The Very Best of Ruskin Bond, the Writer on the Hill: Selected Fiction and Non-Fiction Read Free Page A

guardian and the missionary’s wife and the supple malacca cane, and ran with the others through the town and into the forest.
    The crisp, sunny morning ripened into afternoon.
    In the forest, in the cool dark silence of the jungle, they stopped singing and shouting, suddenly exhausted. They lay down in the shade of many trees, and the grass was soft and comfortable, and very soon everyone except Rusty was fast asleep.
    Rusty was tired. He was hungry. He had lost his shirt and shoes, his feet were bruised, his body sore. It was only now, resting, that he noticed these things, for he had been caught up in the excitement of the colour game, overcome by an exhilaration he had never known. His fair hair was tousled and streaked with colour, and his eyes were wide with wonder.
    He was exhausted now, but he was happy.
    He wanted this to go on for ever, this day of feverish emotion, this life in another world. He did not want to leave the forest; it was safe, its earth soothed him, gathered him in so that the pain of his body became a pleasure...
    He did not want to go home.

    Mr Harrison stood at the top of the veranda steps. The house was in darkness, but his cigarette glowed more brightly for it. A road lamp trapped the returning boy as he opened the gate, and Rusty knew he had been seen, but he didn’t care much; if he had known that Mr Harrison had not recognized him, he would have turned back instead of walking resignedly up the garden path.
    Mr Harrison did not move, nor did he appear to notice the boy’s approach. It was only when Rusty climbed the veranda steps that his guardian moved and said, ‘Who’s that?’
    Still he had not recognized the boy; and in that instant Rusty became aware of his own condition, for his body was a patchwork of paint. Wearing only torn pyjamas he could, in the half-light, have easily been mistaken for the sweeper boy or someone else’s servant. It must have been a newly acquired bazaar instinct that made the boy think of escape. He turned about.
    But Mr Harrison shouted, ‘Come here, you!’ and the tone of his voice—the tone reserved for the sweeper boy—made Rusty stop.
    ‘Come up here!’ repeated Mr Harrison.
    Rusty returned to the veranda, and his guardian switched on a light; but even now there was no recognition.
    ‘Good evening, sir,’ said Rusty.
    Mr Harrison received a shock. He felt a wave of anger, and then a wave of pain: was this the boy he had trained and educated—this wild, ragged, ungrateful wretch, who did not know the difference between what was proper and what was improper, what was civilized and what was barbaric, what was decent and what was shameful—and had the years of training come to nothing? Mr Harrison came out of the shadows and cursed. He brought his hand down on the back of Rusty’s neck, propelled him into the drawing-room, and pushed him across the room so violently that the boy lost his balance, collided with a table and rolled over on to the ground.
    Rusty looked up from the floor to find his guardian standing over him, and in the man’s right hand was the supple malacca cane and the cane was twitching.
    Mr Harrison’s face was twitching too, it was full of fire. His lips were stitched together, sealed up with the ginger moustache, and he looked at the boy with narrowed, unblinking eyes.
    ‘Filth!’ he said, almost spitting the words in the boy’s face. ‘My God, what filth!’
    Rusty stared fascinated at the deep yellow nicotine stains on the fingers of his guardian’s raised hand. Then the wrist moved suddenly and the cane cut across the boy’s face like a knife, stabbing and burning into his cheek.
    Rusty cried out and cowered back against the wall; he could feel the blood trickling across his mouth. He looked round desperately for a means of escape, but the man was in front of him, over him, and the wall was behind.
    Mr Harrison broke into a torrent of words. ‘How can you call yourself an Englishman, how can you come back to this