Selected Stories by Rudyard Kipling

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Rudyard Kipling: Selected Stories

  Rudyard Joseph Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was the author and illustrator of Beast and Man in India, and his mother, Alice, was the sister of Lady Burne-Jones. In 1871 Kipling was brought home from India and spent five unhappy years with a foster family in Southsea, an experience he later drew on in The Light that Failed (1891). The years he spent at the United Services College, a school for officers’ children, are depicted in Stalky & Co. (1899) and the character of Beetle is something of a self-portrait. It was during his time at the college that he began writing poetry and Schoolboy Lyrics was published privately in 1881. In the following year he started work as a journalist in India, and, while there, produced a body of work, stories, sketches and poems – notably Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) – which made him an instant literary celebrity when he returned to England in 1889. Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) contains some of his most popular pieces, including ‘Mandalay’, ‘Gunga Din’ and ‘Danny Deever’. In this collection Kipling experimented with form and dialect, notably the cockney accent of the soldier poems, but the influence of hymns, music-hall songs, ballads and public poetry can be found throughout his verse.

  In 1892 he married an American, Caroline Balestier, and from 1892 to 1896 they lived in Vermont, where Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, published in 1894. In 1901 came Kim and in 1902 the Just So Stories. Tales of every kind – including historical and science fiction – continued to flow from his pen, but Kim is generally thought to be his greatest long work, putting him high among the chroniclers of British expansion.

  From 1902 Kipling made his home in Sussex, but he continued to travel widely and caught his first glimpse of warfare in South Africa, where he wrote some excellent reportage on the Boer War. However, many of the views he expressed were rejected by anti-imperialists who accused him of jingoism and love of violence. Though rich and successful, he never again enjoyed the literary esteem of his early years. With the onset of the Great War his work became a great deal more sombre. The stories he subsequently wrote, A Diversity of Creatures (1917), Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932), are now thought by many to contain some of his finest writing. The death of his only son in 1915 also contributed to a new inwardness of vision.

  Kipling refused to accept the role of Poet Laureate and other civil honours, but he was the first English writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1907. He died in 1936 and his autobiographical fragment Something of Myself was published the following year.

  Andrew Rutherford was Regius Professor of English in the University of Aberdeen (1968–84), Warden of Goldsmiths’ College, London (1984–92) and Vice-Chancellor of London University (1994–7). He was a well-known authority on Kipling and edited Plain Tales from the Hills, Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879–1889, Kipling’s Mind and Art, and two volumes of Kipling’s later stories for Penguin. He died in 1998.

  The Kipling Society, founded in 1927, is a literary society for all who enjoy the prose and poetry of Rudyard Kipling. For enquiries, write to The Honorary Secretary, 6 Clifton Road, London W9 ISS.

  Rudyard Kipling

  SELECTED STORIES

  EDITED

  BY ANDREW RUTHERFORD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  This selection published in Penguin Books 1987

  Reprinted in Penguin Classics 2001

  6

  This selection copyright © Penguin Books, 1987

  Introduction and notes copyright © Andrew Rutherford, 1987

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

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  EISBN: 978–0–141–90999–8

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows

  The Story of Muhammad Din

  The Other Man

  Lispeth

  Venus Annodomini

  His Wedded Wife

  In the Pride of his Youth

  The Daughter of the Regiment

  Thrown Away

  Beyond the Pale

  A Wayside Comedy

  Dray Wara Yow Dee

  Little Tobrah

  Black Jack

  On the City Wall

  At the Pit’s Mouth

  The Man who would be King

  Baa Baa, Black Sheep

  The Head of the District

  The Courting of Dinah Shadd

  The Man Who Was

  Without Benefit of Clergy

  On Greenhow Hill

  ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’

  The Miracle of Purun Bhagat

  The Maltese Cat

  Red Dog

  The Ship that Found Herself

  William the Conqueror

  The Devil and the Deep Sea

  ‘Bread upon the Waters’

  ‘They’

  The Mother Hive

  Marklake Witches

  The Knife and the Naked Chalk

  ‘My Son’s Wife’

  Mary Postgate

  The Wish House

  The Gardener

  Notes

  Introduction

  Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) is beyond question the greatest short-story writer in the English language, and this collection illustrates the richness and variety of his achievement.

  It opens with the first story he published as a young journalist in India – a dramatic monologue spoken by a Portuguese half-caste in an opium den in Lahore. Already we see here, in ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’, Kipling’s eager interest in mankind in all its varieties and his willingness, as he himself once put it, ‘to think in another man’s skin’. Gabral Misquitta is the first of a long series of Kipling narrators – Pathans, Sikhs, Hindus, Anglo-Indian officials, loafers, private soldiers, Scots engineers, English peasants, characters from past ages as well as from the present – who offer their unique perspectives on life to us in their own authentic idiom.

  The collection ends with an acknowledged masterpiece, ‘The Gardener’, written half a century later in the aftermath of the Great War, in which Kipling’s only son had been killed on his first day in action. Helen Turrell’s similar bereavement is treated in an impersonal, complex, elliptical mode of narration typical of the later Kipling: it controls intensities of grief and compassion, and shows him as a sophisticated artist combining, in Coleridge’s phrase, ‘a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order’.

  The stories of the years between show a remarkable ran
ge of subject-matter and technique. India, where Kipling had been born, where he had spent his early years and where he worked for seven years as a journalist between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three, was a rich source of material and inspiration, even after he had left it for America and England. In the vulgar mind indeed he has been typecast as the spokesman for Anglo-India (in the sense of the British community in India) and the propagandist of Empire. The political views which he shared with many millions both before and after him should not, however, be made a stick with which to beat his literary reputation. Historically considered, British imperialism of the later nineteenth century was a complex phenomenon defying simplistic condemnation, and there are many Credit as well as Debit entries in the moral balance-sheet of British rule in India. Furthermore, Kipling’s attitude to his material is more varied than the stereotype would suggest. Anglo-Indian life, that strange mutation from Victorian norms, is described both sympathetically and satirically: its vices, vanities and follies are exposed, yet its achievements and its ethic of self-sacrifice and service are finely celebrated in stories which now stand as records of a vanished world. There were powerful pressures to conformism and to prejudice in that world, and to these Kipling sometimes yielded; but he also had impulses to rebellion – to the repudiation of its orthodoxies and taboos. ‘A stone’s throw out from either hand/From that well-ordered road we tread /And all the world is wild and strange,’ he wrote in the verse-heading to one of his earliest stories; and we find him passing from the narrower confines of Anglo-India to explore the tragic loves of Englishmen and Indian women in ‘Lispeth’, ‘Beyond the Pale’, ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’; and to enter into the minds of characters whose lives are lived on assumptions radically different from his own: the Afghan horse-dealer of ‘Dray Wara Yow Dee’, racked by his obsessive thirst for vengeance; Little Tobrah, who kills his blind sister by pushing her down a well since ‘it is better to die than to starve’; and saintly mendicants, renouncers of the world, like Purun Baghat and Kim’s Lama. This ability to project himself imaginatively into other minds, into representatives of what might seem alien humanity, is one of Kipling’s great strengths as an artist.

  He shows the same capacity for imaginative empathy in his treatment of animals and of machinery – in his rendering the game of polo in ‘The Maltese Cat’ from the viewpoint of the polo ponies, or in his virtuosic presentation of the running-in of the Dimbula in ‘The Ship that Found Herself’. He found indeed new worlds to conquer when he turned, in that highly technological age, to machines and the men who work them, like the ships’ engineers of ‘Bread upon the Waters’ and ‘The Devil and the Deep Sea’. Early in his career he had deliberately crossed the boundaries of class in a revolutionary attempt to render the working-class speech, the attitudes and background, the loves and sorrows, of ordinary British soldiers, and some of his greatest successes in both verse and prose had been couched in a modified version of the language of the barrack-room. His interest extends, however, to many other types and examples of ‘people who do things’: the Sons of Martha who carry out the work of the world, whether as soldiers, administrators, peasants, engine-drivers, deep-sea fishermen, engineers, farmers or builders, were always closer to his heart than the intellectuals he stigmatized as the Sons of Mary (see Luke 10:38–42); and he strove mightily in his fiction to commemorate their qualities and their achievements.

  When he settled at Bateman’s at Burwash in 1902 he found still further challenges in the sheer unfamiliarity, the foreignness of England: the social and psychological discoveries of the protagonist in ‘My Son’s Wife’ make this an anthropological study as well as a moral fable. And Kipling brought to the Sussex countryside, its people and traditions, the same fascinated attention he had given earlier to life in the Punjab. He explores its past as well as its present in stories like ‘Marklake Witches’ and ‘The Knife and the Naked Chalk’, summoning up characters from history or pre-history and demonstrating not so much the differences as the continuity of their experience and values with our own.

  There are also forays into autobiography, like ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’, which is based on the events of his own childhood. There are political fables, like the study of decadence in ‘The Mother Hive’. There are psychological case-histories like ‘Mary Postgate’. And there is an inexhaustible interest in the world around him, an insatiable curiosity about the diversity of creatures it contains. To read a wide selection of Kipling’s fiction is to be astonished by the range and the vitality of his invention, the sureness and the subtlety of his technique. ‘But enough of this,’ as Dryden wrote of Chaucer; ‘there is such a variety of game springing up before me, that I am distracted in my choice, and know not which to follow. It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God’s plenty.’

  The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows1

  If I can attain Heaven for a pice,2 why should you be envious?

  Opium Smoker’s Proverb.

  This is no work of mine. My friend, Gabral Misquitta, the half-caste, spoke it all, between moonset and morning, six weeks before he died; and I took it down from his mouth as he answered my questions. So:

  It lies between the Coppersmith’s Gully and the pipe-stem sellers’ quarter, within a hundred yards, too, as the crow flies, of the Mosque of Wazir Khan. I don’t mind telling anyone this much, but I defy him to find the Gate, however well he may think he knows the City.3 You might even go through the very gully it stands in a hundred times, and be none the wiser. We used to call the gully, ‘The Gully of the Black Smoke’, but its native name is altogether different of course. A loaded donkey couldn’t pass between the walls; and, at one point, just before you reach the Gate, a bulged house-front makes people go along all sideways.

  It isn’t really a gate though. It’s a house. Old Fung-Tching had it first five years ago. He was a boot-maker in Calcutta. They say that he murdered his wife there when he was drunk. That was why he dropped bazar-rum and took to the Black Smoke instead. Later on, he came up north and opened the Gate as a house where you could get your smoke in peace and quiet. Mind you, it was a pukka,4 respectable opium-house, and not one of those stifling, sweltering chandoo-khanas,5 that you can find all over the City. No; the old man knew his business thoroughly, and he was most clean for a Chinaman. He was a one-eyed little chap, not much more than five feet high, and both his middle fingers were gone. All the same, he was the handiest man at rolling black pills I have ever seen. Never seemed to be touched by the Smoke, either; and what he took day and night, night and day, was a caution. I’ve been at it five years, and I can do my fair share of the Smoke with anyone; but I was a child to Fung-Tching that way. All the same, the old man was keen on his money: very keen; and that’s what I can’t understand. I heard he saved a good deal before he died, but his nephew has got all that now; and the old man’s gone back to China to be buried.

  He kept the big upper room, where his best customers gathered, as neat as a new pin. In one corner used to stand Fung-Tching’s Joss – almost as ugly as Fung-Tching – and there were always sticks burning under his nose; but you never smelt ’em when the pipes were going thick. Opposite the Joss was Fung-Tching’s coffin. He had spent a good deal of his savings on that, and whenever a new man came to the Gate he was always introduced to it. It was lacquered black, with red and gold writings on it, and I’ve heard that Fung-Tching brought it out all the way from China. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but I know that, if I came first in the evening, I used to spread my mat just at the foot of it. It was a quiet corner, you see, and a sort of breeze from the gully came in at the window now and then. Besides the mats, there was no other furniture in the room – only the coffin and the old Joss all green and blue and purple with age and polish.

  Fung-Tching never told us why he called the place ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’. (He was the only Chinaman I know who used bad-sounding fancy names. Most of them are flowery. As you’ll see in Calcutta.) We used to find that out
for ourselves. Nothing grows on you so much, if you’re white, as the Black Smoke. A yellow man is made different. Opium doesn’t tell on him scarcely at all; but white and black suffer a good deal. Of course, there are some people that the Smoke doesn’t touch any more than tobacco would at first. They just doze a bit, as one would fall asleep naturally, and next morning they are almost fit for work. Now, I was one of that sort when I began, but I’ve been at it for five years pretty steadily, and it’s different now. There was an old aunt of mine, down Agra way, and she left me a little at her death. About sixty rupees a month secured. Sixty isn’t much. I can recollect a time, seems hundreds and hundreds of years ago, that I was getting my three hundred a month, and pickings, when I was working on a big timber-contract in Calcutta.

  I didn’t stick to that work for long. The Black Smoke does not allow of much other business; and even though I am very little affected by it as men go, I couldn’t do a day’s work now to save my life. After all, sixty rupees is what I want. When old Fung-Tching was alive he used to draw the money for me, give me about half of it to live on (I eat very little), and the rest he kept himself. I was free of the Gate at any time of the day and night, and could smoke and sleep there when I liked, so I didn’t care. I know the old man made a good thing out of it; but that’s no matter. Nothing matters much to me; and besides, the money always came fresh and fresh each month.