Yet Trix was too pretty to go through a Simla season without someone falling for her and by October her father had been driven to comment on how popular with subalterns he had become: ‘They didn’t use to walk by the side of my pony for a mile at a time, nor did they put on a certain propitiatory air, nor were they careful to slip in an occasional “Sir”.’ As for Trix, ‘her brightness and enjoyment are so striking, even when she is limited to the society of her ancient parents, and she makes so much of the very few and very cutcha girl friends she has here, that I cannot help – tho’ I think it somewhat imbecile – echoing her longings for the impossible’.29 Presumably by ‘impossible’ Lockwood meant a good match, but his reference to ‘cutcha girls’, meaning the exact opposite of ‘pukka’, shows how far Trix still had to go in finding acceptance among the daughters of her parents’ friends in Simla Society.
Ruddy had initially moved into North Bank to be with his mother and sister, but when his father joined them for his annual leave at the start of August he took the opportunity to return to his former haunt, James Walker’s Kelvin Grove. He needed his privacy, for at North Bank he had made the mistake of showing the two Alices what he had written of his Anglo-Indian novel Mother Maturin, now extending to 237 foolscap pages. One had thought it ‘nasty’ and the other ‘awfully horrid’, but he was determined to push on with it. ‘It is an unfailing delight to me,’ he confided to his Aunt Edith, ‘and I’m just in that pleasant stage where the characters are living with me always.’30
As the CMG’s Simla correspondent Ruddy was expected to provide weekly reports on the summer capital’s activities, leavening the latest political developments with social tittle-tattle. This he did with a will, in his first column waxing lyrical on the newly installed ‘plate-glass boards’ in the ballroom at Benmore – ‘ample, smooth, springy and cool, the very beau ideal of a dancing room … For the first time this season, it has been possible to twirl from the first to the last waltz, without being violently lacerated by military spurs, or hopelessly entangled in feminine trains.’ An important advance was made on the dance floor with the Dufferins’ introduction of the mazurka, although with mixed results: ‘It was possible to see how sadly His Excellency’s example has borne fruit. Two or three couples spun round to the measure of the dizzying deux temps (there will be two or three hundred before the season is over).’ As part of his duties Ruddy attended and duly reported on Simla’s Monday Pops and Bachelor’s Balls, when groups of single men clubbed together to hire Benmore’s ballroom for an evening and invited subscriptions. He reviewed the local theatricals and made rude remarks about Allan Octavian Hume, classifying him as a shrike or butcher bird: ‘Originally of a blood thirsty and carnivorous disposition, it had killed 64,000 smaller birds and sucked 18,500 eggs … Now, however, it had learned a “more perfect way”, and lives exclusively on dhall [lentils] and rice, which had not improved either the temper or the plumage of the bird.’ He wrote about Simla’s drains and found them wanting, and he wrote about ‘the Simla baby … fearfully and wonderfully spoilt … amenable to no law save hunger’,31 ancestor to ‘Tods’ and ‘Wee Willie Winkie’.
The spare room vacated at North Bank had now been turned into a studio where Lockwood held drawing classes for a select clientele that included the two Dufferin daughters. The Viceroy dropped in from time to time, and on one of these occasions met Ruddy and complimented him on his verses – which suggests that Alice had been at work with a copy of Echoes. Disarmed by the Viceroy’s charm, Ruddy confided in his diary that ‘His Excellency [is] an Angel of the first order’.32
By the end of July the sore on Ruddy’s face was sufficiently healed for him to risk having his photograph taken in a Simla studio. He was reassured that his blemishes would be touched out (as indeed they were; see cover photograph), but feared that ‘the sunken brands and red tracings’ would leave him scarred for life. He had now been in post as the CMG’s Simla correspondent for nearly three months and had become thoroughly disenchanted with the constant round of entertainments, even to the extent of wishing himself back in Lahore. ‘I will tell you a secret,’ he informed his Aunt Edith in a letter. ‘The best way to sicken a youth of frivolity is to pitch him neck and crop into the thick of it on the understanding that he is to write descriptive matter about each dance, frivol etc. Were it not for my love of waltzing I should abominate the whole business. As it is, the dullest of dull things is to be chroniqueur of a Gay Season in the hills.’33
His diary entries for his last fortnight at Kelvin Grove suggest that sex was very much on his mind. The room next to him was occupied by a military surgeon known as ‘Banjo’ Hayes and his wife, whose noisy lovemaking got on his nerves. ‘Wish they wouldn’t put married couple next door to me with one ½ [inch] plank between,’ he jotted in his diary on 1 August. ‘Saps one’s morality.’ The next night was just as bad: ‘Same complaint. This is ghastly.’ However, on the following evening he attended a Monday Pop at Benmore with a Mrs Hogan and twenty-four hours later was able to report in his diary: ‘My own affair entirely. A wet day but deuced satisfactory.’ This ambiguous entry was followed a day later by a second, written in a very different mood: ‘Begin to think I’ve been a fool but ain’t certain. Out for a ride round Jakko. Weather vile.’ Finally, on 16 August he could write: ‘This day I left Simla for Lahore. It was a pleasant three and a half months and taught me much.’34
Two days later Ruddy was back in the real world. ‘Hell!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘94 in the verandah at four in the morning. Went to office wanting to kill someone.’ And on the following day: ‘Worse. A blazing day. Took up the reins and went ahead. Dined with the Kers.’ The day after that: ‘Too savage to swear. Not a soul worth looking at in the Station. Dined with Levett Yeats and laughed. Mem. Must really make my diary a working one. Went home and thought a good deal.’ By the fourth day of his return, Friday 21 August, he had had enough. That night he closed his diary entry with two sentences: ‘Usual philander in Gardens. Home to count the risks of my resolution.’
Even a cursory reading of this precious diary shows that its author had developed a private life in Lahore that he wished to keep private. Scattered throughout are coded remarks suggesting mysterious contacts and assignations, usually in the form of Latin words and symbols. On Friday 6 February 1885 his entry concludes with two cryptic sentences: ‘Mem. eris cum Ŧ Thursd. Ŧ a bundobast. My tack is to lie low and wait.’ Bundobast means an ‘arrangement’ and the Latin translates as ‘Remember you will be with’, suggesting that an assignation has been arranged for Thursday with the person identified by the Ŧ symbol. On the Thursday in question, 12 February, the diary entry ends: ‘W.R.W.M.Ŧ. – a thoroughly satisfactory conclusion.’ Two weeks later a further mysterious assignation took place, this time at a site identified as the Shahdera Gardens, an expanse of ‘rose-burdened gardens’ and acres of decaying Mughal tombs on the banks of the River Ravi much favoured by the younger members of the Station for picnics and romantic assignations. The diary entry on that date ends with a series of indecipherable letters and symbols followed by the remark: ‘Jam! on toast.’ A week later Ruddy is back in the Shahdera Gardens and his diary entry reads: ‘Shadera xxx where found opportunity for another note. There’s something wrong there.’
Ruddy’s next recorded visit to the Shahdera Gardens was on 21 August after his return from Simla; the ‘usual philander’ that ended with him returning home to ‘count the risks’. What these ‘risks’ were can be deduced from the diary entries that follow. On Monday 24 August the entire entry is restricted to three words: ‘Club. work. anticipation.’ On Tuesday the entry is a little longer: ‘I wonder! Work of sorts. [indecipherable] and gardens.’ On Wednesday longer still: ‘Gardens and talk to T. Young. He is sanguine and hopeful. I also. More anticipation.’ By Thursday, the tension seems to have gone: ‘First period probation over. Mind easier. Now to look about me.’35
The only ‘T. Young’ listed in Thacker’s Directory as resident in Lahore in 1885
is Civil Surgeon L. T. Young, Professor of Chemistry and materia medica at the Lahore Medical School, newly arrived in the Punjab. It is a fair assumption that Ruddy’s philandering in the Shahdera Gardens had led him to fear that he might have caught a venereal disease, that he avoided going to the family doctor, Dr Lawrie, and instead sought professional advice from Civil Surgeon Young – and was subsequently relieved to learn that he was uninfected.36
From notes left with Lord Birkenhead it is clear that others on the Station knew of Ruddy’s night excursions, and did not approve. The priggish Louis Dane of the Indian Political Service was serving in the Punjab Secretariat at this time and afterwards joined with his close friend Francis Younghusband to damn Kipling as a cad who not only acted ‘above his station’ but let the side down with his roamings in Lahore city, where ‘everyone thought he was going for a mucker with the harlotries therein’.37 That Ruddy did indeed go for a ‘mucker’ is clear from his letters: in one he writes of being no more capable of abandoning his writing than he can ‘put aside the occasional woman which is good for health and the softening of ferocious manners’;38 in another he writes, in reference to the plight of Indian widows, that ‘My experience of “widdies” [widows] is extensive and peculiar. The virgin widow takes to prostitution in seventy five cases out of a hundred – ’cos she can’t remarry.’39
Even though the worst of the Hot Weather was over, his isolation again got to Ruddy, as he admitted in a candid letter to his cousin Margaret Burne-Jones, the ‘Wop of Albion’. She too had literary ambitions, and over the course of a series of letters exchanged that late summer and autumn these two developed a relationship so close that Ruddy felt able to tell her that she was ‘only one shade less dear to me than my own sister’. In late September Ruddy wrote to Margaret of lonely nights at Bikaner House filled with ‘noises and whispers, and sighs and groans and chuckles from headachy dawn to delirious dusk’ – and hinting at his own sexual frustration. In the same letter he revealed how he had spent ‘one weary weary night on the great minar of the mosque of Wazir Khan, looking down upon the heat tortured city of Lahore and seventy thousand men and women sleeping in the moonlight; and did I not write a description of my night’s vigil and christen it “The City of Dreadful Night”.’40
The night-walk had taken him across the Mall and northwards through the Civil Lines to the Delhi Gate and thence into the city to Wazir Khan’s mosque, laying the ground for one of the most atmospheric passages of writing ever to come from his pen:
Straight as a bar of polished steel ran the road to the City of Dreadful Night; and on either side of the road lay corpses disposed on beds in fantastic attitudes – one hundred and seventy bodies of men. Some shrouded all in white with bound-up mouths; some naked and black as ebony in the strong light; and one – that lay face upwards with dropped jaw, far away from the others – silvery white and ashen gray … They lie – some face downwards, arms folded, in the dust; some with clasped hands flung up above their heads; some curled up dog-wise; some thrown like limp gunny-bags over the side of the grain carts; and some bowed with their brows on their knees in the full glare of the Moon.
As the narrator enters the city by the Delhi Gate he is met by ‘a stifling hot blast … a compound of all evil savours, animal and vegetable, that a walled city can brew in a day and a night.’ But he presses on, to enter the open square in front of the mosque of Wazir Khan, crowded with more corpse-like sleepers, through which he picks his way to the foot of the staircase leading to the top of one of the mosque’s minars, from which the calls to prayer are sounded. He steps over the sleeping janitor and climbs up the corkscrew stairs until at last he can turn and look down on the sleeping city:
The pitiless Moon shows it all. Shows, too, the plains outside the city, and here and there a hand’s-breadth of the Ravee without the walls. Shows lastly, a splash of glittering silver on a house-top almost directly below the mosque Minar. Some poor soul has risen to throw a jar of water over his fevered body; the tinkle of the falling water strikes faintly on the ear. Two or three other men, in far-off corners of the City of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the water flashes like heliographic signals. A small cloud passes over the face of the Moon, and the city and its inhabitants – clear drawn in black and white before – fade into masses of black and deeper black. Still the unrestful noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat, and of a people seeking in vain for rest.
The narrator’s vigil is interrupted by the arrival of the muezzin to make the midnight call to prayer:
A bull-like roar – a magnificent bass thunder – tells that he has reached the top of the Minar. They must hear the cry to the banks of the shrunken Ravee itself! Even across the courtyard it is almost overpowering. The cloud drifts by and shows him outlined in black against the sky, hands laid upon his ears, and broad chest heaving with the play of his lungs – ‘Allah ho Akbar’; then a pause while another Muezzin somewhere in the direction of the Golden Temple takes up the call – ‘Allah ho Akbar’. Again and again; four times in all; and from the bedsteads a dozen men have risen up already – ‘I bear witness that there is no God but God.’ What a splendid cry it is, the proclamation of the creed that brings men out of their beds by scores at midnight! Once again he thunders through the same phrase, shaking with the vehemence of his own voice; and then, far and near, the night air rings with ‘Mahomed is the Prophet of God.’ It is as though he were flinging his defiance to the far-off horizon, where the summer lightning plays and leaps like a bared sword. Every Muezzin in the city is in full cry, and some men on the rooftops are beginning to kneel. A long pause precedes the last cry, ‘La ilaha Illallah,’ and the silence closes up on it, as the ram on the head of a cotton-bale.
The call of the muezzin acts like the breaking of a spell and the sleepers awake like the dead rising from their tombs. The narrator continues his vigil until just before the dawn call to prayer, but as he crosses the square before the mosque he is asked to make way for a woman’s corpse being taken down to the burning-ghat. A bystander explains, ‘“She died at midnight from the heat.” So the city was of Death as well as Night after all.’
By the end of October the Family Square was once more reunited in Lahore. Lockwood Kipling had at once to concentrate on the ‘detestable business’41 of assembling a collection of Punjab ware and an accompanying catalogue for a forthcoming Indo-Colonial Exhibition. His wife and children, however, were in high spirits as they worked together on a joint enterprise: a supplement to the CMG, entitled Quartette, to be sent out to all subscribers as a Christmas supplement, its contents consisting of poems and stories written by ‘Four Anglo-Indian Writers’. Ruddy had put the proposal to James Walker during his stay in Kelvin Grove and permission had been given to use the CMG’s presses and staff. But Stephen Wheeler had not been consulted, and his response was to have nothing to do with the project. Lockwood also refused to help, on the grounds that he was far too busy, and as a result his contribution was limited to four very feeble stories he had written while recovering from his typhoid attack ten years earlier. Both Alice and Trix contributed poems, with Trix also providing a short story about a shipboard haunting which her brother thought ‘a neat bit o’ work’. However, the bulk of the copy came from Ruddy: five poems and three short stories, of which two were more ambitious than anything he had hitherto written.
The printing of Quartette consumed Ruddy’s every spare moment for the better part of six weeks. Set after set of the 124 pages of proofs came back from the CMG’s typesetters riddled with errors, and time and again the head printer, Ram Dass, had to be cajoled into resetting them. ‘If Quartette comes out without a howling misprint in every other line it will be by the blessing of Providence alone,’ Ruddy wrote to his cousin Margaret. ‘Imagine 513 mistakes in one galley of five pages! The family seem to be rather amused than afflicted by “those absurd misprints” but it’s anything but fun for me.’ As the deadline of 15 December came and went, it became obvio
us that the only way to get the book printed in time for Christmas was by bullying and bribing the CMG’s labour force into working long past their agreed overtime hours.
The printing of Quartette was finally completed at five in the morning on 18 December. At ten the previous evening Ruddy had gone home, leaving the paper’s Scottish foreman, Chalmers, to supervise the final print run and the binding. He had returned at midnight to find the workmen on the verge of mutiny. By allowing them to bring in their hookahs and smoke ten at a time, and supplying the tobacco himself, Ruddy brought the men back to work. ‘What a mad night it was,’ he told the Wop of Albion:
About two o’clock something went wrong with the title page again and the impression went bad. Got that corrected and kept on. And the lights bobbed, and the native tobacco stank; and I smoked many cheroots; and Chalmers tramped up and down the shifts; and I tramped and read proofs and Ram Dass was heartened a second time with the bottle and it grew colder and wetter and more dismal and the clock struck five. Then was Quartette born and we laid her aside reverently and departed into the dark each our several ways.42
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