The Wish House and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling Read Free Book Online Page A

as the ship moves?’” These details are, in fact, not imagined at all. Charlie is merely remembering, in a completely unliterary way, two previous existences – a hypothesis Kipling somewhat clumsily corroborates by a fortuitous meeting with Grish Chunder, a Bengali acquaintance with whom the narrator can discuss metempsychosis before he is dismissed from the story as summarily as he was introduced into it. The baldly functional Grish Chunder isn’t the story’s only flaw. There is also the melodramatic detail of dead rowers being cut up attheir oars before they are ‘stuffed through the oar-hole in little pieces’ – evidently, but unconvincingly, to terrify the living remainder. Here we feel Kipling’s design on his reader. He means to shock us, but we can see the electrodes in his hands.
    More vivid, and more germane to Kipling’s preference for dialect, is the description of seawater topping the bulwarks. Here Kipling offers us two versions of the same event – the educated and the demotic, the cooked and the raw. Charlie’s version (‘“It looked just like a banjo-string drawn tight, and it seemed to stay there for years’”) is far more graphic than the more decorous alternative (“‘It looked like a silver wire laid down along the bulwarks, and I thought it was never going to break’”). “The Finest Story in the World’” is, in its way, an expression of Kipling’s artistic credo. It explains his commitment to dialect – largely by its frontal attack on the conventionally literary: when Charlie Mears gets his head into Literature, his power is fatally diminished, his memories become tarnished and second-hand. ‘Again I cursed all the poets of England. The plastic mind of the bank-clerk had been overlaid, coloured, and distorted by that which he had read…’ Kipling knows that Charlie Mears could never do justice to his own story, because he is incapable of telling it in his own words. Only a genius like Kipling could do that, the most unliterary of literary men.
    ‘“Love-o’-Women”’ makes the same point – makes it initially in exactly the same way as “The Finest Story in the World’” – by a considered use of quotation marks around the title. Here the story is given to Mulvaney, his brogue tuned down just the requisite fraction from its earlier appearances in
Soldiers Three.
It is still broad, but acceptable – an evocation rather than a phonetically pedantic transcription. The art, of course, is there in the powerful frame, which parallels the sexual vagaries of Larry Tighe, the gentleman-ranker, with those of Mackie (who is shot by a distressed husband) and with those of Doctor Lowndes, who ‘ran away wid Major–Major Van Dyce’s lady that year’. That hesitation over the name is typical of Kipling’s prodigious attention to detail: it is less flamboyant than the justly famous description of Mackie’s blood on the barrack-square, dried ‘to a dusky goldbeater-skin film, cracked lozenge-wise by the heat’, but it carries weight all the same.
    Larry Tighe is suffering the final stage of locomotor ataxia brought on by syphilis: ‘Love-o’-Women’ was cripplin’ and crumblin’ at ivry step. He walked wid a hand on my shoulder all slued sideways, an’ his right leg swingin’ like a lame camel.’ By the end of the story, Tighe has ‘shrivelled like beef-rations in a hot sun’ – and one cannotread this distressingly powerful simile without recalling that banjo-string of Charlie Mears. The demotic opens on reality like an oven door. We feel the unmitigated blast, rather than a literary effect. Mulvaney is no Gigadibs. When Tighe is being diagnosed by the army doctor, Kipling carefully prepares for his boldest stroke in this non-literary milieu – a quotation from
Antony and Cleopatra.
He establishes Tighe’s superior social status and, therefore, the likelihood of such a quotation, by what might seem a gratuitous detail: ‘“Thrate me as a study, Doctor