Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (89 page)

In this fashion and step by step, all the day’s Convoy were piloted past that danger-point where the Lower Establishment are, for reasons not given us, allowed to ply their trade. The pickets dropped to the rear, relaxed, and compared notes.

‘What always impresses me most,’ said Death to St Peter, ‘is the sheeplike simplicity of the intellectual mind.’ He had been watching one of the pickets apparently overwhelmed by the arguments of an advanced atheist who – so hot in his argument that he was deaf to the offers of the Lower Establishment to make him a god – had stalked, talking hard – while the picket always gave ground before him – straight past the Broad Road.

‘He was plaiting of long-tagged epigrams,’ the sober-faced picket smiled. ‘Give that sort only an ear and they’ll follow ye gobbling like turkeys.’

‘And John held his peace through it all,’ a full fresh voice broke in. ‘“It may be so,” says John. “Doubtless, in your belief, it
is
so,” says John. “Your words move me mightily,”says John, and gorges his own beliefs like a pike going backwards. And that young fool, so busy spinning words – words – words – that he trips past Hell Mouth without seeing it! … Who’s yonder, Joan?’

‘One of your English. ’Always late. Look!’ A young girl with short-cropped hair pointed with her sword across the plain towards a single faltering figure which made at first as though to overtake the Convoy, but then turned left towards the Lower Establishment, who were enthusiastically cheering him as a leader of enterprise.

‘That’s my traitor,’ said St Peter. ‘He has no business to report to the Lower Establishment before reporting to Convoy.’

The figure’s pace slackened as he neared the applauding line. He looked over his shoulder once or twice, andthen fairly turned tail and fled again towards the still Convoy.

‘Nobody ever gave me credit for anything I did,’ he began, sobbing and gesticulating. ‘They were all against me from the first. I only wanted a little encouragement. It was a regular conspiracy, but
I
showed ’em what I could do!
I
showed ’em! And – and—’ he halted again. ‘Oh, God! What are you going to do with
me
?’

No one offered any suggestion. He ranged sideways like a doubtful dog, while across the plain the Lower Establishment murmured seductively. All eyes turned to St Peter.

‘At this moment,’ the Saint said half to himself, ‘I can’t recall any precise ruling under which—’

‘My own case?’ the ever-ready Judas suggested.

‘No-o! That’s making too much of it. And yet—’

‘Oh, hurry up and get it over,’ the man wailed, and told them all that he had done, ending with the cry that none had ever recognised his merits; neither his own narrow-minded people, his inefficient employers, nor the snobbish jumped-up officers of his battalion.

‘You see,’ said St Peter at the end. ‘It’s sheer vanity. It isn’t even as if we had a woman to fall back upon.’

‘Yet there was a woman or I’m mistaken,’ said the picket with the pleasing voice who had praised John.

‘Eh – what? When?’ St Peter turned swiftly on the speaker. ‘Who was the woman?’

‘The wise woman of Tekoah,’ came the smooth answer. ‘I remember, because that verse was the private heart of my plays – some of’em.’

But the Saint was not listening. ‘You have it!’ he cried. ‘Samuel Two, Double Fourteen. To think that
I
should have forgotten! “For we must needs die and are as water spilled on the ground which cannot be gathered up again. Neither doth God respect any person, yet—” Here you! Listen to this!’

The man stepped forward and stood to attention. Some one took his cap as Judas and the picket John closed up beside him.

‘“Yet doth He devise means
(d’you understand that?)
devise means that His banished be not excelled from Him!
”This covers your case. I don’t know what the means will be. That’s for you to find out. They’ll tell you yonder.’ He nodded towards the now silent Lower Establishment as he scribbled on a pass. ‘Take this paper over to them and report for duty there. You’ll have a thin time of it; but they won’t keep you a day longer than I’ve put down. Escort!’

‘Does – does that mean there’s any hope?’ the man stammered.

‘Yes – I’ll show you the way,’ Judas whispered. ‘I’ve lived there – a very long time!’

‘I’ll bear you company a piece,’ said John, on his left flank. ‘There’ll be Despair to deal with. Heart up, Mr Littlesoul!’

The three wheeled off, and the Convoy watched them grow smaller and smaller across the plain.

St Peter smiled benignantly and rubbed his hands.

‘And now we’re rested,’ said he, ‘I think we might make a push for billets this evening, gentlemen, eh?’

The pickets fell in, guardians no longer but friends and companions all down the line. There was a little burst ofcheering and the whole Convoy strode away towards the not so distant Gate.

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. But their minds were with the Convoy that their eyes followed.

Said St Peter proudly at last: ‘If those people of mine had seen that fellow stripped of all hope in front of ’em, I doubt if they could have marched another yard tonight. Watch ’em stepping out now, though! Aren’t they human?’

‘To whom do you say it?’ Death answered, with something of a tired smile. ‘I’m more than human.
I’ve
got to the some time or other. But all other created Beings – afterwards …’

‘
I
know,’ said St Peter softly. ‘And that is why I love you, O Azrael!’

For now they were alone Death had, of course, returned to his true majestic shape – that only One of all created beings who is doomed to perish utterly, and knows it.

‘Well, that’s
that –
for me!’ Death concluded as he rose. ‘And yet—’ he glanced towards the empty plain where the Lower Establishment had withdrawn with their prisoner. ‘“Yet doth He devise means.”’

THE APPEAL

If I have given you delight

By aught that I have done,

Let me lie quiet in that night

Which shall be yours anon:

And for the little, little span

The dead are borne in mind,

Seek not to question other than

The books I leave behind.

AFTERWORD:
RUDYARD KIPLING:
A LIFE IN STORIES

by Stephen Jones

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was bom in Bombay, India, on December 30, 1865. The son of John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Kipling (née Macdonald), he was named after Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire, where his parents became engaged.

Kipling’s father, an author, artist and scholar who was Head of Department of Architectural Sculpture at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art, had considerable influence over his son’s later work. Kipling’s mother was also a talented writer and poet. Two of her sisters married the nineteenth-century painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, while a third married Alfred Baldwin and was the mother of Stanley Baldwin, who became Prime Minister of Great Britain.

With grandfathers who were both Methodist ministers, these familial connections would remain of importance to Kipling throughout his life.

During his first five years, Kipling led a blissfully happy life in India, then the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. As he later recalled: ‘Far across green spaces round the house was a marvellous place filled with smells of paints and oils, and lumps of clay with which I played. That was the atelier of my Father’s School of Art, and a Mr “Terry Sahib” his assistant, to whom my small sister was devoted, was our great friend.’

In 1868, the young boy made his first visit to England, where his sister Alice (‘Trix’) was born. Three years later, six-year-old Rudyard Kipling and his sister were again taken to England, this time to be educated. They were left there for six long years, boarded as paying guests with Captain andMrs P.A. Holloway at Lome Lodge, a foster home in South-sea, near Portsmouth, while their parents returned to India. They gave their children no explanation.

Kipling described Captain Holloway as ‘the only person in that house as far as I can remember who ever threw me a kind word’. However, after the Captain died, the deeply religious Mrs Holloway apparently took a dislike to the young Kipling and allowed her teenage son to bully him.

‘I had never heard of Hell,’ wrote Kipling, ‘so I was introduced to it in all its terrors – I and whatever luckless little slavey might be in the house, whom severe rationing had led to steal food … Myself, I was regularly beaten.’

Because he kept this constant abuse to himself, much of Kipling’s childhood was deeply miserable, and he wrote about these unhappy years with great bitterness in his 1888 story ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’. He later described holidays spent each December in London with his mother’s sister Georgiana Burne-Jones (‘Aunt Georgy’) and her husband Sir Edward Burne-Jones as ‘a paradise which I verily believe saved me’.

Kipling took refuge in reading, ‘So I read all that came within my reach,’ he recalled. ‘As soon as my pleasure in this was known, deprivation from reading was added to my punishments. I then read by stealth and the more earnestly.’ It was also around this time that Kipling first began inventing stories and imaginary characters to entertain himself.

In 1877, after Kipling had suffered a nervous breakdown (‘I imagined I saw shadows and things that were not there’), Alice Kipling arrived from India and took her son away from Mrs Holloway, although Trix remained in Southsea for a further three years.

Following a long recuperation, the sensitive and shortsighted Kipling was enrolled as a pupil at the United Services College, Westward Ho!, near Bideford in North Devon. It was a relatively new and inexpensive boarding school for the sons of impoverished Army officers and civil servants that specialised in training boys for entry into military academies. Conditions may have been basic, but the education was solid, and headmaster Cormell Price – a friend of Kipling’s father – fostered the young boy’s literary ability by making him editor of the school magazine.

‘Many of us loved the Head for what he had done for us,’wrote Kipling, ‘but I owed him more than all of them put together.’

One of the thirteen-year-old Kipling’s early stories, ‘My First Adventure’, involved a time-travelling ‘ghost’ and appeared in a hand-written magazine entitled
The Scribbler
,which he compiled with two fellow pupils in 1879.

While returning to Southsea the following year to collect his sister, Kipling met her fellow-boarder, Florence Garrard, with whom he fell in love. The relationship, which was always somewhat one-sided, vacillated for a number of years.

In 1881, back in India, his parents privately publishedKipling’s first booklet of poems,
Schoolboy Lyrics
,without his knowledge. Years later, he burned his original copy for fear of copyright theft.

After leaving school at the age of sixteen, Kipling returned to India in October to join his parents in Lahore, the principal city of the Punjab. Kipling’s father Lockwood had become curator of the Lahore museum (later described as a ‘wonder house’ in the opening chapter of
Kim
).Outside the walled city, one of the oldest in Islam, were stationed a battalion of infantry and an artillery battery. Inside, around seventy British civilians lived in neat bungalows alongside 200,000 people from all the Asiatic races.

His father found him a job as an assistant editor on the
Civil and Military Gazette
,a local daily English-language newspaper for the British in northern India, where Kipling was paid ‘one hundred silver rupees a month’ and comprised fifty per cent of the editorial staff.

For the next seven years Kipling wrote journalism, working between ten and fifteen hours a day. Death, in the form of typhoid and cholera, was a constant companion, and he was often forced to work with a temperature of 104.

‘The dead of all times were about us,’ he later wrote, ‘in the vast forgotten Moslem cemeteries round the Station, whereone’s horse’s hoof of a morning might break through to the corpse below; skulls and bones tumbled out of our garden walls, and were turned up among the flowers by the Rains; and at every point were tombs of the dead.’

Kipling was fascinated by the contrasts between Lahore’s various inhabitants and the ways in which they interacted with each other, and as a journalist he was able to move between the different classes unrestricted.

Suffering from insomnia, he would walk the streets until dawn. During these nocturnal excursions he had the opportunity to observe the highs and lows of the rich and poor of Anglo-Indian society. But although his love for the country of his birth was deep, Kipling was not uncritical. In his limited spare time, inspired by a novel he had read about a would-be author, he soon began filling the periodicals he worked for with prose sketches (which he described as ‘penny-farthing yarns’ because of the rate paid per line) and light verse.

Kipling’s poems were published in
The Englishman of Calcutta
and the
Civil and Military Gazette
‘when and as padding was needed’. Soon turning his hand to fiction (or ‘turnovers’) to fill occasional columns in the newspaper, he once again called upon his keen observation of his Indian background for inspiration.

His first published story was entitled ‘The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows’, about a drug addict. It was written in the summer of 1894.

In his study,
Kipling, Auden and Co.
(1980), Randall Jarrell noted: ‘Kipling is far closer to Gogol than to a normal realist or naturalist. In Kipling the pressure of the imagination has forced facts over into the supernatural.’

In fact, the second professional story Kipling ever wrote, ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’, was a supernatural tale. Published anonymously in the
Civil and Military Gazette
on Christmas Day, 1884, it was basically an Anglo-Indian version of Charles Dickens’ seminal ghost story ‘A Christmas Carol’ and took the author almost three months to complete.

The following Christmas, the newspaper produced a 126-page ‘Christmas Annual’ entitled
Quartette
,written by ‘fourAnglo-Indian writers’. In fact, the stories and poems were by Kipling, his mother and father, and his sister Alice. Kipling contributed three supernatural tales: ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, ‘The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau’and, most notably, The Phantom ’Rickshaw’.

Written when he was not quite twenty, ‘The Phantom ’Rickshaw’ was set in a milieu Kipling knew well and concerned a man who was eventually driven to his death by the ghost of a wronged lover. Despite being described by at least one critic as ‘crudely material supernaturalism’, Kipling later said of the story: ‘Some of it was weak, much was bad and out of key; but it was my first serious attempt to think in another man’s skin.’

However, Kipling was already a skilled enough writer to leave some doubt as to whether the supernatural manifestation was in fact a figment of his protagonist’s fevered imagination.

‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ was a
conte cruel
, about the eponymous English engineer held captive in a sand pit in a desert region beyond Lahore. It was perhaps inspired by reports Kipling had heard of ‘The Village of the Dead’ (the story’s original title) which were well-known in India during the 1840s.

As Angus Wilson described the tale in his 1977 study
The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling
:‘It remains one of the most powerful nightmares of the precariousness of a ruling group, in this case haunted by memories of the Mutiny not yet twenty years old.’

The character of Tick Boileau in the third tale in the Christmas compendium subsequently turned up in two further Kipling stories: ‘Only a Subaltern’ (1888) and ‘A Conference of the Powers’ (1893).

In 1886, Kipling spent a month at Simla as a correspondent for the
Pioneer
,a major newspaper also owned by the proprietors of the
Civil and Military Gazette.
That same year,
Departmental Ditties and Other Verses
,his privately printed book of comic poems about Anglo-Indian life, sold out almost immediately and a second edition was rushed into print by Thacker, Spink & Co. of Calcutta.

No sooner had Kipling been promoted to the
Pioneer
at Allahabad, in the North-West Provinces, when he began contributing anonymous stories to a weekly edition of the newspaper on a regular basis. ‘My pen took charge and I, greatly admiring, watched it write for me far into the nights,’ he recalled.

According to editor Peter Haining in his 1987 collection
The Complete Supernatural Stories of Rudyard Kipling
,during his four years with the
Pioneer
,Kipling published nine articles, stories and verses, which he did sign with the single initial ‘R’.Around the same time he became friends with Professor Alec Hill, a government employee, and his American wife Edmonia, who would later become another prevailing influence on Kipling’s life and work. Meanwhile, the young Englishman was sent to Rajputana as a special correspondent. The articles he wrote during this period were later collected as
Letters of Marque
(1891).

Kipling continued to publish fiction in the
Civil and Military Gazette
,much of it apparently based on fact. ‘The Recurring Smash’ was credited to ‘ST’ while ‘Bubbling Well Road’ was signed ‘The Traveller’, although the latter was subsequently reprinted under the author’s own by-line in the collection
Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People
(1891).

‘Mercifully, the mere act of writing was, and always has been, a physical pleasure to me,’ Kipling later recalled. ‘This made it easier to throw away anything that did not turn out well.’

Kipling obsessively read and re-read his work, editing it as often as he thought necessary until he had pared it down to a final draft that he was satisfied with. ‘I have had tales by me for three or five years which shortened themselves almost yearly,’he revealed.

In 1888, Kipling became a boarder with the Hills at their house in Allahabad. Now editor of the supplement
Pioneer Weekly
,the twenty-two year-old Kipling’s first short story collection which he had sold for £50,
Plain Tales from the Hills
,was published by Thacker Spink & Co. Along with the first appearance of the heroes of ‘Soldiers Three’ – PrivatesTerence Mulvaney, Stanley Otheris and John Learoyd – the book also contained the supernatural tales ‘In the House of Suddhoo’, ‘The Bisara of Pooree’ and ‘By Word of Mouth’.

However, another of the ‘Plain Tales from India’, the humorous ‘Haunted Subalterns’, originally published in the
Civil and Military Gazette
of May 27, 1887, was surprisingly not included in the collection.

‘I have lived long enough in this India,’ explained the author in his short introduction, ‘to know that it is best to know nothing and can only write the story as it happened’.

Although Kipling was always sceptical of the supernatural, his writings reveal that he probably did have a belief in the existence of unexplained phenomena. ‘There is a type of mind that dives after what it calls “psychical experiences,” he wrote. ‘And I am in no way “psychic”.’ However, he did admit to at least one case of clairvoyance, when he dreamt about a ceremony in Westminster Abbey before the event actually occurred in every detail.

The publication of
Plain Tales from the Hills
was followed by the Indian Railway Library series of short stories, published in Allahabad by AH Wheeler & Co. in six paper-covered volumes costing one rupee apiece:
Soldiers Three
,
The Story of the Gddsbys: A Tale Without a Plot
(a play),
In Black and White
,
Under the Deodars
,
Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories
and his first collection entirely of weird fiction,
The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales.

Actually the fifth volume in the series,
The Phantom ’Rickshaw
contained four stories – ‘The Phantom ’Rickshaw’, ‘My Own True Ghost Story’, ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ and ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ (a macabre adventure tale, considered by some reviewers to be the finest story in the English language).