Strange Tales (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural)

by Rudyard Kipling

  STRANGE TALES

  Rudyard Kipling

  with an introduction by

  David Stuart Davies

  Strange Tales first published by

  Wordsworth Editions Limited in 2006

  Published as an ePublication 2011

  ISBN 978 1 84870 508 1

  Wordsworth Editions Limited

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  ANTHONY JOHN RANSON

  with love from your wife, the publisher

  Eternally grateful for your unconditional love,

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  INTRODUCTION

  When one is considering writers involved in the creation of ghost stories, supernatural and horror tales, or those concocted especially to unnerve the reader, one does not immediately think of Rudyard Kipling, the author of The Jungle Book and the Just So Stories. And yet, like many successful storytellers of the Victorian era, he was drawn from time to time to this particular genre. In some ways it is less surprising that he turned his hand to Gothic entertainments than that other English scribes who were lodged in the safe and mundane environs of leafy suburbia did, for Kipling spent a great deal of his early life in India at a time when mysticism was almost a way of life there. Indeed, a significant number of the stories in this collection have an Indian background, which sympathetically enhances the strangeness of the narrative. The richness and alien qualities of this locale allied to the unusual occurrences in Kipling’s plots give the stories an extra unsettling frisson which increases their power to disturb and intrigue the reader.

  In this collection we have distilled the best of Kipling’s chilling narratives, presenting you with tales of hauntings, magic, violence, horror and the unforgiving power of the supernatural. Where India is the setting, the surroundings and strangeness of the country insinuate their way into the lives of colonial men and women stationed on the subcontinent in a bygone era. The term ‘imperial gothic’ has been coined especially to describe these supernatural tales. Equally effective are the other stories, whether set in the time of war at sea or in the leafy shires, thanks to Kipling’s word wizardry.

  * * *

  Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in India, in 1865, at a time when the country was ruled over by the British. His father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an arts and crafts teacher at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art and his mother, Alice, was a sister-in-law of the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. While Ruddy, as he was affectionately known, grew up in the atmosphere of a white middle-class artistic family, he was also influenced by the Indian culture on his doorstep. Indeed, he was brought up by an ayah, his Indian nurse, who taught him Hindustani as his first language.

  His early years were blissfully happy in this exotic world of vivid colours, strange animals and wonderful sights, smells and sounds, but at the age of five he was shipped off to cold, alien England by his parents and left for five years in a foster home at Southsea. Here he was treated harshly and beaten for the mildest misdemeanour. The contrast between the happiness of his Indian experience and the cold brutality of his British one would colour much of his later writing.

  When he was twelve he entered the United Services College at Westward Ho! near Bideford. It was an expensive establishment that specialised in training boys for a military life. However Kipling’s poor eyesight and his mediocre academic achievements ruled out any hopes of a successful career in the forces. Nevertheless, one good thing did come out of his time at the college: the headmaster, Cormell Price, a friend of his father and uncles, fostered his literary abilities.

  In 1882, aged sixteen, with great joy he returned to India, to Lahore, where his parents now lived, to work on the Civil and Military Gazette (1882–7), and later on its sister paper, the Pioneer, in Allahabad (1887–9). In his limited spare time he wrote many poems and stories, which were published alongside his reporting, and his literary career began to flourish. It was during this period that he wrote most of his tales of the supernatural, influenced to some extent by the unhappy memories he carried with him of his adolescence in England.

  As Kipling’s output increased, so did his fame and the respect of critics and readers. When he returned to Britain in 1889, he was hailed as a literary heir to Charles Dickens. He remained in London, continuing with his writing, until 1892, when he married Caroline Starr Balestier, the sister of an American publisher whom he had known. After a world trip, he returned with Carrie to her family home in Brattleboro, Vermont, USA, with the intention of settling down there. It was at Brattleboro, deep in New England, that he wrote Captains Courageous and The Jungle Books, and that the couple’s first two children, Josephine and Elsie, were born.

  Kipling was dissatisfied with his life in Vermont and a quarrel with his brother-in-law drove the family back to England in 1896. They settled at Rottingdean, near Brighton, where their son John was born the following year. Life was contented and fulfilling until, tragically, Josephine died while the family were on a visit to the United States in early 1899; things were never the same again after Josephine’s death. Living so close to Brighton, Kipling had become a tourist attraction, so in 1902 he sought the seclusion of a lovely seventeenth-century house called Bateman’s, south of Burwash, nearby in Sussex, where he spent his remaining years. Widely regarded as the unofficial poet laureate, Kipling refused the actual post and many other honours, among them the Order of Merit. However, in 1907 he was the first author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His years were darkened by the death of his son John in the the First World War. Kipling died in 1936 and is buried in Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey.

  * * *

  Rudyard Kipling’s literary output was immense, ranging from the fairytale-like excursions of the Just So Stories and children’s fiction such as Stalky & Co and the adventure tales Kim and Captains Courageous to the vast array of poems which he penned, the most famous perhaps being ‘If’. Therefore it is easy to see how his strange and supernatural tales have been overlooked. But we

  have dug deep into the wonderful literary pudding left behind by Kipling and for this edition we have extracted a fine collection of spine-chilling plums for your edification and delight.

  The collection kicks off with one of the more graphically horrific of the author’s tales, ‘The Mark of the Beast’, a story of lycanthropy. It is one of Kipling’s early pieces, written in India before his return to England. By the kind offices of Sir Ian Hamilton, an army officer who was keen to promote Kipling’s work, the story found its way on to the desks of two important editors, Andrew Lang and William Sharp, who both recoiled in horror when they read the story. Lang commented, ‘ . . . this [is] poisonous stuff which has left
an extremely disagreeable impression on my mind.’ Sharp was equally perturbed, writing to Hamilton stating, ‘I strongly recommend you instantly burn this detestable piece of work. I would like to hazard a guess that the writer of the article in question is very young, that he will die mad before he has reached thirty.’ Nevertheless the story was published in the Pioneer, the Allahabad newspaper, in 1890 and later Kipling wrote a sequel, ‘The Return of Imray’, the plot of which, like the original, hinges on an insult to an Indian which results in tragic consequences.

  The Phantom Rickshaw also leans towards the horror end of the ghost-story spectrum. The central character is haunted by visions of a spectral rickshaw inhabited by his dead mistress that drive him towards madness. There is more than a touch of the styling and subject matter of Edgar Allan Poe about this tale and yet it is perhaps less predictable, far removed from the stifling atmosphere of the dark gothic environs of Poe’s landscape and situated in Kipling’s Simla.

  Another story in the Edgar Allan Poe manner is ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, with its vivid description of ‘the horrible little burrows of the nightmare village of the living dead’. However, it has been noted by several critics that for all its obvious dreadfulness, fundamentally this story exhibits a perceptive assessment of the Anglo-Indian position at the time. Though Jukes’s superiority as a sahib appears to be threatened by the equality of life in the valley, it is reaffirmed when Jukes is rescued by his Indian servant. No such rescue awaits the two other characters, Peachy and Dravott. They, too, assert their superiority, and by acting as gods, they carry their roles as sahibs to its logical conclusion. But when they are revealed to be mere mortals on an equal footing with others, the natives destroy them. In this scenario Kipling cleverly illustrates the paradox of British rule in India. Having conquered, the British had to govern; in order to govern they had to act as gods; to act as gods was ultimately impossible and so the crack in the armour was inevitably revealed and the weakness exposed.

  Perhaps ‘They’ is Kipling’s greatest ghost story. Certainly it is his most sensitive and most tender, engendering a sense of unease and melancholy rather than shock and horror. We are very much into the twentieth century here – the story was written in 1904 – with the motor car featuring strongly in the plot. The narrator driving around the Sussex countryside in the spring finds himself lost and discovers an old country house belonging to a blind woman who looks after several ‘elusive’ children. It is only on further visits that he learns the poignant secret of the house and of the children. Kipling’s habit of exorcising his own pain and doubt in his poetry and prose provides no finer example than in this story. It was written by the author to help him move on from the grief he felt at his young daughter’s death some five years earlier. The final parting in the story represents on the page Kipling’s acceptance of the loss of his own child and is all the more moving because of this personal involvement with the narrative.

  One of the incidental pleasures of ‘They’ is Kipling’s rare celebration of the English landscape, which the narrator describes with elegiac freshness:

  I let the country flow under my wheels. The orchid-studded flats of the East gave way to the thyme, ilex, and grey grass of the Downs; these again to the rich cornland and fig-trees of the lower coast, where you can carry the beat of the tide on your left hand for fifteen level miles . . .

  ‘In The Same Boat’ is an odd little story concerning a young man and woman who suffer from a strange affliction. They are troubled by unsettling dreams which make them weak and gloomy for days afterwards and as a result the pair have become addicts of Najdolene, a calming drug. Kipling maintains a subdued satirical tone throughout, faintly mocking this couple, implying that they are somewhat self-indulgent. The cause of their dilemma is solved not by a doctor but by the common-sense companion of the young lady.

  We have what Kipling regarded as a ‘supernatural country-house canine love story’ in ‘The Dog Hervey’ (almost something for everyone then). Kipling had a great love of dogs. It was the unconditional affection that the creatures give to their owners which appealed to him. The hound Malachi, owned by the narrator of this story, was named after one of Kipling’s own dogs. The name is taken from Thomas More’s line, ‘When Malachi wore a collar of gold.’

  Kipling was an acquaintance and indeed a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the detective Sherlock Holmes, and he gave a nod and wink to his friend when he created the psychic detective story, ‘The House Surgeon’, which is about a house which he called Holmescroft.

  It can be seen in certain stories that Kipling’s desire for accuracy in presenting characters with their anomalies of speech and accents can actually hinder the flow of the narrative. This is certainly the case with ‘The Wish House’ in which the plot unravels through the conversation of Mrs Ashcroft and Mrs Fettley which is carried on in Sussex dialect. However, the premise of the story – the lengths someone will go to to keep a person ‘where I want ’im’ – is chilling and highly original.

  The monster sea serpent at the centre of the wise little story ‘A Matter of Fact’ allows Kipling to play about with the notion of truth and lies; what it is appropriate to reveal and when it is right to play on people’s gullibility. As the seasoned old journalist who narrates the story observes, ‘ . . . Truth is a naked lady, and if by accident she is drawn up from the bottom of the sea, it behoves a gentleman either to give her a print petticoat or turn his face to the wall and vow that he did not see.’

  The incidental horrors of war are suggested in the eerie visitation of five children in ‘Swept and Garnished’ which was first published in January 1915, shortly after the outbreak of World War I. The war affected Kipling profoundly; another tale written in 1915 is the bitter and angry ‘Mary Postgate’, which Stanley Baldwin’s son called ‘the wickedest story ever written’. This attack was inspired by the shocking nature of the apparent pleasure experienced by Mary as she watches a German soldier die, and of the implied sexual satisfaction she gains from the act. It has been claimed that Kipling wrote this story as a superstitious attempt to avert the evil eye: if he wrote a story in which he imagined his deepest fears, the gods may spare his son John who was fighting in the war. If this is true, this desperate ploy did not work for John was killed in the trenches in 1917. His death devastated his father.

  ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ was written while the author was working on a history of his son’s regiment, his book, The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923). Kipling’s sense of loss pervades the text which includes some horrifyingly graphic descriptions of conditions in the trenches of the Western Front. The story is one of his most complex and, because of the apparent acceptance of adulterous love, one of his most controversial.

  We are back in India for the final selection of tales. ‘At the End of the Passage’ is a ghost story which takes place in a run-down outpost in a remote area of the country. Here four men, adrift in their isolation, fight the heat, themselves and the fear that there is a strange presence in the room at the end of the passage. This tale also reflects the strain and claustrophobia felt by the English when they are so far removed from what they regard as normality, trapped as it were in a hot, sticky bubble miles away from ‘civilisation’.

  While ‘The Bisara of Pooree’ is a warning parable (‘You will say that all this story is made up’), ‘The Lost Legion’ reads like an old soldier’s tale told around the campfire late at night, one which has grown more fantastic with the repeated tellings. This may well have been its origin, for, like most great writers, Kipling borrowed from life and embroidered the ‘truth’ with his own imagination.

  ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’ is a kind of Anglo-Indian version of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and is peppered with archaic prose to underline the comparison. Kipling was a great admirer of Bunyan and his work and advised would-be writers to: ‘Go home and read him. Read the Pilgrim’s Progress half-a-dozen times before you try to write prose.’


  ‘The Tomb of His Ancestors’ introduces the rare beast, the Clouded Tiger and once again reveals the unique and delicate balance inherent in the relationship between the British invaders and the native Indians.

  ‘By Word of Mouth’ is one of the most famous of Kipling’s supernatural tales. It is chilling because of its simplicity and the bitter-sweet outcome.

  The final story, ‘My Own True Ghost Story’, is a convincing personal anecdote with a suitable twist in the tale. It ends this collection with an authorly flourish.

  * * *

  Rudyard Kipling spent his formative years in India, a country where there was wide belief in ghosts and the supernatural; at the same period of history, Europe was buzzing with speculation concerning matters involving psychic and spiritualist beliefs. Therefore it is no wonder that such an imaginative and informed writer should include other-worldly elements in his fiction. And similarly, it is no wonder that a writer of Kipling’s brilliance should make these tales thrilling and engrossing.

  Kipling is an entertaining writer, but like all great wordsmiths he also provides some enriching and elevating insight or illumination about human nature and the world in which we live. These are strange tales indeed, but insightful and rewarding into the bargain.

  DAVID STUART DAVIES

  STRANGE TALES

  The Mark of the Beast

  Your Gods and my Gods – do you or I know which are the stronger?

  Native Proverb

  East of Suez, some hold, the direct control of Providence ceases; Man being there handed over to the power of the Gods and Devils of Asia, and the Church of England Providence only exercising an occasional and modified supervision in the case of Englishmen.

  This theory accounts for some of the more unnecessary horrors of life in India: it may be stretched to explain my story.