The Phantom Rickshaw Read online

  Rudyard Kipling

  THE PHANTOM RICKSHAW AND OTHER EERIE TALES

  With an Introduction by Ruskin Bond

  Contents

  About the Author

  Introduction

  Preface to the Original Edition

  The Phantom Rickshaw

  The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes

  The Return of Imray

  My Own True Ghost Story

  At the End of the Passage

  The Man Who Would Be King

  Without Benefit of Clergy

  Footnotes

  Without Benefit of Clergy

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE PHANTOM RICKSHAW AND OTHER EERIE TALES

  Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in Bombay and educated in England. Kipling returned to India in 1882 and worked as a newspaper reporter and part-time writer. The seven years that he spent in India, from 1882 to 1889, were an experience that helped him gain rich insights into colonial life, which he presented in many of his classic stories and poems. Kipling went on to write several books for children as well as post war stories and non fiction for adults.

  The Jungle Book, a classic of children’s literature, appeared in 1894, while Kim, the story of Kimball O’Hara and his adventures in the Himalayas, was published in 1901. Kipling’s other works include Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Under the Deodars (1888), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Stalky & Co. (1899), Just So Stories for Little Children (1902) and Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906).

  One of the few writers to have gained popular and critical success, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1926. His autobiography was published posthumously in 1937.

  ‘I have counted forty stars, and I am tired.’

  Without Benefit of Clergy

  Introduction

  I FIRST HEARD the story of ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ from my father, in the course of a rickshaw-ride around Simla’s Elysium Hill, in the summer of 1943. He had recently admitted me to the Bishop Cotton Preparatory School, then situated in ‘Chota Simla’, and later that year he came to take me out during the summer break. It was my last summer with him. He died a few months later in Calcutta. But I was left with treasured memories of rickshaw-rides, cakes and merigues at Davico’s restaurant, visits to the Rivoli and other cinemas, loads of English comic papers and story-telling sessions under the deodars on Jakko Hill.

  At the age of eight I still preferred listening to reading, and other Kipling tales that I received orally from my father were the Mowgli stories, ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ and the exploits of those ‘soldiers three’—Ortheris, Mulvaney and Learoyd. They were contemporaries of my grandfather, another soldier boy who had come out to India with his regiment at the time young Kipling was penning his Barrack-room Ballads and Plain Tales from the Hills.

  It was only when I was much older that I began reading Kipling for myself—Kim, Captains Courageous, and innumerable poems and stories, not all of them set in India. He was to become a world traveller, but it is generally agreed that his best work emerged from his ‘Indian period’—the years 1882 to 1889 when he worked as a journalist at the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore and the Pioneer of Allahabad.

  He travelled extensively over north India, picking up stories along the way and printing many of the shorter ones in these papers. His more ambitious stories went into a series of books first published by A.H. Wheeler in their Indian Railway Library. The railways were then penetrating to almost every corner of India; journeys could be long and arduous; and long-distance travellers needed good reading matter to alleviate the monotony of chugging across the plains, deserts, hills and forests of the subcontinent. Railway bookstalls sprang up at every major station—Wheeler in the north and Higginbotham in the south being the pioneers. No less than six collections of Kipling’s stories were published by Wheeler in 1888, and The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales was probably the most popular title.

  ‘The Phantom Rickshaw’ was one of Kipling’s own favourites (‘my daemon was upon me when I wrote it,’ he says in Something of Myself), but over the years critics have rated ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ and ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ as superior examples of his story-telling skills. J.M. Barrie described ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ as ‘the most audacious thing in fiction’.

  ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ appears in almost everyone’s list of Kipling’s ‘twelve best’. I have included it in this collection, although it was not in the original Wheeler edition but published later. ‘The Return of Imray’ and ‘The End of the Passage’ are two of his most successful tales of the supernatural, the latter a brilliant study in the psychology of fear.

  Rudyard Joseph Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, and baptized in Bombay Cathedral. His father was John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and designer of some distinction and the author of Beast and Man in India. His mother, Alice, was sister-in-law to the painter and designer Sir Edward Burne-Jones.

  At the age of six, Rudyard was sent to school in England; he was seventeen when he returned to India. He was appointed assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette on a salary of £6.10c. per month and he served that paper for five years before he was transferred to the Pioneer. After two years on this paper, he conceived the idea of literature as a career and decided that writing in a big way involved an assault upon London. In this he was instantly successful. But those ‘seven years hard’ in India were in themselves so formative and resulted in so much of his reputation, even though they were only seven years in the life of a young man. He never returned to India, except for a very brief visit in 1891 in the course of a world tour. So it must be remembered that Kipling’s India was the impression of a youth (from the age of seventeen to twenty-four) with ‘quick observation but few scruples, great assurance but little conscience, eager enthusiasm but a judgement immature,’ to quote an early biographer, Hilton Brown, who had spent many years in India.

  It is Kipling’s brilliance as a story-teller and stylist that carries the reader along and obscures some of his faults. He was an enthusiastic and unapologetic chronicler of the British Empire at the zenith of its power. As that power declined, Kipling was reviled by liberals at home in England, and the quality of his work was better appreciated in Europe; he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907. This distressed and annoyed a number of Kipling’s British contemporaries. They called him a jingoist, a music-hall entertainer. The French hailed him as ‘the Professor of Energy’!

  Perhaps it is time to say that Kipling described India not as it was, but as he wanted it to be, and this is particularly true of the books he wrote after leaving India, such as Kim and The Jungle Books. He saw India in bright, vivid colours and beguiled us into seeing it the same way. But in his short stories, the stories he wrote during his ‘seven years hard’, he looks at British colonial society with a sharply satirical eye; his sympathy is with the ordinary soldier, the railwayman, the cultivator, the ascetic, the eccentric, the Lama in search of his river, the opium-addict in search of his rainbow . . . As V.S. Naipaul says in An Area of Darkness: ‘No writer more honest or accurate (than Kipling), no writer more revealing of himself and his society.’ It is 125 years since these stories were first published, and the fact that they are still being read today is proof of their timelessness. Some of Kipling’s work may have been mannered and didactic; but he had an infallible eye and an infallible ear. At times his own heart may have remained hidden, but he looked closely into the hearts of others. And the rest was genius.

  Landour, Mussoorie

  Ruskin Bond

  Preface to the Original Edition

&n
bsp; THIS IS NOT exactly a book of downright ghost-stories as the cover makes believe. It is rather a collection of facts that never quite explained themselves. All that the collector is certain of is, that one man insisted upon dying because he believed himself to be haunted; another man either made up a wonderful lie and stuck to it, or visited a very strange place; while the third man was indubitably crucified by some person or persons unknown, and gave an extraordinary account of himself.

  The peculiarity of ghost-stories is that they are never told first-hand. I have managed, with infinite trouble, to secure one exception to this rule. It is not a very good specimen, but you can credit it from beginning to end. The other three stories you must take on trust; as I did.

  The Phantom Rickshaw

  May no ill dreams disturb my rest,

  Nor Powers of Darkness me molest.

  Evening Hymn

  ONE OF THE few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability. After five years’ service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the two or three hundred Civilians in his Province, all the Messes of ten or twelve Regiments and Batteries and some 1500 other people of the non-official caste. In ten years his knowledge should be doubled, and at the end of twenty he knows, or knows something about, every Englishman in the Empire, and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel-bills.

  Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as a right have, even within my memory, blunted this open-heartedness, but none the less today, if you belong to the Inner Circle and are neither a Bear nor a Black Sheep, all houses are open to you, and our small world is very, very kind and helpful.

  Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of Kumaon some fifteen years ago. He meant to stay two nights, but was knocked down by rheumatic fever, and for six weeks disorganized Polder’s establishment, stopped Polder’s work and nearly died in Polder’s bedroom. Polder behaves as though he had been placed under eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly sends the little Rickett a box of presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. The men who do not take the trouble to conceal from you their opinion that you are an incompetent ass, and the women who blacken your character and misunderstand your wife’s amusements, will work themselves to the bone in your behalf if you fall sick or into serious trouble.

  Heatherlegh, the Doctor, kept, in addition to his regular practice, a hospital on his private account—an arrangement of loose boxes for Incurables, his friend called it, but it was really a sort of fitting-up shed for craft that had been damaged by stress of weather. The weather in India is often sultry, and since the tale of bricks is always a fixed quantity and the only liberty allowed is permission to work overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally break down and become as mixed as the metaphors in this sentence.

  Heatherlegh is the dearest doctor that ever was, and his invariable prescription to all his patients is, ‘lie low, go slow, and keep cool’. He says that more men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies. He maintains that overwork slew Pansay, who died under his hands about three years ago. He has, of course, the right to speak authoritatively, and he laughs at my theory that there was a crack in Pansay’s head and a little bit of the Dark World came through and pressed him to death. ‘Pansay went off the handle,’ says Heatherlegh, ‘after the stimulus of long leave at Home. He may or may not have behaved like a blackguard to Mrs Keith-Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi Settlement ran him off his legs, and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P&O flirtation. He certainly was engaged to Miss Mannering, and she certainly broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about ghosts developed. Overwork started his illness, kept it alight and killed him, poor devil. Write him off to the System— one man to take the work of two and a half men.’

  I do not believe this. I used to sit up with Pansay sometimes when Heatherlegh was called out to patients, and I happened to be within claim. The man would make me most unhappy by describing in a low, even voice, the procession that was always passing at the bottom of his bed. He had a sick man’s command of language. When he recovered I suggested that he should write out the whole affair from beginning to end, knowing that ink might assist him to ease his mind. When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is Literature.

  He was in a high fever while he was writing, and the blood-and-thunder Magazine diction he adopted did not calm him. Two months afterwards he was reported fit for duty, but, in spite of the fact that he was urgently needed to help an undermanned Commission stagger through a deficit, he preferred to die; vowing at the last that he was hag-ridden. I got his manuscript before he died, and this is his version of the affair, dated 1885:

  My doctor tells me that I need rest and change of air. It is not improbable that I shall get both ere long—rest that neither the red-coated messenger nor the midday gun can break, and change of air far beyond that which any homeward-bound steamer can give me. In the meantime I am resolved to stay where I am; and, in flat defiance of my doctor’s orders, to take all the world into my confidence. You shall learn for yourselves the precise nature of my malady; and shall, too, judge for yourselves whether any man born of woman on this weary earth was ever so tormented as I.

  Speaking now as a condemned criminal might speak ere the drop-bolts are drawn, my story, wild and hideously improbable as it may appear, demands at least attention. That it will ever receive credence I utterly disbelieve. Two months ago I should have scouted as mad or drunk the man who had dared tell me the like. Two months ago I was the happiest man in India. Today, from Peshawar to the sea, there is no one more wretched. My doctor and I are the only two who know this. His explanation is, that my brain, digestion and eyesight are all slightly affected; giving rise to my frequent and persistent ‘delusions’. Delusions. indeed! I call him a fool; but he attends me still with the same unwearied smile, the same bland professional manner, the same neatly-trimmed red whiskers, till I begin to suspect that I am an ungrateful, evil-tempered invalid. But you shall judge for yourselves.

  Three years ago it was my fortune—my great misfortune— to sail from Gravesend to Bombay, on, return from long leave, with one Agnes Keith-Wessington, wife of an officer on the Bombay side. It does not in the least concern you to know what manner of woman she was. Be content with the knowledge that, ere the voyage had ended, both she and I were desperately and unreasoningly in love with one another. Heaven knows that I can make the admission now without one particle of vanity. In matters of this sort there is always one who gives and another who accepts. From the first day of our ill-omened attachment, I was conscious that Agnes’ passion was a stronger, a more dominant and—if I may use the expression—a purer sentiment than mine. Whether she recognized the fact then, I do not know. Afterwards it was bitterly plain to both of us.

  Arrived at Bombay in the spring of the year, we went our respective ways, to meet no more for the next three or four months, when my leave and her love took us both to Simla. There we spent the season together; and there my fire of straw burnt itself out to a pitiful end with the closing year. I attempt no excuse. I make no apology. Mrs Wessington had given up much for my sake, and was prepared to give up all. From my own lips, in August, 1882, she learnt that I was sick of her presence, tired of her company and weary of the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have wearied of me as I wearied of them; seventy-five of that number would have promptly avenged themselves by active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs Wessington was the hundredth. On her neither my openly expressed aversion nor the cutting brutalities with which I garnished our interviews had the least effect.

  ‘Jack, darling!’ was her one eternal cuckoo cry: ‘I’m sure it’s all a mistake—a hideous mistake; and we’ll be good friends again some day. Please forgive me, Jack, dear.’

  I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive enduran
ce, and, eventually, into blind hate—the same instinct, I suppose, which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of 1882 came to an end.

  Next year we met again at Simla—she with her monotonous face and timid attempts at reconciliation and I with loathing of her in every fibre of my frame. Several times I could not avoid meeting her alone; and on each occasion her words were identically the same. Still the unreasoning wail that it was all a ‘mistake’; and still the hope of eventually ‘making friends’. I might have seen, had I cared to look, that that hope only was keeping her alive. She grew more wan and thin month by month. You will agree with me, at least, that such conduct would have driven any one to despair. It was uncalled for; childish; unwomanly. I maintain that she was much to blame. And again, sometimes, in the black, fever-stricken night watches, I have begun to think that I might have been a little kinder to her. But that really is a ‘delusion’. I could not have continued pretending to love her when I didn’t; could I? It would have been unfair to us both.

  Last year we met again—on the same terms as before. The same weary appeals, and the same curt answers from my lips. At least I would make her see how wholly wrong and hopeless were her attempts at resuming the old relationship. As the season wore on, we fell apart—that is to say, she found it difficult to meet me, for I had other and more absorbing interests to attend to. When I think it over quietly in my sick-room, the season of 1884 seems a confused nightmare wherein light and shade were fantastically intermingled—my courtship of little Kitty Mannering; my hopes, doubts and fears; our long rides together; my trembling avowal of attachment; her reply; and now and again a vision of a white face flitting by in the rickshaw with the black and white liveries I once watched for so earnestly; the wave of Mrs Wessington’s gloved hand; and, when she met me alone, which was but seldom, the irksome monotony of her appeal. I loved Kitty Mannering; honestly, heartily loved her, and with my love for her grew my hatred for Agnes. In August, Kitty and I were engaged. The next day I met those accursed ‘magpie’ jhampanies at the back of Jakko, and, moved by some passing sentiment of pity, stopped to tell Mrs Wessington everything. She knew it already.