The Wish House and Other Stories

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘Fifty Grand’ is an exception. More typical of the short story in this century is ‘The Killers’, in which two gangsters take over a café in order to murder a customer, who doesn’t in fact appear. The dialogue we hear is full of menace, but we never discover why the men are after Andreson. The modernity of the story can be gauged when you consider how like Pinter’s The Birthday Party this dramatic vignette is. (Some day, incidentally, the influence of Hemingway on Pinter will be properly assessed.) ‘The Killers’ is a classic story in its open-endedness, culminating with Ole Andreson stretched on his bed, resigned to his eventual fate for some undisclosed offence.

  Early Kipling is often anecdotal in the Maupassant manner, but whereas Maupassant felt constrained by the form and eventually did his best work in the novels Bel-Ami and Une Vie, Kipling made a virtue out of the limitation imposed on him by the form. By employing narrators, he was able to squeeze more into the story. Plain Tales from the Hills employs a catch-phrase that finally becomes irritating – ‘But that is another story’ – yet it serves as an index of Kipling’s awareness of the constraints of his chosen medium. Late Kipling, however, circumvents the difficulty. M. Voiron, for example, in ‘The Bull that Thought’, narrates a story which takes place over a number of years, but because he is a character he is allowed to edit his material openly: ‘And next year,’ he says, ‘through some chicane which I have not the leisure to unravel…’ An author could not permit himself this transition which amounts to the phrase, ‘to cut a long story short’. Kipling’s narrators allow him, without breach of decorum, to ramble, to re-cap, to circle, to back-track, to anticipate, as real people do, and therefore to deal with long periods of time over a short space. The narrators, too, permit Kipling to avoid explanation, where necessary, because the responsibility for the story appears to rest with them, the author’s role being that of auditor. In this way, Kipling crams into the short story the substance of a full-length novel, while the privilege of occlusion is retained.

  ‘Mrs Bathurst’ is probably the most notorious example of these techniques at work, though ‘“The Finest Story in the World’” employs them too. The narrative in the latter is, as the Kipling-figure remarks, ‘a maddening jumble’. Charlie Mears can remember not just one previous existence but two, which, in his mind, are inseparable. In fact, as the narrator finally realizes, each tale told separately would be banal: ‘The adventures of a Viking had been written many times before; the history of a Greek galley-slave was no new thing.’ The details are luminous because they are deprived of a coherent setting and context. They exist in the dark-inexplicable and end-stopped – hence their potency. ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’ further illustrates the point: for most of its length, Kipling re-visits the theme of self-haunting. (Despite his often-repeated determination never to repeat himself, he had already touched on this in ‘At the End of the Passage’: ‘the first thing he saw standing in the verandah was the figure of himself.’) After Parrenness has donated his trust in men and women, and his boy’s soul and conscience, to the dream-presence of his older self, he is left with his reward – ‘When the light came I made shift to behold his gift, and saw that it was a little piece of dry bread.’ Perhaps this piece of dry bread alludes to Matthew 4:4 (‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’), thus illustrating the nature of his transaction, the swap of morality for materialism. Perhaps it alludes to ‘the bread of affliction’. Either is possible. Reading the story, however, the image is strangely satisfying in itself. It tells, and tells profoundly, without explaining itself. It is the man, this shrivelled piece of bread, and hardly needs the Bible to underpin it.

  At the centre of ‘Mrs Bathurst’ is another famously baffling image, which once read is never forgotten: two tramps, one squatting, one standing, by the dead-end of a railway siding in South Africa.

  ‘There’d been a bit of a thunderstorm in the teak, you see, and they were both stone dead and as black as charcoal. That’s what they really were, you see – charcoal. They fell to bits when we tried to shift them. The man who was standin’ up had the false teeth. I saw ’em shinin’ against the black. Fell to bits he did too, like his mate squatting down an’ watchin’ him, both of ’em all wet in the rain. Both burned to charcoal, you see. And – that’s what made me ask about marks just now – the false-toother was tattooed on the arms and chest – a crown and foul anchor with M. V. above.’

  When everything has been said about this story, it is this image which continues to grip the heart and squeeze it. Like the piece of dried bread, it never relaxes its hold on the imagination. Is any explanation, then, possible? Kipling approaches this coup de théâtre by a very circuitous route, using several narrators, and yet each apparent digression contributes to the whole.

  Most readers see ‘Mrs Bathurst’ as an obscure tale of elective affinities – the core of which is the passion of a middle-aged warrant officer called Vickery for Mrs Bathurst, a widowed New Zealand hotel keeper. What has passed between them is only guessed at by the narrators. But they agree that Mrs Bathurst is something special. She has ‘It’, hence Vickery’s obsession which manifests itself suddenly and feverishly when, in Cape Town, he sees her for a few seconds on film. She is arriving at Paddington station in search of Vickery. Night after night Vickery watches her – then deserts. Another narrator, Hooper, supplies the grisly denouement above, at the point where the other two, Pyecroft and Pritchard, break off. Vickery’s tattoo shows up white, like writing on a burned letter. There is some dispute as to whether the other body is that of Mrs Bathurst: Pritchard plainly thinks it is, but critics have differed, myself included.

  Though the rambling narration has been denounced by both Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, the story is as precise as a Swiss watch. Everything fits, but the reader has to wind it up. The theory of elective affinity stems from the narrators. They fit Vickery’s story to their own experience: sailors, they know, constantly desert for reasons of the heart. Moon has jumped ship in the South Seas for a woman, ‘bein’ a Mormonastic beggar’; Spit-Kid Jones married a ‘cocoanut-woman’. Hooper agrees that some women can drive a man crazy if he doesn’t save himself. Hence the theory. Kipling, however, is careful to show the observant reader that his narrators are unreliable, and to tuck away the truth of the matter. The credulity of Pyecroft and Pritchard is established in the framing story of Boy Niven who dragged them off on a wild goose chase through the woods of British Columbia. In addition, there is a persistent motif of unreliable machinery – trains derailed on straight lines, a gyroscope that goes on the blink, a brake-van chalked for repair, damaged rolling stock, sprung midship frames, ill-fitting false teeth, and so on. It is a broad hint that the machinery of this story is also unreliable.

  Moreover, on ascertainable facts, the narrators are shown to be wrong. Hooper hears a clink of couplings, ‘“It’s those dirty little Malay boys, you see.’” It isn’t. It’s Pyecroft and Pritchard. Similarly, Pyecroft gets an expert to ‘read’ the captain’s face – wrongly as it turns out. Further, Kipling makes Pyecroft employ a variety of foreign phrases, all italicized, adding an extra one to the magazine version – moi aussi, verbatim, ex officio, status quo, resumé, peeris and casus belli. Taken with other Biblical props from Acts – the beer (‘Others, mocking, said, These men are full of new wine’) and the strong south-easter (‘a sound from heaven like a rushing mighty wind’) – these phrases add up to a parody of the gift of tongues.

  In other words, Pyecroft speaks more than he knows, trusting to erroneous inspiration, as when he compares Vickery’s false teeth to a ‘Marconi ticker’, hinting at strange communication with Mrs Bathurst. Hooper’s tic of dialogue is to say ‘You see’, a total of sixteen times. The point is that his companions don’t see at all.

  The truth is concealed in the words of ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’, sung by some picnickers on the beach, words by A.H. Fitz, music by W.H. Penn. They tell us what Vickery only hints at in the
phrase ‘my lawful wife’, namely that he has married Mrs Bathurst bigamously, in a Moon-like way. A ‘lawful’ wife implies an unlawful wife and the song confirms this suspicion:

  As they sat there side by side.

  He asked her to be his bride

  She answered ‘Yes’ and sealed it with a kiss.

  Vickery’s eventual fate, death by lightning, tells us what happened after the bigamy, for it is paralleled in the framing story of Boy Niven. ‘Heavy thunder with continuous lightning’ is, according to Pyecroft, the punishment for desertion. Vickery, then, is a double-deserter, from Mrs Bathurst and the Navy. We don’t know much about Mrs Bathurst, but we know enough to understand why Vickery is afraid, ‘like an enteric at the last kick’: first, ‘she never scrupled to…set ’er foot on a scorpion’; secondly, as Pritchard’s anecdote of the beer-bottles demonstrates, she never forgets. After five years, she remembers Pritchard’s name and his ‘particular’ beer, unlike the servant girl who chucks him a bottle in mistake for someone else. The contrast is telling.

  Vickery has committed a crime, bigamy, and that presumably is why the captain connives at his absence without leave – desertion being less of a disgrace than legal proceedings from the Navy’s point of view. The element of criminality also explains why Vickery watches the film so compulsively, yet with such dread: in the oldest of traditions, he is revisiting the scene of his crime. The film explains, too, that Vickery, unlike the others, has found Mrs Bathurst forgettable. He takes Pyecroft along for confirmation – so much for their romantic interpretation.

  In ‘Mrs Bathurst’ nothing is wasted. Every digression contributes to the total meaning. It is like a closed economy, as parsimonious as a city under siege, despite its air of beery reminiscence. In ‘The Wrong Thing’, Kipling makes it clear that his art had no place for guesswork. Though he believed in his Daemon, as any writer must if he is not to force his talent, he was conscious and critical after the Inner Voice had played its part: ‘Iron’s sweet stuff’, says Hal, ‘if you don’t torture her, and hammered work is all pure, truthful line, with a reason and a support for every curve and bar of it.’ Though one can scarcely imagine any child grasping this piece of aesthetic theory from Rewards and Fairies, it is a plain warning to adults that nothing can be skipped, that every detail is relevant – as it is in ‘Mrs Bathurst’.

  Does this affect the status of the charcoal figures? Ultimately, it does not. Are we to assume an accident? Or an act of God? Clearly, the fate of Vickery carries an element of poetic justice, but we cannot speculate beyond that point. The reader untangles the thread of the narrative only to discover that Kipling, at the crucial moment, has deliberately snapped it in order to preserve the shock at the heart of the tale. There is no insulating context, only raw voltage.

  The same thing, though less strikingly, is true of ‘Dayspring Mishandled’, when Manallace draws on his black gloves at the crematorium. The gesture has a power and solemnity which are unaccountable. This story illuminates one difference between Kipling’s early work and his late work. In Something of Myself, Kipling dilates briefly on his art: ‘The shortening of them, first to my own fancy after rapturous re-readings, and next to the space available, taught me that a tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked.’ Kipling, rightly in my view, never deviated from this prescription. Yet there are those who have argued that, whereas in the early work excision creates intensity, in the later stories it merely creates obscurity. However, in the later work, the reader is often expected, as in ‘Mrs Bathurst’, to reinstate what Kipling has eliminated. Links are suppressed to involve the reader in the tale: close reading implicates the reader as he deciphers the encoded text. In Henry James’s formula from The Golden Bowl, the writer forgoes ‘the muffled majesty of authorship’ – in order to compel us to ‘live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in the struggle’. ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ is a case in point.

  The plot is as neat in its way as the resolution of Tom’s antecedents in Tom Jones. Alured Castorley has, in his youth, been a member of a literary syndicate which provided pulp fiction for the undiscriminating mass-market. Manallace, another member of the group, decides to ruin Castorley’s carefully nurtured reputation as a Chaucer expert by getting him to authenticate a planted forgery of a previously unknown Chaucer fragment. While Castorley has risen in the world of letters, Manallace has made a reputation of a different kind in ‘the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure’. Manallace’s income goes towards nursing ‘Dal Benzaquen’s mother through her final illness, ‘when her husband ran away’. For about half the length of the tale, Kipling conceals the revenge plot so that, like the narrator, we believe that when ‘Dal’s mother dies, ‘she seemed to have emptied out his life, and left him only fleeting interest in trifles’.

  Part of our pleasure resides in the simple realization that the series of apparently pointless hobbies are, in fact, related to each other and have a profound purpose – that of revenge. Each step is lucid and mesmerizingly technical – Kipling’s impersonation of the insider with special knowledge was never put to better use. Everything comes together – the experiments with ink, the medieval paste, the handwriting, the early Chaucerian tale – as if Kipling was demonstrating to his readership that, in his work, the diversion is always in fact central and germane. In this tale of revenge and literary hoax, where the avenger is finally compassionate, Kipling is careful not to explain two things – the motive for Manallace’s subterfuge and the reason why he finally forbears. Castorley’s careerism, his lack of generosity, his ‘gifts of waking dislike’ – these are all inadequate reasons for a scheme which is designed to kill its victim. The narrator is told the real motive, but we are not: ‘He told it. “That’s why,” he said. “Am I justified?” He seemed to me entirely so.’ Most readers assume that Castorley grossly insulted the mother of ‘Dal Benzaquen, in conversation with Manallace during the war, because she had turned down his proposal of marriage: ‘He went out before the end, and, it was said, proposed to ‘Dal Benzaquen’s mother who refused him.’

  That parenthetical ‘it was said’ carries its own charge of doubt and, taken with the warnings against passive readership that are scattered through the story – like Manallace’s reiterated ‘if you save people thinking, you can do anything with ’em’ – it should put us on our guard. The truth about Castorley and ‘Dal’s mother comes out under the influence of illness and Gleeag’s liver tonics. (Kipling was always willing, perhaps too much so, to use drugs as a way of speeding up necessary disclosure, as in ‘“Wireless”’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’.) The fuddled, dying but truthful Castorley begins by saying that ‘there was an urgent matter to be set right, and now he had the Title and knew his own mind it would all end happily.’ His rambling monologue concludes with his naming ‘Dal’s mother. The crucial words are ‘and knew his own mind’. Castorley, then, is the person who didn’t know his own mind. The phrase would be meaningless if Castorley, as ‘it was said’, had proposed and been refused. Clearly, he proposed and was accepted – only to desert her in order to better himself and get on in the world. Like Wilkett, in ‘The Tender Achilles’, he opts for career rather than caress. Manallace’s motive, then, is that Castorley has rejected ‘Dal’s mother and perhaps boasted of it – a thing hard for Manallace to bear because he has ‘adored’ her.

  Castorley is such a repellent character, so bereft of redeeming features, that this may seem implausible. We find it almost impossible to believe that ‘Dal’s mother actually loved him. Kipling, though, has thoughtfully provided an analogue – in Mrs Castorley, who, if equally ghastly, is having a passionate affair with the surgeon, Gleeag. It is obvious enough, yet Manallace doesn’t realize for a long time: ‘“But she’s so infernally plain, and I’m such a fool, it took me weeks to find out.’” The heart has its reasons – reasons which transcend mere appearances and unworthy personalities. Castorley may be snobbish, selfish and
bellied – but neither is Vickery such a catch, or the ‘unappetizing, ash-coloured’ Mrs Castorley.

  Once we have grasped that Castorley has loved and left ‘Dal’s mother, the story falls into place. For instance, the scrap of Latin, which incorporates an anagram of Manallace’s name, now has its full significance. The text is not simply a vehicle for Manallace’s device to prove the fragment is a forgery. Translated, it reads, ‘Behold this beloved Mother taking with her me, the accepted one.’ We are never told ‘Dal’s mother’s name. She is, as it were, ‘this beloved Mother’ and the words ‘the accepted one’ refer to Castorley’s proposal. The Nodier poem, which provides the story with its epigraph, now makes fuller sense: ‘Dal’s mother is ‘la fille des beaux jours’, the old Neminaka days, whose memory is now poisoning Castorley’s system like mandragora. The Chaucerian fragment, too, with its account of a girl ‘praying against an undesired marriage’, slips into place. ‘Dal’s mother is forced to marry someone else, by default. When she is enduring her fatal illness and is ‘wholly paralysed’, we are told that ‘only her eyes could move, and those always looked for the husband who had left her’. Clearly, if this was her legal husband, the obvious candidate, Manallace would have been better employed in mounting a campaign of revenge against him. In fact, ‘the husband who left her’ must be Castorley. Kipling again resolves the doubt by another careful parallel. At Castorley’s cremation, Mrs Castorley’s eyes turn, like ‘Dal’s mother’s eyes, to her real passion, her illicit lover, Gleeag.