Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1298 page)

Harking back to the first subject of these reminiscences, I have pulled a copy of the 1888 Edition of “ Plain Tales from the Hills “ from the book-case. It’s a quaint looking contraption. There is a picture of the Hills on the top with two flags sticking out of a mountain’s brow. Each flag is about a sixth of the height of the mountain! There is a conglomeration of Mohammedan and Christian edifices down below. The whole looks like a mystical representation of an Emambagh and a prehistoric fort surmounted with many hills and two flags each two hundred feet high.

But looking through “Plain Tales” and reading through the stories again the thought strikes one — Has Kipling ever done better work than some of these gems? Take at random an extract:

“‘ You drive J eh annum ke marfik, mal- lum? ‘Tis no manner of faider bukkin to the Sahib bekaze he don’t samjao your bat. Av he bolos anything, just you choop and chel. Dekker? Go arsty for the first arder mile from cantonments. Thin chely Shaitan ke marfik, and the chooper you choops and the jeldier you chels the better kooshi will the Sahib be : and here’s a rupee for ye.”

Was soldiers’ bat ever more delightfully portrayed?

The “Mark of the Beast” story referred to may have been written originally for Lloyd’s News, but I believe it appeared in a good little paper, The Wednesday Journal; however, upon this point and similar small points, one has to refer to the library of memory. “The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot” (Kipling treasures an eerie name almost as much as the great good Dickens or that amazing genius, Edgar Saltus) was a strongly-scented story of London-in- the-East, illustrated with wash and line drawings by two lady members of the R.I., the Sisters Demain Hammond. “ Septimus “ laments the bad judgment of that very close corporation called The Trade, but his knowledge of books must have taught him that in many instances a like fate has awaited writers who now are read and loved wherever the English Raj rule. Take for appropriate example an author who has been highly praised by Kipling himself, Juliana Horatia Ewing. We read, in her life, that “ Jackanapes “ was much praised when it came out in a magazine, but even when reissued as a book its success was within a hair’s-breadth of failing. The first copies were brought out in dull stone-coloured paper covers, and that powerful vehicle, The Trade, unable to believe that a jewel could be concealed in so plain a casket, refused the work of J. H. E. and R. C. (Randolph Caldecott) until they had stretched the paper cover upon cardboards and coloured the Union Jack which adorns it! By such means shall ye writers climb to the stars.

The happy time brightly retold by “ Septimus” in Indian Ink was the time when the world discovered Rudyard Kipling and enrolled him in its “Celebrities At Home.” He then said that he might go up like the rocket and come down like its stick! It was the time that the Indian Railway Library was being reissued in England, volume by volume, the best railway reading ever offered for a journey. (By the way, that reminds one that Murray the publisher once 

issued a series of “Books Suited for Railway Readers,’’ and volumes number one and two were “ Abercrombie,” “On the Intellectual Powers and on the Philosophy of the Moral Feelings”! Heavens! what railway reading!) The Wheeler Indian Railway Library had the following books by Kipling, “ Soldiers Three,” “ In Black and White,” “ The Story of the Gadsbys,” “ The Phantom Rickshaw,” “ Wee Willie Winkie,” “ Under the Deodars,” and last, and rarest, “ Letters of Marque,” of which I understand only three or four copies were ever sold, in this form. The rare cover is reproduced as an illustration in this present book. Some pictures of the other Railway Library covers are to be seen, by the interested, in a book entitled “ Kiplingiana,” issued in New York in 1899 by Mansfield & Wessels. This is a pleasant little volume produced with great publishing taste and skill.

The cunning charm of many of the illustrated covers, etc., to the Indian stories designed by John Lockwood Kipling will delight for all time the fortunate possessors, but will not surprise those who know that the Kipling family possess trained tastes for the graphic arts. Recently, it is interesting to record, a series of most comical drawings by Rudyard Kipling’s great kinsman, Burne- Jones, were exhibited to the members of the London Library, St. James’s Square. Many were upon notepaper, stamped Rottingdean, Brighton — Mr. Kipling’s own home for some time.

Three books of the early Indian sketches of Rudyard Kipling were suppressed: “ The Smith Administration,” “ Letters of Marque No i,” and “ The City of Dreadful Night.” This latter volume had one of the few covers that were designed for the Indian Railway Library by the artist- author, Brownlow Fforde. The First (English) Edition bore attached to the title-page the following amende honor-

able: “The Publishers beg to state that at the time of printing this Work they had overlooked the fact that the title had been previously used for a volume of Poems by the late James Thomson (B.V.). They have, however, received the kind permission of Mr. Thomson’s Publishers to use it.” The material of which these three books are composed was reissued in the statutory Twenty Volumes of Kipling’s prose that are in all good libraries. But there is still a volume that somewhat persistently eludes the Kiplingite; unless he is as rich as a Hun secret agent. The volume is entitled “ Abaft the Funnel,” taken from its own epigraph, “ Men in pajamas, sitting abaft the funnel and swapping lies of the purple seas.” The author at one time had no intention to reprint these efforts, so we understand. But they are well worth the propriety and dignity of book-form, and he has not suffered any disservice. The same treat-

ment was accorded certain early miscellanea of James Thomson, and the Editor of that collection said: 4 4 Believing as I do that James Thomson is, since Shelley, the most brilliant genius who has wielded a pen ... I take a natural pride and pleasure in rescuing the following articles from burial in the great mausoleum of the Periodical Press.” Verb. sap. The various items that make the volume “ Abaft the Funnel “ may be roughly grouped into three sets of stories and sketches as follows : —

I.

THE ENGLISH IN INDIA.

The Likes of Us.

His Brother’s Keeper.

A Supplementary Chapter.

Tiglath Pileser.

“Sleipner,” late “ Thurinda.”

A Fallen Idol.

New Brooms.

II.

LIFE IN LONDON.

Letters On Leave.

The Adoration of the Magi.

A Death in the Camp.

A Really Good Time.

On Exhibition.

The Three Young Men.

My Great and Only.

“The Betrayal of Confidences.”

The New Dispensation, I. and II.

The Last Of and The Stories.

III.

TALES OF TRAVEL.

Erastasius of the Whanghoa. Her Little Responsibility. A Menagerie Aboard. A Smoke of Manila. The Red Lamp.

The Shadow of His Hand.

A Little More Beef.

Griffiths, the Safe Man.

It.

Chatauquaed.

The Bow Flume Cable-Car.

In addition to the foregoing there are a parody and a poem, the latter oddly entitled “In Partibus.” If, as one may fairly assume, the author really means this to be read as “In Partibus Infidelium” that is to say, “ In Unbelieving Countries,” the poem probably belongs to the period of his exile in London-Under-the-Fog, circa 1889, when attempts were made by the well-intentioned to “ lionise him “ —

“But I consort with long-haired things In velvet collar-rolls,

Who talk about the Aims of Art,

And * theories ‘ and 1 goals,’

And moo and coo with women-folk

About their blessed souls.”

The parody above noted stands outside the three groupings we suggested.

“The History of a Fall,” as it is entitled, can hardly be described as a story. It is a sketch of a comic episode narrated partly in English, partly in a parody of the French idiom of the three-fifty yellow-back. Like a good deal of the matter in “ Abaft the Funnel,” it partakes of the nature of a frisk (as Saltus puts it), a frolic, a maffick in ink. The comic or parodic condensed novel has amused several fun-masters, Thackeray, Bret Harte, Burnand, say; while I believe that the delightful and distinguished Stephen Laycock must be making a fortune as well as a reputation from just that type of literature. Their authors may think them mere ink-potterings, but they are things difficult to do.

“The Likes o’ Us” is a soldier story of the time and style of the ever-living “ Soldiers Three.” Indeed change but the name of the protagonist, Gunner

Barnabas, and you get quite a Mulvaney yarn. The story begins by the G.O.C. at Simla talking to its writer about Tommy Atkins: “ But the point on which he dwelt most pompously was the ease with which Private Thomas Atkins could be ‘handled’ as he called it. ‘ Only feed him and give him a little work to do, and you can do anything with him,’said the General Officer Commanding. * There’s no refinement about Tommy, you know; and one is very like another. They’ve all the same ideas and traditions and prejudices. They’re all big children.’ “

There followed a meeting between the narrator and Gunner Barnabas, who was in the Mountain Battery, and sitting upon a soldier, “ a khaki-coloured volcano of blasphemy,” till the said soldier became sober. There had been a conflict of view-points and the Gunner was nearly shot by his bemused companion, a little private, bedrunken and yet convalescing after fever. Finally, Gunner Barnabas, when the private had recovered from the half-murderous mania that had seized him, carried the silly little chap back towards barracks, shouting, “ It’s the likes o’ ‘im that brings shame on the likes o’ us.” A grim story of one of the darker sides of soldiering life but not, as I take it, meant to glorify brutality of threat or deed, but meant to show once more that order, duty, and decent living must and shall hold sway in the Army. Oddly, the next story is called’’ His Brother’s Keeper,’’ and deals with the moral responsibility that a man sometimes has in the matter of a colleague. Upon the subject of this big theme, “ Am I My Brother’s Keeper? “ the stylist Editor of The Hibbert says in an essay: “ Since it was Cain who asked the question, the inference has been drawn, most impudently, that all men who answer in the negative belong to the tribe of Cain. The negative answer has come to be regarded as one of the characteristic marks of a bad man — in fact, the very brand of Cain. Contrariwise, the acceptance of the position of keeper to one’s brother is usually taken as an unequivocal sign of grace.”

In Mr. Kipling’s strong, tense story, the brave man upon whom the burden of decision was laid, did not hesitate but answered the question in the affirmative and elected to be his brother’s keeper, for a certain time risking life or limb thereby, but choosing conscience before Cain.

Stovey, at work upon a canal with the man “ just above him,” goes mad and plots murder with a Martini. His intended victim gets the gun away upon the pretext that there is a pariah dog in his room — and by chance there was! The ending is quaint and unforeseen : “ Ever meet the man again? “ “ Yes; once at Sheik Katan dak- bungalow — trailing — the big brindled pi after him.”

“Oh, it was real, then? I thought it was arranged for the occasion.”

“Not a bit. It was a pukka pi. Stovey seemed to remember me in the same way that a horse seems to remember. I fancy his brain was a little cloudy. We tiffined together — after the pi had been fed, if you please — and Stovey said to me: ‘ See that dog? He saved my life once. Oh, by the way, I believe you were there, too, weren’t you? ‘ “