Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  Wheeler’s revenge was to forbid his assistant to take up an invitation from the Walkers to join them on a tour of Rajputana and Central India. Not that Ruddy minded too much. He knew that the two longer stories contained in Quartette were something out of the ordinary – and critical opinion has subsequently judged him right. Both are tales of the supernatural after the manner of Edgar Allan Poe, but a cut above Poe in that they leave us guessing as to how much of each tale is a real haunting and how much the figment of a fevered imagination. The one that had come most easily from his pen was ‘The Phantom ’Rickshaw’, begun that summer in Simla and finished on his return to Lahore. In his autobiography Rudyard Kipling states that it was in the writing of this story that his ‘Personal Daemon’ first came to him ‘when I sat bewildered among other notions, and said: “Take this and no other.” I obeyed and was rewarded … Some of it was weak, much of it was bad and out of key; but it was my first serious attempt to think in another man’s skin.’

  The ‘skin’ in question belongs to a sick man, Jack Pansay of the Bengal Civil Service, who is persuaded by his doctor that it will ease his mind if he writes out ‘the whole affair’ from beginning to end. A dramatic monologue in the manner of Gabral Misquitta in ‘The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows’ follows as Pansay relates to his doctor how he turned his back on his married lover, Mrs Keith Wessington, and how she wreaked her revenge. Having terminated the affair, Pansay had fallen in love with Miss Kitty Mannering, causing Mrs Wessington to die of a broken heart. A year later Pansay returns to Simla to resume his courtship of Kitty, but as he rides out past Combermere Bridge with Kitty laughing by his side he hears his name called and sees a rickshaw drawn by four jampanis dressed in Mrs Wessington’s familiar livery of black and white. Inside is Mrs Wessington, ‘golden head bowed on her breast’. From then on every time he takes Kitty out for a ride he meets the ghost in her rickshaw crying, ‘It’s a mistake, a hideous mistake.’ His friends think him mad and Kitty breaks off the engagement. With his life in ruins, he meets his dead lover face to face and discovers that he has left the reality of his world and has entered hers:

  Mrs Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the Sanjowlie road to the turning below the Commander-in-Chief’s house as I might walk by the side of any living woman’s ’rickshaw, deep in conversation … There had been a garden-party at the Commander-in-Chief’s, and we two joined the crowd of homeward-bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows – impalpable, fantastic shadows – that divided for Mrs Wessington’s ’rickshaw to pass through.

  The second of the two stories was ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, an even more disturbing tale. Again, it is told in the first person – by Morrowbie Jukes, a civil engineer, whose work has taken him far out into a wilderness of sand. His story starts with ‘a slight attack of fever’. It is a full moon and the baying of pariah dogs drives Jukes so frantic that he rides out after one particularly large beast with a hog-spear. But his horse slides down an unexpectedly steep slope of sand into a large pit, from which he is unable to extricate himself. He finds himself trapped among a colony of outcastes, victims of cholera and other diseases cast into the pit. Instead of acknowledging him as a sahib, they greet his appearance with derision and mock him. Their leader is an educated Brahmin named Gunga Dass, a babu of the sort that Rudyard Kipling most despised, who tells Jukes that ‘We are now Republic’, and that he must abide by their rules, not his. But their rules amount to anarchy, for ‘the living dead men had thrown behind them every canon of the world which had cast them out’, and Jukes has to fight not only to stay alive but also to preserve his identity as ‘a representative of the dominant race’. Just when all seems lost he is saved by the appearance of Dunnoo, the dog-boy, the least of his servants, who has tracked him down and brought a rope with him.

  ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ can be read as a straightforward horror story in the manner of Poe’s ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, or as a tale of hallucination brought on by a combination of isolation and fever. But it is also the ultimate Anglo-Indian nightmare, in which roles are reversed and the ruler becomes the ruled, helpless under the tyranny of the Bengali babu, who for all his trappings of Western civilisation will plunge India back into the darkness and disorder of its past. From his diary notes we know ‘Morrowbie Jukes’ was written over a period when Ruddy was just beginning to lose his fear of the predominantly Muslim city of Lahore – but not, it seems, of the Hindu minority of the sort he encountered daily in the law courts and the university, men whose studies of Western models of government had made them ask why those same models could not be applied to India.

  Even as copies of the CMG’s Christmas supplement were being read and enjoyed up and down the land, a small gathering was taking place in Bombay. Held over the last four days of December 1885, it was attended by seventy-two delegates drawn from all over India and chiefly inspired by three of the Kiplings’ bêtes noires: Madame Blavatsky, Allan Octavian Hume and Lord Ripon. The delegates declared themselves to be an Indian National Congress, and one of their first published resolutions was that this body should form ‘the germ of a Native Parliament’ that would constitute within a few years ‘an unanswerable reply to the assertion that India is still wholly unfit for any form of representative institution’.

  8

  ‘In vigil or toil or ease’

  THE PLAINS AND THE HILLS, 1886

  Was there aught I did not share

  In vigil or toil or ease,

  One joy or woe I did not know,

  Dear hearts across the seas?

  From the dedicatory verses to the English edition of Departmental Ditties, first published in Lahore, 1886

  The year 1886 began with a ‘New Year’s present to the Queen’ in the form of the annexation of Burma, achieved with deceptive ease and few casualties, but among them Lieutenant R. A. T. Dury, who had been a year above Ruddy at United Services College. The news of his death in action led Ruddy to comment in a letter to Lionel Dunsterville, ‘Did you see that poor Durey [sic] was killed by those swine? There’s £1,800 worth of education gone to smash and a good fellow with it.’1 Ruddy had himself asked to be allowed to cover the Burma campaign as the Civil and Military Gazette’s special correspondent, but can hardly have been surprised by Stephen Wheeler’s answer.

  Despite this news Ruddy began his twentieth year in the best of spirits. Quartette was being received by the Indian press with ‘all manner of sweet and gushing things’, a reviewer in the Bombay Gazette going so far as to compare ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ to the work of Wilkie Collins. The editor of the Englishman was begging for more of his verse to print, and Sir Auckland Colvin, the Financial Member of the Supreme Council, wrote to congratulate him on his ‘wit and delicate humour’ after the CMG printed Ruddy’s poetical squib ‘The Rupaiyat of Omar Kal’vin’, attacking his financial policies.2 In fact, the only two persons who did not seem to appreciate Ruddy’s literary progress were his chief and his father. Lockwood Kipling was becoming increasingly concerned by the direction in which his son’s writing was taking him and the reputation he was gaining in consequence, concerns he expressed in a letter to Margaret Burne-Jones written on 31 January. Its tone helps to explain why Ruddy was so eager to break away from Bikaner House. ‘It is of less than no use snarling at Ruddy,’ Lockwood declared:

  I was (personally) sorry that Quartette came out, but he had set himself to it so eagerly one didn’t like to baulk him. Also I hoped someone would rap his knuckles for the unwholesomeness of the Phantom ’Risha … But the Indian Press has given him only praise and his knuckles await a rapping. I am too near, too little of a judge and too personally interested in his eager, vivid life to do much; but anything from you or his Aunt would sink deep … So the truest kindness is to speak and spare not.3

  But if Lockwood expected Ruddy’s closest confidante to use her influence to get him to abandon his ‘vulgar smartness’ he was to be disappointed; the W
op of Albion wisely left the Wop of Asia to write as he thought fit.

  Ruddy had other reasons for feeling cheerful: his ‘screw’ had been increased to 500 rupees a month; he had been reunited with his old school friend Lionel Dunsterville, on his way to join his regiment in Rawalpindi; and he had met a young woman with ‘the face of an angel, the voice of a dove and the step of the fawn’,4 going so far as to attend church for the first time in four years. The object of his affections was the ‘dark-eyed’ Miss Duke, daughter of a clergyman – according to Lockwood Kipling, ‘an awful military Chaplain at Mian Mir, who, I am told, preaches impossible sermons … The boy for two Sundays has driven five miles to attend Mian Mir Church!’5 The romance with the clergyman’s daughter never got as far as a third Sunday. At an afternoon tea-dance Trix introduced Miss Duke to her brother and after one dance he had had enough, his explanation being that she had ‘the breath of the tomb … When she leant and whispered something to me I could have fainted.’

  Two weeks later a more solid reason for cheerfulness was provided by the visit to Lahore of a journalist from the Pioneer’s offices in Allahabad: thirty-one-year-old Kay Robinson, India-born son of George Allen’s old partner in Allahabad, the Reverend Julian Robinson, and younger brother of Phil Robinson, the well-known writer of the Indian Garden series. After a schooling at Cheltenham and several years in Fleet Street Kay Robinson had followed his elder brother’s footsteps by returning to his parents’ home in Allahabad to work on the Pi. Some Latin verses of his had appeared in the paper under the initials ‘K. R.’ and shortly afterwards Kay had received a good-humoured letter from Ruddy telling him that he was being complimented on the other’s verses. A correspondence had begun and in mid-February Kay Robinson took some leave and came to stay at Bikaner House for four days.

  It was a visit with consequences. Someone – almost certainly Wheeler – had complained to Allen that the CMG’s assistant editor was not pulling his weight, was averse to routine and disliked working on the ‘scraps’ used to fill the page. Allen had then written a stiff letter to Ruddy, who had kept uncharacteristically silent: ‘I sat tight, he [Allen] being a full mouthed man and one of the [newspaper’s] owners to boot.’6 So Robinson may well have come to Lahore with orders to find out how things stood with the CMG and its editorial staff. He challenged Ruddy directly with the charge of slacking and received a furious denial, reiterated in a letter:

  The whole settlement and routine of the old rag from the end of the leader to the beginning of the advertisements is in my hands and mine only: my respected chief contributing a blue pencil mark now and then and a healthy snarl just to soothe me. The telegrams also and such scraps as I or my father write are my share likewise; and these things call me to office half one hour before, and let me out, always three-quarters, sometimes one hour behind, my chief. My Sabbath is enlivened by the official visits of the printer and my evenings after dinner are made merry by his demands. So much for the routine of which I am averse.

  He went on to answer Wheeler’s charge that his ‘skits’ were being written in office hours: ‘The rhymed rubbish and the stuff like “Section 420. I. P. C.” [the original title under which ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ was published] is written out of office for my own personal amusement (I don’t play tennis or whist or ride and my driving is no pleasure to me) and then – O my friend – is damned as a waste of time and only put in with a running lecture on the sinfulness of writing such stuff.’7

  Robinson had come to Lahore expecting to find an aesthete and was initially disappointed by the uncouth appearance of his correspondent: ‘his juvenile appearance … his stoop … his heavy eyebrows, his spectacles, and his sallow Anglo-Indian complexion … his jerky speech and abrupt movements’. After ten minutes’ conversation, however, Robinson’s first impressions were forgotten. The two men very quickly discovered that they had much more in common than a love of literature. Ruddy thought Robinson ‘a nice youth and a merry [one]’,8 while Robinson, for his part, found Ruddy ‘the best of company, bubbling over with delightful humour’.

  Robinson returned to Allahabad convinced that the younger Kipling was a great writer in the making and a hard-working one at that, afterwards declaring in print that ‘if you want to find a man who will cheerfully do the work of three men, you should catch a young genius … The amount of stuff that Kipling got through in the day was indeed wonderful.’ He appears to have passed these sentiments on to Allen – and to Ruddy, too, telling the latter that his talents were lost on British India, where his readership was ‘either too preoccupied with dry-as-dust official business, or too devoted to the frivolities of life to regard literature as anything better than a vehicle for the conveyance of ponderous statistics, or a means of embroidering the accounts of polo matches.’9 He urged him to go to England, where he would ‘win real fame, and possibly wealth’.10

  Ruddy was hugely flattered – ‘you ought to know better at your time o’ life than to knock a youngster off his legs in this way’ – but at twenty the idea of making his way in England did not appeal to him. ‘My home’s out here,’ he wrote back. ‘My people are out here; all the friends etc. I know are out here and all the interests I have are out here. Why should I go home[?] Any fool can put up rhymes and the market is full of boys who could undersell me as soon as I put foot in it.’ Besides, he was greatly indebted to his employers, believing that the ‘personal and purely professional gratitude’ he owed Allen, Walker and Rattigan gave them the right to his services ‘for as long a time in fact as they may choose to retain them’. And he had another reason for wishing to make his future in India:

  I am deeply interested in the queer ways and works of the people of the land. I hunt and rummage among ’em; knowing Lahore City – that wonderful, dirty, mysterious ant hill – blindfold and wandering through it like Haroun Al-Raschid in search of strange things … I’m in love with the country and would sooner write about her than anything else. Wherefore let us depart our several ways in amity. You to Fleet Street (where I shall come when I die if I’m good) and I to my own place where I find heat and smells of oil and spices, and puffs of temple incense, and sweat, and darkness, and dirt and lust and cruelty, and, above all, things wonderful and fascinating innumerable.11

  Gone was the suspicion and hostility that had characterised Ruddy’s initial response to the local Punjabi culture, and in its place was an open-hearted infatuation that spoke volumes. Six months earlier Ruddy had shared a train carriage with an Urdu-speaking Pathan magistrate from Peshawar, an encounter which had forced him to revise his earlier judgements on the Afghan people. The Pathan had explained that their two peoples would always think and act differently because they followed different ethical codes: ‘God made us different – you and I, your fathers and my fathers. For one thing, we do not have the same notions of honesty and of speaking the truth … You come and judge us by your own standard of morality – that morality which is the outcome of your climate and your education and your tradition … Who are we to have your morals, or you to have ours?’ They had eaten together and when the time had come for them to continue their respective journeys on separate trains the two had parted as friends, but in the knowledge that their peoples had little in common and would always go their own ways. ‘God made us – East and West – widely different,’ Ruddy had concluded. ‘Literally and metaphorically, we were standing upon different platforms; and parallel straight lines as everybody does not know, are lines in the same plane which being continued to all eternity will never meet.’12

  The exchange foreshadows the philosophy contained in ‘The Ballad of East and West’, published three years later, which contains perhaps the most quoted and most misunderstood lines Kipling ever wrote: ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’ The ‘Ballad’ drew on the true story of Harry Lumsden, founding father of the renowned Corps of Guides Cavalry and Infantry, and his dealings with one of his more difficult early recruits, Dilawar Khan. It is a celebration
of two strong men, one English and one Afghan, its message that mutual respect can overcome cultural differences, for ‘there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!’13

  Ruddy’s reappraisal of the Afghan character had continued after his return to Lahore. In early January 1886 he spent an entire Sunday exploring Lahore’s Sultan Sarai – ‘that huge open square … surrounded with arched cloisters, where the camel and horse caravans put up on their return from Central Asia’. His initial contact was an Afghan horse-trader named Aslam Khan, known throughout the Punjab for having ‘sold more racing and polo ponies to subalterns than any other man in history’.14 But Aslam Khan then passed Ruddy on to one of his compatriots from Kabul: ‘not much over six foot high; wore a jet-black beard, clean postheen [fur-lined Afghan coat]; fancifully embroidered Bokhara belt and pouches; looked like a hero of medieval romance’.15 The burly Afghan took to the bespectacled little topi-wallah, and from then on Ruddy and the Kabuli met whenever the latter was passing through Lahore. ‘I remember one long-limbed Pathan,’ Kay Robinson was afterwards to write, ‘indescribably filthy, but with magnificent mien and features – Mahbab Ali, I think was his name – who regarded Kipling as a man apart from other “Sahibs”. After each of his wanderings across the unexplored fringes of Afghanistan, where his restless spirit of adventure led him, Mahbab Ali always used to turn up, travel stained, dirtier and more majestic than ever, for confidential colloquy with “Kuppeling Sahib”, his “friend”.’ Robinson was rather in awe of Mahbab Ali, but not so Ruddy: ‘I have seen Kipling in his cotton clothes and great mushroom hat, and Mahbab Ali’s towering, turbaned and loose-robed figure, walking together in earnest and confidential colloquy, the queerest contrast that friendship, even in India … but Mahbab Ali, peace to his bones, was only one link in the strange chain of associations Kipling rivetted round himself in India.’16