The Man Who Would Be King: Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling Read online

  But an introduction to Kipling’s stories necessarily begins with the early ‘Indian’ tales which made him famous, written by a very young man in love with India, who as he declared ‘would sooner write about her than anything else … [the] heat and smells of oil and spices, and puffs of temple incense, and sweat, and darkness, and dirt and lust and cruelty, and above all, things wonderful and fascinating innumerable’.12 The nature of that fascination can be glimpsed by summarizing the first few stories:

  An addict tells of the opium house in Lahore where he is placidly dying. A Lahore con man who exploits an old miser’s credulity in a séance is about to be poisoned by his prostitute lodger. An English engineer falls into a pit of pariah Indians and barely escapes. A Kashmiri girl’s life is ruined by an Englishman who flirts with her. An Englishman has a secret affair with a lovely Hindu widow, for which both are terribly punished. A cuckolded Afghan who has murdered his wife obsessively pursues her lover. An English adulterer falls to his death in front of his mistress.

  The harshness of this world is obvious, as is the unusually wide social range it owes to Kipling’s experiences as a young reporter in Lahore (which included reporting a disaster as grim as his own stories when the roof of Lahore High School collapsed at midnight, killing three boys whose sheeted corpses he saw amongst the debris13). In ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ he describes with relish and gaiety the endless visitors to a newspaper office – disgruntled colonels, missionaries who want to abuse their colleagues, theatrical companies which are unable to pay for their advertisements, dubious inventors of unbreakable swords, and ‘every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand Trunk Road’ wanting the job of proof-reader. These early stories take in not only army officers and their wives, civilian officials, femmes fatales and missionaries but Indian opium addicts, beggars, con men, horse-dealers, but no ‘ordinary’ Indians. There are none of the farmers, village priests, grooms, letter-writers or shopkeepers whose alms and kindness support the hero of Kim, let alone the English cooks, hairdressers, fur-dealers, chemists, solicitors and sailors whose passions and tragedies preoccupy the later stories. With the dubious exception of the men in ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ sleeping by the roadside like corpses, ‘Some shrouded all in white with bound-up mouths; some naked and black as ebony’, almost all Kipling’s early Indian characters either come from a criminal underworld or end up somewhere worse, decayed by drink, punished with mutilation, condemned to the pit of the living dead, or bound to madness and death, as in ‘Dray Wara Yow Dee’.

  This story, which begins in a happier world of horse-dealers cheerfully selling useless nags to ‘the Officer-fools’, is also a splendid instance of Kipling’s unique invention of the archaized English exploiting the language of the King James Bible, by which he rendered the ‘vernacular’ speech of native Indians. This invented formal dialect, at once readily comprehensible and distant enough from English conversational idiom to suggest the ‘otherness’ of a different language and society, is capable of a lyrical directness which narrative and social convention deny to the English – as when the speaker longs for Afghanistan: ‘Here is only dust and a great stink. There is a pleasant wind among the mulberry trees, and the streams are bright with snow-water, and the caravans go up and the caravans go down, and a hundred fires sparkle in the gut of the Pass, and tent-peg answers hammer-nose, and pack-horse squeals to pack-horse across the drift-smoke of the evening.’ But this paradise turns out to be a place of adultery and savage murder, leading to the haunted quest which has brought the narrator to British India and perhaps beyond: ‘If my vengeance failed, I would splinter the Gates of Paradise with the butt of my gun, or I would cut my way into Hell with my knife, and I would call upon Those who Govern there for the body of Daoud Shah. What love so deep as hate?’

  In ‘A Wayside Comedy’, a handful of isolated English officers and their wives make a similar discovery, though without the Afghan’s stylish savagery. In the dreary hell-hole of Kashima where there is not enough ‘public opinion’ to keep sexual behaviour in line, a bitter farce of frustrated desires and affairs gone sour leaves everyone except the blissfully ignorant Major Vansuythen prey to ‘jealousy and dull hatred’. The squalor of the quarrels is matched by their tired language: ‘ “Oh, you liar!” Kurrell’s face changed. “What’s that?” he asked quickly. “Nothing much,” said Boulte. “Has my wife told you that you two are free to go off whenever you please?” ’ The worst of the situation is that the civility of the English officers and their wives is not a pretence: simmering with lust and resentment, they only know to live by the rules they have broken. And in all the stories, there is a striking and very un-Victorian absence of moralizing: people from different societies work out their own damnation without moral comment beyond ‘you dare not blame them’, and with little political commentary apart from some wry remarks about officials’ loneliness and boredom and the need to keep graves dug for ‘incidental wear and tear’ among the English in ‘At the Pit’s Mouth’. Written for Anglo-Indian readers, these early stories take their own assumption of English racial superiority for granted in the horror of Morrowbie Jukes finding himself powerless in a pit of stinking pariahs, or in the comedy of competing illegalities among delinquent rajahs and blackmailing white freebooters in ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ (where the hero’s hubris also implies a disquieting parallel to the British Empire14) rather than in explicit preaching. Even in ‘On the City Wall’, the narrator’s knowing grumbles about Englishmen doing work for which educated Indians will take the credit is less telling than the ingenious conspiracy which makes a fool of him but never seriously worries the imperturbable officers in charge of Lahore.

  Apart from Punch in ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’ demanding the tale of ‘the Ranee that was turned into a tiger’, and Daniel Dravot in ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ crossing the border to Afghanistan disguised as a crazy priest, there is little interchange in these early stories between the peoples of these different races and societies. Kipling’s English and his Indians do not speak one another’s idiom, their only common denominator being the knowledgeable writer who creates the worlds of low-life Indians, respectable officers and civilians, and the British Army’s private soldiers. But in the longer, more highly wrought stories of the 1890s, Kipling develops the complex possibilities of different speech styles in sophisticated ways. Instead of the earlier monologues, we are given storytellers engaged with responsive audiences, like the delighted child in ‘The Finances of the Gods’ listening to Gobind, or the listening women too well acquainted with famine and insecurity, murmuring their chorus of sympathy as Little Tobrah recounts his terrible history, of which his English saviour, shocked at the boy eating oats wetted with horse-saliva out of a used nosebag, will remain happily ignorant. Stories that feature English characters who, unlike the monoglot Morrowbie Jukes, are fluent in Indian vernacular, set up a productive tension between the cultures of colonial ‘Sahibs’ and native speakers. Hummil’s personal servant in ‘At the End of the Passage’ voices a sympathetic yet eerie knowledge of the agonies that destroyed ‘this that was my master’, thereby disconcerting the bluff Dr Spurstow who snubs him – ‘Chuma, you’re a mud-head’ – but can offer no better explanation. John Holden in ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ converses with his Muslim ‘wife’ Ameera in exchanges full of tenderness, momentary jealousy, teasing, pride, sorrow and consolation, and then goes back to talking administrative shop at the ‘Club’, whose wry, stoical idiom will be all that is left him when Ameera is dead (though the last elegiac words are appropriately given to Holden’s vernacular-speaking landlord). Findlayson in ‘The Bridge-Builders’, that ideal administrator full of close attention to technical details, pride in his work and smug amusement at his foreman Peroo’s superstitious anxiety about the river’s anger ‘now we have … run her between stone sills’, disappears as a centre of consciousness once the Hindu Gods appear, speaking in the ‘vernacular’ style of formal yet flexible archaism, to debate the br
idge’s future. This layering of speech styles gives the illusion of undoing humanity’s curse of Babel whereby speakers of different languages are unintelligible to one another, so that in Kipling’s stories, English-speaking readers are made free of linguistic and cultural worlds which in real life are closed to them.

  The world of these Indian tales remains harsh. The lovers’ fragile happiness in ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ is vulnerable to ‘the old programme … famine, fever, and cholera’; an official in ‘At the End of the Passage’ coping alone with a heavy workload in the murkily stifling hot weather dies of insomnia; and we know from ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’ and ‘Little Tobrah’ that the bright-eyed child in ‘The Finances of the Gods’, weary from carrying dung-cakes to market, may be vulnerable to fever or smallpox. Meanwhile Kipling’s imperialist politics, now he is addressing an English audience, become both more emphatic and more central to the stories’ actions. Hardly a tale lacks a reminder that Englishmen are sacrificed for the Empire: English soldiers, helped by Gurkha regiments, hold back Afghan tribesmen in ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ and ‘With the Main Guard’, while English administrators cope efficiently with natural disasters in ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’ and ‘The Bridge-Builders’, work unrewarded and unthanked in ‘On the City Wall’, and suffer misery and death in their lonely labours in ‘At the End of the Passage’. No wonder that Margaret Oliphant suggested in an 1891 review that Queen Victoria might learn from these stories ‘how her Indian Empire … is ruled and defended and fought for every day against the Powers of Darkness’.15

  At the same time, these tales show Kipling’s great and increasing fascination with labour and its techniques, classically manifested in the virtuoso description of the Kashi Bridge under construction by the ass-drivers, riveters, crane-men and train-drivers who make up a ‘humming village of five thousand workmen’, and their skilled, dedicated labour to save the great work from the coming flood in ‘The Bridge-Builders’. Like no other writer, Kipling communicates the feel of action – the foreman inventing a tackle for heavy weights ‘loose-ended, sagging … but perfectly equal to the work in hand’ and the engineer feverishly calculating the strength of his work threatened by the water ‘plucking and fingering along the revetments’; or the discomfort of a sweaty polo pony ‘stiffening up to get all the tickle out of the big vulcanite scraper’ before being hemmed in by people crowding too close to his playing-field’s boundaries in ‘The Maltese Cat’; or how when galley-slaves mutinied they ‘choked [the overseer] to death against the side of the ship with their chained hands quite quietly, and … fought their way up deck by deck, with the pieces of the broken benches banging behind ’em’ in ‘The Finest Story in the World’.

  Kipling’s fascination with the minutiae of action gives his tales of battle a savage vividness combined with a clear if sometimes idealized perception of battle-strategy. Thus Mulvaney in ‘With the Main Guard’ cheerily recalls the experience of hand-to-hand fighting, when his troop was so jammed against the enemy that when one man’s throat was cut, the colonel ‘wint forward by the thickness av a man’s body, havin’ turned the Paythan under him. The man bit the heel off Crook’s boot in his death-bite’, and when the battle moved on, ‘we opind out an’ fair danced down the valley, dhrivin’ thim before us. Oh, ’twas lovely, an’ stiddy too!’ Still more vivid is the terror of the novice troops in ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ lying prone and firing ‘for the sake of the comfort of the noise’ only to plough up the ground ahead of them, and turning tail when charged by knife-wielding Ghazi berserkers while their officers try with curses and blows from sword-hilts to drive them back to the battle. This is finally won by the coolly intelligent Brigadier who knows both how to plan and where necessary to take a chance – or, say the witnesses, by the gallantry of the two youths who played ‘The British Grenadiers’ to a deserted battlefield, and ‘whose little bodies were borne up just in time to fit two gaps’ in a common ditch-grave (the corpses filling convenient gaps in a heap are a characteristically telling detail). And ‘On Greenhow Hill’ makes it very clear that the price of the soldiers’ courage and comradeship is an emotional impoverishment that limits Ortheris to finding pleasure in his deadly marksmanship, and leaves Learoyd for ever haunted by the dying Liza Roantree, ‘And I’ve been forgettin’ her ever since.’

  Kipling’s later stories move away from colonial scenes, apart from the stories of the Boer War (which, since I find them relatively weak, I have not included here), and ‘Mrs Bathurst’, where the South African railway siding represents one point in the global triangle of Cape Town, Auckland and Paddington Station in London. Outside the children’s books, children feature only as the elusive wraiths of ‘They’. Scenes of action and adventure change to an informed interest in the means of communication; steamships, cinema, radio and motor cars become as important as the railways and telegraphs that enabled the administrators of the British Empire in the earlier stories to stay in control of their territories. Familiar things, as Freud describes in his essay on ‘The Uncanny’, become shudderingly strange: a nameless misery can fill the satiny brightness of a rich Jew’s Surrey mansion in ‘The House Surgeon’, despite its ‘fortifying blaze of electric light’, a petty naval officer is mesmerized by the cinematographic spectre of Mrs Bathurst leaving a train half the world away, and a tenant farmer sweats with terror while doggedly trying to get the better of his landlady in ‘They’. Objects take on a life of their own – literally so in the fable ‘The Ship That Found Herself’ where the rivets, deck-beams, engine cylinders and other great and small parts of an iron ship learn, groaning and complaining like humans, to hold on and work together as a team through a violent Atlantic storm (the political allegory is transparent). More figuratively in ‘Mary Postgate’, the dead Wynn’s existence as a beloved, indulged only child is implied by the exhaustive page-long inventory of his boyhood possessions including ‘a dumb gramophone and cracked records’, all carried down to be incinerated with his tin soldiers and jigsaws. Similarly, the uncanny communications from a dead poet in ‘Wireless’ are first mediated by objects: the hare’s fur ‘blown apart in ridges and streaks as the wind caught it’ as it hangs outside an Italian shop on a freezing winter night (an image Hemingway was to borrow for the famous opening of ‘In Another Country’), followed by the unforgettable interior of a chemist’s shop:

  Across the street, blank shutters flung back the gaslight in cold smears; the dried pavement seemed to rough up in goose-flesh under the scouring of the savage wind … Within, the flavours of cardamoms and chloric-ether disputed those of the pastilles and a score of drugs and perfume and soap scents. Our electric lights, set low down in the windows before the tun-bellied Rosamond jars, flung inward three monstrous daubs of red, blue, and green, that broke into kaleidoscopic lights on the faceted knobs of the drug-drawers, the cut-glass scent flagons, and the bulbs of the sparklet bottles. They flushed the white-tiled floor in gorgeous patches; splashed along the nickel-silver counter-rails, and turned the polished mahogany counter-panels to the likeness of intricate grained marbles – slabs of porphyry and malachite.

  The garish opulence of these disturbingly vivid colours, objects and strange scents, so much livelier than the sick people who need them, parodies the sensuous romance of Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, while Shaynor, the consumptive shop assistant mesmerized by the blowsy ‘Fanny Brand’, is a debased, unconscious equivalent to Keats himself. As the wireless expert upstairs waits for the pinch of metallic dust in his glass tube to be cohered by the ‘Hertzian waves’ long enough to conduct an electric impulse to his Morse printer, so Shaynor’s brown-fingered hand stained with chemicals writes the words of a dead poet, opening up infinite possibilities to the narrator – which prove to be a dead end, since the ‘proof’ of their authenticity is Shaynor’s laborious invention of lines which the ‘I’ already knows.

  A fascinated relish for the machinery of publicity – newspapers, music-halls, parliamentary question
-time – powers the high-spirited revenge story ‘The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat’, in which a group consisting of professional men – journalists, the wealthy music-hall impresario ‘Bat’ Masquerier and a Member of Parliament – irked by a speed trap and a rural magistrate’s insolence, conspire to turn the unfortunate Huckley and its magistrate squire into an international joke. They manage this by publicizing a toxic combination of factual details and invented folklore about Huckley including its mythical ‘Gubby Dance’ and, in a brilliant stroke of Masquerier’s ingenuity, by getting star actors dressed up as ‘Geoplanarians’ to persuade the villagers (with the help of much beer) into voting for a flat earth, and then commemorating the event with a hit song about the village. The story acquires an unnerving momentum that comes to alarm even its inventors – ‘We couldn’t stop it if we wanted to now’ – until in a climactic scene of ‘realistic’ fantasy the whole House of Commons, ‘without distinction of Party, fear of constituents, desire for office, or hope of emolument’, bellows the song that has made the village into a global legend.