Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (91 page)

As newspapers around the world reported their condition on the front pages, Kipling and his beloved six-year-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 grown-ups.’ 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 from 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 re-forming 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.

He later explored his terror of the disease in the story ‘The Wish House’ (1924), which was published in the American
MacLean’s Magazine
in October 1924, but did not appear in Britain until the December issue of
Pall Mall Magazine.

Although a sense of bitter emptiness entered his work after his son’s death, Kipling continued to publish articles on the war (much of it censored), and eighteen of these pieces from the
Daily Telegraph
were eventually collected in
The New Army in Training
,
France at War
and
Fringes of the Fleet
(all 1915).

Tales of the Trade
(1916),
Sea Warfare
(1916) and
The Eyes of Asia
(1917) were further collections of war journalism from, amongst other sources, the
Daily Telegraph
and the
New York Times.

In 1917, Kipling joined the War Graves Commission. That same year he published
A Diversity of Creatures
,a collection of stories mainly written before the outbreak of war, but including two ‘Tales of ’15’. One of these, ‘Mary Postgate’, apparently about a woman who refused to help a dying German pilot who had crashed in her garden, has been seen as among the most controversial and important of the author’s later stories.

The book also included ‘As Easy as ABC’, a science fiction story that was a sequel-of-sorts to ‘With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 AD’. It had originally appeared over two issues of both
The Family Magazine
in America and
The London Magazine
in Britain in 1912, where it carried the subtitle ‘A Tale of 2150 AD’.

Kipling also published in newspapers a series of war articles about the Italian-Austrian front, five of which were collected in
The War in the Mountains
(1917).

The Years Between
(1919) was a collection of poems written during the period from just after the Boer War until the aftermath of the First World War and included ‘Epitaphs of the War’, while
Letters of Travel 1892
–
1913
(1920) collected old articles on Japan, the United States, Canada and Egypt.

The Irish Guards in The Great War
,published in 1923, was a history of his late son’s regiment that Kipling compiled from soldiers’ letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of survivors. That same year,
Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides
contained uncollected stories with two new additions and extra verse.

In 1924, Kipling’s only surviving child, Elsie, married former Irish Guards Captain George Bambridge, MC.

Published in
Pall Mall Magazine
for September of that year, Kipling’s story ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ had its inspiration in the First World War. As its reference to ‘the Angels of Mons’ indicated, it also had its roots in Arthur Machen’s totally fictitious tale ‘The Bowmen’, which had created great controversy almost a decade earlier when British troops returning from the first battle of Ypres had claimed to have seen the phantom archers featured in the story.

Debits and Credits
(1926) was a collection of short stories that expanded upon some of the material Kipling collected while writing
The Irish Guards in The Great War.
It also included such tales as ‘The Wish House’, ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ and ‘The Eye of Allah’.

The latter tale caused its author some problems, as he revealed: ‘Again and again it went dead under my hand, and for the life of me I could not see why. I put it away arid waited.’ He finally decided to treat it as ‘an illuminated manuscript’ rather than ‘hard black-and-white decoration,’ and was able to finish it.

The final story in the book, ‘The Gardener’, was an enigmatic blend of religious symbolism and the supernatural. It was written after Kipling visited the war graves at the Rouen Cemetery in France. ‘One never gets over the shock of this dead sea of arrested lives,’ he wrote to H. Rider Haggard two days later on March 14, 1925.

The story was finished at Lourdes on March 22, and was originally published in the April 1925 edition of
McCall’s Magazine
before Kipling spent a year revising it for its appearance in
Debits and Credits.

‘The Gardener’ was Kipling’s final supernatural story.

In 1927, Kipling took a voyage to Brazil and
Brazilian Sketches
reprinted his travel articles that had previously appeared in the
Morning Post.