Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  As well as trading ideas, Ruddy also took great delight in teaching Trix to ride, going out with her nearly every morning before work:

  This morning she and I went into the open and trotted back as hard as we could come (T. bumped a good deal but that is only natural). If you could have seen her with the colour in her cheeks, her hair down and blowing about in the wind, and the hat jammed at the back of the head you would have seen her at her loveliest – and that’s a tall order. We are all spoiling the maiden sadly – but she won’t spoil easily and brightens up the domestic shanty like a ‘Swan’s incandescent’ [Swan match].11

  Included in this same letter to Edith Macdonald was a recent cutting from the CMG in the form of a parody of Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ that began:

  The Stranger and the Resident

  Were strolling down the Mall;

  The former jumped at times to see

  The merry bullets fall.

  ‘If this goes on for long,’ he said,

  ‘Expect a funeral.’

  The verses had been written in response to a complaint from the Director of Public Instruction that a shot fired from the 1st Punjab Volunteers’ rifle range in the Lawrence Gardens had ploughed into the ground at his feet as he passed the CMG’s offices on his morning constitutional. ‘I need only explain,’ wrote Ruddy to his aunt, ‘that I too was once nearly shot while riding down the Mall, and the “Poet’s mind” was, consequently, vexed by the “shallow wit” of volunteers who could miss a mark at two hundred yards and nearly hit a man at two thousand.’ Afterwards ignored by its author, ‘A Beleaguered City’ was the first Rudyard Kipling poem to be published in the CMG,12 its appearance in print being all the sweeter for having been slipped in under Wheeler’s nose under the pseudonym of ‘Blank Cartridge’.

  The volunteers whose loose shooting had inspired Ruddy’s poem were from the same battalion which Ruddy had joined only months earlier, but already he had lost the taste for amateur soldiering. ‘No one ever saw him on parade,’ complained his company commander, Colonel H. R. Goulding, who had eventually to write to Ruddy demanding the repayment of the capitation grant paid to all volunteers – which was promptly done, accompanied by a letter ‘frankly admitting the justice of the penalty and expressing regret for neglect of duty’.13

  Two days after the publication of Ruddy’s ‘A Beleaguered City’ in January 1884 the CMG ran the verdict of a murder trial at the Punjab High Court involving a British Army private, William Day, who had quarrelled with another soldier and then shot him as he slept. A number of military murders and subsequent executions took place during Kipling’s years in India, but this was the only one where he saw the accused face to face and witnessed the passing of a sentence of death – and it left its mark. On 26 September that same year the CMG carried a report of an incident at Multan in which three drunken soldiers from the Manchester Regiment had fired on passers-by, killing an Indian. Three days later ‘The Story of Tommy’ appeared in the CMG under the signature of ‘E. M.’ In six terse stanzas it told the tale of Tommy, ‘aged twenty and drunk in his cot’, who shoots the slumbering punkah-wallah on a hot night and duly suffers the extreme penalty:

  Waited a couple of weeks, while the padris [sic: padres] came and harangued,

  Then, in Central Jail, Tommy, aged twenty, was hanged.14

  ‘The Story of Tommy’ is one of the many unsigned or pseudonymous verses pasted by Rudyard Kipling into his Lahore scrapbook but never publicly acknowledged or collected, which is a puzzle since it is another milestone. One year on and a third military murder was given extensive newspaper coverage, although this time it was CMG’s sister paper, the Pioneer, which reported it – and with a twist that made it unusually macabre. The victim was Lance-Sergeant William Carmody of the 1st Battalion of the Leicestershire Regiment, his killer Private George Flaxman. What was remarkable about the murder was that Flaxman was one of a group of disgruntled soldiers who had drawn cards to decide who should kill their sergeant. Flaxman had drawn the ace of spades and then shot Carmody as he sat in his tent drinking a cup of tea.15 He was duly found guilty of murder at a general court martial. Because of the circumstances of the card-cutting a plea for leniency was entered, but it was rejected by the Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Frederick Roberts, and on 10 January 1887 Private Flaxman was put through the awful ritual of a military execution, involving a full parade on the Lucknow maidan, the forming of troops in an open square and the condemned man marching to the scaffold behind a military band and a coffin on a gun-carriage drawn by two bullocks.

  ‘The Band struck up with the Dead March in Saul which sent a thrill through every living soul on that parade ground,’ wrote one of the condemned man’s comrades:

  He marched with a firm step and his head slightly bent … When he got to the scaffold he halted and ran up the steps as if he was the executioner and not the condemned man … Then a native ran up the steps and placed the rope around his neck. Now he was not aware that the native was going to hang him, but anyhow he must have smelt him, for he said, ‘go away, you black.’ The native then drew the bolt and he was no more. After hanging a few minutes the black cloth that covered the grave was removed, and all the troops marched past him. He hung with his head on one side and there was blood on the coat, he looked an awful sight.16

  Kipling’s masterpiece ‘Danny Deever’ did not appear in print until February 1890,17 but those grim verses were almost certainly sketched out in the weeks following Private Flaxman’s hanging in Lucknow on 10 January 1887. As a child Ruddy had heard his Macdonald grandmother sing a traditional English verse ballad in the form of a dramatic duologue, with a question in one line and an answer in the next:

  ‘Pray where are you going, child?’ said Meet-on-the-road.

  ‘To school, sir, to school, sir,’ said Child-as-it-stood.

  ‘What have you in that basket?’ said Meet-on-the-road.

  ‘Some pudding, sir, some pudding, sir,’ said Child-as-it-stood.18

  For ‘Danny Deever’ Ruddy reworked those well-remembered lines with a ‘combination of heavy beat and variation of pace’ that gave the poem ‘a unity of movement which enhances the horror of the occasion’.19 It was the work of a poet at one with his craft:

  ‘What are the bugles blowin’ for?’ said Files-on-Parade.

  ‘To turn you out, to turn you out,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.

  ‘What makes you look so white, so white?’ said Files-on-Parade.

  ‘I’m dreadin’ what I’ve got to watch,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.

  The story unfolds through the questions put by the frightened recruit, Files-on-Parade, and the replies of his superior, the Colour-Sergeant, who tries to shield him from the awfulness of what is happening until finally both have to face the truth:

  ‘What’s that so black agin the sun?’ said Files-on-Parade.

  ‘It’s Danny fighting ’ard for life,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.

  ‘What’s that that whimpers over’ead? said Files-on-Parade.

  ‘It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now,’ the Colour-Sergeant said.

  Ruddy’s triumph on the boards over Christmas had given him a taste for amateur theatricals, and when the Lahore Amateurs decided to stage a production of W. S. Gilbert’s poetical whimsy The Palace of Truth at Easter he threw himself into the part of Chrysal, a court poet in love with a lady-in-waiting called Palmis, played by a Miss Coxen, daughter of a military officer. A ‘very sudden indisposition’ meant that Ruddy missed the play’s two performances in mid-April, but this did not prevent him from falling for Miss Coxen and writing to her after she left Lahore in June. At the same time he continued to maintain the illusion that he and Flo Garrard still had a romantic understanding, despite receiving a letter from her in July in which she again made it plain that she had no feelings for him.

  The eighteen-year-old had by now grown tired of the company he was forced to keep outside Bikaner House. ‘There is no society in Ind
ia as we understand the word,’ was how he put it when he came to write about the narrowness of Station life:

  There are no books, no pictures, no conversations worth listening to for recreation’s sake. Every man is in some service or other, has a hard day’s work to do, and has very little inclination to do anything but sleep at the end of it … All the older men invariably talk about their own work or pay or prospects when two or three gather together; and the younger men, if in the army, talk of their horses. In a country where every Englishman owns at least one horse, this is natural but monotonous. No one talks lightly and amusingly as in England … They don’t seem to realise any of the beauties of life – perhaps they haven’t time.20

  The only people outside his home with whom Ruddy could identify were the junior officers of the army regiments quartered at Mian Mir. They had more leisure time than the civilians, so they tended to organise most of the local sporting activities and to entertain more generously. Soon after his arrival in Lahore Ruddy had been invited to dine in the officers’ messes of the two British Army Regiments stationed at Mian Mir, represented at this time by the East Lancashire Regiment and units of the Royal Artillery. The junior subalterns of these two units were only a year or two older than he, and invited Ruddy to dine with them when they commanded the detachment on guard duty at Lahore Fort. This led to ‘ghostly dinners … all among marble-inlaid, empty apartments of dead Queens, or under the domes of old tombs, meals began with the regulation thirty grains of quinine in the sherry, and ended – as Allah pleased!’21 One such evening in February 1884 inspired the poem ‘On Fort Duty’, in which a bored artillery subaltern laments being stuck on fort duty beside the pestilent Ravi when he could be up on the Frontier where ‘the passes ring with rifles / And the noise of Afghan raids’.22

  In that same month Ruddy was given a first opportunity to explore beyond the confines of the Station when he received an invitation, ‘couched in flowery English and flowerier Persian’, from an Afghan tribal chief in Lahore city. Greatly intrigued, he allowed himself to be led on his horse into the heart of the city. His host turned out to be a political hostage from the recent Afghan War who evidently believed that pressure on the government from the CMG could end his exile. To reinforce his case he presented Ruddy with a large bundle of currency notes, which were returned to him with the remark that English sahibs did not take bribes. The Afghan’s response was to produce ‘a Cashmeri girl that Moore [Thomas Moore, author of Lalla Rookh] might have raved over’. If Ruddy’s account of the business to his Aunt Edith is to be believed, the girl was beautiful, ‘but I didn’t quite see how she was to be introduced into an English household like ours’. Having rejected this second offer, he was then prevented from leaving the room, causing him to ‘sweat big drops’.

  However, it turned out that the Afghan had a bigger and better bribe to offer, in the form of ‘two bay Arabs, one grey Kathiawar mare, and four perfect little Hazara country breds’, from which he was told to take his pick of any three. After spurning this third temptation as vehemently as before Ruddy returned to his horse, only to find hidden under the saddle ‘a little bag of uncut diamonds and big greasy emeralds’, which he threw ‘through one of the windows of the upper storey’.23 No doubt Edith Macdonald read the tale with the pinch of salt it probably deserved.

  ‘Sulaiman Khel Horse-dealers’, J. L. Kipling (National Trust)

  A more credible tale of bribery followed six weeks later, after Ruddy had won his spurs as the CMG’s special correspondent by reporting on Lord Ripon’s viceregal visit to Patiala, a princely state on the edge of the Punjab plains south of Simla. Patiala’s wealthy Sikh rulers had already acquired a reputation for conspicuous profligacy, to which Ruddy’s dispatches, published in four instalments in late March, added colourful detail. As a guest of the maharaja he was allowed to explore every corner of the palace other than the zanana housing the ruler’s wives and concubines, and had taken full advantage. ‘However much I wrote,’ he told his Aunt Edith, ‘I couldn’t describe the jewels, the champagne, treachery, intrigue, princely hospitality, elephants, four-in-hands etc. I came across … You may say what you like about the decadence of India, but, in a purely native state you see what a blaze of jewels and colour India must have been.’24

  At the close of his visit Ruddy found a thousand rupees hidden in a dauli or presentation basket of fruit and nuts, which he returned, only to discover that two rival reporters also covering the event had happily pocketed their bribes, having received twice as much as he had. He took his revenge by being first with the news, riding through the night to the nearest railway station on a borrowed horse, ‘covering the 32 miles in a trifle less than two and a half hours and getting my letter into the paper next day – much to the disgust of the other men’.25 This ‘starlight ride’ was to provide the material for one of the few credible passages of The Naulahka, written six years later in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier, when the novella’s hero Tarvin sets out for Chittor ‘under the last of the setting moon, the fields silver-white with the opium poppy, or dark with sugar-cane’, riding through the night across ‘a vast level plain flanked by hills of soft outline – a plain that in the dim light seemed as level as the sea’.26

  Having proved his usefulness as a reporter Ruddy was now regularly assigned to cover local events. His early experience on the United Services College Chronicle had already taught him to set down in his notebook exactly what was said and seen. But Ruddy also brought to his reporting a determination to ‘get to grips’ with his subject that bordered on the compulsive. His early admirer Kay Robinson was particularly struck by some satirical verses of his which mocked a famous British cavalry regiment in India for its timidity in making the Umballa steeplechase course safer than need be. Its lines were ‘filled with such technicalities of racing and stable jargon that old steeplechasers went humming them all over every station in Upper India, and swearing that “it was the best thing ever written in English”… What impressed me was that a sporting “vet”, who had lived in the pigskin almost all his life, should have gone wandering about the Lahore Club, asking people “where the youngster picks it up?”’ Robinson put it down to a ‘marvellous faculty for assimilating local colour without apparent effort’27 – which takes no account of the hard graft which Ruddy put into understanding his material. Other observers of Kipling at work have left accounts of the way he worried at a subject like a terrier with a bone, not leaving off until the working of every nut, bolt and flange of its machinery was understood, along with every technical term, nuance, phrase and piece of slang that went with it.

  This rigorous investigation and note-taking also supplied Ruddy with a natural framing device for many of the two hundred or so short stories he wrote in India: that of the reporter who purports to reproduce verbatim what has been told him, as copied down in his notebook. There are early tales where it is impossible to tell if what appears on the printed page is fact or fiction, particularly when the story takes the form of a rambling monologue, seemingly reproduced as heard, word for word. ‘When I comes to a gentleman and says, “Look here! You give me a drink,” and that gentleman says, “No, I won’t neither; you’ve ’ad too much,” am I angry? No! What I says is …’28 So opens ‘Mister Anthony Dawking’, which deals with one of Ruddy’s favourite low-life subjects: the European loafer, almost always an ex-soldier who has fallen on hard times and taken to drink, staggering from one Station to another, scrounging off the Native population until he dies alone and unlamented. This and other tales may have been worked into fiction, but their credibility comes from scrupulously observed fact.

  In late April 1884, as midday temperatures once more climbed above ninety degrees and the Punjab prepared to be ‘ringed by a circle of fire’, Trix went down with her first bout of fever, which her brother took as ‘a not too delicate hint to Mrs Kipling to take her daughter to Dalhousie as soon as may be’. All the signs pointed to an unhealthy Hot Weather to come. ‘Measles and typhoid and small p
ox among the natives in April are pretty certain to grow unpleasant in July and August,’ wrote Ruddy to his Aunt Edith on 28 April. ‘There has been a case of sporadic cholera already … It is funny to watch the progress of the disease. It begins like an [military] engagement with dropping shots, falling no one knows where and gradually settling down into a steady roll – a death roll if you please.’

  In early May the two Alices left Lahore for Dalhousie in the Kangra Hills, the closest hill-station to Lahore, the least fashionable and the least expensive – a prime consideration for a family still beset by financial worries. The women’s departure left their men free to take up the bachelor life: ‘a collarless, cuffless, bootless paradise of tobacco, unpunctuality, and sloth’.29 The lowering of sartorial standards extended to the Club. ‘Men grew careless,’ wrote Kipling in his autobiography, ‘till at last our conscience-stricken Secretary, himself an offender, would fetch us up with a jerk, and forbid us dining in little more than singlet and riding breeches.’ It was this image of untidy summer undress that Ruddy’s second Chief, Kay Robinson, afterwards evoked in portraying his assistant as a rather comic figure so focused on his work as to be careless of his appearance:

  White cotton trousers and a thin vest constituted his office attire, and by the day’s end he was spotted all over like a Dalmatian dog. He had a habit of dipping his pen frequently and deep into the ink-pot, and as all his movements were abrupt, almost jerky, the ink used to fly … Driving or sometimes walking home to breakfast in his light attire plentifully besprinkled with ink, his spectacled face peeping out under an enormous, mushroom-shaped pith hat, Kipling was a quaint-looking object.30