_Fagan_, Rowland Thomas.

_La Grande Bretêche_ ("Jessup and Canby"), Honoré de Balzac.



THE MAN WHO WAS[1]

_By Rudyard Kipling (1865- )_


Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person
till he tucks his shirt in. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only
when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of Western
peoples, instead of the most westerly of Easterns, that he becomes a
racial anomaly[2] extremely difficult to handle. The host never knows
which side of his nature is going to turn up next.

Dirkovitch was a Russian--a Russian of the Russians, as he said--who
appeared to get his bread by serving the czar as an officer in a
Cossack regiment, and corresponding for a Russian newspaper with a
name that was never twice the same. He was a handsome young Oriental,
with a taste for wandering through unexplored portions of the earth,
and he arrived in India from nowhere in particular. At least no living
man could ascertain whether it was by way of Balkh, Budukhshan,
Chitral, Beloochistan, Nepaul, or anywhere else. The Indian
government, being in an unusually affable mood, gave orders that he
was to be civilly treated, and shown everything that was to be seen;
so he drifted, talking bad English and worse French, from one city to
another till he forgathered with her Majesty's White Hussars[3] in the