Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  That this ink-spattered figure was no figment of Robinson’s imagination is confirmed by an account gathered some decades later from an elderly Sikh named Nikka Singh who had looked after the newspaper’s library and who remembered Ruddy as the kharab misaij sab siyahi or ‘bad-tempered inky sahib’ who insisted that his inkpot should always be kept filled to the brim: ‘To interrupt him, so Nikka Singh would say, was to see a book or a paperweight flying through the air.’31

  The departure of the Kipling women gave Ruddy the opportunity to work out of hours at the CMG. With the help of the paper’s printer, J. M. Chalmers, he set in type a selection of poems that he and Trix had decided to publish together in one volume under the title of Echoes, to consist of twenty parodies of Ruddy’s favourite English poets written by him in England, with a further eight poems from Trix. His original plan was to have everything printed and bound by the end of June but, whether by intent or not, the sheets were still at the press when his father left for Dalhousie in the third week of July to begin his annual three months’ leave. Indeed, it seems that Lockwood had originally planned to go at the end of the month, but was persuaded by his son to go early and take an extra ten days’ holiday as ‘privilege leave’.

  Only when his father had left Lahore did Ruddy add more verses to the book, thereby evading the communal vetting process of Bikaner House. As Rudyard Kipling himself hinted in his autobiography, the usefulness of the Family Square as a creative writing workshop went only so far. ‘Here the Mother was at hand,’ he wrote of Alice Kipling’s interest in his poetry, ‘with now and then some shrivelling comment that infuriated me.’ With his parents gone Ruddy felt free to add a new set of verses, some of which he had sketched out in an article entitled ‘Music for the Middle-Aged’, published in the CMG on 21 June 1884 under the name of ‘Jacob Cavendish, M.A.’ These new verses were cynical to a degree, mostly on the theme of matrimonial betrayal, among them a parody of a popular drawing-room ballad of the period that began, ‘In the gloaming, oh my darling’. Ruddy’s version cut to the quick:

  In the spring time, oh my husband,

  When the heat is rising fast,

  When the coolie softly pulling

  Puddles but a burning blast,

  When the skies are lurid yellow,

  When our rooms are ‘ninety-three’,

  It were best to leave you, ducky –

  Rough on you, but best for me.

  Even more disquieting was the nursery rhyme which the ‘nursing mothers of Anglo-India’ were advised to sing to their babes:

  I had a little husband

  Who gave me all his pay.

  I left him for Mussoorie,

  A hundred miles away.

  I dragged my little husband’s name

  Through heaps of social mire,

  And joined him in October,

  As good as you’d desire.

  The inspiration for these ballads of infidelity and betrayal was not hard to find, for every day Ruddy had to cut and paste the several pages of advertisements that appeared in the paper. Both the CMG and the Pioneer ran personal columns which carried notices advertising such items for sale as polo ponies, bay Waler geldings, Swiss cottage tents, barouches or express rifles, often accompanied by the subheading ‘owner going Home’. Another popular category was ‘Houses to let for Season’, which gave details of cottages available to rent at one or other of the Himalayan hill-stations. However, a third category was for miscellaneous notices under the heading of ‘New Advertisements’, within which were to be found a breathtaking number of private messages whose intent was all too clear – and which must have been pored over daily in messes and clubs in every Civil Station and cantonment in Upper India. Two examples selected more or less at random from one issue of the CMG will suffice:

  Darling, your letter safely received, write fully as promised, nothing to fear from my quarter. I will not write to you without your permission, G. B.

  Hope you will enjoy your ten days at F—h, from the 22nd with your old pal, do not forget your make up box, after which sing “Ask nothing more of me.”32

  These personal advertisements show that adultery was alive and flourishing in British India in the 1880s.

  The Hot Weather of ’84 was more harsh than that of ’83. Again Ruddy began by treating it as a trial of strength and delighted in his capacity to rise to the double challenge, for Stephen Wheeler had once more made an early departure for the hills, suffering from fever and ‘ulcer of the cornea’. In early June Ruddy wrote to his Aunt Edith bragging of the hardships – and how well he was surmounting them:

  A two mile ride with the thermometer at 122° has skinned my nose, and the iron of my giglamps has burnt a blue horse-shoe over the bridge of it, but there are times when Life is really worth living … It’s curious to note how the weather trains one down. Just now I am 8 st. 5 lbs. And the Pater chaffs me about my slimness. He calls it ‘leanness’ which is vulgar. I prefer to consider it hard condition … The beauty of Lahore in the hot weather is that you can carry on as you will and there is no one to say ‘don’t’.

  Together with some subalterns from Mian Mir Ruddy rode out late one evening into a dust storm and came home ‘singing and shouting along the deserted roads like children out for a holiday’.33 He and they also hosted an intimate moonlight picnic in Lahore’s Shalimar Gardens, eighty neglected acres of what had been Emperor Shah Jehan’s once famous pleasure garden – ‘great sheets of still water, inlaid marble colonnades, and carved marble couches at the edge, thick trees and lime bushes and acres of night blooming flowers that scented the whole air … We just sat around and talked and then the women began to sing naturally and without pressing and the voices came across the water like the voices of spirits.’34 These two events were afterwards merged to provide the setting for ‘False Dawn’, in which the unfortunate Saumarez accidentally proposes to the wrong sister in the Shalimar Gardens during a dust storm. ‘Moonlight picnics,’ declares the narrator in a quintessentially Kiplingesque passage, ‘are useful just at the very end of the season, before all the girls go away to the Hills. They lead to understandings, and should be encouraged by chaperones especially those whose girls look sweetest in riding-habits. I knew a case once. But that is another story.’35

  But as the heat continued to build, the isolation of the bungalow became increasingly hard to bear and Ruddy’s resolve began to weaken. ‘Alone in the big dark house my eyes began their old tricks again,’ he confessed to Edith Macdonald. ‘I was so utterly unstrung (you’d be as bad if you sweated twenty four hours a day for three weeks on end) that they bothered me a good deal. I could only avoid the shadows by going sixteen hours grind a day at office.’36 Fearing that he was about to suffer a physical and mental collapse similar to that experienced at Christmas 1876, Ruddy became increasingly unnerved.

  By the end of June conditions for the few remaining Europeans on the Station had become all but intolerable. At the Club ‘sudden causeless hates flared up between friends and died down like straw fires; old grievances were recalled and brooded over aloud; the complaint book bristled with accusations and inventions’. Back in the bungalow there was ‘the taste of fever in one’s mouth, and the buzz of quinine in one’s ears; the temper frayed by heat to breaking-point but for sanity’s sake held back from the break; the descending darkness of intolerable dusks; and the [no] less supportable dawns of fierce, stale heat’. One solution tried and abandoned was to drag the bed from room to room in search of less heated air, another to sleep on the bungalow’s flat roof, ‘with the waterman to throw half-skinfuls of water on one’s parched carcase’. A third was to leave the bungalow altogether and walk, and it was this option that Ruddy now began to follow with increasing frequency: ‘Often the night got into my head … and I would wander till dawn in all manner of odd places – liquor shops, gambling- and opium-dens, which are not a bit mysterious, wayside entertainments such as puppet-shows, native dances; or in and about the narrow gullies under the Mosque
of Wazir Khan.’

  What Ruddy discovered on these night prowls was that ‘much of real Indian life goes on in the hot-weather nights’, and that as a newspaperman he was invested with a kind of invisibility denied other sahibs: ‘Having no position to consider, and my trade enforcing it, I could move at will in the fourth dimension … Sometimes, the Police would challenge, but I knew most of their officers, and many folk in some quarters knew me as the son of my Father, which in the East more than anywhere else is useful. Otherwise, the word “Newspaper” sufficed; though I did not supply my paper with many accounts of these prowls.’37

  These night walks first began in the summer of ’84 and the three and a half months during which Ruddy had sole occupancy of Bikaner House – although these months were not consecutive. At the start of August the ‘Amber Toad’ returned from his sick leave, leaving Ruddy free to take off to Dalhousie for a four-week break. ‘For one blessed month I am become a child again,’ he wrote to his Aunt Edith midway through his leave. Despite incessant rain ‘we four have been very happy. In the daytime it is my business to go awalking or ariding when the weather permits; to play hop scotch with Mr Kipling; to shoot with an air gun at a target, drink bottled beer (a thing impossible in the plains) and to write poems – at the rate of one a day.’38

  This is one of a number of the surviving letters to Edith Macdonald which are incomplete, suggesting a family censor at work, and since Ruddy had arrived in Dalhousie bringing with him the first printed copies of Echoes it seems reasonable to speculate that in this instance the lost page carried some reference to his family’s reaction to his additional verses. Ruddy mailed copies of Echoes to family members and friends in England, each with a flattering dedication added to the fly leaf, and no doubt his parents’ copies (which no longer survive) were as sweetened with compliments as the others, but it is hard to believe that Alice in particular could have been anything but dismayed by her son’s public harping about a wife who escapes to the hills to cheat on her ‘little husband’ in the plains. Could Ruddy have been trying to make a point? At least one biographer has suggested that both Ruddy’s parents had eyes for the opposite sex, but evidence of actual impropriety is scant. It does seem odd, however, that the first book of poetry Rudyard Kipling assembled and published by his own hand should not get so much as a mention in Something of Myself.

  What is equally curious is the first verse inscribed in a copy of Echoes sent to Mrs Tavernor Perry, a woman who had become something of a confidante to Ruddy in London a year earlier. ‘Who is the Public I write for?’ he asks,

  Men ’neath an Indian sky

  Cynical, seedy and dry [?]

  Are these then the people I write for?

  No, not I.39

  Echoes failed to impress its Anglo-Indian readership, the Indian Review going so far as to declare that some of the verses it contained ‘ought never to have been published at all’. However, literary London did take some note. A review in the World magazine called it ‘a clever little book’ and singled out for praise the ‘Nursery Rhymes for Little Anglo-Indians’.

  Ruddy returned to Lahore at the start of September to find Wheeler down with another of his bouts of ill-health and the editor’s desk filled by one of the Pioneer’s assistant editors from Allahabad, Mr Macdonald. He took advantage of the Amber Toad’s absence to place in the CMG his first sustained piece of fiction to be published in India, again under the pseudonym of ‘Jacob Cavendish, M.A.’ Written in the cod-archaic language of Daniel Defoe, ‘The Tragedy of Crusoe, C. S.’ purports to be the diary of Mr Crusoe of the Punjab Civil Service, who returns from the Hills without Mrs Crusoe and finds that without her controlling presence his man Friday can turn his life into a living hell within the space of a week. ‘Found this morning that I had but one clean shirt,’ runs part of Crusoe’s entry for the sixth day: ‘Now I know I had twelve when I left my wife, so askt of Friday – who walks as though the ground was air under him – what had become of all my gear. At this he wept for ten minutes (over mine only towel) and prayed me to send him to prison since I had blackt his face this far.’40

  ‘The Tragedy of Crusoe, C. S.’ drew heavily on a vein of Anglo-Indian satire made popular by George Aberigh-Mackay, G. H. Keene and others, but there was an undercurrent of desperation beneath the humour, enough to hint that all was not well with its author. Within days of its publication Ruddy went down with what his older self termed a ‘break down’, brought on by ‘straight overwork, plus fever and dysentery’.41 Ruddy had always had a morbid fear of dirt and disease. Even in his days as editor of the United Services College Chronicle he had proclaimed himself ‘death on drains and water-supply’ and in Lahore he had missed no opportunity to write up anything that touched on the city’s sanitation. Back in May he had been greatly disturbed when one of the office orderlies at the CMG was struck down by what was said to be cholera. ‘The Abominable has come into the station,’ he had written. ‘I saw her knock a man down. He died in a trifle under two hours.’42

  But Ruddy had been even more perturbed when he returned from Dalhousie in September to find that the typhoid had spread to the Civil Lines, affecting eleven out of the seventy adults on the Station: ‘The men sat up with the men and the women with the women. We lost four of our invalids and thought we had done well. Otherwise, men and women dropped where they stood. Hence our custom of looking up anyone who did not appear in our daily gatherings.’ This stiff-lipped account of the outbreak set down in Something of Myself carries no hint of the fears that assailed the eighteen-year-old every evening when he retired to his bungalow, not just the night horrors but a real terror of cholera morbus, the killer that struck seemingly at will and was still believed by the best medical men of the time to be ‘a poison, which may be transmitted from adjacent places through the air’.43 Hence Kipling’s view of cholera as ‘manifestly a breath of the Devil that could kill all on one side of a barrack-room and spare the others’. Something of the fear he felt was caught in two early poems written over this period: ‘The Moon of Other Days’, in which he talks of a ‘seething city … unkept, unclean’;44 and ‘The City of the Heart’, in which he imagines himself riding through the streets ‘in the hush of a hopeless night’ and finding himself surrounded by a pack of pi-dogs, a ‘yelping, yellow crew’ which he can only keep in check ‘with the dog-whip of Work and Fact’.45

  In the middle of the night of 16 September Ruddy was woken by violent stomach spasms. He tried to find his medicines in the dark and failed, and began calling out for his manservant, Kadir Baksh:

  When I had dug up my man he lit a lamp and took a look at me and straightway bolted out of the house. That made me fancy that I must have got a touch of the ‘sickness that destroyeth in the noonday’ as distinguished from the other article and I poured myself a stiff dose of chlorodyne and sat down to await the march of events and pray for the morning. I had hardly rolled on the floor however before my man turned up for the second time with a naked oil lamp, a little bottle and a queer-looking weapon in his hand. The fellow had brought me opium and a pipe all complete.

  Believing that he had nothing to lose, Ruddy took the pipe and began to smoke it: ‘Presently I felt the cramps in my legs dying out and my tummy more settled and a minute or two later it seemed to me that I fell through the floor. When I woke up I found my man waiting at the bed side where he had put me, with a glass of warm milk and a stupendous grin.’ Although Ruddy felt well enough to go to work, Macdonald told him afterwards that he ‘came into the office with every sign of advanced intoxication’. Ruddy promptly sent an account of this incident to his Aunt Edith, which he closed with a tribute to Kadir Baksh: ‘You may guess how grateful I am to him for his prompt action. He vows and declares that I was going to have a touch of the sickness that is loose in our City now. Whether he is right or wrong I know not but … no woman could have tended me more carefully than he through those three terrible hours between eleven and two.’46

  This was Ruddy’s only publicly
acknowledged experience of opium-taking, but by his own admission it was combined with ‘a stiff dose of chlorodyne’, which was itself a mixture of opium in alcoholic solution, tincture of cannabis and chloroform. There is convincing evidence that this double dose hit him with the force of a revelation.47 In modern parlance, it ‘blew his mind’, opening the doors of his unconscious hitherto kept tight shut and causing him to lose some of his fearfulness. His letters48 show that from this time on he continued to rely on opiates, in the form of opium, morphine and bhang or Indian hemp medicinally taken, to get him through Lahore’s hot summer nights – nights of real horror which, as he confessed in Something of Myself, he came to dread more and more with each passing year and ‘cowered in my soul as it [the Hot Weather] returned’. This drug-taking was by no means as shocking then as it might appear today: heat-induced ‘night terrors’ were recognised as a medical condition by such authorities as the Surgeon-General of India and routinely treated with bromide of potassium and Dr Collis-Browne’s Chlorodyne, patented in 1871. A well-known side-effect of this treatment was hallucination, never more lucidly described than in a quite extraordinary piece of writing that appeared unsigned in the CMG on 7 August 1885 under the title of ‘De Profundis’, complete with bravura passages that an habitual user could instantly recognise as ‘tripping’ – and a ‘bad trip’ at that. ‘Here you are alone,’ runs one of these passages,

  utterly alone on the verge of a waste of moonlit sand, stretching away to the horizon. Hundreds and thousands of miles away lies a small silver pool, not bigger than a splash of rain water. A stone is dropped into its bosom, and, as the circles spread, the puddle widens into a devouring, placid sea, advancing in mathematically straight ridges across the sand. The silver lines broaden from east to west, and rush up with inconceivable rapidity to the level of your eyes. You shudder and attempt to fly.