By this date Kipling had been publishing short story collections for twenty years and his audience was familiar with the format: every four or five years Kipling pulled together the short stories he’d published in various magazines into a one-volume collection, giving it a pithy and evocative title, and often writing poems specially to preface or follow each story. Actions and Reactions contains nine stories:
1. An Habitation Enforced (1905)
An American couple, George and Sophie Chapin, buy a house in Sussex, finding themselves slowly falling in love with it, and getting to know and respect the local gentry and peasants, discovering that the wife’s ancestors used to live right in this parish, and eventually giving birth to a son and heir in the house, in a story which idealises Kipling’s deepening feelings for England and for Sussex specifically. A little obvious though the general drift of the story is, it is the style which impresses. It is noticeably more clipped and swift than any previous story and, somehow, feels more mature.
2. Garm: a Hostage (1899)
This is the sixteenth story Kipling wrote featuring one or all of the ‘three soldiers’ which featured among his earliest tales. The narrator nearly runs over Private Stanley Ortheris who is drunkenly pretending to be a highway robber, and being pursued by Military Police. The kindly narrator takes Ortheris home to sleep it off, then delivers him back to barracks next day, with a note to his superior officer explaining that Ortheris was injured, hence his overnight stay – and thus saving Ortheris from punishment.
A few days later Ortheris calls round with his amazing pet dog, a bull-terrier which can do all kinds of tricks, and gives it to the narrator, as a thank-you and as a kind of hostage for Ortheris’s ongoing good behaviour. The narrator already has a dog, Vixen, who is at first resentful until the bull-terrier rescues Vixen from a pack of local strays after which they become firm friends.
The narrator christens the dog ‘Garm’, an abbreviation of the legendary ‘Garin of the Bloody Breast’. Garm is loyal and intelligent, but the narrator soon realises that Ortheris misses him dreadfully and is in fact paying the dog secret visits at night, which is having the effect of making Garm pine during the day for his old owner. When the hot season comes Ortheris, pining away and ill, is sent by his regiment off to the hills, but the narrator follows him there and reunites man and dog.
Like a lot of the ‘three soldiers’ stories it’s not really much of a story. Kipling wrote a lot of dog stories, enough to make up several anthologies later in his career. If they’re all this boring, they’ll be no loss to avoid.
3. The Mother Hive (1908)
One reason to read Kipling is to have one’s own ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ ideas challenged – although sometimes it feels like they’re just being insulted. Kipling established several ways of doing this: one was to mock the foolishness of the White Man, i.e. the weakness of his country and its Liberal rulers, through the unsparing eyes of his black subjects e.g. the Muslim author of the London letter who ridicules the weakness of London Liberals, or the Sikh narrator in A Sahibs’ War who can’t believe the British’s damn-fool, sportsmanlike conduct of the Boer War.
Another way is through animal fables. Thus all the Jungle Book stories rotate around The Law of The Jungle and embody the way Kipling believes – like many conservatives – that Freedom is only possible in a well-regulated society bound by a common Law.
One of the classic metaphors for society is the bee hive, which has been used for this purpose by authors for over 2,000 years. In Kipling’s version the well-regulated hive is invaded by the Wax Moth who represents all the progressive forces he disliked about Edwardian society – ‘progressivism, liberal individualism, pacifism, cosmopolitanism, egalitarianism, little Englandism, class division’. It couldn’t have done this unless society was decadent.
If the stock had not been old and overcrowded, the Wax-moth would never have entered; but where bees are too thick on the comb there must be sickness or parasites.
Wax-moth only succeed when weak bees let them in… All this is full of laying workers’ brood. That never happens till the stock’s weakened.
The Kipling Society notes tell me that Kipling became an enthusiastic bee-keeper at his Sussex home and the story is certainly brimming over with bee-keeping facts, as his stories about ships, cars, mills, radios and electricity brim over with boyish enthusiasm for technicalities and jargon.
The Mother Hive is a complete, rounded fable, which starts with the entrance of the one Wax Moth, satirises the deceitful way she deploys her rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ while all the while she sets about laying eggs of the parasitical caterpillars who will destroy it – the one metaphorically, the other literally, undermining and polluting the hive and its structure.
Until the giant human Bee Keeper comes, as prophesied by the Old Queen, to destroy and rebuild the hive. Right up the end the deceitful Wax Moth is telling the misfits, abortions and genetic freaks her poison has helped to spawn that this is the Dawn of a New Age. But in fact the Bee Keeper realises the entire hive is worthless and polluted and so systematically destroys it – only a few loyal bees and a new Queen survive to create a new society. Based, of course, on Law and Order and Tradition.
I note that Conan Doyle made his hero Sherlock Holmes retire to the South Downs where he became an enthusiastic bee-keeper. The most obvious thing about bees, in our time, is not whether they can be used by conservative authors to symbolise a well-regulated society – but the fact that we are wiping them out.
4. With the Night Mail (1905)
Kipling was nothing if not varied and ambitious as an author. Just the first four tales in this collection consist of a down-home Sussex story, a dog story, a political fable, and now a science fiction fantasy.
It is 2000 AD and the narrator takes a trip aboard the latest GPO airship. Just ploughing through the long, long technical descriptions of Kipling’s imagined futuristic airship brings home how excessively much his stories rely on technical detail, jargon and specialist terms (in this story, largely made-up) – and how very little on sympathetic emotion. There is almost no emotional flicker in any of his stories except Anger or Fear. For the rest, the narrator is generally an unmoved and objective reporter of conversations he hears or things he sees, as emotional as a block of wood.
So in this tale of the future, once the reporter is up in the airship which is trundling through the skies, and the captain says, ‘Would you like a look round the engine room?’ the reader’s heart sinks.
“If you want to see the coach locked you’d better go aboard. It’s due now,” says Mr. Geary. I enter through the door amidships. There is nothing here for display. The inner skin of the gas-tanks comes down to within a foot or two of my head and turns over just short of the turn of the bilges. Liners and yachts disguise their tanks with decoration, but the G.P.O. serves them raw under a lick of grey official paint. The inner skin shuts off fifty feet of the bow and as much of the stern, but the bow-bulkhead is recessed for the lift-shunting apparatus as the stern is pierced for the shaft-tunnels. The engine-room lies almost amidships. Forward of it, extending to the turn of the bow tanks, is an aperture – a bottomless hatch at present – into which our coach will be locked. One looks down over the coamings three hundred feet to the despatching-caisson whence voices boom upward. The light below is obscured to a sound of thunder, as our coach rises on its guides. It enlarges rapidly from a postage-stamp to a playing-card; to a punt and last a pontoon. The two clerks, its crew, do not even look up as it comes into place. The Quebec letters fly under their fingers and leap into the docketed racks, while both captains and Mr. Geary satisfy themselves that the coach is locked home. A clerk passes the way-bill over the hatch coaming. Captain Purnall thumb-marks and passes it to Mr. Geary. Receipt has been given and taken. “Pleasant run,” says Mr. Geary, and disappears through the door which a foot high pneumatic compressor locks after him.
This is reportage, not fiction. Kipling is always a journalist eavesdropping on other people’s lives – never imaginatively inhabiting them. And instead of conversations where characters exchange feelings or thoughts or subtle nuances, in Kipling nine times out of ten you have working men exchanging the gruff manly slang of their trades.
“Hello, Williams!” he cried. “A degree or two out o’ station, ain’t you?”
“May be,” was the answer from the Mark Boat. “I’ve had some company this evening.”
“So I noticed. Wasn’t that quite a little draught?”
“I warned you. Why didn’t you pull out north? The east-bound packets have.”
“Me? Not till I’m running a Polar consumptives’ sanatorium boat. I was squinting through a colloid before you were out of your cradle, my son.”
“I’d be the last man to deny it,” the captain of the Mark Boat replies softly. “The way you handled her just now — I’m a pretty fair judge of traffic in a volt-hurry — it was a thousand revolutions beyond anything even I’ve ever seen.”
You have to make quite an effort to buy into his detailed, highly technical descriptions. It feels like a story for engineers. For the more casual reader, the illustrations to this story are infinitely more interesting and evocative than the prose.
Illustration of With The Night Mail
The most extraordinary thing about this bit of reportage from the future is that, after the main ‘story’, a further long part of the text consists of fictional ‘excerpts’ from newspapers and magazines contemporary with the narrator’s imagined journey. Thus we get:
- a series of weather reports for different parts of the sky on the night the narrator took his trip
- notes on the prevalence of sleet
- the problem of ‘bat boat’ racing (whatever that is)
- an anecdote from Crete
- various letters to the Editor about aerial travelling along with 14 replies from the Editor
- a long review of a fictional book about a fictional pioneer of aerial travel – one Xavier Lavalle
- and then mocked-up adverts selling all kinds of paraphernalia connected with flying
This is a stunning tribute to Kipling’s readiness to prepare a full, complete and exhaustive factual apparatus for each of his ‘stories’ – to work over and over the surface of his texts to create an astonishing intricacy of realistic detail. But the more detail you read, the more you realise there is a big hole where the ‘story’ should be, and a huge emotional and psychological hole at the centre of most of his stories.
And yet… Kipling’s vision clearly spoke to the men who do, who make things happen. Thus Charles Carrington’s excellent biography includes the story that when the first Atlantic flight was achieved by the British airship ‘R.34’ in 1919, the crew took with them a single book, this one, so that they could refer to this story. Then they all autographed the edition, and presented it to its author. Kipling’s audience and impact were on such a different group and class than the ‘literature’ and readership we are educated to expect.
6. A Deal in Cotton
A meeting up of old pals from India, who featured in various Plain Tales From The Hills. The man nicknamed ‘the Infant’ has inherited a vast estate, whither he invites the narrator who finds an old pal, Colonel Corkran (Stalky from the Stalky stories, now grown up) and Strickland of the Punjab Police (who also featured in a number of the early India stories), now retired and bringing along his son, who has just returned from service in Africa very ill.
The son tells a long story about how he’s setting up a cotton growing concern in his District and trying to tame the local tribe of cannibals to work on it. He partly financed this by fining a slave trader he caught transporting slaves through British territory. His audience, experienced administrators to a man – Corkran, the Infant, Strickland – hear him out but, when he’s gone, ask his loyal Muslim servant, Imam Din, for his version of events.
From reading the story alone, I couldn’t make head nor tail of what went on, except the Muslim and the slave trader seem to have done some deal to do some kind of scam to help young Adam with his cotton scheme: I think they burned down the village of the cannibals and terrified them into helping Adam. I think the man who was brought before him as a slave trader was also a friend and devotee of young Adam – but I found the technique of telling two conflicting versions of the same events through the jargon, slang and argot of two completely different men – posh Sahib and deferential Mussulman – too obscure to understand.
7. The Puzzler (1909)
A sort of Ealing comedy which starts with the improbably named Penfentenyou, Premier in his own Province (somewhere in the Empire) who imposes himself on the narrator on a trip to England, turning the study into a Cabinet Room, sending and receiving endless telegrams.
Penfentenyou hears that one of the British politicians he needs to speak to, Lord Lundie, lives only 40 miles away. Next day he insists on being driven there to discuss his oh-so-important business. Arriving in Lundie’s village they notice a) a removal van with several men having a beer outside the local pub b) an organ grinder and monkey.
As they walk towards the hedge of Lord Lundie’s manor house they notice a fine monkey puzzle tree dominating the lawn outside and then hear the braying of upper class voices. Creeping nearer they overhear Lundie, a famous Society painter James Loman and Sir Christopher Tomling the engineer, who are all discussing whether a monkey really can climb a monkey puzzle tree.
They remember the organ grinder in the village and one of them gets sweets and biscuits from the house to plant a trail of goodies to the top of the tree, then they approach the organ grinder with their proposition – can they borrow the monkey to see if he can climb to the top of a monkey puzzle tree?
Unfortunately, the monkey is upset by all these people crowding round it and runs for it, leaping through the open window of a nearby house. The organ grinder detaches his instrument from its trolley, straps it over its shoulder and, along with the three eminent Englishmen, runs into the (empty) house. Closely followed by the narrator and Penfentenyou.
So far so Ealing comedy as the narrator and Penfentenyou hear the posh chaps running around the upstairs of the house, crashing and banging everywhere, trying to capture the monkey. The confusion is compounded when a young married couple pull up outside the house. It is their house and they are moving out and they rouse the removal men from the pub to come and finish the job – at which point the Lord and society painter and eminent engineer and organ grinder all come face to face with an outraged bourgeois couple and their surprised workers. The woman is outraged and demands to know what is going on and the whole action pauses for a comic moment.
The Eternal Bad Boy in every man hung its head before the Eternal Mother in every woman.
But at this comically crucial moment, the noble Englishman keeps his cool and shows his class, as the painter on the spot comes up with the explanation that the monkey has just got away from the organ grinder into the house and the passing aristocrats were so worried that the wild animal might harm any children inside, that they have nobly given chase and are on the verge of capturing it.
The young couple’s mood changes from anger to relief and gratitude, they thank the posh chaps profusely, who then calmly stroll back to their big mansion, followed by the narrator and Penfentenyou, who is only now formally introduced to the man of influence. After this unconventional encounter Penfentenyou manages to get his political plan and budget approved by the much relieved Lord Lundie.
This story is genuinely funny, and it’s a relief to read a Kipling story not made incomprehensible by technical jargon, impenetrable dialect, or the complex overlapping of narrators. The narrator and Penfentenyou reappear in the later farce, The Vortex, collected in A Diversity of Creatures, which is just as funny.
8. Little Foxes: A Tale of The Gihon Hunt (1909)
The Gihon is a river which rises in Ethiopia. This is a comic story about the British Governor of the region and his Inspector, who are trying to establish order after the defeat of the Mahdi in Sudan (in the 1880s). When the Governor learns that real genuine foxes – not hyenas, foxes – inhabit the area, he sends for his pack of fox hunting beagles from Ireland, they duly arrive and he teaches the locals the joys of fox hunting.
Order is shown rippling outwards from this strange importation of such a British pastime – for the Governor pays for holes where foxes are caught and fines for holes where foxes are let escape – and this inadvertently clarifies innumerable land disputes. Also villages are motivated to repair their water wheels in order to fuel their crops, because the Hunt buys the crops at a good rate to feed the horses.
A local boy, Farag, immediately falls in love with the dogs and is allowed to become their groom, allowed to dress in traditional hunting outfit, absorbing the Sahib’s virtues of discipline and loyalty, and radiating these out among his people. Great tales are told in the villages of the Hunt’s mighty achievements. As quite a few of the dogs die in service in what, after all, is an alien land with unusual hazards, the Governor dispatches the Inspector back to Britain to get more huntin’ dogs. The Inspector is passed round the ‘county’ set of fox-hunting aristocrats, until a fateful dinner at a swank country house which happens to include among the guests a spluttering Liberal politician. The Inspector is tempted into exaggerating various aspects of British rule, mentioning the administration of physical punishment to the natives, comically exaggerating it and, in a mad moment, using a very crude local Ethiopian name, little thinking his dinner joke will have any consequences.
Part two of the story tells of the visit to Ethiopia of the spluttering Liberal politician who, before he even arrives, causes a lot of concern and potential bloodshed by writing pamphlets criticising Imperial rule. When these are read by the locals they think the Government is about to overthrow all the hard-won land ownership agreements which the Governor has taken so much trouble to establish. As discontent rises, the Governor finds his work cut out dealing with the effects of the ignorant, meddling, undermining stay-at-home anti-Imperialists’ writings and threats.
When the splutterer, Mr Groombride, arrives the locals have been well briefed by Farag, the dog boy, to expect ridicule and farce. They arrange for a willing translator, Abdul, to take the mickey out of Groombride’s speeches. As he reaches the peroration of a particularly virulent anti-Imperial diatribe to Farag’s assembled village, the unfortunate Groombride uses the taboo word mentioned to him ages ago over dinner by the Inspector, and is taken aback when the whole village falls about laughing at him, pointing at him, ridiculing him. Showing the typical thin skin and anger which (Kipling implies) underlies all shallow Liberals, Groombride is so outraged at this reaction that he turns and beats his translator Abdul with an umbrella – just as the Governor and Inspector ride up to witness the ‘native-loving’ Liberal caught in the peak of hypocrisy.
Groombride abjectly pleads for them not to report the matter and to suppress the law suit for assault which Abdul threatens to bring. Thus the blustering, bullying, ignorant, meddling Liberal anti-Imperialist is brought low and transformed into a whining hypocrite.
Well, this era saw much Liberal, Labour, Radical and even communist literature and propaganda, so it is only fair to savour the propaganda of the extreme opposite, the virulent die-hard rhetoric of the hard-core Imperialist.
9. The House Surgeon (1909)
On a steamer the narrator gets talking to L. Maxwell M’Leod who bought a big old house – Holmescroft – in the Home Counties off the three Moultrie sisters through their lawyer, Baxter. M’Leod invites the narrator for a weekend, where he is no sooner inside the building than he experiences the extraordinary sense of depression, guilt and despair it throws over everyone who inhabits it. Intrigued and disturbed, the narrator decides to investigate and goes off to visit this lawyer, Baxter, working his way into his favours by taking up golf (which he detests) under Baxter’s tutelage and eventually being invited to a health spa, along with the spinster sisters.
What emerges is that only two of three sisters survive – Miss Elizabeth and Miss Mary. The youngest, Miss Agnes, died when they owned and lived in Holmescroft – she was found on the path beneath an open first floor window, having committed suicide. And both sisters, and to some extent the lawyer, believe her ghost haunts the house and accounts for the terrible sense of oppression and gloom inside it.
Now a) the narrator himself had stayed in the very room Miss Agnes was supposed to have thrown herself from just a few weeks earlier, and he had noticed that the catch to the window was both low down towards the floor and very stiff, so that in forcing it up and open he very nearly fell out of the window.
b) At this spa there is an excited scene when Miss Mary shrieks for help and Baxter and the narrator burst into the sisters’ bedroom to find Miss Mary, her hand and throat covered with blood, wrestling with the open window while her sister grips her knees to stop her throwing herself out and repeating Miss Agnes’s suicide. Miss Elizabeth claimed her sister had slashed her throat and was trying to throw herself out of the window.
BUT after the hysterical women have been calmed down, it emerges that Miss Mary had done no such thing – she hadn’t slashed anything, but had been struggling with the stiff catchment of the window with such force that when it finally gave, her wrist went through a pane and she accidentally cut herself. Suddenly all four of them – the two sisters, the narrator and Baxter – realise that this must be what happened to their sister, Agnes, at Holmescroft. She had been struggling with the wretched window, yanked it open and fell to her death by accident. Her spirit has been haunting the place and trying to explain. It is this which explains the terrible sense of foreboding, depression and above all, that something unspeakable is trying to tell you something that afflicts M’Leod’s family and afflicted the narrator, when he stayed.
The narrator phones the M’Leod family and tells them to vacate the old house while he brings the two spinster sisters over. The sisters go up to the fatal bedroom (while the narrator and Baxter wait tactfully downstairs) and have some kind of communion with the dead. When the sisters return they have, somehow, spoken to the spirit of their sister, they have accepted that her death was an accident, the terrible secret the house needed to speak has been spoken, and now, magically, Holmescroft is a happy, well-lit, beautiful house again. The M’Leod family are delighted, and romp through their beautiful and now-released home, and happy young Miss M’Leod sings an old English air.
The name of the story comes from the fact that on the night of the panic at the spa when they think Miss Elizabeth is trying to kill herself, the narrator is introduced as the hospital doctor (to spare the embarrassment of Baxter having to explain that he’s in fact more or less a stranger who he – Baxter – has been telling the family secrets to). But it also has another, ironic, meaning by the end of the story, when the narrator emerges as the hero of the hour who discovered the secret of Holmescroft’s haunting and managed to exorcise it. – Early on the narrator says he is no Sherlock Holmes and this draws our attention to the Holmes in the name of the house, Holmescroft.
Comment
These nine stories are hugely varied in setting and subject matter but the two things which come over most strongly are:
1. Kipling’s ideology, the devotion to duty as exemplified in Imperial rule over the colonies, a duty reflected in and welcomed by the colonised themselves, like Farag the dog boy or the loyal Imam Din – and its mirror image, a fierce, unremitting contempt and hatred of Liberals and do-gooders who don’t understand the basis of Imperial rule and blunder in without understanding the land, the people or the culture, and so are wrecking all the good work of the Imperial administrators (in the stories of the hive and the Ethiopian hunt).
2. Kipling’s fantastic addiction to technical terminology, jargon and cant, whether it’s the technical terms and slang associated with fox hunting or bee keeping or motoring or even, in the Night Mail story, a huge lexicon of technical terms which he appears to have invented purely for the story.
Books & Boots 