“The roof-tops are crammed with men, women, and children; and the air is full of undistinguishable noises. They are restless in the City of Dreadful Night; and small wonder. The marvel is that they can even breathe. If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they are almost as uneasy as a daylight crowd; but the tumult is subdued. Everywhere, in the strong light, you can watch sleepers turning to and fro, shifting their beds and again resettling them. In the pit-like courtyards of the houses there is the same movement.
“The pitiless Moon shows it all. Shows, too, the plains outside the city, and here and there a hand’s-breadth of the Ravee without the walls. Shows lastly, a splash of glittering silver on a house-top almost directly below the mosque Minar. Some poor soul has risen to throw a jar of water over his fevered body; the tinkle of the falling water strikes faintly on the ear. Two or three other men, in far-off corners of the City of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the water flashes like heliographic signals.… Still the unrestful noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat, and of a people seeking in vain for rest. It is only the lower-class women who sleep on the house-tops. What must the torment be in the latticed zenanas, where a few lamps are still twinkling? There are footfalls in the court below. It is the Muezzin — faithful minister; but he ought to have been here an hour ago to tell the Faithful that prayer is better than sleep — the sleep that will not come to the city.
“The Muezzin fumbles for a moment with the door of one of the Minars, disappears awhile, and a bull-like roar — a magnificent bass thunder — tells that he has reached the top of the Minar. They must hear the cry to the banks of the shrunken Ravee itself! Even across the courtyard it is almost overpowering. The cloud drifts by and shows him outlined black against the sky, hands laid upon his ears, and broad chest heaving with the play of his lungs — ’Allah ho Akbar’; then a pause while another Muezzin somewhere in the direction of the Golden Temple takes up the call — ’Allah ho Akbar.’ Again and again; four times in all; and from the bedsteads a dozen men have risen up already. — ’I bear witness that there is no God by God.’”
* * *
“Several weeks of darkness pass after this. For the Moon has gone out. The very dogs are still, and I watch for the first light of the dawn before making my way homeward. Again the noise of shuffling feet. The morning call is about to begin, and my nightwatch is over. ‘Allah ho Akbar! Allah ho Akbar!’ The east grows grey, and presently saffron; the dawn wind comes up as though the Muezzin had summoned it; and, as one man, the City of Dreadful Night rises from its bed and turns its face towards the dawning day.…
“‘Will the Sahib, out of his kindness, make room?’ What is it? Something borne on men’s shoulders comes by in the half-light, and I stand back. A woman’s corpse going down to the burning-ghat, and a bystander says, ‘She died at midnight from the heat.’”
This passage may stand as a fair example of Mr Kipling’s method of dealing with India. It is an able piece of descriptive writing. It is marked by a conscious and deliberate resolve that the “effect” shall be made. It shows us the Indian city from a high distance, as it appeared to an observer with a knack for vividly delivering his impressions. It is in no sense an inspired wrestle with the reality of India; and in that it is typical. Mr Kipling has never claimed to grasp or interpret his Indian theme. He has stood away almost ostentatiously from the material he was exploiting.
It is indeed the chief merit of his Indian tales that he admits himself to be no more, so far as India is concerned, than an adventurer making the literary most of his adventure. He has at any rate the sensibility to be conscious that often he is in the position of a tripper before the Sphinx. His tales are thrilled with respect and a sense of India’s power. She it is who wipes the lips of Aurelian McGoggin, who flouts the Greatest of All the Viceroys, humbles the Legal Member of the Supreme Legislative Council, and drives the lonely white intruder to illusion and death. She is indifferent to every conqueror. She feeds her multitudes like a mother; and then suddenly her bounty dries and there is famine and pestilence. Always she is a confronting Presence dwarfing to one height masters and slaves. Mr Kipling has followed this Presence as Browning’s poet followed a more familiar quest:
“Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune —
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! She goes out as I enter.”
It is a lawful adventure, and for some it is an absolute duty, to follow and challenge the Presence in word and deed. Englishmen who live in her shadow have sometimes for their honour to grasp and defy her; to assume that they are bound to question her authority. India for all her unknown terror has to be wrestled with for the blessing that England requires upon the labour of the English. Though the Gods of India are sacred, the devils of India, filthy and lawless, must be driven out. When India put the mark of the beast upon Fleete the powers of darkness had of necessity to be brought to heel, and this story may be read as a parable. The mark of the beast, wherever it may appear, is the Imperial concern of the English in India.
But a warning enters here. Mr Kipling, celebrating Imperial India, has shown us the English at close war with the India of black magic and secret murder, of cruelty and fear. But he has balanced the account. There is another set of stories, showing us how the white man comes to disaster, who, not content with his exact and simple duty, insolently overleaps the breach between East and West — the breach which Mr Kipling himself so scrupulously observes. There was Trajego:
“He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the second. He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again.”
His story is entitled Beyond the Pale, and is to be found among Plain Tales from the Hills. There is also The Man Who Would Be King. He, too, neglected the barriers. India may be ruled by the resolute and challenged by the brave; but India may never be embraced.
India, who strikes out of a brazen sky; who poisons with her infected breath and is served to the death without reward; who physically cows her people with dust and fever and heat, and is possessed with devils who must be pacified; where successive civilisations have left their bones upon the soil and a hundred religions have decayed, leaving the old air heavy with exhalations — this India slowly takes shape in Mr Kipling’s native stories. Her physical immensity and pressure is felt in stories like The End of the Passage and William the Conqueror. Her sleepless tyranny, which has made men intricate and incalculable, driving them to subterranean ways of thought and fancy, rules in every page of a tale like The Return of Imray. Imray was an amiable Englishman who incautiously patted the head of his servant’s child. Bahadur Khan speaks of it thus to Strickland of the Police:
“‘Walking among us, his servants, he cast his eyes upon my child who was four years old. Him he bewitched, and in ten days he died of the fever, my child!’
“‘What said Imray Sahib?’
“‘He said he was a handsome child and patted him on the head; wherefore my child died. Wherefore I killed Imray Sahib in the twilight, when he had come, and was sleeping. Wherefore I dragged him up into the roof-beams and made all fast behind him — the Heaven-born knows all things. I am the servant of the Heaven-born.… Be it remembered that the Sahib’s shirts are correctly enumerated, and that there is an extra piece of soap in his wash-basin. My child was bewitched and I slew the wizard.’”
There is here just that blend of simplicity and incalculable darkness found in all Mr Kipling’s native tales. If the premises of life in India are tortuous, conduct and reasoning are as naïvely innocent as a problem in geometry.
It follows that, when the devils are out of the story, no story breathes more delightfully of Eden than a story of the East. The white side of the black story of Imray Sahib is shown in Kim, and in all the hints and small studies for Kim that preceded Mr Kipling’s best of all Indian tales.
Here, however, we approach Kim merely as a tale of India — as a link artfully used by Mr Kipling to connect and pass in review the whole pageant of Imperial India as it is revealed to Western eyes — priests, peasants, soldiers, civilians, people of the plains and hills, women of the latticed palanquin and the bazaar, Hindu and Mohammedan, Afghan and Bengali. The picture of the Grand Trunk Road in Kim is an almost unsurpassed piece of descriptive writing. The diversity of the picture dazzles and bewilders us at first. Then out of all this diversity there gradually comes a conviction that fundamentally India is unimaginably simple at heart in spite of her medley of religions and conquests and races; that it is precisely this simplicity which baffles the intruder. There is the simplicity of Bahadur Khan, whose child was bewitched: therefore he killed Imray Sahib and hid his body behind the ceiling cloth. There is the simplicity of the hunter of Daoud Shah, whose house was dishonoured: therefore he killed his wife and went upon the trail of her seducer. There is the simplicity of men who starve and are burnt with the sun: therefore they deprecate the wrath of devils and put food in the beggar’s bowl. There is, above all, the simplicity of clean hunger, thirst, adventure, piety, friendliness and love that threads the whole story of the Lama and his Chela.
Kim is one of the few really beautiful stories in modern literature. The brain and fancy of thousands of readers to-day are richer and sweeter by that tale of the Master and his Friend of All the World. We would not leave him and his Wheel of Things, the River he sought in simple faith, the trust he had in the charity of men, the message that bade him seek release in Nirvana from the importunity of life quaintly warring with instinctive gestures of delight and sympathy with all that made life precious — we would not leave this exquisite story so soon, were it not that it brings forward the imperishable side of Mr Kipling’s work to which we shall have shortly to return. Kim bridges the gap between the Indian stories and The Jungle Book, which means that Kim is all but the top of Mr Kipling’s achievement.
V
SOLDIERS THREE
Mr Kipling’s three soldiers — Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd — are a literary tradition. They are the Horatii and the Curatii, the three Musketeers; Og, Gog and Magog; Captains Fluellin, Macmorris and Jamy; Bardolph, Pistol and Nym. That Kipling’s soldiers three are a literary tradition is significant of their quality and rank as part of their author’s achievement. They belong rather to the efficient literary workman who wrote the Simla tales than to the inspired author of the Jungle books. Though we have run from the House of Suddhu to the barrack-yard, we have not yet lost sight of Mr Kipling, decorator and colourman in words. We shall find him conspicuously at work upon Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd. Where, at first, he seems most closely to rub sleeves with the raw stuff of life we shall find him most aloof, most deliberately an artificer. Mr Kipling has seemed to the judicious, who have duly grieved, to be in his soldier tales throwing all crafty scruples to the winds in order that he may the more joyfully indulge a natural genius for ferocity. Mr Kipling’s soldiers are regarded as an instance of his love for low company, of his readiness to sacrifice aesthetic beauty to vulgar truth.
This is quite the wrong direction from which to approach Mr Kipling’s soldier tales. Mr Kipling’s ferocity on paper is not to be explained as the result of a natural delight in violence and blood. On the contrary, it is distinctively a literary ferocity — the ferocity, not of a man who has killed people, but of a man who sits down and conscientiously tries to imagine what it is like to kill people. It is essentially the same kind of ferocity in imaginative fiction as the ferocity of Nietzsche in lyrical philosophy or of Malthus in speculative politics. When Mr Kipling talks of men carved in battle to the nasty noise of beef-cutting upon the block, or of men falling over like the rattle of fire-irons in the fender and the grunt of a pole-axed ox, or of a hot encounter between two combatants wherein one of them after feeling for his opponent’s eyes finds it necessary to wipe his thumb on his trousers, or of gun wheels greasy from contact with a late gunner — when Mr Kipling writes like this, we admit that his pages are disagreeable. But let us be clear as to the reason. These things are disagreeable, not because they are horrible fact, but because they are deliberate fiction. We feel that these things have been written, not from inspired impulse, but by taking careful thought. Here, clearly, is a writer who writes of war, not because he is by nature full of pugnacity, or necessarily loosed from hell to speak of horrors, but because war is a good “subject” with opportunities for effective treatment.
It is incorrect to say that Mr Kipling naturally delights in savage war. He has been accused of a positive gusto for knives and bayonets, for redly dripping steel and spattered flesh. The gusto must be confessed; but it is not a gusto for the subject. It is the skilled craftsman’s gusto for doing things thoroughly and effectively. Mr Kipling cannot conceal his delight in his competency to make war as nasty as Zola or Tolstoi have made it. But this has nothing to do with a delight in war. Professors have gloried in blood and iron who would probably faint away in the nice, clean operating theatre of a London hospital. Philosophers who cannot run upstairs have preached the survival of the physically fittest. The politest of Roman poets has felicitously described how the two halves of a warrior’s head fell to right and left of his vertebral column. Mr Kipling’s savagery is of this excessively cultivated kind. It is not atavism or a sinister resolution to stand in the way of progress and gentility. Mr Kipling’s warrior tales, in fact, allow us clearly to realise that Mr Kipling’s real inspiration and interest is far away from the battle-field and the barrack. They are the kind of battle story which is usually written by sedentary poets who live in the country and are fond of children. Only they are the very best of their kind.
Mr Kipling’s study of the professional soldier is best observed in Private Ortheris. Mulvaney is more popular, but Mulvaney in no sense belongs to Mr Kipling. He is the stage Irishman of the old Adelphi and the hero of many tales by Lever and Marryat. He is as purely a convention of the days of Mr Kipling’s youth as are Mrs Hawksbee and the Simla ladies. His chief importance lies in the opportunities he gives Mr Kipling for indulging his joyful gift for pure farce. Krishna Mulvaney and My Lord the Elephant are farce of the first quality, whose merit liberally covers the charge that their hero is of no human importance. Ortheris is in rather a different case. He has just that air of being authentic which is needed for an anecdote or narrative. He is not a profound and original document in human nature. There is no such document in any one of Mr Kipling’s books. But he stands well erect among the professional soldiers of literature.
We will take one look at Private Ortheris at work:
“Ortheris suddenly rose to his knees, his rifle at his shoulder, and peered across the valley in the clear afternoon light. His chin cuddled the stock, and there was a twitching of the muscles of the right cheek as he sighted; Private Stanley Ortheris was engaged on his business. A speck of white crawled up the watercourse.
“‘See that beggar?… Got ‘im.’
“Seven hundred yards away, and a full two hundred down the hillside, the deserter of the Aurangabadis pitched forward, rolled down a red rock, and lay very still, with his face in a clump of blue gentians, while a big raven flapped out of the pine wood to make investigation.
“‘That’s a clean
shot, little man,’ said Mulvaney.
“Learoyd thoughtfully watched the smoke clear away. ‘Happen there was a lass tewed up wi’ him, too,’ said he.
“Ortheris did not reply. He was staring across the valley, with the smile of the artist who looks on the completed work.”
This passage has been quoted against Mr Kipling as evidence of his inhuman delight in the hunting of man. If we look at it closely we shall find (1) an obvious delight in Ortheris as a professional expert who knows his business, the same delight which we find in Mr Hinchcliffe the engineer or in Dick Heldar the painter, and (2) the extremely self-conscious and cold-blooded effort of a competent author to write like a professional soldier, and (3) the intrusion of a born sentimentalist in Learoyd’s little touch of feeling at the close.
The War Office book of infantry training contains some very curt and calm directions for getting a “good point” in bayonet exercise. The bayonet has to be correctly driven in, left in the enemy for a reasonable time, and extracted with a minimum of effort to the practitioner and a maximum of damage to the subject. Disabling the enemy in war is a professional and technical matter, and Mr Kipling is always able to be enthusiastic when things are beginning to be technical. Whether it be sighting a deserter at seven hundred yards, painting a charge of horse, writing what Dr Johnson would describe as the “most poetical paragraph in the English language,” or building a bridge over the Ganges, Mr Kipling is ready to be interested so long as the workman is competent, and the work of a highly skilled and special nature. Naturally, therefore, Mr Kipling has succeeded in getting very near to the professional view of soldiering. All Mr Kipling’s soldiers take their soldiering as men of business. This was what so terribly astonished and interested Cleever when he met the Infant and heard that after he had killed a man he had felt thirsty and “wanted a smoke too”; and Cleever has been followed in his astonishment by many of Mr Kipling’s literary critics.
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 975