The Wish House and Other Stories (11 page)

‘The soldiers of my youth’ is a significant phrase. We know that Kipling didn’t mean ‘the officers of my youth’. For preference, Kipling always took the part of the inarticulate, the anonymous, the helpless – and it is typical that his version of Browning’s ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ should be ‘The Mary Gloster’, a poor relation but full of passion and coarse pathos. And written in the demotic. It was a mode that Kipling consciously gave himself over to, as we can see from the poem which follows ‘The Manner of Men’, spoken by the St Paul whom Quabil mistrusts because ‘he had the woman’s trick of taking the tone and colour of whoever he talked to’:

There is something of himself in these verses, and in the plea with which the poem ends: ‘Restore me my self again!’

Browning expresses a similar pang in ‘One Word More’:

Whatever the regrets, the achievement, in both cases, is bound up with the artistic choice ‘to have gathered from the air a live tradition’. Pound’s words apply to every writer engaged in the endless rediscovery of the oral and the liberation of literature from the tyranny of the classical, the received, which was once itself ‘language really used by men’, in Wordsworth’s famous phrase. Isaac Bashevis Singer adapts the Yiddish folk tradition, with its generous allowance of formulaic phrases, old-fashioned omniscience and Biblical directness. Whitman revels in his ‘barbaric yawp’ and the escape from European habits. Twain’s fiction introduces the drawl into American prose: ‘you don’t know me, without you have read a book by the name of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
, but that ain’t no matter.’ Almost exactly a hundred years later, Saul Bellow, after a false and frigid beginning, has fought the literary until he can confidently begin ‘Zetland: By a Character Witness’ with the words, ‘Yes, I knew the guy’. We should see Kipling in this company of essentially oral writers who insist on talking in the library – and then remember how many more voices he can command. Kipling deliberately chose to work with ‘unpromising’ material, just as his allegorical artist, the bull Apis, chooses ordinary Chisto, rather than Villamarti – the result, for both, is immortality.

I have quoted freely in this essay, frequently from work which I haven’t selected for inclusion, in the hope that readers will be encouraged to explore Kipling further.
Kim
in particular should be read and I had to fight the temptation to extract from it. Let me conclude, then, with one last quotation from that work. ‘The sullen coolies, glad of the check, halted and slid down their loads.’ It seems an ordinary sentence, doesn’t it? But how different it would have been, how much lighter their load, if Kipling had written ‘set down their loads,’ instead of ‘slid down their loads’.

Craig Raine
21st April 1985

N
o selection could do justice to Kipling’s prodigious variety. His
oeuvre
encompasses science fiction (’With the Night Mail’) and imaginative historiography (The Church that was at Antioch’). There is travel writing, violent knockabout farce, myth. There is the animal fable: ‘A Walking Delegate’, an exercise in American dialects, derives from Mark Twain and probably fathers Orwell’s
Animal Farm.

I have, therefore, simply chosen the best Kipling, wherever it occurs. Accordingly, some volumes are ignored, while others are heavily drawn on. There are two exceptions. Kipling’s writing for children is inadequately acknowledged here by the inclusion of ‘The Elephant’s Child’. The autobiographical ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ is included for the invaluable glimpse it gives us into Kipling’s psyche. Otherwise, nothing is merely representative. Merit is the sole criterion.

I have chosen nothing from the novels. Only
Kim
was a powerful temptation, in any case, and extracts are always an unsatisfactory compromise. My aim has been completeness. With this in mind, I have included poems whenever they accompany the stories, either as prefaces or pendants. Their relationship to the prose – sometimes intimate, sometimes distant – differs in every case, and it is for each reader to determine Kipling’s intention. In ‘Friendly Brook’, the verse explores a perspective which is scarcely explicit in the story. The Rahere verse with ‘The Wish House’ offers a dense, concentrated parallel. The verse accompanying ‘Mary Postgate’, on the other hand, is a crude summary which misrepresents the subtle prose tale. Often the poems are integral and mined with significant clues: ‘Gertrude’s Prayer’ is one example and the ‘extract’ from ‘Lyden’s Ir
enius’
, which precedes ‘Mrs Bathurst’, may explain the anonymous status of Vickery’s unfortunate travelling companion.

I considered adding notes to this selection of stories. For instance, one could explain that Kipling’s reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘mesmerized dying man’ alludes to ‘The Facts in the case of M. Valdemar’. Or explain that the ‘marring fifth line’ of Miss Florence’s song in “They”’ is ‘Listen, gentle – ay, and simple! listen, children on the knee,’ from the opening verse of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘The Lost Bower’. Or one might list every Masonic reference in ‘The Man who would be King’ and comment redundantly that these are secret Masonic references – adding, perhaps, that Kipling was a Freemason himself, admitted in 1885 to the Lodge, Hope and Perseverance, No. 782 E.C. at Lahore.

On the whole, however, I am inclined to think that these three examples show that Kipling has already provided the necessary amount of information. The point of the allusion to ‘The Lost Bower’, for example, is to impair the atmosphere surrounding the House Beautiful, to
suggest
something mysterious and perhaps grim. A note would short-circuit Kipling’s finely calculated effect and the subtle suggestion harden into flat statement.

Of course, the stories have dated in some unimportant particulars – we no longer use ‘tickey’ for threepenny bit, or ‘Bradbury’ for a pound note, after the name of the Bank of England signatory. Yet, even here, the context makes things clear enough. A note would only exaggerate their significance, and a cumbersome
apparatus criticus
suggest, falsely, that Kipling’s work needs a life-support machine. In time, it may, like all literature. At the moment, the stories are vigorous and hale. When they are indirect and difficult, they are meant to be so. Dr Johnson said of notes: ‘the mind is refrigerated by interruption, the thoughts are diverted from the principal subject’.

T
HE
house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storeyed, with four carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognize it by five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the upper windows. Bhagwan Dass the grocer and a man who says he gets his living by seal-cutting live in the lower storey with a troop of wives, servants, friends, and retainers. The two upper rooms used to be occupied by Janoo and Azizun, and a little black-and-tan terrier that was stolen from an Englishman’s house and given to Janoo by a soldier. Today, only Janoo lives in the upper rooms. Suddhoo sleeps on the roof generally, except when he sleeps in the street. He used to go to Peshawar in the cold weather to visit his son who sells curiosities near the Edwardes’ Gate, and then he slept under a real mud roof. Suddhoo is a great friend of mine, because his cousin had a son who secured, thanks to my recommendation, the post of head-messenger to a big firm in the Station. Suddhoo says that God will make me a lieutenant-governor one of these days. I daresay his prophecy will come true. He is very, very old, with white hair and no teeth worth showing, and he has outlived his wits – outlived nearly everything except his fondness for his son at Peshawar. Janoo and Azizun are Kashmiris, Ladies of the City, and theirs was an ancient and more or less honourable profession; but Azizun has since married a medical student from the North-West and has settled down to a most respectable life somewhere near Bareilly. Bhagwan Dass is an extortioner and an adulterator. He is very rich. The man who is supposed to get his living by seal-cutting pretends to be very poor.
This lets you know as much as is necessary of the four principal tenants in the house of Suddhoo. Then there is me of course; but I am only the chorus that comes in at the end to explain things. So I do not count.

Suddhoo was not clever. The man who pretended to cut seals was the cleverest of them all – Bhagwan Dass only knew how to lie-except Janoo. She was also beautiful, but that was her own affair.

Suddhoo’s son at Peshawar was attacked by pleurisy, and old Suddhoo was troubled. The seal-cutter man heard of Suddhoo’s anxiety and made capital out of it. He was abreast of the times. He got a friend in Peshawar to telegraph daily accounts of the son’s health. And here the story begins.

Suddhoo’s cousin’s son told me, one evening, that Suddhoo wanted to see me; that he was too old and feeble to come personally, and that I should be conferring an everlasting honour on the House of Suddhoo if I went to him. I went; but I think, seeing how well off Suddhoo was then, that he might have sent something better than an
ekka
, which jolted fearfully, to haul out a future lieutenant-governor to the city on a muggy April evening. The
ekka
did not run quickly. It was full dark when we pulled up opposite the door of Ranjit Singh’s Tomb near the main gate of the Fort. Here was Suddhoo, and he said that by reason of my condescension, it was absolutely certain that I should become a lieutenant-governor while my hair was yet black. Then we talked about the weather and the state of my health, and the wheat crops, for fifteen minutes, in the Huzuri Bagh, under the stars.

Suddhoo came to the point at last. He said that Janoo had told him that there was an order of the
Sirkar
against magic, because it was feared that magic might one day kill the Empress of India. I didn’t know anything about the state of the law; but I fancied that something interesting was going to happen. I said that so far from magic being discouraged by the Government it was highly commended. The greatest officials of the State practised it themselves. (If the Financial Statement isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.) Then, to encourage him further, I said that, if there was any
jadoo
afoot, I had not the least objection to giving it my countenance and sanction, and to seeing that it was clean
jadoo
– white magic, as distinguished from the unclean
jadoo
which kills folk. It took a long time before Suddhoo admitted that this was just what he had asked me to come for. Then he told me, in jerks and quavers, that the man who said he cut seals was a sorcerer of the cleanest kind; that every day he gave Suddhoo news of the sick son in Peshawar more quickly
than the lightning could fly, and that this news was always corroborated by the letters. Further, that he had told Suddhoo how a great danger was threatening his son, which could be removed by clean
jadoo;
and, of course, heavy payment. I began to see exactly how the land lay, and told Suddhoo that I also understood a little
jadoo
in the Western line, and would go to his house to see that everything was done decently and in order. We set off together; and on the way Suddhoo told me that he had paid the seal-cutter between one hundred and two hundred rupees already; and the
jadoo
of that night would cost two hundred more. Which was cheap, he said, considering the greatness of his son’s danger; but I do not think he meant it.

The lights were all cloaked in the front of the house when we arrived. I could hear awful noises from behind the seal-cutter’s shop-front, as if some one were groaning his soul out. Suddhoo shook all over, and while we groped our way upstairs told me that the
jadoo
had begun. Janoo and Azizun met us at the stair-head, and told us that the
jadoo
-work was coming off in their rooms, because there was more space there. Janoo is a lady of a free-thinking turn of mind. She whispered that the
jadoo
was an invention to get money out of Suddhoo, and that the seal-cutter would go to a hot place when he died. Suddhoo was nearly crying with fear and old age. He kept walking up and down the room in the half-light, repeating his son’s name over and over again, and asking Azizun if the seal-cutter ought not to make a reduction in the case of his own landlord. Janoo pulled me over to the shadow in the recess of the carved bow-windows. The boards were up, and the rooms were only lit by one tiny oil-lamp. There was no chance of my being seen if I stayed still.

Presently, the groans below ceased, and we heard steps on the staircase. That was the seal-cutter. He stopped outside the door as the terrier barked and Azizun fumbled at the chain, and he told Suddhoo to blow out the lamp. This left the place in jet darkness, except for the red glow from the two
huqas
that belonged to Janoo and Azizun. The seal-cutter came in, and I heard Suddhoo throw himself down on the floor and groan. Azizun caught her breath, and Janoo backed on to one of the beds with a shudder. There was a clink of something metallic, and then shot up a pale blue-green flame near the ground. The light was just enough to show Azizun, pressed against one corner of the room with the terrier between her knees; Janoo, with her hands clasped, leaning forward as she sat on the bed; Suddhoo, face down, quivering, and the seal-cutter.