Daily Short Stories - Mystery & Suspense

The Sending of Dana Da - Rudyard Kipling

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Duration:: 28m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jun 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

At your job, do you ever have to deal with a nose roller? How about a snub bully? Well, if you're installing a new conveyor belt system, dealing with the different components can sound like you're speaking a foreign language. Luckily, you've got a team ready to help. Granger's technical product specialists are fluent in maintenance, repair, and operations. So whenever you want to talk shop, just reach out. Call clickgranger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. [MUSIC PLAYING] Save on O'Reilly Breakparts Cleaner. Get two cans of O'Reilly Breakparts Cleaner for just $8, valid in store only at O'Reilly Auto Parts. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, rightly. Auto Parts. Descending of day and day, by Woojord Kipling, when the devil rides on your chest, remember the trauma, native proverb. Once upon a time, some people in India made a new heaven and a new earth out of broken teacups, a missing brooch or two, and a hairbrush. These were hidden under bushes or stuffed into holes in the hillside, and an entire civil service of subordinate gods used to find or mend them again. And everyone said, there are more things in heaven and earth than are drained in our philosophy. Several other things happened also, but the religion never seemed to get much beyond its first manifestations, though it added an airline postal dock and orchestral effects in order to keep abreast of the times and stall off competition. These religion was too elastic for ordinary use. It stretched itself and embraced pieces of everything that medicine men of all ages have manufactured. It approved and stole from Freemasonry, looted the Latter-day Rose secretions of half their pet words, took any fragments of Egyptian philosophy that it found in the Encyclopedia Britannica, annexed as many of the Vedas as had been translated into French or English, and taught of all the rest. Built in the German versions of what is left of the Zandavesta, encouraged white, gray, and black magic, including spiritualism, palmistry, fortune telling by cards, hot chestnuts, double-curnalled nuts, and tallow droppings. What have adopted Voodoo and Obu had had known anything about them, and showed itself in every way, one of the most accommodating arrangements that had ever been invented since the birth of this sea. When it was in thorough working order, with all the machinery down to the subscriptions complete, Dana Day came from nowhere, with nothing in his hands and wrote a chapter in its history, which has hitherto been unpublished. He said that his first name was Dana, and his second was Day. Now, sitting aside Dana of the New York Sun, Dana is of a heel name, and they fit no native of India, unless you accept the Bengali Day as the original spelling. Day is lap, or finish, and Dana Day was neither fin, chin, pale, Benga, lap, nair, gond, Romani, mark, baccariot, curd, Armenian, liventine, to Persian, Punjabi, Madrasi, Percy, nor anything else known to ethnologists. He was simply Dana Day, and declined to give further information. For the sake of brevity, and as roughly indicating his origin, he was called the native. He might have been the original old man of the mountains, who is said to be the only authorized head of the teacup creed. Some people said that he was, but Dana Day used to smile and deny any connection with the courts, explaining that he was an independent experimenter. As I have said, he came from nowhere with his hands behind his back, and studied the creed for three weeks, sitting at the feet of those best competent to explain its mysteries. Then he laughed aloud, and went away. But the laugh might have been either of devotion, or derision. When he returned he was without money, but his pride was unabated. He declared that he knew more about the things in heaven and earth than those who taught him, and for this, consumercy was abandoned altogether. His next appearance in public life was at a big cantonment in Upper India, and he was then telling fortunes with the help of three laden dyes, every dirty old cloth, and a little tin box of opium pills. He told better fortunes when he was allowed half a bottle of whiskey. But the things which he invented on the opium were quite worth the money. He was in reduced circumstances. Among other peoples, he told the fortune of an Englishman who had once been interested in the similar creed, but who later on had married and forgotten all his old knowledge in the study of babies and exchange. The Englishman allowed Dana Day to tell a fortune for charity's sake, and gave him five rupees, Edina and some old clothes. When he had eaten, Dana Day professed gratitude, and asked if there were anything he could do for his host, in the esoteric line. "Is there anyone that you love?" said Dana Day. The Englishman loved his wife, but had no desire to drag her name into the conversation. He therefore shook his head. "Is there anyone that you hate?" said Dana Day. The Englishman said that there were several men whom he hated deeply. "Very good," said Dana Day, "upon whom the whiskey and the opium were beginning to tell. Only give me their names, and I will dispatch ascending to them, and kill them." Now ascending is a horrible arrangement. First invented, they say, in Iceland. It is a thing sensed by a wizard, and may take any form. But most generally, wanders about the land in the shape of a little purple cloud till it finds the sandy. And him, it kills by changing into the form of a horse or a cat or a man without a face. It is not strictly a native patent, though Tamar's can, if irritated, this patch ascending, which sits on the breast of their enemy by night and nearly kills him. Very few natives care to irritate shamars, for this reason. "Let me dispatch ascending," said Dana Day. "I am nearly dead now, with wand, and drink, and opium, but I should like to kill a man before I die. I can send ascending anywhere you choose, and in any form except in the shape of a man." The Englishman had no friends that he wished to kill. But partly to suit Dana Day, whose eyes were rolling, and partly to see what would be done. He asked whether a modified sending could not be arranged for. Such ascending I should make a man's life a burden to him, and yet do him no harm. If this were possible, he notified his willingness to give Dana Day ten rupees for the job. "I am not what I was once," said Dana Day, "and I must take the money, because I am poor." To what Englishman so I should send it? "Send ascending to Lone Sahib," said the Englishman, naming a man who had been most pitcher in rebuking him for his apostasy from the teacup creed. Dana Day laughed, and nodded. "I could have chosen no better man myself," said he. "I will see that he finds the sending about his path and about his bed." He lay down on the hearth rug, turned up the whites of his eyes, shivered all over, and began to snort. This was magic, or opium, or descending, or all three. When he opened his eyes, he vowed that the sending had started upon the war-path, and was at that moment flying up to the town where Lone Sahib lives. "Give me my tender rupees," said Dana Day wearily, "and write a letter to Lone Sahib, telling him and all who believe with him that you and a friend are using a power greater than theirs. They will see that you are speaking the truth." He departed on steadily, with the promise of some more rupees if anything came of descending. The Englishman sent a letter to Lone Sahib, couched in what he remembered of the terminology of the creed. He wrote, "I also, in the days of what you held, to be my back-sliding, have obtained enlightenment, and West enlightenment has come power." Then he grew so deeply mysterious that the recipient of the letter could make night ahead nor tail of it, and was proportionately impressed. For he fancied that his friend had become a fifth rounder. When a man is a fifth rounder, he can do more than Slade and Houdin combined. Lone Sahib read the letter in five different fashions, and was beginning a sixth interpretation. When his bearer dashed in with the news that there was a captain on his bed. Now, if there was one the thing that Lone Sahib hated more than another, it was a cat. He raided the bearer for not turning it out of the house. The bearer said that he was afraid. All the doors of the bedroom had been shut throughout the morning, and no real cat could possibly have entered the room. He would prefer not to meddle with the creature. Lone Sahib entered the room gingerly, and there, on the pillow of his bed, sprawled and whimpered, a wee white kitten, let it jump some frisky little beast, but a slug-like crawler with its eyes barely open, and its paws lacking strength or direction. A kitten that ought to have been in a basket with its mama. Lone Sahib caught it by the scruff of its neck, handed its over to the sweeper to be drowned, and found the bearer for on us. That evening, as he was reading in his room, he fancied that he saw something moving about on the hearse rug, outside the circle of light from his reading lamp. When the thing began to meow, he realized that it was a kitten, a wee white kitten, nearly blind and very miserable. He was seriously angry, and spoke bitterly to his bearer, who said that there was no kitten in the room when he brought it to the lap, and real kittens of tender age generally had modern cats in attendance. "If the presents will go out into the veranda and listen," said the bearer, "he will hear no cats. How therefore can the kitten on the bed and the kitten on the hearse rug be real kittens?" Lone Sahib wants out to listen, and the bearer followed him, but there was no sound of Rachel mewing for her children. He returned to his room, having hurled the kitten down the hillside, and wrote out the incidents of the day for the benefit of his co-religionists. Those people were so absolutely free from superstition that they ascribed anything a little out of the common two agencies. As it was their business to know all about the agencies, they were on terms of almost indecent familiarity with manifestations of every kind. Their letters dropped from the ceiling unstamped, and spirits used to squatter up and down their staircases all night. But they had never come into contact with kittens. On Sahib wrote out the facts, noting the hour and the minute, as every psychical observer is bound to do, and depending the Englishman's letter, because it was the most mysterious document, and might have had a bearing upon anything in this world, or the next. An outsider would have translated all the tangled dice, "Look out! You laughed at me once, and now I am going to make you sit up." Once Sahib's co-religionists found that meaning in it, but their translation was refined, and full of forced-global words. They held a cedirond, and were filled with tremulous joy, for, in spite of their familiarity with all the other worlds and cycles, they had a very human awe of things sent from ghostland. They met in Loneseip's room in shrouded and sepulchral gloom, and their conclave was broken up by a clinking among the photo-frames on the mental-piece. A wee white kitten, nearly blind, was looping and writhing itself between the clock and the candlesticks. That stopped all investigations or doubtings. Here was the manifestation into flesh. It was, so far as could be seen, the void of purpose. But it was a manifestation of undoubted authenticity. They drafted a round robin to the Englishman. The back-sider of old days adoring him in the interests of the creed to explain whether there was any connection between the embodiment of some Egyptian god or other. I have forgotten the name, and his communication. They called the kitten Ra, or Thoth, or Shem, or Noah, or something, and when Loneseip confessed that their first one had, at his most misguided instance, been drowned by the sweeper, they said consolingly that in his next life he would be a bounder, and that even a rounder of the lowest grade. His words may not be quite correct, but they expressed the sense of the house accurately. When the Englishman received the round robin, it came by post. He was startled and bewildered. He sent him to the bazaar for day and day, who read the letter and laughed. "That is my sending," said he. "I told you I would work well. Now give me another ten rupees." "But what in the world is this gibberish about the Egyptian gods?" asked the Englishman. "Cuts," said Dana Day, with a hiccup, for he had discovered the Englishman's whiskey bottle. "Cuts, and cuts, and cuts never was such a sending. A hundred of cuts, now give me ten more rupees and write as I dictate." Dana Day's letter was a curiosity. It bore the Englishman's signature and hinted at cats, at a sending of cats. The mere words on paper were creepy and uncanny to behold. "What have you done, though?" said the Englishman. "I am as much in the dark as ever. Do you mean to say that you can actually send this absurd sending you talk about?" "George, for yourselves," said Dana Day, "what does not let them in? In a little time they will all be at my feet and yours, and I, oh glory, will be drugged or drunk all day long." Dana Day knew his people. When a man who hates cats wakes up in the morning and finds a little squirming kitten on his breast or puts his hand into his old star pocket and finds a little half that kitten where his gloves should be, or opens his trunk and finds a vile kitten among his dress shirts or goes for a long ride with a Macintosh strapped on his saddle-bow and shakes a little sprawling kitten from its falls when he opens it or goes out to dinner and finds a little blind kitten under his chair or stays at home and finds a rhythm kitten under the quilt or wriggling among his boots or hanging head-down wood in his tobacco jar or being mangled by his terrier in the veranda. When such a man finds one kitten, there are more, nor less, once a day in a place where no kitten rightly could or should be, he is naturally upset. When he dare not murder his daily trove because he believes it to be a manifestation, an emissary, an embodiment, and have a dozen other things all out of the regular cause of nature, he is more than upset, he is actually distressed. Some of Loneseab's choriligenists thought that he was a highly-favored individual, but many said that if he had treated the first kitten with proper respect, as suited as taut sura tum sinakirib embodiment, all his trouble would have been averted. They compared him to the ancient mariner, but nonetheless they were proud of him and proud of the Englishman who had sent the manifestation. They did not call it ascending because Icelandic magic was not in their program. After sixteen kittens, that is to say, after a fortnight, for there were three kittens on the first day to impress the fact of the sending, the whole camp was uplifted by a letter. It came, flying through a window, from the old man of the mountains, the head of all the creed, explaining the manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself. The Englishman said the letter was not there at all. He was a backslider without power or asceticism, who couldn't even raise a table by force of revelation, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the highest authorities within the pale of the creed. There was great joy at this, for some of the weaker brethren seeing that an outsider who had been working on independent lines could create kittens, whereas their own rulers had never gone beyond crockery and broken at that, were showing a desire to break a line on their own trail. In fact, there was the promise of his schism. A second round robin was drafted to the Englishman, beginning Oskofer, an ending with a selection of curses from the rights of Misrem and Memphis, and the combination of Juggana, who was a fifth rounder upon whose name and upstart third rounder once traded. A papal excommunication is a beyadu, compared to the combination of Juggana. The Englishman had been proved under the hand and seal of the old man of the mountains to have appropriated virtue and pretended to have power which, in reality, belonged only to the supreme head. Naturally the round robin did not spare him. He handed the letter to day-to-day to translate into decent English. The effect on day-to-day was curious. At first he was furiously angry, and then he laughed for five minutes. "I had taught," he said, "that they would have come to me. In another week I would have shown that I sent the sending, and they would have discrowned the old man of the mountains, who has sent this sending of mine. Do you do nothing? The time has come for me to act. Write as I dictate, and I will put them to shame, but give me ten more rubies." At day-to-day's dictation the Englishman wrote nothing less than a formal challenge to the old man of the mountains. It warmed up. And if this manifestation be from your hand, then let it go forward. But if it be from my hand, I will, that the standing shall seize in two days' time. On that day there shall be twelve kittens, and sense forward none at all. The people shot judge between us. This was signed by day-to-day, who added pentacles and pentagrams, and a crooks on sata, and half a dozen swastikas, in a triple-tow to his name, just to show that he was all he laid claim to be. The challenge was read out to the gentleman and ladies, and they remembered then that day-to-day had laughed at them some years ago. It was officially announced that the old man of the mountains would treat the matter with contempt. Day-to-day being an independent investigator without a single round at the back of him. But this did not soothe his people. They wanted to see a fight. They were very human for all their spirituality. Lonesy Heeb, who was rarely being worn out with kittens, submitted me clean to his fate. He felt that he was being kitten to prove the power of day-to-day, as the poet says. In the state of day dawned, the shower of kittens began. Some were white, and some were tabby, and all were about the same lotes from age. Three were on his hearth-rug. Three, in his bathroom, and the other six turned up at intervals among the visitors who came to see the prophecy break down. Never was a more satisfactory sending. On the next day, there were no kittens, and the next day, and all the other days were kittenless and quiet. The people murmured and looked to the old man of the mountains for an explanation. A letter, written on a palm leaf, dropped from the ceiling. But everyone except Lonesy Heeb felt that letters were not what the occasion demanded. There should have been cats. There should have been cats. Full-ground ones. The letter proved conclusively that there had been a hitch in the psychic current, which, colliding with a dual identity, had interfered with the recipient's activity all along the main line. The kittens were still going on, but owing to some failure in the developing fluid, they were not materialised. The air was thick, with letters, for a few days afterwards. Unseen hands played glute and bitoven on fingerballs and clock-shades. But all men felt that psychic life was a mockery without materialised kittens. Even Lonesy Heeb shouted with the majority on this head. They noticed letters were very insulting, and if he had then offered to lay the nude departure, there is no knowing what might not have happened. But Dana Day was dying of whiskey and opium in the Englishman's go-down, and had small heart for new creeds. "They have been put to shame," said he. "Never her worth such ascending. It has killed me." "Nonsense," said the Englishman. "You are going to die, Dana Day, and that sort of stuff must be left behind. All that meant that you have made some queer things come about. Tell me, honestly, now how was it done?" "Give me ten more rupees," said Dana Day faintly. "And if I die before I spend them, bury them with me." The silver was counted out while Dana Day was fighting with death. His hand closed upon the money, and he smiled a grim smile. Then, law, he whispered, the Englishman bent. Bonya, Mission School, expelled, Boxwala, peddler, Ceylon Pearl, a merchant, all mine English education, outcasted, and made up named Dana Day, England with American thought-reading man. And you gave me ten rupees several times. I gave the Sahib's bearer two eights a month for cuts. Little, a little cuts. I wrote, and he put them about. Very clever man. Very few kittens now in the bazaar. Ask loan Sahib's sweeper's wife." So saying, Dana Day gasped and passed away into a land where, if all be true, there are no materializations, and the making of new creeds is discouraged. But consider the gorgeous simplicity of it all. "It your job. Do you ever have to deal with a nose roller? How about a snub bully? Well, if you're installing a new conveyor belt system, dealing with the different components can sound like you're speaking a foreign language. Luckily, you've got a team ready to help. Granger's technical product specialists are fluent in maintenance, repair, and operations. So whenever you want to talk shop, just reach out. Call clickgranger.com or just stop by. And don't forget to subscribe to our channel for more information on this channel. Thank you for joining us for more information about this amazing video. Welcome to Salka Media, where your journey into a world of endless audio possibilities begins. 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