This deeply unpleasant attack on Calcutta and its Bengali inhabitants extended over seven articles, afterwards republished under the title of The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places. The heading of the last chapter, ‘Deeper and Deeper Still’, is an allusion to Dante’s Inferno. Calcutta is depicted as a hell on earth and Kipling sees himself as a modern Dante, touring one circle of hell after another, albeit with a police escort rather than Virgil.
Ruddy was still in Calcutta when it was announced that Lord Dufferin was to end early his term of office as Viceroy and would be leaving India at the end of the year. Dufferin’s lukewarm support for the nascent Indian National Congress had been enough to raise Ruddy’s hackles but he still greatly admired Lady Dufferin for her advocacy of Indian women’s rights, and he responded to the news by writing ‘The Song of the Women’, thanking her on behalf of Indian women ‘in darkness by her hand set free’.28 Ruddy’s reward was a letter of thanks, a volume of Lord Dufferin’s poetry and a photograph of Lady Dufferin complete with ‘tiara, pink sash and scowl’. ‘Wah! Wah!’ noted Ruddy. ‘They’ll be making me Poet Laureat [sic] of Peterhoff [sic] next!’29
In late April 1888 Ruddy was ordered to return to ‘the old rag’ to deputise for Kay Robinson, who had taken a month’s leave and gone to Darjeeling. For the first week he had the company of his father but Lockwood then left for England to oversee the installation of the panelling commissioned by the Duke of Connaught for Bagshot Park. Ruddy then moved into the Club and tried to make the best of it, professing to Edmonia Hill that he was cheered to be back among ‘the savage, boastful, arrogant, hot headed men of the North … I am rejoiced to be among the men I understand again. They are not saints but I like them and they pretend to like me.’30 Among them was a ‘snaky locked and vulture eyed’ Pathan whose proud demeanour inspired Ruddy to work up a report of a frontier murder case in the CMG into ‘Dray Wara Yow Dee’, a short story in which an Afridi tribesman explains how he has beheaded his wife caught in the act of adultery, and why he cannot rest until he has tracked down and killed the other partner in the act. Edmonia Hill found the tale violent beyond comprehension, but to Ruddy it made perfect sense. ‘What is your Law to me?’ Kipling has his Afghan explain. ‘Do the kites of Ali Masjid forbear because the carrion lies under the shadow of the Ghor Kuttri? The matter lies across the Border. It shall finish where God pleases. Here, in my country, or in Hell.’31
But as the old realities of Lahore in May began to kick in once more, so too did Ruddy’s depression. ‘I have returned to the old, wearying, Godless futile life at a club,’ he wrote to Mrs Hill. ‘Same men, same talk, same billiards – all connu and triple connu and … I could almost swear I had never been away.’32 Again the heat made it impossible to get a good night’s sleep and the night terrors returned – terrors symbolised by the krait which he knew lay curled under his bed at night, waiting to strike should he put so much as a hand or toe out from under his sheets. On 19 May Ruddy placed an unsigned turnover in the CMG entitled ‘Till the Day Break’, another of his soliloquies about heat and mental collapse. ‘Curious idea – a man’s bellowing,’ he writes in one paragraph. ‘It would be amusing for a punkah-coolie to hear a Sahib bellowing and to know that the Sahib could do nothing, and so to fan that Sahib from this world to the next – if there is one; the punkah-stroke answering the last beat of the pulse just like the relentless tick, tick, tick, of the watch under the pillow.’
As he had done in earlier times of crisis Ruddy kept himself sane by writing: political squibs in verse for the Pioneer, stories for the Week’s News and so many turnovers for his own paper that he had to resort to pseudonyms. The best of his writing from this torrent of work are portraits of Indians at the bottom of the social pile: the sweeper Mowgi in ‘The Great Census’, who uses his wits to get ahead; the money-lending Marwari twins Ram Dass and Durga Dass in ‘Gemini’; the Indian lovers in ‘Through the Fire’ who die together in a suicide pact; and Little Tobrah in the story of that name who kills his blind sister in a time of famine as an act of mercy. But there is also a deal of bad writing, including an extraordinarily mean-spirited attack on the Bengal civilian Sir William Hunter, who had recently retired from India after years of distinguished service. Hunter’s crime was to show support for the Indian National Congress, for which he was branded a hypocrite seeking political advancement in Ruddy’s poem ‘To the Address of W. W. H.’, printed in the Pioneer on 1 June. What Ruddy may not have known was that only weeks earlier Hunter had gone out of his way to talk to the editor of a London magazine about publishing some of Ruddy’s poems. His restrained rebuke must surely have cut Ruddy to the quick. ‘It is to be regretted,’ he wrote to Ruddy in July, ‘that you devote to clever trifles of this sort talents which are capable of much better things. They practically fix your standard at that of the gymkhana and the mess-room.’33 Before the end of the year Hunter had written a review of Departmental Ditties for the Academy which could well be accounted the most important notice Rudyard Kipling ever received. ‘Perhaps this young poet is the destined man,’ Hunter declared, ‘who will make that nobler Anglo-Indian world known as it really is … His serious poems seem to me the ones most full of promise. Taken as a whole his book gives hope of a new literary star of no mean magnitude rising in the East.’34
When not writing verse or fiction Ruddy passed the hours scribbling long, rambling and increasingly personal letters to Mrs Edmonia Hill. He had now lost the Wop of Albion as a confidante following Margaret Burne-Jones’s engagement to Jack Mackail, a scholar of Balliol, and Mrs Isabella Burton had to all intents stopped replying to his letters, so it was Mrs Hill who now became the principal recipient. Night after night he retired to his room at the Club to pour his heart out to her in letters that were part literary, part gossip and part confession. Ruddy confided to Mrs Hill that he was desperately in love with a ‘Maiden Peerless’ who lived ‘far far away’. In letter after letter he agonised at length over what her feelings for him might be and how he should proceed: the Maiden only writes to him infrequently, and when she does her letters are never ‘lengthy outpourings’; how can he find out what she thinks, and should he force the issue? ‘Tell me how I can tell my Lady to write to me more than she does,’ he asks plaintively at one point. ‘Again and again I come back to the old question: “Does she know what her power is over me?” My own pride has kept me from writing to her point blank: “For pity’s sake write – if it is only a line to let me know that you are still under the same sky as I.”’35 But then Ruddy does force the issue, apparently writing to his beloved ‘in the bitterness of my heart’, and he immediately regrets it. Again he begs Mrs Hill to advise him on what he should do, apologising as he does so for his ‘ravings’. ‘Is that vanity to assume she does care a little?’ he asks. ‘I suppose I shall never know until the end whether she does or whether she does not … In your opinion is it worth while for a man to change the whole tenor of his life and his views – whatever they may have been – for the future of a girl’s sake?’
The letters have led to a lot of speculation over the identity of Ruddy’s ‘Dark Lady’. In the absence of any further evidence the most plausible explanation is that she was Ruddy’s first love Flo Garrard and that he still clung to the hope that she had some feelings for him, as well as indulging in what he himself called ‘building castles in the air at a rate that would disgrace a Clapham Jerrybuilder’.36 Nevertheless, his outpourings had the effect of drawing him much closer to Edmonia Hill, who became his comforter in a way that was maternal without ever being censorious or judgemental. In doing so Edmonia Hill came to fill that void in his life which Ruddy’s mother must have ached to close, but which his distrust and her temperament had made it impossible that she should.
The letters have also to be seen as a companion piece to what was Ruddy’s major preoccupation during those six weeks in Lahore: the completion of a conte or playlet in eight scenes entitled The Story of the Gadsbys, inspired by the writings by a popular finde
-siècle French novelist.37 He had started work on the Gadsbys just before setting out for Lahore and when it was done he convinced himself it was the best thing he had ever written: a sophisticated dissection of an Anglo-Indian marriage, nominally for the stage but intended to be read between the lines.
The Story of the Gadsbys opens with the moustachioed masher Captain Gadsby of the Pink Hussars laying siege to Mrs Threecourt, who has ‘the worn smile of sixteen seasons, the worse for exchange’ – until he notices her virginal daughter Minnie. Three weeks later Gadsby proposes to Minnie and ends a loveless liaison with a Mrs Herriot. Gadsby duly marries Minnie and after an idyllic honeymoon in the hills they face the reality of married life in the plains. When Minnie nearly dies of fever Gadsby is forced to choose between his wife and the army career he loves. He resigns his commission, taking what the author of the play clearly regards as the coward’s way out.
It was a while before Ruddy realised that The Story of the Gadsbys was a disaster. Whether out of mental exhaustion or from lack of understanding, Ruddy had failed to give expression to the deeper human emotions except in terms that were trite and sentimental. Only the sexually predatory Mrs Threecourt and Mrs Herriot come to life as characters. His Minnie is not so much a person as an ideal, in very much the same way as the ‘Maiden Peerless’ of his letters appears to be an idealised fantasy of the real Flo Garrard. ‘I had an experience,’ he admitted afterwards in his autobiography, ‘which, in my innocence, I mistook for the genuine motions of my Daemon … My pen took charge and I, greatly admiring, watched it write for me far into the nights.’38 The only literary merit in the Gadsbys is to be found in the verses of the closing ‘Envoi’, with its memorable refrain of ‘He travels the fastest who travels alone’. They summarise the play’s message that marriage is an obstacle to a man’s fulfilment as a man, which suggests that the play’s author had very ambivalent feelings about love and marriage.
What should have been a month of ‘acting’ in Lahore became six weeks as Kay Robinson delayed his return from his leave. He had, it seems, gone to Darjeeling for an assignation with a woman, and to Ruddy’s indignation it was this ‘strong attraction’ that had kept him there beyond the period of his leave. He eventually turned up at Lahore on 12 June, and on the following day Ruddy set off for the hills – although not to Simla, where his mother and sister were, but to Mussoorie, to spend a week with Edmonia and Alex Hill.
Mussoorie was where the Hills habitually took their summer leave. They knew the place intimately, and it is reasonable to assume that they introduced Ruddy to Charlie Wilson, the wealthiest man in Mussoorie and owner of several properties in the area, including the Hotel Charleville, where Ruddy stayed.
The episode back in December of the two Freemasons on the train had given Ruddy a starting point for a tale involving a pair of English loafers with a thirst for adventure who set out to seek their fortunes in the Indian hinterland. There were plenty of examples of European freebooters on the sub-continent whose real-life adventures Ruddy could draw on, ranging from the naval deserter George Thomas, who had ruled over part of the Punjab in the last decade of the eighteenth century, to the American mercenary Josiah Harlan, who had carved out a kingdom for himself in Afghanistan in the late 1830s. But in Mussoorie Ruddy was presented with a much more recent case: that of Charlie Wilson’s father, the legendary Frederick Wilson, also known as Rajah Wilson or as Pahari Wilson, the ‘Mountain-man’.
Described by a contemporary as ‘a sort of superior “European loafer” … whose skill as a hunter enabled him to earn more than a livelihood’, Rajah Wilson was widely believed to be a British soldier who had deserted at the time of the First Afghan War. In fact, he had served in India at that time but after being invalided home to England had returned to India to seek his fortune. According to his obituary notice which the Pioneer carried on 6 August 1883: ‘He started from Calcutta, armed with five rupees and a gun, on his long march to the Himalayas, accomplishing it successfully. There, amid the scenes he loved with passion to the last, he lived for many years by the sale of what he shot, and finally embarked on timber contracts in the forest with which he was so familiar, until he amassed a considerable fortune … Though wholly self-educated, he added to the lore of the sportsman and the naturalist contributions full of bright imagination and literary grace.’ What the obituary failed to say was that Wilson had forced himself at gunpoint on the local population of the Upper Gangotri valley, deep in the Himalayan ranges north of Mussoorie, and by the 1850s had become to all intents the local ruler, minting his own coins, taking wives and concubines from the local community and building himself a magnificent summer palace of deodar wood, hidden away in a high mountain valley beyond the Central Himalayan Range. Initially Wilson had made his living as a hunter but in the 1860s he had turned to logging the great deodar and sal forests of the foothills to supply timber for the railways, and by 1877 ‘had made so much money that it is currently believed in Masuri … that he was worth more than £150,000’.39
The Pioneer obituary also omitted any mention of the tragedy that had clouded the last years of Wilson’s life, revolving around his two younger sons, Nathaniel and Henry, whom he had left to ‘rule’ his mountain estate while he retired with his youngest wife to Mussoorie’s premier property, Astley Hall. According to local legend, Nathaniel, the elder and wilder of the two brothers, persuaded the more malleable Henry to join him in kidnapping two high-caste local women at gunpoint and carrying them back to their mountain palace. The scandal was on the point of being resolved by negotiation when Nathaniel went mad and began taking pot-shots at anyone who approached, killing some pilgrims. He was eventually seized while in a drunken stupor, and both he and his brother were then expelled from their mountain kingdom. One version of the story ends with Nathaniel Wilson dying insane as a prisoner of the Maharaja of Tehri-Garhwal, but a more plausible account has him being caught up in a flash-flood soon after his expulsion, and drowning.40
Here was a story to stir the imagination, and whether Ruddy got it direct from Charlie Wilson or at third hand, he left Mussoorie for Simla knowing that his two Freemason loafers would do as Rajah Wilson had, and carve out a kingdom for themselves in the mountains. But a more remote location than Tehri-Garhwal was required, and the story itself had to be more than a mere tale of high adventure.
10
‘Who travels the fastest’
SIMLA, ALLAHABAD AND AN ENDING, 1888–9
One may fall, but he falls by himself –
Falls by himself, with himself to blame;
One may attain, and to him is the pelf,
Loot of the city in gold or fame:
Plunder of earth shall be all his own
Who travels the fastest, and travels alone.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘L’Envoi’, from The Story of the Gadsbys, 1888
June–July 1888 marked Ruddy’s last visit to Simla, and the least enjoyable. Simla now appeared to him as ‘a land of ghosts’. Herr von Goldstein’s pleasure dome of Benmore had been sold to the Punjab Government and was in the process of being turned into a Secretariat office. The days of ‘glamour, wine and witchery’ had gone. Despite having ‘the ordered felicity of our domestic life to content me, and our queer brutal interchange of thought and work to enjoy’, Ruddy felt so alienated that both mother and sister were driven to comment. ‘It is owned that I am no longer ownable and only a visitor in the land,’ he wrote to Edmonia Hill soon after his arrival. ‘The Mother says that it is so and the Sister too and their eyes see far. “You belong to yourself” says the Mother and the Maiden says: “You don’t belong to us at any rate.”’
The main reason for this discontent was that Ruddy now knew he had to leave India for the sake of his career. ‘I must – must get away,’1 he informed Edmonia. His mind was set on what he called ‘the Scheme’, which was to leave India and make a career for himself in London, initially as a journalist before becoming a full-time writer.
George Allen was also to
blame, for he had decided to spend the summer at Mashobra, seven miles east of Simla, together with his second wife, Maud, and their growing family. To Ruddy’s ‘extreme disgust’, Allen ordered him to take over the weekly Simla letter which his mother had been writing for the Pioneer, ignoring the fact that his protégé was supposed to be on leave. Then within days came news that in Allahabad George Chesney, the editor of the Pioneer, was seriously ill with smallpox and his assistant Park also seedy – and that in Lahore Kay Robinson was down with acute dysentery. Allen held what Ruddy termed a ‘tiffin-of-war’, at which it was decided that his political correspondent, Howard Hensman, should leave at once to take over the paper in Allahabad and that Ruddy should take Hensman’s place in Simla. ‘I must put my shoulder to the wheel,’ Ruddy wrote to Edmonia Hill. ‘“We’ll give you more leave in September or October,” says Allen. “Can’t afford it,” says I, and once I quit Simla I am sure as nails that I don’t go back … I am more than ever set in my determination to go home and quit the Pi (but this is a confidence most particular). The leading paper in India is an excellent thing but there are many things better in the world and I must strike out and find them.’2
With Robinson’s recovery the editorial crisis was partially resolved, but Ruddy remained deeply enmeshed in Allen’s schemes and became increasingly resentful: ‘Allen is reiterating his promises about giving me compensatory leave later on. I don’t want it and won’t take it … I explained to him this morning that I am neither “fish, flesh, fowl nor good red herring” where I am – neither working nor on leave, and that I want to get away to some place where I can work.’
Ruddy also had a family crisis to deal with, involving Trix, who while out picnicking among the pine woods at Mashobra had confessed that her rejected suitor from the previous summer, the gloomy Captain Jack Fleming, was once more calling on her and had again begged her to marry him:
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