Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1326 page)

Occasionally one could test a plagiarist. I had to invent a tree, with name to match, for a man who at that time was rather riding in my pocket. In about eighteen months — the time it takes for a ‘test’ diamond, thrown over the wires into a field of ‘blue’ rock, to turn up on the Kimberley sorting-tables — my tree appeared in his ‘nature-studies’ name as spelt by me and virtues attributed. Since in our trade we be all felons, more or less, I repented when I had caught him, but not too much.

And I would charge you for the sake of your daily correspondence, never to launch a glittering generality, which an older generation used to call ‘Tupperism.’ Long ago I stated that ‘East was East and West was West and never the twain should meet.’ It seemed right, for I had checked it by the card, but I was careful to point out circumstances under which cardinal points ceased to exist. Forty years rolled on, and for a fair half of them the excellent and uplifted of all lands would write me, apropos of each new piece of broad-minded folly in India, Egypt, or Ceylon, that East and West had met — as, in their muddled minds, I suppose they had. Being a political Calvinist, I could not argue with these condemned ones. But their letters had to be opened and filed.

Again. I wrote a song called ‘Mandalay’ which, tacked to a tune with a swing, made one of the waltzes of that distant age. A private soldier reviews his loves and, in the chorus, his experiences in the Burma campaign. One of his ladies lives at Moulmein, which is not on the road to anywhere, and he describes the amour with some minuteness, but always in his chorus deals with ‘the road to Mandalay,’ his golden path to romance. The inhabitants of the United States, to whom I owed most of the bother, ‘Panamaed’ that song (this was before copyright), set it to their own tunes, and sang it in their own national voices. Not content with this, they took to pleasure cruising, and discovered that Moulmein did not command any view of any sun rising across the Bay of Bengal. They must have interfered too with the navigation of the Irrawaddy Flotilla steamers, for one of the Captains S.O.S.-ed me to give him ‘something to tell these somethinged tourists about it.’ I forget what word I sent, but I hoped it might help.

Had I opened the chorus of the song with ‘Oh’ instead of ‘On the road,’ etc., it might have shown that the song was a sort of general mix-up of the singer’s Far–Eastern memories against a background of the Bay of Bengal as seen at dawn from a troop-ship taking him there. But ‘On’ in this case was more singable than ‘Oh.’ That simple explanation may stand as a warning.

Lastly — and this got under my skin because it touched something that mattered — when, after the Boer War, there seemed an off chance of introducing conscription into England, I wrote verses called ‘The Islanders’ which, after a few days’ newspaper correspondence, were dismissed as violent, untimely, and untrue. In them I had suggested that it was unwise to ‘grudge a year of service to the lordliest life on earth.’ In the immediate next lines I described the life to which the year of service was grudged as: —

Ancient, effortless, ordered — cycle on cycle set — Life so long untroubled that ye who inherit forget It was not made with the mountains; it is not one with the deep. Men, not Gods, devised it. Men, not Gods, must keep.

In a very little while it was put about that I had said that ‘a year of compulsory service’ would be ‘effortless, ordered,’ etc. etc. — with the rider that I didn’t know much about it. This perversion was perversified by a man who ought to have known better; and I suppose I should have known that it was part of the ‘effortless, ordered’ drift towards Armageddon. You ask; ‘Why inflict on us legends of your Middle Ages?’ Because in life as in literature, its sole enduring record, is no age. Men and Things come round again, eternal as the seasons.

But, attacking or attacked, so long as you have breath, on no provocation explain. What you have said may be justified by things or some man, but never take a hand in a ‘dog-fight’ that opens ‘My attention has been drawn to,’ etc.

I came near to breaking this Law with Punch, an institution I always respected for its continuity and its utter Englishdom, and from whose files I drew my modern working history. I had written during the Boer War a set of verses based on unofficial criticisms of many serious junior officers. (Incidentally they contained one jewel of a line that opened ‘And which it may subsequently transpire’ — a galaxy of words I had long panted to place in the literary firmament.) Nobody loved them, and indeed they were not conciliatory; but Punch took them rather hard. This was a pity because Punch would have been useful at that juncture. I knew none of its staff, but I asked questions and learned that Punch on this particular issue was — non-Aryan ‘and German at that.’ It is true that the Children of Israel are ‘people of the Book,’ and in the second Surah of the Koran Allah is made to say; ‘High above mankind have I raised you.’ Yet, later, in the fifth Surah, it is written; ‘Oft as they kindle a beacon-fire for war, shall God quench it. And their aim will be to abet disorder on the earth but God loveth not the abettors of disorder.’ More important still, my bearer in Lahore never announced our good little Jew tyler but he spat loudly and openly in the verandah. I swallowed my spittle at once. Israel is a race to leave alone. It abets disorder.

Many years later, during the War, The Times, with which I had had no dealings for a dozen years or so, was ‘landed’ with what purported to be some verses by me, headed ‘The Old Volunteer.’ They had been sent in by a Sunday mail with some sort of faked postmark and without any covering letter. They were stamped with a rubber-stamp from the village office, they were written on an absolutely straight margin, which is beyond my powers, and in an unEuropean fist. (I had never since typewriters began sent out press-work unless it was typed.) From my point of view the contribution should not have deceived a messenger-boy. Ninthly and lastly, they were wholly unintelligible.

Human nature being what it is, The Times was much more annoyed with me than anyone else, though goodness knows — this, remember, was in ‘17 — I did not worry them about it, beyond hinting that the usual week-end English slackness, when no one is in charge, had made the mess. They took the matter up with the pomp of the Public Institution which they were, and submitted the MS. to experts, who proved that it must be the work of a man who had all but ‘spoofed’ The Times about some fragments of Keats. He happened to be an old friend of mine, and when I told him of his magnified ‘characteristic’ letters, and the betraying slopes at which they lay — his, as I pointed out, ‘very C’s and U’s and T’s,’ he was wrath and, being a poet, swore a good deal that if he could not have done a better parody of my ‘stuff’ with his left hand he would retire from business. This I believed, for, on the heels of my modest disclaimer which appeared, none too conspicuously, in The Times, I had had a letter in a chaffing vein about ‘The Old Volunteer’ from a non-Aryan who never much appreciated me; and the handwriting of it, coupled with the subtlety of choosing a week-end (as the Hun had chosen August Bank Holiday of ‘14) for the work, plus the Oriental detachedness and insensitiveness of playing that sort of game in the heart of a life-and-death struggle, made me suspect him more than a little. He is now in Abraham’s bosom, so I shall never know. But The Times seemed very happy with its enlarged letters, and measurements of the alphabet, and — there really was a war on which filled my days and nights. Then The Times sent down a detective to my home. I didn’t see the drift of this, but naturally was interested. And It was a Detective out of a book, down to the very creaks of Its boots. (On the human side at lunch It knew a lot about second-hand furniture.) Officially, It behaved like all the detectives in the literature of that period. Finally, It settled Itself, back to the light, facing me at my work-table, and told me a long yarn about a man who worried the Police with complaints of anonymous letters addressed to him from unknown sources, all of which, through the perspicacity of the Police, turned out to have been written by himself to himself for the purpose of attracting notoriety. As in the case of the young man on the Canadian train, that tale felt as though it had come out of a magazine of the ‘sixties; and I was so interested in its laborious evolution that I missed its implication till quite the end. Then I got to thinking of the psychology of the detective, and what a gay life of plots It must tramp through; and of the psychology of The Times-ina-hole, which is where no one shows to advantage; and of how Moberly Bell, whose bows I had crossed in the old days, would have tackled the matter; what Buckle, whom I loved for his sincerity and gentlehood, would have thought of it all. Thus I forgot to defend my ‘injured honour.’ The thing had passed out of reason into the Higher Hysterics. What could I do but offer It some more sherry and thank It for a pleasant interview?

I have told this at length because Institutions of idealistic tendencies sometimes wait till a man is dead, and then furnish their own evidence. Should this happen, try to believe that in the deepest trough of the War I did not step aside to play with The Times, Printing House Square, London, E.C.

In the come-and-go of family talk there was often discussion as to whether I could write a ‘real novel.’ The Father thought that the setting of my work and life would be against it, and Time justified him.

Now here is a curious thing. At the Paris Exhibition of 1878 I saw, and never forgot, a picture of the death of Marion Lescaut, and asked my Father many questions. I read that amazing ‘one book’ of the Abbé Prévost, in alternate slabs with Scarron’s Roman Comique, when I was about eighteen, and it brought up the picture. My theory is that a germ lay dormant till my change of life to London (though that is not Paris) woke it up, and that The Light that Failed was a sort of inverted, metagrobolised phantasmagoria based on Manon. I was confirmed in my belief when the French took to that conte with relish, and I always fancied that it walked better in translation than in the original. But it was only a conte — not a built book.

Kim, of course, was nakedly picaresque and plotless — a thing imposed from without.

Yet I dreamed for many years of building a veritable three-decker out of chosen and longstored timber-teak, green-heart, and ten-year-old oak knees — each curve melting deliciously into the next that the sea might nowhere meet resistance or weakness; the whole suggesting motion even when, her great sails for the moment furled, she lay in some needed haven — a vessel ballasted on ingots of pure research and knowledge, roomy, fitted with delicate cabinet-work below-decks, painted, carved, gilt and wreathed the length of her, from her blazing stern-galleries outlined by bronzy palm-trunks, to her rampant figure-head — an East Indiaman worthy to lie alongside The Cloister and the Hearth.

Not being able to do this, I dismissed the ambition as ‘beneath the thinking mind.’ So does a half-blind man dismiss shooting and golf.

Nor did I live to see the day when the new three-deckers should hoist themselves over the horizon, quivering to their own power, over-loaded with bars, ball-rooms, and insistent chromium plumbing; hellishly noisy from the sports’ deck to the barber’s shop; but serving their generation as the old craft served theirs. The young men were already laying down the lines of them, fondly believing that the old laws of design and construction were for them abrogated.

And with what tools did I work in my own mould-loft? I had always been choice, not to say coquettish in this respect. In Lahore for my Plain Tales I used a slim, octagonal-sided, agate penholder with a Waverley nib. It was a gift, and when in an evil hour it snapped I was much disturbed. Then followed a procession of impersonal hirelings each with a Waverley, and next a silver penholder with a quill-like curve, which promised well but did not perform. In Villiers Street I got me an outsize office pewter ink-pot, on which I would gouge the names of the tales and books I wrote out of it. But the housemaids of married life polished those titles away till they grew as faded as a palimpsest.

I then abandoned hand-dipped Waverleys — a nib I never changed — and for years wallowed in the pin-pointed ‘stylo’ and its successor the ‘fountain’ which for me meant geyser-pens. In later years I clung to a slim, smooth, black treasure (Jael was her office name) which I picked up in Jerusalem. I tried pump-pens with glass insides, but they were of ‘intolerable entrails.’

For my ink I demanded the blackest, and had I been in my Father’s house, as once I was, would have kept an ink-boy to grind me Indian-ink. All ‘blue-blacks’ were an abomination to my Daemon, and I never found a bottled vermilion fit to rubricate initials when one hung in the wind waiting.

My writing-blocks were built for me to an unchanged pattern of large, off-white, blue sheets, of which I was most wasteful. All this old-maiderie did not prevent me when abroad from buying and using blocks, and tackle, in any country.

With a lead pencil I ceased to express — probably because I had to use a pencil in reporting. I took very few notes except of names, dates, and addresses. If a thing didn’t stay in my memory, I argued it was hardly worth writing out. But each man has his own method. I rudely drew what I wanted to remember.

Like most men who ply one trade in one place for any while, I always kept certain gadgets on my work-table, which was ten feet long from North to South and badly congested. One was a long, lacquer, canoe-shaped pen-tray full of brushes and dead ‘fountains’; a wooden box held clips and bands; another, a tin one, pins; yet another, a bottle-slider, kept all manner of unneeded essentials from emery-paper to small screwdrivers; a paper-weight, said to have been Warren Hastings’ a tiny, weighted fur-seal and a leather crocodile sat on some of the papers; an inky foot-rule and a Father of Penwipers which a much-loved housemaid of ours presented yearly, made up the main-guard of these little fetishes.