The Wish House and Other Stories

by Rudyard Kipling

  Dowson’s ‘Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae’, glancingly alluded to by Manallace, also finds its true place in this structure. The poem is an account of sleeping with a prostitute, while actually being sick with love for someone else – Cynara, who comes as a vision in the grey dawn:

  But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

  When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:

  I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

  Dowson’s poem is yet another example of dayspring mishandled, like Nodier’s poem. Kipling’s text is so richly worked that one wonders finally whether it is totally fanciful to see the motif of the grey dawn punningly reiterated in Graydon’s name.

  Graydon’s factory, which produces pulp literature for mass consumption, makes its contribution to the whole. Kipling seldom wastes a frame in any of his stories. Here he is warning us against literature which does not require the reader to think, as well as touching on the idea of forgery, fakery and substitution: ‘So, precisely as the three guinea handbag is followed in three weeks by its thirteen and sevenpence ha’penny, indistinguishable sister, the reading public enjoyed perfect synthetic substitutes for Plot, Sentiment, and Emotion.’ The single word, ‘sister’, alerts us to the parallel between literature and women: Castorley, instead of marrying the real thing, has chosen an ashen-faced substitute, who has never believed him ‘since before we were married’. As a consequence, Castorley has to endure a concealed, corrosive passion. It is this that Manallace finally takes pity on. Like many another in Kipling’s work. Castorley is compelled to eke out his emotional life on ‘perfect synthetic substitutes’ for sentiment and emotion.

  One last detail of ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ remains to be accounted for – the twice-repeated phrase, ‘for old sake’s sake’. This comes from a poem in Kingsley’s The Water Babies, which describes a doll lost on a heath and rediscovered:

  I found my poor little doll, dears,

  As I played in the heath one day:

  Folk say she is terribly changed, dears,

  For her paint is all washed away,

  And her arm trodden off by the cows, dears,

  And her hair not the least bit curled:

  Yet, for old sake’s sake, she is still, dears,

  The prettiest doll in the world.

  The paralysis of ‘Dal’s mother and Castorley’s sick-bed declaration of love are encapsulated and underlined by Kingsley’s poem. The gloves so mysteriously donned by Manallace continue to hoard their meaning – as so often in Kipling’s work.

  For those to whom Kipling is merely a crude jingoist, the almost Joycean meticulousness of his art will come as a surprise. But his abiding concern with love, in all its desolate manifestations, will come as a revelation. Love in Kipling’s oeuvre isn’t often happy: in Plain Tales it is mainly adulterous or disappointing or competitive; in ‘Without Benefit of Clergy’, it is tragic, with Ameera and the child dead, the mother greedily acquisitive and Holden’s home suddenly wrecked by the rains: ‘he found that the rains had torn down the mud pillars of the gateway, and the heavy wooden gate that had guarded his life hung lazily from one hinge. There was grass three inches high in the courtyard; Pir Khan’s lodge was empty, and the sodden thatch sagged between the beams.’ What had once seemed secure and solid is wiped out virtually overnight, the house mirroring the frail relationship – a symbolic scene possible only in the tropics. Desolation, sacrifice and waste are the words that present themselves when one considers Kipling’s treatment of love.

  There are, of course, moments when sacrifice isn’t entirely negative. Even ‘The Wish House’ has its positive side – grim and thankless though Grace Ashcroft’s sacrifice is. She may herself be doubtful, for all her toughness, and seek reassurance from her friend Liz Fettley (“‘It do count, don’t it – de pain?’”) but there is something movingly tenacious in her emotional commitment which Kipling captures in one sentence: ‘The lips that still kept trace of their original moulding hardly more than breathed the words.’ If Kipling had added the indefinite article – and written ‘the lips that still kept a trace’ – how much weaker this statement of willed beauty in the face of old age and imminent death would have been. If we compare ‘The Wish House’ to Chekhov’s great story of old age, ‘A Dreary Story’, the power of Grace Ashcroft is evident. Chekhov’s hero, Professor Nikolay Stepanovitch, is the incarnation of Yeats’s summation of age – ‘testy delirium and dull decrepitude’. The Professor’s sense of mortality infects his entire life, empties him of profundity, interest and affection, even for his ward Katya whom he loves. ‘Farewell, my treasure!’ the story ends, but these are the hollow words of a man recalling the memory of emotion, not the thing itself. By comparison, Grace Ashcroft isn’t such a desolate figure.

  The sacrifice in ‘Dymchurch Flit’ is difficult and touching, too. The Pharisees ask for a boat to take them to France ‘an’ come back no more’. There is a boat but no one to sail it, and so they ask the widow to lend them her sons: ‘Give ’em Leave an’ Good-will to sail it for us, Mother – O Mother!’ The conflict is then between her own delimited maternal feelings – ‘One’s dumb, an’ t’other’s blind…but all the dearer me for that’ – and her mother’s heart which goes out to the invisible Pharisees and their children: ‘the voices justabout pierced through her; an’ there was childern’s voices too. She stood out all she could, but she couldn’t rightly stand against that.’ Finally, she consents, shaking ‘like a aps-tree makin’ up her mind’. She is rewarded for her charity by the return of her sons and by the promise that psychic gifts will run in her family, but Tom Shoesmith makes it clear that her sacrifice was not made for gain: ‘No. She loaned her sons for a pure love-loan, bein’ as she sensed the Trouble on the Marshes, an’ was simple good-willing to ease it.’

  Kipling’s stories return ceaselessly to the nature of parental love, its ability to expend inexhaustible passion on apparently worthless objects. There is Wynn Fowler in ‘Mary Postgate’, ‘an unlovely orphan of eleven’, who repays Mary’s devotion ‘by calling her “Gatepost”, “Postey”, or “Packthread”, by thumping her between her narrow shoulders, or by chasing her bleating, round the garden, her large mouth open, herlarge nose high in the air, at a stiff-necked shamble very like a camel’s’. Kipling, artistically generous as ever, doesn’t reserve strong feeling for the handsome. Nor are the recipients of this love perfect. In ‘Friendly Brook’, Mary, the adopted Barnardo girl, garners no praise from Jabez and Jesse; ‘“It don’t sometimes look to me as if Mary has her natural right feelin’s. She don’t put on an apron o’ Mondays ‘thout being druv to it – in the kitchen or the henhouse. She’s studyin’ to be a school-teacher. She’ll make a beauty! I never knowed her show any sort o’ kindness to nobody…’ For this plain, vinegary girl, whose ‘Maker ain’t done much for her outside nor yet in’, her foster-father, Jim Wickenden, is prepared to commit murder – loosening a plank so that her real father is drowned on one of his visits to blackmail the foster-parents. Eliot, understandably in wartime, chose to read this story as a kind of pagan celebration of England, with the brook as a tutelary deity. It isn’t. Jim Wickenden’s relationship with the brook is made clear in the implicit pun with which Kipling ends the story. Wickenden is happy when the brook floods and takes a snatch of his hay because that represents hush-money: ‘The Brook had changed her note again. It sounded as if though she were mumbling something soft.’ His secret is safe with the brook.

  In the same story, there is the Copley family and their ‘Bernarder cripple-babe’, whom they foster, but not for the financial inducement: ‘It’s handy,’ says Jabez. ‘But the child’s more. “Dada” he says, an’ “Mumma” he says, with his great rollin’ head-piece all hurdled up in that iron collar. He won’t live long – his backbone’s rotten, like. But they Copley’s do just about set store by him – five bob or no five bob.’ For Kipling, this isn’t an extreme case. It is a human constant he can effortlessly empathize with.

 
It is this knowledge of parental love, too, which produces some of Kipling’s most savage stories. He knows it can be murderous if threatened – as it is, most obviously, in ‘Mary Postgate’, where the wizened old spinster stands over a German airman with a revolver, luxuriating first in his death (from injuries sustained in a fall from his aircraft) and then in a hot bath. This act of barbarism, her refusal to fetch a ‘Toctor’, Mary knows, would not gain Wynn’s approval were he alive. Nor does it, I think, elicit Kipling’s approval – only his understanding. The same theme is examined in ‘A Sahibs’ War’, where Kipling’s attitude is less ambiguous. The narrator, Umr Singh, is a Sikh who is a kind of adopted father to a Sahib called Kurban: ‘Young – of a reddish face – with blue eyes, and he lilted a little on his feet when he was pleased, and cracked his finger-joints.’ How carefully Kipling implies, in the first three phrases, this young man’s virtual anonymity, and how carefully he conveys the immense emotional investment of the narrator in the last two descriptive touches, singling out characteristics invisible except to the eye of love. In this story, the narrator attempts to revenge himself on a treacherous Boer family who have killed his ‘son’, Kurban Sahib.

  They are not prepossessing: ‘An old man with a white beard and a wart upon the left side of his neck; and a fat woman with the eyes of a swine and the jowl of a swine; and a tall young man deprived of understanding. His head was hairless, no larger than an orange, and the pits of his nostrils were eaten away by a disease. He laughed and slavered…’ When the Sikh narrator plans his revenge, he intends to be exact, a child for a child: ‘and the idiot lay on the floor with his head against her knee, and he counted his fingers and laughed, and she laughed again. So I knew they were mother and son…’ He means to hang the son in front of the mother and Kipling accurately records her anguish: ‘The woman hindered me not a little with her screechings and plungings.’ Umr Singh, who has taken opium to sustain him, is deflected from his purpose by a vision of the dead Kurban Sahib who orders him to refrain, telling him that this is a Sahibs’ War. Mary Postgate has no such assistance back to civilized values and the rule of law – only her tortured instinct, in its full atavism. Nevertheless, though the Boer family survive, Kipling makes us know the force of parental grief. If it is the eye of love that isolates and cherishes that habit of cracking the fingers, it is the same eye, hideously inflamed, that registers the wart on the left side of the Boer’s neck.

  In his stories, Kipling often measures love by its opposite, and O Beloved Kids, his letters to his children, also shows how deep this habit of thought and expression went. His expressions of affection are rarely straightforward. Except for two occasions (‘You see, I love you’), Kipling prefers the ironical mode: ‘Mummy is better I think every day than she was (perhaps because two yelling pestiferous brats are away)’; ‘she says as long as she hasn’t you two horrid brats to look after she can stand most things’; ‘I regret I have not kicked you enough’; ‘if it had been you I should have chastised you with a cricket stump.’ Examples of this knock-about stuff would be easy to multiply. Clearly, they conceal an almost embarrassing concern and tenderness, a passion more single-minded and obsessive than the sexual. Despite the tough front, Kipling is evidently infatuated and showers gifts on his son while the letters keep up a saving pretence of sternness. Squash courts are built, there are treats at Brown’s Hotel followed by music halls, motor bikes are bought, gramophones, and finally a Singer car. There can be no question-Kipling was a sugar daddy.

  With this, and the death of his beloved daughter, Josephine, in mind, we come to Kipling’s most tender story, ‘“They”’, which unfolds in a way that gives new meaning to that old cliché: its progress is as grave, delicate and measured as Mrs Bremmil, in ‘Three and – An Extra’, ‘turning over the dead baby’s frocks’. Kipling’s treatment of the theme of bereavement is simple and reticent. There is none of the bravura prose with which ‘The Gardener’ ends, when Helen Turrell confronts the military cemetery: ‘She climbed a few wooden-faced earthen steps and then met the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath. She did not know that Hagenzeele Third counted twenty-one thousand dead already. All she saw was a merciless sea of black crosses, bearing little strips of stamped tin at all angles across their faces.’ This difference granted, to the detriment of neither, ‘“They”’ and ‘The Gardener’ are intimately connected. Behind each lies the death of one of Kipling’s children, Josephine, and John who was lost in action during the First World War. Both, too, share the theme of reticence. Helen Turrell is prevented from expressing her grief by the threat of social exposure, the narrator of “They”’ by an emotional fastidiousness, which is clearly related to Kipling’s own personality – as we see it in his ironic letters to his children and in the very title of his autobiography, Something of Myself. Kipling was shy about his emotions, shy indeed about using his own voice, preferring to speak through others or adopting the bluff clubman’s tone of his caste and its grating air of worldliness: ‘for he did me the honour to talk at me plentifully’ and ‘it is not always expedient to excite a growing youth’s religious emotions’. “They”’, however, has none of this ponderous archness, except deliberately.

  The narrator is, at first, in marked contrast to Miss Florence, who is blind and therefore openly sensitive as an exposed membrane: ‘“we blindies have only one skin, I think. Everything outside hits straight at our souls. It’s different with you. You’ve such good defences…”’ The defences are apparent in the narrator’s response to Miss Florence’s question, ‘“You’re fond of children?’”; ‘I gave her one or two reasons why I did not altogether hate them.’ This is recognizably the Kipling who told his children he loved them by brandishing a cricket stump. And, of course, the narrator’s shyness is more than matched by the elusive children, ‘the shadows within the shadow’. The narrator’s attitude to Miss Florence is one of straightforward pity, without a trace of condescension: like her, he accepts that he is more capable, less vulnerable. To the other parents who have suffered bereavement, he is less neutral, more superior: ‘I saw the Doctor come out of the cottage followed by a draggle-tailed wench who clung to his arm,’ he coldly notes, and we are reminded of Helen Turrell’s refusal to meet the hysterical, ‘mottled’ Mrs Scarsworth on equal terms.

  By the story’s end, everything has been reversed. His grief is such that Miss Florence pities him: ‘ “And, d’you remember, I called you lucky – once – at first. You who must never come here again.’” The narrator is included in the democracy of grief, but when his heart is opened the pain is so great that the consolation provided by the children of the House Beautiful is, after all, no consolation but an unbearable torment. The unseen touch of his dead child is just not enough – and therefore too much. Finally, Kipling’s attitude is there in the inverted commas which surround his title, “They”’: the children are wraiths, necessary to some, but they do not exist, and it is this which the narrator finds impossible to endure.

  Kipling’s poem, ‘The Road to En-Dor’, specifically warns against dabbling in the supernatural and in Something of Myself he is equally firm: ‘I have seen too much evil and sorrow and wreck of good minds on the road to En-Dor to take one step along that perilous track.’ Still, “They”’ is an exploration, even if Kipling does turn back: the tallies which feed Miss Florence’s fire are an example of a more ancient form of communication; both the narrator and Miss Florence know about ‘the Colours’ and ‘the Egg which it is given to very few of us to see’. Kipling doesn’t explain what either is, though the Egg may be the Egg of the Universe, deposited by the First Cause from which Brahma came. It isn’t important: the mere mention is enough to open up possibilities about the potential of the human mind – a theme Kipling considers in ‘“Wireless”’.

  There, a consumptive chemist, Mr Shaynor, is in love with a girl called Fanny Brand, ‘a great, big, fat lump of a girl’, who distantly resembles ‘the seductive shape on a gold-framed toilet-water advertise
ment’. Shaynor, weakened by TB, takes a drink prepared by the narrator from random drugs and goes into a trance. Once under, he stares at the advertisement and writes snatches of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ and the ode ‘To a Nightingale’, occasionally lapsing into the deadest prose. The poetry (Shaynor has never heard of Keats) is inspired by his surroundings – vulgar druggist’s dross, a hare hanging up outside the (Kipling’s use of the definite article is always superb) Italian warehouse next door and so on. The narrator, desperate for an explanation, tries analogies with radio waves and faulty receivers, since the story is framed by some early broadcasting experimentation. The frame, however, is completely ironic, though the jargon of Cashell, the enthusiast, comes so thickly that Kipling’s deflating irony is easily missed in the welter of Hertzian waves and coherers. “That’s all,” he said, proudly, as though himself responsible for the wonder.’ How much more wonderful, Kipling implies, is the transmutation of life’s pitiful fragments into art-Spinoza, falling in love, the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking. Eliot’s comment on his list might have been Kipling’s: ‘When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.’ Kipling prefers a description closer to Yeats’s rag-and-bone shop of the heart: ‘Followed without a break ten or fifteen lines of bald prose – the naked soul’s confession of its physical yearning for its beloved-unclean as we count uncleanliness; unwholesome, but human exceedingly; the raw material…whence Keats wove the twenty-sixth, seventh and eighth stanzas of his poem.’ Beside the miracle of the gifted human coherer, that rare occurence, stand the pathetic transmissions achieved by science – ‘Signals unintelligible’.