Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Only at one point on his tour did Ruddy’s confidence falter: as he explored the vast Rajput fortress of Chittor, where the ruins of the ancestral home of the oldest of the Hindu warrior clans crown the summit of an enormous rock bluff. Three mass immolations of Rajput women, each accompanied by the slaughter of their menfolk, had cast their shadows over Chittor, and Ruddy was all too aware of the site’s grim past. After clambering down the cliff face in search of a spring known as the Gau-Mukh or ‘Cow’s Mouth’, he entered a dark watery recess where the air ‘was thick with the sick smell of stale incense’ and came upon a rock-cut pool fed by water pouring from a shapeless stone gargoyle and ‘oozing between the edges of the steps and welling up from the stone slabs of the terrace’. Here he was confronted by a Shaivite shrine in the form of a phallic stone lingam – ‘the loathsome Emblem of Creation’. Ruddy must surely have encountered this popular expression of Hindu worship before, but the overtly sexual nature of the scene and its setting now overwhelmed him. ‘It seemed,’ he wrote, ‘as though the descent had led the Englishman, firstly, two thousand years away from his own century, and secondly, into a trap, and that he would fall off the polished stones into the stinking tank, or that the Gau-Mukh would continue to pour water placidly until the tank rose up and swamped him, or that some of the stone slabs would fall forward and crush him flat.’ Overcome by ‘an apprehension of great evil’, Ruddy fled the scene, stumbling over the smooth, worn rocks to get away: ‘He felt their sliminess through his boot-soles. It was as though he was treading on the soft, oiled skin of a Hindu … He did not care to look behind him, where stood the reminder that he was not better than the beasts that would perish.’

  Despite this horror, which lends itself to all sorts of Freudian interpretations, Ruddy felt compelled to return to Chittor that same evening, to explore by moonlight the abandoned citadel, with its crumbling redoubts and its marbled palaces of kings and queens, inhabited only by jackals and monkeys. Although he later visited the palace-fortress of Amber, abandoned when the new city of Jaipur was built in the eighteenth century, it was the older and infinitely more charged bastion of Hindu civilisation at Chittor that remained fixed in his memory. At the time he wrote that he would never try to describe what he saw there by moonlight for fear of insulting ‘a scene as lovely, wild, and unmatchable as any that mortal eyes have been privileged to rest upon’, but five years later he conjured up that same memory to depict the ruined palace known as ‘Cold Lairs’ of his Jungle Books.

  The tour of Rajputana led inevitably to encounters with fellow travellers which he also put to good account, most notably the European loafers met in railway refreshment rooms or wayside dakbungalows – ‘a genial, blasphemous, blustering crew, and pre-eminent even in a land of liars’. One particular encounter involved two Freemasons, whose mode of communicating with each other was so bizarre that he promptly wrote about it to his cousin Margaret. ‘The message was perfectly unintelligible to me,’ he wrote:

  My brother [Freemason] gave me this message and I went up and northwards from the Western side of India till I came to a junction on the edge of the desert and was set out of the train at five on a bitterly cold winter’s morning with all the stars blazing overhead and a wind fit to cut you in two blowing off the sands. The Calcutta train … came in and a man in one of the carriages opened a window and looked out sleepily … I went towards the window and behold, it was the man I was told to find; for he also (doesn’t this sound mad) was a brother of mine. I bent over him and gave the message and he said sleepily: ‘Thanks, I know what it means. You needn’t repeat it. Tha’anks.’ Then I went away and the Calcutta train went off to Bombay and I set out into the desert on my journey … Wasn’t it odd and out of this world?15

  When Ruddy got back to Allahabad just before Christmas 1887 he was startled to see the railway station bookstall advertising his name and coupling it with that of Bret Harte, one of the American authors he most admired. The Pioneer was promoting him as the author of a series of ‘Anglo-Indian Studies’ to be carried in the new Week’s News, which would also run stories from Harte and other well-known writers. Ruddy’s response was to go to Allen armed with a proof copy of Plain Tales from the Hills and point out that he could dispense with Harte, since he himself could supply all the fiction required, and at half the price. Allen duly gave him his head – but must have wondered if he had done the right thing when he read the first short story published in the Week’s News. ‘A Wayside Comedy’ tells of the hell on earth brought about in the tiny upcountry Station of Kashima when its two memsahibs – Mrs Boulte, ‘who hated her husband with the hate of a woman who has met with nothing but kindness from her mate, and, in the teeth of this kindness, has done him a great wrong’, and Mrs Vansuythen, who ‘knows and is deeply sorry for the evil she has done to Kashima’ – both commit adultery with the same man. By the standards of the day it was a deeply immoral tale, made all the more shocking by the amoral ending, for the punishment of the guilty parties is to remain trapped in the ‘rat-pit’ of Kashima and to have to pretend that all is well.

  ‘A Wayside Comedy’ seems to have been written as an act of revenge, evolving out of the supposed infatuation of Mrs Isabella Burton with a senior political officer notorious for his ‘poodle-faking’, Sir Lepel Griffin, brilliant and arrogant and already targeted by Ruddy in one of his milder Simla stories, ‘Wressley of the Foreign Office’. Since Ruddy had feelings for Mrs Burton, he must have observed these two carrying on behind Major Burton’s back in Simla that summer with considerable disgust. Immediately after its publication in the Week’s News he sent a copy of ‘A Wayside Comedy’ to Mrs Burton, declaring himself pleased by its ‘economy of implication’. To his dismay, Mrs Burton replied that she and her husband had decided to leave India for good, with the hint that the move was to save their marriage. Ruddy’s response was to reprint in the Week’s News a short story which had appeared earlier as a turnover in the CMG and was in many respects a preliminary sketch for ‘A Wayside Comedy’, with adultery and its corrupting consequences as its central theme. This prototype version, ‘The Hill of Illusion’, had so shocked Alice Kipling when she was shown it in draft form that she had tried to ban it with the remark, ‘Never you do that again.’ But now Ruddy’s mother saw the same unpleasant story reproduced in an even more offensive form. Her response was to write her son a reproachful letter telling him, ‘It’s clever and subtle and all that and I see the morality of it but, O my boy, how do you know it? Don’t tell me about “guessing in the dark”. It’s an insult to your old Mother’s intelligence. If Mrs Hauksbee enlightened you I’m not sorry that she has gone home.’16

  Ruddy’s next step was to write to Mrs Burton to tell her that he had ‘fallen in love with an American woman’ who was ‘everything that is beautiful and fascinating’.17 No doubt he did it to wound, but he had indeed discovered a replacement for Mrs Burton in Mrs Edmonia Hill, the thirty-year-old daughter of an American Methodist college principal and wife of Professor Alex Hill. A meteorologist by profession and an Ulsterman, Alex Hill had come out to India in 1879 to join his brother as a teacher at the Muir College and was now Professor of Physical Sciences at Allahabad University. Ruddy had met the Hills at a dinner party given by the Allens soon after his arrival and had been bowled over by Edmonia Hill’s outgoing nature, which he thought quintessentially American. She was another of those free-spirited matrons who gave as good as they got, but intellectually a cut above others of that type that Ruddy had previously got to know in India – and a great deal more sympathetic.

  The Hills occupied Belvidere House – in Mrs Hill’s words, ‘a famous old bungalow, standing since Mutiny days when nearly every other house was destroyed’ – a dilapidated single-storey house with a thatched roof which stood in its own overgrown garden just across the road from the Pioneer offices. The couple were accessible and welcoming, and although Edmonia Hill was not particularly attractive, even by Anglo-Indian standards, and stood several inches taller than
Ruddy, she had an open countenance not unlike Alice Kipling’s, with dark eyes and hair and a sympathetic smile. More importantly, she enjoyed literary talk and, with no children of her own and no family in India, she had time on her hands. Ruddy was immediately drawn to her and she, too, was greatly taken by this exuberant young man, describing him to her sister Caroline in the United States as looking ‘about forty, as he is beginning to be bald, but … in reality just twenty-two. He was animation itself, telling his stories admirably, so that those about him were kept in gales of laughter.’18

  Ruddy was by now back with the Allens at No. 1 Bund Road, and finding it increasingly stressful to have George Allen breathing down his neck day and night: ‘The Pioneer lived under the eye of its chief proprietor,’ he wrote of this period. ‘It is true I owed him my chance in life, but when one has been second in command of even a third-class cruiser, one does not care to have one’s Admiral permanently moored at a cable’s length. His love for his paper, which his single genius had created, led him sometimes to “give the boys a hand.” On those hectic days (for he added and subtracted to the last minute) we were relieved when the issue caught the down-country mail.’19 Ruddy had also discovered that social life in Allahabad was stultifying by comparison with Lahore. The Station was top-heavy with ‘large-bore officials, and of a respectability all new’20 and lacked the ‘frontier’ spirit that was part of Lahore’s slightly raffish charm. The same went for the Club, where, according to a contemporary, Ruddy refused to play tennis, billiards or poker and kept himself to himself, so much so that he gained the nickname of ‘Muskrat’ because he was ‘quiet and shy, rather going about the fringe of things and not seeking to make much of a splash’.21 He maintained this same air of aloofness in the office, causing some resentment among his colleagues. ‘Kipling seemed to do little work in the office, and certainly no sub-editing,’ was how one of the Pioneer’s assistant editors of the time remembered him. ‘Most of his time was spent in the Pioneer’s library, and it was when I passed through the room on occasion that he looked up from his book and I became conscious of an ominous glint that made me wonder whether this exceedingly amiable youngster could not be a trifle disagreeable without any grave provocation.’22

  Ruddy’s inveterate scruffiness also marked him out. Another journalist on the Pioneer afterwards recalled that his first impression of Rudyard Kipling was ‘distinctly unfavourable – a small bespectacled youth, blotchy, with startlingly bushy eyebrows – the worst tailored Englishman I had encountered since I left old England’s shores, with not an inch of clothes that seemed to fit him’.23 All this helps to explain why late one night when Ruddy was staying over at the Club three bold and probably inebriated fellow members crept into his room intending to give him a ragging: ‘They were almost alongside the bed when suddenly Kipling awoke. “Who’s there?” he yelled. A scuttering from in the darkness was the only reply. Suddenly, to the terror of the practical jokers, Kipling whipped out a service revolver from beneath his pillow and fired into the darkness. The room was emptied in a couple of seconds.’24

  What is striking about these recollections from acquaintances rather than friends or family is that in almost every instance they tell of a young man who kept to himself and chose his own company. Ruddy had begun a process of withdrawal that he was to continue for the rest of his life, socialising only on his own terms, keeping the company of an ever-diminishing circle of trusted friends, guarding his privacy with ever-increasing vigilance.

  One trusted friend was the Frenchman Émile Édouard Moreau, the earliest of Kipling’s admirers to recognise the commercial potential of his work. Moreau was based in Allahabad and a senior partner of the firm of A. H. Wheeler and Co., which had bookstalls on all the major railway stations in northern India, and it was he who came up with the idea of marketing the stories as part of an ‘Indian Railway Library’: a series of slim, soft-cover volumes to be sold to railway travellers at one rupee each. Each volume would contain half a dozen or so of the tales already published in the CMG and the Week’s News, assembled by themes. Moreover, Moreau felt confident enough to propose that Wheeler’s should not only bear the cost of publication of six volumes but also pay a £200 sterling advance to their author, with further royalties to follow after 1500 copies had been sold. It was a very generous offer that Ruddy was quick to accept. A contract was duly drawn up under which the first volume would be published in the late autumn and the rest at monthly intervals thereafter.

  A second round of travels began at the start of 1888. This time Ruddy journeyed eastwards, with Benares as his first stop. The outcome of his visit to this most sacred of Hindu cities was ‘The Bride’s Progress’, published in the Pioneer a month later. Purporting to be a humorous account of the visit of a newly married English couple to ‘the city of monstrous creeds’, it allowed Ruddy to give free rein to his anti-Hindu prejudice. As they make their way down to the city’s famous riverside ghats, the honeymooners feel increasingly threatened from all sides by ‘the symbols of a brutal cult … Hanuman, red, shameless, and smeared with oil, leaped and leered upon the walls above stolid, black, stone bulls, knee-deep in yellow flowers. The bells clamoured from unseen temples, and half-naked men with evil eyes rushed out of dark places.’ When they emerge into the open air beside the river the bride is horrified to see corpses burning on the steps below and pariah dogs gnawing at half-burned human limbs. She and her husband struggle back through the sunless lanes where ‘at every turn lewd gods grinned and mouthed at her, the still air was clogged with thick odours and the reek of rotten marigold flowers, and disease stood blind and naked before the sun … The walls dripped filth, the pavement sweated filth, and the contagion of uncleanliness walked among the worshippers.’ Unable to see beyond the dirt, the bride turns to her husband and asks indignantly, ‘“Why don’t these horrid people clean the place out?” “I don’t know,” said the Bridegroom, “I suppose their religion forbids it.”’

  The English couple flee Benares early next morning, and as they leave the city they hear the call to prayer of the muezzin, reasserting the supremacy of monotheism: ‘In the silence a voice thundered far above their heads: “I bear witness that there is no God but God.” It was the mullah proclaiming the Oneness of God in the city of the Million Manifestations. The call rang across the sleeping city and far over the river, and be sure that the mullah abated nothing of the defiance of his cry for that he looked down upon a sea of temples and smelt the incense of a hundred Hindu shrines.’

  Some literary critics have interpreted this story as a satire against globetrotting tourists, but the fact is that Kipling’s writing of this period is suffused with anti-Hindu rhetoric; the sentiments expressed in ‘The Bride’s Progress’ are too heartfelt to be anything other than a true reflection of his views. His prejudice is also laced with the fears of disease and of sexual intimacy that Ruddy had evidenced elsewhere in his earlier writing. This may explain why he afterwards suppressed the story. ‘My life had lain among Muslims, and a man leans one way or other according to his first service’25 was how Rudyard Kipling afterwards explained his antipathy towards Hinduism and Hindus. Islam he could relate to, but never Hinduism, as he made clear when he reviewed an English translation of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata in terms that echoed Macaulay’s notorious denunciation of Hindu culture contained in his Minute on Education of 1837: ‘Boars like purple mountains, maidens with lotos feet and the gait of she elephants, giants with removable and renewable heads and bodies accommodating as the stomach of the sea-cucumber, are scattered broadcast through its pages. The high thoughts, the noble sentiments, the outcomes of human genius … are few and far between.’26

  From Benares Ruddy continued to Bengal, where he inspected coalfields and railway workshops before moving on to Calcutta. Here he professed himself to be hugely shocked to discover a city of squalor, permeated throughout by the stench of drains: ‘the big Calcutta stink … sickly … indescribable’. He had once before drawn a memorable parallel w
ith James Thompson’s ‘The City of Dreadful Night’ in describing Lahore by night, and he now reapplied that same Gothic metaphor to Calcutta, a city with all the outward trappings of modern living but filled with ‘the essence of corruption’ from which there was no escape. ‘Where is the criminal,’ he demanded, ‘who is to be hanged for the stench that runs up and down Writers’ Building staircases; for the rubbish heaps in the Chitpore Road; for the sickly savour of Chowringhi; for the dirty little tanks at the back of Belvedere; for the street full of smallpox; for the reeking gharri-stand outside the Great Eastern [Hotel] … and for a hundred other things?’ And because the city was now governed by a locally elected municipal council, Ruddy found someone to blame in the Indian membership of the Calcutta Municipal Board – ‘men of the breed born in and raised off this surfeited muckheap!’

  He visited the debating chamber of the Bengal Legislative Council and there had all his prejudices against both English liberals and Bengali intellectuals confirmed when he heard one of the latter quote John Stuart Mill. ‘It is Our own fault,’ Ruddy duly protested. ‘We taught him what was constitutional and what was unconstitutional in the days when Calcutta smelt. It smells still, but We must listen to all he has to say about the plurality of votes and the threshing of wind and the weaving of ropes of sand … They want shovels, not sentiments, in this part of the world.’27