The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales

by Rudyard Kipling

Which shall be yours anon:

  And for the little, little span

  The dead are borne in mind,

  Seek not to question other than

  The books I leave behind.

  AFTERWORD:

  RUDYARD KIPLING:

  A LIFE IN STORIES

  by Stephen Jones

  Joseph Rudyard Kipling was bom in Bombay, India, on December 30, 1865. The son of John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Kipling (née Macdonald), he was named after Lake Rudyard in Staffordshire, where his parents became engaged.

  Kipling’s father, an author, artist and scholar who was Head of Department of Architectural Sculpture at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art, had considerable influence over his son’s later work. Kipling’s mother was also a talented writer and poet. Two of her sisters married the nineteenth-century painters Sir Edward Burne-Jones and Sir Edward Poynter, while a third married Alfred Baldwin and was the mother of Stanley Baldwin, who became Prime Minister of Great Britain.

  With grandfathers who were both Methodist ministers, these familial connections would remain of importance to Kipling throughout his life.

  During his first five years, Kipling led a blissfully happy life in India, then the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. As he later recalled: ‘Far across green spaces round the house was a marvellous place filled with smells of paints and oils, and lumps of clay with which I played. That was the atelier of my Father’s School of Art, and a Mr “Terry Sahib” his assistant, to whom my small sister was devoted, was our great friend.’

  In 1868, the young boy made his first visit to England, where his sister Alice (‘Trix’) was born. Three years later, sixyear-old Rudyard Kipling and his sister were again taken to England, this time to be educated. They were left there for six long years, boarded as paying guests with Captain andMrs P.A. Holloway at Lome Lodge, a foster home in Southsea, near Portsmouth, while their parents returned to India. They gave their children no explanation.

  Kipling described Captain Holloway as ‘the only person in that house as far as I can remember who ever threw me a kind word’. However, after the Captain died, the deeply religious Mrs Holloway apparently took a dislike to the young Kipling and allowed her teenage son to bully him.

  ‘I had never heard of Hell,’ wrote Kipling, ‘so I was introduced to it in all its terrors – I and whatever luckless little slavey might be in the house, whom severe rationing had led to steal food … Myself, I was regularly beaten.’

  Because he kept this constant abuse to himself, much of Kipling’s childhood was deeply miserable, and he wrote about these unhappy years with great bitterness in his 1888 story ‘Baa Baa, Black Sheep’. He later described holidays spent each December in London with his mother’s sister Georgiana Burne-Jones (‘Aunt Georgy’) and her husband Sir Edward Burne-Jones as ‘a paradise which I verily believe saved me’.

  Kipling took refuge in reading, ‘So I read all that came within my reach,’ he recalled. ‘As soon as my pleasure in this was known, deprivation from reading was added to my punishments. I then read by stealth and the more earnestly.’ It was also around this time that Kipling first began inventing stories and imaginary characters to entertain himself.

  In 1877, after Kipling had suffered a nervous breakdown (‘I imagined I saw shadows and things that were not there’), Alice Kipling arrived from India and took her son away from Mrs Holloway, although Trix remained in Southsea for a further three years.

  Following a long recuperation, the sensitive and shortsighted Kipling was enrolled as a pupil at the United Services College, Westward Ho!, near Bideford in North Devon. It was a relatively new and inexpensive boarding school for the sons of impoverished Army officers and civil servants that specialised in training boys for entry into military academies. Conditions may have been basic, but the education was solid, and headmaster Cormell Price – a friend of Kipling’s father – fostered the young boy’s literary ability by making him editor of the school magazine.

  ‘Many of us loved the Head for what he had done for us,’wrote Kipling, ‘but I owed him more than all of them put together.’

  One of the thirteen-year-old Kipling’s early stories, ‘My First Adventure’, involved a time-travelling ‘ghost’ and appeared in a hand-written magazine entitled The Scribbler,which he compiled with two fellow pupils in 1879.

  While returning to Southsea the following year to collect his sister, Kipling met her fellow-boarder, Florence Garrard, with whom he fell in love. The relationship, which was always somewhat one-sided, vacillated for a number of years.

  In 1881, back in India, his parents privately publishedKipling’s first booklet of poems, Schoolboy Lyrics,without his knowledge. Years later, he burned his original copy for fear of copyright theft.

  After leaving school at the age of sixteen, Kipling returned to India in October to join his parents in Lahore, the principal city of the Punjab. Kipling’s father Lockwood had become curator of the Lahore museum (later described as a ‘wonder house’ in the opening chapter of Kim).Outside the walled city, one of the oldest in Islam, were stationed a battalion of infantry and an artillery battery. Inside, around seventy British civilians lived in neat bungalows alongside 200,000 people from all the Asiatic races.

  His father found him a job as an assistant editor on the Civil and Military Gazette,a local daily English-language newspaper for the British in northern India, where Kipling was paid ‘one hundred silver rupees a month’ and comprised fifty per cent of the editorial staff.

  For the next seven years Kipling wrote journalism, working between ten and fifteen hours a day. Death, in the form of typhoid and cholera, was a constant companion, and he was often forced to work with a temperature of 104.

  ‘The dead of all times were about us,’ he later wrote, ‘in the vast forgotten Moslem cemeteries round the Station, whereone’s horse’s hoof of a morning might break through to the corpse below; skulls and bones tumbled out of our garden walls, and were turned up among the flowers by the Rains; and at every point were tombs of the dead.’

  Kipling was fascinated by the contrasts between Lahore’s various inhabitants and the ways in which they interacted with each other, and as a journalist he was able to move between the different classes unrestricted.

  Suffering from insomnia, he would walk the streets until dawn. During these nocturnal excursions he had the opportunity to observe the highs and lows of the rich and poor of Anglo-Indian society. But although his love for the country of his birth was deep, Kipling was not uncritical. In his limited spare time, inspired by a novel he had read about a would-be author, he soon began filling the periodicals he worked for with prose sketches (which he described as ‘penny-farthing yarns’ because of the rate paid per line) and light verse.

  Kipling’s poems were published in The Englishman of Calcutta and the Civil and Military Gazette ‘when and as padding was needed’. Soon turning his hand to fiction (or ‘turnovers’) to fill occasional columns in the newspaper, he once again called upon his keen observation of his Indian background for inspiration.

  His first published story was entitled ‘The Gate of a Hundred Sorrows’, about a drug addict. It was written in the summer of 1894.

  In his study, Kipling, Auden and Co. (1980), Randall Jarrell noted: ‘Kipling is far closer to Gogol than to a normal realist or naturalist. In Kipling the pressure of the imagination has forced facts over into the supernatural.’

  In fact, the second professional story Kipling ever wrote, ‘The Dream of Duncan Parrenness’, was a supernatural tale. Published anonymously in the Civil and Military Gazette on Christmas Day, 1884, it was basically an Anglo-Indian version of Charles Dickens’ seminal ghost story ‘A Christmas Carol’ and took the author almost three months to complete.

  The following Christmas, the newspaper produced a 126-page ‘Christmas Annual’ entitled Quartette,written by ‘fourAnglo-Indian writers’. In fact, the stories and poems were by Kipling, his mother and father, and his sister Alice. Kipling contributed three
supernatural tales: ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’, ‘The Unlimited Draw of Tick Boileau’and, most notably, The Phantom ’Rickshaw’.

  Written when he was not quite twenty, ‘The Phantom ’Rickshaw’ was set in a milieu Kipling knew well and concerned a man who was eventually driven to his death by the ghost of a wronged lover. Despite being described by at least one critic as ‘crudely material supernaturalism’, Kipling later said of the story: ‘Some of it was weak, much was bad and out of key; but it was my first serious attempt to think in another man’s skin.’

  However, Kipling was already a skilled enough writer to leave some doubt as to whether the supernatural manifestation was in fact a figment of his protagonist’s fevered imagination.

  ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ was a conte cruel, about the eponymous English engineer held captive in a sand pit in a desert region beyond Lahore. It was perhaps inspired by reports Kipling had heard of ‘The Village of the Dead’ (the story’s original title) which were well-known in India during the 1840s.

  As Angus Wilson described the tale in his 1977 study The Strange Ride of Rudyard Kipling:‘It remains one of the most powerful nightmares of the precariousness of a ruling group, in this case haunted by memories of the Mutiny not yet twenty years old.’

  The character of Tick Boileau in the third tale in the Christmas compendium subsequently turned up in two further Kipling stories: ‘Only a Subaltern’ (1888) and ‘A Conference of the Powers’ (1893).

  In 1886, Kipling spent a month at Simla as a correspondent for the Pioneer,a major newspaper also owned by the proprietors of the Civil and Military Gazette. That same year, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses,his privately printed book of comic poems about Anglo-Indian life, sold out almost immediately and a second edition was rushed into print by Thacker, Spink & Co. of Calcutta.

  No sooner had Kipling been promoted to the Pioneer at Allahabad, in the North-West Provinces, when he began contributing anonymous stories to a weekly edition of the newspaper on a regular basis. ‘My pen took charge and I, greatly admiring, watched it write for me far into the nights,’ he recalled.

  According to editor Peter Haining in his 1987 collection The Complete Supernatural Stories of Rudyard Kipling,during his four years with the Pioneer,Kipling published nine articles, stories and verses, which he did sign with the single initial ‘R’.Around the same time he became friends with Professor Alec Hill, a government employee, and his American wife Edmonia, who would later become another prevailing influence on Kipling’s life and work. Meanwhile, the young Englishman was sent to Rajputana as a special correspondent. The articles he wrote during this period were later collected as Letters of Marque (1891).

  Kipling continued to publish fiction in the Civil and Military Gazette,much of it apparently based on fact. ‘The Recurring Smash’ was credited to ‘ST’ while ‘Bubbling Well Road’ was signed ‘The Traveller’, although the latter was subsequently reprinted under the author’s own by-line in the collection Life’s Handicap: Being Stories of Mine Own People (1891).

  ‘Mercifully, the mere act of writing was, and always has been, a physical pleasure to me,’ Kipling later recalled. ‘This made it easier to throw away anything that did not turn out well.’

  Kipling obsessively read and re-read his work, editing it as often as he thought necessary until he had pared it down to a final draft that he was satisfied with. ‘I have had tales by me for three or five years which shortened themselves almost yearly,’he revealed.

  In 1888, Kipling became a boarder with the Hills at their house in Allahabad. Now editor of the supplement Pioneer Weekly,the twenty-two year-old Kipling’s first short story collection which he had sold for £50, Plain Tales from the Hills,was published by Thacker Spink & Co. Along with the first appearance of the heroes of ‘Soldiers Three’ – PrivatesTerence Mulvaney, Stanley Otheris and John Learoyd – the book also contained the supernatural tales ‘In the House of Suddhoo’, ‘The Bisara of Pooree’ and ‘By Word of Mouth’.

  However, another of the ‘Plain Tales from India’, the humorous ‘Haunted Subalterns’, originally published in the Civil and Military Gazette of May 27, 1887, was surprisingly not included in the collection.

  ‘I have lived long enough in this India,’ explained the author in his short introduction, ‘to know that it is best to know nothing and can only write the story as it happened’.

  Although Kipling was always sceptical of the supernatural, his writings reveal that he probably did have a belief in the existence of unexplained phenomena. ‘There is a type of mind that dives after what it calls “psychical experiences,” he wrote. ‘And I am in no way “psychic”.’ However, he did admit to at least one case of clairvoyance, when he dreamt about a ceremony in Westminster Abbey before the event actually occurred in every detail.

  The publication ofPlain Tales from the Hills was followed by the Indian Railway Library series of short stories, published in Allahabad by AH Wheeler & Co. in six paper-covered volumes costing one rupee apiece: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gddsbys: A Tale Without a Plot (a play),In Black and White, Under the Deodars, Wee Willie Winkie and Other Child Stories and his first collection entirely of weird fiction, The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales.

  Actually the fifth volume in the series, The Phantom ’Rickshaw contained four stories – ‘The Phantom ’Rickshaw’, ‘My Own True Ghost Story’, ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ and ‘The Man Who Would Be King’ (a macabre adventure tale, considered by some reviewers to be the finest story in the English language).

  As Kipling explained in his brief Preface: ‘This is not exactly a book of real ghost-stories, as the cover makes believe, but rather a collection of facts that never quite explained themselves. All that the collector can be certain of is that one man insisted upon dying because he believed himself to be haunted; another man either made up a wonderful fiction, or visiteda very strange place; while the third man was indubitably crucified by some person or persons unknown, and gave an extraordinary account of himself.

  ‘Ghost-stories are very seldom told at first-hand. I have managed, with infinite trouble, to secure one exception to this rule. It is not a very good specimen, but you can credit it from beginning to end. The other three stories you must take on trust; as I did.’

  In fact, despite the author’s entreaty to ‘credit’ the events reported in ‘My Own True Ghost Story’, the supernatural element was basically explained away at the end.

  Kipling had sold the rights for the six paperback books for £200 plus a small royalty. Each of the Indian Railway Library booklets featured a line drawing on the cover by an artist named Brownlow Fforde. His artwork of skull-headed figure for The Phantom ’Rickshaw was suitably macabre.

  Encouraged by his parents and his editor-in-chief, Edward Kay Robinson, in the autumn of 1889 Kipling left India to become a roving correspondent and try to make a career for himself as an author.

  ‘After all, there was no need for me to stay here for ever,’Kipling later recalled, ‘and I could go away and measure myself against the doorsills of London as soon as I had money.’

  He travelled with the Hills to Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong and Canton, Japan and San Francisco. While crossing the United States, they visited Mrs Hill’s family home in Beaver, Pennsylvania, where he met her sister Caroline Taylor, to whom he became informally engaged.

  The group finally arrived in London in September and took rooms in Villiers Street, off The Strand. Kipling’s reputation had preceded him, and within a year he was already being acclaimed as one of the most brilliant authors of his time and a literary heir to Charles Dickens.

  ‘There was an evident demand for my stuff,’ Kipling observed. ‘I do not recall that I stirred a hand to help myself. Things happened to me.’

  Yet despite his new fame, Kipling soon found himself in debt. On the advice of Walter Besant, founder of the Authors’Society, he retained the services of AP Watt as his literary agent. ‘In the course
of forty odd years I do not recall any difference between us that three minutes’ talk could not clear up,’ Kipling later wrote about their very successful working relationship.

  By the spring of 1890, Kipling had become so famous that his work was the subject of an editorial in The Times of March 25 which stated that the author had ‘tapped a new vein’. Amongst the titles singled out for praise by the newspaper was ‘that very grim story’, ‘In the House of Suddhoo’ (1886).

  ‘I am afraid that I was not much impressed by reviews,’ said Kipling. ‘As I got to know literary circles and their critical output, I was struck by the slenderness of some of the writers’equipment.’

  Kipling found himself being praised by such contemporaries as Oscar Wilde, Lord Tennyson, Henry James and Andrew Lang, while Jerome K. Jerome observed that the author, ‘must have felt like a comet trying to lose its tail’.

  By now, all his earlier books had finally been published in English and American editions. However, despite his literary success, Kipling remained unlucky in love. While staying in London, his engagement to Caroline Taylor was broken off, and a chance meeting in the street with childhood sweetheart Florence Garrard ended unsuccessfully when he tried to resume their relationship.

  The strain was too much, and Kipling suffered another nervous breakdown.

  While Kipling was convalescing in London, he made a new friend, American writer and publisher Wolcott Balestier. He also met Balestier’s mother and his sisters, Josephine and Caroline (‘Carrie’). During his recovery, Kipling wrote his first novel, The Light That Failed,about a painter going blind who was spurned by the woman he loved. It was published in New York to great success the following year.

  Meanwhile, an unauthorised collection of his articles from the Pioneer was published as The City of Dreadful Night,thefourteenth volume in AH Wheeler & Co.’s Indian Railway Library series. The title piece was an atmospheric prose-poem about death-like sleepers during the heat of an Indian night. Kipling attempted to have the book suppressed.