The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales

by Rudyard Kipling

  One of Kipling’s best-known horror stories, ‘The Mark of the Beast’ appeared over two issues of the Pioneer in July 1890. It was about a man cursed by a native priest to apparently transform into a were-leopard. Kipling himself described the tale as ‘a rather nasty story’, while Andrew Lang declared it ‘poisonous stuff’.

  However, in his ground-breaking essay ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’, American author HP Lovecraft wrote: ‘The naked leper-priest who mewed like an otter, of the spots which appeared on the chest of the man that priest cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the victim and of the fear which horses began to display towards him, and of the eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being things which no reader is ever likely to forget.’

  The unconventional policeman Strickland who appeared in the story later turned up in a further five tales by Kipling, including ‘The Recrudescence of Imray’ (aka ‘The Return of Imray’, 1891), a murder mystery that revolved around a deadly curse and the decaying corpse of an Indian manservant. This latter tale appeared in another pirated volume of Kipling’s fiction, Life’s Handicap,published by Hurst & Company of New York in 1891.

  That same year Kipling collaborated with Wolcott Balestier in writing the romantic novel The Naulahka: A Story of West and East,Balestier, who had now become Kipling’s American agent, also helped his friend establish his copyrights in the United States, after many problems with unauthorised editions.

  It was another busy year for Kipling, and the author suffered a further breakdown from overwork.

  After setting off on a voyage to South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, he returned one final time to India to spend Christmas with his family. But no sooner had Kipling arrived than he was informed by cable of Balestier’s death fromtyphoid, and he rushed back to London, arriving on January 10, 1892.

  Just eight days later, Kipling married Balestier’s sister Caroline in a London gripped by an influenza epidemic. ‘The undertakers had run out of black horses,’ observed Kipling, ‘and the dead had to be content with brown ones. The living were mostly abed.’

  The newlyweds quickly left for a voyage around the world, stopping in Brattleboro, Vermont, to visit the bride’s family. While there, Caroline’s brother Beatty sold them a plot of land for a nominal sum.

  The honeymooners then continued on to Japan. But when Kipling’s bank failed, the couple were left with no assets but their travel tickets, which they exchanged for return fares to New England, where the Balestiers found them a house to rent for ten dollars (around £2.00) a month.

  Written after his final visit to India the previous year, ‘The Lost Legion’ was one of the author’s final supernatural stories set in his homeland. It shared the May 1892 issue of the then one-year-old Strand Magazine with the Sherlock Holmes mystery, ‘The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet’ by Arthur Conan Doyle. The two men would later become neighbours in Sussex, and Kipling paid tribute to the Great Detective in his 1909 story ‘The House Surgeon’.

  That same year saw the publication of The Naulahka,his collaboration with Wolcott Balestier, which was not a success. However, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses,which included the poem ‘Gunga Din’, only added to Kipling’s fame and, during this period, the author bought back the rights to some of his earlier books with the money he continued to earn in royalties.

  With the death of the poet laureate Alfred, Lord Tennyson, it could be said that Kipling unofficially took his place in the public’s estimation, although he reportedly turned down this and many other honours, including a knighthood and the Order of Merit.

  A daughter, Josephine,wasborntothe KiplingsonDecember 29 – her father’s and mother’s birthdays falling on the days either side. Perhaps inspired by the arrival of his first child, Kipling began writing for children.

  Published in 1893, Many Inventions contained stories written both before and after his marriage to Caroline. It included the last story narrated by the Irish soldier Mulvaney (who, up until then, was his most popular character) and the first story about Mowgli, the feral child who would become the leading character in Kipling’s classic collection of children’s stories and poems, The Jungle Book (1894).

  Many Inventions also featured ‘The Finest Story in the World’, one of Kipling’s few fantastic stories not to be set in India, which concerns a poetic writer who suffers from a recurring dream of previous lives upon the sea.

  Later that year, the Kiplings moved into ‘Naulakha’, a large wooden house they had had built on the land purchased from Beatty Balestier.

  The Second Jungle Book was published in 1895 and was as equally successful as the first volume. ‘When those books were finished they said so themselves with, almost, the water-hammer click of a tap turned off,’ Kipling explained.

  He also considered Edgar Rice Burroughs’Tarzan of the Apes to have been explicitly inspired by his own work: ‘He had “jazzed” the motif of the Jungle Books and, I imagine, had thoroughly enjoyed himself,’ said Kipling, with a trace of irony. ‘He was reported to have said that he wanted to find out how bad a book he could write and “get away with”, which is a legitimate ambition.’

  On February 2, 1896, a second daughter was born to the Kiplings, who named her Elsie. Unfortunately, their happiness was shattered when the family’s manners and attitudes were considered objectionable by Beatty Balestier and their neighbours. The dispute ended with a well-publicised court case after a confrontation on the road between Kipling and his alcoholic brother-in-law.

  ‘The idea seemed to be that I was “making money” out of America,’ explained Kipling, ‘and was not sufficiently grateful for my privileges.’

  From that time onwards, Kipling considered Americans – like the French – as ‘foreigners’, and he maintained his position that only ‘lesser breeds’ were born beyond the English Channel. As if to reinforce this xenophobic outlook, his collection of poems The Seven Seas (1896) included the popular patriotic cycle, ‘A Song of the English’.

  The family left Brattleboro, and in the spring of 1896 moved into a house in Torquay, England. Kipling admitted that the family’s new home, ‘seemed almost too good to be true’ and despite the building’s bright rooms and the fresh sea air, he revealed that he and his wife experienced ‘the shape of a growing depression which enveloped us both – 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. It was the Feng-shui – the Spirit of the house itself – that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips.’

  He later wrote about the experience in his psychic detective story ‘The House Surgeon’, which was published in two parts in Harper’s Magazine in September and October 1909.

  In 1897, the family finally settled at ‘The Elms’ in Rotting-dean, Sussex, near Kipling’s cousin, Stanley Baldwin. A son, John, was born on August 17 in ‘North End House’, the holiday home of Kipling’s aunt, Georgiana Burne-Jones.

  That same year, Kipling published Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks, his novel about the New England codfishing fleet that was inspired by the author’s American doctor and friend, Charles Eliot Conland. ‘My part was the writing; his the details,’ Kipling wrote. ‘I wanted to see if I could catch and hold something of a rather beautiful localised American atmosphere that was already beginning to fade. Thanks to Conland I came near this.’

  In America, Scribner’s published a collection of Kipling’s work by subscription. The stories were rearranged by topic, and some uncollected material was added. At the age of thirty-two, he was now the highest-paid writer in the world.

  During the first of many winter holidays in South Africa, Kipling travelled to Rhodesia in 1898, where he struck up a friendship with the diamond magnate and statesman Cecil Rhodes, who presented him with a house near Cape Town.

  This association only strengthened Kipling’s imperialist and raci
st persuasions, which grew stronger with the passing of years. He genuinely believed that it was the duty of every Englishman – or, more likely, every white man – to bring European culture to the uncivilised natives who populated the rest of the world. This glorification of Britain as a colonial Empire reached its apogee in his poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’(1899).

  However, Kipling’s ideas were out of step with liberal thought of the age, and as he grew older he became an increasingly isolated figure. In 1924, the critic Alfred Ward wrote: ‘Nearly all his Indian stories demand that the reader, shall, at the outset, grant certain large premises: such that the British are God’s chosen race.’

  That same year he published the short story collection The Day’s Work which included ‘The Maltese Cat’, a story about polo ponies that would prove one of the most popular he ever wrote. He also published A Fleet in Being, a series of six articles on the navy reprinted from the Morning Post.

  In the winter of 1899, the Kiplings paid their final visit to America. During the stormy sea crossing, Kipling and all the children became ill.

  As newspapers around the world reported their condition on the front pages, Kipling and his beloved sixyear-old daughter Josephine grew worse; and developed pneumonia in New York. Caroline Kipling, also unwell, was unable to care for both of them. She made the decision to take her daughter to a house across mid-winter Manhattan to be looked after by someone else.

  Josephine died on March 6, and her father barely survived.

  Kipling was never the same again and wrote about the extent of his loss in ‘They’ (1904), a poignant story about a bereaved father in a mysterious house filled with the laughterof ghostly children. It has justly been compared to Henry James’‘The Turn of the Screw’ as a classic of supernatural fiction.

  At the outbreak of the Boer War in South Africa, Kipling became involved in a campaign for service charities organised by the Daily Mail newspaper. ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’Fund, named after a poem Kipling wrote which became a popular song of the day, raised vast amounts of money for the benefit of British soldiers.

  From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel was published in 1899 in two volumes. It was an authorised version of travel sketches and uncollected articles from the Pioneer and The Pioneer Post. Meanwhile, Kipling featured himself as ‘the egregious Beetle’in Stalky & Co.,a collection of public school stories with a strong autobiographical links to his time at the United Services College in Devon.

  ‘Stalky & Co. became the illegitimate ancestor of several stories of school-life whose heroes lived through experiences mercifully denied to me,’ the author later observed.

  Kipling returned to South Africa for the first three months of 1900, where he continued war work and writing, including two weeks in Bloemfontein on the newspaper The Friend,published by the British Army. At the time, Kipling was criticised by many liberals for his support of the British military campaign against the Boers.

  He was also working on the novel Kim (1901), the last – and thought by many to be the most important – of Kipling’s Indian writings. It concerned the adventures of an orphaned boy of a sergeant in the Irish Guards and was written with help from Kipling’s father.

  ‘Under our united tobaccos it grew like the Djinn released from the brass bottle,’ Kipling recalled, ‘and the more we explored its possibilities the more opulence of detail did we discover.’

  In 1902, the house in Vermont finally sold. The family moved into their final home, a seventeenth-century ironmaster’s house near Burwash, Sussex. To maintain theirsolitude, Kipling also purchased several acres of the surrounding countryside.

  Built of local sandstone, ‘Bateman’s’ had the atmosphere that Kipling had been looking for in a home. ‘We entered and felt her Spirit – her Feng-shui – to be good,’ he wrote. ‘We went through every room and found no shadow of ancient regrets, stifled miseries, nor any menace though the “new” end of her was three hundred years old.’

  However, Kipling’s belief in the supernatural persisted as he listened to local folk-tales about magic, witchcraft and love-philtres. He came to believe that Gladwish Wood, close to his family’s new home, was haunted by the ghost of a poacher, wrongly hanged for the death of a confederate: ‘It is full of a sense of ancient ferocity and evil … there is a spirit of some kind there,’ he revealed to ghost-hunter Robert Thurston Hopkins, author of Rudyard Kipling’s World (1925). ‘A very impolite fellow he is, too, for one evening something suddenly gripped me and despite my attempts to walk forward I was gradually forced back. I felt some unseen, unknown power just pushing against me and in the end I was compelled to turn around and leave the wood in a most undignified manner.’

  Kipling also told his mother that he saw the figure of his deceased daughter, Josephine, in the house and gardens at ‘Bateman’s’, and he used the building as the inspiration for the house in his story ‘They’.

  Just So Stories for Little Children (1902) was a collection of fables that had originally been written for his own children. Along with The Jungle Book, it has remained one of Kipling’s most enduring works. The Five Nations (1903) was a great contrast; it collected together his poems about the Boer War and its aftermath.

  Kipling enjoyed his seclusion amongst the Sussex Downs, and during the first decade of his new life there he wrote the collection Traffics and Discoveries (1904), plus the children’s fantasies Puck ofPook’s Hill (1906) – based on the hill that can be seen to the south-east of the lawn at ‘Bateman’s’ – and Rewards and Fairies (1910).

  The latter two titles featured Dan and Una, two childrenwho were transported back to specific moments in time by the supernatural Puck. They contained an innovative series of allegorical stories and poems primarily intended for children, inspired by the author’s love of English history and his new home in the Sussex countryside.

  Rewards and Fairies was also a belated attempt to put a cap on some of his ‘imperialist’ writings of the past. The book was nominally a sequel to Puck of Rook’s Hill but, as Kipling later wrote, ‘I worked the material in three or four overlaid tints and textures, which might or might not reveal themselves according to the shifting light of sex, youth and experience. The tales had to be read by children, before people realised that they were meant for grownups.’ The book included perhaps his single most famous poem, ‘If—’, written for his son, John, when he was thirteen.

  In 1907, Kipling was the first Englishman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. ‘It was a very great honour,’revealed the author, ‘in all ways unexpected.’ He travelled to Stockholm, Sweden, to accept his prize from the new King.

  That same year he journeyed to Canada for a speaking tour and to receive an honorary degree from the McGill University at Montreal. Years later, he recalled a story he was told in Canada about a body-snatching incident, ‘perpetrated in some lonely prairie-town and culminating in purest horror’. Kipling wrote the story up and then put it aside. Months later, while glancing through a back-issue of Harper’s Magazine in his dentist’s parlour, he found the exact same story down to every detail. ‘Had I published that tale,’ he cautioned, ‘what could have saved me from the charge of deliberate plagiarism?’

  Another collection of stories, Actions and Reactions, appeared in 1909. It included Kipling’s pioneering science fiction tale, – ‘With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD’, about flying-boats crossing the Atlantic. The story was originally published in McClure’s Magazine in November 1905, but for its first British appearance the following month in The Windsor Magazine it carried the subtitle ‘From “The Windsor Magazine” October,AD 2147’.

  Abaft the Funnel was published in the United States byB. W. Dodge & Co. of New York without Kipling’s permission. The book contained thirty uncollected stories and sketches from newspaper files in India, including the racing ghost story ‘Sleipner, Late Thurinda’ (1888), which Kipling had planned never to reprint. To secure copyright, the pirated printing was quickly followed by an authorised edition f
rom his New York publishers, Doubleday, Page & Co.

  ‘At first this annoyed me, but later I laughed,’ wrote Kipling, ‘and Frank Doubleday chased the pirates up with cheaper and cheaper editions, so that their thefts became less profitable.’

  Kipling’s mother, Alice, died in 1910, and his father followed her just a year later. Meanwhile, he collaborated on the textbook A School History of England (1911) with historian C.R.L. Fletcher.

  Kipling visited Egypt in 1913. He also published Songs from Books,a collection of poems that had appeared in, or been used as introductions or afterwords to his previously published stories, some of which were expanded upon for this edition.

  That same year, The Harbour Watch,a play written in collaboration with his teenage daughter Elsie, was performed in London but closed after only a few performances.

  Around this time Kipling began work on a story about the dead of the Boer War ‘flickerering and reforming as the horizon flickered in the heat’ during a summer day’s military manoeuvres. However, he eventually decided that ‘in cold blood it seemed more and more fantastic and absurd, unnecessary and hysterical,’ and he later discarded the draft.

  With the outbreak of the First World War, Kipling wrote ‘Swept and Garnished’ during the immediate aftermath of the German invasion of Belgium. A ghostly propaganda story, it appeared simultaneously in British and American magazines in January 1915.

  After John was told that he could not enlist because of his poor eyesight, Kipling used his considerable influence and his son was given a commission in the Irish Guards as a Second Lieutenant. Not long after, the eighteen-year-old boy was reported missing in action, believed killed in the Battle ofLoos, his first conflict on the Western Front. Kipling did everything he could to trace his son, including travelling to France and even dropping leaflets behind enemy lines, but John’s body was never recovered.

  Perhaps exacerbated by worry for his missing son, from this period onwards Kipling was in constant pain from a duodenal ulcer, although at the time he feared it was cancer, which he thought was a family ailment.