From Simla we have come down to the plains and the work of the English
in Imperial India. Thence we pass to India herself. Concerning native
India Mr Kipling's principle thesis--a thesis illustrated with point
and competency in many excellent tales--is that for the people of the
West there can be no such thing as the real India--only here and there
an understanding that wavers and frequently expires. Mr Kipling does
not insolently explain that India is thus and thus. He allows the
impression to grow upon us, as once it grew upon himself, that in India
all the settled ways of the West are insecure, that at any moment we
may be looking into the House of Suddhu.
"A stone's throw out on either hand
From that well-ordered road we tread,
And all the world is wild and strange:
Churel and ghoul and Djinn and sprite
Shall bear us company to-night,
For we have reached the Oldest Land
Wherein the Powers of Darkness range."
It is not for an Englishman to speak of the real India. Let him stand
with Mr Kipling between East and West, and allow each thing he sees to
add to his dark and intricate impression. India will then assume her
own uneasy and vast form, will press upon the nerves, and be declared
mysterious.
There are a few pages in _Life's Handicap_ describing the City of
Lahore by night. There is great heat in these pages; there is distance
also, and the breathless air of streets where the formic swarming of
India, her callous fecundity, the tyranny of her skies, and her old
faith, prepare us for the House of Suddhu and the return of Imray:
"The roof-tops are crammed with men, women, and children; and the air
is full of undistinguishable noises. They are restless in the City of
Dreadful Night; and small wonder. The marvel is that they can even
breathe. If you gaze intently at the multitude you can see that they
are almost as uneasy as a daylight crowd; but the tumult is subdued.
Everywhere, in the strong light, you can watch sleepers turning to and
fro, shifting their beds and again resettling them. In the pit-like
courtyards of the houses there is the same movement.
"The pitiless Moon shows it all. Shows, too, the plains outside the
city, and here and there a hand's-breadth of the Ravee without the
walls. Shows lastly, a splash of glittering silver on a house-top
almost directly below the mosque Minar. Some poor soul has risen to
throw a jar of water over his fevered body; the tinkle of the falling
water strikes faintly on the ear. Two or three other men, in far-off
corners of the City of Dreadful Night, follow his example, and the
water flashes like heliographic signals. . . . Still the unrestful
noise continues, the sigh of a great city overwhelmed with the heat,
and of a people seeking in vain for rest. It is only the lower-class
women who sleep on the house-tops. What must the torment be in the
latticed zenanas, where a few lamps are still twinkling? There are
footfalls in the court below. It is the _Muezzin_--faithful minister;
but he ought to have been here an hour ago to tell the Faithful that
prayer is better than sleep--the sleep that will not come to the city.
"The _Muezzin_ fumbles for a moment with the door of one of the Minars,
disappears awhile, and a bull-like roar--a magnificent bass
thunder--tells that he has reached the top of the Minar. They must
hear the cry to the banks of the shrunken Ravee itself! Even across
the courtyard it is almost overpowering. The cloud drifts by and shows
him outlined black against the sky, hands laid upon his ears, and broad
chest heaving with the play of his lungs--'Allah ho Akbar'; then a
pause while another _Muezzin_ somewhere in the direction of the Golden
Temple takes up the call--'Allah ho Akbar.' Again and again; four
times in all; and from the bedsteads a dozen men have risen up
already.--'I bear witness that there is no God by God.'"
* * * * * *
"Several weeks of darkness pass after this. For the Moon has gone out.
The very dogs are still, and I watch for the first light of the dawn
before making my way homeward. Again the noise of shuffling feet. The
morning call is about to begin, and my nightwatch is over. 'Allah ho
Akbar! Allah ho Akbar!' The east grows grey, and presently saffron;
the dawn wind comes up as though the _Muezzin_ had summoned it; and, as
one man, the City of Dreadful Night rises from its bed and turns its
face towards the dawning day. . . .
"'Will the Sahib, out of his kindness, make room?' What is it?
Something borne on men's shoulders comes by in the half-light, and I
stand back. A woman's corpse going down to the burning-ghat, and a
bystander says, 'She died at midnight from the heat.'"
This passage may stand as a fair example of Mr Kipling's method of
dealing with India. It is an able piece of descriptive writing. It is
marked by a conscious and deliberate resolve that the "effect" shall be
made. It shows us the Indian city from a high distance, as it appeared
to an observer with a knack for vividly delivering his impressions. It
is in no sense an inspired wrestle with the reality of India; and in
that it is typical. Mr Kipling has never claimed to grasp or interpret
his Indian theme. He has stood away almost ostentatiously from the
material he was exploiting.
It is indeed the chief merit of his Indian tales that he admits himself
to be no more, so far as India is concerned, than an adventurer making
the literary most of his adventure. He has at any rate the sensibility
to be conscious that often he is in the position of a tripper before
the Sphinx. His tales are thrilled with respect and a sense of India's
power. She it is who wipes the lips of Aurelian McGoggin, who flouts
the Greatest of All the Viceroys, humbles the Legal Member of the
Supreme Legislative Council, and drives the lonely white intruder to
illusion and death. She is indifferent to every conqueror. She feeds
her multitudes like a mother; and then suddenly her bounty dries and
there is famine and pestilence. Always she is a confronting Presence
dwarfing to one height masters and slaves. Mr Kipling has followed
this Presence as Browning's poet followed a more familiar quest:
"Yet the day wears,
And door succeeds door;
I try the fresh fortune--
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
Still the same chance! She goes out as I enter."
It is a lawful adventure, and for some it is an absolute duty, to
follow and challenge the Presence in word and deed. Englishmen who
live in her shadow have sometimes for their honour to grasp and defy
her; to assume that they are bound to question her authority. India
for all her unknown terror has to be wrestled with for the blessing
that England requires upon the labour of the English. Though the Gods
of India are sacred, the devils of India, filthy and lawless, must be
driven out. When India put the mark of the beast upon Fleete the
powers of darkness had of necessity to be brought to heel, and this
story may be read as a parable. The mark of the beast, wherever it may
appear, is the Imperial concern of the English in India.
But a warning enters here. Mr Kipling, celebrating Imperial India, has
shown us the English at close war with the India of black magic and
secret murder, of cruelty and fear. But he has balanced the account.
There is another set of stories, showing us how the white man comes to
disaster, who, not content with his exact and simple duty, insolently
overleaps the breach between East and West--the breach which Mr Kipling
himself so scrupulously observes. There was Trajego:
"He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the
second. He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never
do so again."
His story is entitled _Beyond the Pale_, and is to be found among
_Plain Tales from the Hills_. There is also _The Man Who Would Be
King_. He, too, neglected the barriers. India may be ruled by the
resolute and challenged by the brave; but India may never be embraced.
India, who strikes out of a brazen sky; who poisons with her infected
breath and is served to the death without reward; who physically cows
her people with dust and fever and heat, and is possessed with devils
who must be pacified; where successive civilisations have left their
bones upon the soil and a hundred religions have decayed, leaving the
old air heavy with exhalations--this India slowly takes shape in Mr
Kipling's native stories. Her physical immensity and pressure is felt
in stories like _The End of the Passage_ and _William the Conqueror_.
Her sleepless tyranny, which has made men intricate and incalculable,
driving them to subterranean ways of thought and fancy, rules in every
page of a tale like _The Return of Imray_. Imray was an amiable
Englishman who incautiously patted the head of his servant's child.
Bahadur Khan speaks of it thus to Strickland of the Police:
"'Walking among us, his servants, he cast his eyes upon my child who
was four years old. Him he bewitched, and in ten days he died of the
fever, my child!'
"'What said Imray Sahib?'
"'He said he was a handsome child and patted him on the head; wherefore
my child died. Wherefore I killed Imray Sahib in the twilight, when he
had come, and was sleeping. Wherefore I dragged him up into the
roof-beams and made all fast behind him--the Heaven-born knows all
things. I am the servant of the Heaven-born. . . . Be it remembered
that the Sahib's shirts are correctly enumerated, and that there is an
extra piece of soap in his wash-basin. My child was bewitched and I
slew the wizard.'"
There is here just that blend of simplicity and incalculable darkness
found in all Mr Kipling's native tales. If the premises of life in
India are tortuous, conduct and reasoning are as naïvely innocent as a
problem in geometry.
It follows that, when the devils are out of the story, no story
breathes more delightfully of Eden than a story of the East. The white
side of the black story of Imray Sahib is shown in _Kim_, and in all
the hints and small studies for _Kim_ that preceded Mr Kipling's best
of all Indian tales.
But _Kim_ is something of a paradox. It is the best of all Indian
tales by virtue of qualities which have little to do with India. It is
an Indian book only upon its least important side. It is true that Kim
himself is upon one side the most cunning of Mr Kipling's studies of
the meeting of East and West; but that, for us, is not his final merit.
It is the final merit of Kim to be first cousin of Mowgli, the child of
the Jungle. His first claim to our delight in him is that he is the
quickest of young creatures, his senses sharp and clean, of a
conscience untroubled, of a spirit that rejoices in nimble work, of a
will in which loyalty and courage and the peace of self-confidence are
firmly rooted. In a word, he is Mowgli among men.
Here, however, we approach _Kim_ merely as a tale of India--as a link
artfully used by Mr Kipling to connect and pass in review the whole
pageant of Imperial India as it is revealed to Western eyes--priests,
peasants, soldiers, civilians, people of the plains and hills, women of
the latticed palanquin and the bazaar, Hindu and Mohammedan, Afghan and
Bengali. The picture of the Grand Trunk Road in Kim is an almost
unsurpassed piece of descriptive writing. The diversity of the picture
dazzles and bewilders us at first. Then out of all this diversity
there gradually comes a conviction that fundamentally India is
unimaginably simple at heart in spite of her medley of religions and
conquests and races; that it is precisely this simplicity which baffles
the intruder. There is the simplicity of Bahadur Khan, whose child was
bewitched: _therefore_ he killed Imray Sahib and hid his body behind
the ceiling cloth. There is the simplicity of the hunter of Daoud
Shah, whose house was dishonoured: _therefore_ he killed his wife and
went upon the trail of her seducer. There is the simplicity of men who
starve and are burnt with the sun: _therefore_ they deprecate the wrath
of devils and put food in the beggar's bowl. There is, above all, the
simplicity of clean hunger, thirst, adventure, piety, friendliness and
love that threads the whole story of the Lama and his _Chela_.
_Kim_ is one of the few really beautiful stories in modern literature.
The brain and fancy of thousands of readers to-day are richer and
sweeter by that tale of the Master and his Friend of All the World. We
would not leave him and his Wheel of Things, the River he sought in
simple faith, the trust he had in the charity of men, the message that
bade him seek release in Nirvana from the importunity of life quaintly
warring with instinctive gestures of delight and sympathy with all that
made life precious--we would not leave this exquisite story so soon,
were it not that it brings forward the imperishable side of Mr
Kipling's work to which we shall have shortly to return. _Kim_ bridges
the gap between the Indian stories and The _Jungle Book_, which means
that _Kim_ is all but the top of Mr Kipling's achievement.
V