He observed, of a cake of dried poppy juice: ‘This has power to cut off all pain from a man’s body.’
‘I have seen it,’ said John.
‘But for pain of the soul there is, outside God’s Grace, but one drug; and that is a man’s craft, learning, or other helpful motion of his own mind.’ (The Eye of Allah)
Published eight long years after the end of the Great War, eleven years after his only son, John, was reported ‘missing presumed dead’ during the 1915 Battle of Loos, and gathering together all the short stories Kipling wanted to keep from the previous decade, Debits and Credits contains 14 stories and 21 poems.
In their range and, especially, in their worked-over depths and subtleties, this is by far his best volume of stories – some are flawed and uneven, cryptic and apparently callous – but many others are crafted and subtle and moving.
The stories
1. The Enemies to Each Other
2. Sea Constables (1915) ‘A tale of ’15
In February 1915 the German High Command declared the North Sea a war zone in which all merchant shipping, including neutral ships, were liable to be attacked and sunk without warning. This story describes four Royal Navy men meeting at a choice restaurant in London.
The four men sat down. They had the coarse-grained complexions of men who habitually did themselves well, and an air, too, of recent, red-eyed dissipation. Maddingham, the eldest, was a thick-set middle-aged presence, with crisped grizzled hair, of the type that one associates with Board Meetings. He limped slightly. Tegg, who followed him, blinking, was neat, small, and sandy, of unmistakable Navy cut, but sheepish aspect. Winchmore, the youngest, was more on the lines of the conventional prewar ‘nut,’ but his eyes were sunk in his head and his hands black-nailed and roughened. Portson, their host, with Vandyke beard and a comfortable little stomach, beamed upon them as they settled to their oysters.
In Kipling’s usual late manner the four old pros settle down to telling stories, before slowly drifting into swapping notes about the Neutral vessel (presumably American, though it isn’t stated) which they were all partly involved in tailing through the North Sea, down the Channel and round into the Irish Sea.
Winchmore sets the ball rolling, then hands over to Maddingham who played the lion’s share. The ‘Newt’ (as they nickname the neutral vessel) claims to be carrying oil for Antigua, which they think a likely story. Maddingham’s ship pursues the neutral vessel into the Irish Sea and then into an unnamed West of England port, where the American captain prompts a Court of Inquiry into the way he’s being closely tailed and chased.
This is portrayed as one of the umpteen examples in Kipling where the British bend over backwards to be fair and above board to an enemy (in this case suspected enemy) which is utterly unscrupulous – an approach he thought bedevilled our efforts in the Boer War – and the kind of ‘health and safety gone mad’ sentiment you can still read any day in the Daily Mail.
One of the four at table, Tegg, was a lawyer during the inquiry.
And that’s what you get for trying to serve your country in your old age!’ Maddingham emptied and refilled his glass.
‘We did give you rather a grilling,’ said Tegg placidly. ‘It’s the national sense of fair play.’
The Newt goes back to sea, closely followed again by Maddingham who tags him up and down the Irish Sea, in stormy foggy weather, regularly hailing the captain on his bridge and exchanging insults. Maddingham and the others suspect he was planning to rendezvous with a German submarine and transfer his cargo of oil to it. Eventually the Newt puts into Cloone Harbour, where the captain takes to his bed, ill with bronchial pneumonia. Dying, he asks Manningham to help him organise his affairs and write a will. Manningham sticks to his orders and refuses.
This is taken as the crux of the story, where a usually decent man fails to show common humanity / oversteps some moral mark, and is interpreted in some commentaries as an example of how war deforms morality. As usual the text is dense with naval jargon as swished around by a bunch of chaps used to shorthand expressions, fleeting references, who share the same values and so don’t have to explain their sentiments and views. A number of critics point to the clipped approach of these later stories, and the way they’re couched in talk, in reams of highly technical or slang or dialect speech, as evidence that Kipling had forged a kind of ‘modernist’ style of his own. Maybe. This is how the main talker, Maddingham, talks:
‘He set the tops’ls in his watch. Hilarity won’t steer under any canvas, so we rather sported round our friend that afternoon, I believe. When I came up after dinner, she was biting his behind, first one side, then the other. Let’s see — that would be about thirty miles east-sou-east of Harry Island. We were running as near as nothing south. The wind had dropped, and there was a useful cross-rip coming up from the south-east. I took the wheel and, the way I nursed him from starboard, he had to take the sea over his port bow. I had my sciatica on me — buccaneering’s no game for a middle-aged man — but I gave that fellow sprudel! By Jove; I washed him out! He stood it as long as he could, and then he made a bolt for Harry Island. I had to ride in his pocket most of the way there because I didn’t know that coast. We had charts, but Sherrin never understood ’em, and I couldn’t leave the wheel. So we rubbed along together, and about midnight this Newt dodged in over the tail of Harry Shoals and anchored, if you please, in the lee of the Double Ricks. It was dead calm there, except for the swell, but there wasn’t much room to manoeuvre in, and I wasn’t going to anchor. It looked too like a submarine rendezvous. But first, I came alongside and asked him what his trouble was. He told me he had overheated his something-or-other bulb. I’ve never been shipmates with Diesel engines, but I took his word for it, and I said I ‘ud stand by till it cooled. Then he told me to go to hell.’
3. ‘In the Interests of the Brethren’ (1917)
In a pet shop the narrator briefly meets a man who he later bumps into running a tobacconist’s shop. He is a Mason and invites the narrator along to a meeting of his Lodge (‘Faith and Works 5837’) that night. The narrator helps vet half a dozen Masons in Army uniform who have turned up hoping for recognition and admission. It is a way to suggest the appalling damage to the war injured, men with jaws shot away, who’ve lost arms or legs, the huge holocaust of the injured, plus those Kipling calls the ‘shell-shockers’ or just ‘shockers’. One Brother explains how a severe ‘mental case’ was rehabilitated by being given the Lodge’s jewellery to clean and look after. Practical therapy.
The point of the story is the compassion the men show to each other. They vote on what ceremonies to perform and then the half-crippled men are helped to carry them out. For many it’s the only religion or ritual they’ve ever had. Others gain dignity and self-respect by performing the (unspecified) rituals, even if they need help from the able-bodied. A crippled man is carried by a sergeant Major into the organ loft where he softly plays Bach. A ‘silent’ Brother is moved to slobber and squawk something which another Brother interprets as a Welsh placename. Acceptance. Forgiveness. A one-legged Corporal explains to the narrator that it was all the tobacconist’s idea, to revive the Lodge and just create a place, a safe space, where wounded, injured, broken men can talk and support each other.
All Ritual is fortifying. Ritual’s a natural necessity for mankind.
This is not a ‘story’, it is in effect a lightly fictionalised journalistic feature. Kipling became a Freemason back in India in the 1880s. What is interesting is the new feel in the ‘story’ -a more mature sense of forgiveness, acceptance, mercy – and a deeper understanding of the healing power of ritual and ceremony which is not conventional empty Church ritual, something somehow more effective and inclusive.
Exactly the same message as in W.B. Yeat’s famous poem A Prayer For My Daughter (1919):
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
4. The United Idolaters (1924)
Another ‘Stalky’ story i.e. set among staff and pupils at a comically exaggerated version of Kipling’s own rather unconventional public school, United Services College in Devon. The ‘story’ loosely describes the craze among pupils and masters for Joel Chandler Harris’s Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox stories, collected in his best-selling Uncle Remus books (the first one of the series was published 1881).
Apart from the ostensible subject matter, it is useful to have Kipling’s own formulation of how the arcane and laboured facetiousness of public schoolboy slang was created from contemporary fads and crazes.
As the Studies brought back brackets and pictures for their walls, so did they bring odds and ends of speech — theatre, opera, and music-hall gags — from the great holiday world; some of which stuck for a term, and others were discarded… In a short time the College was as severely infected with Uncle Remus as it had been with Pinafore [1878] and Patience [1881] …. The book was amazing, and full of quotations that one could hurl like javelins.
It is interesting that Kipling acknowledges the aggression that can be implicit in groups, sets, circles of people using in-jokes and in-quotations, to fight each other or to keep outsiders out.
The comedy is in the escalation of the craze, as one of the boys buys a tortoise which is quickly painted house colours and hoisted by a rope up on a stick, and processed round the various form rooms to the accompaniment of Brer Rabbit-style songs. Then Stalky, Beetle, M’Turk and others make a good effigy of the Tar Baby (a character in the books).
Soon the school has divided into competing factions, each with distinct war chants, supporting either the Tar Baby or Brer Tortoise – some of the boys dress up in increasingly ludicrous outfits. A tug-of-war rope is introduced, which causes mayhem, and eventually desks are knocked over, windows smashed and even a fire grating wrenched out in the collective chaos.
Ultimately it all ends in a heroic number of canings by the Head, and the issuance of thousands of lines of Latin to be done as punishment by countless culprits. To give a sense of the schoolboy slang:
‘It was worth it,’ Dick Four pronounced on review of the profit-and-loss account with Number Five in his study.
‘Heap-plenty-bong-assez,’ Stalky assented.
‘But why didn’t King ra’ar up an’ cuss Tar Baby?’ Beetle asked.
‘You preter-pluperfect, fat-ended fool!’ Stalky began —‘Keep your hair on! We all know the Idolaters wasn’t our Uncle Stalky’s idea. But why didn’t King —’
‘Because Dick took care to paint Brer Terrapin King’s House-colours. You can always conciliate King by soothin’ his putrid esprit-demaisong. Ain’t that true, Dick?’
Dick Four, with the smile of modest worth unmasked, said it was so.
A running sub-plot throughout has been the appearance, at the start, of a new master to the school, a Mr Brownell. He is appalled all the way through by the school’s lax rules and permissiveness and utterly disgusted by the Brer Rabbit ‘riots’. He is shown at the end, having a bitter argument with the rest of the staff, before leaving in a huff. His stiff priggishness throws into relief the essential innocence of the schoolboy hijinks.
5. The Wish House (1924)
Frame: Two old Sussex ladies, Mrs Ashcroft and Mrs Fettley meet to do some knitting in the sunshine, not much bothered by the packed charabancs motoring by down to the local football ground (the kind of framing detail which Kipling delights in). They fall to telling stories about men, men they’ve loved and lost. Mrs Fettley tells a story about a man she loved, who had died quite recently. But Kipling is such a savage editor of his own works, that the entire account of their affair has been cut and is only referred to obliquely.
Mrs. Fettley had spoken very precisely for some time without interruption, before she wiped her eyes. ‘And,’ she concluded, ‘they read ‘is death-notice to me, out o’ the paper last month.’
Then Kipling adjusts himself, makes himself more comfortable, eases deeper into the atmosphere he’s created.
The light and air had changed a little with the sun’s descent, and the two elderly ladies closed the kitchen-door against chill. A couple of jays squealed and skirmished through the undraped apple-trees in the garden. This time, the word was with Mrs. Ashcroft, her elbows on the tea table, and her sick leg propped on a stool…
Story: Now Mrs Ashcroft reveals that she was desperately in love with one Harry Mockler, Bert Mockler’s son. They feel in love when she came down from London to the area to work. When the time came for her to return to London, she went to the lengths of scalding her arm to delay her return.
Then they arranged between them for Harry to get a job up ‘Lunnon’ so they could be close. ‘‘Dere wadn’t much I didn’t do for him. ‘E was me master.’ But, eventually, Harry tired of her and took to other women.
It is then that a new element enters the text: their charwoman’s ‘fiddle girl’ — Sophy Ellis.
Mrs Ashcroft, it appears, was susceptible to severe headaches. During one of them Sophy, a little slip of a girl, goes off to a ‘wish house’ – just a non-descript terraced house that’s been abandoned for some time, and speaks her wish through the letter box to the ‘token’ within. Her wish is to take Mrs Ashcroft’s headache upon herself. And Mrs Ashcroft’s headache disappears. It is now that Sophy reappears at the house, looking awful and, when Mrs Ashcroft asks why, slowly, hesitantly, the girl tells the story of the wish house and how she’s taken Mrs A’s headache upon herself. Stuff and nonsense, the older woman cries.
Then she bumps into Harry in the street – still besotted with him, though he shamefacedly avoids her – and notices he is looking very ill. She learns that he’s been in hospital, having cut his foot badly with a spade and gotten a bad infected.
So, after some thought and hesitation, Mrs Ashcroft goes to the ‘wish house’, at the address Sophy told herself about – furtively, embarrassed, knocks and hears an eerie shuffling and pokes open the letter box.
I stooped me to the letter-box slit, an’ I says: “Let me take everythin’ bad that’s in store for my man, ‘Arry Mockler, for love’s sake.” Then, whatever it was ‘tother side de door let its breath out, like, as if it ‘ad been holdin’ it for to ‘ear better.’
‘Nothin’ was said to ye?’ Mrs. Fettley demanded.
‘Na’un. She just breathed out — a sort of A-ah, like. Then the steps went back an’ downstairs to the kitchen — all draggy — an’ I heard the cheer drawed up again.’
And, to her amazement, she learns soon after that Harry is healed. Oh how happy she is. And yet the restored man carries on with his womanising while she, for her part, develops a nasty ulcer on her shin which she’s had ever since. It is the physical form of Harry’s illness, which she has taken upon herself.
And that’s it. Now she knows she is dying. And Mrs Fettley, in the closing pages of the story herself confesses that she’s going blind. Two afflicted old women at the end of their lives. The story ends with Mrs Ashcroft pitifully needing reassurance that her sacrifice has been worth it, that by taking Harry’s pain she will guarantee his love… in another place.
‘But the pain do count, don’t ye think, Liz? The pain do count to keep ‘Arry where I want ’im. Say it can’t be wasted, like.’
This is a stunning story and his portrayal of two ailing old ladies is a tremendous advance in Kipling’s art from the casual misogyny of his early tales. He shows a tremendous imaginative sympathy with physical pain and with a certain kind of muted psychological suffering. This is just one of a set of late tales which reach out and depict older women with a tremendous vividness and sympathy.
6. The Janeites (1924)
Further incidents in the Freemasons’ Lodge (“Faith and Works 5837”) introduced in the previous story, ‘In the Interests of the Brethren’. That was set in 1917; this one is set in autumn 1920. As with so many Kipling texts, there is the Frame and the Yarn.
Frame: The narrator has become a regular at the lodge and is helping to clean it on a Saturday afternoon, with a rag-tag body of ex-soldiers. Up in the organ loft sharp-eyed Anthony – a taxi-driver who served in Palestine and is always ready to tell acerbic anecdotes about life in a cab – is supervising big strong damaged Humberstall, as they polish the acacia-wood panels of the Lodge organ.
Humberstall served in an artillery battery, was badly wounded, recuperated at home back in Leicestershire, before sneaking back to rejoin his old regiment. His kindly Major recognises his need to be there, but tactfully orders him to become mess-waiter i.e. allots him a safe job away from the front. It is here, helping the head waiter, Macklin (much given to drunkenness) that he overhears a conversation between two officers – Captain Mosse and Major Hammick, a private detective and divorce lawyer in civilian life – discussing a woman they call ‘Jane’.
Story: Macklin explains to Humberstall the origins of the conversation he overheard: there is a Society of ‘Janeites’, membership of which allows officers to speak freely to men and vice versa. Macklin offers him membership, for a fee and so Humberstall pays up a ‘bradbury’ (slang for £1). Macklin explains that the society is based on the works of a woman who wrote long ago, Jane Austen, and makes him read Jane’s six novels. Humberstall (who is telling this narrative) is struck by how ordinary and recognisable all the characters are.
There is a longish sequence where Macklin and Humberstall get into trouble for chalking the names of three Austen characters on the sides of their big guns, with much larkey humour. Then the Germans launch their March Offensive in 1918 and roll up a lot of the Western Front, a naive officer comes past their position with a squad of little more than kids who are all wiped out in a barrage and then – the barrage lands on the guns and mess of our characters.
Humberstall recovers consciousness to find himself blown clear of the main damage, with his clothes blown off. There are corpses and body parts everywhere. He dresses with the clothes of a corpse, before staggering back to what’s left of the mess and discovering that Mosse, Hammick, Macklin and all the others are dead.
Humberstall hitches a lift on a retreating lorry, but at the nearest railhead he is prevented from squeezing onto a packed troop train by an officious nurse. It is here that his half-understood membership of ‘the Janeites’ gives him one last boost – he mentions to her superior that the officious nurse blocking him from the train reminds him of Miss Bates (from Austen’s novel Emma) – and the superior nurse is so impressed that she makes a space for him and his stretcher, not only on the train, but near a fire. And so his knowledge of Jane Austen probably saved his life.
Back to the frame: Worshipful Brother Burges, who set up the Lodge and who we met in the first story, calls out to the soldiers that tea’s ready, and the Brethren cease their labours for refreshment. Big broken Humberstall ends his yarn and lumbers down the ladder, and sharp little Anthony turns to ask the narrator whether ‘the Janeites’ really existed. The narrator replies that it’s too complex a story for a man like Humberstall to have invented.
Anthony says he’s been seeing a lot of Humberstall’s sister, who’s giving him advice about how to look after Humberstall. ‘Careful,’ smiles the narrator: ‘Jane was a great match-maker and all her novels are about match-making. Maybe the Janeites will have one last legacy, and create a love affair between Humberstall’s sister and Anthony.’ Anthony blushes. Jane’s legacy lives on.
7. The Prophet and the Country (1924)
Frame: This is another ‘motoring story’ and Kipling adopts the persona of the permanently disgruntled petrolhead, outraged that the police pull him over, outraged that any other vehicle gets in his way, outraged and disgusted of Tunbridge Wells (or Burwash, Sussex, in his case). His car breaks down and as he is preparing to spend the night in the car a sort of caravan pulls up driven, it soon emerges, by an American, all conveyed in Kipling’s characteristic allusive style.
I diagnosed it as a baker’s van on a Ford chassis, lit with unusual extravagance. It pulled up and asked what the trouble might be. The first sentence sufficed, even had my lights not revealed the full hairless face, the horn-rimmed spectacles, the hooded boots below, and the soft hat, fashioned on no block known to the Eastern trade, above, the yellow raincoat.
Story: The American tells his story which is a long rambling account of how, after his wife died, he decided to dedicate his life to making a film about the disastrous effects of Prohibition on the American national character. He predicts that weaning the entire nation off the Demon Drink will make it as weak and helpless as when the teetotal red Indians or Pacific Islanders were exposed to rum and whiskey i.e. after a long enough time teetotal, the Land of the Free will become vulnerable to attack from East and West by booze-wielding enemies.
The film he planned to make was based around photos of an angry red Indian, of his wife’s best friend who hoped he would marry her when he was widowed and of a motley crew of tourists in the wilderness, looking ‘unutterably mean’. As a ‘treatment’ for a film this is incomprehensible, and really just a frame for the American – named Mr Tarworth from Omaha Nebraska – to boom on in loud pretentious capitalised proper nouns.
He spoke in capital letters, a few of which I have preserved, on our National Spirit, which, he had sensed, was Homogeneous and in Ethical Contact throughout — Unconscious but Vitally Existent. That was his Estimate of our Racial Complex. It was an Asset, but a Democracy postulating genuine Ideals should be more multitudinously-minded and diverse in Outlook.
When word of this mad project got around, Tarworth was lambasted as an anti-American traitor, becoming so unpopular he was forced to leave the country, hence his touring round England. And the film ‘treatment’? Safe in the Bank of England but he wouldn’t consider trying to produce it here, as he is
‘a one-hundred-per-cent. American. The way I see it, I could not be a party to an indirect attack on my Native Land.’
I suppose this is a comedy, and some kind of satire against State Intervention, and maybe also against a certain kind of Americans’ booming self-importance – but in lots of ways it doesn’t make sense (the whole idea of working up a screenplay from four photos is bizarrely unlikely) and its irony and sarcasm – if that’s what they are p are certainly not very funny.
8. The Bull that Thought (1924)
Frame: The narrator is touring France in a motor car, and has discovered a particularly straight stretch of road in the south, where you can get up to an amazing 90 kilometres per hour! (Since his chauffeur is Mr Leggatt, this is presumably the same narrator as in ‘The Horse Marines’ and, by extension, the other Pyecroft stories which featured a chauffeur named Leggatt.)
In the hotel where he’s staying, he meets Monsieur Andre Voiron, a well-off local businessman, who he takes along on the night-time drive to attempt maximum speed. Impressed, M. Voiron, back at the hotel, gets out his finest champagne and tells the narrator the story of a bull.
Story: They breed bulls hereabouts to send to the arena at Arles. One particular calf was always more intelligent than the others, chasing the boys who baited it; hiding and ambushing its enemies. He reports the time the bull assassinated a rival and then calmly cleaned its horns in the dust – very unusual. When it was taken to Arles its horns were padded with cloth to take part in pretend bull-fighting; but half way through the bout, it rubbed the pads off on the ground and terrorised its tormentors. Thereupon it was bought by Voiron’s chief herdsman Christophe, and Voiron returned to business.
The main part of the story occurs when Christophe informs Voiron that the bull – named, by the way, Apis – was scheduled to appear in a small bullring near Barcelona. The core of the story is how Apis humiliates (and kills) all the matadors and picadors sent to kill him, until an old-timer, Chisto, who used to play with him when he was a calf, defuses him, playing with him, frisking and then, in alliance, walking peacefully back to the gate through which Apis entered – and his life is spared.
According to bullfighting experts the story is misleading in at least two respects; if anyone is killed in a bullfight it is stopped immediately; bulls in bullfights are completely inexperienced – they have never seen the cloths or stands and gestures before; any bull which has and so has learned to dodge them and attack the matadors, is spotted and excluded. Lots of commentators overlook these factual flaws in interpreting the story as a metaphor for the artist and his art.
9. A Madonna of The Trenches (1924)
Frame: One of several post-War stories set in the Freemason Lodge ‘Faith and Works 5837’. The narrator is helping the Senior Warden who is also a doctor, Dr Keede. During a lecture a new recruit, Strangwick, has a nervous attack, has to be helped out and administered a sedative. The noise of scraping chairs had reminded Strangwick of the noise made by the leather straps of the corpses which the French used to build their trenches over, of the squeaking noise the dead men’s straps made when you walked on the duckboards laid over them. God. What horror. But as Keede gently questions and sympathetically listens to the stammering man, he draws out a story which is far weirder and stranger than mere post-traumatic stress.
Story: Strangwick was in the same regiment as an older man, Sergeant Godsoe, who he’d known since a boy and had been a father figure to him and his sister. On the day in question, Godsoe was found dead in a sealed gas room in the trenches, with two lighted braziers. Asphyxiation. Dr Keede knew about the incident but thought, like everyone else, it was an accident – that the gas-proof door banged shut and locked Godsoe in by accident.
Now Strangwick slowly, hesitantly, in his working class idiom, explains that Godsoe had been having an affair with his (Strangwick’s) auntie Armine, his mum’s sister (real name, in fact, Bella). Auntie Armine had given Strangwick, on his most recent leave, a note to take back to Godsoe, saying her little trouble would be over on the 21st and she was dying to meet him as soon as possible thereafter.
Strangwick, in his job as a runner on the fateful 21 January, thinks he sees his Auntie Armine at a corner of an old French trench, and, when he tells Godsoe, the latter realises what it means and makes Strangwick take him back to the scene. Here Strangwick’s hair stands on end as he realises that the apparition he thought was a trick of the light earlier on, really is the ghost of his Auntie who – he later finds out – died of cancer that morning. The ghostly figure is holding out her arms to Sergeant Godsoe, imploring him with a terrifying look on her face – and the Sergeant calmly beckons her into the gas room with the braziers and barricades the door behind him. He deliberately asphyxiated himself, killed himself, so that he can be with his lover for all eternity.
Frame: Having got all this out of his system, Strangwick sleeps. The Brother who introduced him comes along and apologises for his behaviour. He’s been under a lot of strain, he explains, on account of a ‘breach of promise’ action brought against him by his sweetheart, after Strangwick broke off the engagement. The Brother doesn’t know why, but we know the full story and the way the sight of a) a middle-aged love affair b) and the ghostly horror of his ‘uncle’s death have unhinged Strangwick. And there is a final irony because the Brother who brought him to the Lodge is his actual Uncle, Auntie Armine’s husband. Only Strangwick knows that his Uncle’s wife was so totally unfaithful to him. And this is another element or level in his hysteria.
A spooky story, sure enough – but for me the ghost story element is outweighed by the touching sensitivity to hysterical soldiers shown by the narrator, the doctor and the other Masonic members, who quietly come to enquire if they can help. It is a community of men looking after men.
Strangwick, who had been fidgeting and twitching for some minutes, rose, drove back his chair grinding across the tesselated floor, and yelped ‘Oh, My Aunt! I can’t stand this any longer.’ Under cover of a general laugh of assent he brushed past us and stumbled towards the door.
‘I thought so!’ Keede whispered to me. ‘Come along!’ We overtook him in the passage, crowing hysterically and wringing his hands. Keede led him into the Tyler’s Room, a small office where we stored odds and ends of regalia and furniture, and locked the door.
‘I’m — I’m all right,’ the boy began, piteously.
‘‘Course you are.’ Keede opened a small cupboard which I had seen called upon before, mixed sal volatile and water in a graduated glass, and, as Strangwick drank, pushed him gently on to an old sofa. ‘There,’ he went on. ‘It’s nothing to write home about. I’ve seen you ten times worse. I expect our talk has brought things back.’
He hooked up a chair behind him with one foot, held the patient’s hands in his own, and sat down.
It feels a world away from the cocky young men kicking their native servants in Plain Tales, nearly 40 years earlier.
10. The Propagation of Knowledge (1926)
Another ‘Stalky’ story i.e set among staff and pupils at a comically exaggerated version of Kipling’s own rather unconventional public school, United Services College in Devon. Mr King is trying to teach the class about Augustan literature. This story makes clearer than ever before that the elaborate facetious sarcasm of the teachers is a coping mechanism, a way of managing the daily battle with obstructive, obtuse and dilatory pupils.
Then King implored [Beetle] to vouchsafe his comrades one single fact connected with Dr. Johnson which might at any time have adhered to what, for decency’s sake, must, Mr. King supposed, be called his mind.
The focus of the story is when an external examiner comes down to the school to supervise their Army Preliminary Exam. Mr King sets a preparatory general knowledge exam and we are shown the boys conspiring and confabulating on how to divide up their thin store of knowledge so as all to get a pass. There is no notion whatever of individual boys being assessed on their work and merits; the whole ethos is that specialists in one area share around the likely answers on that topic, and that the whole group works together. In this rather unconventional way, the school – knowingly or not – fosters team effort, co-operation and a rough sense of fairness and comradeship.
‘Beetle’, the bookish bespectacled Kipling figure in the stories, has been recognised for his literary talents, let off maths and given free run of the headmaster’s extensive library. Here he stumbles across the theory that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Bacon or some other aristocrat. He shares this with his Form and when they hesitantly raise it in their next lesson Mr King goes mad, delivering a long tirade against this ‘imbecile and unspeakable girls’— school tripe’.
Which gives the boys a sneaky idea. When the external examiner arrives to work through their papers with the boys one or two casually float the notion that Shakespeare didn’t write his own works and… the examiner, a Mr Hume, far from exploding, listens with interest. Aha. He may be a devotee of the theory. In which case they may be able to distract him onto it and away from asking tricky questions about the Augustans. Which is what happens. In a carefully co-ordinated attack, the boys ask a series of leading questions about the Shakespeare theory which lead Hume into a lengthy consideration of the theory… only realising, embarrassed towards the end of the time, that he’s meant to be quizzing them about the Augustans. Nonetheless, he goes away impressed with their studiousness and says ‘
he would have particular pleasure in speaking well of this Army Class, which had evinced such a genuine and unusual interest in English Literature, and which reflected the greatest credit on their instructors.
Victory to the boys, Stalky, Beetle, M’Turk, Vernon and the others! And when Hume mentions in passing to Mr King the boys’ surprising knowledge of literature and especially the Shakespeare theory, King is left beside himself with rage and chagrin. I found this genuinely funny and enjoyable, like the other Stalky story in this volume; I think because they are genuinely humorous and light in tone, unlike the Stalky stories from the 1890s which were significantly more savage and cruel.
11. A Friend of the Family (1924)
Frame: Fourth of the stories set in the Masonic Lodge ‘Faith and Works 5837’. Four chaps get chatting over dinner – Bevin, Pole, a sassy Australian with a glass eye named Orton, and the narrator. They yarn about their respective trades (Bevin owns a chicken farm and is diversifying into herbs). They all grumble that all they wanted after the War was Judgement and justice, instead of which they got talk talk talk. Grumble grumble grumble.
‘We didn’t want all that talk afterwards – we only wanted justice. What I say is, there must be a right and a wrong to things. It can’t all be kiss-an’-make-friends, no matter what you do.’
But if any generation had a right to grumble it’s the men who went through the war. Kipling conveys the way they fall to remembering incidents e.g. on the beach at Gallipolli, then go quiet, their faces suddenly tight, with the awful memories.
Story: Once they’re all comfortably settled after dinner, Bevin tells the story of Hickmot, a quiet Australian from the back of beyond, ‘brought up among blackfellas’, who was the only survivor of his battalion at Gallipolli and seconded to what was left of Bevin’s battalion. He was very quiet, very unobtrusive. Then a new draft came out including a man from the narrator, Bevin’s, village, one Bert Vigors. His dad was a market-gardener and they tried to exempt Bert on account of the family business but the local tribunal didn’t listen and he was drafted. The same tribunal exempted the son of a Mr Margetts, also a market gardener, because he hired a canny lawyer and was friends with some of the tribunes. Result: Vigors’ business goes bust, Margett’s old man buys it up.
Vigors won’t stop moaning to anyone who’ll listen about his Grievance, so quite quickly all the boys nickname him ‘the Grief’ and avoid him – all except Hickmot. He’ll listen to Vigors about his Grievance for hours so long as Vigors will then listen to him talking about sheep in the Outback. The two become inseparable. Soon Hickmot cops it in the leg and is shipped home and then Vigors is killed.
Bevin knows he right on the edge of a breakdown and wonders whether he’ll win a VC for some reckless exploit or go postal and shoot everyone around him. Just in time he’s posted back to England as a bomb instructor, marries his sweetheart – who just happens to have been Bert Vigors’s sister – and sleeps at home in his native village, before going off to instruction duty every day.
They get a letter from the Brighton hospital where Hickmot is asking if he can come and stay. Since Bert’s sister read about him in the letters Bert sent home, she says Yes. Hickmot arrives, with one leg amputated above the knee, hardly says a word, but fits right in and does all the chores. One day he unobtrusively accompanies Bevin to bomb instruction, holing up in the dugout where the duds are kept till used, then accompanying home at the end of the day. Then they see him onto the train to Roehampton, where he will be fitted with a prosthetic leg.
That night there is a series of explosions in the village, the villagers initially thinking they must be stray bombs from an air raid but Bevin and another officer quickly realise the damage is very localised; in fact it is limited to the market gardener Margett’s property: the roof of his house has been bombed, so it burns down, two hay ricks set afire, the furnace in his greenhouse has exploded demolishing it, all his horses released to trample and graze in the new fields he’d bought off Vigors’s dad. Oddest of all, Bevin had applied to dam a local stream to create a duck-pond for his wife’s ducks and been refused permission. But a bomb happens to have exploded under the bank of the stream and blocked it exactly where Bevin wanted. Fancy.
By now his listeners are laughing. Silent Hickmot had listened to all Vigor’s grievances and made a plan to enact justice for the injustice of his drafting and his death, and take revenge on the all-conquering Margett family.
Revenge: So it is one of Kipling’s many ‘revenge’ stories, but this time the brutality of the war somehow justifies it, and also justifies it as comedy, or farce – and also makes it very moving. On the surface it’s a story about how at least one soldier carried out poetic justice. But the real impact of the story comes from the many little touches in it indicating just how psychologically damaged and scarred by war the talkers are. There are several moments in his telling where Bevin’s face grows stiff and his hands go to tighten a belt he isn’t wearing, unconsciously carried back to the trenches. More overtly, he admits that, after Hickmot’s wounding and Vigors’s death, he was reaching breaking point, with a funny taste in his mouth and a sense of being distant from everything – just when his superiors had the sense to post him home as a bomb instructor. He is, in fact, just one more of Kipling’s many many men on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
‘It took ’em five minutes to make me understand I was saved. Then I vomited, an’ then I cried. You know!’ The fat face of Bevin had changed and grown drawn, even as he spoke; and his hands tugged as though to tighten an imaginary belt.’
12. On the Gate (1926)
Set in 1916 and, according to various sources, drafted and finished in that year, then slowly pruned back over the following decade.
It is quite a funny comic sketch set at the Gates of Heaven where St Peter is feeling overwhelmed by the flood of dead people and – like an Army staff officer or schoolmaster – is struggling to keep his junior staff up to the mark. Death has called by for a chat and sympathises. Furthermore, it turns out there are several ‘deaths’ all in a highly bureaucratic civil service.
‘Thanks to this abominable war,’ he began testily, ‘my N.C.D. has to spend all its time fighting for mere existence. Your new War-side seems to think that nothing matters except the war. I’ve been asked to give up two-thirds of my Archives Basement (E. 7-E. 64) to the Polish Civilian Casualty Check and Audit. Preposterous! Where am I to move my Archives? And they’ve just been cross-indexed, too!’
Death in fact takes St Peter on a tour of the cramped office and over-burdened civil servants – in this case seraphs and cherubim – struggling with all the paperwork and the confused causes of death these days. St Peter watches as a signal comes through on the wireless (Heaven has all the latest technology!) about a deserter and traitor being executed. He makes haste back to the Gates – what with all the crowds these days the ‘Lower Establishment’ (i.e. hell) is picking off stragglers heading towards heaven.
The basic premise sounds almost like a Monty Python sketch and there are some funny details, like the way St Peter deputises St Ignatius Loyola and St Christopher to the Admissions Board while he goes for his walkabout with Death – the former liable to let anyone in who argues with sufficient subtlety, while St Christopher is a sucker for anyone who’s wet and muddy. But overall it is arch and mechanical and there are satirical hits about contemporary England which the modern reader senses but doesn’t really ‘get’.
And there is some of Kipling’s strange science fiction visionariness.
The Saint and Death stayed behind to rest awhile. It was a heavenly evening. They could hear the whistle of the low-flighting Cherubim, clear and sharp, under the diviner note of some released Seraph’s wings, where, his errand accomplished, he plunged three or four stars deep into the cool Baths of Hercules; the steady dynamo-like hum of the nearer planets on their axes; and, as the hush deepened, the surprised little sigh of some new-born sun a universe of universes away.
13. The Eye of Allah (1926)
As usual a group of men consort and yarn, only it is the 13th century and the men in this story are monks at the monastery of St Illod’s, who specialise in copying manuscripts. The main figure is John Otho or John of Burgos, a leading illustrator.
The Sub–Cantor looked over his shoulder at the pinned-down sheet where the first words of the Magnificat were built up in gold washed with red-lac for a background to the Virgin’s hardly yet fired halo. She was shown, hands joined in wonder, at a lattice of infinitely intricate arabesque, round the edges of which sprays of orange-bloom seemed to load the blue hot air that carried back over the minute parched landscape in the middle distance.
In the first half he journeys to Spain, to Burgos, for twenty months, ostensibly to research Moorish designs, the Spanish way of illustrating devils and to buy materials for the art work of the monastery. But in a sensitive conversation with the Abbot, Stephen, John admits that he is going to visit his infidel lover. it was a more relaxed age.
As in the Puck of Pook’s Hill stories, a lot of effort has gone into the factual background. As John, the Abbot, Martin the senior copyist, Clement the sub-cantor, the Infirmarian (doctor) and so on meet and chat and stroll around, the physical layout of the monastery is very precisely described – I shouldn’t be surprised if Kipling had made a diagram, or based it on a real monastery and carefully located each encounter.
John went down the stairs to the lane that divides the hospital and cook-house from the back-cloisters.
The Abbot and his guests went out to cool themselves in an upper cloister that took them, by way of the leads, to the South Choir side of the Triforium.
As to ‘plot’, the various conversations head towards a particular dinner, when the Abbot is entertaining two visitors, Roger a doctor from Salerno, and Roger Bacon, the English philosopher, and there is a good deal of impassioned discussion about the dead hand of ancient authors, and of the Church authorities, who prevent reasoned discussion (Roger Bacon) and the study of human anatomy (Roger of Salerno). The Abbot shrewdly defuses the tension by suggesting they look at John’s illustration for the scene of the Gadarene Swine in the copy of Luke’s gospel he is illuminating.
Some devils were mere lumps, with lobes and protuberances – a hint of a fiend’s face peering through jelly-like walls. And there was a family of impatient, globular devillings who had burst open the belly of their smirking parent, and were revolving desperately toward their prey. Others patterned themselves into rods, chains and ladders, single or conjoined, round the throat and jaws of a shrieking sow, from whose ear emerged the lashing, glassy tail of a devil that had made good his refuge. And there were granulated and conglomerate devils, mixed up with the foam and slaver where the attack was fiercest. Thence the eye carried on to the insanely active backs of the downward-racing swine, the swineherd’s aghast face, and his dog’s terror.
Discussion of where John gets his inspiration prompts him to get out a device he bought from the Arabs in Spain and they call ‘the eye of Allah’. It is a primitive microscope, with one lens, held between compass-type wooden pins. The Abbot, the two Rogers, John and Thomas the Infirmarian all look, in turn, through it at a drop of water, and are amazed and appalled to see the microscopic world of creatures wriggling and squirming in the liquid. It is a whole New World and the monks feverishly discuss whether it is a Hell or Heaven, and the two Rogers argue that this opens up vast new worlds for knowledge and research, but that they risk – as recent experimenters and rebels have – being burned at the stake for their trouble. But the Abbot is master here, insisting that the world is not ready for this knowledge. He insists on being handed the eye of Allah, crushes the crystal lens and burns the rest of it in the fire.
The whole story reminds us that Kipling was the nephew of the famous pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, so moved in aesthetic circles in his boyhood, and was no mean draughtsman himself, as his own illustrations to the Just So Stories demonstrate. Indeed, the distinctness of the detail could be compared to the bright lucidity of a pre-Raphaelite painting.
Roger of Salerno was quite quiet till they regained the dining-room, where the fire had been comforted and the dates, raisins, ginger, figs, and cinnamon-scented sweetmeats set out, with the choicer wines, on the after-table. The Abbot seated himself, drew off his ring, dropped it, that all might hear the tinkle, into an empty silver cup, stretched his feet towards the hearth, and looked at the great gilt and carved rose in the barrel-roof… The bull-necked Friar watched a ray of sunlight split itself into colours on the rim of a crystal salt-cellar…
It could be a scene by Millais. It is also a good example of the way the later stories are made up of multiple layers: the factual background of the monastery; a detailed account of the art of illumination; the almost buried references to John’s beloved in Spain who, we learn, in a brief aside, died during childbirth, in his arms; then the learnèd debate about the state of scientific knowledge; and only then does the narrative reach its climax with the showing of the microscope. The story feels like it has been honed and burnished to reveal multiple depths and layers.
And this is also one of the late stories which feature art and sheds some light on Kipling’s own seriousness in his craft.
‘My meaning is that if the shape of anything be worth man’s thought to picture to man, it’s worth his best thought.’
‘In my craft, a thing done is done with. We go on to new shapes after that.’
14. The Gardener (1925)
Written 10 years after Kipling’s own son, Jack, went missing during the Battle of Loos, this short story is about a well-off single woman, Helen, who adopts the orphaned son of her scapegrace brother, George, who had got an unmarried woman pregnant.
When George died in India, Helen arranged the passage of the baby back to England, named him Michael, and raised him as his ‘Aunty’. Michael goes through prep and public school and is scheduled to go up to Oxford when the Great War breaks out. He enlists into a regiment which is posted to fill the gap in the Loos Offensive. (This is the prolonged battle during which Kipling’s only son was killed, aged barely 18.)
Helen at once accepts the terrible message of the telegram, and communes with the vicar and others in the village who have also lost sons.
After some years she gets an official letter notifying her that Michael’s body has finally been found and buried in Hagenzeele Third graveyard, the letter giving the grave’s row and number.
Helen decides to go and visit it and finds herself entering what Kipling describes as a well-established process for travelling to France, feeling like she is entering a sausage factory, a production-line type machine, which had been set up to process literally millions of grieving relatives.
She arrives at the pre-booked hotel in France, where she has a strange encounter with an insistent fellow grave visitor, who insists on sitting with her at dinner and nattering on about this and that, before she more or less forces her way into Helen’s bedroom to confess that, when she said she was visiting her friends’ sons’ graves, she was lying – she is in fact compulsively visiting and revisiting the grave of the only man she ever loved but who belonged to another.
Helen gets rid of her and lies in bed shaking. Everybody’s lives seem wracked. Next morning she walks to the graveyard and is appalled by the rows upon rows of graves, some 20,000 in total. A young man planting flowers sees her, comes over, asks the number of Michael’s grave and takes her to it. In the very last line there is the strong, ghostly implication, that the young man is Christ.
A man knelt behind a line of headstones – evidently a gardener, for he was firming a young plant in the soft earth. She went towards him, her paper in her hand. He rose at her approach and without prelude or salutation asked: ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘Lieutenant Michael Turrell – my nephew,’ said Helen slowly and word for word, as she had many thousands of times in her life.
The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass toward the naked black crosses.
‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies.’
When Helen left the Cemetery she turned for a last look. In the distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.
A masterpiece, a genuinely great story, which is all in the selection of the material, the paring back to the barest essentials, just three short scenes conveying the relationship between the growing Michael and his Aunt – the disconcerting scene at the hotel with a distraught fellow grave visitor – and then just these seven sentences at the end. I’m crying as I write this.
Related links
- Debits and Credits on the University of Adelaide website
- The New Readers’ Guide to the works of Rudyard Kipling
- Index of Kipling Society notes on all his works
Books & Boots 