Kipling Sahib

by Charles Allen

  At Naulakha father and son worked side by side, the one writing his tales, the other drawing sketches to decorate and illustrate them. Together with Carrie and baby Josephine they might almost have been a new Family Square. In September Lockwood returned to England and the atmosphere changed, in large part because Carrie’s determination to run things her way had put a strain on the Kiplings’ relations with the other members of the Balestier family and their neighbours. Three bitter months marooned in deep snow was as much as Ruddy and Carrie could endure, and in January 1894 they fled to the warmth of Bermuda – where, characteristically, Ruddy buttonholed in the street a sergeant from the Royal Berkshire Regiment and secured an invitation to tea in his married quarters. Fourteen years earlier the sergeant had been present at the Maiwand disaster in the Second Afghan War and had seen his colonel and the other wing of his regiment overwhelmed while he and the rest retreated in panic back to Kandahar. Rudy coaxed the story out of him and turned it into cruel, honest poetry in ‘That Day’:

  I ’eard the knives be’ind me, but I dursn’t face my man,

  Nor I don’t know where I went to, ’cause I didn’t ’alt to see,

  Till I ’eard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as ’e ran,

  An’ I thought I knew the voice an’ – it was me!17

  A trip to England in the summer to show off his sixteen-month-old daughter to his mother reinforced Ruddy’s conviction that literary London held no more charms for him. He visited old friends and old haunts, but felt alienated and unable to connect. He attended a formal banquet honouring the newly ennobled Lord Roberts, lately retired from India, and was astonished by the reception given to the pair of them. His tribute to ‘Bobs’ Roberts – ‘There’s a little red-faced man, / Which is Bobs, / Rides the tallest ’orse ’e can – / Our Bobs’ – had recently appeared in the newspapers to universal praise, and when these two little men entered the banqueting hall side by side they were given a standing ovation directed as much towards the younger man as the grizzled old warrior. No less unsettling was a return to Westward Ho!, where Ruddy represented USC’s old boys at a ceremony marking the retirement of his beloved guru Cormell Price and was observed ‘silently looking into the past’.18

  For most of their time in England Ruddy and Carrie lived in a rented house near his parents at Tisbury, allowing Ruddy to commune daily with his father for almost three months before they returned to Vermont in August. ‘Heaven was kind to me in England,’ he wrote to an American correspondent, ‘where I was safely delivered of several poems, four new jungle tales and a piece of broad farce.’19 The last Jungle Book story was completed back in Vermont, with Ruddy finally writing to Mary Mapes Dodge on 18 June 1895 that he had ‘this week finished the last of the New Jungle books with the words “and this is the last of the Mowgli tales because there are no more to be told.” Now we must try new things.’20

  Among the new things tried were two Indian tales conceived as further tributes to the empire-building work of Anglo-Indians of the same mould as Findlayson the engineer hero of ‘The Bridge-Builders’, all three being subsequently collected and published in 1898 in the aptly named The Day’s Work. The more readable of the two is ‘The Tomb of His Ancestors’, which begins with a private joke that the Kiplings’ friends would have enjoyed: ‘Some people will tell you that if there were but a loaf of bread in all India it would be divided equally between the Plowdens, the Trevors, the Beadons, and the Rivett-Carnacs. That is only one way of saying that certain families serve India generation after generation as dolphins follow in line across the open seas.’ The Chinns are one such family, the brighter ones going into the ICS and the duller ones joining the Police or the Forest Service. John Chinn the Younger follows family tradition and finds himself administering the Satpura hills of Central India, inhabited by tribal Bhils, where his father and grandfather served before him. The Bhils are up in arms against the Government’s vaccination programme – until John Chinn goes out into the jungle to take on the vengeful spirit of his ancestor ‘Jan Chinn’ in the form of a giant man-eating tiger, which he shoots and kills.

  Far more ambitious is ‘William the Conqueror’, in which the ‘William’ of the title is not a man but the mannish sister of a Punjab official for whom she keeps house. After four hard years in India in which she has survived cholera and typhoid, William wears her hair ‘cropped and curling over her head’, walks in ‘long, easy strides’, prefers a ‘dingy old riding-habit’ to dresses, will ‘never set foot on the ground if a horse were within hail’, likes to sit on chairs with ‘one foot tucked under her … rolling cigarettes for her brother’, loves to talk shop, speaks fluent Urdu and Punjabi, and looks at men ‘squarely and deliberately between the eyes – yea, after they had proposed to her and been rejected’.

  The story is divided between Lahore and a district in southern India where a state of famine has been declared which promises to be as bad as the mismanaged ‘Big Famine’ of Lord Lytton’s time. William’s brother and her brother’s friend Scott of the Punjab Irrigation Department are sent south to help out. William goes with them and soon finds herself as involved in famine relief work as her menfolk, to the extent of taking on some of Scott’s work when he goes down with fever. They all work manfully through the Hot Weather until the Rains break, by which time Scott and William are in love. As they return to the Punjab the latter knows she has found her destiny: ‘Here was the land she knew and loved, and before her lay the good life she understood, among folk of her own caste and mind.’

  During the writing of ‘William the Conqueror’ Carrie noted in her diary that Ruddy had ‘got the hang of quite a new sort of woman’ who was ‘turning out stunningly’.21 William is indeed a far more rounded and believable heroine than those Ruddy had tried and failed to portray in The Light That Failed and The Brushwood Boy but she is not, as several Kipling biographers have suggested, an idealised version of Edmonia Hill. Far from it. To put it plainly, William is no more than a man in a skirt.

  A dry spell followed. Efforts to get Kim going again were started and abandoned. Their second child, Elsie, looking ‘ridiculously like her mother’, was born in February 1896, by which time Carrie’s relations with her prickly brother Beatty were approaching breaking point, while Ruddy for his part was becoming increasing vexed by what he saw as the US Government’s growing belligerence towards his own country, to say nothing of the behaviour of American reporters, who regarded him as public property. Ruddy found refuge in his friendship with their family doctor, James Conland, who as a young man had served on the cod-fishing fleets of the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. This led to the two of them exploring the doctor’s old haunts in Boston and Gloucester, and to the writing of Ruddy’s third novel, Captains Courageous: a Story of the Grand Banks, first published in instalments in McClure’s Magazine over the winter of 1896–7. Its author confided to a friend that it was ‘plain narrative done from the inside and … a corker’, adding that ‘I always told you I could write a tale.’22 The critics’ judgement was that it was rich in local detail but lacked conviction, particularly in its characterisation of the main protagonist: the unlikeable rich man’s son Harvey Cheyne, who is rescued from drowning by cod fishermen and over the course of eight chapters at sea in their company becomes a better man for it.

  In early May 1896 angry words were exchanged between Ruddy and his brother-in-law in a country lane, resulting in Beatty being brought to court and a great deal of hostile reporting in the press. ‘Rud a total wreck,’ Carrie noted in her diary a week later. ‘Sleeps all the time. Dull, listless, and weary. These are dark days for us.’23 Within weeks they had decided to quit Vermont for England. On their last day at Naulakha friends came to say goodbye and found Carrie in tears and Ruddy ‘frozen in misery’. The latter was quoted as saying, ‘There are only two places where I want to live – Bombay and Brattleboro. And I can’t live in either.’24

  On 1 September the family boarded a steamship bound for Southampton and from there mov
ed into Rock House, a large country mansion set high on the cliffs at Maidencombe in south Devon, with spectacular views across Torbay to Portland Bill sixty miles away. A return to the county he had known in the happier years of his boyhood led Ruddy to invoke those years afresh in his imagination. In mid-December he wrote to ‘Uncle Crom’ Price about the doings of the Old USCs he had met or heard of, adding that he was ‘deep in a school tale, in which Dunsty [Dunsterville], Beresford, Crofts and all the rest of them come in. There’s a lovely scene of you in your study … I’ve never worked the mine of material I accumulated at Westward Ho! But come down and you shall hear it read.’25 This was ‘Slaves of the Lamp’, the first of the Stalky & Co. stories, published in Cosmopolitan in April 1897. It does not seem to have crossed his mind that in writing about his fellow pupils and their masters in barely disguised form he was trespassing on their privacy.

  Despite the pleasure Ruddy found in writing his Stalky tales, and however much he professed to feel at home, neither he nor Carrie was at ease in Rock House. Within weeks of occupying it they found themselves in the grip of what Kipling afterwards described as a ‘brooding Spirit of deep, deep Despondency within the open, lit rooms … a growing depression which enveloped us both in a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart, that each put down to the new, soft climate and, without telling the other, fought against for long weeks’.26 When at last in February 1897 Ruddy discovered that Carrie hated the house as much as he, they chose to forfeit six months’ rent for a happier home. Something of the darkness of that time may have been preserved in the eleven stark lines written in April 1897 at the behest of Ruddy’s cousin Phil Burne-Jones, who had followed in his father’s footsteps as an artist after failing to complete his degree at Oxford. When they first met as adults in 1889 after his return to London Ruddy had thought Phil a bit of a ‘phool’, but eight years later he found him more likeable and agreed to help further his career by providing a text to the centrepiece of an exhibition at the New Gallery in London. The painting showed a man sprawled unconscious on a couch with a beautiful, sharp-toothed woman in a white shroud lowering over him – with just a hint of a leer on her lips. The only explanation offered was the caption, The Vampire, and Ruddy’s text began:

  A fool there was and he made his prayer

  (Even as you and I!)

  To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair

  (We called her the woman who did not care)

  But the fool he called her his lady fair –

  (Even as you and I!)

  Oh, the years we waste and the tears we waste

  And the work of our head and hand

  Belong to the woman who did not know

  (And now we know that she never could know)

  And did not understand!

  The sub-text, of which Ruddy must surely have been aware, was that the painting was of the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, who had rejected Phil’s advances. Phil must have hoped that his famous cousin’s name would help to sell the picture, but it was the eleven stark lines, published in the Daily Mail two weeks before the painting was even exhibited, that received all the attention, helping to advertise the fact that the author of ‘Danny Deever’, ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ and other chill reminders of human frailty was back in England.

  The big event in 1897 was the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. It was also the year in which Rudyard Kipling became the first poet to command a mass audience. In early April, with Carrie and the family settled into a hotel in Kensington, he was elected to the Athenaeum under the club’s rule for the admittance of eminent persons without balloting, and on the day of his election he dined with Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes, Sir Sidney Colvin, Sir Walter Besant and Moberly Bell, editor of The Times. Over the course of the previous year Bell had published in his paper a number of poems of what Ruddy had taken to calling ‘a national character’, afterwards collected in The Seven Seas. Offered gratis, these public verses elevated Kipling to the status of a national weathervane, a poet who spoke for as much as to the British people on national and international issues, even when his views were in conflict with those of the government of the day. Inevitably Moberly Bell wanted something for The Times to mark the Jubilee, and after much grumbling Ruddy obliged. On 15 June Carrie noted in her diary that he was working on a poem called ‘White Man’s Burden’, which he then put to one side in order to try a different approach on the theme of imperial hubris, constructed around a single phrase lodged in his head: ‘Lest we forget’.

  With both sets of verses still unfinished Ruddy went down to Spithead for a fortnight with the Royal Navy, gathered for the Jubilee Review as the greatest armada the world had ever seen. Thrilled though he was by this display of naval strength, he was dispirited by all the patriotic fervour whipped up by the Jubilee celebrations, and on his return to land went back to work on the second of the two poems, soon afterwards submitted to Moberly Bell with the remark that it was ‘about time we sobered down’. The poem was immediately published under the title ‘Recessional’. The impact of this solemn call for national humility before God was immediate and unparalleled. Ruddy’s agent, A. P. Watt, wept when he first read the verses and declared his client to be ‘the only rightful heir to the mantles of Shakespeare, Milton, and Tennyson’. Sir Walter Besant probably got it right when he wrote: ‘You caught the exact feeling – what all people with the Puritanic touch in us wanted to have said and couldn’t say. That is genius.’27

  Much as Ruddy savoured the public acclaim, the birth in mid-August of a first male child, named John after his grandfather, meant a great deal more. He and Carrie had just taken a five-year lease on The Elms, a house overlooking the green at Rottingdean in Sussex and within a cricket ball’s throw of Ned and Georgie Burne-Jones’s cottage, North End House, on the other side of the green. Within this wider circle of relatives and friends visiting from London something of the contentment Ruddy had known in Vermont returned, although not enough to dispel entirely his bouts of ‘darkness and gloom’. Crom Price came to stay with Ned Burne-Jones, a close friend since their grammar school days together in Birmingham, and his company gave Ruddy encouragement to further plunder and embellish his Westward Ho! days in more Stalky tales. But Ruddy’s continuing depressions, the winter darkness and what he described in his autobiography as a growing unease about the way political events were shaping led him to take his family to winter in South Africa at the start of 1898.

  A return to sunlight at the Cape brought back the delights of ‘the life unaltered our childhood knew’ (see Chapter 2, pp. 36–8) and with the renewal of warmth he began to write the Just So Stories: simple spoken tales intended to delight his own children. By the spring these had taken on a life of their own, to be tested out on his return to Sussex on other young members of the Macdonald clan, including Margaret Burne-Jones’s daughter, Angela Mackail, then aged eight:

  The Just So Stories are a poor thing in print compared with the fun of hearing them told in Cousin Ruddy’s deep unhesitating voice. There was a ritual about them, each phrase having its special intonation which had to be exactly the same as last time and without which the stories are dried husks. There was an inimitable cadence, an emphasis of certain words, an exaggeration of certain phrases, a kind of intoning here and there which made his telling unforgettable.28

  In South Africa Ruddy had been taken up by Cecil Rhodes, and in his admiration for the man and his loathing for the Dutch Boers, representing the worst excesses of colonialism, he willingly allowed himself to be seduced by Rhodes’s vision of Africa under Anglo-Saxon rule. His return to England in April coincided with America’s little proxy war with Spain over Cuba, which ended with the United States becoming colonial rulers in all but title of Cuba and the Philippines. Since he viewed America as Britain’s natural ally in its role as global lawgiver, Ruddy was pleased to see it sign up to membership of the imperial club. Dusting down the verses abandoned the previous summer, he reworked them into a call to the United
States to join with Britain in its self-appointed task of extending the blessings of the Law to the far corners of the earth:

  Take up the White Man’s burden –

  Send forth the best ye breed –

  Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need;

  To wait in heavy harness

  On fluttered folks and wild –

  Your new caught sullen peoples,

  Half devil and half child.29

  Whatever their intent, the verses of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ were among the clumsiest Kipling ever penned, their sentiments among the crudest: at best a call to the Anglo-Saxon world to do its painful duty by spreading its higher values to the rest of the world, at worst a hymn to aggressive white supremacy. Critics and biographers alike have scratched their heads over the incongruity of these lines being written seemingly in tandem with ‘Recessional’ in the Jubilee summer of 1897, but it is worth remembering that the final polish to ‘The White Man’s Burden’ was only given in November 1898, at a time when Ruddy was feeling unusually low, still grieving for a close relative and reeling from a second no less devastating blow.

  The first disaster was the sudden death of his Uncle Ned, who suffered a heart attack at The Grange in mid-June 1898. This was the first real loss Ruddy had suffered since the death of Wolcott Balestier seven years earlier, and he took it hard. After an all-night vigil in which the men of the family stood two-hour watches, Ned Burne-Jones’s ashes were buried in the churchyard at Rottingdean in a ceremony Ruddy found harrowing, made all the worse by seeing Uncle Crom ‘broken to pieces’. He and his Uncle Ned had exchanged long, heartfelt and even scabrous letters over the years, and as soon as the opportunity arose Ruddy went through his uncle’s papers, removing and destroying the lot, together with as many of his letters to his Aunt Georgie as he could lay hands on. Carrie’s diary shows that Ruddy subsequently found solace in returning to work on Kim, an early outline or draft of which he sent to his father in Tisbury for comments. In late September Alice Kipling came to stay with her sister in Rottingdean, bringing with her that same draft, together with Lockwood’s notes. Very soon afterwards the second disaster hit the Kiplings: the mental breakdown of their beloved ‘Maiden’.