being a savage by birth, she took no trouble to hide her feelings, and
the Englishman was amused. When he went away, Lispeth walked with
him, up the Hill as far as Narkunda, very troubled and very miserable. The
Chaplain’s wife, being a good Christian and disliking anything in the shape
of fuss or scandal — Lispeth was beyond her management entirely — had
told the Englishman to tell Lispeth that he was coming back to marry her.
“She is but a child, you know, and, I fear, at heart a heathen,” said the
Chaplain’s wife. So all the twelve miles up the hill the Englishman, with his
arm around Lispeth’s waist, was assuring the girl that he would come back
and marry her; and Lispeth made him promise over and over again. She
wept on the Narkunda Ridge till he had passed out of sight along the
Muttiani path.
Then she dried her tears and went in to Kotgarth again, and said to
the Chaplain’s wife: “He will come back and marry me. He has gone to his
own people to tell them so.” And the Chaplain’s wife soothed Lispeth and
said: “He will come back.” At the end of two months, Lispeth grew
impatient, and was told that the Englishman had gone over the seas to
England. She knew where England was, because she had read little
geography primers; but, of course, she had no conception of the nature of
the sea, being a Hill girl. There was an old puzzle-map of the World in the
House. Lispeth had played with it when she was a child. She unearthed it
again, and put it together of evenings, and cried to herself, and tried to
imagine where her Englishman was. As she had no ideas of distance or
steamboats, her notions were somewhat erroneous. It would not have
made the least difference had she been perfectly correct; for the
Englishman had no intention of coming back to marry a Hill girl. He
forgot all about her by the time he was butterfly-hunting in Assam. He
wrote a book on the East afterwards. Lispeth’s name did not appear.
At the end of three months, Lispeth made daily pilgrimage to
Narkunda to see if her Englishman was coming along the road. It gave her
comfort, and the Chaplain’s wife, finding her happier, thought that she was
getting over her “barbarous and most indelicate folly.” A little later the
walks ceased to help Lispeth and her temper grew very bad. The Chaplain’s
wife thought this a profitable time to let her know the real state of affairs —
that the Englishman had only promised his love to keep her quiet — that
he had never meant anything, and that it was “wrong and improper” of
Lispeth to think of marriage with an Englishman, who was of a superior
clay, besides being promised in marriage to a girl of his own people.
Lispeth said that all this was clearly impossible, because he had said he
loved her, and the Chaplain’s wife had, with her own lips, asserted that the
Englishman was coming back.
“How can what he and you said be untrue?” asked Lispeth.
“We said it as an excuse to keep you quiet, child,” said the Chaplain’s
wife.
“Then you have lied to me,” said Lispeth, “you and he?”
The Chaplain’s wife bowed her head, and said nothing. Lispeth was
silent, too for a little time; then she went out down the valley, and returned
in the dress of a Hill girl — infamously dirty, but without the nose and ear
rings. She had her hair braided into the long pig-tail, helped out with black
thread, that Hill women wear.
“I am going back to my own people,” said she. “You have killed
Lispeth. There is only left old Jadeh’s daughter — the daughter of a pahari
and the servant of Tarka Devi. You are all liars, you English.”
By the time that the Chaplain’s wife had recovered from the shock of
the announcement that Lispeth had ’verted to her mother’s gods, the girl
had gone; and she never came back.
 She took to her own unclean people savagely, as if to make up the
arrears of the life she had stepped out of; and, in a little time, she married
a wood-cutter who beat her, after the manner of paharis, and her beauty
faded soon.
“There is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of the
heathen,” said the Chaplain’s wife, “and I believe that Lispeth was always
at heart an infidel.” Seeing she had been taken into the Church of England
at the mature age of five weeks, this statement does not do credit to the
Chaplain’s wife.
Lispeth was a very old woman when she died. She always had a
perfect command of English, and when she was sufficiently drunk, could
sometimes be induced to tell the story of her first love-affair.
It was hard then to realize that the bleared, wrinkled creature, so like
a wisp of charred rag, could ever have been “Lispeth of the Kotgarth
Mission.”

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