Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  On 1 January 1889, two days after the conclusion of the Indian National Congress conference, the Pioneer carried an article entitled ‘A Study of the Congress by an Eye-Witness’, unsigned but unquestionably the work of its most waspish writer. The report dismissed the conference as a putli nautch or puppet show, mocked the delegates as unrepresentative and referred to the presence of a number of ‘half-castes’, including one ‘brown Captain’. This was unmistakably a reference to Captain Andrew Hearsey, the natural son by an Indian bibi of the late General Sir John Hearsey, famous as the man who had ridden down and disarmed Mangal Pandey, the first sepoy mutineer of 1857. Captain Hearsey had taken the courageous step of publicly supporting the Congress movement. However, he was notoriously short-tempered, and when he read the report in the Pi he stormed into the editor’s bungalow and proceeded to thrash George Chesney with a horsewhip. The office staff came to Chesney’s rescue and Hearsey was thrown out of the building. He was then charged with assault, brought before the city magistrate and sentenced to a month’s imprisonment in Naini Tal jail.

  Ruddy followed these events from the sidelines, reacting to Hearsey’s punishment with uncharitable delight but knowing also that he was partly to blame and fearful of the consequences. ‘The Native Press,’ he wrote in a note to Edmonia Hill, ‘is pointing out with great glee that I, and not Mr Chesney[,] ought to have been whacked by Hearsey. Hall tells me that the same gentleman is now in Naini [jail] maturing plans that shall sweep the Pi off the face of the earth.’23 As Ruddy feared, Captain Hearsey was not the sort of man to let things lie and on his release he sued Chesney, as editor of the Pioneer, for defamation. At this point George Allen stepped in, declaring that it was he and no one else who had written the offending article. He also initiated a cross-action against Hearsey, which led to both cases being dropped. However, the furore effectively resolved the issue of when Ruddy should quit India: it was to be in weeks rather than months.

  The Hearsey scandal came at a bad time for Ruddy, for in mid-January a fever which Edmonia Hill had been nursing since the start of the year suddenly flared up into what the doctor diagnosed as cerebral malaria, followed by pleurisy. A nurse had to be brought in and Ruddy moved out to the Club, from where he dispatched a stream of letters to Belvidere House, addressing Edmonia Hill no longer as ‘Mrs Hill’ but as ‘My Lady’. For a week Edmonia Hill was ‘deathly sick’ and ‘babbling like an idiot’ and it was another five before she was strong enough to receive visitors. Her illness happened to coincide with an outbreak of smallpox in the station and the combination of events was almost too much for Ruddy to bear. ‘The last month,’ he wrote in mid-February, ‘has been to me one long stretch of “fever an’ ague” coupled with violent sickness and mental depression, yea even to the verge of hanging myself. It was never bad enough to spoil my work or at least stop it but it put me “down in a gulf of black despair”… I wrote you two letters that were so gloomy, and suicidal in their tendencies that I tore ’em up.’

  This confession was written not to Mrs Hill but to Ruddy’s cousin Margaret Burne-Jones. It had been a year since he had last written to her and although he could no longer address her as ‘Wop’ or speak as freely as before, he still felt the need to unburden himself. ‘It nearly broke me,’ he confessed:

  You don’t know how awful it is to have a brilliant clever American woman in whose house you have lived, becoming for the time being insane. Except for the joy of her recovery, and the deep delight in proving the doctor wrong, I wouldn’t go through the past six weeks for all under Heaven … She’s hysterical and captious and exacting beyond belief but these little incidents are cheap at the price. She can do anything she darn well pleases so long as she keeps her head.

  What Ruddy also revealed in the same letter was that the date of his departure from India was now fixed. The Hills had decided that Edmonia needed a long sea voyage to recover her health and were therefore going to go home to America by easy stages by way of Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan – and they had invited Ruddy to join them. In a week’s time he would go to Lahore to say goodbye to his parents, and three weeks later would join the Hills on the quayside in Calcutta:

  On the 9th of next month the bows of my steamer ought to be pointing for Rangoon … I’ve got about a thousand pounds of my own and the Pi will take a series of letters on my wanderings. Further they will guarantee me £100 a year for the sister paper, the Civil and Military Gazette, and at the end of two years claim first refusal of my services at enhanced rates if I don’t wish to stay on in England. Also the royalty of my Plain Tales is bringing me in £300 a year … My other books are all about the country and are selling like smoke … Anyway I ought to be in blue water a month after this and if I have time to stay over a steamer or two I shall go up to Mandalay the capital of our new Burma and see all the old schoolfellows I can.

  Even though Ruddy looked forward to seeing his mother again – ‘I confess that I should like to feel her arms round me once more before I go’ – he was eager to bring the ‘tyranny’ of India to an end, ‘for I am practically fifteen years older than my age – broken down, bitter, and un[?] … It has taken the bulk of my top-hair off and I am as bald as a coot: or I shall be soon: and the gray hairs (don’t laugh) have begun to come on my temples whence I pluck them in disgust.’

  And yet, for all the hardships, he was proud of what he had achieved in his six and a half years in India:

  As your grandfather said: ‘Lord what things I lie here and remember!’ I’ve had a good time. I’ve tasted success and the beauty of money, I’ve mixed with fighters and statesmen, administrators and women who control them all, and ‘much have I seen, cities and men’. It was vivid and lively, and gloomy and savage. I’ve tried to get to know folk from the barrack room and the brothel, to the Ballroom and the Viceroy’s Council and I have in a little measure succeeded. My training has been extensive and peculiar and now I’m going to come home by long wanderings to see how it will work.24

  A week later Ruddy bade farewell to the proprietor of the Pioneer and his staff. As a parting gift, George Allen gave Ruddy six months’ pay in lieu of notice. Although relieved to see him go, he had no doubts as to the twenty-three-year-old’s literary talent and was canny enough to ensure that he continued to write for him. But not everyone on the paper thought as Allen did. William Dare, managing director of the Pioneer, told Ruddy: ‘Take it from me, you’ll never be worth more than four hundred rupees a month to anyone.’25

  On 21 February Ruddy and his bearer Kadir Baksh were reunited with their respective families in Lahore, and Ruddy’s relations with his parents, which had been strained for some months, were restored. ‘I can hardly tell you how pleased I am to find the Fambly looking so well,’ he wrote to Edmonia Hill. ‘The Pater is a young and frivolous lad by comparison with the weighed-down man I left behind me. The Mother is stronger than I have known her for years, and the child radiant in the hope of Jack’s approaching return.’ Trix and Jack Fleming were to be married in the summer and Ruddy had no great desire to witness their wedding, grumbling to Mrs Hill that Fleming had ‘hung her about with jewellry from pearl necklaces to curb-chain bangles and one – two – three engagement rings! I walked round and round her till she grew dizzy asking: “Where did you get this” and the invariable answer was: “Oh, Jack gave that to me, ages ago. Didn’t you know?” I didn’t but perceive now that there is a steady undercurrent of Jack flowing through the house.’

  What was much more to Ruddy’s liking was to find himself greeted as a friend by all and sundry in Lahore, and to have a stream of ‘horsedealers, clerks (we don’t keep babus in these parts), carpenters, coach-builders, and a whole horde of chaprassis and low folk’ turning up on the verandah to pay their respects. He called in at the offices of the CMG and found his old friend Kay Robinson fit and hearty, but uncommunicative. Ruddy had recently learned that the woman Robinson had taken to Darjeeling the previous May was in fact his newly married wife, but when he raised t
he subject Robinson refused to enlighten him: ‘I didn’t pursue the topic as it did not seem to delight him.’

  It was now the kite-flying season in the Punjab, and one morning father and son joined the local population in the streets of the Mozung District to try their hands at this most deceptive of sports, for every kite string was limed with ground glass so that it might cut through the string of other kites. ‘’Tis a most fascinating game and mysterious withal,’ he told Edmonia Hill. ‘You don’t see and cannot tell who your antagonist is. He may be a quarter of a mile away and the spoils of battle fall to a third person equally unknown to you both. Very much like life isn’t it. I am very delighted with the new pastime and this morning cut away a big white butterfly kite that deliberately challenged me and flew across a high belt of trees to catch me.’26

  Shortly before his departure Ruddy called in again at the ‘old Rag’ to say goodbye to Kay Robinson. Now he learned a little more about Robinson’s marriage: ‘Kay really is married but, being by nature a brute, he keeps his wife in Amritsar and doesn’t tell people up here.’ For reasons unknown but which may have been linked to his wife’s background Robinson was unwilling to have her with him in Lahore. ‘This is not nice,’ was Ruddy’s response. ‘Seems to me that if a man becomes possessed of a wife, no matter by what strange and accidental means, it is his duty to see that she ranks with him. His own pride ought to make him jam her down the throat of society.’ The newspaper had recently moved into new premises, so that all that remained of Ruddy’s old office was ‘the chair and table where I had sweated through those long hot nights … It all seemed so strange and so distant.’27

  On 3 March Ruddy handed over to his parents for safe keeping the tin box containing the manuscript of Mother Maturin – ‘the novel that is always being written and yet gets no furrader’.28 His motives for leaving behind what was supposed to be his great Indian novel remain unexplained. He then bade farewell to his parents and his sister, to his beloved terrier Vixen and to Kadir Baksh and the other family servants at Bikaner House, and was driven by his father in the family trap to the railway station in time to catch the evening train. Two mornings later he alighted briefly at the station platform at Allahabad, where he saw the Hills into their railway compartment and said goodbye to his old employer George Allen. After a further night in the train he and the Hills arrived in Calcutta, where on 7 March Ruddy sold the copyright of his six Indian Railway Library books to A. H. Wheeler and Co. for £200 and a four per cent royalty on all sales.29 Two days later the three travellers boarded the SS Madura, bound for Rangoon.

  11

  ‘Life and Death … and Love and Fate’

  LONDON AND FAME, 1889–91

  ‘And what,’ said Gobind one Sunday evening, ‘is your honoured craft, and by what manner of means earn you your daily bread?’

  ‘I am,’ said I, ‘a kerani – one who writes with a pen and paper, not being in the service of Government … I write on all matters that lie within my understanding, and many that do not. But chiefly I write of Life and Death, and men and women, and Love and Fate according to the measure of my ability, telling the tale through the mouths of one, two or more people.’

  Rudyard Kipling, Preface to Life’s Handicap; Being Stories of Mine Own People, 1891

  On 4 October 1889 Ruddy landed in Liverpool, accompanied by Mrs Edmonia Hill, on whom he doted, and her younger sister, Carrie Taylor, whom he professed to love. Seven months of travelling had taken him across two-thirds of the globe and had engendered a stream of jaunty articles for the Pioneer and the CMG. In Burma he had been charmed by the forwardness of the women, who had looked ‘at all the world between the eyes’; in Singapore, struck by the energy of the Chinese as compared to the Indians; in Japan, uncertain whether to class the Japanese as sahibs or Natives. From San Francisco he had continued his sight-seeing alone while Alex and Edmonia Hill went on ahead to visit their families, and the further he had travelled eastwards across the North American continent the stronger had grown his conviction that egalitarian America presented a model for the future in which the composite ‘Anglo-American-German-Jew’ would be ‘the Man of the Future’. ‘Here are Americans,’ he had enthused to his Anglo-Indian readers, ‘men ruling themselves by themselves and for themselves and their wives and their children – in peace, order and decency.’

  Ruddy had also found much to admire in American womanhood: ‘They are clever: they can talk … they are self-possessed without parting with any tenderness.’1 Indeed, so enamoured did he become of this new model woman that after two idyllic weeks spent among Edmonia Hill’s strait-laced Methodist family in Beaver, North Pennsylvania, he fell romantically in love – both with her sister Carrie, a ‘full-statured woman with the imperial eyes and the mouth of eloquence’, and with the ‘absolutely fresh, wholesome, sweet life’2 she represented. By the end of August Ruddy and Carrie Taylor had become unofficially engaged, the only obstacle to a public engagement being Professor Taylor’s qualms about Ruddy’s religious affiliations. When the time came for Ruddy to begin the last stage of his travels and return to England, both sisters chose to accompany him. This curious arrangement came about because Professor Hill had gone on ahead to resume his teaching duties at Allahabad, leaving Edmonia to follow at a more leisurely pace together with her sister, who had agreed to join her in India as a companion.

  During his progress across the Pacific and America Ruddy had received further intimations of literary success: a pirated American edition of Plain Tales from the Hills displayed in a bookshop in Yokohama; requests for interviews from no fewer than four reporters when he disembarked at San Francisco; a month later, news of a ‘splendid review’ of Soldiers Three in the Spectator, together with a fan letter from the essayist and critic John Addington Symonds also praising Soldiers Three; finally, in September, favourable reviews of In Black and White and Wee Willie Winkie in the World and the Saturday Review, the latter describing their author as ‘a new writer, new to the English as distinct from the Anglo-Indian public. He is so clever, so fresh, and so cynical that he must be young.’ There had also been a memorable put-down from the New York publishers Harper and Brothers when the firm’s head, Henry Harper, turned Ruddy away with the remark: ‘Young man, this house is devoted to the production of literature.’3

  After revisiting his Aunt Georgie and her family at The Grange, the Three Dear Ladies in Warwick Gardens – now very old – and the lesser Macdonald aunts and uncles living in London, Ruddy set about finding lodgings in the West End with the help of the Taylor sisters and a male Taylor cousin who had come along in the role of a chaperone. They settled on a suite of unfurnished rooms on the fifth floor of Embankment Chambers, 19 Villiers Street, between the Strand and the Thames, which they then set about furnishing in as exotic a style as Ruddy could afford. The location was a district ‘primitive and passionate in its habits and population’ – in plainer terms, infested with prostitutes and brothels – and was probably chosen because of its close proximity to the Pioneer’s London offices in the Strand.

  In the hurly-burly of London the tendresse that Ruddy and Carrie Taylor had evidently felt for each in the pastoral landscape of northern Pennsylvania began to wane, and a point must surely have been reached when all three parties became aware that Ruddy cared much more for Edmonia than he did for Carrie – and that the unmarried sister’s role was essentially that of a stalking-horse. On 25 October Ruddy and the Taylor cousin saw the two sisters off at the Royal Albert Docks. It was an awkward parting for all and an agonising one for Ruddy, as he continued to keep up the pretence that it was Carrie who had his affections. ‘Verily dear people,’ he wrote to both sisters after returning to his rooms that evening. ‘When your faces had gone into white blobs and the last twirl of Mrs Hill’s boa was indistinct (or else there was something in my eyes) my empty tummy heaved within me and there fell upon me a fine and gilt edged misery.’ But as he continued to write his letter became increasingly directed at Edmonia alone:

&
nbsp; I wasn’t half so wretched when I went away by myself 7 years ago [i.e. from England to India in 1882]. Nor indeed was there so much reason, for you have made my life happy and delightful for two years – given me help, sympathy, encouragement and council [sic] and a host of things of which it is easy to think but not so easy to write down in black and white … I’m miserable and a perfectly illogical soul within is crying out ‘Come back to me, come back to me!’ as tho’ I were a little child. I believe I am and a deed fool too. But you go on and have a good time and take care o’ Miss Taylor who is going to take care of you and remember that I am always and always