Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  She talked to me and told me as much about it as a woman would ever tell a man and at last the blessed tears came to her relief and she cried all among the pine-needles while I lacked words that could give her any comfort. Then she pointed out, half crying and half laughing, the uselessness of the beauty of the forest … So we agreed that never since the world began was there any sorrow like to her sorrow and hunted for raspberries till the tears were dried and our fingers blue red, and we began to steal from each other’s vines and throw pine-cones at each other’s heads as it was in the very early days. But somehow the fooling was not amusing and when Trix collapsed on a rock and said: ‘Oh how miserable I am!’ I felt that we could not play at being babies any more.3

  With his father absent and his mother down with an imagined attack of diphtheria, Ruddy felt obliged to step in. He ordered Fleming to stay away from their rented cottage – but to no avail; a fortnight later he had to admit defeat:

  ‘Only let him see me,’ said the Maiden, ‘try not to hate him so and then – if there is another quarrel it will all be over – indeed it will.’ The Mother said: ‘Let them see each other and get to understand each other and perhaps they won’t care so much’… So I trotted out and caught him and explained that while I hated him as much as ever (poor brute, he was so humble) I liked my sister’s peace of mind more and consequently he wasn’t to stay at the Club making a gibbering baboon of himself but to come down and see the maiden now and again … I always thought that the maid was so wise and sensible. But she said to me: ‘In these things I’m no wiser than anyone else – and I care for him ever so much.’ I give it up.4

  Two weeks on and Trix and Jack Fleming were once more engaged, leading her father in England to speculate, all too accurately, on their future prospects of happiness. ‘I can only hope with all my heart the child is right,’ he wrote to Edith Plowden in late August, ‘and that she will not one day when it is too late find her Fleming but a thin pasture, and sigh for other fields … He is in the Survey & his record is good – a model young man: Scotch and possessing all the virtues; but to me somewhat austere; not caring for books nor for many things for which our Trix cares intensely.’5 Right though he was to suggest that the pair were unmatched, Lockwood Kipling quite overlooked the fact that ever since Trix had joined them in Lahore in January 1884 she had lived in close quarters with her mother, a woman whose temperament was every bit as uneven as her own.

  Trix was to publish in 1891 a novel under the not entirely anonymous pseudonym of ‘Beatrix Grange’ entitled The Heart of a Maid. Set in British India, it is full of remarks about marriage as a matter of convenience rather than love, with the narrator asserting that ‘half the hasty, ill-assorted marriages that take place [in India] have for a cause the fact that the girl is not happy at home’. The maid of the title is ‘May’ and between May and her mother there is ‘very little sympathy, a result probably of their never having lived together until the girl was eighteen. When mother and daughter – comparative strangers, having scarcely met since the latter’s early childhood – are put to the test of living together, without the links of custom to bind them, disagreement, even constant quarrelling, is too often the result.’ In May’s case, two years of living with her mother are enough ‘to convince a not very strong-minded girl that marriage was the only career to look forward to’. In Trix’s case it was four and a half years.

  In late July 1888, with six months of his curtailed term of office left to complete, Lord Dufferin moved into the completed Viceregal Lodge. It was the first residence in Simla to be equipped with electric light, and when the first Viceregal ball was held there it was observed that the ladies’ gowns, so bewitching by lamp- and candle-light, now appeared distinctly shabby. The event scarcely gained a mention in the Pioneer’s weekly Simla letter, its writer having more pressing concerns on his mind. The most immediate of these was the progress of the first of A. H. Wheeler and Co.’s Indian Railway Library volumes. It was to be entitled Soldiers Three, consisting of five already published tales of ‘the lives and adventures of my esteemed friends and sometime allies Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd’, together with two more serious stories as yet unpublished: ‘With the Main Guard’ and ‘Black Jack’.

  Ruddy had by now secured a promise from George Allen that if he did leave India Allen would retain him as the Pioneer’s special correspondent in England. This was enough for him to believe that he had the financial security he needed to seek his fortune in London. ‘I go home next year with a new book or two under my arm to make my place,’ he wrote to Edmonia Hill. ‘As soon as I am fixed up with the regular papers to take my work, [with] a lien on the Pioneer for English letters which ought to be a sure prop of £200 a year, I shall rest content to be forgotten by all the sets … and to live my life in my own way.’ He had plans to revisit some of the country scenes where he had known happiness as a child, including ‘the whole of North Devon that I used to know and love,’ but then he would settle in London – ‘above all, rattling London with some place to go to every night if one cares to … to dive into London and break with all the folks I know. If all goes well I shall marry there’.6

  Whether deliberately or unconsciously, Ruddy now set about burning his bridges. ‘Simla always makes me savage,’ he wrote to his confidante in Allahabad, ‘and this year more than any other of my five seasons.’ He treated with contempt Miss Parry-Lambert, the unlovely daughter of the lovely ‘Venus Annodomini’, to whom he was reported to be engaged; he made fun of the lovely Miss Gussie Tweddell, whom his mother thought just the sort of girl he should marry, but who was unwise enough to show him some verses she had written; he was brutal to the ‘gigantic’ Mrs Beauclare, who had ‘a notion that India is improperly governed’, taking her out in a rickshaw to ‘an unfrequented path of surpassing vileness’ and encouraging her to walk, so that ‘in half an hour her boots were cut to pieces, [and] she was blowing like a grampus’; and he was even more brutal to Mrs Napier, who believed herself to be a rival to Mrs Hauksbee, calling her the bigger liar of the two because she was the elder. He also offended the Allens, penning a ‘slightly acid’ review of a play in which Mrs Maud Allen played the leading role and making no effort to disguise from his employer his determination to get away from India as soon as possible. ‘All of this is black treachery to Allen,’ he wrote to Edmonia Hill, ‘who wishes me to live and die in his service. “Journalism” sez he and, inferentially, “me for your Lord God Almighty.” “Literature” sez I and, though this does not concern him, “a divinity of my own choosing.”’7

  Praises from the highest in the land failed to move Ruddy or to curb his appetite for political baiting. One afternoon as he rode down the Mall he was joined by the Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Frederick ‘Bobs’ Roberts, who asked him what the British troops in India thought about ‘their accommodation, entertainment-rooms and the like’. Coming from the second most powerful man in India this was a remarkable compliment, and almost half a century later Kipling described the exchange as ‘the proudest moment of my young life’.8 But this was not how he felt at the time, for Sir Frederick and Lady Roberts were disliked by many of the younger members of the Simla set, chiefly on account of their imperious ways. On 31 August the Pioneer ran an editorial suggesting, ‘cautiously as a terrier drawing up to a porcupine’, that Sir Frederick Roberts’s position left him in control of a ‘vast patronage’ which was open to abuse – a polite hint that he was indulging in nepotism in making military appointments. This left the door open for Ruddy to write one of his political squibs, which appeared in the paper on the following day under the title of ‘A Job Lot’, with an additional sub-title of ‘NOT to be sung in Snowden Theatre’. The verses spoke openly of nepotism, ‘that too notorious vice’, ending with a hard-hitting, four-line chorus:

  We’ve heard it before, but we’ll drink once more,

  While the Army sniffs and sobs

  For Bobs its pride, who has lately died,

  And is now suc
ceeded by Jobs.

  This was well over the mark and, as Kipling afterwards admitted in his autobiography, caused a great deal of anger: ‘I don’t think Lord Roberts was pleased with it, but I know he was not half so annoyed as my chief proprietor.’ But as if this offence was not enough, Ruddy then compounded it by writing a second set of verses that further displeased the Commander-in-Chief, as well as angering the departing Viceroy. ‘One Viceroy Resigns’ purports to be the thoughts of Lord Dufferin in the form of an extended late-night reverie in which he broods over what advice he might give the incoming Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne. It is a sombre meditation in the free style of Robert Browning, full of arresting passages as the Viceroy seeks to put his disillusionment into words: ‘You’ll never plumb the Oriental mind, /And if you did it isn’t worth the toil.’9 It was not the thoughts put into his head that had raised the Viceroy’s temperature, however, but the invasion of his privacy. He had confided to an inner circle of friends in Simla that he proposed to publish some poems written by his mother, Helen, Countess of Gifford, to whose memory he was devoted. Ruddy referred to this in his poem, which led Lord Dufferin to accuse Alice Kipling of betraying a confidence. In fact, it was the scheming Mrs Napier, whose sour ‘Mrs Reiver’ character can be glimpsed in half a dozen of the Simla tales. But Alice was forced to write the most grovelling of apologies on her son’s behalf, explaining that she and her husband had been ‘grieved to note from time to time offences … which no cleverness, nor even genius itself, can excuse. His youth and inexperience of the world in which he does not live, are I feel sure the explanation of what no one regrets more keenly than do his parents.’10 Despite Alice’s assurances that ‘the parody will not be republished’, it was, reappearing in a revised edition of Departmental Ditties in 1890, albeit with the offending lines about the Viceroy’s mother omitted.

  If Ruddy’s obstreperousness was intended to bring an end to the state of limbo in which he had been suspended since arriving in Simla, his tactics succeeded. Following the publication of ‘A Job Lot’ he was ordered to return to Allahabad, his proprietor having conceded that it was indeed time for his star employee to move on. ‘I fancy my owners thought me safer on the road than in the chair,’ he afterwards wrote. ‘My proprietor at Allahabad had his own game to play (it brought him his well-deserved knighthood in due course) and, to some extent, my vagaries might have embarrassed him.’11 Having already agreed that Ruddy could leave India at some time in the following year, Allen now had to accept that it would be best for all parties if he departed sooner rather than later.

  When Ruddy returned in Allahabad in late September 1888 it was not to the Allens but to his new hosts, Alex and Edmonia Hill. His room at No. 1, The Bund had been taken by Howard Hensman, acting for George Chesney at the helm of the Pioneer. The Hills offered to have him, and Ruddy accepted with alacrity. At Belvidere House he was given ‘the Blue room for his study, and the guest room with the big four poster mahogany bed’.12

  Here he was able to enjoy the comforts of a family home unencumbered with family tensions, but the greatest blessing was to have the daily companionship of Edmonia Hill and her remarkably tolerant husband. ‘You shouldn’t have taken me in, dear people, and showed me what a happy home is like,’ Ruddy wrote tellingly to them soon after moving in – the Hills themselves having left Allahabad on a tour of the Satpura Hills in the Central Provinces, where Professor Hill had secondary duties to perform as a Government meteorologist. ‘Never was a graceless boy in thicker clover,’ he added. ‘I fare sumptuously on egg soup, cunning stews, roast fowl with all the liver and plantain fritters followed by coffee set upon a table handy to the blue couch, the reading lamp gently moderated thereover and my noble soul cased in yellow slippers … The servants take a wicked delight in pressing beer upon me.’13

  Quite apart from the company, Belvidere House had the inestimable advantage of being surrounded on all sides by an expanse of overgrown garden. Ruddy could breakfast every morning on the front verandah under a thatched roof supported by red sandstone pillars and look out from his study window over a garden abounding in tuberoses, balsams, sunflowers and passion flowers, with blue jays and parrots screaming in the date palms.14 Despite the snakes in the garden, it was as close to his childhood home in Bombay as he could hope to find, afterwards evoked in ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’, the tale of the mongoose who protects the little English boy Teddy from the two cobras Nag and Nagaina.

  In the event, Ruddy’s sojourn at Belvidere House was very brief – scarcely more than four months all told – and his time spent in the Hills’ company briefer still. He was now determined to leave India before the next Hot Weather, and his thoughts were increasingly focused on how he might make his way as a writer in London. In June the Saturday Review had called him ‘a born storyteller and a man of humour into the bargain’ and in September Sir William Hunter’s essay had appeared in the Academy. Buoyed up by these notices, he wrote to all the literary contacts he knew, including his former editor Stephen Wheeler, now working for the St James’s Gazette and whom he believed responsible for another favourable notice of Departmental Ditties which had appeared in that paper. He also wrote to literary figures he admired, including Walter Besant, whose novel All in a Garden Fair had made such a powerful impression on him a year earlier. Besant had helped set up the Society of Authors, founded with the express purpose of encouraging young writers and establishing international rules for copyright, so he was an obvious name to turn to for support.

  To say that Ruddy now experienced a renewal of creative energy is no exaggeration, except that the bout of activity which now began was of a different order from the episodes of almost frantic writing that had accompanied his Hot Weather crises. Now it was as if he was working against a deadline which required that every idea and scrap of plot which he carried in his head should be set down on paper before he left India. It was at Belvidere House that Ruddy poured out the quasi-autobiographical story of the ‘House of Desolation’ at Southsea in ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’. According to Edmonia Hill, the circumstances were that George Allen wanted a Christmas story that would fill a whole sheet of the Week’s News. Ruddy brooded for a while and then sat down to write. ‘It was pitiful,’ Mrs Hill afterwards wrote, ‘to see Kipling living over the experience, pouring out his soul in the story … When he was writing this he was a sorry guest, as he was in a towering rage at the recollection of those days.’15 According to Trix, the published story came as a very unwelcome Christmas present to their parents. As she told it to her brother’s first biographer, and as he subsequently reported it, ‘They tried to make Trix say it was all exaggerated and untrue, but even to comfort them she could not pretend that they had ever been happy [at Southsea].’16 This public airing of the family’s dirty linen inevitably widened the gap now growing between Ruddy and his parents.

  Over the next four months Ruddy completed some of the best of his Indian tales, the most undervalued being ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’, whose unlikely protagonists are two foul-mouthed drummer-boys, Jakin and Lew: ‘When not looked after, they smoked and drank. They swore habitually after the manner of the barrack-room; and they fought religiously once a week. Jakin had sprung from some London gutter and may or may not have passed through Dr Barnardo’s hands ere he arrived at the dignity of a drummer-boy. Lew could remember nothing but the regiment and the delight of listening to the band from his earliest years.’ The story only takes off when the boys’ regiment, nicknamed the ‘Fore and Aft’, is ordered to Afghanistan to reinforce the troops already engaged in the Second Afghan War. Its ranks are largely made up of untried men, and the realities of frontier warfare come as a shock to them:

  At the end of their third march they were disagreeably surprised by the arrival in their camp of a hammered iron slug which, fired from a steady rest at seven hundred yards, flicked out the brains of a private seated by the fire … At every march, the hidden enemy became bolder and the Regiment writhed and twisted under attacks it could not a
venge. The crowning triumph was a sudden night-rush ending in the cutting of many tent-ropes, the collapse of the sodden canvas, and a glorious knifing of the men who struggled and kicked below. It was a great deed, neatly carried out, and it shook the already shaken nerves of the Fore and Aft … Sullen, discontented, cold, savage, sick, with their uniforms dulled and unclean, the Fore and Aft joined their Brigade.

  When the regiment finally meets the Afghans in open battle the ferocity of the enemy’s charge takes the men by surprise and panic spreads through the ranks. The men turn and run, leaving the two drummer-boys behind. Tipsy on rum stolen from a soldier’s canteen, Jakin and Lew can think of nothing better to do than to start playing ‘British Grenadiers’ on fife and drum. They are soon shot down but their action shames their comrades and they regroup and counter-attack, with ‘the curses of their officers in their ears, and in their hearts the shame of open shame’. Fortunately for the regiment, the war correspondent attached to the brigade misses the action and their cowardice goes unreported.

  In writing ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’ Kipling combined three episodes of Indian military history: an incident from the days of Clive involving two Indian drummer-boys recounted in Orme’s Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan; the battle of Ahmed Khel in the Second Afghan War, where Mulvaney’s supposed ‘ould regiment’ (the 59th Foot, afterwards the East Lancashire Regiment) suffered a momentary panic; and the Black Mountain Campaign of 1888, in which his old friends from Mian Mir, the Northumberland Fusiliers, were involved. The details of battle, so scrupulously observed, came from Ruddy’s questioning of Howard Hensman and other veterans of the Second Afghan War – such as two army officers met at a dinner party in Allahabad. ‘After dinner Kipling directed the conversation to the last Afghan War,’ recalled a barrister friend. ‘The way in which he extracted the information he wanted to know of the two officers made me understand how he was able to write with such detail on subjects on which he had no personal knowledge.’17 A further source from Allahabad tells of Ruddy ‘loafing about [army] Canteens, persuading soldiers to sit and talk to him while he supplied them with all the beer their thirsty souls demanded’.18