If

by Christopher Benfey

  Everything about the wedding, following so closely on the heels of the funeral, struck the participants as strange. Its shocking haste, in particular, took everyone by surprise. Kipling had been in London for barely a week when the wedding was held, at All Souls Church on Langham Place, on January 18. If there had been an understanding between Kipling and Carrie, reached before his departure for the South Seas, the couple had kept it a secret even from their closest friends. Was there a long-simmering romance, hidden to all? Or had Wolcott Balestier, dying in Dresden, exacted a deathbed promise from his sister to marry his best friend?

  The wedding was more like an extension of Balestier’s burial than a reprieve from it. Carrie’s mother and sister were laid up with influenza; so were Kipling’s aunts, Georgiana and Agnes, the wives of the distinguished painters Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter, respectively. It is probably just as well that Kipling’s parents, back in India, did not attend, since upon meeting Carrie on an earlier visit to London they had been unimpressed. Kipling’s father, echoing James’s assessment of her “manly” emotions, had said that strong-willed Carrie “would have made a good man.” Gosse attended and so did Heinemann, arriving late with a bouquet of flowers.

  It was left to Henry James to give the bride away—“a queer office for me to perform,” as he remarked. The whole occasion, as James summed it up, was yet another indication of what he called “the ubiquity of the American girl.” In preparation for his honeymoon, Kipling hurriedly changed the pronouns in the love poem that he had written for Balestier. He dedicated “The Long Trail” to Carrie instead, addressing her as “Dear Lass” rather than “Dear Lad.”

  On February 2, the Kiplings left London on the first leg of their projected around-the-world honeymoon. Four imposing men had loyally congregated to wish them farewell: Henry James, Edmund Gosse, William Heinemann, and Bram Stoker. With Carrie’s sister, Josephine, and their mother, they then boarded the SS Teutonic in Liverpool.

  “I saw the Rudyard Kiplings off by the Teutonic the other day,” James wrote to his brother William. “She was poor Wolcott Balestier’s sister and is a hard devoted capable little person whom I don’t in the least understand his marrying. It’s a union of which I don’t forecast the future though I gave her away at the altar in a dreary little wedding with an attendance simply of four men.” He added a handsome, though qualified, compliment: “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.”

  As something of a wedding gift, James had secured a suitable traveling companion for the Kiplings. Henry Adams, returning to his home in Washington, was also on the Teutonic. During the long days on board, Kipling made final corrections to The Naulahka—the novel he had written with Balestier that would now serve as his dear friend’s memorial—and wrote verses for its chapter headings. Each evening, the two writers met for dinner. Like Mark Twain before him, Adams was astonished by his new friend’s verbal dexterity. Kipling “dashed over the passenger his exuberant fountain of gaiety and wit—as though playing a garden hose on a thirsty and faded begonia.” After the shocking suicide of his wife, Clover, a gifted photographer who had killed herself by ingesting the cyanide she used to develop her prints, Adams had traveled to Japan to restore some emotional and spiritual balance to his life. Mourning his dead wife, he told a reporter in Nebraska that he was pursuing nirvana. “It’s out of season,” the reporter responded. The honeymooning Kiplings, who planned to travel on to Japan after a brief stopover in New England, were hoping for a better harvest.

  Chapter Four

  A BUDDHA SNOWMAN

  1.

  The British steamer Empress of India, which the Kiplings had boarded in Vancouver for the Pacific crossing, dropped anchor off the port city of Yokohama at seven a.m. on April 20. A launch shuttled the honeymooners and their luggage to shore. Kipling had reserved top-story rooms in the Grand Hotel, the most exclusive lodgings in the city, visible from the launch. With its balconies—and its formal dining room specializing in French cuisine, a novelty in Japan—the Grand Hotel was a major fixture of the Bund, the long seaside esplanade looking out on the horseshoe-shaped harbor of Yokohama, a dazzling view depicted in countless Japanese prints.

  Japan was the third leg of their honeymoon, and the most eagerly anticipated. After a brief stopover in New York, the young couple had paused in Brattleboro, where they impulsively bought a few acres of land from Carrie’s brother, Beatty, as they contemplated a possible vacation house in Vermont. From the elevated site, they could see Mount Monadnock—which “came to mean everything that was helpful, healing, and full of quiet,” Kipling wrote—and celebrated the occasion by building a snowman. “For the honor of Monadnock there was made that afternoon an image of snow of Gautama Buddha,” Kipling wrote with mock solemnity, “something too squat and not altogether equal on both sides, but with an imperial and reposeful waist.” At that moment, some men came up the road in a wood-sledge and confronted the Buddha. Of this strange meeting of East and West, Kipling remarked, “the amazed comments of two Vermont farmers on the nature and properties of a swag-bellied god are worth hearing.”

  Then, the epic wedding journey resumed in earnest, like an open parenthesis with no predetermined closure in sight: across the Canadian wilderness to Vancouver and then the long Pacific crossing. Kipling hoped to travel all the way around the world, with a stop at Samoa to pay their respects to Robert Louis Stevenson, a long-cherished dream. His last attempt had been interrupted by news of Wolcott’s death. They might even visit Bombay, and Kipling’s parents, before the eventual return home.

  For Carrie Kipling, Japan had a special significance. Her maternal grandfather, Erasmus Peshine Smith, was an expert in banking and international law. He was the first foreign adviser hired by the emperor, or mikado, to help Japan, long isolated from the West, catch up with the modern world. Commodore Matthew Perry’s heavily armed Black Ships had entered Edo Bay in 1853, and demanded that Japan open its ports to American ships and American trade. The famous “opening” was a humiliation for Japan; Smith and other foreigners were enlisted to right the balance. Smith remained in Tokyo for five years, overseeing treaties and establishing the nation’s banking system. He also represented Japan in a landmark case in which a Peruvian ship, loaded with a cargo of 230 so-called “coolies” from China and other parts of Asia, was wrecked off the Japanese coast. The ship’s occupants were freed after Smith argued that such human trafficking violated international agreements against the slave trade. In accord with his official status, Peshine Smith proudly dressed as a samurai on ceremonial occasions, with the two swords appropriate to his rank. Kipling had seen the impressive swords in his brother-in-law Beatty’s house in Vermont.

  2.

  A few doors down from the Grand Hotel stood the Overseas Club, where Kipling liked to read the international newspapers on hot afternoons. With its ample veranda equipped with a telescope for viewing incoming ships, the club was a fine example of the colonial outpost so often portrayed by Joseph Conrad—in Hong Kong, Rangoon, or Kipling’s native Bombay. In such places, the vagabonds whom Kipling referred to as “Outside Men” (a literal translation, presumably, of the Japanese term for foreigner, gaijin) could find momentary respite and camaraderie. “A strong family likeness runs through both buildings and members,” Kipling wrote, “and a large and careless hospitality is the note.” According to Kipling, there was “always the same open-doored, high-ceiled house, with matting on the floors; the same come and go of dark-skinned servants, and the same assembly of men talking horse or business, in raiment that would fatally scandalize a London committee, among files of newspapers from a fortnight to five weeks old.”

  Kipling was summoning a world nostalgically recalled—open doors, high ceilings, and servants—from his infancy in Bombay, as evoked in “Song of the Wise Children”:

  We shall go back by the boltless doors,

&nbs
p; To the life unaltered our childhood knew—

  To the naked feet on the cool, dark floors,

  And the high-ceiled rooms that the Trade blows through.

  He also knew from his childhood that disaster could intrude at any moment. During his lonely years in England, at the foster home he called “The House of Desolation,” he found momentary solace in the fantasy world of books, enacting scenes from Robinson Crusoe in a mildewy basement. “My apparatus was a coconut shell strung on a red cord, a tin trunk, and a piece of packing-case which kept off any other world,” he recalled. “Thus fenced about, everything inside the fence was quite real. The magic,” he added, “lies in the ring or fence that you take refuge in.”

  For Kipling, the veneer of refuge at the Overseas Club masked the precarious lives of the Outside Men, even as childhood was surrounded by unsuspected dangers. He began an upbeat passage with a rhyme: “Consuls and judges of the Consular Courts meet men over on leave from the China ports, or it may be Manila, and they all talk tea, silk, banking, and exchange with its fixed residents.” But the description moves abruptly from comfort to disaster: “Everything is always as bad as it can possibly be, and everybody is on the verge of ruin. That is why, when they have decided that life is no longer worth living, they go down to the skittle-alley—to commit suicide.”

  3.

  On his previous visit to Japan, when he was circling the world in 1889 on his way to the United States, Kipling had been an Outside Man himself. And it was in Japan during that earlier journey that he had experienced something deeply unsettling, an early intimation that at any time, and with no advance warning, one could suddenly find oneself on the verge of ruin. He was twenty-three at the time—unknown, unmarried, and equipped with a passport identifying him, like some Tibetan beggar, as Radjerd Kyshrig. “Write your name distinctly,” he admonished himself, not for the last time. He had taken a room at the Yaami Hotel, a weather-beaten enclave supposedly in the Western style, favored by foreign tourists. Notched among the forested eastern hills of Kyoto, the old capital city of Japan, the ramshackle hotel was surrounded by ancient Buddhist temples. It was spring, the famous cherry trees were in full bloom, and a whole sea of blossoms—the sakura of the plaintive song the local Japanese schoolchildren sang—unfurled below his window.

  Kipling had come up the coast from the port city of Nagasaki, making his way overland to Kyoto. Like many other travelers, Kipling viewed Japan as a realm of perfect taste, perfect beauty, as though woodblock prints had miraculously assumed three dimensions. He glimpsed, from the porthole of his ship as it approached Nagasaki, two islands amid the waves. “This morning, after the sorrows of the rolling night, my cabin porthole showed me two great grey rocks, studded and streaked with green, and crowned by two stunted blue-black pines.” Kipling had seen enough Japanese art to know what he was looking at: art transformed into life. “Below the rocks a boat, that might have been carved sandalwood for color and delicacy, was shaking out an ivory-white frilled sail to the wind of the morning. An indigo-blue boy with an old ivory face and a musical voice was hauling on a rope.” Rock, tree, and boat,” Kipling concluded of this scene straight out of Hokusai, “made a panel from a Japanese screen.”

  And yet it was not a Japanese artist that the stunted pines and the rippling waves recalled for Kipling. Instead, it was a few lines from his beloved Emerson:

  Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,

  Or dip thy paddle in the lake,

  But it carves the bow of beauty there,

  And ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.

  The meaning of these mysterious lines seems to be that when we are in the right mood, there is an intimate correspondence between our human selves and the surrounding landscape. At such magical moments, poetry is somehow built into what we see, the rhyming ripples and the sculpted features of pine and mountain, as in the forested hills of Kyoto, where Kipling slept soundly in his quiet hotel.

  4.

  And then, suddenly, in the first light of morning, the whole hillside seemed to be rolling, undulating, as though to shake the delicate pink and white flowers loose from their jagged black branches. “Very early in the dawn, before the nesting sparrows were awake, there was a sound in the air which frightened me out of my virtuous sleep,” he wrote. “It was a lisping mutter—very deep and entirely strange.” Kipling conferred on the event, after the fact, an oddly domestic, even maternal, aspect—the nesting sparrows, the sleeping man-child, the lisping mutter (or mother) gently shaking her child awake: “And the lisp of the split banana-frond,” as he wrote in the nostalgic poem about his Bombay childhood, “that talked us to sleep when we were small.”

  All is well, until it’s not.

  At breakfast, when the ominous shaking had finally subsided, hotel staff members showed Kipling, with proper ceremony, the path that led to the source of the earthquake. Kipling “stepped through the violet-studded long grass into forgotten little Japanese cemeteries—all broken pillars and lichened tablets.” There he found, “under a cut in the hillside, the big bell of Kyoto—twenty feet of green bronze hung inside a fantastically roofed shed of wooden beams.” It was as though Kipling had entered, for a moment, the echoing space of a haiku, in which temple bells have resounded through the centuries, from haiku masters Basho to Shiki. One can even imagine the wording: “Cherry blossom dawn. / I awake to an earthquake: / Chion temple bell.”

  Kipling found himself, that morning, in the sublime presence of the legendary temple bell of Chion-in, all seventy-four tons of it, the largest cast-iron bell in all of Japan. “A knuckle rapped lightly on the lip,” he noted, “made the great monster breathe heavily, and the blow of a stick started a hundred shrill-voiced echoes round the darkness of its dome.” As he looked on, half a dozen men heaved the great battering ram of the knocker against the cavernous belly of the bell. “I endured twenty strokes and removed myself,” Kipling wrote, “not in the least ashamed of mistaking the sound for an earthquake.”

  5.

  Rising sharply above the busy streets of Yokohama, and buffered from the crowds by a canal lined with boats, stood the fashionable Bluff, where Europeans and Americans had their homes, their exclusive private clubs, and their cemetery. It was here, after a few nights at the Grand Hotel, that the Kiplings settled in, welcomed into the home of a friendly English merchant, E. J. Hunt, and his wife, whom they had met on their passage from Vancouver. “They made us more than welcome in their house,” Kipling wrote, “and saw to it that we should see Japan in wisteria and peony time.” Seeing Japan entailed visits to the curio shops and photographers’ studios of Yokohama. It also meant the obligatory side trip to Nikko, the mountain resort to the north where the Tokugawa shoguns, the fierce warlords who had ruled Japan during its centuries of isolation, were buried. They spent a night in Tokyo en route to Nikko, but not long enough, as Kipling explained to the young British attaché, Cecil Spring Rice, for social calls. To the south, they visited the baths at picturesque Miyanoshita, a craggy resort of pine-forested cliffs in view of Mount Fuji.

  But seeing Japan mainly meant, for the young couple, lounging in the Hunts’ garden on a corner of the Bluff overhanging the harbor, and admiring—as though the view had been composed by Hiroshige—how the curving eaves on the house “consorted with the sweep of the pine branches.” The Kiplings enjoyed “a garden that is not ours, but belongs to a gentleman in slate-colored silk, who, solely for the sake of the picture, condescends to work as a gardener, in which employ he is sweeping delicately a welt of fallen cherry blossoms from under an azalea aching to burst into bloom.” Kipling also noted the “steep stone steps, of the color that nature ripens through long winters,” that led up to the garden. With its overriding theme of ripeness after a long winter, and the azalea aching to burst into blossom, the whole passage is written in code. For Carrie was pregnant, and there was every reason to lounge in the garden rather than join the American tourists d
own in the shopping districts below the Bluff.

  6.

  The narrow streets of Yokohama smelled of tea. “All along the sea face,” Kipling wrote of his daily walk down the Bluff, “is an inspiring smell of the finest new-mown hay, and canals are full of boats loaded up with the boxes jostling down to the harbor.” The newly harvested tea, from choice locales like Uji and Shizuoka, was unloaded and carried through the streets to the great factory, where it was laboriously dried (or “fired”) by hand, before being packaged for the insatiable American market. For Kipling, the whole process in the tea factory had a symbolic aura. It became in his mind a magical scene of metamorphosis, of life, and, more alarmingly, of death:

  The factory floors are made slippery with the tread of bare-footed coolies, who shout as the tea whirls through its transformations. The over-note to the clamor—an uncanny thing too—is the soft rustle-down of the tea itself—stacked in heaps, carried in baskets, dumped through chutes, rising and falling in the long troughs where it is polished, and disappearing at last into the heart of the firing-machine—always this insistent whisper of moving dead leaves. Steam-sieves sift it into grades, with jarrings and thumpings that make the floor quiver, and the thunder of steam-gear is always at its heels; but it continues to mutter unabashed till it is riddled down into the big, foil-lined boxes and lies at peace.

  There is that reassuring word “mutter” again, and the image of lying at peace. After the violent, uncanny transformation of the tea, all seems to be well. Until it isn’t.

  On June 3, Kipling was fast asleep in the early dawn. Suddenly, he was wide awake. He saw, with horror, that his empty boots on the floor were moving. They made the strangest sound—“sat and played toccatas stately at the clavichord,” as in one of Robert Browning’s poems. But no, that was only the washstand rattling. Then it—whatever it was—intensified: “a clock fell and a wall cracked, and heavy hands caught the house by the roof-pole and shook it furiously.” It sounded as though batteries of artillery were charging up the Bluff. This time, he was certain. It really was an earthquake.