Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (595 page)

“Oh, not in the least,” said I. “No sugar, thanks.” This to the hostess, who was waving Sally Lunns under my nose. A female, who could not have been less than seven feet high, came on, half speed ahead, through the fog of the tea-steam, and docked herself on the sofa just like an Inman liner.

“Have you ever considered,” said she, “the enormous moral responsibility that rests in the hands of one who has the gift of literary expression? In my own case — but you surely know my collaborator.”

A much huger woman arrived, cast anchor, and docked herself on the other side of the sofa. She was the collaborator. Together they confided to me that they were desperately in earnest about the amelioration of something or other. Their collective grievance against me was that I was not in earnest.

“We have studied your works — all,” said the five-thousand-ton four-master, “and we cannot believe that you are in earnest.” “Oh, no,” I said hastily, “I never was.” Then I saw that that was the wrong thing to say, for the eight- thousand-ton palace Cunarder signalled to the sister ship, saying: “You see, my estimate was correct.”

“Now, my complaint against him is that he is too savagely farouche “ said a weedy young gentleman with tow hair, who ate Sally Lunns like a workhouse orphan. CCFaroucherie in his age is a fatal mistake.”

I reflected a moment on the possibility of getting that young gentleman out into a large and dusty maidan and gently chukkering him before chota hazri. He looked too sleek to me as he then stood. But I said nothing, because a tiny-tiny woman with beady-black eyes shrilled: “I disagree with you entirely. He is too much bound by the tradition of the commonplace. I have seen in his later work signs that he is afraid of his public. You must never be afraid of your public.”

Then they began to discuss me as though I

were dead and buried under the hearth-rug, and they talked of “tones” and “notes” and “lights” and “shades” and tendencies.

“And which of us do you think is correct in her estimate of your character?” said the tiny-tiny woman when they had made me out (a) a giddy Lothario; (b) a savage; (c) a pre- Rafaelite angel; (d) co-equal and co-etemal with half a dozen gentlemen whose names I had never heard; (e) flippant; (f) penetrated with pathos; (g) an open atheist; (h) a young man of the Roman Catholic faith with a mission in life.

I smiled idiotically, and said I really didn’t know.

Then a man entered whom I knew, and I fled to him for comfort. “Have I missed the fun?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

I explained, snorting, what had befallen.

“Ay,” said he quietly, “you didn’t go the right way to work. You should have stood on the hearth-rug and fired off epigrams. That’s what I did after I had written Down in the Doldrums, md was fed with crumpets in consequence.”

A woman plumped down by my side and twisted ter hands into knots, and hung her eyes over her iheek-bones. I thought it was too many muffins, ill she said: “ Tell me, oh, tell me, was such-and- luch in such a one of your books — was he real? $as he quite real? Oh, how lovely! How sweet! how precious! “ She alluded to that drunken ruffian Mulvaney, who would have driven her into fits had he ever set foot on her doorstep in the flesh. I caught the half of a wink in my friend’s eye as he removed himself and left me alone to tell fibs about the evolution of Private Mulvaney I said anything that eame uppermost, and my answers grew so wild that the woman departed.

Then I heard the hostess whispering to a girl a nice, round, healthy English maiden. “ Go and talk to him/’ she said. “ Talk to him about his books.’’

I gritted my teeth, and waited till the maiden was close at hand and about to begin. There wa a lovely young man at the end of the room suck ing a stick, and I felt sure that the maiden woulc much have preferred talking to him. She smiled prefatorily.

“It’s hot here,” I said; “ let’s go over to the window ‘‘; and I plumped down on a three-seated settee, with my back to the young man, leaving only one place for the maiden. I was right. I signalled up the man who had written Down in the Doldrums, and talked to him as fast as I knew how. When he had to go, and the young mar with him, the maiden became enthusiastic, not to say gushing. But I knew that those compliments were for value received. Then she explained thai she was going out to India to stay with her married aunt, wherefore she became as a sister unto me on the spot. Her mamma did not seem to know much about Indian outfits, and I waxed eloquent on the subject.

“It’s all nonsense,” I said, “to fill your boxes with things that can be made just as well in the country. What you want are walking- dresses and dinner-dresses as good as ever you can get, and gloves tinned up, and odds and ends of things generally. All the rest, unless you’re extravagant, the dharzee can make in the verandah. Take underclothing, for instance.” I was conscious that my loud and cheerful voice was ploughing through one of those ghostly silences that sometimes fall upon a company. The English only wear their out- sides in company. They have nothing to do with underclothing. I could feel that without being told. So the silence cut short the one matter in which I could really have been of use.

On the pavement my friend who wrote Down in the Doldrums was waiting to walk home with me. “What in the world does it all mean?” I said. “Nothing,” said he. “You’ve been asked there as a small deputy lion to roar in place of a much bigger man. You growled, though.”

“I should have done much worse if I’d known,” I grunted. “Ah,” said he, “you haven’t arrived at the real fun of the show. Wait till they’ve made you jump through hoops and your turn’s over, and you can sit on a sofa and watch the new men being brought up and put through their paces. You’ve nothing like that in India. How do you manage your parties?”

And I thought of smooth-cut lawns in the gloaming, and tables spread under mighty trees, and men and women, all intimately acquainted with each other, strolling about in the lightest of raiment, and the old dowagers criticising the badminton, and the young men in riding-boots making rude remarks about the claret cup, and the host circulating through the mob and saying: “Hah, Piggy,” or Bobby or Flatnose, as the nickname might be, “have another peg,” and the hostess soothing the bashful youngsters and talking hhitmatgars with the Judge’s wife, and the last new bride hanging on her husband’s arm and saying: “Isn’t it almost time to go home, Dicky, dear?” and the little fat owls chuckling in the bougain- villeas, and the horses stamping and squealing in the carriage-drive, and everybody saying the most awful things about everybody else, but prepared to do anything for anybody else just the same; and I gulped a great gulp of sorrow and homesickness.

“You wouldn’t understand,” said I to my friend. “Let’s go to a pot-house, where cabbies call, and drink something.”

THE THREE YOUNG MEN

LONDON IN THE FOG

“CURIOUSER and curiouser,” as Alice in Wonderland said when she found her neck beginning to grow. Each day under the smoke brings me new and generally unpleasant discoveries. The latest are most on my mind. I hasten to transfer them to yours.

At first, and several times afterwards, I very greatly desired to talk to a thirteen-two subaltern — not because he or I would have anything valuable to say to each other, but just because he was a subaltern. I wanted to know all about that evergreen polo-pony that “can turn on a sixpence,” and the second-hand second charger that, by a series of perfectly unprece dented misfortunes, just failed to win the Calcutta Derby. Then, too, I wished to hear of many old friends across the sea, and who had got his company, and why and where the new Generals were going next cold weather, and how the Commander-in-Chief had been enlivening the Simla season. So I looked east and west, and north and south, but never a thirteen- two subaltern broke through the fog; except once — and he had grown a fifteen-one cot down, and wore a tall hat and frock coat, and was begging for coppers from the Horse- Guards. By the way, if you stand long enough between the mounted sentries — the men who look like reflectors stolen from Christmas trees — you will presently meet every human being you ever knew in India. When I am not happy — that is to say, once a day — I run off and play on the pavement in front of the Horse-Guards, and watch the expressions on the gentlemen’s faces as they come out. But this is a digression.

After some days — I grew lonelier and lonelier every hour — I went away to the other end of the town, and catching a friend, said: “Lend me a man — a young man — to play with. I don’t feel happy. I want rousing. I have liver.” And the friend said: “Ah, yes, of course. What you want is congenial society, something that will stir you up — a fellow- mind. Now let me introduce you to a thoroughly nice young man. He’s by way of being an ardent Neo-Alexandrine, and has written some charming papers on the ‘Ethics of the Wood Pavement.’ “ Concealing my almost visible rapture, I murmured “Oh, bliss!” as they used to say at the Gaiety, and extended the hand of friendship to a young gentleman attired after the fashion of the Neo-Alexandrines, who appear to be a sub- caste of social priests. His hand was a limp hand, his face was very smooth because he had not yet had time to grow any hair, and he wore a cloak like a policeman’s cloak, but much more so. On his finger was a cameo-ring about three inches wide, and round his neck, the weather being warm, was a fawn, olive and dead-leaf comforter of soft silk — the sort of thing any right-minded man would give to his mother or his sister without being asked.

We looked at each other cautiously for some minutes. Then he said: “What do you think of the result of the Brighton election?” “Beautiful, beautiful,” I said, watching his eye, which saddened. “One of the worst — that is, entirely the most absurd reductio ad absurdum of the principle of the narrow and narrow-minded majority imposing a will which is necessarily incult on a minority animated by ...” I forget exactly what he said they were animated by, but it was something very fine.

“When I was at Oxford,” he said, “Haward of Exeter” — he spoke as one speaks of Smith of Asia — ”always inculcated at the Union By the way, you do not know, I suppose, anything of the life at Oxford?” “No,” I said, anxious to propitiate, “but I remember some boys once who seduced an ekka and a pony into a Major’s tent at a camp of exercise, laced up the door, and let the Major fight it out with the horse.” I told that little incident in my best style, and was three parts through it before I discovered that he was looking pained and shocked.

“That — ah — was not the side of Oxford that I had in mind when I was saying that Haward of Exeter” And he explained all about Mr. Haward, who appeared to be a young gentleman, rising twenty-three, of wonderful mental attainments, and as pernicious a prig as I ever dreamed about. Mr. Haward had schemes for the better management of creation; my friend told me them all — social, political and economical.

Then, just as I was feeling faint and very much in need of a drink, he launched without warning upon the boundless seas of literature. He wished to know whether I had read the works of Messrs. Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget and Pierre Loti. This in the tone of a teacher of Euclid. I replied that all my French was confined to the Vie Parisienne and translations of Zola’s novels with illustrations. Here we parted. London is very large, and I do not think we shall meet any more.

I thanked our Mutual Friend for his kindness, and asked for another young man to play with. This gentleman was even younger than the last, but quite as cocksure. He told me in the course of half a cigar that only men of mediocre calibre went into the army, which was a brutalising profession; that he suffered from nerves, and “an uncontrollable desire to walk up and down the room and sob” (that was too many cigarettes), and that he had never set foot out of England, but knew all about the world from his own theories. Thought Dickens coarse; Scott jingling and meretricious; and had not by any chance read the novels of Messrs. Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget and Pierre Loti.

Him I left quickly, but sorry that he could not do a six weeks’ training with a Middlesex militia regiment, where he would really get something to sob for. The novel business interested me. I perceived that it was a fashion, like his tie and his collars, and I wanted to work it to the fountain-head. To this end I procured the whole Shibboleth from Guy de Maupassant even unto Pierre Loti by way of Bourget. Unwholesome was a mild term for these interesting books, which the young men assured me that they read for style. When a fat Major makes that remark in an Indian Club, everybody hoots and laughs. But you must not laugh overseas, especially at young gentlemen who have been to Oxford and listened to Mr. Haward of Exeter.

Then I was introduced to another young man who said he belonged to a movement called Toynbee Hall, where, I gathered, young gentlemen took an indecent interest in the affairs of another caste, whom, with rare tact, they called “the poor,” and told them generally how to order their lives. Such was the manner and general aggressiveness of this third young gentleman, that if he had told me that coats were generally worn and good for the protection of the body, I should have paraded Bond Street in my shirt. What the poor thought of him I could not tell, but there is no room for it in this letter. He said that there was going to be an upheaval of the classes — the English are very funny about their castes. They don’t know how to handle them one little bit, and never allow them to draw water or build huts in peace — and the entire social fabric was about to be remodelled on his recommendations, and the world would be generally altered past recognition. No, he had never seen anything of the world, but close acquaintance with authorities had enabled him to form dispassionate judgments on the subjects, and had I, by any chance, read the novels of Guy de Maupassant, Pierre Loti and Paul Bourget?