The Wish House and Other Stories (8 page)

At the centre of ‘Mrs Bathurst’ is another famously baffling image, which once read is never forgotten: two tramps, one squatting, one standing, by the dead-end of a railway siding in South Africa.

When everything has been said about this story, it is this image which continues to grip the heart and squeeze it. Like the piece of dried bread, it never relaxes its hold on the imagination. Is any explanation, then, possible? Kipling approaches this
coup de théâtre
by a very circuitous route, using several narrators, and yet each apparent digression contributes to the whole.

Most readers see ‘Mrs Bathurst’ as an obscure tale of elective affinities – the core of which is the passion of a middle-aged warrant officer called Vickery for Mrs Bathurst, a widowed New Zealand
hotel keeper. What has passed between them is only guessed at by the narrators. But they agree that Mrs Bathurst is something special. She has ‘It’, hence Vickery’s obsession which manifests itself suddenly and feverishly when, in Cape Town, he sees her for a few seconds on film. She is arriving at Paddington station in search of Vickery. Night after night Vickery watches her – then deserts. Another narrator, Hooper, supplies the grisly denouement above, at the point where the other two, Pyecroft and Pritchard, break off. Vickery’s tattoo shows up white, like writing on a burned letter. There is some dispute as to whether the other body is that of Mrs Bathurst: Pritchard plainly thinks it is, but critics have differed, myself included.

Though the rambling narration has been denounced by both Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson, the story is as precise as a Swiss watch. Everything fits, but the reader has to wind it up. The theory of elective affinity stems from the narrators. They fit Vickery’s story to their own experience: sailors, they know, constantly desert for reasons of the heart. Moon has jumped ship in the South Seas for a woman, ‘bein’ a Mormonastic beggar’; Spit-Kid Jones married a ‘cocoanut-woman’. Hooper agrees that some women can drive a man crazy if he doesn’t save himself. Hence the theory. Kipling, however, is careful to show the observant reader that his narrators are unreliable, and to tuck away the truth of the matter. The credulity of Pyecroft and Pritchard is established in the framing story of Boy Niven who dragged them off on a wild goose chase through the woods of British Columbia. In addition, there is a persistent motif of unreliable machinery – trains derailed on straight lines, a gyroscope that goes on the blink, a brake-van chalked for repair, damaged rolling stock, sprung midship frames, ill-fitting false teeth, and so on. It is a broad hint that the machinery of this story is also unreliable.

Moreover, on ascertainable facts, the narrators are shown to be wrong. Hooper hears a clink of couplings, ‘“It’s those dirty little Malay boys, you see.’” It isn’t. It’s Pyecroft and Pritchard. Similarly, Pyecroft gets an expert to ‘read’ the captain’s face – wrongly as it turns out. Further, Kipling makes Pyecroft employ a variety of foreign phrases, all italicized, adding an extra one to the magazine version –
moi aussi, verbatim, ex officio, status quo, resumé, peeris
and
casus belli.
Taken with other Biblical props from Acts – the beer (‘Others, mocking, said, These men are full of new wine’) and the strong south-easter (‘a sound from heaven like a rushing mighty wind’) – these phrases add up to a parody of the gift of tongues.

In other words, Pyecroft speaks more than he knows, trusting to erroneous inspiration, as when he compares Vickery’s false teeth to a ‘Marconi ticker’, hinting at strange communication with Mrs Bathurst. Hooper’s tic of dialogue is to say ‘You see’, a total of sixteen times. The point is that his companions don’t see at all.

The truth is concealed in the words of ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’, sung by some picnickers on the beach, words by A.H. Fitz, music by W.H. Penn. They tell us what Vickery only hints at in the phrase ‘my
lawful
wife’, namely that he has married Mrs Bathurst bigamously, in a Moon-like way. A ‘lawful’ wife implies an unlawful wife and the song confirms this suspicion:

Vickery’s eventual fate, death by lightning, tells us what happened after the bigamy, for it is paralleled in the framing story of Boy Niven. ‘Heavy thunder with continuous lightning’ is, according to Pyecroft, the punishment for
desertion.
Vickery, then, is a double-deserter, from Mrs Bathurst and the Navy. We don’t know much about Mrs Bathurst, but we know enough to understand why Vickery is afraid, ‘like an enteric at the last kick’: first, ‘she never scrupled to…set ’er foot on a scorpion’; secondly, as Pritchard’s anecdote of the beer-bottles demonstrates, she never forgets. After five years, she remembers Pritchard’s name and his ‘particular’ beer, unlike the servant girl who chucks him a bottle in mistake for someone else. The contrast is telling.

Vickery has committed a crime, bigamy, and that presumably is why the captain connives at his absence without leave – desertion being less of a disgrace than legal proceedings from the Navy’s point of view. The element of criminality also explains why Vickery watches the film so compulsively, yet with such dread: in the oldest of traditions, he is revisiting the scene of his crime. The film explains, too, that Vickery, unlike the others, has found Mrs Bathurst forgettable. He takes Pyecroft along for confirmation – so much for their romantic interpretation.

In ‘Mrs Bathurst’ nothing is wasted. Every digression contributes to the total meaning. It is like a closed economy, as parsimonious as a city under siege, despite its air of beery reminiscence. In ‘The Wrong Thing’, Kipling makes it clear that his art had no place for guesswork. Though he believed in his Daemon, as any writer must if he is not to force his talent, he was conscious and critical after the
Inner Voice had played its part: ‘Iron’s sweet stuff’, says Hal, ‘if you don’t torture her, and hammered work is all pure, truthful line, with a reason and a support for every curve and bar of it.’ Though one can scarcely imagine any child grasping this piece of aesthetic theory from
Rewards and Fairies
, it is a plain warning to adults that nothing can be skipped, that every detail is relevant – as it is in ‘Mrs Bathurst’.

Does this affect the status of the charcoal figures? Ultimately, it does not. Are we to assume an accident? Or an act of God? Clearly, the fate of Vickery carries an element of poetic justice, but we cannot speculate beyond that point. The reader untangles the thread of the narrative only to discover that Kipling, at the crucial moment, has deliberately snapped it in order to preserve the shock at the heart of the tale. There is no insulating context, only raw voltage.

The same thing, though less strikingly, is true of ‘Dayspring Mishandled’, when Manallace draws on his black gloves at the crematorium. The gesture has a power and solemnity which are unaccountable. This story illuminates one difference between Kipling’s early work and his late work. In
Something of Myself
, Kipling dilates briefly on his art: ‘The shortening of them, first to my own fancy after rapturous re-readings, and next to the space available, taught me that a tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked.’ Kipling, rightly in my view, never deviated from this prescription. Yet there are those who have argued that, whereas in the early work excision creates intensity, in the later stories it merely creates obscurity. However, in the later work, the reader is often expected, as in ‘Mrs Bathurst’, to reinstate what Kipling has eliminated. Links are suppressed to involve the reader in the tale: close reading implicates the reader as he deciphers the encoded text. In Henry James’s formula from
The Golden Bowl
, the writer forgoes ‘the muffled majesty of authorship’ – in order to compel us to ‘live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in the struggle’. ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ is a case in point.

The plot is as neat in its way as the resolution of Tom’s antecedents in
Tom Jones.
Alured Castorley has, in his youth, been a member of a literary syndicate which provided pulp fiction for the undiscriminating mass-market. Manallace, another member of the group, decides to ruin Castorley’s carefully nurtured reputation as a Chaucer expert by getting him to authenticate a planted forgery of a previously unknown Chaucer fragment. While Castorley has risen in the world of letters, Manallace has made a reputation of a different
kind in ‘the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure’. Manallace’s income goes towards nursing ‘Dal Benzaquen’s mother through her final illness, ‘when her husband ran away’. For about half the length of the tale, Kipling conceals the revenge plot so that, like the narrator, we believe that when ‘Dal’s mother dies, ‘she seemed to have emptied out his life, and left him only fleeting interest in trifles’.

Part of our pleasure resides in the simple realization that the series of apparently pointless hobbies are, in fact, related to each other and have a profound purpose – that of revenge. Each step is lucid and mesmerizingly technical – Kipling’s impersonation of the insider with special knowledge was never put to better use. Everything comes together – the experiments with ink, the medieval paste, the handwriting, the early Chaucerian tale – as if Kipling was demonstrating to his readership that, in his work, the diversion is always in fact central and germane. In this tale of revenge and literary hoax, where the avenger is finally compassionate, Kipling is careful not to explain two things – the motive for Manallace’s subterfuge and the reason why he finally forbears. Castorley’s careerism, his lack of generosity, his ‘gifts of waking dislike’ – these are all inadequate reasons for a scheme which is designed to kill its victim. The narrator is told the real motive, but we are not: ‘He told it. “That’s why,” he said. “Am I justified?” He seemed to me entirely so.’ Most readers assume that Castorley grossly insulted the mother of ‘Dal Benzaquen, in conversation with Manallace during the war, because she had turned down his proposal of marriage: ‘He went out before the end, and, it was said, proposed to ‘Dal Benzaquen’s mother who refused him.’

That parenthetical ‘it was said’ carries its own charge of doubt and, taken with the warnings against passive readership that are scattered through the story – like Manallace’s reiterated ‘if you save people thinking, you can do anything with ’em’ – it should put us on our guard. The truth about Castorley and ‘Dal’s mother comes out under the influence of illness and Gleeag’s liver tonics. (Kipling was always willing, perhaps too much so, to use drugs as a way of speeding up necessary disclosure, as in ‘“Wireless”’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’.) The fuddled, dying but truthful Castorley begins by saying that ‘there was an urgent matter to be set right, and now he had the Title and knew his own mind it would all end happily.’ His rambling monologue concludes with his naming ‘Dal’s mother. The crucial words are
‘and knew his own mind’.
Castorley, then, is the person who
didn’t
know his own mind. The
phrase would be meaningless if Castorley, as ‘it was said’, had proposed and been refused. Clearly, he proposed and was accepted – only to desert her in order to better himself and get on in the world. Like Wilkett, in ‘The Tender Achilles’, he opts for career rather than caress. Manallace’s motive, then, is that Castorley has rejected ‘Dal’s mother and perhaps boasted of it – a thing hard for Manallace to bear because he has ‘adored’ her.

Castorley is such a repellent character, so bereft of redeeming features, that this may seem implausible. We find it almost impossible to believe that ‘Dal’s mother actually loved him. Kipling, though, has thoughtfully provided an analogue – in Mrs Castorley, who, if equally ghastly, is having a passionate affair with the surgeon, Gleeag. It is obvious enough, yet Manallace doesn’t realize for a long time: ‘“But she’s so infernally plain, and I’m such a fool, it took me weeks to find out.’” The heart has its reasons – reasons which transcend mere appearances and unworthy personalities. Castorley may be snobbish, selfish and bellied – but neither is Vickery such a catch, or the ‘unappetizing, ash-coloured’ Mrs Castorley.

Once we have grasped that Castorley has loved and left ‘Dal’s mother, the story falls into place. For instance, the scrap of Latin, which incorporates an anagram of Manallace’s name, now has its full significance. The text is not simply a vehicle for Manallace’s device to prove the fragment is a forgery. Translated, it reads, ‘Behold this beloved Mother taking with her me, the accepted one.’ We are never told ‘Dal’s mother’s name. She is, as it were, ‘this beloved Mother’ and the words ‘the accepted one’ refer to Castorley’s proposal. The Nodier poem, which provides the story with its epigraph, now makes fuller sense: ‘Dal’s mother is ‘la fille des beaux jours’, the old Neminaka days, whose memory is now poisoning Castorley’s system like mandragora. The Chaucerian fragment, too, with its account of a girl ‘praying against an undesired marriage’, slips into place. ‘Dal’s mother is forced to marry someone else, by default. When she is enduring her fatal illness and is ‘wholly paralysed’, we are told that ‘only her eyes could move, and those always looked for the husband who had left her’. Clearly, if this was her legal husband, the obvious candidate, Manallace would have been better employed in mounting a campaign of revenge against
him.
In fact, ‘the husband who left her’ must be Castorley. Kipling again resolves the doubt by another careful parallel. At Castorley’s cremation, Mrs Castorley’s eyes turn, like ‘Dal’s mother’s eyes, to her real passion, her
illicit
lover, Gleeag.