The light that failed by rudyard kipling

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The Light That Failed

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Title: The Light That Failed

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Release Date: December 23, 2008 [EBook #2876]
Last Updated: November 5, 2012

Produced by David Reed, and David Widger

THE LIGHT THAT FAILED

By Rudyard Kipling

CHAPTER I

So we settled it all when the storm was done
As comf’y as comf’y could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears,
Because I was only three;
And Teddy would run to the rainbow’s foot,
Because he was five and a man;
And that’s how it all began, my dears,
And that’s how it all began.

—Big Barn Stories.

‘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.

The Light That Failed/Chapter 1

So we settled it all when the storm was done
As comf’y as comf’y could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears,
Because I was only three,
And Teddy would run to the rainbow’s foot.
Because he was five and a man;
And that’s how it all began, my dears,
And that’s how it all began.—Big Barn Stories.

‘ 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 purchases, 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 eachings of Mrs. Jennett, and, that the chain of discipline might not be weakened by association with the world, was generally beaten, ​ on one count 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 unkept 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 bathing-machines and pier-heads, 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’t like 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 weed-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 lead 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.’

‘I don’t know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett; and I’ve got to be educated somewhere, —in France, perhaps,—I don’t know 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 some time. 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 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.’

‘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 you do 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.

‘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’t they?’

‘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 to-morrow 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!’

The Light That Failed by Rudyard Kipling

Prepared by David Reed haradda@aol.com or davidr@inconnect.com

The Light That Failed

by Rudyard Kipling

So we settled it all when the storm was done As comf’y as comf’y could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears, Because I was only three;
And Teddy would run to the rainbow’s foot, Because he was five and a man;
And that’s how it all began, my dears, And that’s how it all began. — Big Barn Stories.

‘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, 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 wa 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’t like 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.’

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 b any next holidays for me,’ said Maisie. ‘I’m going away.’

‘I don’t know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I’ve got to be educated somewhere,–in France, perhaps,–I don’t know 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 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.’

‘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.’

‘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’t they?’

‘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 to-morrow 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!’?

Then we brought the lances down, then the bugles blew, When we went to Kandahar, ridin’ two an’ two, Ridin’, ridin’, ridin’, two an’ two,
Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra,
All the way to Kandahar, ridin’ two an’ two.

‘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-eyes 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-shelled 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’t say 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.’

So it came to pass that, after some purchase of horse-flesh and arrangements financial and political, Dick was made free of the New and Honourable Fraternity of war correspondents, who all possess the inalienable right of doing as much work as they can and getting as much for it as Providence and their owners shall please. To these things are added in time, if the brother be worthy, the power of glib speech that neither man nor woman can resist when a meal or a bed is in question, the eye of a horse-cope, the skill of a cook, the constitution of a bullock, the digestion of an ostrich, and an infinite adaptability to all circumstances. But many die before they attain to this degree, and the past-masters in the craft appear for the most part in dress-clothes when they are in England, and thus their glory is hidden from the multitude.

Dick followed Torpenhow wherever the latter’s fancy chose to lead him, and between the two they managed to accomplish some work that almost satisfied themselves. It was not an easy life in any way, and under its influence the two were drawn ver closely together, for they ate from the same dish, they shared the same water-bottle, and, most binding tie of all, their mails went off together. It was Dick who managed to make gloriously drunk a telegraph-clerk in a palm hut far beyond the Second Cataract, and, while the man lay in bliss on the floor, possessed himself of some laboriously acquired exclusive information, forwarded by a confiding correspondent of an opposition syndicate, made a careful duplicate of the matter, and brought the result to Torpenhow, who said that all was fair in love or war correspondence, and built an excellent descriptive article from his rival’s riotous waste of words. It was Torpenhow who–but the tale of their adventures, together and apart, from Philae to the waste wilderness of Herawi and Muella, would fill many books. They had been penned into a square side by side, in deadly fear of being shot by over-excited soldiers; they had fought with baggage-camels in the chill dawn; they had jogged along in silence under blinding sun on indefatigable little Egyptian horses; and they had floundered on the shallows of the Nile when the whale-boat in which they had found a berth chose to hit a hidden rock and rip out half her bottom-planks.

Now they were sitting on the sand-bank, and the whale-boats were bringing up the remainder of the column.

‘Yes,’ said Torpenhow, as he put the last rude stitches into his over-long-neglected gear, ‘it has been a beautiful business.’

‘The patch or the campaign?’ said Dick. ‘Don’t think much of either, myself.’

‘You want the Euryalus brought up above the Third Cataract, don’t you? and eighty-one-ton guns at Jakdul? Now, I’m quite satisfied with my breeches.’ He turned round gravely to exhibit himself, after the manner of a clown.

‘It’s very pretty. Specially the lettering on the sack. G.B.T. Government Bullock Train. That’s a sack from India.’

‘It’s my initials,–Gilbert Belling Torpenhow. I stole the cloth on purpose.

What the mischief are the camel-corps doing yonder?’ Torpenhow shaded his eyes and looked across the scrub-strewn gravel.

A bugle blew furiously, and the men on the bank hurried to their arms and accoutrements.

‘”Pisan soldiery surprised while bathing,”‘ remarked Dick, calmly.

‘D’you remember the picture? It’s by Michael Angelo; all beginners copy it. That scrub’s alive with enemy.’

The camel-corps on the bank yelled to the infantry to come to them, and a hoarse shouting down the river showed that the remainder of the column had wind of the trouble and was hastening to take share in it. As swiftly as a reach of still water is crisped by the wind, the rock-strewn ridges and scrub-topped hills were troubled and alive with armed men.

Mercifully, it occurred to these to stand far off for a time, to shout and gesticulate joyously. One man even delivered himself of a long story. The camel-corps did not fire. They were only too glad of a little breathing-space, until some sort of square could be formed. The men on the sand-bank ran to their side; and the whale-boats, as they toiled up within shouting distance, were thrust into the nearest bank and emptied of all save the sick and a few men to guard them. The Arab orator ceased his outcries, and his friends howled.

‘They look like the Mahdi’s men,’ said Torpenhow, elbowing himself into the crush of the square; ‘but what thousands of ’em there are! The tribes hereabout aren’t against us, I know.’

‘Then the Mahdi’s taken another town,’ said Dick, ‘and set all these yelping devils free to show us up. Lend us your glass.’

‘Our scouts should have told us of this. We’ve been trapped,’ said a subaltern. ‘Aren’t the camel guns ever going to begin? Hurry up, you men!’

There was no need of any order. The men flung themselves panting against the sides of the square, for they had good reason to know that whoso was left outside when the fighting began would very probably die in an extremely unpleasant fashion. The little hundred-and-fifty-pound camel-guns posted at one corner of the square opened the ball as the square moved forward by its right to get possession of a knoll of rising ground. All had fought in this manner many times before, and there was no novelty in the entertainment; always the same hot and stifling formation, the smell of dust and leather, the same boltlike rush of the enemy, the same pressure on the weakest side, the few minutes of hand-to-hand scuffle, and then the silence of the desert, broken only by the yells of those whom their handful of cavalry attempted to purse. They had become careless. The camel-guns spoke at intervals, and the square slouched forward amid the protesting of the camels. Then came the attack of three thousand men who had not learned from books that it is impossible for troops in close order to attack against breech-loading fire.

A few dropping shots heralded their approach, and a few horsemen led, but the bulk of the force was naked humanity, mad with rage, and armed with the spear and the sword. The instinct of the desert, where there is always much war, told them that the right flank of the square was the weakest, for they swung clear of the front. The camel-guns shelled them as they passed and opened for an instant lanes through their midst, most like those quick-closing vistas in a Kentish hop-garden seen when the train races by at full speed; and the infantry fire, held till the opportune moment, dropped them in close-packing hundreds. No civilised troops in the world could have endured the hell through which they came, the living leaping high to avoid the dying who clutched at their heels, the wounded cursing and staggering forward, till they fell–a torrent black as the sliding water above a mill-dam–full on the right flank of the square.

Then the line of the dusty troops and the faint blue desert sky overhead went out in rolling smoke, and the little stones on the heated ground ant the tinder-dry clumps of scrub became matters of surpassing interest, for men measured their agonised retreat and recovery by these things, counting mechanically and hewing their way back to chosen pebble and branch. There was no semblance of any concerted fighting. For aught the men knew, the enemy might be attempting all four sides of the square at once. Their business was to destroy what lay in front of them, to bayonet in the back those who passed over them, and, dying, to drag down the slayer till he could be knocked on the head by some avenging gun-butt.

Dick waited with Torpenhow and a young doctor till the stress grew unendurable. It was hopeless to attend to the wounded till the attack was repulsed, so the three moved forward gingerly towards the weakest side of the square. There was a rush from without, the short hough-hough of the stabbing spears, and a man on a horse, followed by thirty or forty others, dashed through, yelling and hacking. The right flank of the square sucked in after them, and the other sides sent help. The wounded, who knew that they had but a few hours more to live, caught at the enemy’s feet and brought them down, or, staggering into a discarded rifle, fired blindly into the scuffle that raged in the centre of the square.

Dick was conscious that somebody had cut him violently across his helmet, that he had fired his revolver into a black, foam-flecked face which forthwith ceased to bear any resemblance to a face, and that Torpenhow had gone down under an Arab whom he had tried to ‘collar low,’ and was turning over and over with his captive, feeling for the man’s eyes. The doctor jabbed at a venture with a bayonet, and a helmetless soldier fired over Dick’s shoulder: the flying grains of powder stung his cheek. It was to Torpenhow that Dick turned by instinct. The representative of the Central Southern Syndicate had shaken himself clear of his enemy, and rose, wiping his thumb on his trousers. The Arab, both hands to his forehead, screamed aloud, then snatched up his spear and rushed at Torpenhow, who was panting under shelter of Dick’s revolver. Dick fired twice, and the man dropped limply. His upturned face lacked one eye. The musketry-fire redoubled, but cheers mingled with it. The rush had failed and the enemy were flying. If the heart of the square were shambles, the ground beyond was a butcher’s shop. Dick thrust his way forward between the maddened men. The remnant of the enemy were retiring, as the few–the very few–English cavalry rode down the laggards.

‘Old man, you’re cut rather badly,’ said Torpenhow. ‘I owe you something for this business. Thanks. Stand up! I say, you can’t be ill here.’

Throughout the night, when the troops were encamped by the whale-boats, a black figure danced in the strong moonlight on the sand-bar and shouted that Khartoum the accursed one was dead,–was dead,–was dead,–that two steamers were rock-staked on the Nile outside the city, and that of all their crews there remained not one; and Khartoum was dead,–was dead,–was dead!

But Torpenhow took no heed. He was watching Dick, who called aloud to the restless Nile for Maisie,–and again Maisie!?

‘Behold a phenomenon,’ said Torpenhow, rearranging the blanket. ‘Here is a man, presumably human, who mentions the name of one woman only. And I’ve seen a good deal of delirium, too.–Dick, here’s some fizzy drink.’

‘Thank you, Maisie,’ said Dick.

So he thinks he shall take to the sea again For one more cruise with his buccaneers, To singe the beard of the King of Spain, And capture another Dean of Jaen
And sell him in Algiers.–A Dutch Picture. Longfellow

THE SOUDAN campaign and Dick’s broken head had been some months ended and mended, and the Central Southern Syndicate had paid Dick a certain sum on account for work done, which work they were careful to assure him was not altogether up to their standard. Dick heaved the letter into the Nile at Cairo, cashed the draft in the same town, and bade a warm farewell to Torpenhow at the station.

‘I am going to lie up for a while and rest,’ said Torpenhow. ‘I don’t know where I shall live in London, but if God brings us to meet, we shall meet.

Are you starying here on the off-chance of another row? There will be none till the Southern Soudan is reoccupied by our troops. Mark that.

Good-bye; bless you; come back when your money’s spent; and give me your address.’

Dick loitered in Cairo, Alexandria, Ismailia, and Port Said,–especially Port Said. There is iniquity in many parts of the world, and vice in all, but the concentrated essence of all the iniquities and all the vices in all the continents finds itself at Port Said. And through the heart of that sand-bordered hell, where the mirage flickers day long above the Bitter Lake, move, if you will only wait, most of the men and women you have known in this life. Dick established himself in quarters more riotous than respectable. He spent his evenings on the quay, and boarded many ships, and saw very many friends,–gracious Englishwomen with whom he had talked not too wisely in the veranda of Shepherd’s Hotel, hurrying war correspondents, skippers of the contract troop-ships employed in the campaign, army officers by the score, and others of less reputable trades.

He had choice of all the races of the East and West for studies, and the advantage of seeing his subjects under the influence of strong excitement, at the gaming-tables, saloons, dancing-hells, and elsewhere. For recreation there was the straight vista of the Canal, the blazing sands, the procession of shipping, and the white hospitals where the English soldiers lay. He strove to set down in black and white and colour all that Providence sent him, and when that supply was ended sought about for fresh material. It was a fascinating employment, but it ran away with his money, and he had drawn in advance the hundred and twenty pounds to which he was entitled yearly. ‘Now I shall have to work and starve!’

thought he, and was addressing himself to this new fate when a mysterious telegram arrived from Torpenhow in England, which said, ‘Come back, quick; you have caught on. Come.’

A large smile overspread his face. ‘So soon! that’s a good hearing,’ said he to himself. ‘There will be an orgy to-night. I’ll stand or fall by my luck. Faith, it’s time it came!’ He deposited half of his funds in the hands of his well-known friends Monsieur and Madame Binat, and ordered himself a Zanzibar dance of the finest. Monsieur Binat was shaking with drink, but Madame smiles sympathetically– ‘Monsieur needs a chair, of course, and of course Monsieur will sketch; Monsieur amuses himself strangely.’

Binat raised a blue-white face from a cot in the inner room. ‘I understand,’ he quavered. ‘We all know Monsieur. Monsieur is an artist, as I have been.’ Dick nodded. ‘In the end,’ said Binat, with gravity, ‘Monsieur will descend alive into hell, as I have descended.’ And he laughed.

‘You must come to the dance, too,’ said Dick; ‘I shall want you.’

‘For my face? I knew it would be so. For my face? My God! and for my degradation so tremendous! I will not. Take him away. He is a devil. Or at least do thou, Celeste, demand of him more.’ The excellent Binat began to kick and scream.

‘All things are for sale in Port Said,’ said Madame. ‘If my husband comes it will be so much more. Eh, ‘how you call–‘alf a sovereign.’

The money was paid, and the mad dance was held at night in a walled courtyard at the back of Madame Binat’s house. The lady herself, in faded mauve silk always about to slide from her yellow shoulders, played the piano, and to the tin-pot music of a Western waltz the naked Zanzibari girls danced furiously by the light of kerosene lamps. Binat sat upon a chair and stared with eyes that saw nothing, till the whirl of the dance and the clang of the rattling piano stole into the drink that took the place of blood in his veins, and his face glistened. Dick took him by the chin brutally and turned that face to the light. Madame Binat looked over her shoulder and smiled with many teeth. Dick leaned against the wall and sketched for an hour, till the kerosene lamps began to smell, and the girls threw themselves panting on the hard-beaten ground. Then he shut his book with a snap and moved away, Binat plucking feebly at his elbow. ‘Show me,’ he whimpered. ‘I too was once an artist, even I!’ Dick showed him the rough sketch. ‘Am I that?’ he screamed. ‘Will you take that away with you and show all the world that it is I,–Binat?’ He moaned and wept.

‘Monsieur has paid for all,’ said Madame. ‘To the pleasure of seeing Monsieur again.’

The courtyard gate shut, and Dick hurried up the sandy street to the nearest gambling-hell, where he was well known. ‘If the luck holds, it’s an omen; if I lose, I must stay here.’ He placed his money picturesquely about the board, hardly daring to look at what he did. The luck held.

Three turns of the wheel left him richer by twenty pounds, and he went down to the shipping to make friends with the captain of a decayed cargo-steamer, who landed him in London with fewer pounds in his pocket than he cared to think about.

A thin gray fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.

‘It’s a cheerful wilderness, and it hasn’t the knack of altering much,’ Dick thought, as he tramped from the Docks westward. ‘Now, what must I do?’

The packed houses gave no answer. Dick looked down the long lightless streets and at the appalling rush of traffic. ‘Oh, you rabbit-hutches!’ said he, addressing a row of highly respectable semi-detached residences. ‘Do you know what you’ve got to do later on? You have to supply me with men-servants and maid-servants,’–here he smacked his lips,–‘and the peculiar treasure of kings. Meantime I’ll clothes and boots, and presently I will return and trample on you.’ He stepped forward energetically; he saw that one of his shoes was burst at the side. As he stooped to make investigations, a man jostled him into the gutter. ‘All right,’ he said.

‘That’s another nick in the score. I’ll jostle you later on.’

Good clothes and boots are not cheap, and Dick left his last shop with the certainty that he would be respectably arrayed for a time, but with only fifty shillings in his pocket. He returned to streets by the Docks, and lodged himself in one room, where the sheets on the bed were almost audibly marked in case of theft, and where nobody seemed to go to bed at all. When his clothes arrived he sought the Central Southern Syndicate for Torpenhow’s address, and got it, with the intimation that there was still some money waiting for him.

‘How much?’ said Dick, as one who habitually dealt in millions.

‘Between thirty and forty pounds. If it would be any convenience to you, of course we could let you have it at once; but we usually settle accounts monthly.’

‘If I show that I want anything now, I’m lost,’ he said to himself. ‘All I need I’ll take later on.’ Then, aloud, ‘It’s hardly worth while; and I’m going to the country for a month, too. Wait till I come back, and I’ll see about it.’

‘But we trust, Mr. Heldar, that you do not intend to sever your connection with us?’

Dick’s business in life was the study of faces, and he watched the speaker keenly. ‘That man means something,’ he said. ‘I’ll do no business till I’ve seen Torpenhow. There’s a big deal coming.’ So he departed, making no promises, to his one little room by the Docks. And that day was the seventh of the month, and that month, he reckoned with awful distinctness, had thirty-one days in it!?

It is not easy for a man of catholic tastes and healthy appetites to exist for twenty-four days on fifty shillings. Nor is it cheering to begin the experiment alone in all the loneliness of London. Dick paid seven shillings a week for his lodging, which left him rather less than a shilling a day for food and drink. Naturally, his first purchase was of the materials of his craft; he had been without them too long. Half a day’s investigations and comparison brought him to the conclusion that sausages and mashed potatoes, twopence a plate, were the best food. Now, sausages once or twice a week for breakfast are not unpleasant. As lunch, even, with mashed potatoes, they become monotonous. At dinner they are impertinent. At the end of three days Dick loathed sausages, and, going, forth, pawned his watch to revel on sheep’s head, which is not as cheap as it looks, owing to the bones and the gravy. Then he returned to sausages and mashed potatoes. Then he confined himself entirely to mashed potatoes for a day, and was unhappy because of pain in his inside. Then he pawned his waistcoat and his tie, and thought regretfully of money thrown away in times past. There are few things more edifying unto Art than the actual belly-pinch of hunger, and Dick in his few walks abroad,–he did not care for exercise; it raised desires that could not be satisfied–found himself dividing mankind into two classes,–those who looked as if they might give him something to eat, and those who looked otherwise. ‘I never knew what I had to learn about the human face before,’ he thought; and, as a reward for his humility, Providence caused a cab-driver at a sausage-shop where Dick fed that night to leave half eaten a great chunk of bread. Dick took it,–would have fought all the world for its possession,–and it cheered him.

The month dragged through at last, and, nearly prancing with impatience, he went to draw his money. Then he hastened to Torpenhow’s address and smelt the smell of cooking meats all along the corridors of the chambers. Torpenhow was on the top floor, and Dick burst into his room, to be received with a hug which nearly cracked his ribs, as Torpenhow dragged him tot he light and spoke of twenty different things in the same breath.

‘But you’re looking tucked up,’ he concluded.

‘Got anything to eat?’ said Dick, his eye roaming round the room.

‘I shall be having breakfast in a minute. What do you say to sausages?’

‘No, anything but sausages! Torp, I’ve been starving on that accursed horse-flesh for thirty days and thirty nights.’

‘Now, what lunacy has been your latest?’

Dick spoke of the last few weeks with unbridled speech. Then he opened his coat; there was no waistcoat below. ‘I ran it fine, awfully fine, but I’ve just scraped through.’

‘You haven’t much sense, but you’ve got a backbone, anyhow. Eat, and talk afterwards.’ Dick fell upon eggs and bacon and gorged till he could gorge no more. Torpenhow handed him a filled pipe, and he smoked as men smoke who for three weeks have been deprived of good tobacco.

‘Ouf!’ said he. ‘That’s heavenly! Well?’

‘Why in the world didn’t you come to me?’

‘Couldn’t; I owe you too much already, old man. Besides I had a sort of superstition that this temporary starvation–that’s what it was, and it hurt–would bring me luck later. It’s over and done with now, and none of the syndicate know how hard up I was. Fire away. What’s the exact state of affairs as regards myself?’

‘You had my wire? You’ve caught on here. People like your work immensely. I don’t know why, but they do. They say you have a fresh touch and a new way of drawing things. And, because they’re chiefly home-bred English, they say you have insight. You’re wanted by half a dozen papers; you’re wanted to illustrate books.’

Dick grunted scornfully.

‘You’re wanted to work up your smaller sketches and sell them to the dealers. They seem to think the money sunk in you is a good investment.

Good Lord! who can account for the fathomless folly of the public?’

‘They’re a remarkably sensible people.’

‘They are subject to fits, if that’s what you mean; and you happen to be the object of the latest fit among those who are interested in what they call Art. Just now you’re a fashion, a phenomenon, or whatever you please. I appeared to be the only person who knew anything about you here, and I have been showing the most useful men a few of the sketches you gave me from time to time. Those coming after your work on the Central Southern Syndicate appear to have done your business. You’re in luck.’

‘Huh! call it luck! Do call it luck, when a man has been kicking about the world like a dog, waiting for it to come! I’ll luck ’em later on. I want a place to work first.’

‘Come here,’ said Torpenhow, crossing the landing. ‘This place is a big box room really, but it will do for you. There’s your skylight, or your north light, or whatever window you call it, and plenty of room to thrash about in, and a bedroom beyond. What more do you need?’

‘Good enough,’ said Dick, looking round the large room that took up a third of a top story in the rickety chambers overlooking the Thames. A pale yellow sun shone through the skylight and showed the much dirt of the place. Three steps led from the door to the landing, and three more to Torpenhow’s room. The well of the staircase disappeared into darkness, pricked by tiny gas-jets, and there were sounds of men talking and doors slamming seven flights below, in the warm gloom.

‘Do they give you a free hand here?’ said Dick, cautiously. He was Ishmael enough to know the value of liberty.

‘Anything you like; latch-keys and license unlimited. We are permanent tenants for the most part here. ‘Tisn’t a place I would recommend for a Young Men’s Christian Association, but it will serve. I took these rooms for you when I wired.’

‘You’re a great deal too kind, old man.’

‘You didn’t suppose you were going away from me, did you?’ Torpenhow put his hand on Dick’s shoulder, and the two walked up and down the room, henceforward to be called the studio, in sweet and silent communion. They heard rapping at Torpenhow’s door. ‘That’s some ruffian come up for a drink,’ said Torpenhow; and he raised his voice cheerily. There entered no one more ruffianly than a portly middle-aged gentleman in a satin-faced frockcoat. His lips were parted and pale, and there were deep pouches under the eyes.

‘Weak heart,’ said Dick to himself, and, as he shook hands, ‘very weak heart. His pulse is shaking his fingers.’

The man introduced himself as the head of the Central Southern Syndicate and ‘one of the most ardent admirers of your work, Mr.

Heldar. I assure you, in the name of the syndicate, that we are immensely indebted to you; and I trust, Mr. Heldar, you won’t forget that we were largely instrumental in bringing you before the public.’ He panted because of the seven flights of stairs.

Dick glanced at Torpenhow, whose left eyelid lay for a moment dead on his cheek.

‘I shan’t forget,’ said Dick, every instinct of defence roused in him.

‘You’ve paid me so well that I couldn’t, you know. By the way, when I am settled in this place I should like to send and get my sketches. There must be nearly a hundred and fifty of them with you.’

‘That is er–is what I came to speak about. I fear we can’t allow it exactly, Mr. Heldar. In the absence of any specified agreement, the sketches are our property, of course.’

‘Do you mean to say that you are going to keep them?’

‘Yes; and we hope to have your help, on your own terms, Mr. Heldar, to assist us in arranging a little exhibition, which, backed by our name and the influence we naturally command among the press, should be of material service to you. Sketches such as yours—-‘

‘Belong to me. You engaged me by wire, you paid me the lowest rates you dared. You can’t mean to keep them! Good God alive, man, they’re all I’ve got in the world!’

Torpenhow watched Dick’s face and whistled.

Dick walked up and down, thinking. He saw the whole of his little stock in trade, the first weapon of his equipment, annexed at the outset of his campaign by an elderly gentleman whose name Dick had not caught aright, who said that he represented a syndicate, which was a thing for which Dick had not the least reverence. The injustice of the proceedings did not much move him; he had seen the strong hand prevail too often in other places to be squeamish over the moral aspects of right and wrong.

But he ardently desired the blood of the gentleman in the frockcoat, and when he spoke again, and when he spoke again it was with a strained sweetness that Torpenhow knew well for the beginning of strife.

‘Forgive me, sir, but you have no–no younger man who can arrange this business with me?’

‘I speak for the syndicate. I see no reason for a third party to—-‘

‘You will in a minute. Be good enough to give back my sketches.’

The man stared blankly at Dick, and then at Torpenhow, who was leaning against the wall. He was not used to ex-employees who ordered him to be good enough to do things.

‘Yes, it is rather a cold-blooded steal,’ said Torpenhow, critically; ‘but I’m afraid, I am very much afraid, you’ve struck the wrong man. Be careful, Dick; remember, this isn’t the Soudan.’

‘Considering what services the syndicate have done you in putting your name before the world—-‘

This was not a fortunate remark; it reminded Dick of certain vagrant years lived out in loneliness and strife and unsatisfied desires. The memory did not contrast well with the prosperous gentleman who proposed to enjoy the fruit of those years.

‘I don’t know quite what to do with you,’ began Dick, meditatively. ‘Of course you’re a thief, and you ought to be half killed, but in your case you’d probably die. I don’t want you dead on this floor, and, besides, it’s unlucky just as one’s moving in. Don’t hit, sir; you’ll only excite yourself.’

He put one hand on the man’s forearm and ran the other down the plump body beneath the coat. ‘My goodness!’ said he to Torpenhow, ‘and this gray oaf dares to be a thief! I have seen an Esneh camel-driver have the black hide taken off his body in strips for stealing half a pound of wet dates, and he was as tough as whipcord. This things’ soft all over–like a woman.’

There are few things more poignantly humiliating than being handled by a man who does not intend to strike. The head of the syndicate began to breathe heavily. Dick walked round him, pawing him, as a cat paws a soft hearth-rug. Then he traced with his forefinger the leaden pouches underneath the eyes, and shook his head. ‘You were going to steal my things,–mine, mine, mine!–you, who don’t know when you may die.

Write a note to your office,–you say you’re the head of it,–and order them to give Torpenhow my sketches,–every one of them. Wait a minute: your hand’s shaking. Now!’ He thrust a pocket-book before him. The note was written. Torpenhow took it and departed without a word, while Dick walked round and round the spellbound captive, giving him such advice as he conceived best for the welfare of his soul. When Torpenhow returned with a gigantic portfolio, he heard Dick say, almost soothingly, ‘Now, I hope this will be a lesson to you; and if you worry me when I have settled down to work with any nonsense about actions for assault, believe me, I’ll catch you and manhandle you, and you’ll die. You haven’t very long to live, anyhow. Go! Imshi, Vootsak,–get out!’ The man departed, staggering and dazed. Dick drew a long breath: ‘Phew! what a lawless lot these people are! The first thing a poor orphan meets is gang robbery, organised burglary! Think of the hideous blackness of that man’s mind! Are my sketches all right, Torp?’

‘Yes; one hundred and forty-seven of them. Well, I must say, Dick, you’ve begun well.’

‘He was interfering with me. It only meant a few pounds to him, but it was everything to me. I don’t think he’ll bring an action. I gave him some medical advice gratis about the state of his body. It was cheap at the little flurry it cost him. Now, let’s look at my things.’

Two minutes later Dick had thrown himself down on the floor and was deep in the portfolio, chuckling lovingly as he turned the drawings over and thought of the price at which they had been bought.

The afternoon was well advanced when Torpenhow came to the door and saw Dick dancing a wild saraband under the skylight.

‘I builded better than I knew, Torp,’ he said, without stopping the dance.

‘They’re good! They’re damned good! They’ll go like flame! I shall have an exhibition of them on my own brazen hook. And that man would have cheated me out of it! Do you know that I’m sorry now that I didn’t actually hit him?’

‘Go out,’ said Torpenhow,–‘go out and pray to be delivered from the sin of arrogance, which you never will be. Bring your things up from whatever place you’re staying in, and we’ll try to make this barn a little more shipshape.’

‘And then–oh, then,’ said Dick, still capering, ‘we will spoil the Egyptians!’?

The wolf-cub at even lay hid in the corn, When the smoke of the cooking hung gray: He knew where the doe made a couch for her fawn, And he looked to his strength for his prey.

But the moon swept the smoke-wreaths away.

And he turned from his meal in the villager’s close, And he bayed to the moon as she rose.–In Seonee.?

‘WELL, and how does success taste?’ said Torpenhow, some three months later. He had just returned to chambers after a holiday in the country.

‘Good,’ said Dick, as he sat licking his lips before the easel in the studio.

‘I want more,–heaps more. The lean years have passed, and I approve of these fat ones.’

‘Be careful, old man. That way lies bad work.’

Torpenhow was sprawling in a long chair with a small fox-terrier asleep on his chest, while Dick was preparing a canvas. A dais, a background, and a lay-figure were the only fixed objects in the place. They rose from a wreck of oddments that began with felt-covered water-bottles, belts, and regimental badges, and ended with a small bale of second-hand uniforms and a stand of mixed arms. The mark of muddy feet on the dais showed that a military model had just gone away. The watery autumn sunlight was falling, and shadows sat in the corners of the studio.

‘Yes,’ said Dick, deliberately, ‘I like the power; I like the fun; I like the fuss; and above all I like the money. I almost like the people who make the fuss and pay the money. Almost. But they’re a queer gang,–an amazingly queer gang!’

‘They have been good enough to you, at any rate. Than tin-pot exhibition of your sketches must have paid. Did you see that the papers called it the “Wild Work Show”?’

‘Never mind. I sold every shred of canvas I wanted to; and, on my word, I believe it was because they believed I was a self-taught flagstone artist.

I should have got better prices if I worked my things on wool or scratched them on camel-bone instead of using mere black and white and colour. Verily, they are a queer gang, these people. Limited isn’t the word to describe ’em. I met a fellow the other day who told me that it was impossible that shadows on white sand should be blue,–ultramarine,–as they are. I found out, later, that the man had been as far as Brighton beach; but he knew all about Art, confound him. He gave me a lecture on it, and recommended me to go to school to learn technique. I wonder what old Kami would have said to that.’

‘When were you under Kami, man of extraordinary beginnings?’

‘I studied with him for two years in Paris. He taught by personal magnetism. All he ever said was, “Continuez, mes enfants,” and you had to make the best you could of that. He had a divine touch, and he knew something about colour. Kami used to dream colour; I swear he could never have seen the genuine article; but he evolved it; and it was good.’

‘Recollect some of those views in the Soudan?’ said Torpenhow, with a provoking drawl.

Dick squirmed in his place. ‘Don’t! It makes me want to get out there again. What colour that was! Opal and umber and amber and claret and brick-red and sulphur–cockatoo-crest–sulphur–against brown, with a nigger-black rock sticking up in the middle of it all, and a decorative frieze of camels festooning in front of a pure pale turquoise sky.’ He began to walk up and down. ‘And yet, you know, if you try to give these people the thing as God gave it, keyed down to their comprehension and according to the powers He has given you—-‘

‘Modest man! Go on.’

‘Half a dozen epicene young pagans who haven’t even been to Algiers will tell you, first, that your notion is borrowed, and, secondly, that it isn’t Art.

”This comes of my leaving town for a month. Dickie, you’ve been promenading among the toy-shops and hearing people talk.’

‘I couldn’t help it,’ said Dick, penitently. ‘You weren’t here, and it was lonely these long evenings. A man can’t work for ever.’

‘A man might have gone to a pub, and got decently drunk.’

‘I wish I had; but I forgathered with some men of sorts. They said they were artists, and I knew some of them could draw,–but they wouldn’t draw. They gave me tea,–tea at five in the afternoon!–and talked about Art and the state of their souls. As if their souls mattered. I’ve heard more about Art and seen less of her in the last six months than in the whole of my life. Do you remember Cassavetti, who worked for some continental syndicate, out with the desert column? He was a regular Christmas-tree of contraptions when he took the field in full fig, with his water-bottle, lanyard, revolver, writing-case, housewife, gig-lamps, and the Lord knows what all. He used to fiddle about with ’em and show us how they worked; but he never seemed to do much except fudge his reports from the Nilghai. See?’

‘Dear old Nilghai! He’s in town, fatter than ever. He ought to be up here this evening. I see the comparison perfectly. You should have kept clear of all that man-millinery. Serves you right; and I hope it will unsettle your mind.’

‘It won’t. It has taught me what Art–holy sacred Art–means.’

‘You’ve learnt something while I’ve been away. What is Art?’

‘Give ’em what they know, and when you’ve done it once do it again.’

Dick dragged forward a canvas laid face to the wall. ‘Here’s a sample of real Art. It’s going to be a facsimile reproduction for a weekly. I called it “His Last Shot.” It’s worked up from the little water-colour I made outside El Maghrib. Well, I lured my model, a beautiful rifleman, up here with drink; I drored him, and I redrored him, and I redrored him, and I made him a flushed, dishevelled, bedevilled scallawag, with his helmet at the back of his head, and the living fear of death in his eye, and the blood oozing out of a cut over his ankle-bone. He wasn’t pretty, but he was all soldier and very much man.’

‘Once more, modest child!’

Dick laughed. ‘Well, it’s only to you I’m talking. I did him just as well as I knew how, making allowance for the slickness of oils. Then the art-manager of that abandoned paper said that his subscribers wouldn’t like it. It was brutal and coarse and violent,–man being naturally gentle when he’s fighting for his life. They wanted something more restful, with a little more colour. I could have said a good deal, but you might as well talk to a sheep as an art-manager. I took my “Last Shot” back. Behold the result! I put him into a lovely red coat without a speck on it. That is Art. I polished his boots,–observe the high light on the toe. That is Art. I cleaned his rifle,–rifles are always clean on service,–because that is Art.

I pipeclayed his helmet,–pipeclay is always used on active service, and is indispensable to Art. I shaved his chin, I washed his hands, and gave him an air of fatted peace. Result, military tailor’s pattern-plate. Price, thank Heaven, twice as much as for the first sketch, which was moderately decent.’

‘And do you suppose you’re going to give that thing out as your work?’

‘Why not? I did it. Alone I did it, in the interests of sacred, home-bred Art and Dickenson’s Weekly.’

Torpenhow smoked in silence for a while. Then came the verdict, delivered from rolling clouds: ‘If you were only a mass of blathering vanity, Dick, I wouldn’t mind,–I’d let you go to the deuce on your own mahl-stick; but when I consider what you are to me, and when I find that to vanity you add the twopenny-halfpenny pique of a twelve-year-old girl, then I bestir myself in your behalf. Thus!’

The canvas ripped as Torpenhow’s booted foot shot through it, and the terrier jumped down, thinking rats were about.

‘If you have any bad language to use, use it. You have not. I continue.

You are an idiot, because no man born of woman is strong enough to take liberties with his public, even though they be–which they ain’t–all you say they are.’

‘But they don’t know any better. What can you expect from creatures born and bred in this light?’ Dick pointed to the yellow fog. ‘If they want furniture-polish, let them have furniture-polish, so long as they pay for it.

They are only men and women. You talk as if they were gods.’

‘That sounds very fine, but it has nothing to do with the case. They are they people you have to do work for, whether you like it or not. They are your masters. Don’t be deceived, Dickie, you aren’t strong enough to trifle with them,–or with yourself, which is more important.

Moreover,–Come back, Binkie: that red daub isn’t going anywhere,–unless you take precious good care, you will fall under the damnation of the check-book, and that’s worse than death. You will get drunk–you-re half drunk already–on easily acquired money. For that money and you own infernal vanity you are willing to deliberately turn out bad work. You’ll do quite enough bad work without knowing it. And, Dickie, as I love you and as I know you love me, I am not going to let you cut off your nose to spite your face for all the gold in England. That’s settled. Now swear.’

‘Don’t know, said Dick. ‘I’ve been trying to make myself angry, but I can’t, you’re so abominably reasonable. There will be a row on Dickenson’s Weekly, I fancy.’

‘Why the Dickenson do you want to work on a weekly paper? It’s slow bleeding of power.’

‘It brings in the very desirable dollars,’ said Dick, his hands in his pockets.

Torpenhow watched him with large contempt. ‘Why, I thought it was a man!’ said he. ‘It’s a child.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Dick, wheeling quickly. ‘You’ve no notion owhat the certainty of cash means to a man who has always wanted it badly.

Nothing will pay me for some of my life’s joys; on that Chinese pig-boat, for instance, when we ate bread and jam for every meal, because Ho-Wang wouldn’t allow us anything better, and it all tasted of pig,–Chinese pig. I’ve worked for this, I’ve sweated and I’ve starved for this, line on line and month after month. And now I’ve got it I am going to make the most of it while it lasts. Let them pay–they’ve no knowledge.’

‘What does Your Majesty please to want? You can’t smoke more than you do; you won’t drink; you’re a gross feeder; and you dress in the dark, by the look of you. You wouldn’t keep a horse the other day when I suggested, because, you said, it might fall lame, and whenever you cross the street you take a hansom. Even you are not foolish enough to suppose that theatres and all the live things you can by thereabouts mean Life.

What earthly need have you for money?’

‘It’s there, bless its golden heart,’ said Dick. ‘It’s there all the time.

Providence has sent me nuts while I have teeth to crack ’em with. I haven’t yet found the nut I wish to crack, but I’m keeping my teeth filed.

Perhaps some day you and I will go for a walk round the wide earth.’

‘With no work to do, nobody to worry us, and nobody to compete with? You would be unfit to speak to in a week. Besides, I shouldn’t go. I don’t care to profit by the price of a man’s soul,–for that’s what it would mean.

Dick, it’s no use arguing. You’re a fool.’

‘Don’t see it. When I was on that Chinese pig-boat, our captain got credit for saving about twenty-five thousand very seasick little pigs, when our old tramp of a steamer fell foul of a timber-junk. Now, taking those pigs as a parallel—-‘

‘Oh, confound your parallels! Whenever I try to improve your soul, you always drag in some anecdote from your very shady past. Pigs aren’t the British public; and self-respect is self-respect the world over. Go out for a walk and try to catch some self-respect. And, I say, if the Nilghai comes up this evening can I show him your diggings?’

‘Surely.’ And Dick departed, to take counsel with himself in the rapidly gathering London fog.

Half an hour after he had left, the Nilghai laboured up the staircase. He was the chiefest, as he was the youngest, of the war correspondents, and his experiences dated from the birth of the needle-gun. Saving only his ally, Keneu the Great War Eagle, there was no man higher in the craft than he, and he always opened his conversation with the news that there would be trouble in the Balkans in the spring. Torpenhow laughed as he entered.

‘Never mind the trouble in the Balkans. Those little states are always screeching. You’ve heard about Dick’s luck?’

‘Yes; he has been called up to notoriety, hasn’t he? I hope you keep him properly humble. He wants suppressing from time to time.’

‘He does. He’s beginning to take liberties with what he thinks is his reputation.’

‘Already! By Jove, he has cheek! I don’t know about his reputation, but he’ll come a cropper if he tries that sort of thing.’

‘So I told him. I don’t think he believes it.’

‘They never do when they first start off. What’s that wreck on the ground there?’

‘Specimen of his latest impertinence.’ Torpenhow thrust the torn edges of the canvas together and showed the well-groomed picture to the Nilghai, who looked at it for a moment and whistled.

‘It’s a chromo,’ said he,–‘a chromo-litholeomargarine fake! What possessed him to do it? And yet how thoroughly he has caught the note that catches a public who think with their boots and read with their elbows! The cold-blooded insolence of the work almost saves it; but he mustn’t go on with this. Hasn’t he been praised and cockered up too much? You know these people here have no sense of proportion. They’ll call him a second Detaille and a third-hand Meissonier while his fashion lasts. It’s windy diet for a colt.’

‘I don’t think it affects Dick much. You might as well call a young wolf a lion and expect him to take the compliment in exchange for a shin-bone.

Dick’s soul is in the bank. He’s working for cash.’

‘Now he has thrown up war work, I suppose he doesn’t see that the obligations of the service are just the same, only the proprietors are changed.’

‘How should he know? He thinks he is his own master.’

‘Does he? I could undeceive him for his good, if there’s any virtue in print. He wants the whiplash.’

‘Lay it on with science, then. I’d flay him myself, but I like him too much.’

‘I’ve no scruples. He had the audacity to try to cut me out with a woman at Cairo once. I forgot that, but I remember now.’

‘Did he cut you out?’

‘You’ll see when I have dealt with him. But, after all, what’s the good? Leave him alone and he’ll come home, if he has any stuff in him, dragging or wagging his tail behind him. There’s more in a week of life than in a lively weekly. None the less I’ll slate him. I’ll slate him ponderously in the Cataclysm.’

‘Good luck to you; but I fancy nothing short of a crowbar would make Dick wince. His soul seems to have been fired before we came across him.

He’s intensely suspicious and utterly lawless.’

‘Matter of temper,’ said the Nilghai. ‘It’s the same with horses. Some you wallop and they work, some you wallop and they jib, and some you wallop and they go out for a walk with their hands in their pockets.’

‘That’s exactly what Dick has done,’ said Torpenhow. ‘Wait till he comes back. In the meantime, you can begin your slating here. I’ll show you some of his last and worst work in his studio.’

Dick had instinctively sought running water for a comfort to his mood of mind. He was leaning over the Embankment wall, watching the rush of the Thames through the arches of Westminster Bridge. He began by thinking of Torpenhow’s advice, but, as of custom, lost himself in the study of the faces flocking past. Some had death written on their features, and Dick marvelled that they could laugh. Others, clumsy and coarse-built for the most part, were alight with love; others were merely drawn and lined with work; but there was something, Dick knew, to be made out of them all. The poor at least should suffer that he might learn, and the rich should pay for the output of his learning. Thus his credit in the world and his cash balance at the bank would be increased. So much the better for him. He had suffered. Now he would take toll of the ills of others.

The fog was driven apart for a moment, and the sun shone, a blood-red wafer, on the water. Dick watched the spot till he heard the voice of the tide between the piers die down like the wash of the sea at low tide. A girl hard pressed by her lover shouted shamelessly, ‘Ah, get away, you beast!’

and a shift of the same wind that had opened the fog drove across Dick’s face the black smoke of a river-steamer at her berth below the wall. He was blinded for the moment, then spun round and found himself face to face with–Maisie.

There was no mistaking. The years had turned the child to a woman, but they had not altered the dark-gray eyes, the thin scarlet lips, or the firmly modelled mouth and chin; and, that all should be as it was of old, she wore a closely fitting gray dress.

Since the human soul is finite and not in the least under its own command, Dick, advancing, said ‘Halloo!’ after the manner of schoolboys, and Maisie answered, ‘Oh, Dick, is that you?’ Then, against his will, and before the brain newly released from considerations of the cash balance had time to dictate to the nerves, every pulse of Dick’s body throbbed furiously and his palate dried in his mouth. The fog shut down again, and Maisie’s face was pearl-white through it. No word was spoken, but Dick fell into step at her side, and the two paced the Embankment together, keeping the step as perfectly as in their afternoon excursions to the mud-flats. Then Dick, a little hoarsely– ‘What has happened to Amomma?’

‘He died, Dick. Not cartridges; over-eating. He was always greedy. Isn’t it funny?’

‘Yes. No. Do you mean Amomma?’

‘Ye–es. No. This. Where have you come from?’

‘Over there,’ He pointed eastward through the fog. ‘And you?’

‘Oh, I’m in the north,–the black north, across all the Park. I am very busy.’

‘I paint a great deal. That’s all I have to do.’

‘Why, what’s happened? You had three hundred a year.’

‘I have that still. I am painting; that’s all.’

‘Are you alone, then?’

‘There’s a girl living with me. Don’t walk so fast, Dick; you’re out of step.’

‘Then you noticed it too?’

‘Of course I did. You’re always out of step.’

‘So I am. I’m sorry. You went on with the painting?’

‘Of course. I said I should. I was at the Slade, then at Merton’s in St.

John’s Wood, the big studio, then I pepper-potted,–I mean I went to the National,–and now I’m working under Kami.’

‘But Kami is in Paris surely?’

‘No; he has his teaching studio in Vitry-sur-Marne. I work with him in the summer, and I live in London in the winter. I’m a householder.’

‘Do you sell much?’

‘Now and again, but not often. There is my ‘bus. I must take it or lose half an hour. Good-bye, Dick.’

‘Good-bye, Maisie. Won’t you tell me where you live? I must see you again; and perhaps I could help you. I–I paint a little myself.’

‘I may be in the Park to-morrow, if there is no working light. I walk from the Marble Arch down and back again; that is my little excursion. But of course I shall see you again.’ She stepped into the omnibus and was swallowed up by the fog.

‘Well–I–am–damned!’ exclaimed Dick, and returned to the chambers.

Torpenhow and the Nilghai found him sitting on the steps to the stgudio door, repeating the phrase with an awful gravity.

‘You’ll be more damned when I’m done with you,’ said the Nilghai, upheaving his bulk from behind Torpenhow’s shoulder and waving a sheaf of half-dry manuscript. ‘Dick, it is of common report that you are suffering from swelled head.’

‘Halloo, Nilghai. Back again? How are the Balkans and all the little Balkans? One side of your face is out of drawing, as usual.’

‘Never mind that. I am commissioned to smite you in print. Torpenhow refuses from false delicacy. I’ve been overhauling the pot-boilers in your studio. They are simply disgraceful.’

‘Oho! that’s it, is it? If you think you can slate me, you’re wrong. You can only describe, and you need as much room to turn in, on paper, as a P. and O. cargo-boat. But continue, and be swift. I’m going to bed.’

‘H’m! h’m! h’m! The first part only deals with your pictures. Here’s the peroration: “For work done without conviction, for power wasted on trivialities, for labour expended with levity for the deliberate purpose of winning the easy applause of a fashion-driven public—-” ‘That’s “His Last Shot,” second edition. Go on.’

‘—-“public, there remains but one end,–the oblivion that is preceded by toleration and cenotaphed with contempt. From that fate Mr. Heldar has yet to prove himself out of danger.’

‘Wow–wow–wow–wow–wow!’ said Dick, profanely. ‘It’s a clumsy ending and vile journalese, but it’s quite true. And yet,’–he sprang to his feet and snatched at the manuscript,–‘you scarred, deboshed, battered old gladiator! you’re sent out when a war begins, to minister to the blind, brutal, British public’s bestial thirst for blood. They have no arenas now, but they must have special correspondents. You’re a fat gladiator who comes up through a trap-door and talks of what he’s seen. You stand on precisely the same level as an energetic bishop, an affable actress, a devastating cyclone, or–mine own sweet self. And you presume to lecture me about my work! Nilghai, if it were worth while I’d caricature you in four papers!’

The Nilghai winced. He had not thought of this.

‘As it is, I shall take this stuff and tear it small–so!’ The manuscript fluttered in slips down the dark well of the staircase. ‘Go home, Nilghai,’

said Dick; ‘go home to your lonely little bed, and leave me in peace. I am about to turn in till to-morrow.’

‘Why, it isn’t seven yet!’ said Torpenhow, with amazement.

‘It shall be two in the morning, if I choose,’ said Dick, backing to the studio door. ‘I go to grapple with a serious crisis, and I shan’t want any dinner.’

The door shut and was locked.

‘What can you do with a man like that?’ said the Nilghai.

‘Leave him alone. He’s as mad as a hatter.’

At eleven there was a kicking on the studio door. ‘Is the Nilghai with you still?’ said a voice from within. ‘Then tell him he might have condensed the whole of his lumbering nonsense into an epigram: “Only the free are bond, and only the bond are free.” Tell him he’s an idiot, Torp, and tell him I’m another.’

‘All right. Come out and have supper. You’re smoking on an empty stomach.’

There was no answer.

‘I have a thousand men,’ said he,
‘To wait upon my will,
And towers nine upon the Tyne,
And three upon the Till.’?

‘And what care I for you men,’ said she, ‘Or towers from Tyne to Till,
Sith you must go with me,’ she said, ‘To wait upon my will?’

Sir Hoggie and the Fairies

NEXT morning Torpenhow found Dick sunk in deepest repose of tobacco.

‘Well, madman, how d’you feel?’

‘I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.’

‘You had much better do some work.’

‘Maybe; but I’m in no hurry. I’ve made a discovery. Torp, there’s too much Ego in my Cosmos.’

‘Not really! Is this revelation due to my lectures, or the Nilghai’s?’

‘It came to me suddenly, all on my own account. Much too much Ego; and now I’m going to work.’

He turned over a few half-finished sketches, drummed on a new canvas, cleaned three brushes, set Binkie to bite the toes of the lay figure, rattled through his collection of arms and accoutrements, and then went out abruptly, declaring that he had done enough for the day.

‘This is positively indecent,’ said Torpenhow, ‘and the first time that Dick has ever broken up a light morning. Perhaps he has found out that he has a soul, or an artistic temperament, or something equally valuable.

That comes of leaving him alone for a month. Perhaps he has been going out of evenings. I must look to this.’ He rang for the bald-headed old housekeeper, whom nothing could astonish or annoy.

‘Beeton, did Mr. Heldar dine out at all while I was out of town?’

‘Never laid ‘is dress-clothes out once, sir, all the time. Mostly ‘e dined in; but ‘e brought some most remarkable young gentlemen up ‘ere after theatres once or twice. Remarkable fancy they was. You gentlemen on the top floor does very much as you likes, but it do seem to me, sir, droppin’ a walkin’-stick down five flights o’ stairs an’ then goin’ down four abreast to pick it up again at half-past two in the mornin’, singin’

“Bring back the whiskey, Willie darlin,’”–not once or twice, but scores o’ times,–isn’t charity to the other tenants. What I say is, “Do as you would be done by.” That’s my motto.’

‘Of course! of course! I’m afraid the top floor isn’t the quietest in the house.’

‘I make no complaints, sir. I have spoke to Mr. Heldar friendly, an’ he laughed, an’ did me a picture of the missis that is as good as a coloured print. It ‘asn’t the high shine of a photograph, but what I say is, “Never look a gift-horse in the mouth.” Mr. Heldar’s dress-clothes ‘aven’t been on him for weeks.’

‘Then it’s all right,’ said Torpenhow to himself. ‘Orgies are healthy, and Dick has a head of his own, but when it comes to women making eyes I’m not so certain,–Binkie, never you be a man, little dorglums. They’re contrary brutes, and they do things without any reason.’

Dick had turned northward across the Park, but he was walking in the spirit on the mud-flats with Maisie. He laughed aloud as he remembered the day when he had decked Amomma’s horns with the ham-frills, and Maisie, white with rage, had cuffed him. How long those four years seemed in review, and how closely Maisie was connected with every hour of them! Storm across the sea, and Maisie in a gray dress on the beach, sweeping her drenched hair out of her eyes and laughing at the homeward race of the fishing-smacks; hot sunshine on the mud-flats, and Maisie sniffing scornfully, with her chin in the air; Maisie flying before the wind that threshed the foreshore and drove the sand like small shot about her ears; Maisie, very composed and independent, telling lies to Mrs. Jennett while Dick supported her with coarser perjuries; Maisie picking her way delicately from stone to stone, a pistol in her hand and her teeth firm-set; and Maisie in a gray dress sitting on the grass between the mouth of a cannon and a nodding yellow sea-poppy. The pictures passed before him one by one, and the last stayed the longest.

Dick was perfectly happy with a quiet peace that was as new to his mind as it was foreign to his experiences. It never occurred to him that there might be other calls upon his time than loafing across the Park in the forenoon.

‘There’s a good working light now,’ he said, watching his shadow placidly. ‘Some poor devil ought to be grateful for this. And there’s Maisie.’

She was walking towards him from the Marble Arch, and he saw that no mannerism of her gait had been changed. It was good to find her still Maisie, and, so to speak, his next-door neighbour. No greeting passed between them, because there had been none in the old days.

‘What are you doing out of your studio at this hour?’ said Dick, as one who was entitled to ask.

‘Idling. Just idling. I got angry with a chin and scraped it out. Then I left it in a little heap of paint-chips and came away.’

‘I know what palette-knifing means. What was the piccy?’

‘A fancy head that wouldn’t come right,–horrid thing!’

‘I don’t like working over scraped paint when I’m doing flesh. The grain comes up woolly as the paint dries.’

‘Not if you scrape properly.’ Maisie waved her hand to illustrate her methods. There was a dab of paint on the white cuff. Dick laughed.

‘You’re as untidy as ever.’

‘That comes well from you. Look at your own cuff.’

‘By Jove, yes! It’s worse than yours. I don’t think we’ve much altered in anything. Let’s see, though.’ He looked at Maisie critically. The pale blue haze of an autumn day crept between the tree-trunks of the Park and made a background for the gray dress, the black velvet toque above the black hair, and the resolute profile.

‘No, there’s nothing changed. How good it is! D’you remember when I fastened your hair into the snap of a hand-bag?’

Maisie nodded, with a twinkle in her eyes, and turned her full face to Dick.

‘Wait a minute,’ said he. ‘That mouth is down at the corners a little.

Who’s been worrying you, Maisie?’

‘No one but myself. I never seem to get on with my work, and yet I try hard enough, and Kami says—-‘

‘”Continuez, mesdemoiselles. Continuez toujours, mes enfants.” Kami is depressing. I beg your pardon.’

‘Yes, that’s what he says. He told me last summer that I was doing better and he’d let me exhibit this year.’

‘Not in this place, surely?’

‘Of course not. The Salon.’

‘I’ve been beating my wings long enough. Where do you exhibit, Dick?’

‘I don’t exhibit. I sell.’

‘What is your line, then?’

‘Haven’t you heard?’ Dick’s eyes opened. Was this thing possible? He cast about for some means of conviction. They were not far from the Marble Arch. ‘Come up Oxford Street a little and I’ll show you.’

A small knot of people stood round a print-shop that Dick knew well.

‘Some reproduction of my work inside,’ he said, with suppressed triumph. Never before had success tasted so sweet upon the tongue. ‘You see the sort of things I paint. D’you like it?’

Maisie looked at the wild whirling rush of a field-battery going into action under fire. Two artillery-men stood behind her in the crowd.

‘They’ve chucked the off lead-‘orse’ said one to the other. ”E’s tore up awful, but they’re makin’ good time with the others. That lead-driver drives better nor you, Tom. See ‘ow cunnin’ ‘e’s nursin’ ‘is ‘orse.’

‘Number Three’ll be off the limber, next jolt,’ was the answer.

‘No, ‘e won’t. See ‘ow ‘is foot’s braced against the iron? ‘E’s all right.’

Dick watched Maisie’s face and swelled with joy–fine, rank, vulgar triumph. She was more interested in the little crowd than in the picture.

That was something that she could understand.

‘And I wanted it so! Oh, I did want it so!’ she said at last, under her breath.

‘Me,–all me!’ said Dick, placidly. ‘Look at their faces. It hits ’em. They don’t know what makes their eyes and mouths open; but I know. And I know my work’s right.’

‘Yes. I see. Oh, what a thing to have come to one!’

‘Come to one, indeed! I had to go out and look for it. What do you think?’

‘I call it success. Tell me how you got it.’

They returned to the Park, and Dick delivered himself of the saga of his own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a woman.

From the beginning he told the tale, the I–I–I’s flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. Maisie listened and nodded her head. The histories of strife and privation did not move her a hair’s-breadth. At the end of each canto he would conclude, ‘And that gave me some notion of handling colour,’ or light, or whatever it might be that he had set out to pursue and understand. He led her breathless across half the world, speaking as he had never spoken in his life before.

And in the flood-tide of his exaltation there came upon him a great desire to pick up this maiden who nodded her head and said, ‘I understand. Go on,’–to pick her up and carry her away with him, because she was Maisie, and because she understood, and because she was his right, and a woman to be desired above all women.

Then he checked himself abruptly. ‘And so I took all I wanted,’ he said, ‘and I had to fight for it. Now you tell.’

Maisie’s tale was almost as gray as her dress. It covered years of patient toil backed by savage pride that would not be broken thought dealers laughed, and fogs delayed work, and Kami was unkind and even sarcastic, and girls in other studios were painfully polite. It had a few bright spots, in pictures accepted at provincial exhibitions, but it wound up with the oft repeated wail, ‘And so you see, Dick, I had no success, though I worked so hard.’

Then pity filled Dick. Even thus had Maisie spoken when she could not hit the breakwater, half an hour before she had kissed him. And that had happened yesterday.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you something, if you’ll believe it.’ The words were shaping themselves of their own accord. ‘The whole thing, lock, stock, and barrel, isn’t worth one big yellow sea-poppy below Fort Keeling.’

Maisie flushed a little. ‘It’s all very well for you to talk, but you’ve had the success and I haven’t.’

‘Let me talk, then. I know you’ll understand. Maisie, dear, it sounds a bit absurd, but5 those ten years never existed, and I’ve come back again. It really is just the same. Can’t you see? You’re alone now and I’m alone.

What’s the use of worrying? Come to me instead, darling.’

Maisie poked the gravel with her parasol. They were sitting on a bench.

‘I understand,’ she said slowly. ‘But I’ve got my work to do, and I must do it.’

‘Do it with me, then, dear. I won’t interrupt.’

‘No, I couldn’t. It’s my work,–mine,–mine,–mine! I’ve been alone all my life in myself, and I’m not going to belong to anybody except myself. I remember things as well as you do, but that doesn’t count. We were babies then, and we didn’t know what was before us. Dick, don’t be selfish. I think I see my way to a little success next year. Don’t take it away from me.’

‘I beg your pardon, darling. It’s my fault for speaking stupidly. I can’t expect you to throw up all your life just because I’m back. I’ll go to my own place and wait a little.’

‘But, Dick, I don’t want you to–go–out of–my life, now you’ve just come back.’

‘I’m at your orders; forgive me.’ Dick devoured the troubled little face with his eyes. There was triumph in them, because he could not conceive that Maisie should refuse sooner or later to love him, since he loved her.

‘It’s wrong of me,’ said Maisie, more slowly than before; ‘it’s wrong and selfish; but, oh, I’ve been so lonely! No, you misunderstand. Now I’ve seen you again,–it’s absurd, but I want to keep you in my life.’

‘Naturally. We belong.’

‘We don’t; but you always understood me, and there is so much in my work that you could help me in. You know things and the ways of doing things. You must.’

‘I do, I fancy, or else I don’t know myself. Then you won’t care to lose sight of me altogether, and–you want me to help you in your work?’

‘Yes; but remember, Dick, nothing will ever come of it. That’s why I feel so selfish. Can’t things stay as they are? I do want your help.’

‘You shall have it. But let’s consider. I must see your pics first, and

The Light That Failed Poem by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

The Light That Failed

So we settled it all when the storm was done
As comfy as comfy could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears,
Because I was only three.
And Teddy would run to the rainbow’s foot
Because he was five and a man—
And that’s how it all began, my dears,
And that’s how it all began!

Then we brought the lances down—then the trumpets blew—
When we went to Kandahar, ridin’ two an’ two.
Ridin’—ridin’—ridin’ two an’ two!
Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-a!
All the way to Kandahar,
Ridin’ two an’ two.

The wolf-cub at even lay hid in the corn,
When the smoke of the cooking hung grey.
He knew where the doe made a couch for her fawn,
And he looked to his strength for his prey.
But the moon swept the smoke-wreaths away;
And he turned from his meal in the villager’s close,
And he bayed to the moon as she rose.

«I have a thousand men,» said he,
«To wait upon my will;
And towers nine upon the Tyne,
And three upon the Till.»

«And what care I for your men? » said she,
«Or towers from Tyne to Till?
Sith you must go with me,» said she,
«To wait upon my will.

And you may lead a thousand men
Nor ever draw the rein,
But before you lead the Fairy Queen
‘Twill burst your heart in twain.»

He has slipped his foot from the stirrup-bar,
The bridle from his hand,
And he is bound by hand and foot
To the Queen of Fairy Land.

«If I have taken the common clay
And wrought it cunningly
In the shape of a God that was digged a clod,
The greater honour to me.»

«If thou hast taken the common clay,
And thy hands be not free
From the taint of the soil, thou hast made thy spoil
The greater shame to thee.»

The lark will make her hymn to God,
The partridge call her brood,
While I forget the heath I trod,
The fields wherein I stood.

‘Tis dule to know not night from morn,
But greater dule to know
I can but hear the hunter’s horn
That once I used to blow.

There were three friends that spoke of the dead—
The strong man fights but the sick man dies—
«And would he were here with us now,» they said,
«The Sun in our face and the wind in our eyes.»

Yet at the last ere our spearmen had found him,
Yet at the last, ere a sword-thrust could save,
Yet at the last, with his masters around him,
He spoke of the Faith as a master to slave.
Yet at the last though the Kafirs had maimed him,
Broken by bondage and wrecked by the reiver,
Yet at the last, tho’ the darkness had claimed him,
He colled on Allah and died a Believer!

The Light that Failed

An Introduction

by Geoffrey Annis

Background

The Light That Failed is Kipling’s first novel, written when he was 26 years old, and therefore of considerable importance in the canon of his works. Since its initial publication in 1891 it has encountered a substantial body of negative, even hostile criticism. However, Jad Adams author of a recent (2006) Kipling biography, reminds us that the novel has stayed in print ever since its first publication, over a hundred years ago.

The story

The story centres on Dick Heldar – a thinly-veiled Kipling self-portrait – and his relationship with, and unrequited love for, Maisie, his childhood playmate, who was based on the real-life artist Flo Garrard, of whom more later. As children they are both under the cruel and repressive care of Mrs Jennet, where, even as a child, Maisie treats Dick with indifference. Dick later becomes a successful artist through his war-time illustrations, for London newspapers, of the Sudan campaign. (This was mounted in 1885, to defeat the Mahdi and relieve General Gordon at Khartoum.) In the Sudan Dick meets Gilbert Torpenhow, the correspondent of the Central Southern Syndicate, who is instrumental in spreading Dick’s reputation. They pledge friendship and promise to keep in touch.

Later, after Dick’s travels in Africa and the Orient, he hears from Torpenhow that his illustrations have made him famous, and this renews the friendship. Dick returns to London, meets Maisie again unexpectedly, and falls in love with her. Maisie, however, has artistic ambitions of her own, and rejects his passion to concentrate on her career, encouraged by her nameless companion, ‘the red-haired girl’, between Dick and whom there springs up a complex love-hate relationship. She is jealous of Dick’s attention to Maisie, but is secretly attracted to him. She makes a drawing of him, mocking his enslavement to Maisie, and vindictively destroys it.

Maisie and Dick begin work on their own versions of ‘Melancolia’ the symbolic figure in James Thompson’s poem “The City of Dreadful Night”, a key influence on the novel and discussed in detail later. Their competitiveness creates unresolveable personal and artistic conflict. Dick thinks himself the superior artist, convinced that Maisie has neither the insight nor ability to meet such a challenge. Throughout, Kipling sustains the novel’s one true lasting relationship, between Dick and Torpenhow. Dick has endured the earlier pressures of commercialism on his own artistic integrity, his fruitless passion for Maisie, and the conflict between Love and Art. Then he becomes incurably blind from the delayed effects of a Sudan war wound.

Emotionally distraught, Maisie leaves him. He is left alone in his blindness and privation, with only his artistic credo and dedication intact. He is finally drawn from the world of art to the world of action, once again on the battlefields of the Sudan. He is struck by a stray bullet, and dies in Torpenhow’s arms.

Critical responses

One could extend the catalogue of strictures, assertions and counter-arguments ad infinitum, and to little purpose. Readers will, after all, come to their own conclusions on these matters.The fact is that The Light That Failed has always suffered in comparison with Kim (1901), Kipling’s most famous and popular novel. The aim of these notes is to move it out of the shadows, and assess its qualities on their own literary merits, as well as considering its rich background and range of themes.

Cruelty and brutality

One recurrent critical theme does, though, merit closer consideration; the novel’s recurrent cruelty and brutality. Many critics and writers who are admirers of Kipling have had difficulties with this, both in this novel and in other works. J M Barrie and Henry James, for example, whilst recognising his enormous talent, could not accept the brutality and cynicism as they perceived them. George Orwell, in his famous Horizon essay on Kipling (Horizon 1942 in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters Vol 2, Penguin Books 1970), acknowledged the realism of Kipling’s vision of war, seeing him as a prophet of late 19th Century imperial expansionism, and admiring the way the book captures the atmosphere of life at that time. But he echoes the charge of a ‘definite strain of sadism’ (p. 214), and the ‘hunger for cruelty’ (p. 222), to be confronted and answered.

The problem tends to arise in relation to three particular scenes: Torpenhow’s gouging out the eye of the Arab soldier in Chapter II; Dick’s manhandling of the Syndicate Head in Chapter III, and Dick’s orgiastic response to the machine-gunning of enemy troops in the final chapter. One might also add Dick’s generally unpleasant treatment of Bessie Broke, the artist’s model. His treatment of the Syndicate Head can be partly explained by the unjust and chaotic Copyright laws of the time [see the Note on Ch III Page 40 line 28]. Kipling’s own resentment over the treatment of artists and writers undoubtedly lasted throughout his life. There is a telling reminiscence, ironically paraphrasing his famous poem “Recessional”, in his autobiography Something of Myself (1937), where he refers to the surge of interest in his poetic juvenilia after he attained fame and success. He gave a schoolboy poem to a woman when he left school:

…who returned it to me many years later… I burnt it, lest it should fall into the hands of ‘lesser breeds without the (Copyright) law’.

We will return to these episodes later, in other contexts.

Childhood influences

Whatever the flaws in Dick’s character and behaviour, Kipling carefully establishes a pattern of childhood influence and causation in Chapter I. Kipling readers will be familiar with the various accounts of the exile in England forced by their parents on the five year old Kipling and his three year old sister ‘Trix in 1871. This was a common practice amongst Anglo-Indian families to protect their childrens’ health and ensure that they had a thoroughly English upbringing. Rudyard and Trixie were placed in the foster-care of Mrs Sarah Holloway at Lorne Lodge, Southsea, later referred to by Kipling as ‘the House of Desolation’ where they endured six years of tyrannical harshness, an experience which marked him for life, and forms the basis for this Chapter.

In The Light That Failed Sarah Holloway becomes ‘Mrs Jennet’, whilst Dick is clearly the young Rudyard. This episode is also prominently fictionalised in a more-or-less contemporaneous story “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” (Wee Willie Winkie 1890) in which Kipling becomes ‘Punch’ and Sarah Holloway ‘Auntie Rosa’. Kipling refers bitterly, but with characteristic succinctness, to the repression of these formative years in Something of Myself: ‘I had never heard of hell, so I was introduced to it in all its terrors’.

Kipling leaves us in no doubt as to the effect on Dick, and himself as a child:

Where he had looked for love, she gave him aversion, and then hate. Where he growing older had sought a little sympathy, she gave him ridicule.

Dick’s sufferings and neglect teach him the power of living alone and of enduring schoolboy mockery, but set in motion an undercurrent of violence in his character. It is a reasonable assumption that for Kipling these experiences may account for the incidents of bullying and humiliation in some of the later schoolboy stories in Stalky & Co (1899) These are echoed in one brief passage in the novel:

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 final phrase hints at the sadistic element that is taking root within him. In Chapter III, as an adult, prompted by the Syndicate Head’s emphasis on how much he owes them for spreading his reputation, Dick is reminded of ‘certain vagrant years, lived out in loneliness and strife, and unsatisfied desires.’ There is frequent testimony in Kipling’s writings to the persistent sense of pain and suffering which influenced the darker side of his own and, therefore Dick’s, character. In a 1907 address to McGill University he says:

There is a certain darkness and abandonment which the soul of a young man sometimes descends – horror of desolation, abandonment and realised worthlessness, which is one of the most real of hells in which we are compelled to walk.

The early descriptions of Dick’s character from The Light That Failed are a kind of fictional shorthand; we have to take Kipling’s word for them, in the absence of narrative. But they surely explain, even if not wholly justifying, the troublesome aspects of Dick’s behaviour, and are at the heart of Kipling’s artistic vision and practice. The portrait of Dick, consequently, is unflinchingly ‘real’ and honest; an unpredictable, arrogant, immature young man, but one who feels deeply and suffers profoundly. All else stems from this. Kipling could be no other kind of writer.

Because “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” dramatises the Southsea experiences so vividly, the final lines of the story offer perhaps the most eloquent expression of the influence of these years onThe Light That Failed and on much else of Kipling’s work. In imagery drawn from the Bible and Bunyan, and directly relevant to the novel, he writes:

…when young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge; though it may turn darkened eyes for a while to the light, and teach Faith where no Faith is.

Dick, therefore, is merely being true to his own nature and his artist’s code when sardonically describing the graphic realism of his illustration of the soldier called “His Last Shot”, which he is forced to clean up to make it acceptable to the public. Dick may even have had Torpenhow’s life-and-death struggle with the one-eyed Arab in mind at this point:

It was brutal, coarse, violent — Man being naturally gentle when he’s fighting for his life.

The remark both encapsulates Kipling’s own credo, and the conflict between the the claims of Art and Commercialism which informs so much of The Light that Failed.

‘Maisie’ and ‘Flo’ Garrard

If Kipling’s childhood experiences at Southsea are one key autobiographical influence on the novel, the other is the relationship between Kipling and Florence (Flo) Garrard, the inspiration for the character of Maisie. Kipling’s unfulfilled passion for Flo, and her rejection of him, form the emotional core of the book.

Any first-time Kipling student with little or no knowledge of his works, and reading his autobiography Something of Myself, will find no mention of Flo nor of the devastating effect of his love for her; it is as if they had never existed. The title of the autobiography is self-revelatory, and its structure equally so, as so much of his short fiction, where there is rigorous selectivity and withholding of detail to create an effect. We simply, in this case, don’t get the whole story.

According to Something of Myself, written in the last year of his life, the germ of the novel: ‘lay dormant till my change of life in London woke it up’. (p. 228) The hibernation period dates, perhaps, from 1878 when he saw and never forgot Jean Paul Pascale-Bouverie’s painting of ‘Manon Lescaut’ at the Paris Exhibition, based on the 18th Century novel by Abbé Prévost. He described the resultant The Light That Failed as a: ‘sort of inverted, metagrobolised phantasmagoria based on Manon‘. Metagrobolise is derived from the French of Rabelais, meaning to ‘puzzle’ or ‘mystify’. The adjective may just about pass muster as a clue to Kipling’s emotionally confused state of mind when writing the book, as may ‘my change of life in London’ when in 1890 he met Flo again after an absence of 8 years. Phantasmagoria means either a dreamlike series of illusory images or an early optical illusion show. Both definitions reflect Dick’s mental state in his latter days, the episodic structure of the novel, and its creative use of visual ‘moments’.

In 1877 Alice Kipling returned to England to take the young Rudyard away from Southsea to become a pupil at the United Services College at Westward Ho! In 1880 Kipling came to Lorne Lodge to fetch Trixie. It was here that he met and fell in love with Florence Garrard, a year his senior.

The immediacy of Rudyard’s encounter with Flo in London, and its effect on him, are vividly reflected in his description of Dick’s meeting with the adult Maisie in Chapter IV page 56 of the novel. Dick is leaning on the Thames Embankment wall when:

…a shift of the fog drove across Dick’s face the black smoke of a river steamer at her berth below the wall. He was blinded for a moment, then spun round and found himself face to face—with Maisie. There was no mistaking. The years had turned the child into a woman, but they had not altered the dark grey eyes, the thin scarlet lips, or the firmly-modelled mouth and chin; and, that all should be as it was of old, she wore a closely-fitting gray dress.

This is almost cinematic in style, as befits Kipling’s life-long interest in photography and later in the moving image. For the reader to be told that: ‘Dick’s body throbbed furiously and his palate dried in his mouth’ is in a sense redundant; the emotion is all in the visual recall. Kipling almost certainly never forgot the meeting with Flo; and one wonders if the artist in him recognised the ‘phantasmagorical’ quality of the moment, and perhaps used it again in the story “Mrs Bathurst” (Traffics and Discoveries 1904) when Hooper recalls the effect of seeing Mrs Bathurst alight from a train at Paddington in a ‘Magic Lantern show’.

But the more ardent Rudyard became, the cooler Flo’s response. For almost two years they maintained a desultory correspondence until in the autumn of 1882 the sixteen-year-old Rudyard returned to India, and launched upon his journalistic and writing career.

Florence trained at the Slade School of Art in London and the fashionable Academie Julienne in Paris, becoming quite a successful portrait and landscape painter and a forceful character, with a fondness for cats. A self-styled ‘Chelsea artist’ she had exhibitions in the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy. Her sketch book revealed her Bohemianism in a series of drawings, cartoons and caricatures, to which Rudyard later contributed over a packed few days after his return to England in 1889, when he was still only twenty-three, and Florence twenty-four.

Rudyard visited her at her London house where she was living with Mabel Price, the model for the red-haired girl in the book, a fellow student of Flo’s at the Academie and daughter of an Oxford don. She too enjoyed some success as an artist, with a painting exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1889.

Kipling could not compete with their intensely close relationship,
which may well have been a lesbian one. It is not certain, however, if Kipling knew this or not, guessed it, or refused to acknowledge it. Flo treated his literary success and his amorous emotions with wounding indifference. The note to the Heading poem “Blue Roses” for Chapter VII, which was dedicated to her, illustrates the contempt that she later expressed to a close friend and companion, for him, for the poem, and for the novel, which was first published in January 1891. She lived on and died on January 31 1938, two years after Kipling, aged 73, after a moderately successful career as a painter.

The term ‘relationship’ is patently inappropriate to characterise such a one-sided series of encounters. The artist in Kipling, however, superseded the lover enough for him to realise that it would be inadequate as the theme for a novel. Maisie and Dick, therefore, do have a relationship, adversarial, unsatisfactory, moving at times and ultimately doomed to failure, but at least a viable subject for fictional narrative.

There is, to this Editor, a tantalising if highly speculative postscript to all this. In her later years, Florence Garrard wrote a strange cartoon-like illustrated story, describing her time in prison after being arrested for trying to paint outside the Houses of Parliament. It was called Phantasmagoria, the same expression that Kipling used of The Light That Failed in Something of Myself (p. 228).

Did Kipling know of the existence of Florence Garrard’s Phantasmagoria and deliberately use the expression when writing of The Light that Failed in the last year of his life? Had he followed Flo’s career over the years? Was there the merest trace of conscience or regret on the part of either of them, with the long passage of time? Perhaps, but we shall never know.

Publishing history

As David Richards, the latest Kipling bibliographer, has explained, the publishing history of The Light that Failed is far from straightforward. Over two years, four versions of the story appeared: in twelve chapters with a happy ending; in fifteen chapters with a sad ending; in fourteen chapters with a sad ending; and in eleven chapters with a happy ending. The hardback ‘Standard’ version, ending in Dick’s death, is described in a prefatory note as ‘The Light that Failed as it was originally conceived by the writer.’ To understand the background, we must go back to Kipling’s arrival in England to forge a continuing and successful literary career.

He arrived in London in 1889, a few days before Mrs Edmonia [‘Ted’] Hill, an American friend from Indian days, whom he had met in Allahabad in 1887. Earlier in the year he had travelled with her and her husband Prof ‘Aleck’ Hill, from Calcutta to San Francisco, and stayed with her parents in Beaver, Connecticut. Mrs Hill came with her sister Caroline Taylor, to whom Kipling became engaged for a time. They set him up in rooms in Villiers Street across the road from Charing Cross Station in the heart of London, and then left for India. He corresponded frequently with them until 1890. Villiers Street is clearly the setting for Dick’s room in the novel, as is the London skyline from his window.

Kipling was never at ease with women of his own age, and his engagement to Caroline came to an end with Florence Garrard’s arrival on the scene. Kipling was now experiencing real literary fame, and it soon became obvious that a novel was expected. The one he had planned never appeared in print.
Mother Maturin

Since 1885 he had been devising a novel of Indian low-life called The Book of Mother Maturin, the manuscript of which arrived in London by mail, sent by his parents. Its whereabouts remain the last great Kipling mystery, although it is thought to have been in existence after 1900. In July 1885 Kipling wrote a Letter to his Aunt Edith MacDonald that it was going to be:

Some of the intended material from Mother Maturin eventually found its way into Kim (1901). It had all the hallmarks of a controversial work, perhaps too much so for the Victorian reading public, accustomed though they were to realism and even sensationalism in their fiction. Even the brief scenario we have indicates the uncompromising side of Kipling as a writer, the modernity, almost, in the refusal to observe literary conventions, and his honesty in describing life’s unpalatable truths. The same spirit informs much of The Light That Failed.

Wolcott Balestier

Rudyard had been struggling with the first draft of The Light That Failed, but managed to meet his deadline of August 1890. It is at this point that Wolcott Balestier, Kipling’s American future brother-in-law, although posthumously so, comes into the story.

Balestier was the eldest of four children; his sister Carrie would later marry Kipling. He came from a prominent East Coast family with homes in New York and Brattleboro, Vermont, where Carrie and Rudyard lived for a while from 1892-1896. The American period produced Kipling’s only other novel solely under his own name, apart from The Light That Failed and Kim, Captain’s Courageous, which has an American setting and is partly an admiring tribute to certain American values.

After limited success as a writer, Balestier, an unconventional character who only lasted a year at Cornell University, drifted into journalism, becoming editor of a low-brow magazine called Tid-Bits, published by John W Lovell and Company. In 1888 he arrived in London on behalf of Lovell to court British authors and encourage them to sign up with firms like his. Because the regulations on copyright protection in the United States were rather looser than those in Britain, American publishers had been able to pirate foreign authors by publishing their works without permission, and without any payment of royalties. Lovell wanted to pre-empt new copyright laws, which were in prospect, by sending agents like Balestier to acquire rights in Europe.

It was soon after this that the paths of the man from Vermont and the successful young author would cross. When they did, it was the start of a close, albeit short-lived, friendship and literary partnership. Balestier could get things done. He was a man after Kipling’s own heart. He also combined a strong business sense with genuine literary understanding, and quickly made his mark in London. Carrie arrived there in 1889 and by 1891 had met and taken to Kipling.

During this crucial period, Kipling was becoming ill with stress and overwork. He was trying to cope with The Light That Failed, revising the collection of stories Wee Willie Winkie for publication, and working on another collection called The Book of Forty-Nine Mornings. He had also been engaged in a dispute with the publishers Harper and Brothers over the rights to some of his stories, and an attack on him in one of their magazines. Harpers backed down in the dispute, almost certainly thanks to Balestier’s intervention and support. He persuaded Kipling to abandon Forty Nine Mornings, and enabled the American publication, through Lovell, of Barrack-Room Ballads in 1890. That collection was dedicated to Wolcott Balestier.

Alternative versions

There has been considerable debate as to exactly how the different versions of The Light That Failed came to be published. Andrew Lycett, however, is unequivocal on the matter (p. 228):

Balestier also suggested Rudyard should put out two versions of The Light That Failed – his original ‘sad’ story, which would be published in volume form by the United States Book Company (the latest incarnation of the financially troubled John Lovell company) in the United States, and Macmillan in London, and a shorter alternative, bringing Dick and Maisie happily together, which would be easier for him to syndicate.

The upshot was that the version with a ‘happy ending’ was published in Lippincott’s Magazine in January 1891. Lippincott’s was a popular journal, first published in Philadelphia in 1886, with a high reputation and with circulation in Britain, the USA, and Australia. It featured literary criticism, general articles and original creative writing. It had recently had best-sellers, with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel The Sign of Four and – more controversially — The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.

Kipling’s contribution was eagerly anticipated by its editors, and sold well in New York and London. This illustration (right) shows the cover of the London version, which sold for a shilling (five pence in modern currency). But the story hardly enhanced his literary reputation. The original and longer ‘sad’ version was published by Macmillan in March 1891, with the full fifteen chapters; Chapter VIII and Chapters XIV and XV did not appear in the shorter version. The fifteen-chapter ‘sad’ version is now seen as the ‘standard’ text, and is the subject of these notes.

It is believed by some critics that in addition to Balestier’s view, Alice Kipling, the author’s mother, pressed him to go for a happy ending, which Kipling himself genuinely regretted. This tends to be the view of this Editor, and is borne out by the emphatic prefatory note at the head of the Standard Edition: This is the story of The Light That Failed as it was originally conceived by the writer.

However, the Dedicatory poem “Mother o’ Mine, O Mother o’ Mine” suggests that in insisting on the ‘sad’ ending Kipling felt some guilt at having betrayed his mother’s wishes. In this context, Philip Mallett (p. 58) subscribes to the neo-Freudian belief that:

…the love Kipling/Dick is looking for is essentially maternal … the story ends with Torpenhow on his knees, holding Dick’s body in his arms, in a presumably unintended parody of the Pieta.

In an oddly co-incidental way, the two versions of the novel can be said to echo Dick’s awareness of the conflict between ‘real’ and ‘commercial’ over the issue of the painting “His Last Shot”.

Wolcott Balestier died of typhoid in Dresden on December 6 1891, having collaborated with Kipling on The Naulahka, a novel largely neglected since by the general reader, but important in relation to The Light That Failed, as we will discuss later. It was published in 1892.

Such was the depth of affection and admiration between the two men that Kipling’s dedication to the Barrack-Room Ballads became his tribute to Balestier. The poem, written in eloquent and vigorous heptameters, ends:

Beyond the loom of the lone last star, through open darkness hurled,
Further than rebel comet dared or hiving star-swarm swirled,
Sits he with those that praise our God for that they served His world.

Carrie and Rudyard married in January 1892.

The ‘happy ending’

The ‘happy ending’ is generally derided by the critics as being incompatible with the thrust of the story as a whole, the characters of Dick and Maisie, and the nature of their relationship. The quality of the writing has also been criticised. In the view of this Editor, some of the cliche-ridden romantic exchanges seem hardly the high watermark of Kipling’s prose achievement. Nevertheless, however threadbare the love dialogue may be, this version merits some scrutiny.

The text does not, as one might reasonably expect from the derisive comments of the critics, end with Dick and Maisie in a mutually adoring embrace. Maisie leaves Dick, temporarily grief-stricken in the midst of her happiness at the vicious defacement of his painting that Dick cannot see. Apart from the fact that her departure is permanent in the Standard edition, both versions are very similar at this point in the story.

When Torpenhow stops Cassavetti singing the ‘Battle Hymn’ with the words ‘We’ve nothing to do with that. It belongs to another man’. Dick concludes the story with an emphatic ‘No … the other man belongs.’ In short, and surprisingly, it ends not with images of romantic bliss, but of the old virtues of war as adventure, and male camaraderie.

Opinion will doubtlessly continue to work against the ‘happy’ version. But it is interesting to note that that the ‘original’ version did not altogether disappear in this one, indicating. perhaps, where Kipling’s allegiances really lay.

Kipling and the Aesthetes

A study of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and The Light That Failed (1891), opens up illuminating comparisons between the two in relation to the conflict between Kipling and the Aesthetic movement, and the dualities and contradictions within Kipling the man and artist.

Both novels, although so very dissimilar, focus on the themes of Art and the role of the Artist. Paintings as central symbols, which are ultimately destroyed, are a common feature. Dorian’s portrait is a fantasy image, which grows increasingly monstrous as his corruption increases, but his outward beauty remains unimpaired and ageless until the very end of the story. Dick’s “Melancolia” is a ‘real’ painting, based by Kipling on Albrecht Durer’s engraving. This was the basis for James Thompson’s original description of the figure in his poem “The City of Dreadful Night”, which outwardly expresses his artistic soul.

There are frequent references to the soul in both books. Basil Hallward, the painter of Dorian’s picture, fears the consequences of too much self-revelation if it appears publicly:

The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

(Complete Works of Oscar Wilde ed. Vyvyan Holland, Collins 1989 page 21)

And in a warning against the obsessiveness of Art, but with an implied homoerotic sub-text, and referring to his first meeting with Dorian, he declares:

I knew I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

I don’t care to profit by the price of a Man’s soul — Dick’s soul is in the bank.

Both Dorian and Dick have, in their own ways but to different degrees, made pacts with the Devil, but Dick’s attitude changes profoundly, and he preaches his doctrine to Maisie:

You mustn’t mind what other people do. If their souls were your souls it would be different. You stand and fall by your own work remember.

DC Rose provides some fascinating reflections on the two works:

Hallward’s portrait of Gray is his masterwork … as Heldar’s ‘Melancolia’ is central to the plot of The Light. Heldar paints the piece while going blind, sustaining himself with whisky … His sight fails soon after the picture is finished and his model, who hates Heldar ‘emptied half a bottle of turpentine on a duster and began to scrub the face of the Melancolia viciously … She took a palette knife and scraped, following each stroke with the wet duster. In five minutes the picture was a formless, scarred muddle of colours.’ In Kipling we have a picture that is destroying its artist. In Wilde we have a picture that destroys its model.
(‘Blue Roses and Green Carnations’ KJ 302 p. 33)

It is interesting to note the difference between the descriptions of the destruction of the two paintings. Dorian sees a palette knife handy and Wilde simply states ‘He seized the thing and stabbed the picture with it’. One feels Kipling’s desire for authentic detail, however, extends as much to the destruction of a work of art as the creating of it. The quotation omits the small but signficant touch that the initial smudge was not enough; hence Bessie’s use of the palette knife.

The animosity towards Wilde and the Aesthetes was both moral and artistic. Kipling had made an earlier contribution to the debate with the poem “In Partibus” for the Civil and Military Gazette in 1889.

There are further jibes in the poem at ‘long haired things/ in velvet collar rolls’, who ‘moo and coo with women folk/about their blessed souls’. This seems mean-spirited stuff, with Wilde clearly in mind, and appearing all the more so when recalling Wilde’s rather more generous, albeit later, assessment of Plain Tales from the Hills. Kipling’s scorn for the Aesthetes was still intact 38 years later in Something of Myself (p. 219) as his reference to ‘the suburban Toilet-Club school favoured by the late Mr Oscar Wilde’ confirms.

“In Partibus” (see the notes on the poem in this Guide) attacks what Kipling sees as the derivative second-hand nature of Aesthetic theory. The same idea recurs in two later celestial fables, “Tne Conundrum of the Workshops” (1890) and “Tomlinson” (1891). In the latter the Devil derides the eternal quest for new artistic theories with his insistent variant refrain “It’s pretty but is it Art?”:

The tale is as old as the Eden Tree — and new as the new-cut tooth—
For each man knows ere his lip-thatch grows he is master of Art and Truth;
And each man hears as the twilight nears, to the beat of his dying heart
The Devil drum on the darkened pane ‘You did it, but was it Art?’

One wonders here if the phrase “lip-thatch” is a rueful allusion to the premature arrival of his own youthful moustache. The Devil also makes an appearance in “Tomlinson”, a poem about a young man-about-town, now dead, who had committed a double-sin; fornication with another man’s wife, and reliance on received bookish opinions. Such men, as Andrew Lycett puts it, ‘manage to lose their souls’ :

Then Tomlinson he gripped the bars and yammered “Let me in —
“For I mind that I borrowed my neighbour’s wife to sin the deadly sin”
The Devil he grinned behind the bars, and banked the fire high:
“Did ye read of that sin in a book?” said he; and Tomlinson said “Ay!”.

William Ernest Henley, poet, playwrite, critic and publisher, was the leader of the counter-decadence of the late 1890’s so his involvement in the whole anti-Aesthetic saga is not surprising. He was the epitome of Victorian imperialistic views and hearty masculinity. He was also a periodical editor of distinction and a man of substantial literary cultivation. He edited the Scots Review — later the National Review (1884-94), which published Kipling’s “Danny Deever” in 1887, enhancing the reputation of both publisher and author. His familiar wooden leg, arising from an amputation caused by tuberculosis, made him the model for Stevenson’s Long John Silver in Treasure Island. The final lines of his most famous poem “Invictus” read:

It matters not how strait the gate
How charged with punishment the scroll
I am the Master of my fate
I am the Captain of my soul.

The poem was written in 1875, so we may assume Kipling’s familiarity with it. In any case, its spirit of male courage in the face of adversity would have greatly appealed to him — and to Dick Heldar.

In such a context we are faced with the paradoxes within Kipling the man and Kipling the artist. His hostility to Wilde and his like seems strange in one sense, bearing in mind his close youthful relationships with his aunt and uncle Georgina and Edward Burne-Jones and the liberal Pre-Raphaelite circle. He was later to describe his visits to them in his childhood as ‘a paradise which I verily believed saved me.’ (Something of Myself p.11) His distaste for homosexuality, however, remained unwavering.

Here, then, we have a young man resolutely set against membership of the literary establishment, who rejected all honours offered him, yet was to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907; he was the first Englishman to receive it, and became one of the nation’s most revered literary figures. Allan Massie sees Kipling as:

…a highly self-conscious artist, reared in the shadow of the Pre-raphaelite brotherhood, who nevertheless despised artistic coteries and preferred to associate with men of action
(The Literary Review Jan 1998; review of the new biography of Kipling by Harry Ricketts)

And John Palmer, quoted earlier, ironically describes Kipling’s art as:

…as formal as the Art of Wilde or the Art of Baudelaire, which he helped to send out of fashion, despite being contemptuous of literary formality.
(Rudyard Kipling’, Nisbet 1928 edition p. 14)

So, despite his so-called vulgarity and lack of ‘style’, and his shock-of-the-new realism, we have a painstakingly disciplined writer for whom dedication to the craft was essential for the creation of the art. Later in life he declared in Something of Myself (pp. 72-3):

There is no line of my verse or prose which has not been mouthed till the tongue has made all smooth,and memory,after many recitals,has mechanically skipped the grosser superfluities.

From all this emerges the character of Dick Heldar in The Light that Failed; the rebel and outsider; the individualist loyal to his own credo; the true artist unable to quite break free from the world of male camaraderie and action.

Kipling and the Arts

Painting and the visual arts were an important part of Kipling’s younger life, as one would expect with Lockwood Kipling, a distinguished artist, illustrator and designer, as his father. Lockwood, with his wife Alice, moved to India in 1865, the year of Rudyard’s birth, as a teacher in the JeeJeebhoy School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai). Later Lockwood became curator of the Lahore Museum, and made an appearance in Kim as the Curator of the ‘Wonder House’. He illustrated Kim and the Jungle Books, as well as working on decorations for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Given this background, a novel from Rudyard with a painting theme was probably inevitable sooner or later. That it was sooner was probably due to the power of these influences and the contact with illustrators which his journalistic career brought him, as well as his frustrations with Flo Garrard. As a child he would have been familiar with his father’s studio, the smell of oils and paints, the feeling of modelling clay and so on. These sense impressions find their way into The Light that Failed, so that it becomes, in the strictest sense, a colourful novel.

Kipling frequently describes his craft in visual terms; tone, brushwork and background and so on, and casually stated that to commit something to memory:

I rudely drew what I wanted to remember. (Something of Myself p. 230)

The writing of the stories in Rewards and Fairies (1910) is described as:

working the materials in three or four overlaid tints and textures…it was like working lacquer and mother of pearl, a natural combination. (Something of Myself p. 190)

The nature and creation of art, and in particular, the art of painting, is explored in the novel in three identifiable strands: the notion of an associated work ethic, the concept of artistic integrity, and the fascination for technique and process, which was to last a lifetime. In the penultimate Chapter of the novel he writes:

A man may forgive those who ruin the love of his life, but he will never forgive the destruction of his work. (p. 256).

Work, sacrifice, and the Law

The idea of sacrifice and dedications is of major importance in the novel, although Dick doesn’t forget his early poverty, or advocate it for its own sake. He tells Maisie:

‘You must sacrifice yourself, and live under orders, and never think for yourself, and never have real satisfaction in your work, except just at the beginning, when you’re reaching out for a notion.’ (Ch. VII p. 107)

This austere doctrine has affinities with Kipling’s own concept of a personal ‘Daemon’ or inspiration outside oneself, to which one has to submit. The idea is developed further when Maisie recalls the words of her teacher Kami who stresses the importance of: ‘the conviction that nails the work to the wall’. (Ch XIII p. 212)

Shamsul Islam’s perceptive book on Kipling’s Law makes little direct reference to the novel, but what he says is highly relevant to it. Here, he could be discussing Dick himself, struggling to obey a natural law of survival, despite his tragic end:

Man’s victory lies in the struggle which he puts up against darkness,chaos and disorder. In the ultimate analysis Kipling’s is a very positive message. (Ch. 4)

Shamsul Islam (Ch. 5) sees the Law as a complex association of ideas drawing on moral, cultural and religious influences. Also, he itemises his notions of Kipling’s ideal man, which we slightly paraphrase :

Given the odd exception, perhaps, and allowing for the possibility of human failings, this seems to this Editor a pretty fair summation of Dick’s character. Dick refers to the Law on more than one occasion, preaching here to a sceptical Maisie about self-sacrifice, and expressing Kipling’s idea of the Law as something natural and inevitable in human affairs:

“How can you believe that?”
“There’s no question of belief or disbelief. That’s the Law, and you take it or refuse it as you please.” (Ch. VII p.107)

The hectoring side of Dick’s character surely plays some part in the ultimate failure of their relationship. Maisie’s independence and her own self-containing loneliness, exacerbate Dick’s thwarted longings, forcing him into the unsustainable dual role of lover and teacher. He coaches her in line, form and colour, but his desire to help and protect her conflicts with his own artistic dedication, and widens the gulf between them. He is often brutally, if penetratingly, honest about her work:

‘Sometimes there’s power in it, but there is no special reason why it should be done at all’. (Ch. VII p. 98)

Dick even defines love in artistic terms when he says:

‘Love is like line work; you must go forward or backward, you can’t stand still’. (55).

This was hardly a recipe for romance or domestic bliss. His longing for Maisie and his love of Art become entwined into an illusory love, inconceivable outside their artistic relationship, and thus doomed to failure.

Techniques

Kipling’s abiding interest in technical process, and the crafts of making and doing is unique amongst English writers, and is almost a theme in itself, running through the body of his work. Perhaps its most notable manifestation is to be found in the complex later story “Dayspring Mishandled” (Limits and Renewals 1932) in which Manallace’s Chaucerian forgery, as an act of revenge against Castorley, the Chaucer expert, is described stage by stage in detail. This display of skills is crucial to the story, as it is essential that the reader – like Castorley – accepts the forgery as a credible deception. The extent of such knowledge of a range of processes in The Light that Failed is demonstrated through the many examples we have noted, chapter by chapter.

One key incident was Dick’s description of his picture ‘His Last Shot’. Dick tells how he has pipeclayed the helmet image to clean up the look (see Chapter IV p. 49 and Chapter XV p. 271); but Kipling adds the information that the technique is: ‘always used on active service’ and is ‘indispensable to Art’ (56).

Perhaps the most important instance is Dick’s account in Chapter VIII of the painting inspired by the ‘Negroid-Jewess-Cuban’ woman on the Lima to Auckland cargo boat in his roving days. She will make a re-appearance in this essay, but for the moment her interest is as a sort of ‘daemon’. Kipling dwells on the process with great energy and particularity of detail. Not only does he give us the approach to the painting but the inspiration and motivation. The excitement of sea travel, the likelihood of storm danger, and the fear of death, all contribute. Above all there is the woman’s sexual attraction, heightened by the fact she is always close to him when working and mixing his paints. The challenge of the limited choice of paint is also a factor; only brown, green and black ship’s paint is available. Kipling’s implication here is that this will give the right elemental quality to the picture.

Colour

Dick is also inspired by Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee” (Ch. VIII p. 131) to make creative use of the three colours, such as green for ‘the green waters over the naked soul’ of
the drowning woman. (Ch. VIII p.132) The choice of such dramatic subject-matter is an indication of Dick’s character. (One could never imagine him painting an English pastoral theme.)There are references to the light on the lower deck and its supernatural effect on the painting, on bad drawing, foreshortening and so on.

Examples of colour imagery in the novel are too numerous to individualise in detail, but a selection will make the point. There are references to the grayness of Maisie’s eyes, the magenta of Dick’s necktie (a tiny but notable artistic flourish). Yellow is a colour motif, from the yellow sea-poppy on Southsea beach, to Yellow Tina. the Port Said artist’s model, and the recurrent imageof the yellow London fog, which some critics have identified as an influence on T S Eliot’s “Preludes” and “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”. In addition there are so many striking colour’moments’ such as: ‘the crackling volcanoes of many coloured fire’ behind Dick’s increasingly sightless eyes as he paints ‘Melancolia’ in a sleepless delirium. (Ch. XI p. 186)

Colour awareness seems to take on a romantic dimension as Dick and Maisie end a happy reunion day at Southsea. We are almost tempted to believe in the possibility of a happy ending at this point; maybe this is an effect Kipling was trying to create. But at such a moment, when the possibility of romance appears tantalisingly close, there is the subtle hint that Dick is still fixated on the idea of Maisie as pupil-cum-fellow artist:

They…turned to look at the glory of the full tide under the moonlight and the intense black shadows of the furze-bushes. It was an additional joy to Dick that Maisie could see the colour even as he saw it – could see the blue in the white of the mist, the violet that is gray pailings, and all things else as they are – not of one hue but a thousand. (Ch. VII p.113.)

Even as Dick thinks in the language of an artist rather than a lover, we detect both the influence of his father in Kipling’s colour knowledge, and his own writer’s commitment to seeing things as they really are.

Male and female

The gender sub-texts of The Light that Failed are, arguably, the most complex and easily misinterpreted. We have already touched upon the conflict within Kipling/Dick in relation to the two worlds of Art and Action; the latter is inseparable from the novel’s celebration of male camaraderie This is presented most vividly in Chapter VIII, in which Dick’s love for Maisie is set directly against male bonding and the yearning for adventure. The roistering songs serve to emphasise this. “Farewell, to you Spanish Ladies” conjures up the image of the sailor leaving his wife behind, and his desire for the dusky maiden in a distant land. In ‘The Sea is a Wicked Old Woman” the irresistible lure of the sea is the dominant force. The song’s rhythmn becomes, in Dick’s imagination, the pounding of the waves of the Lima cargo boat:

…and the go-fever, which is more real than many doctor’s diseases,waked and raged, urging him who loved Maisie beyond anything in the world to go away and taste the old hot unregenerate life again, to scuffle, swear, gamble … and love light loves with his fellows; to take ship and know the sea once more and beget pictures… (Ch VIII p. 140)

Kipling could not have put it any plainer, although Art does get a brief look-in at the end. The message itself is reinforced by the seductive rythmns of the authors’s prose. This longing, not only for male comradeship, but for a return to the battlefield, is unmistakeably expressed, when the passage above blends into the yearning for:

the crackle of musketry, and see the smoke roll outward … and in that hell every man strictly responsible for his own head, and his alone, and struck with an unfettered arm. (Ch VIII p. 140)

Here is Kipling’s Ideal Man, in action

The image of the beat of the waves becomes the drum beat and sounds of a guards band playing outside Dick’s rooms, as, tormented by his blindness, he listens, feeling the: ‘massed movement in his face, heard the maddening tramp of feet and the friction of the pouches on the belts.’ (Ch XI p.193) The pathos of this scene is heightened by Kipling’s masterly detail of the sound of the pouches, indicating how Dick’s blindness has sensitised his hearing.

It is here we re-encounter the Negroid-Jewess-Cuban woman ‘with morals to match’ from Chapter VIII. The association of colour with promiscuity could be taken as racist; an accusation that has always tarnished Kipling’s reputation. That is, as he might have said, another story, but the implication in the description lingers. In this context she embodies the erotic and the exotic, and the attraction of forbidden fruit, as Dick enthusiastically recalls: ‘…the sea outside and unlimited lovemaking inside.’ (Ch. VIII p.132) There is almost certainly an element of sexual fantasising in the image of the woman; although implicit, retrospectively for Dick, there is a painful contrast between sexual desire satisfied and love unconsummated.

We may widen out the issues of gender and sexuality in the novel by a consideration of the late Victorian fascination for the seductive underground urban worlds of vice and sin, a seediness which assumes a glamour of its own. Gail Ching Liang-Low’s observations on this are particularly illuminating, interpreting the novel as showing: ‘an interesting split between the two sides of Kipling‘s heritage’. She perceives Port Said, Dick’s early hunting ground, as the quintessential Oriental City of vice … sexual perversity’ and ‘dancing hells’ (White skin; Black Mask; Representation and Colonialism, Gail Ching Liang-Low, Routledge Keegan and Paul 1996 page 170). She goes on to describe the voyeuristic fascination for this underworld for artists like Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec, linking this with the episode of the Negro-Jewess-Cuban woman. She concludes, therefore, that the novel presents us with, on the one hand a feminine decadent world of sexual pleasure, and on the other the masculine world of adventure, military heroism and male camaraderie. The former is evoked in this lurid description of a ‘mad dance’ which takes place in M and Madame Binat’s house:

…the naked Zanzibari girls danced furiously by the light of kerosene lamps. Binat sat upon a chair and stared with eyes that saw nothing, till the whirl of the dance and the clang of the rattling piano stole into the drink that took the place of blood in his veins, and his face glistened … Dick took him by the chin brutally and turned that face to the light. Madame Binat looked over her shoulder and smiled with many teeth… (Ch III pp. 32-3)

The late Victorian period saw the dissemination of feminist ideas, leading ultimately to the Suffragette Movement, and the concept of the ‘New Woman’ in social, artistic and political life. Readers and theatregoers would know at least something of the ideas of Shaw and Ibsen in this context, whose characters were often the equal of or superior to, their menfolk. Nora Helmer, the heroine of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House”, which opened in London in 1889, sent shockwaves through audiences, as she rejected her submissive status as her husband’s pretty plaything, leaving him and their children to seek her own indentity and maturity. Ibsen’s blast of cold Scandinavian dramatic air, as Nora walks out of her door, changed theatrical convention for ever. The concept itself, therefore, can be seen as both destructive and liberating.

Many contemporary interpreters of Kipling saw Maisie as an embodiment of the ‘New Woman’, and, consequently, an unsympathetic figure. Hilton Brown, writing in 1945, takes a view which seems a contemporary one for our own day:

Maisie was an unpopular heroine largely because her creator was, for once,years ahead of his time … Her views that seemed hard and unreasonable and unwordly, now arouse no serious criticism. (Rudyard Kipling, Hilton Brown, Hamish Hamilton 1945 p.146)

A notable literary friendship may be significant here. The bond between Kipling and Rider Haggard was characterised by a shared love of adventure and colonial fiction. Kipling would undoubtedly have been familiar.with Haggard’s She (1889) which anticipated the gender theories of the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. In She Ayesha, a beautiful but powerful and destructive priestess, rises after 2000 years to claim the 19th century explorer-hero Leo Vincey, whom she believes is a reincarnation of her ancient lover Kallikrates. So powerful does she see herself, that at one point she threatens to depose Queen Victoria and take over the British Empire. Her’s is a very different character from that of Ustane, who embodies unselfishness and unconditional love, the very qualities Dick wants from Maisie.

All this is a far cry from the world of art in Victorian London, although the Sudan deserts are a little closer to home. Nor is Maisie an English Ayesha. But this basic principle of role-reversal, and the assumption of opposed gender traits, clearly informs the characterisations of Dick and Maisie, and helps to explain the conflict between them. This being said, all the novel’s textual evidence indicates that Kipling’s treatment of Maisie is more even-handed and credible than those critics who see Kipling as a misogynist would suggest. Kipling’s portrayal avoids the pitfalls which would have romantically conventionalised the relationship. Maisie is enough of a realist to know that there is no chance for them until one or both surrenders to the other, when she says ‘You know I should ruin your life and you’d ruin mine as things are now.’

Kipling’s view of women

Kipling has been accused of misogyny by some critics, but in the view of this Editor, this is an area where one needs to tread carefully. He is too complex a a writer for such a simplification. There is, for example, no trace of misogyny in the characterisation of Helen Turrell in the story “The Gardener” (Debits and Credits 1926), for example, the loving mother seeking her dead son in the war graves of the Great War, nor in the sensitive portrait of the blind woman in “They” (Traffics and Discoveries 1904) It is quite absent from one of Kipling’s most moving stories “Without Benefit of Clergy” (Life’s Handicap 1891) which tells of the passionate, devoted, but short-lived marriage between the Englishman John Holden and his Muslim bride Ameera, which ends tragically with the death of Ameera and her child during a cholera epidemic. There is little doubt as to where Kipling’s sympathies lie in this story, in the tender portrayal of Ameera’s beauty and devotion to her family. There is no trace of misogyny, either, in the character of Grace Ashcroft in ‘The Wish House’ (Debits and Credits 1926), dying of cancer because she has loyally and devotedly, in a mysterious way, taken on the afflictions of Harry Mockler, the man she has loved all her life but who does not return her love. The cumulative evidence of stories such as these may suggest an element of idealisation and wish-fulfilment on Kipling’s part; but this Editor can find no overt trace of misogyny.

The theme of repressed sexuality in The Light That Failed re-emerges in one of Kipling’s most powerful, ambiguous and disturbing stories “Mary Postgate” (A Diversity of Creatures 1917). It is World War I, and Mary Postgate is a lonely, emotionally deprived spinster, who has spent years of her life as a sort of governess to her employer’s nephew Wynn. She cannot even cry when Wynn is killed in a flying accident. Then a bomb falls killing a child, and Mary comes across the wounded German pilot. As she stokes the funeral pyre of Wynn’s belongings, her hatred for the German mounts, whilst she waits for him to die.

an increasing rapture laid hold on her… her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life.

“Mary Postgate” is arguably the most sexually charged story in Kipling’s works; the sense of implied orgasmic release and satisfaction is almost palpable in its intensity at the end of the tale. It is just on the ‘right’ side of explicit, and all the more powerful for being so. Unlike the stories referred to above, there is no demand for sympathy for Mary; not even a judgement as such. Kipling invites an open response by the reader to character and events.

However, many modern critics have undoubtedly found the attitude to women in The Light that Failed unacceptable. As Philip Mallett puts it:

… the novel is punctuated with assertions that women waste men’s time, spoil their work, and demand sympathy when they ought to give it. The only woman it is safe to love is the sea, described as an “unregenerate old hag” who draws men on to
‘scuffle, swear, gamble, and love light loves’… (Rudyard Kipling, a literary life Palgrave Macmillan 2003, p. 57).

It is certainly true to say that the treatment meted out by Dick and to a lesser extent by Torpenhow, to Bessie Broke the artist’s model, who later defaces his picture, is arrogant and chauvinistic, despite Kipling’s pleas in mitigation of Dick’s behaviour, early in the novel, previously discussed. Dick’s reaction to her in Chapter IX is true to his established character and artistic credo, but unpleasant nonetheless, talking about her as if she were an object, rather than a human being:

Do you notice how the skull begins to show through the flesh padding on the face and cheek bone?

This, and Dick’s initial behaviour towards Bessie, suggest an influence on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912), despite Shaw’s dismissal of the novel in a letter to Ellen Terry (Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw; a Correspondence, Reinhardt & Evans 1949 pp. 337-8). The similarities are quite striking. When Dick attempts to soothe Bessie’s sobbing and wailing with ‘There you are … nobody’s going to hurt you’ (Ch. IX p. 156) it could be Henry Higgins in Shaw’s play talking to Eliza. This impression is strengthened when Dick lays down his employment terms to her:

‘You will come to the room across the landing three times a week at eleven in the morning, and I’ll give you three quid just for sitting still and lying down.’ (Ch. IX p. 158)

The use of ‘quid’ instead of ‘pounds’ emphasises Dick’s contempt for Bessie, and is manner and tone are not totally dissimilar to Higgins’s when he tells Eliza, addressing her as Dick does Bessie, almost as if she were a child:

Two brutal episodes have made some critics very uncomfortable with the novel, but are highly relevant to the theme under discussion. In Chapter III, Dick’s abuse of the Syndicate man, claiming Dick’s work as the Syndicate’s property, despite there being no specific agreement between them (see the Note to page 40 line 28 Chapter III). He even brazenly offers to set up an exhibition of Dick’s work to spread his reputation. This naturally encourages a degree of sympathy with Dick’s righteous indignation. and his angry accusations of theft and burglary are understandable. But he goes further, firstly with threats of physical violence, and then actually manhandling him. It is at this point one detects a distinctly homophobic note intruding:

He put one hand on the man’s face and ran the other down the plump body beneath the coat … ‘The thing’s soft all over- like a woman’ … Dick walked round him, pawing him, as a cat paws a soft hearth rug. Then he traced with his forefingers the leaden pouches underneath the eyes. (pp. 42-3)

‘Dick stretched himself on the floor, wild with delight at the sounds and smells.
‘God is very good-I never thought I’d hear this again. Give ’em hell, men!. Oh, give ‘em hell’ he cried’ (Ch III p. 42-3)

At one level, the episode is a ‘lark’, a boy’s own adventure thrill at his return to the war zone. But at another, in its uncontrolled ecstasy, it suggests an orgiastic, homoerotic response. An interpretation of this kind of thing as symbolic of Dick’s thwarted, frustrated sexuality has not,however, mitigated similar critical disapproval to that of the Syndicate man’s humiliation.

One is very conscious in this particular analytical approach, of over-imposing a 21st century sexual agenda onto late Victorian mores, and reading Kipling too intently in this light. Nevertheless. the text does yield to gender interpretation, but hopefully not at the expense of other important lines of enquiry. The relationship between Dick and Torpenhow has, also, not escaped this particular scrutiny. Torpenhow is counsellor, and honest critic,,unafraid to denounce Dick’s arrogance and vanity. His is a fellow press man and war adventurer, drinking partner, and companion about town In Chapter XI, when Dick, is in an anguish of panic at the onset of his blindness, Torpenhow tries to calm him into sleep, and as he does so ‘kissed him lightly on the forehead, as men do sometimes kiss a wounded comrade in the hour of death to ease his departure’ (Ch. XV p. 229)

This moment consciously anticipates Dick’s death in the Sudan; one can imagine Torpenhow doing exactly the same over his dead body as he cradles him in his arms. In other words, I think Kipling is being truthful and accurate in his interpretation of Torpenhow’s action.; it is what one would do to a wounded comrade, and therefore I cannot subscribe to a homoerotic sub-text, nor do I feel the passage stands up to such an analysis.

This is re-inforced retrospectively in Chapter 5, when Torpenhow comes into the studio where Dick is in an emotionally confused state after being with Maisie. He looks at Dick in the darkness:-

… with his eyes full of the austere love that springs up between men who have tugged at the same oars together, and are yoked by custom and use and intimacies of toil. This is a good love, and since it allows, and even encourages, strife, recrimination, and the most brutal sincerity, does not die but increases, and is proof against any absence and evil conduct. (Ch XI p 188-9)

This definition of love is much in the spirit of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 118 (“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds” etc), and is finely and movingly done; the very essence of their friendship, and indeed the true nature of friendship itself. Nevertheless, whilst there is no sexuality in it, Kipling is certainly describing male friendship, and the unambiguous message here is that Torpenhow is providing more durable and meaningful support than any woman can.

War and Pessimism

There can be few readers who are unfamiliar, at least in outline from history or the cinema, of the dramatic conflict between between General Charles George Gordon and his enemy the Sudanese rebel leader the Mahdi; a conflict which symbolises Empire and visions of Empire even now, and still captures the popular imagination. The 1884-5 Expedition to the Sudan under General Wolseley, to relieve the besieged Gordon at Khartoum, pre-dated the novel by some 5 years. The Sudan campaign, as Imperial and military history was clearly in the forefront of Kipling’s mind during the gestation of “The Light That Failed”[The historical background is covered in the detailed Notes for Chapter II and for Chapters XIV and XV, and in the account given in an Appendix to ORG. The context of these events has sometimes been mistaken for the Battle of Omdurman, which heralded the final defeat of the Mahdi, but that was
not until 1889, well after the novel was written.]

The Anglo-Indian community reacted with enormous shock to the news of Gordon’s fate, and we may be pretty sure that Kipling reacted in the same way, given his likely admiration for Gordon as a man of action and a hero of the Empire. Public opinion in Britain blamed the Government, particularly Gladstone, for failing to relieve the siege. Some historians, however, have accused Gordon of defying orders, and refusing to evacuate Khartoum despite the late possibility of doing so.

These events, described in Chapter II of The Light that Failed, and their background influence the whole novel, up to and including the final two chapters. Gordon himself has only a few brief mentions, but he seems to cast his unacknowledged shadow over the novel’s action.

The most striking fact about the war sequences is that Kipling had never been on a battlefield, let alone in the Sudan campaign. It was the Boer War that later gave him his first experience of the real thing. He had only visited Egypt for 4 days in Port Said aged 16, during an earlier Egyptian war. So the vivid and realistic descriptions that Orwell and other critics have so admired, were derived from Kipling’s own imagination enhanced by reading numerous eye-witness acounts of the conflict. It is not only the descriptions of action and scene that impress, but the attention Kipling gives to the details of military resourcing, tactics and logistics. (He was later to apply the same approach to the Jungle Books (1894), evoking a jungle world from images and books about a part of India he had never visited.)

If the tragedy of Gordon seems to anticipate the end of Empire, the sombre mood in Britain which followed it can be seen as related to the mood of world-weariness and pessimism which characterised the late 19th Century; ironically co-incidental with the high tide of Britain’s wealth and imperial supremacy. William Knighton summed up the atmosphere in his 1881 essay on suicide for the Contemporary Review (no 39, 1881): ‘Men everywhere are becoming more weary of the burden of life’. And Knighton describes ‘the erosion of vitality’ brought about by ‘the force of their own inventions, runaway science, runaway technology, runaway urbanism.’

Such a view of life can be traced back to Wordsworth and his withdrawal from revolutionised society, and is discernable through the work of of Tennyson, especially in “In Memoriam”(1853), to the French Symbolists,Rimbaud and Baudelaire, to Poe, Wilde and Hardy’s tragic fatalism.. Wilde expressed the sense of a world suddenly become meaningless and out of joint, in the macabre musical imagery of “The Harlot’s House”:

Then suddenly the tune went false
The dancers wearied of the waltz
The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl”

(“The Harlot’s House” Oscar Wilde (1885) Complete Works, Collins page 790)

An earlier example, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1865) one of the great lyric poems of the 19thC, contemplates the Age’s crisis of religious faith, and the need for love and stability in a world without order. The poem ends with his vision of a society that:

Hath neither joy, nor love, nor light
Nor certitude nor peace nor help for pain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(“Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold: Palgrave’s Golden Treasury 1980 ed. page 790)

The power of the poem derives from a profound moral awareness of a kind of heart of darkness. There is an interesting and instructive parallel between this late Victorian sense of alienation, and the mood of the 1920’s; similarly an age of great prosperity and endless possibilities. Yet, it was the darker moral and spiritiual underside of that society which concerned writers like Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and D H Lawrence. And darkness and alienation certainly pervade the final chapters of The Light That Failed, indeed our own age is comparable, which is why this Editor finds in the novel a modernity as well as a portrait of its time.

The 1870’s and 1880’s also saw a liberalising of the attitude towards, and philosophical concern with,the idea of suicide, as Knighton’s article suggests. In The Light That Failed when Dick is most painfully aware of the hopelessness of his condition, he is kept alive by:

‘a lingering sense of humour … suicide he had persuaded himself would be a ludicrous insult to the gravity of the situation,as well as a weak-kneed confession of fear.’
(Ch. XIV p. 235)

This is clearly Dick the brave, but the passage indicates that suicide has crossed his mind, and that he is no stranger to fear. It is possible,in the light of this, to see his death as both an act of heroism and of willed suicide, a euthanasia of a kind, aided by Torpenhow, whom he has asked to deliberately put him to ‘the forefront of the battle’. In the view of this Editor the novel’s penultimate paragraph could justifiably support this interpretation:

His luck held to the last, even to the crowning mercy of a kindly bullet to his head”
(Chapter XV p. 289)

Cities of Dreadful Night

There are two works entitled “The City of Dreadful Night” which are important influences on The Light That Failed. One is the collection of eight articles by Kipling describing Calcutta, originally published in the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer in 1887-8, and later as sections of Letters of Travel, in Volume 2 of From Sea to Sea in 1900.

There is also the surreal narrative poem by the Glasgow-born poet James Thomson, from whom Kipling borrowed the phrase. This appeared in instalments in the National Reformer in 1874, and in book form in 1880.

Kipling recalls how his youthful reading of it ‘shook me to my unformed core’ (Something of Myself, Chapter II p 33). The poem’s mood and imagery pervade the novel; Kipling quotes the text frequently, and the two ‘Melancolia’ paintings are the novel’s central images, impacting on the personal and artistic conflicts between Maisie and Dick. Thomson’s ‘Melancolia’ is a huge bronze female winged statue or effigy, based on Albrecht Durer’s engraving ‘Melencolia 1‘ (Kipling updated the spelling of the name for clarity.(see the note for Ch. IX pages 148-9).

Kipling’s vivid description of Dick in Chapter IV sombrely watching the Thames from the Embankment wall, and looking at ‘the faces flocking past … some with death on their features … others merely drawn and lined with work’ (Ch. IV p. 54), owes something to the opening of the poem’s Section VI as the speaker tells us how:

I sat forlornly by the river-side
And watched the bridge-lamps glow like golden stars
Above the blackness of the swelling tide. (Section VI Verse 1)

He too sees anonymous crowds, but also hears ‘stranger voices in a stranger talk’.

Edwin Morgan, however, identifies a paradox in Thomson’s image/statue of ‘Melancolia’. Despite her inertia and world-weariness, he says of her in his Introduction to the poem:

There is a suggestion of great endurance and patience;great latent force,a force that remains under an even more powerful spell, and so cannot act in the real world. (Introduction to the poem, page 22).

This surely must have influenced Kipling’s portrait of the heroic aspects of Dick’s character, enduring his affliction even in despair, and similarly ultimately unable to “act in the real world”. Edwin Morgan also points out that Section XXI symbolises the artist wrestling with his material and a kind of epic struggle:

Unvanquished in defeat and desolation
Undaunted in the hopeless conflagration.
(Verse 7)

…Baffled and beaten back she works on still,
Weary and sick of soul she works the more,
Sustained by her indomitable will:
The hands shall fashion and the brain shall pore,
And her sorrow shall be turned to labour,
Till Death the friend-foe piercing with his sabre
That mighty heart of hearts ends bitter war.
(Verse 8)

A change of gender and instrument of death, and you have the essence of Dick Heldar’s heroic dimension.

Section IV describes a symbolic desert dreamscape, vividly lit with nightmare images of isolation and despair, with its refrain:

As I came through the desert thus it was
As I came through the desert all was black.

Dick in his blackness is in a very real desert, and like the narrator facing ‘the deep jaws of death.’ (Verse 3 line 20)

Which brings us once again to the issue of Dick’s end and the accompanying final ambiguity. Is his death, in the present context of this poem, a fin-de-siecle ‘literary’ suicide in keeping with the late century’s pessimistic mood, or an act of courage escaping the fetters of his isolation and blindness? Dick is, after all, a passionate man, unlike the lost souls of Thomson’s imaginary city.

The Chambers of the mansion of my heart,
In every one whereof thine image dwells,
Are black with grief eternal for thy sake.

The inmost oratory of my soul,
Wherein thou ever dwellest quick or dead,
Is black with grief eternal for thy sake.
( Verses 8 and 9).

“The City of Dreadful Night” is a poem of extreme moods and vision, often unrelenting in its morbidity, but unforgettable once read. Edwin Morgan also sees in it something of the poet’s sense of cultural displacement, coming from his native Scotland to London. In the same way, Kipling may well have recognised his own struggle to adjust to London literary and metropolitan life after the crucial formative years in India, so cruelly interrupted by Lorne Lodge, and so creating the burden of a double displacement.

If Thomson’s imaginary nightmare city is a place of fear and desolation, the Calcutta of Kipling’s own “City of Dreadful Night” is a thronging metropolis to be absorbed in all its diversity; a ‘Real Live City’ (Chapter I, Header page 201), and all that that implies, as Kipling’s invitation, hard to resist, anticipates the comprehensiveness of his urban portrait:

Let us take off our hats to Calcutta, the many-sided, the smoky, the magnificent, as we drive in over the Hughli bridge in the dawn of a still February morning.
(Chapter 1 page 201)

In contrast there is Port Said, a city which contains ‘the concentrated essence of all the iniquities and all the vices in all the continents.’ (Ch III p. 31. It also has light and colour, as opposed to London’s gloom; an open city of adventurous possibilities, in spite of the war background:

For recreation there was the straight vista of the canal,the blazing sands,the procession of shipping and the white hospitals where the British soldiers lay. (Ch. III p. 31)

But Calcutta of course has its poverty, at a level beyond that of Dick’s immediate milieu, although not of the London slums themselves as Kipling indicates in a brief description of Dickensian intensity:

The vision dies out in the smells and gross darkness of the night, in evil, time-rotten brickwork, and another wilderness of shut-up houses.
(Ch. VI p. 247)

Running through Kipling’s “City of Dreadful Night” is the presentation of Calcutta as a kind of surreal negative mirror image of London. This is not just a convenient visual metaphor, but the epitome of Anglo-India itself. East and West are separate. yet they are one, so the city symbolises the reality of Empire and is a microcosm of late Victorian life. When Kipling describes Calcutta’s Park Street as:

…a rush of broughams, neat buggies, the lightest of gigs,trim office brownberries, shining victorias, and a sprinkling of veritable hansom cabs…

we could be in the heart of London itself. And the long account of the doings of the Bengal Legislation Council in Chapter II, with its frock-coated members, and committee rhetoric is not so far removed from the business atmosphere of a Victorian London Boardroom.

Calcutta, too, is a city of sin; personified by the seedy glamour of two ‘Madams’ ‘Dainty Iniquity’ and ‘Fat Vice’ We journey to a backstreet den and up a staircase to be met by:

Just in case we get too carried away with excitement at the delights on offer, Kipling strips away the masks to reveal the sordid reality:

‘The scene changes suddenly as a slide in a magic-lantern’ as Dainty Iniquity and Fat Vice slide away on a roll of streets and alleys, each more squalid than the other. (Ch VI p 247).

Images of human life

This image reminds us of Kipling’s abiding interest in photography. Indeed, much of the book is a series of vivid snapshots; a guided tour of sorts with the author exhorting us to listen in here, to take in a scene there, and follow him on a remarkable journey.
The Light That Failed can also be seen as a sequence of images, a book strongly visualised and full of colour in an age before colour photography. There is a notable example in Chapter V, just after Dick’s reunion with Maisie, as he thinks back to their childhood, and memories of:

…storm across the sea, and Maisie in a gray dress on the beach,sweeping her drenched hair out of her eyes and laughing … Maisie flying before the wind that threshed the foreshore … Maisie picking her way delicately from stone to stone, a pistol in her hand … and Maisie in a gray dress sitting on the grass between the mouth of a cannon and a nodding yellow poppy. The pictures passed before him one by one,and the last stayed the longest.
(Chapter V pages 63-4)

The recall becomes a photo album in his mind; the last picture, of course, is pure holiday snapshot.

A variant of this is Kipling’s imaginative ‘listing’ technique, often, as in this instance, a panoramic view of the variety of human types and races. In Chapter IV of “City of Dreadful Night” Kipling is at the Calcutta Port Office, and observes the surrounding mix of:

…the cast-ups of all races … Italians with gold ear-rings and a thirst for gambling; Yankees of all states, with Mulattos and pure-buck niggers; red and rough Danes, Cingalese … tunbellied Germans, Cockney mates keeping a little aloof from the crowd … an ethnological museum where all the specimens are playing comedies and tragedies…

There is a hint of stereotyping here, but as all sterotypes begin from a factual starting point, we may accept that Kipling is describing the scene as it would be, and is showing a genuine fascinated interest in human diversity. To a modern reader the use of ‘buck nigger’ seems unfortunate, marginally excusable only in that it was common usage at the time. In the context of Kipling’s whole oeuvre however, there is insufficient evidence to supplement the familar charge of racism that has for so long haunted his reputation. Describing people as ‘specimens’ or ‘objects’ in a museum is certainly curious, and made more so by the – for Kipling – surprisingly clumsy mixed metaphor used. At worst, the analogy is a thoughtless and misconceived attempt at the narrator-as-dispassionate-observer role; at best he may be genuinely seeing people as valid artistic subject matter.

Less vivid and particularised, but in the same spirit and tone is the Chapter III account in The Light that Failed of Dick in Port Said, and how:

He spent his evenings on the quay, and boarded many ships and saw very many friends … hurrying war correspondents, skippers of the contract
troop-ships employed in the campaign … and others of less reputable trades. He had the choice of all the races of the East and West for studies…
(Ch III p. 31)

This is more generalised fare, ‘all human life is there’, but the approach is the same. Immediately, however, we come up against yet another contradiction, best illustrated by a brief consideration of an extract from a more popular Kipling novel. The experiences at sea of many peoples and dialects of the arrogant young Harvey Cheyne, in Captain’s Courageous (1896), expand out into a wider sense of community; there is a change of attitude and feeling beyond the creation of images of colourful humanity. Harvey has relished his initiation into responsible manhood aboard the schooner We’re Here – a Melvillian microcosm of humanity – and has been re-united with his parents, who are walking the streets of Gloucester, Massachusetts, contemplating:

…women in light summer dresses … straw-hatted men fresh from Boston desks … clear eyed Nova-Scotians … French, Italians, Swedes and Danes … ministers of many creeds … captains of tugs and water-boats, riggers, fitters, lumpers, salters, boat builders and coopers, and all the mixed population of the waterfront…
(Captain’s Courageous Chapter X pages 265-6)

However, the readiness with which Kipling creatively mined the sources of Thomson’s poem, and the consequent slough of despond of the final chapters of The Light That Failed, suggest that he was not at home in true Christian belief. Edwin Morgan, in the poem’s Introduction, reminds us forcefully that ‘this is a poem about the loss of God, or the death of God’, and quotes from Section XIV where a preacher preaches an ‘anti-sermon’ espousing a ‘doctrine of stoic necessity’ :

I find no hint throughout the Universe
Of good or ill, of blessing or of curse;
I find alone Necessity Supreme.
(Introduction to Thomson’s “City of Dreadful Night” page 19 and Section XIV verse 13)

When Dick mentions God it is usually in the heat of personal despair rather than a declaration of faith, and his predicament is akin to the isolation and suffering of the Greek tragic hero, as well as in keeping with the mood of the poem. And there is an almost Lear-like bitter irony in his idea of:

the very just Providence who delights in causing pain has decreed that the agony shall return and in the midst of keenest pleasure.
(Ch. XIV p. 255)

If a conclusion of any kind can be drawn at this point, it is that Kipling emerges as clearly as ever as a writer of fascinating dualities and opposites. That is part of his nature as man and artist, and – faults notwithstanding – an element in his greatness.

Some other influences – Manon Lescaut

In Manon Lescaut, the 18th Century novel by the Abbé Prévost, the Chevalier des Grieux meets and seduces the faithless demi-mondaine Manon, who lives in Paris with him, but leaves him for a rich admirer. She is later arrested and charged with prostitution, and deported to Louisiana. Des Grieux, his passion unassuaged, manages to join her in America. They flee but find no shelter. Finally, in a tragic denouement, Manon dies in des Grieux’s arms in a desert waste, just as Dick dies in the desert in the arms of his one true friend. The story leaves unresolved whether Manon is thief, whore, a personification of passionate love, or a type of ‘New Woman’ and in some way a literary inspiration for Maisie.

In an interesting article by Margaret Newsom in KJ 195, she draws attention to Part 3 of the Roman Comique by Paul Scarron (1610-1660). In this work a story is told by one of the characters with interesting parallels to The Light That Failed, “The Story of the Capricious Lover”. It tells of Margaret and her lover Saint Germain, who loves her passionately, but whose love is constantly repulsed. He vows to join the army and die rather than live without her love. He goes to war, and afterwards is wounded in a quarrel by a sword blow to the head. His injury arouses Margaret’s compassion, and they marry when he has recovered.

This happy ending may conceivably have appealed to Kipling and been ‘metagrobolised’ into the first, shorter, version of The Light That Failed. As Mrs Newsom reminds us: ‘Kipling read French literature voraciously, under his learned father’s eye at Lahore … Lockwood Kipling had once earned his living in London as a French teacher.’ The characters of the butler and housekeeper in that story may have influenced Kipling’s account of Mr and Mrs Beeton in his novel.
Aurora Leigh

Another possible influence is Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s lengthy, but hugely popular novel written in blank verse Aurora Leigh (1856), in which there are some striking points of comparison with The Light That Failed.
The poem deals with a number of familiar Victorian issues to do with social relationships and gender, including the theme of ‘Woman-As-Artist’ and of blindness as ‘the light failing’.

Aurora is a woman poet of mixed English and Italian parentage. She is orphaned at thirteen, and like both Kipling and Dick Heldar is brought up for a time by a narrow-minded and repressive aunt who intends to prepare her for middle-class wifehood. She submits outwardly, but inwardly desires to become a poet. Her aunt’s cousin, Romney Leigh, dedicated to social service, proposes to her, wishing her to help him in his political career, but she rejects him in favour of her own vocation. Romney decides to marry a lower-class woman, Marian Earle, but she is discouraged by an aristocratic rival for Romney’s love. Sent to France, Marian is raped and becomes pregnant, but she and the child are rescued by Aurora, and the three set up home in Italy, where Romney appears. He has been blinded by an accident, after a falling beam from his burning house has withered his optic nerve. Aurora marries Romney, but whilst not giving up poetry, she will write in service to her husband’s ideas. The poem contains many referenes to failure and failing light, and the links with The Light That Failed are clear.
Poe’s “Annabel Lee”

This poem by Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) is a lamentation on the death of a young girl. The narrator and Annabel shared a childhood together by the sea as do Dick and Maisie, although as true childhood sweethearts. In both cases their love is doomed. Sea imagery runs throughout Poe’s poem, just as the atmosphere and experience of the sea colour passages in Kipling’s novel, notably Dick’s portrait of the Negroid-Jewess-Cuban woman. There is some evidence that Poe also was drawing on his own experience. The treatment of passion in “Annabel Lee” in comparison with Dick’s – and indeed Kipling’s – experience, strongly suggests the inclusion of the poem as a piece of wish-fulfilment on Kipling’s part.

“Wressley of the Foreign Office”

Closer to home, Kipling appears to have revisited themes from a short story from Plain Tales From the Hills (1888) in The Light that Failed. “Wressley Of The Foreign Office” contains too many parallels for co-incidence and must have had deep personal resonance for Kipling: a rejected infatuation for an uncaring young woman, intense dedication to work; the centrality of a magnum opus; the imagery of Art, and a male protagonist who is not entirely sympathetic. The opening everse “Tarrant Moss” is also heavily indicative:

I closed and drew for my Love’s sake
That now is false to me…
…And ever I moan my loss
for I struck the blow for my false Love’s sake.

The poem was later enlarged and set to music by the American composer Charles Ives in 1902. It also echoes Dick’s final “for old sake’s sake” (see the Notes to Chapter XIV p. 257 line 17), with its connotations of nostalgia and unrequited passion.
Echoes in later works

Although Maisie abruptly departs from The Light That Failed in Chapter XIII, she is to re-appear in another persona as Kate Sheriff in Kipling’s least read novel The Naulahka, co-authored with his friend Wolcott Balestier. The two men had begun work on it in 1890, but it followed closely on fromThe Light That Failed and was published after Balestier’s death in April 1892. There is general agreement that Balestier wrote the opening American chapters, and Kipling the later sections set in India. It is an adventure novel, but it also explores the familiar themes of relationships between men and women that are at the heart of the earlier novel.

Nicholas Tarvin, an ambitious American, plans to persuade a railroad chairman to build a station in the High Plains town of Topaz. Nick’s girl-friend, the strongly independent ‘New Woman’ Kate Sheriff, rejects his proposal of marriage, and sets out to work as a medical missionary in the state of Rhatore in Rajasthan. Nick, desiring both Kate and political success, follows her to India. He plans to obtain a priceless jewelled necklace the green emerald Naulahka (note the culture clash implied by the name Topaz), to bribe the wife of the railroad chairman in order to ensure the railroad will be built. Kate returns to America with Tarvin. Both are changed by their experiences in India. Kate is willing finally to let Nick be the decision maker. Nick, realising the dishonesty of his intrigue, chooses Kate above the precious stone.

‘Suppose I ask you to give up the centre and meaning of your life? Suppose I ask you to give up your work? And suppose I offered in exchange-marriage! No, no.’ She shook her head.’Marriage is good; but what man would pay that price for it?’

The general critical consensus is that The Naulahka is not a very successful novel. It does, however, have interesting points of comparison withThe Light That Failed.

“The Vampire”

A rather curious echo of the relationship between Maisie and Dick – and perhaps between Flo and Rudyard – is to be found in Kipling’s 1897 poem “The Vampire”, which appeared at about the same time as the publication of Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel Dracula. Kipling wrote it as publicity, to help bolster the erratic career of his artist cousin, Philip Burne-Jones. Burne-Jones was passionately in love with the actress Beatrice Tanner, better known as Mrs Patrick Campbell, and later the original Eliza Doolittle in Shaw’s play Pygmalion. She rejected his advances in favour of Johnston Forbes-Robertson, the actor who would play Dick Heldar in the second London stage version of The Light that Failed. The jealous Burne-Jones painted a Gothic fantasy picture of a youth – obviously himself – being straddled by a vampirish dark-haired woman – clearly Mrs Pat Campbell, which he entered for the tenth summer show at the New Gallery. Rudyard’s poem was intended to get the painting noticed. Burne-Jones didn’t sell his work, which sank into obscurity, but the poem appeared in the gallery catalogue and in the Daily Mail. It includes these lines, repeated with variations, throughout:

The fool was stripped to his foolish hide
(Even as you and I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside –
(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died –
(Even as You and I!)

Even with the Burne-Jones connection in mind, and after 5 years of marriage between Carrie and Rudyard, the echo of the past is unmistakeable.

Other echoes of Kipling’s tragic theme

Several other later well-known novels bear marked similarities to The Light That Failed. George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1892) is also predicated on the notion of commercialism versus artistic integrity; writing as trade is opposed to writing as art. Pitiful intransigent Edwin Reardon endures poverty in his refusal to compromise. He too suffers from an ambitious woman, his wife Amy, who subsequently deserts him.
Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1898) also explores the character of a dedicated would-be artist and his conflicting and destructive relationship with women. Jude is caught between two women, the earthy sensual Arabella Donn, and the hypersensitive and vacillating Sue Brideshead. The sexual frankness of the novel exceeds anything Kipling attempts in The Light That Failed, and its hostile reception so angered Hardy that he forsook novel writing permanently and concentrated on poetry. Both novels however share an acute sense of human tragedy. We have no knowledge of Kipling’s opinion about Gissing, but he had a friendly relationship with Hardy, an admirer of his work. In 1928 Kipling acted as a pallbearer at Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey.

The Moon and Sixpence

There is also an instructive comparison to be made between The Light That Failed and W Somerset Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence (1919). Both Dick and Maugham’s ‘Strickland’ are obsessional artists, and both go blind. Strickland’s life and character are based closely on Paul Gauguin, and Maugham, as a knowledgeable and discerning admirer of Kipling’s fiction, may well have been influenced by Kipling. (It may not be too fanciful, also, to suspect that Maugham’s use of the the name ‘Strickland’ possibly echoes the mysterious police inspector who figures in a number of Kipling’s stories.) Maugham uses Kipling’s familiar device of the narrator as observer and raconteur, describing events at second-hand. But the self-confessed limitations of Maugham’s narrator ( ‘I can give no description of the arduous steps by which he reached such mastery over his art as he ever acquired … He kept the secret of his struggles to himself …’ etc ) are clearly Maugham’s own, and preclude our directly experiencing Strickland’s inner life and emergence as a great painter. [The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham, Heinemann 1955 pp. 214-215] In contrast we see Dick at first-hand, with sustained insight into his sufferings and his struggle to keep his artistic conscience intact.

The Four Feathers

Arguably the most popular successor to The Light That Failed is AEW Mason’s classic The Four Feathers (1902),which shares significant characteristics with Kipling. There is the Sudanese campaign background (Mason’s tale covers the years 1882-1888), and the element of exciting ‘Boy’s Own’ adventure. More importantly, both explore the theme of loss of sight commensurate with courage and personal growth. Guards officer Harry Feversham is given four feathers as an accusation of cowardice because he resigns his commission before active duty in the Sudan. The fourth feather is given by his fiancee Ethne, also a woman in conflict, who has rejected Harry because of his actions.

Stage versions

A stage version of Kipling’s novel played at the Royalty Theatre in London in 1898, starring Courtney Thorpe as Dick, Frank Atherley as Torpenhow, and Furtado Clarke as Maisie. Much more successful was the 1902 production. It used the ‘happy ending’ to appeal to the romantic appetites of its audiences, and ran for 150 performances until April 1903. It was adapted by a woman, ‘George Fleming’, in reality Constance Fletcher, who had several stage plays to her credit under this pseudonym. Johnston Forbes-Robertson played Dick. He was a major star of the English stage, and a great attraction for audiences, preparing perhaps for his role as another tortured soul, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. C Aubrey Smith was Torpenhow.

Film versions

There have been three cinematic incarnations of Kipling’s novel; once in 1916, a 5-reel Pathe version directed by Edward Jose; the 7-reel Paramount film directed in 1923 by George Melford; and most famously William Wellman’s 1939 Hollywood version (left). This movie enjoyed no small success; Wellman was one of Hollywood’s finest directors, and its most celebrated British-born star Ronald Colman took the role of Dick. Walter Huston, father of the great director John, was Torpenhow, Ida Lupino a much admired Bessie, and Muriel Angelus played Maisie.

A New York Times review of December 1939 praised its courage in sticking to the unhappy ending and noted Colman’s charm and charisma, but remarked wryly that it gave the: ‘comforting impression that the characters, good fellows all, will never concede that it’s a woman’s world they’re living in.’ It was a penetrating comment on the tensions within Kipling’s tale.

Some conclusions

The Light That Failed has not enjoyed the popularity of the best-known fiction of its own time, and critical reception has ranged from indifference to hostility. Nevertheless it contains some of Kipling’s finest descriptive and narrative writing, and earns its rightful place in the Kipling canon. Time and time again, one encounters images and set-pieces which move and excite by their contextual rightness, and provide many of the novel’s high points.

Poet and critic Al Alvarez recently noted:

Rudyard Kipling, who wrote some of the purest prose in the English language, said that when he finished a story he locked it away in a drawer for a few weeks, then went through it again, blacking out with Indian ink all the bits he had been most proud of the first time around.
[The Writer’s Voice, Chapter 1 page 35 Bloomsbury Press 2005]

Alvarez thus defines his own notion of Kiplings purity; a style committed to significant detail, never seduced into ’fine writing’ or striving for effect. For Kipling, visual and emotional truth are paramount. Here is a battle-scene from Chapter II of the novel (pp. 25-6), reminding us again that his experience of the Sudan campaign was second-hand, but invested with a powerful sense of realism:

No civilised troops in the world could have endured the hell through which they came, the living leaping high to avoid the dying who clutched at their heels, the wounded cursing and staggering forward till they fell – a torrent black as the sliding water above a mill-dam – full on the right flank of the square.The line of the dusty troops and the faint blue desert sky overhead went out in rolling smoke,and the little stones on the heated ground and the tinder-dry clumps of scrub became matters of surpassing interest, for men measured their agonised retreat and recovery by these things, counting mechanically and hewing their way back to chosen pebble and branch.

The first thing that strikes one here is the knowledge of battle conditions; how every detail registers. There is the awful image of the dying clutching at enemy heels, and the impact of the landscape as a kind of desperate reference point for the retreating soldiers. It sounds authentic even if it is imaginative re-creation. The ‘mill-dam’ imagery could hardly be bettered in conveying the unstoppable force of an attack and the sheer weight of numbers. The phrase ‘surpassing interest’ suggests the men’s terror by its ironic understatement.

The ‘mill-dam’, as an image of oppression, becomes the ‘millstones’ of Dick’s thoughts grinding against each other in this description of him alone in his darkness in Chapter XIII, p. 231:

… yet the brain would not wear out and give him rest. It continued to think at length, with imagery and all manner of reminiscences. It recalled Maisie and past successes, reckless travels by land and sea, the glory of doing work and feeling that it was good, and suggested all that might have happened had the eyes only been faithful to their duty. When thinking ceased through sheer weariness, there poured into Dick’s soul tide on tide of overwhelming, purposeless fear- dread of starvation always, terror lest the unseen ceiling should crush down upon him, fear of fire in the chambers and a louse’s death in red flame, and agonies of fiercer horror that had nothing to do with any fear of death.

The power of this extract derives as much from its structure as its language. Kipling divides Dick’s mental processes into two halves; relentless thought giving way to overwhelming emotion. The significance of both is emphasised by the contrast between them. By making the brain ‘it’, as something with an identity separate from Dick, Kipling conveys his extreme state and the break-down of his self-control. One feels the effect of Kipling’s prose rythm, and his mastery of the long sentence, with its cumulative emotional effect. Somehow he has managed to make us, temporarily at least, forget the unpleasant side of Dick’s character in his affliction. The weight of the words, the alliterations and repetitions, all play their part in creating the total effect. As so often with Kipling there is a bold stroke; a striking or unusual image that spearheads the impact of a whole passage. In this instance it is the subtle but horrifying ‘louse’s death in red flame’. In one image, Kipling has combined the sense of Dick’s reduced, less than human state, with the cruelty inflicted on him, and the terrible suddenness of death by fire.

Opinion in Kipling’s own time and the view of posterity has not always been bad news for The Light That Failed. A contemporary view by the poet Lionel Johnson offers an enthusiastic and perceptive judgement, surprisingly so from a writer closer to Wilde than to Kipling:

… it is the first truth about him that he has power; not a clever trick nor a happy knack, nor a flashy style, but real intrinsic power. The reader … feels his heart go out to a writer with mind and muscle, not only nerve and sentiment.
[R L Green (Ed.) quoted in DC Rose “Blue Roses and Green Carnations” KJ 302 p. 31]

One of the novel’s main faults, according to J M S Tompkins, is Kipling’s artistic inability to always distance himself from his material. But she is moved to comment (p. 3) that:

The writing never runs to waste, but it is explicit and fully expressive. Scenes and feelings are worked out, and people declaim and debate their opinions. Nothing is hinted or bitten back; it is a style of full statement.

By way of conclusion, let us leave the final word with Kipling himself, with the final four lines from “When Earth’s Last Picture is Painted” (1892), which seem a fitting tribute to both Dick Heldar and to Rudyard Kipling his creator:

And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It, for the God of Things as They are!