The Man Who Would Be King: Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling

by Rudyard Kipling

  He made no explanation. He did not refer to orders or disorders. He simply adjourned the House till six that evening. And the House adjourned – some of it nearly on all fours.

  I was not correct when I said that the Speaker was the only man who did not laugh. Woodhouse was beside me all the time. His face was set and quite white – as white, they told me, as Sir Thomas Ingell’s when he went, by request, to a private interview with his Chief Whip.34

  THE HOUSE SURGEON

  On an evening after Easter Day, I sat at a table in a homeward-bound steamer’s smoking-room, where half-a-dozen of us told ghost stories. As our party broke up, a man, playing Patience in the next alcove, said to me: ‘I didn’t quite catch the end of that last story about the Curse on the family’s first-born.’1

  ‘It turned out to be drains,’ I explained. ‘As soon as new ones were put into the house the Curse was lifted, I believe. I never knew the people myself.’

  ‘Ah! I’ve had my drains up twice; I’m on gravel too.’

  ‘You don’t mean to say you’ve a ghost in your house? Why didn’t you join our party?’

  ‘Any more orders, gentlemen, before the bar closes?’ the steward interrupted.

  ‘Sit down again and have one with me,’ said the Patience player. ‘No, it isn’t a ghost. Our trouble is more depression than anything else.’

  ‘How interesting! Then it’s nothing anyone can see?’

  ‘It’s – it’s nothing worse than a little depression. And the odd part is that there hasn’t been a death in the house since it was built – in 1863. The lawyer said so. That decided me – my good lady, rather – and he made me pay an extra thousand for it.’

  ‘How curious. Unusual, too!’ I said.

  ‘Yes, ain’t it? It was built for three sisters – Moultrie was the name – three old maids. They all lived together; the eldest owned it. I bought it from her lawyer a few years ago, and if I’ve spent a pound on the place first and last, I must have spent five thousand. Electric light, new servants’ wing, garden – all that sort of thing. A man and his family ought to be happy after so much expense, ain’t it?’ He looked at me through the bottom of his glass.

  ‘Does it affect your family much?’

  ‘My good lady – she’s a Greek by the way – and myself are middle-aged. We can bear up against depression; but it’s hard on my little girl. I say little; but she’s twenty. We send her visiting to escape it. She almost lived at hotels and hydros last year, but that isn’t pleasant for her. She used to be a canary – a perfect canary – always singing. You ought to hear her. She doesn’t sing now. That sort of thing’s unwholesome for the young, ain’t it?’

  ‘Can’t you get rid of the place?’ I suggested.

  ‘Not except at a sacrifice, and we are fond of it. Just suits us three. We’d love it if we were allowed.’

  ‘What do you mean by not being allowed?’

  ‘I mean because of the depression. It spoils everything.’

  ‘What’s it like exactly?’

  ‘I couldn’t very well explain. It must be seen to be appreciated, as the auctioneers say. Now, I was much impressed by the story you were telling just now.’

  ‘It wasn’t true,’ I said.

  ‘My tale is true. If you would do me the pleasure to come down and spend a night at my little place, you’d learn more than you would if I talked till morning. Very likely ’twouldn’t touch your good self at all. You might be – immune, ain’t it? On the other hand, if this influenza-influence does happen to affect you, why, I think it will be an experience.’

  While he talked he gave me his card, and I read his name was L. Maxwell M‘Leod, Esq., of Holmescroft. A City address was tucked away in a corner.

  ‘My business,’ he added, ‘used to be furs. If you are interested in furs – I’ve given thirty years of my life to ’em.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ I murmured.

  ‘Far from it, I assure you. I can meet you next Saturday afternoon anywhere in London you choose to name, and I’ll be only too happy to motor you down. It ought to be a delightful run at this time of year – the rhododendrons will be out. I mean it. You don’t know how truly I mean it. Very probably – it won’t affect you at all. And – I think I may say I have the finest collection of narwhal tusks in the world. All the best skins and horns have to go through London, and L. Maxwell M‘Leod, he knows where they come from, and where they go to. That’s his business.’

  For the rest of the voyage up-Channel Mr M‘Leod talked to me of the assembling, preparation, and sale of the rarer furs; and told me things about the manufacture of fur-lined coats which quite shocked me. Somehow or other, when we landed on Wednesday, I found myself pledged to spend that week-end with him at Holmescroft.

  On Saturday he met me with a well-groomed motor, and ran me out in an hour and a half to an exclusive residential district of dustless roads and elegantly designed country villas, each standing in from three to five acres of perfectly appointed land. He told me land was selling at eight hundred pounds the acre, and the new golf links, whose Queen Anne pavilion2 we passed, had cost nearly twenty-four thousand pounds to create.

  Holmescroft was a large, two-storied, low, creeper-covered residence. A veranda at the south side gave on to a garden and two tennis courts, separated by a tasteful iron fence from a most park-like meadow of five or six acres, where two Jersey cows grazed. Tea was ready in the shade of a promising copper beech, and I could see groups on the lawn of young men and maidens appropriately clothed, playing lawn tennis in the sunshine.

  ‘A pretty scene, ain’t it?’ said Mr M‘Leod. ‘My good lady’s sitting under the tree, and that’s my little girl in pink on the far court. But I’ll take you to your room, and you can see ’em all later.’

  He led me through a wide parquet-floored hall furnished in pale lemon, with huge cloisonné3 vases, an ebonised and gold grand piano, and banks of pot flowers in Benares brass bowls, up a pale oak staircase to a spacious landing, where there was a green velvet settee trimmed with silver. The blinds were down, and the light lay in parallel lines on the floors.

  He showed me my room, saying cheerfully: ‘You may be a little tired. One often is without knowing it after a run through traffic. Don’t come down till you feel quite restored. We shall all be in the garden.’

  My room was rather close, and smelt of perfumed soap. I threw up the window at once, but it opened so close to the floor and worked so clumsily that I came within an ace of pitching out, where I should certainly have ruined a rather lopsided laburnum below. As I set about washing off the journey’s dust, I began to feel a little tired. But, I reflected, I had not come down here in this weather and among these new surroundings to be depressed, so I began to whistle.

  And it was just then that I was aware of a little grey shadow, as it might have been a snowflake seen against the light, floating at an immense distance in the background of my brain. It annoyed me, and I shook my head to get rid of it. Then my brain telegraphed that it was the forerunner of a swift-striding gloom which there was yet time to escape if I would force my thoughts away from it, as a man leaping for life forces his body forward and away from the fall of a wall. But the gloom overtook me before I could take in the meaning of the message. I moved toward the bed, every nerve already aching with the foreknowledge of the pain that was to be dealt it, and sat down, while my amazed and angry soul dropped, gulf by gulf, into that Horror of great darkness4 which is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as auctioneers say, must be experienced to be appreciated.

  Despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear after fear, each causing their distinct and separate woe, packed in upon me for an unrecorded length of time, until at last they blurred together, and I heard a click in my brain like the click in the ear when one descends in a diving-bell,5 and I knew that the pressures were equalised within and without, and that, for the moment, the worst was at an end. But I knew also that at any moment the darkness might come down anew; and while I dwelt o
n this speculation precisely as a man torments a raging tooth with his tongue, it ebbed away into the little grey shadow on the brain of its first coming, and once more I heard my brain, which knew what would recur, telegraph to every quarter for help, release, or diversion.

  The door opened, and M‘Leod reappeared. I thanked him politely, saying I was charmed with my room, anxious to meet Mrs M’Leod, much refreshed with my wash, and so on and so forth. Beyond a little stickiness at the corners of my mouth, it seemed to me that I was managing my words admirably, the while that I myself cowered at the bottom of unclimbable pits. M‘Leod laid his hand on my shoulder, and said: ‘You’ve got it now already, ain’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘it’s making me sick!’

  ‘It will pass off when you come outside. I give you my word it will then pass off. Come!’

  I shambled out behind him, and wiped my forehead in the hall.

  ‘You mustn’t mind,’ he said. ‘I expect the run tired you. My good lady is sitting there under the copper beech.’

  She was a fat woman in an apricot-coloured gown, with a heavily powdered face, against which her black long-lashed eyes showed like currants in dough. I was introduced to many fine ladies and gentlemen of those parts. Magnificently appointed landaus and covered motors swept in and out of the drive, and the air was gay with the merry outcries of the tennis-players.

  As twilight drew on they all went away, and I was left alone with Mr and Mrs M‘Leod, while tall men-servants and maid-servants took away the tennis and tea things. Miss M‘Leod had walked a little down the drive with a light-haired young man, who apparently knew everything about every South American railway stock. He had told me at tea that these were the days of financial specialisation.

  ‘I think it went off beautifully, my dear,’ said Mr M‘Leod to his wife; and to me: ‘You feel all right now, ain’t it? Of course you do.’

  Mrs M‘Leod surged across the gravel. Her husband skipped nimbly before her into the south veranda, turned a switch, and all Holmescroft was flooded with light.

  ‘You can do that from your room also,’ he said as they went in. ‘There is something in money, ain’t it?’

  Miss M‘Leod came up behind me in the dusk. ‘We have not yet been introduced,’ she said, ‘but I suppose you are staying the night?’

  ‘Your father was kind enough to ask me,’ I replied.

  She nodded. ‘Yes, I know; and you know too, don’t you? I saw your face when you came to shake hands with mamma. You felt the depression very soon? It is simply frightful in that bedroom sometimes. What do you think it is – bewitchment? In Greece, where I was a little girl, it might have been; but not in England, do you think? Or do you?’

  ‘I don’t know what to think,’ I replied. ‘I never felt anything like it. Does it happen often?’

  ‘Yes, sometimes. It comes and goes.’

  ‘Pleasant!’ I said, as we walked up and down the gravel at the lawn edge. ‘What has been your experience of it?’

  ‘That is difficult to say, but – sometimes that – that depression is like as it were’ – she gesticulated in most un-English fashion – ‘a light. Yes, like a light turned into a room – only a light of blackness, do you understand? – into a happy room. For sometimes we are so happy, all we three, – so very happy. Then this blackness, it is turned on us just like – ah, I know what I mean now – like the head-lamp of a motor, and we are eclipsed. And there is another thing –’

  The dressing-gong roared,6 and we entered the overlighted hall. My dressing was a brisk athletic performance, varied with outbursts of song – careful attention paid to articulation and expression. But nothing happened. As I hurried downstairs, I thanked Heaven that nothing had happened.

  Dinner was served breakfast-fashion; the dishes were placed on the sideboard over heaters, and we helped ourselves.

  ‘We always do this when we are alone, so we talk better,’ said Mr M‘Leod.

  ‘And we are always alone,’ said the daughter.

  ‘Cheer up, Thea. It will all come right,’ he insisted.

  ‘No, papa.’ She shook her dark head. ‘Nothing is right while it comes.’

  ‘It is nothing that we ourselves have ever done in our lives – that I will swear to you,’ said Mrs M‘Leod suddenly. ‘And we have changed our servants several times. So we know it is not them.’

  ‘Never mind. Let us enjoy ourselves while we can,’ said Mr M‘Leod, opening the champagne.

  But we did not enjoy ourselves. The talk failed. There were long silences.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, for I thought someone at my elbow was about to speak.

  ‘Ah! That is the other thing!’ said Miss M‘Leod. Her mother groaned.

  We were silent again, and, in a few seconds it must have been, a live grief beyond words – not ghostly dread or horror, but aching, helpless grief – overwhelmed us, each, I felt, according to his or her nature, and held steady like the beam of a burning-glass. Behind that pain I was conscious there was a desire on somebody’s part to explain something on which some tremendously important issue hung.

  Meantime I rolled bread pills and remembered my sins; M‘Leod considered his own reflection in a spoon; his wife seemed to be praying, and the girl fidgeted desperately with hands and feet till the darkness passed on – as though the malignant rays of a burning-glass had been shifted from us.

  ‘There,’ said Miss M‘Leod, half rising. ‘Now you see what makes a happy home. Oh, sell it – sell it, father mine, and let us go away!’

  ‘But I’ve spent thousands on it. You shall go to Harrogate next week, Thea dear.’

  ‘I’m only just back from hotels. I am so tired of packing.’

  ‘Cheer up, Thea. It is over. You know it does not often come here twice in the same night. I think we shall dare now to be comfortable.’

  He lifted a dish-cover, and helped his wife and daughter. His face was lined and fallen like an old man’s after a debauch, but his hand did not shake, and his voice was clear. As he worked to restore us by speech and action, he reminded me of a grey-muzzled collie herding demoralised sheep.

  After dinner we sat round the dining-room fire – the drawing-room might have been under the Shadow for aught we knew – talking with the intimacy of gipsies by the wayside, or of wounded comparing notes after a skirmish. By eleven o’clock the three between them had given me every name and detail they could recall that in any way bore on the house, and what they knew of its history.

  We went to bed in a fortifying blaze of electric light. My one fear was that the blasting gust of depression would return – the surest way, of course, to bring it. I lay awake till dawn, breathing quickly and sweating lightly, beneath what De Quincey inadequately describes as ‘the oppression of inexpiable guilt’.7 Now as soon as the lovely day was broken, I fell into the most terrible of all dreams – that joyous one in which all past evil has not only been wiped out of our lives, but has never been committed; and in the very bliss of our assured innocence, before our loves shriek and change countenance, we wake to the day we have earned.

  It was a coolish morning, but we preferred to breakfast in the south veranda. The forenoon we spent in the garden, pretending to play games that come out of boxes, such as croquet and clock-golf. But most of the time we drew together and talked. The young man who knew all about South American railways took Miss M‘Leod for a walk in the afternoon, and at five M‘Leod thoughtfully whirled us all up to dine in town.

  ‘Now, don’t say you will tell the Psychological Society, and that you will come again,’ said Miss M‘Leod, as we parted. ‘Because I know you will not.’

  ‘You should not say that,’ said her mother. ‘You should say, “Goodbye, Mr Perseus. Come again.” ’

  ‘Not him!’ the girl cried. ‘He has seen the Medusa’s head!’8

  Looking at myself in the restaurant’s mirrors, it seemed to me that I had not much benefited by my week-end. Next morning I wrote out all my Holmescroft notes at fullest
length, in the hope that by so doing I could put it all behind me. But the experience worked on my mind, as they say certain imperfectly understood rays work on the body.

  I am less calculated to make a Sherlock Holmes than any man I know, for I lack both method and patience, yet the idea of following up the trouble to its source fascinated me. I had no theory to go on, except a vague idea that I had come between two poles of a discharge, and had taken a shock meant for someone else. This was followed by a feeling of intense irritation. I waited cautiously on myself, expecting to be overtaken by horror of the supernatural, but my self persisted in being humanly indignant, exactly as though it had been the victim of a practical joke. It was in great pains and upheavals – that I felt in every fibre – but its dominant idea, to put it coarsely, was to get back a bit of its own. By this I knew that I might go forward if I could find the way.

  After a few days it occurred to me to go to the office of Mr J. M. M. Baxter – the solicitor who had sold Holmescroft to M‘Leod. I explained I had some notion of buying the place. Would he act for me in the matter?

  Mr Baxter, a large, greyish, throaty-voiced man, showed no enthusiasm. ‘I sold it to Mr M‘Leod,’ he said. ‘It ’ud scarcely do for me to start on the running-down tack now. But I can recommend –’

  ‘I know he’s asking an awful price,’ I interrupted, ‘and atop of it he wants an extra thousand for what he calls your clean bill of health.’

  Mr Baxter sat up in his chair. I had all his attention.