Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  And if Captain Hamilton was regarded as Simla’s leading beau, then the belle of that season of ’86 was undoubtedly the beautiful Miss Jean Muir, said to be ‘the loveliest woman who ever came east of Suez’, and widely assumed to be about to be claimed by a visiting prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Prince Louis Esterházy. ‘How I used to watch for “Miss Muir” on the Mall, or at dances,’ wrote Trix of this gilded couple. ‘Of course in 1886 we were all on the alert, hoping that dull-faced Prince Louis would not be the favoured one.’ Trix’s hopes were answered when Ian Hamilton claimed Miss Muir for himself, leaping dramatically through a paper hoop and sweeping her off her feet at a cotillion given by the Dufferins. He then proceeded to woo her furiously and in secret for a fortnight – until found out by Sir Frederick Roberts. Livid that his aide had disobeyed his command to remain at his beck and call at all times, the Commander-in-Chief ordered Hamilton to leave Simla within the hour. This cruelly broken-off romance prompted Ruddy to write a double-edged set of verses, ‘An Old Song’, which reflect the delights and tensions of that summer:

  So long as Death ’twixt dance and dance

  Chills best and bravest blood

  And drops the reckless rider down

  The rotten, rain-soaked khud [mountainside],

  So long as rumours from the North

  Make loving wives afraid,

  So long as Burma takes the boy

  And typhoid kills the maid,

  If you love me as I love you

  What knife can cut our love in two?48

  For Ruddy himself the young and eligible beauties of Simla appeared to hold no charms, perhaps because he knew them to be far beyond his reach. Instead, he joined the large circle of admirers who professed themselves to be in thrall to the seemingly ageless beauty of Mrs Parry-Lambert, wife of a major in the Public Works Department, whom he immortalised as ‘Venus Annodomini’ – ‘as immutable as the Hills. But not quite so green.’ Another of Mrs Parry-Lambert’s swains that summer was a young subaltern of the Corps of Guides named George Younghusband. According to Ian Hamilton, Younghusband became infatuated with her and ‘since his face was a looking-glass and his forehead an open book, by reason of his innocence, his brothers-in-arms made life a burden to him and embittered his naturally sweet disposition’. But then Mrs Parry-Lambert was joined in Simla by her eighteen-year-old daughter, as plain as her mother was beautiful. In Kipling’s telling, George Younghusband becomes ‘Very Young Gayerson’, who is joined in Simla by his father, ‘Young Gayerson’, at which point he discovers that his father was himself an admirer of the ‘Venus Annodomini’ in his youth and that she has an eighteen-year-old daughter – whereupon he abruptly leaves for the plains. ‘Probably I was the only person in Simla who did not know who “Very Young Gayerson” was,’ wrote George Younghusband in his autobiography. ‘It was only years later that the secret was revealed to me.’49 It may explain why he and his brother Francis were afterwards so hostile to Kipling.

  In subsequent Simla seasons it became something of a parlour game to try to work out who exactly was who among the leading characters created by Rudyard Kipling. It was generally agreed that Strickland, the policeman of many disguises who makes his first appearance in the pages of the CMG in April 1887 as ‘Miss Youghal’s Syce’ and is fleshed out thereafter in a number of Plain Tales, could only be based on Horace Goad, and that ‘Venus Annodomini’ was mostly Mrs Parry-Lambert. However, the main subject of speculation was always the identity of the delightful, dangerous woman who was ‘clever, witty, brilliant and sparkling beyond most of her kind; but possessed of many devils of malice and mischievousness’.50 Her name was ‘Mrs Hauksbee’ and she slipped fully formed out of the pages of the CMG on 17 November 1886, going on to make a further nine appearances over the next fourteen years.51 Everyone had their own theories as to who the real Mrs Hauksbee might be, George Younghusband remembering that the ‘entrancing’ older woman whom he and his friends had identified as the model for ‘Mrs Hauksbee’ was mortified to hear of it, until it was suggested to her that Kipling ‘must have taken all the best parts of the character from you, and the rest from other people’.

  No doubt there were wise heads in Simla ready to point out that a strong candidate for Mrs Hauksbee was ‘Mrs Vereker’ in Judge Cunningham’s Chronicles of Dustypore, published in 1877. There is equally a case for arguing that something of Alice Kipling went into her making, just as there is for believing that an element of Lockwood Kipling went into the all-wise Strickland. But if any single person inspired Mrs Hauksbee it could only have been a forty-year-old, round-faced, full-lipped and rather dumpy little woman who liked to parade up and down the Simla Mall dressed in yellow and black in misguided tribute to her husband’s corps, popularly known as the ‘Yellow Boys’. She was Mrs Isabella Burton, wife of a major of Skinner’s Horse, whose main attraction to a young man half her age was that she was both a flirt and a bluestocking but, above all, a woman of the world, possessing ‘the wisdom of the Serpent, the logical coherence of the Man, the fearlessness of the Child, and the triple intuition of the Woman’. By modern standards Mrs Burton was not promiscuous, but she delighted in surrounding herself with ardent young men whom she could amuse, manipulate, tease and educate all at the same time – a woman determined, in the words of her fictional alter ego, ‘to act, dance, ride, frivol, talk scandal, dine out, and appropriate the legitimate captives of any woman I choose, until I d-r-r-rop’.52 Ruddy had first met Mrs Burton when his mother had drawn him into Simla’s busy amateur-theatrical scene the previous summer. A year later their renewed acquaintance blossomed to the point where she became Ruddy’s ‘guide, philosopher and friend’,53 particularly in matters pertaining to female sexual mores.

  Whether it was because they represented a maternal aspect of womanhood that Ruddy craved but failed to find in his mother or because their sexual confidence allowed him to engage with them to a degree forbidden with other women, he was drawn to older married women like Mrs Burton as a bee to nectar. And when he came to write about them as a distinct Anglo-Indian species he did so with an honesty that acknowledged their many strengths:

  Women of forty to fifty and upwards … are the Lillie Langtrys of India …They have more individuality than English women. They know more of life, death, sickness and trouble than English women, I think; and this makes them broader in their views … I admit that their ‘belles’ startle one rather. They would be out of consideration in a small country town in England. As a general rule, only the older women try to be ‘fast’, and their fastness is very modified; but it lasts for many years.54

  All in all, Simla in July–August 1886 was a heady brew for a young man of twenty to imbibe, and when Ruddy returned to Lahore in mid-August his head was swimming with ideas, one of which was to write a series of glimpses of Simla life for his paper. Almost the first of these was ‘Three and – an Extra’, in which the reader is first introduced to ‘Mrs Hauksbee’. Over the next four months another four stories appeared in which this devious, bitchy, worldly-wise schemer played some part, establishing Mrs Hauksbee as one of the most engaging female characters in English fiction.

  To Ruddy’s great satisfaction Stephen Wheeler had retreated to England for five months’ sick leave, and his desk was occupied by Kay Robinson. What Ruddy termed a joyous reign’ now began, for Robinson was under instructions from George Allen to ‘put sparkle’ into the CMG, and did so with an enthusiasm that was infectious. ‘Between the two of us we’ve been making the Civil and Military Gazette hum,’ wrote Ruddy to his Aunt Edith in early December, as Robinson’s brief period in office drew to a close. ‘They say the paper is immensely improved under the new direction. We certainly have freshened things up all round and cut down expenses simply because we used to write the greater part of our paper ourselves … Robinson gave me absolutely free hand and consulted me about questions of “views” and “lines” and “policies” so that in his Consulship I got a greater insight into the higher workings o
f a paper than ever before.’55

  As well as being more directly involved in the running of the paper Ruddy also had a lot more fun working alongside an editor who was ‘in every way congenial and bright and witty … and [with] a shameful levity of disposition’. There were evenings when the two of them went rat-hunting with their terriers through the paper’s offices and when they decorated the walls with large drawings of themselves carrying out Allen’s instructions to put sparkle into the paper. Like his elder brother Phil Robinson, Kay was a keen naturalist and adopted an office mascot in the form of a crow picked up injured in the road, which was tamed and given its own column in the paper within which to comment ‘upon politics and things in general’. However, Robinson’s greatest contribution to Ruddy’s well-being was his introduction of the ‘turnover’, which he had discovered earlier while working in London for the Globe newspaper. This consisted of a feature of approximately two and a half thousand words which filled one column, usually in the middle spread of the paper, and then continued over on to the next page for a further half-column. It was perfect for Ruddy’s Simla tales, and from November onwards the turnover became an established weekly feature of the paper, so that when Wheeler reappeared in December and reclaimed his office it was a case of fait accompli. The turnover stayed and the stories kept coming, week on week.

  At Christmas that year two seasonal poems appeared in the Pioneer, one signed ‘K. R.’, the other ‘R. K.’, both entitled ‘Christmas in India’. The first was conventionally sentimental, the second characteristically sardonic:

  High noon behind the tamarisks – the sun is hot above us –

  As at Home the Christmas Day is breaking wan.

  They will drink our healths at dinner – those who tell us how they love us,

  And forget us till another year be gone!56

  Printed side by side, the two poems celebrated a fellowship of like minds – which makes Ruddy’s continuing hostility towards Robinson in the matter of his sister’s affections all the more perplexing. It is clear from Trix’s remarks that Robinson wrote to her after being warned off by Ruddy and that it was on his advice – ‘Shoot the brute!’ – that she gave him no further encouragement. By the standards of the day their age difference was hardly an impediment to marriage, so Ruddy evidently had other objections. Whatever these were, in the light of what befell Trix they were misplaced. Not a word or note survives to show if Ruddy ever felt remorse or had second thoughts, but there was to be a curious parallel some years later when he found himself in love with the sister of his best friend – and fled the scene.

  At the end of the year the Family Square celebrated the attainment of Ruddy’s majority, and with it the news that Lockwood Kipling was to be appointed to the Order of the Indian Empire as a Commander (CIE). Public recognition had come to both father and son, and, in the case of the son, literally so. ‘I have made a mark,’ wrote Ruddy to his Aunt Edith. ‘Everyone in the sets I know, has read or heard about the Departmental Ditties and strangers in trains, and hotels and all manner of out of the way places come up to me and say nice things. Also – last proof of notoriety – people turn their heads and look and ask to be introduced to me when I dance or dine in strange places beyond my district.’57 At twenty-one he was known among his own people.

  9

  ‘Forty foolish yarns’

  FROM LAHORE TO ALLAHABAD, 1887–8

  Between the gum pot and the shears,

  The weapons of my grimy trade,

  In divers moods and various years

  These forty foolish yarns were made.

  Rudyard Kipling, from the inscription in his presentation copy of Plain Tales from the Hills to Mrs Edmonia Hill, 1888

  Only seven Rudyard Kipling letters have survived from 1887, of which three are business letters addressed to the Calcutta publisher Thacker, Spink and Co. In the first, written in February, he asks for a price quotation for the printing of a book of no more than 130 pages containing twenty-four short stories, to be called Punjab People Brown and White.1 In the second, dating from mid-June, he states that the projected book is now to be called Plain Tales from the Hills and will be made up of thirty-nine stories ‘of Simla and the plains’.2

  The four private letters are all addressed to older married women, three of them to Mrs Isabella Burton, the spirited ‘Mrs Hauksbee’ figure whose acquaintance Ruddy again renewed in Simla in the summer of ’87 when they rehearsed and performed together in a play at the Gaiety Theatre. The letters hint at sexual advances on his part and rebuffs on hers. In the first Ruddy asks permission to dedicate his forthcoming book to Mrs Burton: ‘If I put on the title page, sans initials or anything, just this much, “To the wittiest woman in India I dedicate this book” will you, as they say in the offices, “initial and pass as correct?”’3

  When Plain Tales from the Hills was finally published in January 1888 it consisted of thirty-two stories selected from the more than seventy which had previously appeared in the CMG, as well as another eight previously unpublished. These last show that Ruddy’s decision to wait until he had forty good stories written was a wise one, and not simply because another Simla leave had given him more grist for the mill. Four of the eight escaped the censors of the Family Square and had their roots in Ruddy’s fifth and last Lahore Hot Weather.

  ‘Thrown Away’ tells the story of a young officer who is too sensitive to survive the realities of India and is driven to blow out his brains with his revolver. The narrator and one of the man’s brother officers conspire together to concoct ‘a big, written lie … to soothe the Boy’s people at Home’, making it appear that he has died of cholera. ‘The Madness of Private Ortheris’ also deals with acute depression, in this case that of Private Ortheris of the Soldiers Three, driven half mad by homesickness and boredom. ‘What must I do to get out o’ this ’ere a-Hell?’ he cries desperately, leading his two friends to join with the narrator in a scheme to bring him back to his senses.

  The third story of the four, ‘Beyond the Pale’, is even darker, being ‘the story of a man who wilfully stepped beyond the safe limits of decent everyday society, and paid heavily for it’. This is Trejago, an Englishman who ‘took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again’. Trejago likes to wander through Lahore’s back streets and has gained a great knowledge of Indian lore in the process. One evening he comes upon a dead end in a dark gully and he hears a laugh from behind a grated window. He flirts with the unseen woman and next day receives a coded message, which he correctly interprets as coming from an Indian widow who seeks him as a lover. He responds and a month of illicit visits follows. By day Trejago goes through the routine of office work and puts on his best suit to call on the ladies of the Station, but every night he conceals himself under an ‘evil-smelling boorka’ and enters the sleeping city to find ‘endless delight’ with his lover, the teenage widow Bisesa, ‘fairer than bar-gold in the Mint’ but ‘ignorant as a bird’. In the ‘narrow dark Gully where the sun never came and where the buffaloes wallowed in the blue slime’ Trejago finds passion unlike anything he has known or will ever know in the ordered, sunlit world of the Civil Lines. He swears he loves Bisesa more than anyone else in the world, but she tells him he has been seen walking with a memsahib by the bandstand. She is unable to understand that this means nothing to Trejago, and to his bemusement breaks off the relationship. After three weeks without a sign from Bisesa, Trejago returns to the gully and raps at her grated window as of old: ‘There was a young moon, and one stream of light fell down into Amir Nath’s Gully, and struck the grating which was drawn away as he knocked. From the dark black Bisesa held out her arms into the moonlight. Both hands had been cut off at the wrists, and the stumps were nearly healed.’ A hidden assailant lunges at Trejago with something sharp and wounds him in the groin. The grating is closed and he is left alone in the blackness of the gully.

  The structure of the tale is unusual for the young Kipling in that he dispenses with a narrator and ins
tead opens with what appears to be a moral: ‘A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race, and breed. Let the White go to the White and the Black to the Black’ – lines frequently taken at face value. But this is Rudyard Kipling the story-teller articulating the censorious views of British India, for he goes on to show that his sympathies lie with the lovers who have dared to cross the racial divide and who are punished for it. Like the lovers Héloise and Abélard, Trejago and Bisesa have dared to break society’s bounds and suffer the consequences, in Trejago’s case with a symbolic castration.

  The fourth story appeared last in Ruddy’s ordering of his forty published Plain Tales and is arguably the weakest. ‘To Be Filed for Reference’ is about McIntosh Jellaludin, one of those European loafers whose fuddled, drink-soaked lives held such a fascination for Ruddy precisely because they had abandoned social constraints and had struck out into the ‘fourth dimension’. McIntosh Jellaludin’s surname marks him out as a convert to Islam, but his particular tragedy is that he was once a scholar and a gentleman. Despite being filthy drunk most of the time he befriends the narrator and tells him that he proposes to bequeath him a manuscript of a novel he has written – ‘the materials of a new Inferno’ – which will make the narrator famous. The loafer duly dies of pneumonia and his Native wife hands the narrator a bundle of papers ‘all numbered and covered with fine cramped writing’. The policeman Strickland helps the narrator sort them out and declares the writer to have been either ‘an extreme liar or a most wonderful person. He thought the former. One of these days you may be able to judge for yourselves.’ Only then do we learn that McIntosh Jellaludin’s master work is entitled ‘The Book of Mother Maturin’. The story is nothing less than an advertisement for the great novel of Lahore low-life that Ruddy had been writing on and off for almost two years.