When the anonymous reviewer in the Spectator of Almayer’s Folly suggested that Conrad might become the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago he was, no doubt, clutching at a straw of likeness. But the comparison stuck and was used several times thereafter. It is well to remember, though, that the Kipling that the reviewer had in mind was still, though less radically than Conrad, an outsider. Looking back, we see him as so thoroughly an established figure - the friend of Rhodes, the cousin of Stanley Baldwin, the man chosen to decide on the wording on war graves, the man whose ashes were conveyed to Westminster Abbey by, among others, a Prime Minister, an admiral, a general, and the Master of a Cambridge college. He first burst on the literary scene, however, as a visitor from India, bringing demotic stories of often disreputable people and news of a far-away and exotic world.
From the start he inspired strong and mixed feelings; the reviewers of his first volume applauded his energy and the novelty of his tales, but they were bothered by lapses of tone, vulgarity, and the lack of what one called a ‘sustaining philosophy’; much of the later development of Kipling’s reputation has about it the air of a rather outraged acceptance that he has brought it off, together with outright hostility by some. His work still rouses strong feelings.
The variation of quality in his work and the fact that some of it aims (successfully) at popular success is hardly enough reason; we have learnt to distinguish between Bennett’s good novels and his bad ones. But Kipling, unlike other writers, tends to make us feel that in admiring or disliking him we are taking up a position and there are, I think, two reasons for this. The less important one is that he has written himself into the national consciousness as a children’s storyteller. He is still a part of many people’s childhoods and this leads to kinds of rejection or possessiveness which are not dangers for writers whom we encounter later in life. What would be the effect on us if someone unearthed a number of stories about the struggles of small farmers against bureaucracy by Beatrix Potter or a study of senior common-room intrigues by Lewis Carroll?
The more important reason for our sense of taking up a position is that his relationship to political ideas is basically different from, say, that of Yeats, who expresses opinions which might be expected to prove unacceptable to those who dislike Kipling’s imperialism. But Yeats treats his politics frivolously; he starts a poem, as he tells us in The Cat and the Moon and Certain Poems, with a belief that democracy is worn out and we need a new, violent annunciation but as he writes the politics disappears, bird and lady take possession, and he ends up with ‘Leda and the Swan’. Kipling seems to believe that political matters are more important than his stories; a direct didactic purpose is obvious in many of these - ‘The Army of a Dream’, for example, and ‘The Mother Hive’—and throughout his writing there recur appeals which give the impression that the writer is happy to take instruction from the practical man. Certainly those who greatly admired Kipling in his lifetime, as well as those who disliked him, were in no doubt that he was a teacher; nor did Kipling himself show any sign of wishing to dissociate himself from such praise.
But the particular quality in Kipling which rouses such immediate feelings of liking or disliking is more widespread than a number of didactic stories. His dominant beliefs are more basic than his imperial faith and they are not merely declared but embodied in his narrative structures.
What is fundamental to Kipling’s view is that, like Conrad but unlike (as I hope to show) Forster, he sees men as inextricably parts of society and he agrees in seeing society as often harsh. He differs from Conrad in believing that society has the right, even the duty, to make great demands because what at bottom he fears is anarchy and disorder. Conrad’s distrust of organized states is congenial to our late-twentieth-century view of the matter, for we have observed that the worst atrocities of our century have been committed by men obeying orders and doing their duty with clear consciences. The forces of anarchy and disorder have had remarkably little to their discredit by comparison with, say, the camps set up in the Third Reich and Stalinist Russia. It was easier to believe, when Kipling began writing in the late 1880s, that the danger came either from an alien and more primitive society (Piets or, as in ‘The Man Who Was’, Cossacks) or from disorderly forces within. There has, in recent years, been a good deal of discussion of Kipling’s beliefs in terms of the sociologists of the later nineteenth century and it may be true that his ideas can be assimilated to the concepts of Pareto and others, but this hardly seems necessary, though one can gain a good deal of innocent amusement from speculating as to what Kipling would have made of having his faith in the civilizing power of Rome or the British Empire likened to those of foreign theoreticians.
A contrast with Conrad’s narrative method is a useful way of making clear the essence of Kipling’s attitude. Conrad’s technique is a distancing one. This distance may be achieved by his interposing narrators—Marlow, for example, in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and various personages in Nostromo: Mitchell, Decoud, and the authorial persona who opens the book with a historical survey and maintains, throughout, a detached observing position. It may also be achieved by a tone, as in The Secret Agent, which seems to hold his characters at a distance and present them for our inspection (paradoxically this proves to be the one method which could in such a scene as the cab drive across London make us feel intensely both the pathos of the poor in general and the rightness of Stevie in particular). Kipling’s tone, by contrast, endeavours to bring us as close as possible, sometimes to the extent of being positively buttonholing. He constantly asserts shared experience and shared standards. Conrad’s aim is often to disorientate the implied reader; we think that we can in Under Western Eyes take the teacher of languages as a reliable guide and are then obliged to reconsider this when Natalie Haldin speaks with such disdain of those who are secure because they have made a bargain with fate. Kipling never to any significant extent throws us off balance; when he uses irony he signals it too clearly to be missed. Security is too valuable to be put at risk.
The circumstances of Kipling’s first publication favoured his method. Writing for the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore, he had a specific public with whom to identify and he took full advantage of this. We see it in ‘Thrown Away’, a simple and sad story of a young man, spoiled from childhood, who makes stupid mistakes when he is stationed in India, has none of the sense of proportion which a more rough-and-tumble life would have given him, and kills himself in the belief that he has wasted his life and committed unforgivable offences. To achieve the effect of pathos and inevitability Kipling insistently implies our joint membership of a group or class or caste which is uniquely in a position to understand what is happening. The tone is that of one man of the world speaking to another and the effect is reinforced by a multiplicity of references to supposedly shared judgements and experiences. He says:
The boy, by contrast,
Presumably the original readers, or most of them, would have known about ekka-ponies and the scarcity of Home-furlough, but the appeal is the same for English readers of the English publication. They are invited to feel that they are being addressed as members of a society in which these references come naturally. It is often, and correctly, said that Kipling makes great play with his status as a man who knows the passwords and the technical terms and the finer points of private rituals, and that this can grow tedious; but it is equally true that he is asserting that we know them, too, and name-dropping can be effectively indulged in with some people even when they are not certain to whom the names refer.
This urge to assert the solidarity of the reader with the writer and their society continues throughout his writing and towards the end of his life even increases. There are stories in which it seems more important than anything else, so that they become predominantly acts of mutual self-identification and the assertion of community of judgement. The frame of the tale is more important than the tale itself.
It is an inevitable consequence of this narrative method that Kipling’s beliefs and social attitudes should become an issue for his readers; a technique which seeks to incorporate the reader in a group whose judgements enforce a belief in the paramount importance of society over the individual does not allow us any room for aesthetic detachment. This is reinforced by the nature of many of the stories, which are based upon an opposition between groups and beliefs. Kipling is not very often concerned to show complexities or contradictions of feeling within one person. Apart from his simpler anecdotes he usually puts us in a position where we are called upon to take sides. His famous comment about needing both sides of his head may imply not only greater variety of attitude than is sometimes thought but also a tendency to see matters in terms of bipolar oppositions.1
Thus those who in general agree with his political and social views find no problem, except that sometimes the fellow is a bit ingratiating. Those who do not agree with him are likely to feel that they want to extricate themselves from the implied relationship in which they find themselves.
Moreover, as has constantly been said, very many of the stories are concerned with those issues which have been most controversial in this century—war, inter-racial encounters, class and group conflicts, certain views about the continuity of historical experience - and many of those which do not specifically tackle these themes have settings in which the issues figure largely. And there can be no doubt that in most cases he demands that we accept what will go against the grain of most of us - cowardly Babus, straightforward Pathans who respect our firm rule, treacherous Boers, pitied young men who have married beneath them, outspoken old rustics who yet know their place and accept it; there is hardly a reactionary cliché which we will not find.
His treatment of war provides the best example of the problems which his narrative method presents for readers. A comparison with a short-story writer who greatly admired Kipling makes the problem very clear. Isaac Babel’s stories in Red Cavalry2 show every bit as much awareness of blood and wounds and pain and death as Kipling’s and, like Kipling, Babel appears to believe that the war he is recording is necessary and that his Cossacks are the men to do the job (he had also, which Kipling had not, taken part in the campaign). But his cold, clear presentation, his astonishing images (‘Into the cool of evening dripped the smell of yesterday’s blood, of slaughtered horses’) come from a distance; we are not asked, as we are by Kipling, to enjoy the slaughter. The problem with Kipling is not that we cannot accept that violent cruelty happens, that it may for those performing it be necessary and even an enjoyable release, but that we cannot join in the enjoyment. It comes as a shock, now, to find Henry James, for one, expressing such admiration for ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ with its vicarious pleasure in combat (‘The red lances dipped by twos and threes, and with a shriek, up rose the lance-butt, like a spar on a stormy sea, as the trooper cantering forward cleared his point’). Since about 1915 it has not been possible for a decent civilian, sitting at his ease, so to relish warfare; this inhibition is one of the legacies of Loos and Ypres and the Somme. But there were, as he said, two sides to Kipling’s head, even though to a striking extent they seem normally to have operated separately. In ‘Kidnapped’, from Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), we are asked to applaud a jaunty tale of how Miss Castries is cheated of her lover because he is a white man and she is a half-caste. ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, in Life’s Handicap (1891), is a sad and touching story of the love between an Englishman and an Indian woman and the question of race arises only because the reader knows that even if death had not separated them the rules of their society would eventually have found them out.3 There are numerous stories, often employing the metaphor of the breaking-in of a horse, about the training, often brutal, of young men for their job where we are asked to applaud the necessary harshness; but there are also stories, particularly in the later volumes, about those who have been tried too hard. But the two kinds of attitude do not mingle; they are kept in separate stories.
One story in which the two sides do coexist proves to be the clearest sign that they cannot blend. ‘The Brushwood Boy’, in The Day’s Work (1898), is the story of George Cottar, a dazzlingly successful army officer, adored by his men and respected by his superiors, who has a series of repeated dreams, sometimes frightening and sometimes inexplicably happy. Returning on leave, having just won the DSO for rescuing wounded under fire, he is introduced to a young woman who reveals, by a song which she has composed and sings, that she is the companion whom he meets in his dreams. He declares himself, and we leave the youngest major in the army to a future which seems to be a daytime life of military success and public virtues and a night-time life of enchantment and terrors shared, while they are asleep, with his soul mate. Neither half of the life means anything in terms of the other half, nor is there any suggestion that the split is even potentially upsetting or dangerous.
Kipling lavishes on Cottar more success than, perhaps, any other of his characters. He is to inherit a large and beautiful house with a superb estate where the servants from butler to under-keeper worship him; he is very attractive to women but does not realize it; his success at school (‘head of the school, ex officio captain of the games; head of his house’) is equalled by his success first at Sandhurst and then in his regiment (‘Cottar nearly wept with joy as the campaign went forward’); and he has a relationship with his mother which is summed up, on his return from India, in the statement that ‘they talked for a long hour, as mother and son should, if there is to be any future for our Empire’. The prose in which he is presented alternates between two of Kipling’s most favoured tones: the gruff colloquial (‘he kept his pores open and his mouth shut’) and the biblical (‘he bore with him from school and college a character worth much fine gold’). The almost parodie presentation of the officer and gentleman is surely so extreme because there is a bit of Cottar, albeit an unconscious bit, which is out of bounds and Kipling has to strain to show that it has done him no harm. In his dreams he may flee from terrors to sanctuary but in real life he commands men who, serving as a rearguard ‘covered themselves with great glory in the eyes of fellow-professionals’.
Kipling can write brisk and entertaining and sometimes macabre anecdotes about the ruling group - his initial reputation was founded on these plain tales from the hills - but if he goes any deeper into their characters he tends towards the idealized and stereotypical as if afraid that he might weaken the moral and political imperatives which are central to his outlook. His best work—apart from some of the anecdotes, the only work on which any significant claim for him can be based - is done when he escapes from the power of these imperatives and writes about those who are not called upon to carry the burden of responsibility. There are three groups who are sometimes able to fulfil this requirement - children, other ranks, and (despite George Cottar’s mother) women.
He wrote a good deal for children - the Just So Stories, the Jungle Books, Puck of Pook’s Hill, and Rewards and Fairies—and it is certainly true that in some of these he is concerned with his imperatives, concerned to teach the need for the law and obedience and the duty to defend the wall, but one book stands out as totally different from the others. He lavished most time upon Kim—it was seven years in the writing, interspersed with other work - and it is the work which has most unquestionably established itself as a classic. It has often, and rightly, been compared with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), another story of a boy from the supposedly higher race but on the margin of society, travelling with a member of a supposedly lower race whom he comes to love along a great highway and coming to face the conflict between this love and the demands of society. Both books raise the question of how far they are addressed to boys and how far to adults.
What is the nature of the appeal of Kim to the grown-up reader? Is it for most of us the affection that comes from reading it, in Lionel Trilling’s words, ‘fixed deep in childhood feeling’?4 There are certainly many parts which the adult, even if he did not read it first as a child, has to read as if through the eyes of a child; the exchange of passwords on the train and the disguising of the hunted Mahratta, for example, demand a straightforward relish for excitement without too much worry about plausibility. Yet we often find that we are involved in conflicts of feeling which demand some complexity of response. We are, in fact, asked to read in that special frame of mind which is appropriate to fables and legends and the modulations of tone insist on this.
The prose of the very first paragraph enforces a double focus:
The move between the two sentences from the brisk realism of ‘municipal orders’ to the incantatory archaic ‘Who hold …’ prepares us for a tale which will hover between different appeals and different plausibilities or, as Kipling might have wished us to put it, between two racial outlooks which join in the boy. The second paragraph reinforces the effect. It begins:
and ends:
The effect is inevitably a precarious one but it succeeds because the choice as protagonist and observer of a boy, and, moreover a boy who is initially in effect an honorary Indian, appears to release in Kipling a variety of feelings which elsewhere are so often stopped short by his sense of responsibility. Kipling himself said that the story was ‘nakedly picaresque and plotless’ and, though this minimizes the theme of Kim’s conflicting love of the Lama and of the Great Game, one of the strongest effects of the book is sheer delight in variety of people and places and the energetic and irresponsible curiosity of Kim about them. Kipling put into this novel many of the fruits of his observation of India which did not altogether fit into the framework of assumptions of, say, the Plain Tales. It is but rarely outside Kim that he presents the life of the inhabitants of the sub-continent except in relation to the British. Here there are hints of the British presence on the road-mention of police stations and so forth and the somewhat stereotyped figure of the Ressaldar who remained loyal in the days of the Mutiny (a Nostromo of the Raj, as it were)—but there is much which seems quite untouched by the British and one effect of this is naturally to enlarge the scope of India. One of the functions of seeing Indians largely in relation to their rulers is to reduce the size and variety to order; it is not only a framework of administration that is imposed upon a country but also a conceptual framework. In Kim, drawing one supposes upon his childhood memories and, as we know, aided by his father, who had worked with Indians a great deal, Kipling reveals an India which is large and varied beyond categorization.
In giving such a panoramic view Kipling set himself the substantial problem of finding a language, or set of languages, in which to render the variety; and he did not make matters easier by having at the centre of the book a holy man who talks with the solemnity and formality appropriate to holy men. For the vernacular he adopts an archaic style, with second personal singular usages, interspersed with apparently proverbial phrases to add pungency - ‘That North country is full of horse-dealers as an old coat of lice.’ This runs the risk of making his cultivators and prostitutes sound like old-fashioned Quakers or notional medieval peasants, but in so far as the latter effect is achieved it is not altogether inappropriate for his purpose. There are times when it may seem unintentionally comic and I have no idea how close it may or may not approximate to a literal translation from Urdu or Punjabi or any of the other languages which we must imagine spoken, but one of the purposes which it serves is to suggest an immemorial quality about India which goes about its business away from the Europeans who speak normal colloquial English.
The intermittent formality and archaism of the narrator’s prose, too, reinforce this sense of the continuity and decorum of Indian life which is contrasted with the crude and graceless manners of the chaplain, Bennett, say, or the drummer boy who is set to keep Kim away from the bazaar. ‘At noon they turned aside to eat,’ we are told, ‘and the meal was good, plentiful, and well-served on plates of clean leaves, in decency, out of drift of the dust. They gave the scraps to certain beggars, that all requirements might be fulfilled, and sat down to a long, luxurious smoke’ (4).
Because Kim is a boy and we share his experiences, Kipling is able to make good use of what is so often elsewhere one of his most damaging habits - the knowingness which, I have suggested, is part of his desire to involve us in a group but which becomes a veritable tic. When Kim learns the truth of the pedigree of the white stallion or stops the railway clerk from cheating the lama and cheats the railway instead or, dressed in a white boy’s suit, astonishes a sweeper by fluent Urdu abuse, we do not feel the laboured knowingness of the narrator of so many of the stories, but the pleasure of a clever child who likes Creighton because he ‘was a man after his own heart - a tortuous and indirect person playing a hidden game’, a boy far more at home (and making us more at home) with the country-bred and half-caste boys at St Xavier’s than with the white men with their ‘dull fat eyes’.
We are not, however, merely released into the safety of pre-adolescent fantasy; from Kim’s viewpoint we see many harsh matters which Kipling’s adult characters are not allowed to recognize. He is strikingly successful, through the boy’s perceptions and his delight in intrigue, at showing the disingenuousness within one’s own side. It is not perhaps surprising that, when Kim teasingly asks Mahbub Ali what would have happened if he had betrayed him, the horse dealer replies: ‘Then thou wouldst have drunk water twice - perhaps thrice, afterwards. I do not think more than thrice.’ What does surprise us is the admission of the ruthlessness of the English side in the Great Game when Kim, going back to school from Lurgan Sahib’s, reflects that he could tell stories which would astonish his schoolmates about his adventures on the road, and then realizes that this would cause Creighton to ‘cast him off - and he would be left to the wrath of Lurgan Sahib and Mahbub Ali—for the short space of life that would remain to him’. He is already committed to the game and if he is indiscreet he will be killed by the British Intelligence Service. The Brushwood Boy’s daytime mind, one feels, would hardly come to terms with murdering schoolboys. But boys grow up; Kipling fudges the issue of Kim’s age; we can work out that he is thirteen at the beginning of the novel and sixteen at the end but he is kept for as long as possible in that limbo in which he can frolic on Zam-Zammah and also be one step ahead in calculations about men who come to murder Mahbub Ali. We feel, despite chronology, that he spends some years at school and yet remains the same age; but by the end of the book he is almost a man and the episode with the woman of Shamlegh points this up.
Open talk about sex has played quite a large part in the book; Kim is accustomed from his earliest years to carrying messages for prostitutes; the woman who drugs Mahbub Ali so that his belongings can be ransacked rolls his head off her lap, recalling her customers, with the comment ‘I earn my money’; Kim knows that the place to go to be disguised is a brothel where he chats gaily with the girls; the Sahiba enjoys nothing so much as joking innuendoes about strong-backed men. Nevertheless, despite his knowledge and the compliments often paid him, Kim is pre-sexual in his feelings to an extent which, though hardly plausible in the reality of sixteen-year-olds, is acceptable within the framework of this story. The same could be said of Huck Finn, and Twain knew as well as Kipling that the particular balance of feelings which is needed to anchor the book to its quasi-fabulous childhood response could not coexist with the presence of sexual feelings in his protagonist.
The appeal of the woman of Shamlegh to Kim, however, is openly sexual and our recollection of her earlier appearance in the Plain Tales adds to her sexual reality. Though Kim promises her ‘payment’ and ‘reward’ after she has helped him (and there cannot be any doubt of the nature of the payment nor of her offer to him when she puts out ‘a hard brown hand all covered with turquoise set in silver’) the need to take the lama down to the plains removes Kim from Shamlegh before he can pay it. His virginity is saved by a hair’s breadth, though not before we have been reminded, as the woman tells him the story of her early life as Christian Lispeth, of her grief and anger at the white man’s triviality and betrayal of love. They kiss, European fashion, and Kim, looking back as they go down to the plains, reflects ‘she did not treat me like a child’. Indeed, he no longer is a child and one sign of this is that he ceases to be infinitely resourceful and energetic and lively. He has said, when telling the woman of Shamlegh that he would like to stay, that he is very weary, and on the journey back to the plains this weariness increases and becomes something more than mere physical tiredness. He feels the burden of obligations and responsibility - ‘Kim’s shoulders bore all the weight of it - the burden of an old man, the burden of the heavy food-bag with the locked books, the load of the writings on his heart, and the details of the daily routine.’ He breaks down and cries at the lama’s feet because the burden is too great for his years and only gains some relief when the books and letters are stored in a locked box under his bed. The Sahiba restores him to health with drugs and massage and when Hurree collects the documents he feels that he has got rid of ‘a burden incommunicable’.
The exhaustion, the massage, the convalescence, and the sleep on the earth after the moment when ‘with an almost audible click he felt the wheels of his being lock up anew on the world without’ are in the nature of a rite de passage which take him from childhood to manhood. What this means is that he must now choose and take responsibility. So far there has been for him no conflict between his love of the lama and his love of playing the Great Game and this has prevented us, the readers, from dwelling on the contradiction. Logically, he has in his journey into the hills to use the lama as a stalking horse for the purpose of spying on the foreign spies, though the framework of childhood’s lack of reflection keeps this very much at the back of our minds. But the conflict has told on him and exhausted him at the end and now his choice is, so it seems, made for him by his nature. When, walking into the open after rising from his convalescent bed, he sees that
His nature is choosing a path which is not that of the lama, for whom the visible world is an illusion and who, having found his River, smiles ‘as a man who has won salvation for himself and his beloved’ and whom we are surely meant to feel has come to the end of his life. But Kim, of whom Mahbub Ali says to the Lama, ‘the boy, sure of Paradise, can yet enter Government service’, will indeed take up as a man that government service which has so far been a play.
It is at this point that the book must end. Mahbub Ali may say that the conflict between the two ways of life can be reconciled, but the reader, as soon as he begins to think in those adult terms to which Kim is being brought, knows that they cannot. They could only coexist in one man as they do in ‘The Brushwood Boy’; the exhaustion and illness of Kim and his recovery are Kipling’s acceptance of the end of childhood.
The army’s other ranks are cut off from the imperatives of power even more thoroughly than Kim. He grows up and has to answer the question ‘What is Kim?’, but Kipling’s most famous and successful portrayal of those who do society’s dirty work - the Soldiers Three - is of men who by circumstances of birth and, to a lesser extent, of temperament, will never determine their own fates. The eighteen stories in which they appear are of varying types and quality.5 Some, such as ‘Blackjack’ and On Greenhow Hill’ are among his best works, while others, like ‘The God from the Machine’ and ‘The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney’, are more in the nature of elaborated anecdotes or exaggerated tall tales; but the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts. The three soldiers start in ‘The Three Musketeers’ as stock types: the blarneying Irishman, the slow Yorkshireman, and the sharp Cockney. By the time we have read all the stories, though they still retain marked elements of blarneydom, stolidity, and sparrowdom, they have been individualized as men who endure a weight of frustration, resentment, and despair quite outside the comprehension of those who make the decisions which govern their lives.
This is conveyed to us partly by the stories which they tell but even more by the framework of shared experience, gossip, and relationship within which the stories are set. This interrelationship of frame and tale can be shown very clearly in the story which has probably attracted more critical attention than any other, On Greenhow Hill’. As they lie in wait on a Himalayan spur for a deserter from a native corps, Learoyd tells his two comrades the story of how he came to enlist. This account of how he thought that his chance of marrying Liza Roantree was being frustrated by a Primitive Methodist minister, how he nearly killed the man in revenge and then found that he alone has not realized that she is ill and his real rival is death is akin to Hardy in its sense of the irony of circumstances and its lack of patronage of the illiterate and the inarticulate. It has flashes of the comic which keep the pathos from slipping into sentimentality: when the young Learoyd is refused admission to the house where the girl is dying, her father embodies his Methodist rejection of the supposedly wild young man in the phrase ‘and long as thou lives thou’ll never play the big fiddle’. At the end of the story Learoyd enters the army and the lack of forgetfulness:
At this point the deserter whom they have been ambushing crawls into view and Ortheris shoots him. They have speculated before that perhaps there is a woman behind the desertion and Mulvaney has said that women make most men enlist and they’ve no right to make them desert, too, and it is this indeed which has started Learoyd telling the story. Now, with the man dead by a red rock with his face in a clump of blue gentians, we reflect that Learoyd has been brought here by the bunch of ribbons, pinned on his hat as a sign of enlistment and put straight and admired by Liza on her death-bed.
But the framework is doubly effective if we know the three soldiers already and know, among other things, that Learoyd is no talker. Mulvaney tells eleven of the stories and Learoyd has only narrated one previously, a slight anecdote of a stolen dog.6 We have gained the sense of Learoyd as a taciturn, slow presence and have waited to understand him better; now that he does speak it is with the effect of the lumbering, silent man at last finding words for what has been in his mind all the time. The insight given into Ortheris is greater and more disturbing. He never tells a full story; in ‘The Madness of Private Ortheris’ we see him hysterically homesick for a London which includes such memories as going with a girl to see ‘the Humaners practisin’ a-hooking dead corpses out of the Serpentine o’ Sundays’, though there are plenty of hints that his childhood was harsh. He can only reveal himself by fits and starts and the effect which he often makes of cold viciousness is related to these spasmodic utterances. That effect is at its strongest in this story. The three men have been encouraged by a subaltern to hunt the deserter, but there is something chilling about Ortheris’s pleasure in ‘a ‘evinly clear drop for a bullet’ across the valley and in his mockery of Learoyd’s conversion to Methodism under the influence of Liza and in the calculated blasphen y with which he takes out the cartridge from his rifle and greets it as his chaplain, making ‘the venomous black-headed bullet bow like a marionette’. But we do not only see him as a callous man who enjoys killing. When, in the last words of the story, ‘He was staring across the valley, with the smile of the artist who looks on the completed work’, we do not only relate this to the present story and wonder what it is that he so much enjoys destroying; our response is also connected with a sense of the Ortheris whom we have got to know as one of the three friends and we are shocked to find that he is in as bad a way as this.
The dominant effect of the series of stories is, indeed, that all three are in a bad way. About half the stories are of triumphs in war, in stratagems, in rivalries, but their cumulative effect is extraordinarily sad. The three soldiers are conventionally patriotic, admiring good officers, and devoted to efficiency in their profession of arms, but through all the stories comes a sense of loss, not only because of the passage of time and the ravages of the bad climate and disease but also a sense of potentialities unfulfilled and feelings thwarted. Mulvaney regrets his seductions or near-seductions and speaks repeatedly of how drink has ruined his chances of promotion and his self-respect and yet he cannot stop boasting not only of his prowess as a fighter in the old days but as a lover and a drinker, too. They live through the hot weather in squalid cantonments or barracks, their refuge is drink, and they must endure being men who cheat or wheedle or steal to get it. They are loyal to that service which degrades them and their conception of a gentleman-ranker is as plain a statement as can be that the fortunate ones of this world would not lead their lives unless they were blackguards.
Kim escapes the limitations of what Kipling could usually envisage by the irresponsibility of childhood and Mulvaney and his friends by their membership of the class which is denied the responsibility of power. Kipling’s view of women also liberates him in some of his stories, though here success is more unpredictable. His view of women is often the conventional one of the society about which he writes: the eponymous heroine of ‘William the Conqueror’ is the tomboy and staunch comrade, Mrs Hauksbee the flirtatious older woman (an unpassionate Marschallin as it were) and the mother of ‘The Brushwood Boy’, the ideal of impiperial womanhood. But since his world is one which is dominated by men who are responsible for its ordering and where women gain their ends and play their part most often by exercising their influence upon men, they are inevitably under less discipline. They are often seen as lonelier than men, living more in their impulses and with more of the primitive and there are a number of stories, such as ‘The Wish House’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’, both from the volume Debits and Credits (1926), where he seems to feel that women are closer to quasi-supernatural powers. There are also two most striking stories about the Great War in which he deals with states of emotional deprivation in women who have lived with their feelings shut away from public view and with no possibility of admitting them socially. One, ‘The Gardener’, from Debits and Credits, is the story of a woman’s concealing, even after his death in action, that her supposed nephew is really her illegitimate son; it has great force but is ruined by a sudden twist at the end. The attendant at the war cemetery directs her to the grave, using the word ‘son’, and the story ends ‘and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener’. The biblical echo is either totally gratuitous and the man has merely made an accurate guess as to the relationship or else (and surely this must be Kipling’s intention) we are to take him as Jesus Christ, a demand that we should adjust ourselves to a supernatural element totally unrelated to anything thaj; has gone before and come to terms with ideas about resurrection and forgiveness which are therefore inert;
The other story of the Great War and a woman’s feelings about it is ‘Mary Postgate’, which he wrote in 1915 and which appeared in A Diversity of Creatures (1917). All commentators have emphasized its horror and many seem to have regretted it. Whatever interpretation we give to it is likely to raise feelings of outrage but what gives it a resonance unusual in Kipling is the complexity and contradiction of feeling which prevent an easy reading. The simplest reading, apparently underwritten by the appending to it of the poem ‘The Beginnings’ which proclaims how ‘the English began to hate’, is as a straight revenge story. Mary Postgate, the mousey and ladylike companion of Miss Fowler, has adored Miss Fowler’s nephew, Wynn, who has treated her as a bit of a joke, gone off to the war as an airman, and been killed in an accident while training. As she is disposing of his effects, lighting the fire ‘that would burn her heart to ashes’, she hears a groan from a German airman who, after dropping a bomb on the village and killing a child, has crashed. He cries out for help, but Mary Postgate refuses to get help and watches him die. Love for our own side makes us hate the other side and Mary Postgate reflects that if she tells anyone else the German airman will be saved. Any man would be a ‘sportsman’ and it is woman’s work to see that the German dies in pain. Kipling, it has often been pointed out, is interested in revenge and certainly seems to have enjoyed the thought of its being taken with a good conscience. Several of the comic extravaganzas, notably ‘The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat’, are acts of revenge and, more seriously, the theme is followed through in the context of the Boer War in ‘A Sahib’s War’ and in ‘The Sea Constables’, written at about the same time as ‘Mary Postgate’. But in these stories and in others where the revengers are men there is always the sense of communal action and consequently of a reinforcement of solidarity by the sharing of revenge by the group. Mary Postgate’s revenge is secret and the more closely we look at the story the more we find that her feelings must be kept secret for reasons more significant than the simple fear that a good sportsman would take the German off to the nearest hospital.
Throughout the story we - not, apparently, Mary Postgate herself - have been aware how abominably Wynn has behaved to her. The disrespectful jocularity of the young to the old may be taken as callowness concealing affection, and if we were merely told that she was ‘always his butt and his slave’ this might be so here; but Kipling gives plenty of evidence that Wynn is stupidly callous. When she fails to identify different kinds of aeroplane he says:
and, a little later
This is not the proper way, in the society that Kipling is depicting (nor in any other), to talk to an older woman in a subordinate position. But Mary Postgate seems not to resent it. Nor, though Miss Fowler quizzes her, does she seem to admit to sexual feelings. Miss Fowler reminisces shockingly with tales ‘not always for the young’, but her companion listens unflinchingly and drops the subject, ‘for she prided herself on a trained mind which “did not dwell on these things”’; when Miss Fowler comments that she is now over forty and asks whether she ever thinks about ‘the things that women think about’ Mary Post-gate avoids a direct answer, and says: ‘I’ve no imagination, I’m afraid.’
Her reaction to Wynn’s death is the stoic acceptance of loss, the stiff upper lip shown by the bereaved in ‘The Gardener’, too, but it is mingled with a regret of a strikingly specific and non-rhetorical kind; “Yes,” she said. “It’s a great pity he didn’t die in action after he had killed somebody.”’ The choice of this phrase rather than, as might be expected, something more grand and general about throwing back invaders or doing one’s duty, tends to make us conscious of a number of hints of resemblance between Wynn and the German, who has killed somebody. His uniform is described as ‘something like Wynn’s’ and he has fallen through trees and ‘Wynn had told her that it was quite possible for people to fall out of aeroplanes. Wynn told her too, that trees were useful things to break an aviator’s fall.’ She has, after all, remembered something from those conversations in which Wynn jeered at her. It would be too simple to say merely that in watching the German die she is taking revenge for slights and jeers as well as for the wrongdoing of the enemy, nor that her final ecstasy can be simply defined as the pleasure of sadism after a lifetime of subordination, but the conclusion of the story, with its sexual overtones, does not allow us to deny that both these are present in a complex effect more powerful than anything else in Kipling. She goes on burning Wynn’s things, while listening for the airman’s groans: