The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling (4 page)

I flipped through it, read a stanza here and a stanza there. The author’s meter was unmistakable and he had never lost his dexterity at rhyming, but what I was reading looked like doggerel to me.

For this I’d passed up Krugerrands and Barber Proofs, Fabergé and Baccarat and Daum Nancy. For this I’d returned the pearl-and-ruby ring to its little velvet case.

Mr. Whelkin would be proud of me.

I
met J. Rudyard Whelkin on a slow midweek morning two weeks prior to my little venture in breaking and entering. The Yankees had just dropped the first two games of the Series, and the night before I’d watched a kid barely old enough to shave strike out Reggie Jackson with the bases loaded. This morning it was damp and drizzly, and it figured.

I hadn’t had any customers yet and I didn’t much care; I was settled in behind the counter with a paperback. I don’t stock paperbacks, and the ones that come in I wholesale to a guy on Third and Sixteenth who deals in nothing else.

Sometimes, though, I read them first. The one I was reading was one of Richard Stark’s books about Parker. Parker’s a professional thief, and every book runs pretty much to form—Parker puts together a string of crooks, he goes someplace like Spartanburg, South Carolina, to buy guns and a truck, he gets a dentist in Yankton Falls to put up front money for the operation, he and his buddies pull the job, and then something goes horribly wrong. If nothing went horribly wrong, all of the books would end around page 70 and by now Parker would own his own island in the Caribbean.

Last time I was inside, everybody was a big fan of Parker’s. My colleagues read everything they could get their hands on about him, even if they had to move their lips to get the job done. I swear there were grizzled cons in that joint who would walk around quoting passages at each other, especially parts where Parker maimed someone. One safecracker always quoted the part where Parker settled a score with an unworthy fellow laborer by breaking three important bones and leaving him in a swamp. It was the adjective that did it for him, the idea of deliberately breaking important bones.

I had just reached the part where Parker was putting in an urgent call to Handy McKay at his diner in Presque Isle, Maine, when the little bells above the door tinkled to announce I had company. I moved the paperback out of sight as my visitor approached the counter. After all, antiquarian booksellers have an image to protect. We’re not supposed to read trash.

He was a stout man, florid of face, jowly as a bulldog, with thinning mahogany hair combed straight back over a glossy salmon scalp. He wore a charcoal-brown herringbone tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, a tobacco-brown sweater vest, a tan oxford-cloth shirt with a button-down collar, a chocolate-brown knit tie. His trousers were fawn cavalry twill, his shoes brown wing tips. He had a long narrow nose, a graying guardsman’s mustache. His eyebrows were untamed tangles of briar; beneath them his eyes (brown, to match his outfit) were keen and cool and just a trifle bloodshot.

He asked if Mr. Litzauer was expected, and I explained about the change in ownership. “Ah,” he said. “No wonder he hasn’t been in touch. I’m a collector, you see, and he always lets me know when he runs across an item I might fancy.”

“What do you collect?”

“Victorian poets, for the most part, but I follow my taste, you know. I’m partial to artful rhymers. Thomas Hood. Algernon Charles Swinburne. William Mackworth Praed. Kipling, of course, is my keenest enthusiasm.”

I told him whatever I had was on the shelves. He went to look for himself and I got Parker out from beneath the counter and returned to vicarious crime. Two of Parker’s henchpersons were just getting ready to set up a doublecross when my tweedy customer presented himself once again at the counter, a small clothbound volume in hand. It contained the collected lyric poems of Austin Dobson and I had it priced at six or seven dollars, something like that. He paid in cash and I wrapped it for him.

“If you happen on anything you think I might like,” he said, “you might want to ring me up.”

He handed me his card. It bore his name, an address in the East Thirties, and a phone number with a MUrray Hill 8 exchange. The card conveyed no suggestion of what the man did for a living.

I looked from it to him. “You collect Kipling,” I said.

“Among others, yes.”

“Is there a family connection?”

He smiled broadly. “Because of the name, you mean? Natural guess, of course. But no, I’m no relative of Kipling’s. Rudyard’s not a family name, you see. It’s the name of a lake.”

“Oh?”

“In Staffordshire. Kipling’s parents first met on a picnic at Lake Rudyard. When in due course their son was born he was given the lake’s name as a middle name. His first name was Joseph, actually, although he never did use it and was known as Ruddy from earliest childhood.”

“And your first name—”

“Is James, as it happens, and I don’t use it either. James Rudyard Whelkin. I was eight years old when Kipling died and I remember the day very well. That was in 1936, just two days after George V preceded him to the grave. A day of mourning in our household, as you can well imagine. My father admired Kipling enormously. He’d have to have done, to name his only son after him, wouldn’t he? Because I was named for Kipling, of course, not for a lake in Staffordshire. ‘First the old king and now the Bard of Empire,’ my father said. ‘Mark my words, Ruddy. There’ll be war in Europe within the next two years.’ He was off by a year of course, and I don’t suppose Kipling’s demise had much to do with Hitler’s invading Poland, but it all linked up in the old fellow’s mind, you see.” He smiled fiercely and his great eyebrows shook. “Are you interested in Kipling, Mr. Rhodenbarr?”

“I read him when I was a kid.”

“You might try him again. He’s returning to fashion, you know, after altogether too many years of neglect. Have you had a look at
Kim
lately? Or
The Light That Failed
? Or—But reading must be a bit of a busman’s holiday for you, eh? Must grow sick and tired of the printed word by the end of a long day.”

“Oh, I still enjoy reading. And maybe I will try Kipling again.”

“Do. There’s books on your own shelves, for a starter.” An appraising glance from his alert brown eyes. “I say, sir. Do you suppose you could possibly lunch with me this afternoon? I might have something to say that would interest you.”

“I’d like that.”

“My club, then. Do you know the Martingale? And how’s half past twelve?”

I told him I knew where the club was, and that twelve-thirty was fine.

He’d already said something that interested me.

The Martingale Club was just right for him, a good match for his dress and his faintly pukka sahib manner. It stood at the corner of Madison Avenue and Thirtieth Street and was decorated largely with uncomfortable Jacobean oak furniture and the heads of innumerable dead animals.

We dined in a fair-sized room on the second floor under the glass-eyed stare of a bison allegedly shot by Theodore Roosevelt for reasons I could not begin to guess. Lunch was a leathery mixed grill with thawed green peas and spineless French fried potatoes. The waiter who brought this mess to the table was a rheumy-eyed chap who walked as though his feet were killing him. He looked almost as woebegone as the bison.

Whelkin and I talked books through the meal, then both turned down dessert. The sad waiter brought us a large silver coffeepot of the sort they used to serve you on trains. The coffee was even better than the old Pennsy dining car once supplied, rich and winy and aromatic.

Our table was next to a pair of casement windows. I sipped my coffee and looked out at Madison Avenue. The last of the Good Humor men was doing light business on the corner. In a matter of days he’d be gone, yielding place to a seller of hot pretzels and chestnuts as the seasons changed in their inexorable fashion. You couldn’t watch the leaves turn, not from this window, but you could mark time’s passage by keeping an eye on the street vendors.

Whelkin cleared his throat, interrupting this reverie. “H. Rider Haggard,” he said. “I told you I collect him as well?”

“I think you mentioned him.”

“Interesting man. Did for South Africa what Kipling did for India.
She, King Solomon’s Mines
—but of course you know his work.”

“In a general way.”

“He and Kipling became great friends, you know. Both of them were on the outs with the Bloomsbury crowd. Both lived long enough to see their own literary reputations fade dismally. The public came to think of them in the same breath as apologists for a discredited imperialism. Do you know the J. K. Stephens poem?”

I didn’t even know whom he was talking about, but he managed to quote the poem from memory:

He moved to refill our coffee cups. “Nasty piece of billingsgate, eh? One of many such. Just drove the two of them closer together, however. Haggard spent as much time at Kipling’s house in Surrey as he did at home. They’d actually work together in Kipling’s study, sitting on opposite ends of the long desk, batting ideas back and forth, then scribbling away furiously at one thing or another.”

“Interesting,” I said.

“Isn’t it? Not too long after the 1918 Armistice the two men set about organizing the Liberty League, a sort of anti-Communist affair which never got terribly far off the ground. The bit of doggerel someone wrote gives a fair idea of the Liberty League’s slant on current affairs. You know the poem?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s cleverly rhymed, and I think I mentioned my admiration for a facility at rhyming.

“Neatly done, don’t you think? I could quote others of a similar nature but I’ll spare you that.”

I very nearly thanked him. I was beginning to think I’d been mistaken, that he’d just brought me here to quote verse at me. Well, at least the coffee was good.

Then he said, “Liberty League. After it fell apart, Kipling went through a difficult time. His health was poor. Gastritis, which he thought might be symptomatic of cancer. Turned out he had duodenal ulcers. He was subject to depression and it may have affected his thinking.

“The man became briefly fixated on the curious notion that the British Empire was menaced by an unholy alliance of Jewish international financiers and Jewish Bolsheviks. These two unlikely forces were joining together to destroy Christianity by wresting the overseas empire from the British crown. Kipling wasn’t the sort of moral degenerate to whom anti-Semitism comes naturally, and he didn’t persist in it for any length of time, nor did it color his work to a considerable extent.

“But he did write one extremely bizarre piece of work on an anti-Semitic theme. It was a narrative poem in ballad meter, some three thousand two hundred lines called
The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.
The plot line concerns the efforts of a gallant British regiment to save India from a revolution stirred up by Jewish agitators, and it’s quite clear that the battle for Fort Bucklow is not merely the decisive battle of this war but Kipling’s version of the Battle of Armageddon, with the forces of Good and Evil pitted against one another to decide the fate of humankind.

“Do you remember
Soldiers Three
? Learoyd, Ortheris and Mulvaney? Kipling brought them back to make them the heroes who deliver Fort Bucklow and save the day for God and King George. Oh, there are some stirring battle scenes, and there’s a moment when ‘two brave men stand face to face’ in a manner reminiscent of
The Ballad of East and West,
but poor Kipling was miles from the top of his form when he wrote it. The premise is absurd, the resolution is weak, and there are elements of frightful unwitting self-parody. He often skated rather close to the edge of self-parody, you know, and here he lost his footing.

“Perhaps he recognized this himself. Perhaps his vision of the Hebraic Conspiracy embraced the world of publishing. In any event, he didn’t offer
The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow
to his London publishers. He may have planned to do so ultimately, but in the meantime he elected to safeguard the copyright by bringing out the poem in a small private edition.”

“Ah.”

“Ah indeed, sir. Kipling found a printer named Smithwick & Son in Tunbridge Wells. If Smithwick ever printed another book before or since, I’ve never heard of it. But he did print this one, and in an edition of only one hundred fifty copies. It’s not fine printing by any means because Smithwick wasn’t capable of it. But he got the job done, and the book’s quite a rarity.”

“It must be. One hundred fifty copies…”

Whelkin smiled widely. “That’s how many were printed. How many do you suppose survive?”

“I have no idea.
The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow
? I’ve never heard the title.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Fifty copies? Seventy-five? I have no idea what the survival rate would be.”

The coffeepot was empty. Whelkin frowned and rang a bell mounted on the wall. He didn’t say anything until the waiter limped over with a fresh pot.

Then he said, “Kipling wrote the poem in 1923. He’d hoped to give out copies to close friends for Christmas that year, but the holiday had come and gone before Smithwick was able to make delivery. So Kipling decided to hold them over for Christmas of ’24, but sometime in the course of the year he seems to have come to his senses, recognizing the poem as a scurrilous piece of Jew-baiting tripe and bad verse in the bargain.

“As was his custom, Kipling had presented his wife, Carrie, with an inscribed copy. He asked for it back. He’d given another copy to a Surrey neighbor of his named Lonsdale as a birthday gift in early spring and he managed to get it back as well, giving the man several other books in exchange. These two books, as well as the other bound volumes, the printer’s proofs, and the original holograph manuscript plus the typed manuscript from which Smithwick set type—all of this went up the chimney at Bateman’s.”