The Man Who Would Be King

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘I see. That’s marvellous.’

  ‘Marvellous, isn’t it? And, remember, we’re only at the beginning. There’s nothing we shan’t be able to do in ten years. I want to live – my God, how I want to live, and see it develop!’ He looked through the door at Shaynor breathing lightly in his chair. ‘Poor beast! And he wants to keep company with Fanny Brand.’

  ‘Fanny who?’ I said, for the name struck an obscurely familiar chord in my brain – something connected with a stained handkerchief, and the word ‘arterial’.

  ‘Fanny Brand – the girl you kept shop for.’ He laughed. ‘That’s all I know about her, and for the life of me I can’t see what Shaynor sees in her, or she in him.’

  ‘Can’t you see what he sees in her?’ I insisted.

  ‘Oh yes, if that’s what you mean. She’s a great, big, fat lump of a girl, and so on. I suppose that’s why he’s so crazy after her. She isn’t his sort. Well, it doesn’t matter. My uncle says he’s bound to die before the year’s out. Your drink’s given him a good sleep, at any rate.’ Young Mr Cashell could not catch Mr Shaynor’s face, which was half turned to the advertisement.

  I stoked the stove anew, for the room was growing cold, and lighted another pastille. Mr Shaynor in his chair, never moving, looked through and over me with eyes as wide and lustreless as those of a dead hare.

  ‘Poole’s late,’ said young Mr Cashell, when I stepped back. ‘I’ll just send them a call.’

  He pressed a key in the semi-darkness, and with a rending crackle there leaped between two brass knobs a spark, streams of sparks, and sparks again.

  ‘Grand, isn’t it? That’s the Power – our unknown Power – kicking and fighting to be let loose,’ said young Mr Cashell. ‘There she goes – kick – kick – kick into space. I never get over the strangeness of it when I work a sending-machine – waves going into space, you know. T. R. is our call. Poole ought to answer with L. L. L.’

  We waited two, three, five minutes. In that silence, of which the boom of the tide was an orderly part, I caught the clear ‘kiss – kiss – kiss’ of the halliards on the roof, as they were blown against the installation-pole.

  ‘Poole is not ready. I’ll stay here and call you when he is.’

  I returned to the shop, and set down my glass on a marble slab with a careless clink. As I did so, Shaynor rose to his feet, his eyes fixed once more on the advertisement, where the young woman bathed in the light from the red jar simpered pinkly over her pearls. His lips moved without cessation. I stepped nearer to listen. ‘And threw – and threw – and threw,’ he repeated, his face all sharp with some inexplicable agony.

  I moved forward astonished. But it was then he found words – delivered roundly and clearly. These: –

  ‘And threw warm gules on Madeleine’s young breast.’15

  The trouble passed off his countenance, and he returned lightly to his place, rubbing his hands.

  It had never occurred to me, though we had many times discussed reading and prize-competitions as a diversion, that Mr Shaynor ever read Keats, or could quote him at all appositely. There was, after all, a certain stained-glass effect of light on the high bosom of the highly-polished picture which might, by stretch of fancy, suggest, as a vile chromo16 recalls some incomparable canvas, the line he had spoken. Night, my drink, and solitude were evidently turning Mr Shaynor into a poet. He sat down again and wrote swiftly on his villainous note-paper, his lips quivering.

  I shut the door into the inner office and moved up behind him. He made no sign that he saw or heard. I looked over his shoulder, and read, amid half-formed words, sentences, and wild scratches:

  ‘ – Very cold it was. Very cold

  The hare – the hare – the hare –

  The birds –’

  He raised his head sharply, and frowned toward the blank shutters of the poulterer’s shop where they jutted out against our window. Then one clear line came:

  ‘The hare, in spite of fur, was very cold.’

  The head, moving machine-like, turned right to the advertisement where the Blaudett’s Cathedral pastille reeked abominably. He grunted, and went on: –

  ‘Incense in a censer –

  Before her darling picture framed in gold –

  Maiden’s picture – angel’s portrait –’

  ‘Hsh!’ said Mr Cashell guardedly from the inner office, as though in the presence of spirits. ‘There’s something coming through from somewhere; but it isn’t Poole.’ I heard the crackle of sparks as he depressed the keys of the transmitter. In my brain, too, something crackled, or it might have been the hair on my head. Then I heard my own voice, in a harsh whisper: ‘Mr Cashell, there is something coming through here, too. Leave me alone till I tell you.’

  ‘But I thought you’d come to see this wonderful thing – sir,’ indignantly at the end.

  ‘Leave me alone till I tell you. Be quiet.’

  I watched – I waited. Under the blue-veined hand – the dry hand of the consumptive – came away clear, without erasure:

  ‘And my weak spirit fails

  To think how the dead must freeze –’

  he shivered as he wrote –

  ‘Beneath the churchyard mould.’17

  Then he stopped, laid the pen down, and leaned back.

  For an instant, that was half an eternity, the shop spun before me in a rainbow-tinted whirl, in and through which my own soul most dispassionately considered my own soul as that fought with an over-mastering fear. Then I smelt the strong smell of cigarettes from Mr Shaynor’s clothing, and heard, as though it had been the rending of trumpets, the rattle of his breathing. I was still in my place of observation, much as one would watch a rifle-shot at the butts, half-bent, hands on my knees, and head within a few inches of the black, red, and yellow blanket of his shoulder. I was whispering encouragement, evidently to my other self, – sounding sentences, such as men pronounce in dreams.

  ‘If he has read Keats, it proves nothing. If he hasn’t – like causes must beget like effects. There is no escape from this law. You ought to be grateful that you know “St Agnes’ Eve” without the book; because, given the circumstances, such as Fanny Brand, who is the key of the enigma, and approximately represents the latitude and longitude of Fanny Brawne; allowing also for the bright red colour of the arterial blood upon the handkerchief, which was just what you were puzzling over in the shop just now; and counting the effect of the professional environment, here almost perfectly duplicated – the result is logical and inevitable. As inevitable as induction.’

  Still, the other half of my soul refused to be comforted. It was cowering in some minute and inadequate corner – at an immense distance.

  Hereafter, I found myself one person again, my hands still gripping my knees, and my eyes glued on the page before Mr Shaynor. As dreamers accept and explain the upheaval of landscapes and the resurrection of the dead, with excerpts from the evening hymn or the multiplication-table, so I had accepted the facts, whatever they might be, that I should witness, and had devised a theory, sane and plausible to my mind, that explained them all. Nay, I was even in advance of my facts, walking hurriedly before them, assured that they would fit my theory. And all that I now recall of that epoch-making theory are the lofty words: ‘If he has read Keats, it’s the chloric-ether. If he hasn’t, it’s the identical bacillus, or Hertzian wave of tuberculosis, plus Fanny Brand and the professional status which, in conjunction with the main-stream of subconscious thought common to all mankind, has thrown up temporarily an induced Keats.’

  Mr Shaynor returned to his work, erasing and re-writing as before with swiftness. Two or three blank pages he tossed aside. Then he wrote, muttering:

  ‘The little smoke of a candle that goes out.’18

  ‘No,’ he muttered. ‘Little smoke – little smoke – little smoke. What else?’ He thrust his chin forward toward the advertisement, whereunder the last of the Blaudett’s Cathedral pastilles fumed in its holder. ‘Ah!’ Then with relief:


  ‘The little smoke that dies in moonlight cold.’

  Evidently he was snared by the rhymes of his first verse, for he wrote and rewrote ‘gold – cold – mould’ many times. Again he sought inspiration from the advertisement, and set down, without erasure, the line I had overheard:

  ‘And threw warm gules on Madeleine’s young breast.’

  As I remembered the original it is ‘fair’ – a trite word – instead of ‘young,’ and I found myself nodding approval, though I admitted that the attempt to reproduce ‘Its little smoke in pallid moonlight died’ was a failure.

  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, so it seemed to me in that hour and in that place, whence Keats wove the twenty-sixth, seventh, and eighth stanzas of his poem.19 Shame I had none in overseeing this revelation; and my fear had gone with the smoke of the pastille.

  ‘That’s it,’ I murmured. ‘That’s how it’s blocked out. Go on! Ink it in, man. Ink it in!’

  Mr Shaynor returned to broken verse wherein ‘loveliness’ was made to rhyme with a desire to look upon ‘her empty dress’. He picked up a fold of the gay, soft blanket, spread it over one hand, caressed it with infinite tenderness, thought, muttered, traced some snatches which I could not decipher, shut his eyes drowsily, shook his head, and dropped the stuff. Here I found myself at fault, for I could not then see (as I do now) in what manner a red, black, and yellow Austrian blanket coloured his dreams.20

  In a few minutes he laid aside his pen, and, chin on hand, considered the shop with thoughtful and intelligent eyes. He threw down the blanket, rose, passed along a line of drug-drawers, and read the names on the labels aloud. Returning, he took from his desk Christy’s New Commercial Plants and the old Culpeper that I had given him, opened and laid them side by side with a clerky air, all trace of passion gone from his face, read first in one and then in the other, and paused with pen behind his ear.

  ‘What wonder of Heaven’s coming now?’ I thought.

  ‘Manna – manna – manna,’ he said at last, under wrinkled brows. ‘That’s what I wanted. Good! Now then! Now then! Good! Good! Oh, by God, that’s good!’ His voice rose and he spoke rightly and fully without a falter:

  ‘Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd,

  With jellies smoother than the creamy curd,

  And lucent syrops tinct with cinnamon;

  Manna and dates in argosy transferred

  From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,

  From silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.’21

  He repeated it once more, using ‘blander’ for ‘smoother’ in the second line; then wrote it down without erasure, but this time (my set eyes missed no stroke of any word) he substituted ‘soother’ for his atrocious second thought, so that it came away under his hand as it is written in the book – as it is written in the book.

  A wind went shouting down the street, and on the heels of the wind followed a spurt and rattle of rain.

  After a smiling pause – and good right had he to smile – he began anew, always tossing the last sheet over his shoulder:

  ‘The sharp rain falling on the window-pane,

  Rattling sleet – the wind-blown sleet.’22

  Then prose: ‘It is very cold of mornings when the wind brings rain and sleet with it. I heard the sleet on the window-pane outside, and thought of you, my darling. I am always thinking of you. I wish we could both run away like two lovers into the storm and get that little cottage by the sea which we are always thinking about, my own dear darling. We could sit and watch the sea beneath our windows. It would be a fairyland all of our own – a fairy sea – a fairy sea …’

  He stopped, raised his head, and listened. The steady drone of the Channel along the sea-front that had borne us company so long leaped up a note to the sudden fuller surge that signals the change from ebb to flood. It beat in like the change of step throughout an army – this renewed pulse of the sea – and filled our ears till they, accepting it, marked it no longer.

  ‘A fairyland for you and me

  Across the foam – beyond ….

  A magic foam, a perilous sea.’23

  He grunted again with effort and bit his underlip. My throat dried, but I dared not gulp to moisten it lest I should break the spell that was drawing him nearer and nearer to the high-water mark but two of the sons of Adam have reached. Remember that in all the millions permitted there are no more than five – five little lines – of which one can say: ‘These are the pure Magic. These are the clear Vision. The rest is only poetry.’ And Mr Shaynor was playing hot and cold with two of them!

  I vowed no unconscious thought of mine should influence the blindfold soul, and pinned myself desperately to the other three, repeating and re-repeating:

  ‘A savage place! as holy and enchanted

  As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

  By woman wailing for her demon-lover.’24

  But though I believed my brain thus occupied, my every sense hung upon the writing under the dry, bony hand, all brown-fingered with chemicals and cigarette-smoke.

  ‘Our windows fronting on the dangerous foam,’

  (he wrote, after long, irresolute snatches), and then –

  ‘Our open casements facing desolate seas

  Forlorn – forlorn –’

  Here again his face grew peaked and anxious with that sense of loss I had first seen when the Power snatched him. But this time the agony was tenfold keener. As I watched, it mounted like mercury in the tube. It lighted his face from within till I thought the visibly scourged soul must leap forth naked between his jaws, unable to endure. A drop of sweat trickled from my forehead down my nose and splashed on the back of my hand.

  ‘Our windows facing on the desolate seas

  And pearly foam of magic fairyland –’

  ‘Not yet – not yet,’ he muttered. ‘Wait a minute. Please wait a minute. I shall get it then –

  ‘Our magic windows fronting on the sea,

  The dangerous foam of desolate seas … For aye.

  Ouh, my God!’

  From head to heel he shook – shook from the marrow of his bones outwards – then leaped to his feet with raised arms, and slid the chair screeching across the tiled floor where it struck the drawers behind and fell with a jar. Mechanically, I stooped to recover it.

  As I rose, Mr Shaynor was stretching and yawning at leisure.

  ‘I’ve had a bit of a doze,’ he said. ‘How did I come to knock the chair over? You look rather –’

  ‘The chair startled me,’ I answered. ‘It was so sudden in this quiet.’

  Young Mr Cashell behind his shut door was offendedly silent.

  ‘I suppose I must have been dreaming,’ said Mr Shaynor.

  ‘I suppose you must,’ I said. ‘Talking of dreams – I – I noticed you writing – before –’

  He flushed consciously.

  ‘I meant to ask you if you’ve ever read anything written by a man called Keats.’

  ‘Oh! I haven’t much time to read poetry, and I can’t say that I remember the name exactly. Is he a popular writer?’

  ‘Middling. I thought you might know him because he’s the only poet who was ever a druggist. And he’s rather what’s called the lover’s poet.’

  ‘Indeed. I must dip into him. What did he write about?’

  ‘A lot of things. Here’s a sample that may interest you.’

  Then and there, carefully, I repeated the verse he had twice spoken and once written not ten minutes ago.

  ‘Ah! Anybody could see he was a druggist from that line about the tinctures and syrups. It’s a fine tribute to our profession.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said young Mr Cashell, with icy politeness, opening the door one half-inch, ‘if you still happen to be interested in our trifling experiments. But, should such be the case –’


  I drew him aside, whispering, ‘Shaynor seemed going off into some sort of fit when I spoke to you just now. I thought, even at the risk of being rude, it wouldn’t do to take you off your instruments just as the call was coming through. Don’t you see?’

  ‘Granted – granted as soon as asked,’ he said, unbending. ‘I did think it a shade odd at the time. So that was why he knocked the chair down?’

  ‘I hope I haven’t missed anything,’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t say that, but you’re just in time for the end of a rather curious performance. You can come in too, Mr Shaynor. Listen, while I read it off.’

  The Morse instrument was ticking furiously. Mr Cashell interpreted: ‘ “K.K.V. Can make nothing of your signals.” ’ A pause. ‘ “M.M.V. M.M.V. Signals unintelligible. Purpose anchor Sandown Bay. Examine instruments to-morrow.” Do you know what that means? It’s a couple of men-o’-war working Marconi signals off the Isle of Wight. They are trying to talk to each other. Neither can read the other’s messages, but all their messages are being taken in by our receiver here. They’ve been going on for ever so long. I wish you could have heard it.’

  ‘How wonderful!’ I said. ‘Do you mean we’re overhearing Portsmouth ships trying to talk to each other – that we’re eavesdropping across half South England?’

  ‘Just that. Their transmitters are all right, but their receivers are out of order, so they only get a dot here and a dash there. Nothing clear.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘God knows – and Science will know to-morrow. Perhaps the induction is faulty; perhaps the receivers aren’t tuned to receive just the number of vibrations per second that the transmitter sends. Only a word here and there. Just enough to tantalise.’

  Again the Morse sprang to life.

  ‘That’s one of ’em complaining now. Listen: “Disheartening – most disheartening.” It’s quite pathetic. Have you ever seen a spiritualistic séance? It reminds me of that sometimes – odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere – a word here and there – no good at all.’