In 1888 Kipling published Plain Tales from the Hills, 40 brief stories which put him on the map as a chronicler of Anglo-India. In the same year he published six more slim volumes of stories – an explosion of output – and all before the age of 23!
This cheap Wordsworth paperback contains all the stories from the last three of the 1888 volumes, Under the Deodars, The Phantom Rickshaw and Wee Willie Winkie.
Under the Deodars
1. The Education of Otis Yeere
2 At the Pit’s Mouth
3 A Wayside Comedy
4 The Hill of Illusion
5 A Second-rate Woman
6 Only a Subaltern
7 In the Matter of a Private
8 The Enlightenments of Pagett, M. P.
The Phantom Rickshaw
1. The Phantom Rickshaw (1889) First person narrative (most of them are) told by Theobald Jack Pansay who had a ship-board romance with Agnes Keith-Wessington, wife of another officer in the service, but then breaks it off in order to concentrate on his fiancee, Kitty. Agnes, however, refuses to accept the end of the affair and plagues Pansay, following him everywhere, turning up at the most embarrassing junctures in her yellow-panelled rickshaw.
Pansay’s (emotional) brutality makes her pine away and die of a broken heart, not that he cares much. But as he squires pretty Kitty around Simla – the rest town for British officers in northern India – to his horror, the rickshaw and dead Agnes appear again and again, parked across the road, blocking his path when they’re out riding, and everywhere Pansay hears the ghost’s pitiful voice declaring it’s all some ‘hideous mistake’.
When he overcomes his horror enough to try talking to the ‘ghost’, his friends think he’s talking into empty air and is drunk or going mad. Kitty breaks off the engagement with a man who’s become the laughing stock of the town. Pansay’s life falls to pieces and the final section of the text is journal entries in which the narrator describes himself waiting resignedly for his own inevitable death.
Pity me, at least on the score of my ‘delusion’, for I know you will never believe what I have written here. Yet as surely as ever a man was done to death by the Powers of Darkness I am that man.
In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever woman was killed by man, I killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my punishment is ever now upon me.
2 My Own True Ghost Story (1888) The narrator devotes pages and pages to showing off his in-depth knowledge of India and its temporary accommodation for Imperial officers, the dreaded dâk-bungalow, along with a breezy expertise about Indian ghosts.
There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black.
After all this build-up it is a comically debunking story. In the depths of the night the narrator is convinced he can hear billiards being played in the room next door, though it is a basic bed room just like his. Next morning the servant says it used to be a billiard room thirty years ago when the white men were building the local railway, which puts the narrator into mortal terror.
But at the end of the story he walks into the ‘haunted’ bedroom and sees the loose curtains banging against the windows to produce the sound of billiard balls clacking. What a fool!
3 The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes (1885) Another first-person narrative, this time told by a young officer in India who takes his horse, Pornic, for an impetuous ride and trips, stumbles and falls down a steep sandy slope into a bizarre village of the undead.
Out of the holes they have excavated into the side of the sandy slope shuffle the nightmareish inhabitants. They were all Hindus, who were thought to be dead, whose bodies were lovingly prepared by their relatives to be burned and cremated, but then (as sometimes happens) stirred with life and revived. Since their religion had ceremoniously moved them on beyond this world they were not allowed to return to normal life but consigned to this open air prison for the living dead, unable to escape up the high, almost vertical, sand sides of the enclave.
Jukes sees that the settlement is open to the river on one side but when he tries to wade out into it, rifle shots are fired from a boat which guards that exit. Even at night, when the boat goes away, the sandy spits in the river turn out to be treacherous quicksand, impossible to escape.
This is all bizarre enough, but the story turns on the relationship between Jukes and a ‘native’ who shows him the ropes, Gunga Dass. Dass is by turns abjectly servile, until his knowledge of the village of the undead reverses the tables and he lords it over Jukes – until the latter restores the good order of the Empire by giving him a good kicking.
He threw himself down on the ground and clasped my ankles. But I had my doubts about Gunga Dass’s benevolence, and kicked him off as he lay protesting… Brahmin or no Brahmin, by my soul and my father’s soul, in you go!” I said, and, seizing him by the shoulders, I crammed his head into the mouth of the burrow, kicked the rest of him in, and, sitting down, covered my face with my hands.
Jukes discovers that another white man had fallen into the settlement and had been working out a route across the quicksand, a little every night, when Dass treacherously shot him dead with his own revolver. Jukes establishes that the white man had made a map of sorts, and is preparing to try it out that night, after the gun boat leaves, when Dass – knowing his plan – hits him over the head, knocking him unconscious. When Jukes comes to, he groggily hears his loyal servant, Dunnoo, his dog-boy, calling over the lip of the sand. Dunnoo had trailed Juke’s horse’s tracks to the Village of the Dead and now throws down a rope, allowing Juke to escape in a flash. Did Dass escape using the map? The narrator and reader never find out.
The strangeness of the subject should dominate but is tainted or even superseded by the casual brutality of the narrator and his assumption that it is fine for a white man to kick an Indian into obedience.
4 The Man Who Would Be King
Wee Willie Winkie
1. Wee Willie Winkie
2 Baa, Baa, Black Sheep
3 His Majesty the King
4 The Drums of Fore and Aft (1889) Quite a long story, the gist of which is that an inexperienced Indian Army regiment is brought up to the North-West Frontier, and involved in a massed attack on a force of Pathans, alongside a Gurkha regiment and some Highlanders. Being completely inexperienced and – crucially – lacking older soldiers and officers with experience of the terrain and of fighting Afghans, the first attack of fifty or so Muslim fanatics armed with terrifying man-high machetes makes the Fore and Aft break in a screaming panic and run back to the pass they emerged from. The two coarse orphan fourteen-year-old drummer boys who were with the band, Jakin and Lew, are left behind in the mad flight, recover a drum and fife, have a swig of rum from a canteen of one of the casualties, and set about playing the stirring military tune, ‘the British Grenadier’, marching up and down between the Afghan lines and the trembling regiment cowering in its retreat. Shamed by their officers and humiliated by the example of the boys Jakin and Lew, the regiment regroups and charges back out, this time co-ordinated with attacks by the Gurkhas and Highlanders on its flanks, and decimates the Afghans, though not before both boys have been shot dead by the enemy.
There’s story enough here, but not much below the surface is a blatant tract or pamphlet lamenting the lack of training, the shortness of service and the disorganisation which can lead to such lamentable catastrophes. Also it is very violent. Early on, while still in barracks, Lew and Jakin establish their street credentials by kicking the crap out of an officer’s son they find spying on them. The battle itself is described with, for its day, pretty stomach-churning realism.
The English were not running. They were hacking and hewing and stabbing, for though one white man is seldom physically a match for an Afghan in a sheepskin or wadded coat, yet, through the pressure of many white men behind, and a certain thirst for revenge in his heart, he becomes capable of doing much with both ends of his rifle. The Fore and Aft held their fire till one bullet could drive through five or six men, and the front of the Afghan force gave on the volley. They then selected their men, and slew them with deep gasps and short hacking coughs, and groanings of leather belts against strained bodies, and realised for the first time that an Afghan attacked is far less formidable than an Afghan attacking; which fact old soldiers might have told them.
But they had no old soldiers in their ranks.
The Gurkhas’ stall at the bazar was the noisiest, for the men were engaged — to a nasty noise as of beef being cut on the block — with the kukri, which they preferred to the bayonet; well knowing how the Afghan hates the half-moon blade.
‘To a nasty noise as of beef being cut on the block’. Wow.
Conclusion
I hadn’t expected so much range – social comedy à la Oscar Wilde, tales of flirtation and adultery in hill stations, soldier stories from the barracks, ghost stories, Edgar Allen Poe-esque macabre, and a surprising number of stories set in England, and about children.
Along with the torrent of poems he unleashed at the same time, I begin to understand how Kipling came to dominate the 1890s and beyond.
Related links
Other Kipling reviews
- Strange Tales (2006)
- The Best Short Stories (1997)
- Rudyard Kipling: Selected Poetry edited by Craig Raine (1992)
- War Stories and Poems (1990)
- Rudyard Kipling: Selected Verse edited by James Cochrane (1977)
- Rudyard Kipling: His Life and Art by Charles Carrington (1955)
- Charles Carrington on Kipling’s verse (1955)
- A Choice of Kipling’s Verse by T.S. Eliot (1941)
- Something of Myself (1937)
- Limits and Renewals (1932)
- The Muse Among the Motors (1904-1929)
- Debits and Credits (1926)
- A Diversity of Creatures (1917)
- Rewards and Fairies (1910)
- Actions and Reactions (1909)
- Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906)
- Traffics and Discoveries (1904)
- Just So stories (1902)
- Kim (1901)
- The Absent-Minded Beggar (1899)
- Stalky and Co (1899)
- The Day’s Work (1898)
- Captains Courageous (1897)
- The Seven Seas (1896)
- The Jungle Books (1895, 1895)
- Many Inventions (1893)
- Barrack Room Ballads (1892)
- Life’s Handicap (1891)
- The Light That Failed (1891)
- The Man Who Would Be King and other stories (1888)
- Plain Tales From The Hills (1888)
Books & Boots 