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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
The Essential Writings of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition) showcases a collection of some of Kipling's most influential works, including 'The Jungle Book', 'Kim', and 'Just So Stories'. Known for his vivid storytelling and exploration of themes such as imperialism, identity, and the human experience, Kipling's literary style is characterized by a blend of adventure, wit, and moral lessons. This illustrated edition provides readers with a comprehensive look into the genius of Kipling's writing and its lasting impact on literature. The inclusion of illustrations enhances the reader's visual experience and deepens their understanding of the narratives. Rudyard Kipling, a British author born in British India, drew inspiration from his upbringing and travels to create compelling stories that continue to captivate audiences worldwide. His firsthand encounters with colonialism and cultural diversity influenced his perspectives and storytelling, adding layers of depth to his works. Kipling's ability to weave intricate plots with rich characters has solidified his place in the literary canon. I highly recommend The Essential Writings of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition) to readers who appreciate classic literature, captivating storytelling, and thought-provoking themes. This collection serves as a timeless testament to Kipling's talent and the enduring relevance of his works. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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The Essential Writings of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition)
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Table of Contents
Introduction
This illustrated edition gathers Rudyard Kipling’s essential writings across the major forms he practiced—novels, short stories, poems, essays, and travel journalism—to present a coherent panorama of his craft. It brings together the celebrated Indian tales, sea and school narratives, animal fables for the young, ballads and civic verse, and reportage from home and abroad. Rather than a single theme or period, the selection traces a lifetime of experiment with voice and vantage, from newsroom apprentice to world figure. The purpose is not encyclopedic completeness but representative amplitude: the books that defined his reputation and continue to frame informed reading of his achievement.
At the heart are the Anglo‑Indian stories that first made Kipling widely known: Plain Tales From the Hills, Life’s Handicap, and Soldiers Three (including the later extensions of that cycle), alongside The City of Dreadful Night and Under the Deodars, Wee Willie Winkie, and Abaft the Funnel. These volumes map cantonments, clubs, bazaars, and barracks with a reporter’s eye for incident and an ironist’s ear for speech. Administrators, subalterns, and civilians move through climates of heat, duty, and misunderstanding. The result is a portrait of British India rendered in compact episodes whose sympathies and hierarchies remain central to discussions of empire and literature.
The novels included here display Kipling’s range. The Light That Failed follows a war artist whose professional rise is shadowed by threatened blindness and complicated loyalties. Captains Courageous places a spoiled millionaire’s son among the fishermen of the Grand Banks, where work at sea becomes his education. Kim sets an Irish orphan loose in the roads and railways of North India, where he is drawn into espionage. The Naulahka: A Story of West and East, composed in collaboration with Wolcott Balestier, turns on cross‑continental ambition and allure. Across these narratives, apprenticeship, craft, and the testing of character under pressure recur as structuring motifs.
The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book made Kipling an enduring presence in children’s literature while engaging adult readers through their layered design. The Mowgli tales and companion animal fables imagine a forest society with its rituals and limits, and consider what it means to learn a code and belong. Just So Stories, addressed to younger listeners, delights in origins and transformations, fusing play, cadence, and natural observation. The stories are not zoology but pattern, parable, and theater. They extend a lifelong interest in how rules, names, and stories themselves train the senses and grant passage between worlds.
Stalky and Co. turns to schooling, discipline, and camaraderie in an English setting, following a trio of students whose tactics and pranks have moral and tactical dimensions. With Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, Kipling invents a time‑slip device to stage encounters with England’s past, using lyric interludes and ventriloquized voices to animate craftsmen, soldiers, and settlers. These books explore how history lodges in places and speech, and how the present converses with the work of earlier hands. Across them runs a pedagogical current: knowledge won by attention, by trial, and by listening to those who know their trade.
Kipling also wrote the uncanny with remarkable economy. The Phantom ’Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories gathers tales of visitation, guilt, and psychological duress. Actions and Reactions and Traffics and Discoveries mix such disturbances with stories of technology, travel, and war, while The Eyes of Asia adopts the form of letters to imagine the experiences of Indian soldiers in the First World War. These pieces blur the line between document and fiction, treating voice itself as evidence. They demonstrate a capacity to fuse folklore with modern anxieties, and to make machines, memories, and rumors act as agents in the drama of ordinary lives.
Industrial and maritime energies course through The Day’s Work, Many Inventions, and sea‑minded narratives elsewhere in the collection. Engineers, bridge builders, engines, ships, and coastal weather occupy the stage, often with the same dignity granted to human protagonists. The sea is a schoolhouse; a locomotive, a character with temperament; a repair crew, a chorus of competence. Such stories insist that craft knowledge and attention to process carry their own romance. They also register the shocks of modernity—speed, communication, risk—without surrendering to them, making narrative out of procedures and technical language in a way few prose writers had attempted.
The verse gathered here charts Kipling’s development from Departmental Ditties, with their satiric portraits of officialdom, through Barrack‑Room Ballads, where the common soldier speaks in vigorous, memorable rhythms, to larger maritime and imperial canvases in The Seven Seas and The Five Nations. An Almanac of Twelve Sports plays with calendar and pastime; Songs From Books collects lyrics embedded in his fiction; The Years Between gathers work surrounding the First World War. Across meters and registers he writes for public occasions and private feeling alike, building songs that travel by memory and sheet, and that proved central to his early and later standing.
A substantial body of nonfiction illuminates the same concerns from other angles. A Fleet in Being records naval observations; Sea Warfare, France at War, The New Army in Training, and The War in the Mountains respond to the Great War’s demands and theaters. The Graves of the Fallen addresses remembrance and the forms of public mourning. From Sea to Sea, American Notes, and Letters of Travel: 1892–1913 follow itineraries across continents, mixing scene‑making with judgment and curiosity. How Shakespeare Came to Write the ‘Tempest’ offers an occasional excursion into literary pretext. Together these works display a journalist’s discipline tempered by art.
Several hallmarks unify this shelf. Kipling’s prose is compressed yet vivid, technical without pedantry, and quick to adopt distinct voices—soldier, clerk, seaman, child—without condescension. He is a master of framing devices, parable, and embedded song, and of the telling proper noun or trade term that fixes a scene. He can turn from the camp‑fire to the engine‑room, from ballad measure to bureaucratic memo, with equal authority. The result is an art of surfaces that also implies depths: codes learned by doing, loyalties tested in work, and an ethic in which skill, responsibility, and memory anchor both individuals and communities.
These selections also expose tensions that have shaped his reception. Kipling’s representations of empire, service, and hierarchy have been celebrated for craft and condemned for attitude, and continue to prompt careful reading and debate. Yet his influence remains unmistakable: on adventure writing, children’s literature, sea stories, and the English ballad revival; on how English prose handles dialect, jargon, and the feel of work; and on the imaginative geography of India and the sea. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, an early acknowledgment of range and authority. This collection invites a balanced encounter with that complex legacy.
An illustrated edition suits an author so attentive to image, emblem, and scene. Visual accompaniment emphasizes the textures he names—rope, teak, dust, surf—and the postures of animals, soldiers, and apprentices learning their trade. Readers may approach straight through or by theme: India and empire, sea and craft, childhood and history, war and travel. The arrangement encourages both rediscovery of familiar landmarks and first engagements free of spoilers. It aims to present, in one place, the novels, stories, poems, and essays most often returned to, so that the variety and coherence of Kipling’s art can be judged with clarity and pleasure.
Author Biography
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British writer whose fiction, verse, and journalism captured the energies and anxieties of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Raised between India and Britain and trained as a newspaperman, he became one of the most widely read authors in English, noted for technical clarity, narrative drive, and memorable rhythms. His range ran from children’s classics to sea tales, ghost stories, and reportage. Works such as The Jungle Book, Kim, and Barrack-Room Ballads helped define popular images of empire, travel, and adventure. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English-language laureate, consolidating an already international reputation.
Education at the United Services College in Devon, with its emphasis on discipline and camaraderie, shaped Kipling’s early outlook, as did apprenticeship in Anglo-Indian journalism. As a young reporter in Lahore and Allahabad he learned speed, compression, and an ear for colloquial speech. From this phase came Departmental Ditties and Plain Tales From the Hills, brisk sketches of bureaucrats, soldiers, and civilians in British India. He developed recurring military characters in Soldiers Three and continued exploring Simla society in Under the Deodars and Wee Willie Winkie. The City of Dreadful Night recorded urban impressions, fusing observation with a growing command of scene and tone.
Relocating to London at the end of the 1880s, Kipling rapidly established himself as a master of the short story and ballad. Collections such as The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories, Life’s Handicap, and Many Inventions displayed versatility across horror, satire, and technology-driven narratives. Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads popularized vernacular voices and marching rhythms, extending his audience. He also attempted longer fiction: The Light That Failed examined art, friendship, and disillusionment, while The Naulahka: A Story of West and East, written with Wolcott Balestier, experimented with cross-cultural plot and divided settings, reflecting his continuing interest in the traffic between Britain and India.
During the 1890s he wrote with extraordinary breadth, including sea and animal tales that became touchstones for younger readers. The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book joined adventure with fable, while Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks honored maritime labor and apprenticeship. The Day’s Work gathered stories of engineers, ships, and machines, balancing romance with technical detail. In verse he extended range with The Seven Seas, and in collaboration with artists he produced An Almanac of Twelve Sports. These works consolidated a style at once direct and allusive, attentive to craft, and capable of evoking both camaraderie and solitude.
After the turn of the century Kipling continued to enlarge his fictional world. Kim offered a panoramic journey across the subcontinent—espionage, education, and pilgrimage woven into a single narrative. Stalky and Co. drew on school experiences to explore discipline and improvisation. Short-story sequences such as Traffics and Discoveries, Actions and Reactions, and A Diversity of Creatures mixed experiment with reminiscence. For younger audiences he issued Just So Stories and the folklore-inflected pair Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies; Songs From Books gathered lyrics embedded in his prose. Abaft the Funnel preserved earlier journalism, highlighting the workshop behind his polished tales.
Wartime intensified Kipling’s public role and documentary impulse. He wrote on naval and land campaigns in A Fleet in Being, France at War, The New Army in Training, Sea Warfare, and The War in the Mountains, blending admiration for service with close observation. The Eyes of Asia presented letters framed from Indian perspectives on the Western Front, and The Graves of the Fallen addressed commemoration. His poetry volume The Years Between gathered work from the conflict and its aftermath. In parallel he traveled and reported widely, issuing American Notes, From Sea to Sea, Letters of Travel: 1892–1913, and the essay How Shakespeare Came to Write the ‘Tempest’.
In later years Kipling remained a commanding, if contested, presence: admired for narrative economy and musicality, debated for views on empire and duty. He died in 1936, his work continuing to circulate internationally in classrooms and popular culture. His influence persists in the short story’s tight architecture, in children’s literature shaped by The Jungle Book and Just So Stories, and in public language. Engagements with history, technology, and folklore in books from Kim to Rewards and Fairies keep scholars returning, while travel and war writings sustain interest in reportage as literature. His legacy remains vivid, widely read, and persistently argued.
Historical Context
Rudyard Kipling’s essential writings span the late Victorian, Edwardian, and early twentieth-century worlds, a period marked by the zenith and strain of the British Empire, the spread of industrial modernity, and the shocks of global war. Trained in journalism and steeped in colonial service culture, he wrote fiction, verse, and reportage that move between India, the North Atlantic, England’s shires, and continental battlefields. The collection’s range—from Departmental Ditties and Plain Tales From the Hills to Kim, The Jungle Book, The Seven Seas, and France at War—captures decades when railways, telegraphs, steamships, and mass print reshaped experience, while imperial policy, frontier campaigns, and later the First World War reframed political horizons and personal loyalties.
Kipling’s Indian apprenticeship underpins early collections such as Departmental Ditties, Plain Tales From the Hills, The City of Dreadful Night, and Under the Deodars. Produced out of Lahore and Allahabad newspaper work in the 1880s, these pieces anatomize Anglo-Indian administration, club life, and hill-station society under the Raj. They reflect the bureaucratic routines and social stratifications of the Indian Civil Service and the army, alongside the practical realities of distance, climate, disease, and communications that bound colonial governance together. Their satiric edge and observational detail link to a wider late nineteenth-century press culture that prized immediacy, character sketch, and the moral ambiguities of rule.
Soldier’s Three and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads register the voice of the rank-and-file under the Cardwell-era army reforms and in the wake of frontier policing from Afghanistan to Burma. Dialect ballads like “Tommy” and “Danny Deever” (collected in Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads) paired with stories in Soldier’s Three and its sequel humanize ordinary soldiers within the machinery of empire, capturing rhythms of barracks, drafts, and distant postings. This work resonated with expanding literacy and public recitation, bridging music-hall performance and print culture. It also chronicles the logistics of late Victorian “small wars,” professionalization of the service, and the social distance between officers, other ranks, and civilians.
The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories, Wee Willie Winkie, and Life’s Handicap fold the uncanny into colonial life, aligning with widespread fin-de-siècle interests in spiritualism, mesmerism, and the psychology of isolation. Set against segregated quarters, medical crises, and telegraphic ties that collapsed distance yet intensified longing, these tales render empire as both material system and haunted landscape. They echo anxieties about mixed communities, transgression, and memory that troubled late nineteenth-century urban and military cultures from Simla to cantonments. Without divulging plots, one can note how recurring motifs—fever, echoes, apparitions—reflect the stresses of service, separation, and the fragility of status in an imperial hierarchy.
Many Inventions and The Day’s Work reflect the industrial and engineering imagination that underwrote global connectivity. Stories of bridges, ships, machines, and men harmonize with the era’s marine engines, river management, and telegraphy, foregrounding the ethic of competence central to late Victorian professionalism. “The Bridge-Builders,” for example, engages with massive riverine projects of the period, while other pieces celebrate or test the reliability of new technologies. The fascination with systems—signal codes, schedules, and craft discipline—parallels imperial administration’s reliance on survey, mapping, and standardization, the same rationalizing impulses that also inform Kim and the travel writings gathered in From Sea to Sea.
Maritime labor and sea power are treated from distinct angles in Captains Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks and A Fleet in Being. The former places readers amid the North Atlantic fisheries, where seasonal work, risk, and skill prefigure twentieth-century debates about industrial labor and safety at sea. The latter, based on Kipling’s time observing Royal Navy maneuvers in 1897–1898, enters the pre-dreadnought fleet during Britain’s navalist moment, on the eve of accelerating Anglo-German competition. Together they illuminate the commercial and strategic infrastructures—merchant routes, patrols, and communications—sustaining a maritime empire and shaping public understandings of discipline, masculinity, and national security.
The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, though primarily children’s classics, sit within late nineteenth-century scientific and administrative interests in zoology, forestry, and codified “laws.” British India’s Imperial Forest Department (established in the 1860s) and contemporary natural history writing inform their settings and concerns. The stories’ attention to rule-making, boundary-keeping, and knowledge-transfer echoes administrative habits of the high empire while remaining attuned to ecological variety and oral instruction. Just So Stories later extends this child-centered didactic mode, condensing contemporary fascination with origins and explanation into playful etiologies that nonetheless mirror Victorian habits of classification and moral pedagogy.
Kim crystallizes the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia across the late nineteenth-century Indo-Tibetan and Afghan frontiers. Set among surveyors, spies, and pilgrims moving along railways and the Grand Trunk Road, it draws on cartography, census-taking, and intelligence-gathering that defined security policy after the 1857 uprising and the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880). Its attention to codes, disguises, and polyglot exchanges matches the ethnographic curiosity of the period. The novel’s landscapes—plains, bazaars, passes—are as much administrative theaters as physical terrains, revealing the entwining of personal apprenticeship, statecraft, and technological infrastructures in late imperial geopolitics.
The Naulahka: A Story of West and East, written with Wolcott Balestier, reflects transatlantic literary and commercial circuits in the 1890s. Framing encounters between American ambition and Indian princely politics, it registers Gilded Age journalism, missionary endeavors, and the lure and limits of reform within colonial legal and economic constraints. Its joint authorship signals the wider cultural exchange linking London, New York, and colonial India through syndication, copyright partnerships, and steamship-enabled mobility. Read alongside American Notes and From Sea to Sea, it traces how reportage, fiction, and travelogue worked together to mediate “East–West” perception in an expanding global print marketplace.
Traffics and Discoveries captures the texture of early twentieth-century modernity: motorcars on new roads, wireless telegraphy spanning oceans, and cinema reframing memory and evidence. Stories such as “Wireless” and “Mrs. Bathurst” correspond to the Marconi era and the novelty of film, while the volume’s recurrent military and naval backgrounds register the South African War’s aftershocks (1899–1902) for intelligence and logistics. Actions and Reactions continues these themes with domestic and imperial anxieties, reflecting ambivalence toward democracy, organized labor, and technological acceleration that marked Edwardian debates, even as Britain navigated social reform, aviation’s emergence, and a volatile European balance of power.
Stalky and Co. draws on Kipling’s schooling at the United Services College in Devon to dramatize a public-school ethos that vectored many boys into imperial and military service. The tales’ focus on initiative, camaraderie, and pragmatic cunning relates to late Victorian educational ideals—classics, discipline, games—as preparation for administration and war. They also intersect with contemporary critiques of “muscular Christianity,” bullying, and the reproduction of class hierarchies. In historical terms, the milieu prefigures the officer corps that would serve in South Africa and, later, on the Western Front, linking domestic institutions with imperial governance and military leadership.
Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies relocate attention to England’s deep past, staging episodes from Roman occupation through the Normans and Tudors in the Sussex landscape around Kipling’s home at Bateman’s. These cycles align with Edwardian antiquarianism, local history societies, and heritage preservation, pressing questions of continuity, belonging, and national character. Rewards and Fairies contains “If—,” a widely circulated Edwardian ideal of stoic self-mastery. Together with Actions and Reactions, these works explore how a maritime empire and an industrial nation sought legitimacy in layered narratives of place, common law, and the stewardship of land and memory.
A Diversity of Creatures, assembled in 1917, gathers prewar and wartime stories that mirror Britain’s unsettled passage from Edwardian confidence to total war. Its inclusion of pieces like “As Easy as A.B.C.” (a 1912 future-set tale later collected here) shows Kipling’s technocratic imagination and skepticism about mass politics, while other stories revisit rural England, civil service, and international trade under strain. Abaft the Funnel, a 1909 collection of early sketches and shipboard pieces, complements this picture by preserving the late 1880s’ cosmopolitan newspaper world, emigrant traffic, and merchant marine—the informal arteries that ran parallel to official imperial structures.
Kipling’s verse volumes trace shifts in public mood and world affairs. Departmental Ditties (1886) satirizes Anglo-Indian officialdom, while Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads (1892) popularized the soldier’s voice for metropolitan audiences. The Seven Seas (1896) celebrates maritime reach and diaspora, An Almanac of Twelve Sports (1898) pairs verse with William Nicholson’s prints to fix seasonal Englishness, and The Five Nations (1903) engages, among other things, the South African War’s lessons. Songs From Books (1912) anthologizes lyrics embedded in fiction, and The Years Between (1919) gathers wartime poems of endurance and grief, reflecting the unprecedented mobilization and losses of 1914–1918.
The Light That Failed (1891) emerges from the era of the special correspondent and war artist, framed by late Victorian “small wars” such as the Sudan campaigns. It aligns with the rise of illustrated journalism and the hazards of covering expeditionary warfare. Later wartime prose—France at War, The New Army in Training, Sea Warfare, The War in the Mountains—and the pamphlet The Graves of the Fallen track the First World War’s phases: Kitchener’s volunteer recruitment, the Royal Navy’s North Sea and Channel vigil, the Italian front’s alpine struggle, and the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission’s principles of permanent, uniform commemoration irrespective of rank.
The Eyes of Asia (1917) channels voices of Indian soldiers serving on the Western Front and in related theaters, echoing the presence of hundreds of thousands of colonial troops in the Allied war effort. Framed as letters, these pieces reflect contemporary censorship practices and the cultural translation required of intermediaries. Read with France at War and The New Army in Training, they place imperial diversity inside a shared catastrophe, while The Years Between registers its poetic aftermath. The Graves of the Fallen then documents a new commemorative language of equality and endurance that would shape cemeteries from Flanders to the Dardanelles and East Africa.
Travel writing—American Notes, From Sea to Sea, and Letters of Travel: 1892–1913—records a world increasingly knit by steamship lines and railroads. Kipling’s routes through the United States, Canada, Japan, Egypt, and South Africa reveal late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates over immigration, industrial capitalism, settler colonialism, and federation within the British world. Observations on urban growth, race relations, and civic rituals intersect with journalism’s appetite for vivid, sometimes controversial, generalization. Essays such as How Shakespeare Came to Write the ‘Tempest’ show his habit of linking literature with maritime exploration and empire, folding cultural history into the age’s seaborne imagination and global archives of travel lore.
Synopsis (Selection)
Novels of Identity, Art, and Empire (Kim; The Light That Failed; The Naulahka: A Story of West and East)
Kim follows an orphan navigating espionage and spiritual geographies across the subcontinent, balancing loyalty with self-invention. The Light That Failed traces a war artist’s rise and reckoning as ambition, friendship, and the demands of craft collide. The Naulahka: A Story of West and East stages a transcontinental quest that tests cultural assumptions and the costs of desire; together these novels blend vivid reportage with moral inquiry in a world ordered by service and risk.
Sea Apprenticeship Novel (Captain Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks)
Captain Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks casts a cosseted boy among hard-bitten fishermen, where seamanship, labor, and camaraderie refashion his character. Kipling’s tone is briny and unsentimental, attentive to the rhythms of work and the tacit codes that bind a crew.
Early Indian Short Stories and Simla Sketches (Plain Tales From the Hills; Under the Deodars; Wee Willie Winkie)
Plain Tales From the Hills, Under the Deodars, and Wee Willie Winkie draw quick, incisive portraits of Anglo-Indian society, from civil servants and club rooms to cantonments and childhood trials. Irony and sympathy interplay as social codes, small scandals, and acts of courage reveal how individuals negotiate status, duty, and conscience.
Soldiers’ Tales of the British Army in India (Soldier’s Three; Soldier’s Three - Part II)
Soldier’s Three and Soldier’s Three - Part II follow a trio of enlisted men through barracks life, patrols, and scrapes that test wit, loyalty, and nerve. Vernacular voices, brisk pacing, and rough humor counterpoint moments of peril and tenderness, sketching a ground-level ethic of comradeship within imperial routine.
Supernatural and Urban Nightscapes (The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories; The City of Dreadful Night)
The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories uses hauntings and uncanny visitations to probe guilt, obsession, and the strain of empire on the mind. The City of Dreadful Night turns a reporter’s eye on oppressive heat and nocturnal streets, transforming urban reality into a fevered, claustrophobic vision; together they reveal modern anxieties in spectral and documentary keys.
Transitional Collections of Global Reach (Life’s Handicap; Many Inventions)
Life’s Handicap and Many Inventions range from India to ships and workshops, blending romance, irony, and technical curiosity in stories where chance encounters become turning points. Kipling experiments with voice and structure to test how character, craft, and accident alter fate, marking a shift toward broader geographies and subjects.
Work, Machines, and Modern Nerve (The Day’s Work; Traffics and Discoveries; Actions and Reactions; A Diversity of Creatures)
The Day’s Work, Traffics and Discoveries, Actions and Reactions, and A Diversity of Creatures explore engineers, motorists, mariners, animals, and officials confronting the promises and perils of new systems. Reports, dialogues, and embedded documents lend a hands-on texture as mastery, mishap, and responsibility define the moral weather of modernity.
Schoolroom Strategy and Satire (Stalky and Co.)
Stalky and Co. chronicles tactical gamesmanship at a boys’ school, where mischief, discipline, and teamwork become training for leadership. The tone is sharp and sardonic yet affectionate, suggesting how small-unit cunning can translate into adult service.
Animal Lore and Origin Fables (The Jungle Book; The Second Jungle Book; Just So Stories)
The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book imagine law, kinship, and peril in animal societies and borderlands between wild and human, while Just So Stories playfully invent origins for creatures and customs. Storyteller authority and musical cadences temper danger with wonder, and codes of belonging and apprenticeship anchor the tales’ moral spine.
English Past Reimagined (Puck of Pook’s Hill; Rewards and Fairies)
Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies summon figures from across English history to meet modern children, turning landscape into a living archive of craft, courage, and custom. The mood is intimate and reflective, binding national memory to local speech and the obligations of place.
Maritime and Portside Miscellany (Abaft the Funnel)
Abaft the Funnel gathers sketches and stories from steamship routes and harbors, catching cosmopolitan types and transient dramas in motion. The pieces are brisk, observant, and wry, mapping how work, rank, and chance meetings shape lives at sea and ashore.
War’s Eastern Eyes (The Eyes of Asia)
The Eyes of Asia presents letter-like testimonies in which Indian soldiers describe a distant, unfamiliar war and the worlds they move through. Its restraint and humane attention to perspective deepen Kipling’s interest in voice, allegiance, and the costs of service.
Early Satire in Verse (Departmental Ditties)
Departmental Ditties turns bureaucratic routines, small scandals, and social pretenses into nimble, epigrammatic verse. Lightness of touch sharpens critique, showcasing Kipling’s ear for spoken cadence and office life’s comic theater.
Ballads of Barracks and Beyond (Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads)
Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads adopts dramatic monologues and marching rhythms to voice soldiers’ humor, hardship, and fatalism. Accessible form carries layered ironies about duty and loss, setting a template for his popular narrative verse.
Oceanic and Imperial Cadences (The Seven Seas; The Five Nations; Songs From Books)
The Seven Seas, The Five Nations, and Songs From Books widen the compass to sea-lanes, trade, and nationhood, mixing chant-like choruses with reflective pieces. The mood shifts from expansive confidence to stormier foreboding, uniting themes of travel, work, and shared story.
Sporting Calendar in Verse (An Almanac of Twelve Sports)
An Almanac of Twelve Sports offers month-by-month snapshots of games and customs, treating sport as a seasonal map of character and community. The verse is crisp and playful, attentive to ritual, weather, and wit.
Between Wars, Between Tones (The Years Between)
The Years Between gathers poems of a tense historical interval, negotiating public exhortation and private doubt. Elegy, argument, and reflection meet as the verse measures loyalty against the costs of conflict.
The Navy at Hand (A Fleet in Being; Sea Warfare)
A Fleet in Being and Sea Warfare look closely at ships, drills, and engagements, balancing technical detail with a sense of awe at machinery and the men who manage it. The prose is pragmatic and vivid, treating sea power as disciplined craft in action.
Warfront Training, Campaigns, and Remembrance (France at War; The New Army in Training; The War in the Mountains; The Graves of the Fallen)
France at War, The New Army in Training, The War in the Mountains, and The Graves of the Fallen record preparation, endurance, terrain, and remembrance in wartime. Landscape and logistics share the stage with human resilience, and the tone is sober, compassionate, and precise about collective effort and memory.
Journeys and Notes Across Continents (From Sea to Sea; Letters of Travel: 1892 – 1913; American Notes)
From Sea to Sea, Letters of Travel: 1892 – 1913, and American Notes collect itineraries, sketches, and reflections from voyages and visits across regions. Curiosity drives encounters with cities, technologies, and customs, and the voice is brisk, observant, and often comparative.
Literary Origins and Weathered Guesses (How Shakespeare Came to Write the ‘Tempest’)
How Shakespeare Came to Write the ‘Tempest’ ventures a playful, craft-minded speculation on how weather, voyages, and stagecraft might converge into a play. It exemplifies Kipling’s habit of treating creativity as a problem of tools, circumstance, and tradition.
The Essential Writings of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition)
Novels:
The Light That Failed
Chapter I
"What do you think she'd do if she caught us? We oughtn't to have it, you know," said Maisie.
"Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom," Dick answered, without hesitation. "Have you got the cartridges?"
"Yes; they're in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire cartridges go off of their own accord?"
"Don't know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry them."
"I'm not afraid." Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver.
The children had discovered that their lives would be unendurable without pistol-practice. After much forethought and self-denial, Dick had saved seven shillings and sixpence, the price of a badly constructed Belgian revolver. Maisie could only contribute half a crown to the syndicate for the purchase of a hundred cartridges. "You can save better than I can, Dick," she explained; "I like nice things to eat, and it doesn't matter to you. Besides, boys ought to do these things."
Dick grumbled a little at the arrangement, but went out and made the purchase, which the children were then on their way to test. Revolvers did not lie in the scheme of their daily life as decreed for them by the guardian who was incorrectly supposed to stand in the place of a mother to these two orphans. Dick had been under her care for six years, during which time she had made her profit of the allowances supposed to be expended on his clothes, and, partly through thoughtlessness, partly through a natural desire to pain,—she was a widow of some years anxious to marry again,—had made his days burdensome on his young shoulders.
Where he had looked for love, she gave him first aversion and then hate.
Where he growing older had sought a little sympathy, she gave him ridicule. The many hours that she could spare from the ordering of her small house she devoted to what she called the home-training of Dick Heldar. Her religion, manufactured in the main by her own intelligence and a keen study of the Scriptures, was an aid to her in this matter. At such times as she herself was not personally displeased with Dick, she left him to understand that he had a heavy account to settle with his Creator; wherefore Dick learned to loathe his God as intensely as he loathed Mrs. Jennett; and this is not a wholesome frame of mind for the young. Since she chose to regard him as a hopeless liar, when dread of pain drove him to his first untruth he naturally developed into a liar, but an economical and self-contained one, never throwing away the least unnecessary fib, and never hesitating at the blackest, were it only plausible, that might make his life a little easier. The treatment taught him at least the power of living alone,—a power that was of service to him when he went to a public school and the boys laughed at his clothes, which were poor in quality and much mended. In the holidays he returned to the teachings of Mrs. Jennett, and, that the chain of discipline might not be weakened by association with the world, was generally beaten, on one account or another, before he had been twelve hours under her roof.
The autumn of one year brought him a companion in bondage, a long-haired, gray-eyed little atom, as self-contained as himself, who moved about the house silently and for the first few weeks spoke only to the goat that was her chiefest friend on earth and lived in the back-garden. Mrs. Jennett objected to the goat on the grounds that he was un-Christian,—which he certainly was. "Then," said the atom, choosing her words very deliberately, "I shall write to my lawyer-peoples and tell them that you are a very bad woman. Amomma is mine, mine, mine!" Mrs. Jennett made a movement to the hall, where certain umbrellas and canes stood in a rack. The atom understood as clearly as Dick what this meant. "I have been beaten before," she said, still in the same passionless voice; "I have been beaten worse than you can ever beat me. If you beat me I shall write to my lawyer-peoples and tell them that you do not give me enough to eat. I am not afraid of you." Mrs. Jennett did not go into the hall, and the atom, after a pause to assure herself that all danger of war was past, went out, to weep bitterly on Amomma's neck.
Dick learned to know her as Maisie, and at first mistrusted her profoundly, for he feared that she might interfere with the small liberty of action left to him. She did not, however; and she volunteered no friendliness until Dick had taken the first steps. Long before the holidays were over, the stress of punishment shared in common drove the children together, if it were only to play into each other's hands as they prepared lies for Mrs. Jennett's use. When Dick returned to school, Maisie whispered, "Now I shall be all alone to take care of myself; but," and she nodded her head bravely, "I can do it. You promised to send Amomma a grass collar. Send it soon." A week later she asked for that collar by return of post, and was not pleased when she learned that it took time to make. When at last Dick forwarded the gift, she forgot to thank him for it.
Many holidays had come and gone since that day, and Dick had grown into a lanky hobbledehoy more than ever conscious of his bad clothes. Not for a moment had Mrs. Jennett relaxed her tender care of him, but the average canings of a public school—Dick fell under punishment about three times a month—filled him with contempt for her powers. "She doesn't hurt," he explained to Maisie, who urged him to rebellion, "and she is kinder to you after she has whacked me." Dick shambled through the days unkempt in body and savage in soul, as the smaller boys of the school learned to know, for when the spirit moved him he would hit them, cunningly and with science. The same spirit made him more than once try to tease Maisie, but the girl refused to be made unhappy. "We are both miserable as it is," said she. "What is the use of trying to make things worse? Let's find things to do, and forget things."
The pistol was the outcome of that search. It could only be used on the muddiest foreshore of the beach, far away from the bathing-machines and pierheads, below the grassy slopes of Fort Keeling. The tide ran out nearly two miles on that coast, and the many-coloured mud-banks, touched by the sun, sent up a lamentable smell of dead weed. It was late in the afternoon when Dick and Maisie arrived on their ground, Amomma trotting patiently behind them.
"Mf!" said Maisie, sniffing the air. "I wonder what makes the sea so smelly? I don'tlike it!"
"You never like anything that isn't made just for you," said Dick bluntly. "Give me the cartridges, and I'll try first shot. How far does one of these little revolvers carry?"
"Oh, half a mile," said Maisie, promptly. "At least it makes an awful noise. Be careful with the cartridges; I don't like those jagged stick-up things on the rim. Dick, do be careful."
"All right. I know how to load. I'll fire at the breakwater out there."
He fired, and Amomma ran away bleating. The bullet threw up a spurt of mud to the right of the wood-wreathed piles.
"Throws high and to the right. You try, Maisie. Mind, it's loaded all round."
Maisie took the pistol and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud, her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left eye screwed up.
Dick sat down on a tuft of bank and laughed. Amomma returned very cautiously. He was accustomed to strange experiences in his afternoon walks, and, finding the cartridge-box unguarded, made investigations with his nose. Maisie fired, but could not see where the bullet went.
"I think it hit the post," she said, shading her eyes and looking out across the sailless sea.
"I know it has gone out to the Marazion Bell-buoy," said Dick, with a chuckle. "Fire low and to the left; then perhaps you'll get it. Oh, look at Amomma!—he's eating the cartridges!"
Maisie turned, the revolver in her hand, just in time to see Amomma scampering away from the pebbles Dick threw after him. Nothing is sacred to a billy-goat. Being well fed and the adored of his mistress, Amomma had naturally swallowed two loaded pin-fire cartridges. Maisie hurried up to assure herself that Dick had not miscounted the tale.
"Yes, he's eaten two."
"Horrid little beast! Then they'll joggle about inside him and blow up, and serve him right.... Oh, Dick! have I killed you?"
Revolvers are tricky things for young hands to deal with. Maisie could not explain how it had happened, but a veil of reeking smoke separated her from Dick, and she was quite certain that the pistol had gone off in his face. Then she heard him sputter, and dropped on her knees beside him, crying, "Dick, you aren't hurt, are you? I didn't mean it."
"Of course you didn't," said Dick, coming out of the smoke and wiping his cheek. "But you nearly blinded me. That powder stuff stings awfully." A neat little splash of gray led on a stone showed where the bullet had gone. Maisie began to whimper.
"Don't," said Dick, jumping to his feet and shaking himself. "I'm not a bit hurt."
"No, but I might have killed you," protested Maisie, the corners of her mouth drooping. "What should I have done then?"
"Gone home and told Mrs. Jennett." Dick grinned at the thought; then, softening, "Please don't worry about it. Besides, we are wasting time. We've got to get back to tea. I'll take the revolver for a bit."
Maisie would have wept on the least encouragement, but Dick's indifference, albeit his hand was shaking as he picked up the pistol, restrained her. She lay panting on the beach while Dick methodically bombarded the breakwater. "Got it at last!" he exclaimed, as a lock of weed flew from the wood.
"Let me try," said Maisie, imperiously. "I'm all right now."
They fired in turns till the rickety little revolver nearly shook itself to pieces, and Amomma the outcast—because he might blow up at any moment—browsed in the background and wondered why stones were thrown at him. Then they found a balk of timber floating in a pool which was commanded by the seaward slope of Fort Keeling, and they sat down together before this new target.
"Next holidays," said Dick, as the now thoroughly fouled revolver kicked wildly in his hand, "we'll get another pistol,—central fire,—that will carry farther."
"There won't be any next holidays for me," said Maisie. "I'm going away."
"Where to?"
"I don't know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I've got to be educated somewhere,—in France, perhaps,—I don'tknow where; but I shall be glad to go away."
"I shan't like it a bit. I suppose I shall be left. Look here, Maisie, is it really true you're going? Then these holidays will be the last I shall see anything of you; and I go back to school next week. I wish——"
The young blood turned his cheeks scarlet. Maisie was picking grass-tufts and throwing them down the slope at a yellow sea-poppy nodding all by itself to the illimitable levels of the mud-flats and the milk-white sea beyond.
"I wish," she said, after a pause, "that I could see you again sometime. You wish that, too?"
"Yes, but it would have been better if—if—you had—shot straight over there—down by the breakwater."
Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy who only ten days before had decorated Amomma's horns with cut-paper ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.
"Don't be stupid," she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct attacked the side-issue. "How selfish you are! Just think what I should have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I'm quite miserable enough already."
"Why? Because you're going away from Mrs. Jennett?"
"No."
"From me, then?"
No answer for a long time. Dick dared not look at her. He felt, though he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in words.
"I don't know," she said. "I suppose it is."
"Maisie, you must know. I'm not supposing."
"Let's go home," said Maisie, weakly.
But Dick was not minded to retreat.
"I can't say things," he pleaded, "and I'm awfully sorry for teasing you about Amomma the other day. It's all different now, Maisie, can't you see? And you might have told me that you were going, instead of leaving me to find out."
"You didn't. I did tell. Oh, Dick, what's the use of worrying?"
"There isn't any; but we've been together years and years, and I didn't know how much I cared."
"I don't believe you ever did care."
"No, I didn't; but I do,—I care awfully now, Maisie," he gulped,—"Maisie, darling, say you care too, please."
"I do, indeed I do; but it won't be any use."
"Why?"
"Because I am going away."
"Yes, but if you promise before you go. Only say—will you?" A second "darling" came to his lips more easily than the first. There were few endearments in Dick's home or school life; he had to find them by instinct. Dick caught the little hand blackened with the escaped gas of the revolver.
"I promise," she said solemnly; "but if I care there is no need for promising."
"And do you care?" For the first time in the past few minutes their eyes met and spoke for them who had no skill in speech....
"Oh, Dick, don't! Please don't! It was all right when we said good-morning; but now it's all different!" Amomma looked on from afar.
He had seen his property quarrel frequently, but he had never seen kisses exchanged before. The yellow sea-poppy was wiser, and nodded its head approvingly. Considered as a kiss, that was a failure, but since it was the first, other than those demanded by duty, in all the world that either had ever given or taken, it opened to them new worlds, and every one of them glorious, so that they were lifted above the consideration of any worlds at all, especially those in which tea is necessary, and sat still, holding each other's hands and saying not a word.
"You can't forget now," said Dick, at last. There was that on his cheek that stung more than gunpowder.
"I shouldn't have forgotten anyhow," said Maisie, and they looked at each other and saw that each was changed from the companion of an hour ago to a wonder and a mystery they could not understand. The sun began to set, and a night-wind thrashed along the bents of the foreshore.
"We shall be awfully late for tea," said Maisie. "Let's go home."
"Let's use the rest of the cartridges first," said Dick; and he helped Maisie down the slope of the fort to the sea,—a descent that she was quite capable of covering at full speed. Equally gravely Maisie took the grimy hand. Dick bent forward clumsily; Maisie drew the hand away, and Dick blushed.
"It's very pretty," he said.
"Pooh!" said Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired over the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red disc. The light held Dick's attention for a moment, and as he raised his revolver there fell upon him a renewed sense of the miraculous, in that he was standing by Maisie who had promised to care for him for an indefinite length of time till such date as——A gust of the growing wind drove the girl's long black hair across his face as she stood with her hand on his shoulder calling Amomma "a little beast," and for a moment he was in the dark,—a darkness that stung. The bullet went singing out to the empty sea.
"Spoilt my aim," said he, shaking his head. "There aren't any more cartridges; we shall have to run home." But they did not run. They walked very slowly, arm in arm. And it was a matter of indifference to them whether the neglected Amomma with two pin-fire cartridges in his inside blew up or trotted beside them; for they had come into a golden heritage and were disposing of it with all the wisdom of all their years.
"And I shall be——" quoth Dick, valiantly. Then he checked himself: "I don't know what I shall be. I don't seem to be able to pass any exams, but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho!"
"Be an artist, then," said Maisie. "You're always laughing at my trying to draw; and it will do you good."
"I'll never laugh at anything you do," he answered. "I'll be an artist, and I'll do things."
"Artists always want money, don'tthey?"
"I've got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians tell me I'm to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin with."
"Ah, I'm rich," said Maisie. "I've got three hundred a year all my own when I'm twenty-one. That's why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she is to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to me,—just a father or a mother."
"You belong to me," said Dick, "for ever and ever."
"Yes, we belong—for ever. It's very nice." She squeezed his arm. The kindly darkness hid them both, and, emboldened because he could only just see the profile of Maisie's cheek with the long lashes veiling the gray eyes, Dick at the front door delivered himself of the words he had been boggling over for the last two hours.
"And I—love you, Maisie," he said, in a whisper that seemed to him to ring across the world,—the world that he would tomorrow or the next day set out to conquer.
There was a scene, not, for the sake of discipline, to be reported, when Mrs. Jennett would have fallen upon him, first for disgraceful unpunctuality, and secondly for nearly killing himself with a forbidden weapon.
"I was playing with it, and it went off by itself," said Dick, when the powder-pocked cheek could no longer be hidden, "but if you think you're going to lick me you're wrong. You are never going to touch me again. Sit down and give me my tea. You can't cheat us out of that, anyhow."
Mrs. Jennett gasped and became livid. Maisie said nothing, but encouraged Dick with her eyes, and he behaved abominably all that evening. Mrs. Jennett prophesied an immediate judgment of Providence and a descent into Tophet later, but Dick walked in Paradise and would not hear. Only when he was going to bed Mrs. Jennett recovered and asserted herself. He had bidden Maisie good night with down-dropped eyes and from a distance.
"If you aren't a gentleman you might try to behave like one," said Mrs. Jennett, spitefully. "You've been quarrelling with Maisie again."
This meant that the usual good-night kiss had been omitted. Maisie, white to the lips, thrust her cheek forward with a fine air of indifference, and was duly pecked by Dick, who tramped out of the room red as fire. That night he dreamed a wild dream. He had won all the world and brought it to Maisie in a cartridge-box, but she turned it over with her foot, and, instead of saying "Thank you," cried—"Where is the grass collar you promised for Amomma? Oh, how selfish you are!"
Chapter II
"I'm not angry with the British public, but I wish we had a few thousand of them scattered among these rooks. They wouldn't be in such a hurry to get at their morning papers then. Can't you imagine the regulation householder—Lover of Justice, Constant Reader, Paterfamilias, and all that lot—frizzling on hot gravel?"
"With a blue veil over his head, and his clothes in strips. Has any man here a needle? I've got a piece of sugar-sack."
"I'll lend you a packing-needle for six square inches of it then. Both my knees are worn through."
"Why not six square acres, while you're about it? But lend me the needle, and I'll see what I can do with the selvage. I don't think there's enough to protect my royal body from the cold blast as it is. What are you doing with that everlasting sketch-book of yours, Dick?"
"Study of our Special Correspondent repairing his wardrobe," said Dick, gravely, as the other man kicked off a pair of sorely worn riding-breeches and began to fit a square of coarse canvas over the most obvious open space. He grunted disconsolately as the vastness of the void developed itself.
"Sugar-bags, indeed! Hi! you pilot man there! lend me all the sails for that whale-boat."
A fez-crowned head bobbed up in the stern-sheets, divided itself into exact halves with one flashing grin, and bobbed down again. The man of the tattered breeches, clad only in a Norfolk jacket and a gray flannel shirt, went on with his clumsy sewing, while Dick chuckled over the sketch.
Some twenty whale-boats were nuzzling a sand-bank which was dotted with English soldiery of half a dozen corps, bathing or washing their clothes. A heap of boat-rollers, commissariat-boxes, sugar-bags, and flour—and small-arm-ammunition-cases showed where one of the whale-boats had been compelled to unload hastily; and a regimental carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sun-parched gaping seams of the boat herself.
"First the bloomin' rudder snaps," said he to the world in general; "then the mast goes; an' then, s' help me, when she can't do nothin' else, she opens 'erself out like a cock-eyed Chinese lotus."
"Exactly the case with my breeches, whoever you are," said the tailor, without looking up. "Dick, I wonder when I shall see a decent shop again."
There was no answer, save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half a mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next few miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The desert ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped. No man dared even for a day lose touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them. Rapid had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group, till the rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and very nearly of time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why, to do something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and at the other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a town called Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the desert, or in one of the many deserts; there were yet more columns waiting to embark on the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at Assioot and Assuan; there were lies and rumours running over the face of the hopeless land from Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men supposed generally that there must be some one in authority to direct the general scheme of the many movements. The duty of that particular river-column was to keep the whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid trampling on the villagers' crops when the gangs "tracked" the boats with lines thrown from midstream, to get as much sleep and food as was possible, and, above all, to press on without delay in the teeth of the churning Nile.
With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the newspapers, and they were almost as ignorant as their companions. But it was above all things necessary that England at breakfast should be amused and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or half the British army went to pieces in the sands. The Soudan campaign was a picturesque one, and lent itself to vivid word-painting. Now and again a "Special" managed to get slain,—which was not altogether a disadvantage to the paper that employed him,—and more often the hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were many correspondents with many corps and columns,—from the veterans who had followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in '82, what time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first miserable work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and the scrub swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at the end of a telegraph-wire to take the places of their betters killed or invalided.
Among the seniors—those who knew every shift and change in the perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk a telegraph-clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of a newly appointed staff-officer when press regulations became burdensome—was the man in the flannel shirt, the black-browed Torpenhow. He represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the campaign, as he had represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere. The syndicate did not concern itself greatly with criticisms of attack and the like. It supplied the masses, and all it demanded was picturesqueness and abundance of detail; for there is more joy in England over a soldier who insubordinately steps out of square to rescue a comrade than over twenty generals slaving even to baldness at the gross details of transport and commissariat.
He had met at Suakin a young man, sitting on the edge of a recently abandoned redoubt about the size of a hat-box, sketching a clump of shell-torn bodies on the gravel plain.
"What are you for?" said Torpenhow. The greeting of the correspondent is that of the commercial traveller on the road.
"My own hand," said the young man, without looking up. "Have you any tobacco?"
Torpenhow waited till the sketch was finished, and when he had looked at it said, "What's your business here?"
"Nothing; there was a row, so I came. I'm supposed to be doing something down at the painting-slips among the boats, or else I'm in charge of the condenser on one of the water-ships. I've forgotten which."
"You've cheek enough to build a redoubt with," said Torpenhow, and took stock of the new acquaintance. "Do you always draw like that?"
The young man produced more sketches. "Row on a Chinese pig-boat," said he, sententiously, showing them one after another.—"Chief mate dirked by a comprador.—Junk ashore off Hakodate.—Somali muleteer being flogged.—Star-shell bursting over camp at Berbera.—Slave-dhow being chased round Tajurrah Bah.—Soldier lying dead in the moonlight outside Suakin.—throat cut by Fuzzies."
"H'm!" said Torpenhow, "can'tsay I care for Verestchagin-and-water myself, but there's no accounting for tastes. Doing anything now, are you?"
"No. I'm amusing myself here."
Torpenhow looked at the sketches again, and nodded. "Yes, you're right to take your first chance when you can get it."
He rode away swiftly through the Gate of the Two War-Ships, rattled across the causeway into the town, and wired to his syndicate, "Got man here, picture-work. Good and cheap. Shall I arrange? Will do letterpress with sketches."
The man on the redoubt sat swinging his legs and murmuring, "I knew the chance would come, sooner or later. By Gad, they'll have to sweat for it if I come through this business alive!"
In the evening Torpenhow was able to announce to his friend that the Central Southern Agency was willing to take him on trial, paying expenses for three months. "And, by the way, what's your name?" said Torpenhow.
"Heldar. Do they give me a free hand?"
"They've taken you on chance. You must justify the choice. You'd better stick to me. I'm going up-country with a column, and I'll do what I can for you. Give me some of your sketches taken here, and I'll send 'em along." To himself he said, "That's the best bargain the Central Southern has ever made; and they got me cheaply enough."
