[In the following essay, Stinton finds thematic similarities between the story “Mrs. Bathurst” and several other Kipling tales and explores the story's discontinuous narrative.]

To use one work of an author to illuminate another is always hazardous. Each work starts from different premises to reach different conclusions. So it is an error to use Sophocles' Oedipus Coloneus to illuminate his Oedipus Tyrannus, and vice versa. With Kipling it is even more hazardous, since he said himself that it was his policy to avoid repetition, and clearly implied this in ‘The Bull that Thought’: ‘no artist can be expected to repeat himself’.¹ Nonetheless, he did often treat the same theme more than once, not only in a general way, such as the themes of laughter or revenge which occur throughout his works, but with themes of more restricted scope, treated in different ways. I believe that the special and much discussed difficulties of ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ justify a cautious comparison with other stories, and that there are enough analogies, as I deem them, to make this worth-while—stories, that is, which embody the theme of ‘destined reunion’. These I shall briefly review, summarizing only those parts that are immediately relevant.

‘By Word of Mouth’ is the last but one of Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). Dr. Dumoise is a Civil Surgeon, called ‘“Dormouse”, because he was a round little, sleepy little man’, who ‘married a girl as round and sleepy-looking as himself’. The couple lived in happy isolation, absorbed in each other, till Mrs. Dumoise died of typhoid in an epidemic. Dumoise, inconsolable, goes on leave to walk in the hills, where ‘the scenery is good if you are in trouble’. As he halts for the night at a remote dâk-bungalow, his terror-stricken bearer appears to tell him that he has seen the dead woman, and that she has given him a message for her husband: ‘“Ram Dass, Give my salaams to the Sahib, and tell him that I shall meet him next month at Nuddea”’. Dumoise waits all night for her but she never comes. Closely questioned, the bearer says he does not know where Nuddea is, has no friends there and ‘would most certainly never go to Nuddea, even though his pay were doubled’. Nuddea is in fact in Bengal, twelve hundred miles from Dumoise's station in the Punjab. On his return there Dumoise has just finished telling the story to his locum when a telegram arrives ordering him on special duty to Nuddea—alone, since his bearer refuses to come with him—and eleven days later he is dead.

The story is a straightforward one, and the supernatural element—which cannot be rationalized—is not outside the range of other magazine stories of the time. Its strength lies in the simplicity and restraint with which it is told: it has none of the complexity or irony which characterize that brilliant but erratic collection to which it belongs, and achieves a pathos matched by very few of the others, such as the equally simple ‘The Story of Muhammad Din’. Forty years later, in ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ (Debits and Credits, 1926), Kipling treated the theme in a very different mode. As in some other stories of the Great War and its aftermath, this has its setting, and its frame, in the Masonic Lodge where its victims are made welcome and given such help or healing as is possible. The war is over. Strangwick, a boy who went out in 1917 and served as battalion runner, breaks down; ‘I’ and Keede, the doctor, who has already come across him as a shell-shock case in France, take him aside and get him to talk about what is troubling him, while the sedative he has been given does its work.

At first he talks hysterically about the frozen corpses which creak beneath the duckboards, but Keede senses that this is a cover for something deeper. Strangwick's platoon sergeant has been found dead from charcoal fumes in a dug-out. Keede, who has known about this, is puzzled by it, and probes the boy in the belief that he has some guilty knowledge, which is the cause of his malaise. The truth that emerges is very different. Strangwick has known his platoon sergeant John Godsoe since infancy as ‘Uncle John’—no real relation, but a friend of the family who lives in the next street. His mother's sister Bella (‘Auntie Armine’ because she was ‘“like somethin' movin' slow,” in armour’: she had been handsome, and her husband's surname, as we learn later, is Armine) has also been close since infancy. During his leave in January 1918 she has given him a message for Godsoe: ‘“Tell Uncle John I hope to be finished of my drawback by the twenty-first, an' I'm dying to see 'im as soon as 'e can after that date”’. The drawback, as we know but Strangwick does not, is terminal cancer—‘“a bit of a gatherin' in 'er breast, I believe”’—and he delivers the message on his return on January 11th. Ten days later, on January 21st, he goes to warn Godsoe for immediate leave, one of his duties as runner. On his way he is startled for a moment to see his Auntie Armine, but ‘“it was only the dark an' some rags of gas-screen, ‘angin’ on a bit o' board, ‘ad played me the trick”’. He tells Godsoe this, and laughs: ‘“That's the last time I 'ave laughed”’. Godsoe takes it calmly, but on the way back asks exactly where she was.

‘“In 'er bed at 'ome”, I says. “Come on down. It's perishin' cold, and I'm not due for leaf”.

‘“Well, I am’, 'e says. ‘I am …” An' then—give you me word I didn't recognise the voice—he stretches out 'is neck a bit, in a way 'e 'ad, an' he says: “Why, Bella!” 'e says. “Oh, Bella!” 'e says. “Thank Gawd! 'e says. Just like that! An' then I saw—I tell you I saw—Auntie Armine herself standin' by the old dressin'-station door where first I'd thought I'd seen her. He was lookin' at 'er an' she was lookin' at him. I saw it, an' me soul turned over inside me because—because it knocked out everything I'd believed in. I ‘ad nothing to lay ‘old of, d'ye see? An' 'e was lookin' at ‘er as though he could 'ave 'et 'er, an' she was lookin' at ‘im in the same way, out of 'er eyes. Then he says: “Why, Bella”, 'e says “this must be only the second time we've been alone together in all these years.” An' I saw 'er half hold out her arms to 'im in the perishin' cold. An' she nearer fifty than forty an me own Aunt! …

‘If the dead do rise—and I saw 'em—why—why anything can 'appen … For I saw 'er’, he repeated. ‘I saw 'im and 'er—she dead since mornin' time, ‘an he killin' 'imself before my livin' eyes so as to carry on with 'er for all Eternity—an' she ‘oldin' out 'er arms for it!’

The truth revealed, he passes out. ‘“That's the real thing at last”’, says Keede. ‘“All he wants now is to be kept quiet till he wakes”’.

The supernatural is again all-important, and no more here than in ‘By Word of Mouth’ can it be rationalized without making nonsense of the story. It is not, however, the vision of the supernatural in itself that has so shocked Strangwick and knocked the bottom out of his world, but the sudden apprehension of a love which is not only beyond his imagining in its scale and intensity, but literally out of this world; and the lovers who share this passion are two solid, middle-aged pillars of his own home life. The supernatural gives the scale: John Godsoe's suicide is to bring the lovers together for all eternity. Moreover, the appointment in death, to which their long years of mutual fidelity has somehow entitled them, is seen as sanctioned by powers beyond human understanding. No wonder Strangwick has rejected his conventional engagement to the conventional girl with whom he has been ‘pricin’ things in the windows’, and so (as we learn from Bella's widower, Brother Armine) implicated himself in ‘a little breach of promise action’. He is, as he says, left with ‘nothing to lay hold of’. The revelation has not only shown what he thought was real love to be an empty thing; it has shattered the once stable world of home in which his aunt and ‘uncle’ had hitherto played their appointed role as mother-and father-figures.

In this story, which must rank as one of Kipling's best, a complex theme is handled with admirable economy and tact. Nothing is out of key. The naive narrator, who does not fully understand what he describes—or in this case understands only when realisation is forced upon him—is a favourite device of Kipling's, and here particularly effective. The effect is helped by his uneducated speech, which does not jar as the dialect sometimes does in the early stories, and is brilliantly set off against the lofty, evocative words of the burial service, also only half-understood. The Masonic framework is unobtrusive, while giving a realistic occasion for the story; and the shrewd questioning of the experienced doctor, sympathetic but firm, keeps the war scenes in perspective and provides a natural means of penetrating the patient's hysterical evasions and bring the truth to light. As we should expect in Kipling's later work, some of the background is sketched in by the merest hint; but the theme comes through without obscurity and without residue. Bodelsen reads into Keede's last words, quoted above, the notion that for Strangwick, as for John and Bella, life is to begin only at death. But this is an unnecessary and over-subtle complication. On the other hand there seem to be clear hints that Strangwick's aunt and ‘uncle’ are closer to him than he thinks. Bella and her husband never had any children; this is the second time she and John Godsoe have been together in all these years. When we remember Helen Turrell in ‘The Gardener’, whose tragedy was that she could never acknowledge openly, though all the village knew it, that the nephew killed in action was really her son, we can fairly infer, even from such slight indication as these, that the lovers Strangwick saw with his own eyes preparing to carry on for all eternity were his own mother and father.

That ‘By Word of Mouth’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’ deal, in a very different modes, with the same theme is clear enough. At first sight, ‘Love-o'-Women’ (Many Inventions, 1893) has nothing in common with these stories. Its elaborate frame, and incident which occasions the story, as often in Kipling, is not to the point, since it sits loosely to the story which is fully intelligible without it. Mulvaney recalls a gentleman-ranker, Larry Tighe, who could ‘put the comether on any woman that trod the green earth av God, an' he knew ut’. He did it not for pure devilry or amusement, as Mulvaney did (‘an mighty sorry I have been whin harm came’), but always ‘for the black shame’; and his targets—or his victims—were the most vulnerable: women of his class (the Colonel's governess) and of transparent innocence, who would be the most harmed by his seduction, and the least risk to himself, since no-one would suspect the liaison. Even Mulvaney remonstrates with him, and gets a short answer: ‘“An' I counsel you not to judge your betters”. “My betthers!” I sez. “God help you, Larry. There's no betther in this; 'tis all bad, as ye will find for yoursilf. … Fwhin your time comes”, sez I, “ye'll remimber fwhat I say”. “An' whin that time comes”, sez he, “I'll come to you for ghostly consolation, father Terence”’.

They next meet on the North-West Frontier, after a bloody engagement. Tighe says he is now married, as he hears Mulvaney is. ‘“Send you happiness”, I sez, “That 's the best hearin' for a long time”. “Are ye of that opinion?” he sezs; an' thin he began talkin' av the campaign.’ All seems normal, save that Tighe has an unnatural thirst for more fighting, and a curious lurching gait on which he brooks no comment. But when Mulvaney has been transferred as acting NCO to Tighe's depleted company, he presently discovers him one night, alone and trying to draw the enemy's fire on himself. ‘“Oh Lord, how long, how long!” he sez, an' at that he lit a match an' held ut above his head.’ Mulvaney pulls him down under cover. ‘“I dare not kill meself”, he sez, rockin' to and fro … I'm to die slow. But I'm in hell now” he sez, shriekin' like a woman. “I'm in hell now!”’. He is tormented by memories, and he can no longer get drunk. ‘“Di'monds and pearls”’, he begins again. ‘“Di'monds an' pearls I have thrown away wid both hands—an' fwhat have I left? … So long as I did not think … so long I did not see—I wud not see, but I can now, what I've lost … How cud I ha' believed her sworn oath—me that have bruk mine again an' again for the sport av seein' them cry? An' there are the others”, he sez. “Oh, what will I do—what will I do?”’ Just then a Pathan who had crept up with a knife, makes for Tighe, who makes no move; but a stone trips him and he falls. ‘“I tould you I was Cain,” sez Love-o'-Women. “Fwhat's the use av killin' him? He's an honust man—by compare.”’ So he is spare to recall his horrors. ‘Av the scores an' scores that he called over in his mind (an' they were drivin' him mad), there was, mark you, wan woman av all, an' she was not his wife, that cut him to the quick av his marrow. 'Twas there he said that he'd thrown away di'monds an' pearls past count, an' thin he'd begin again … to considher (him that was beyond all touch av bein' happy this side hell!) how happy he wud ha' been wid her.’

One day his lurching, uncontrolled walk attracts the attention of the doctor, who knows at once what it is: ‘locomotor ataxi’, or tertiary syphilis. From then on he breaks up fast. On the long march back to Peshawar he is carried in a dooli, while Mulvaney walks beside him. The wives come out to meet their husbands—the Colonel's wife with Mulvaney's Dinah. As they meet, ‘He was watchin' us, an' his face was like the face av a divil that has been cooked too long … I dhrew the curtain, an' Love-o'-Women lay back and groaned’. Mulvaney takes him to hospital by a road well clear of the troops. ‘Av a sudden I heard him say: “Let me look. For the mercy av Hiven, let me look.” … There was a woman ridin' a little behind av us … an' she rode by, walkin'-pace, an' Love-o'-Women's eyes wint afther her as if he wud fair haul her down from the saddle. “Follow there”, was all he sez, … an' I knew by those two wan words an' the look in his face that she was Di'monds-an'-Pearls that he'd talk av in his disthresses.’

They came to the brothel where she works. At the verandah Tighe bids them stop, and, incredibly, swings himself out of the dooli ‘… a little froth came to his lips, an' he wiped ut off wid his hand and looked at her an' the paint on her … “Ay, look”, she sez, “for 'tis your work … you always said I was a quick learner, Ellis”’. So she taunts him with his betrayal of the one woman who would have died for him and with him. ‘“Ye know that, man! If iver your lyin' sowl saw truth in uts life ye know that.” An' Love-o'-Women lifted up his head an' said, “I knew”, an' that was all’. Somehow he finds the strength to go up the verandah steps, and then: ‘He lifted up his eyes, slow an' very slow, an' he looked at her long an' very long, an' he tuk his spache betune his teeth wid a wrench that shuk him. “I'm dyin', Aigypt—dyin',” he sez. Ay, those were his words, for I remimber the name he called her. He was turnin' the death-colour, but his eyes niver rowled. They were set—set on her. Widout word or warnin' she opened her arms full stretch, an' “Here!” she sez. … “Die here!” she sez; an' Love-o'-Women dhropped forward, an' she hild him up, for she was a fine big woman’. And so Mulvaney goes off for the doctor, and they come back to find that she has shot herself beside him.

There is nothing in this story of the finesse and elliptical restraint that is the mark of Kipling's later work. All is set out in detail and fully orchestrated. He has perhaps laid on the colour with too heavy a hand, but the story is a powerful and moving one, and finds its own economy at its own pace. In particular, he has been criticized for the narrator's dialect, especially in the rendering of Antony's words to Cleopatra. This is I think unjust. In some stories the dialect can be irritating, but here it has a point: it emphasizes the device, which we have already seen used to good effect in ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’, of a narrator who cannot fully understand what he was witnessed. It also underlines the difference in social status and education between the narrator and his subject.

There seems to be general agreement that the theme of ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ (Traffics and Discoveries, 1904) is the destructive power of love: by his obsession with her and the wrong he has done, whatever that may be, Vickery has made himself a private hell; with the rider that his incineration by lightning is the visible symbol of this infernal destruction. I shall argue that the main contention, though true, is not the whole truth, and that the rider is false.

It is what actually happens that is in dispute. There is some common ground, succinctly defined by Miss Tompkins as follows:²

The facts about Vickery are that he has a fifteen-year old daughter, his wife dies in childbed six weeks after he came out, so that he is free; he did not murder her; there was ‘a good deal between’ him and Mrs. Bathurst and he has some wrong or deceit against her on his mind. He says that she was looking for him at Paddington. He sees his Captain, is sent up-country alone and deserts eighteen months before his pension is due. He is found dead with a woman after a thunderstorm. Pyecroft and Pritchard both insist that it was not Mrs. Bathurst's fault. She was left a widow very young, never remarried, and had the respect of the non-commissioned and warrant officers who went to her little hotel in Hauraki. The scene From Lyden's ‘Irenius’ that precedes the tale makes the point that the groom, or clown, is caught in the same noose as kings—this may account for the grotesque stress on ‘Click’; that the woman destroyed him in ignorance, for she loved him; and that the groom in the end threw life from him out of weariness and self-disgust—which suggests that Vickery stood up to attract the lightning. This is not a continuous narrative, but neither is it confusion. Rather it is like the early biograph, ‘just like life. Only—only when any one came down too far towards us that was watchin', they walked right out o' the picture, so to speak.’

This is a very fair account, though some of the inferences from ‘Irenius’, as she indicates, are guesswork not fact, and may be wrong. That the flickering biograph represents the discontinuity of the story is a most interesting conjecture, and may be right; but it does not help with the problem, since Kipling cannot have started with a discontinuous plot. This is so of no other story, however allusive, and seems in any case to be ruled out by what he himself has said (and such revelations are rare) about the genesis of this one:

All I carried away from the magic town of Auckland was the face and voice of a woman who sold me beer at a little hotel there. They stayed at the back of my mind till ten years later when, in a local train of the Cape Town suburbs, I heard a petty officer from Simon's Town telling a companion about a woman in New Zealand who ‘never scrupled to help a lame duck or put her foot on a scorpion’. Then—precisely as the removal of the key-log in a timber-jam starts the whole pile—those words gave me the key to the face and the voice at Auckland, and a tale called ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ slid into my mind, smoothly and orderly as floating timber on a bank-high river.³

There is no question, then, of a deliberately bad story⁴, or even of a hoax, with the author leading his readers astray as Boy Niven led his fellow-seamen round an uninhabited island with the false promise of farming-land. It is a serious story, as any sympathetic reading confirms; and it must have a continuous plot, if only we could fill in the gaps.

These gaps are best indicated by a series of questions. Who is the other person struck by lightning with Vickery? What does the lightning signify? Why does it happen in a teak forest to the north of Buluwayo? What does the film mean? What was the wrong Vickery did to Mrs. Bathurst? What kind of man was Vickery? What did he tell the Captain, and why did his mood change after the interview? Why did the interview make the Captain put on his ‘court-martial face’, and why did he return to normal after going ashore? How far are we meant to rely on Pyecroft's judgement? Why was Vickery sent up-country on a solitary mission? Why did Vickery impress on Pyecroft that his legal wedded wife had died six weeks after his departure from England, and that therefore he was not a murderer? What is the point of the Boy Niven episode? Is there any significance in the locale of the frame? What is the point of the Malay boys trying to tamper with the wagons, thus provoking ‘I's comment, ‘The railway's a general refuge in Africa’? What significance is there, if any, in ‘I's missing the ship he came to meet?

I shall not try to answer these questions in any order, but I hope that answers to all of them, however speculative, will emerge. Firstly, I do not think there is any doubt that the second figure at the end is Mrs. Bathurst. Bodelsen's arguments are conclusive:⁵ Hooper carefully evades the implication of Pyecroft's remark, that the other ‘tramp’ is male; the shorter figure, squatting down and looking up at him, suggests a woman; above all, the reaction: ‘Pritchard covered his face with his hands for a moment, like a child shutting out an ugliness. “And to think of her at Hauraki!” he murmured … “Oh, my Gawd!”’. Bodelsen adds two other arguments. First the song of the picnickers, which must at this point be significant: ‘Underneath the bower, ‘mid the perfume of the flower, / Sat a maiden with the one she loves the best—’. Second, the illustration in the original publication, in the Westminster Magazine, which clearly shows a female figure. It is possible that this was not seen and approved by Kipling, but the illustrator must have had some instructions.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly (since this is his own contribution), I think Bodelsen is right in saying that Mrs. Bathurst is by then already dead.⁶ It is true that this means a three-dimensional spirit so solidly embodied that it can be struck by lightning and buried, but given a supernatural dimension, we need not stick at arbitrary limits to it. The alternative is to suppose that Mrs. Bathurst has come directly from London to the African hinterland, which makes little sense. (Why should she have come? If because Vickery's wife was dead, why could she not have met him in Cape Town? After all, he was free.)

The rest of Bodelsen's account I do not find so convincing. This is that Vickery's crime is to pretend to Mrs. Bathurst that he is not married, that she arrived in London, is met by him, told that marriage is impossible, retires hurt and dies, perhaps by her own hand. Vickery was a conventional family man, unwilling to risk his marriage; the evidence being that he has a fifteen-year old daughter, and that his wife dies in childbed shortly after he leaves England.⁷ This is as pedestrian as Bodelsen's assessment of Vickery. From Pyecroft's description of him as genteelly-spoken (sic) and half-bred he infers that Vickery is a lower-class character with pretentions above his station. He further infers from the fact that Vickery carries out his orders at Bloemfontein before proceeding north that he is unimaginative. But all the last point means is that he is a good soldier (sailor, marine etc.), as Godsoe is a good soldier (and presumably Larry Tighe, since he keeps company as equals with Mulvaney). For the rest, what Pyecroft actually says is this: ‘“They called ‘im a superior man, which is what we'd call a long, black-'aired, genteelly-speakin’, ‘alf-bred beggar on the lower deck”’. ‘Genteelly-spoken’ is patronising; ‘genteelly-speaking’ means that the man was educated. ‘Half-bred’ might mean that he was not out of the top drawer, but in this context it might simply mean that on the lower deck he was a misfit. Pyecroft later says that Vickery was not well known to anyone in the ship that brought them out because ‘“he was what you call a superior man”’. We are at once reminded of Sergeant Godsoe, ‘pensioned Sergeant with a little money left him—quite independent—and very superior’; also of Larry Tighe, whose superior education and status is more than once emphasized. The point of this gap in social status between subject and narrator in each case is not only that the narrator cannot wholly comprehend what he describes but also that the most intense forms of romantic love, for good or ill, are (so Kipling evidently felt) beyond the reach of the man in the street. Mulvaney has little more understanding of Tighe's hell than Pyecroft has of Vickery's.

Bodelsen thinks that here, as in ‘Wireless’, Kipling has seized on the dramatic possibilities of a new invention: a film can portray people to the life after they are dead, and so haunt the living. I believe Kipling had a deeper insight: that pictures on film do not guarantee the physical reality of their subjects (Hooper's remark, ‘“Of course they are taken from the very thing itself”’ is a deliberate irony).⁸ Mrs. Bathurst is already dead before the film was shot; she has never been to London, and Vickery knows it; so that the film not only intensifies his guilt, in that he cannot now make good to her the wrong he has done: it also sets him a problem, a message which he must decode. It is this combination at work which Pyecroft witnesses in the walks they take together.

What then is the wrong or deceit of which Vickery is guilty? Bodelsen is I think half right, in that Vickery has pretended to her that he is not married. But we are assured that she is not the sort of woman to have a casual affair with a visiting warrant officer. In fact, Vickery's crime is bigamy: he has persuaded Mrs. Bathurst to keep their ‘marriage’ a secret, as he is married already (note the emphasis of ‘my legal wedded wife’).⁹ This is one part of what he tells the Captain, so that he puts on his ‘court-martial face’; the confession of a love-affair in a distant port would scarcely have this effect. But he has also, I surmise, decoded the message of the film: he is to meet her ‘at the end of the line’.¹⁰ In England, at least to sailors based on Devonport, this means Paddington; in South Africa, it means somewhere far up-country. Vickery tells his Captain everything, and asks for leave to go north. This the Captain can do, or at least arrange a mission which makes Vickery's purpose feasible; hence Vickery is ‘happyish’ after the interview—he can at least go to his doom trying to fulfil his instructions. It is the bigamy which the Captain cannot condone without the authority of the Admiral on shore, and it is this authority which brings him back to normal. (Bodelsen points out that the position of the Admiral's house on the quay is twice unnecessarily stressed, and draws the right conclusion about the Captain's visit ashore.) Possibly the Admiral has also authorised the mission to Bloemfontein. Pyecroft still sees Vickery as damned, and wants nothing more to do with him. But the permission Vickery has obtained to meet his own destiny has given his fortunes a new, upward direction, which the half-comprehending Pyecroft has not grasped.

What then is Vickery's destiny? He meets his beloved somewhere up-country, some time before the conclusion (there is time for Hooper's predecessor to tell him about the ‘two tramps’). At the end of a siding in teak-forest,¹¹ they are discovered struck by lightning. The bodies are buried, but there are two macabre features: the tattoo-marks turned white on Vickery's chest, and the undamaged false teeth. This is a sombre enough close, quite apart from the reactions of Pritchard and Pyecroft. But this is a case in which the narrator has not just half-comprehended the story: he has, in an important respect, misunderstood it. If Vickery's incineration is simply the visible mode of his damnation, what about his innocent partner, whether living being or embodied spirit? It is true that in Kipling's world there is very little justice; it is also true that the pair in ‘Unconvenanted Mercies’ (Limits and Renewals, 1932) suffer for no fault, and so (presumably) does Tighe's discarded mistress. But none of these are damned; nor is Tighe, though it is as true of him, as it is of Vickery, that (as Miss Tompkins puts it)¹², ‘the moral nature of man is outside the sphere of fortune, and carries its own scourges’. Vickery is still in his ‘happyish’ mood when he leaves, he shakes Pyecroft's hand, and he carries out his duties in Bloemfontein to the letter before going north—an act which the Sikh Regimental Chaplain of ‘In the Presence’ would have approved no less than Godsoe's orderly preparations for suicide. Vickery does not commit suicide; his destiny is to wait for death to overtake him at the appointed time. In fact, Tighe is the mediating factor. Godsoe's reunion is never in doubt; Tighe's comes by some chance, fate or mercy. Vickery's fate seems to us horrific, but here I believe Kipling has left out his most important clue.

There has been at various times and places a widespread belief¹³ that those struck by lightning are sacred, singled out for some special honour by the power that wields the lightning. In particular, this belief was held in East Africa (and I quote from a book to which Kipling would pretty certainly have had access) in the following form: ‘[The Kafirs of South Africa] have strange notions respecting the lightning. They consider that it is governed by the umshologu, or ghost, of the greatest and most renowned of their departed chiefs, and who is emphatically styled the inkosi; … Hence they allow of no lamentation for the person killed by lightning¹⁴, as they say that it would be a sign of disloyalty to lament for one the inkosi had sent for, and whose services he consequently needed’. I should infer from this that the manner of Vickery's death signified not damnation but redemption. This would explain the inclusion of his partner: both are redeemed. Of course Vickery is guilty, and damned in his own hell; but, like Tighe, he is finally released from his torments, as Tighe is from his, and the pair in ‘Unconvenanted Mercies’ from theirs—released, that is, by divine compassion. It is true that there is no hint of such compassion in the story: Pyecroft's epigraph, ‘“avin' seen 'is face for five consecutive nights on end, I'm inclined to finish what's left of the beer an' thank Gawd he's dead!”’, if taken at face value, would rule it out. But Pyecroft does not wholly understand; and although it is true that the other half-comprehending witnesses, Strangwick and Mulvaney, nevertheless reveal the whole picture, I think it is the peculiarity of this story that the narrator does not reveal it.

It might also be said that the pastiche From Lyden's ‘Irenius’, which precedes the story and should therefore, after Kipling's manner, throw light on it (as Gow's Watch throws light on ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’, which it follows) holds no such hope. ‘Jack of the Straw’ (whom I take to be neither a groom nor a clown, but a common man) has not had his destiny foreseen when Vulcan caught Mars in the house of stinking Capricorn (i.e. ever since men and women were sexually attracted to each other) simply because he was a man of no account (as are Godsoe, Tighe and Vickery). ‘She that damned him to death knew not that she did it, or would have died ere she had done it. For she loved him.’ So far, so good: the reference is plain. ‘He that hangs him does so in obedience to the Duke, and asks no more than “Where is the rope?” The Duke, very exactly he hath told us, works God's will … We have then … only Jack whose soul now plucks the left sleeve of Destiny in Hell to overtake why she clapped him up like a fly on a sunny wall …’ … ‘He too, loved his life?’—‘He was born of woman … but at the end threw life from him, … for a little sleep … I left him railing at Fortune and woman's love’. There follow some lines about the caprice of Fortune¹⁵, to the effect that a person of no account is equally vulnerable to ‘lightnings loosed / Yesterday 'gainst some king’. This would imply that Vickery, victim of his obsession, killed himself as the only way to achieve peace. In this story, peculiar in so many ways, I suspect that the speakers in From Lyden's ‘Irenius’ are not intended to have any more idea of the true workings of fate than are Pritchard and Pyecroft. All that we can infer from it (and this is not explicit in the story) is that Mrs. Bathurst loved Vickery, as he loved her. The picture of woman's love that damns is true as far as it goes; but it does not extend to the final episode, not there in ‘Irenius’, in which the damned lover is redeemed. Jack of the Straw's ‘throwing away life for a little sleep’ does not refer to Vickery's standing up to attract the lightning—this may be the point of his posture, but by then it is to join his beloved rather than to end his agony—but to his decision in Simonstown to go north and seek his own end there. He knows that if he is successful he will meet Mrs. Bathurst; but he is not to know then that he is to be forgiven, and die in peace; so that he might still, like Jack, ‘rail at Fortune and woman's love’. But woman's love will finally be his salvation. Fate sometimes singles out common men, as well as kings, for singular recompense. Finally ‘the Duke, very exactly he hath told us, works God's will, in which holy employ he's not to be questioned’. We should not perhaps press too far the significance for a story of the poem or ‘dramatic fragment’ with which Kipling prefaces or concludes it. But the Duke looks very much like the Admiral, and if the Admiral works God's will, this may give a hint of divine sanction in Vickery's end.

One small point may give a little substance to all this speculation. Strangwick sees Bella Armine ‘stretching out her arms’ to Godsoe. ‘Egypt’ ‘opened her arms full stretch’ to Tighe, and ‘“Here!” she sez … “Die here!”’ The figure with Vickery is described in the text as ‘squatting down and looking up at him’, but in the illustration in the Westminster Magazine, which may not of course have had Kipling's imprimatur, she is holding out her arms.

Other questions concern the earlier part of the story. First the episode of Boy Niven, who tricks some fellow-seamen into deserting by false promises. This has been interpreted as representing the blind operation of fate—they walk round an uninhabited island and simply come back to where they started. In this story, however, fate is not blind, and there is a simpler answer. The deluded seamen follow a will-o'-the-wisp, they are duly punished and duly punish their deceiver, and all goes on as before. Moon, one of their number, is a womaniser—‘a Mormonastic beggar’—and he deserts for a positive reason, though its precise object is not defined. The object of Vickery's desertion is very clearly defined: it is one particular woman, to whom he is in thrall. The first two episodes of desertion, then, may be seen as leading up to Vickery's story and homing in on it. They are the introductory terms (or foil) to a climax, that well-known rhetorical pattern commonly called by classicists a priamel.¹⁶ This is what gives the story within the frame its structure.

The significance for Kipling's stories of their frame (the part outside the narrative proper) has often been noticed¹⁷. Bodelsen has observed how Kipling is especially prone to allusion in this part of his stories, and that we should therefore be particularly alert for clues—the phrase not quite in key, or the apparently unmotivated episode. Bodelsen himself sees a clue in the locale of the frame in ‘Mrs. Bathurst’: the sandy beach is just the place for Aphrodite, a Greek divinity already hinted at in ‘I’s purchase of his picnic from ‘Greeks’. This is wholly fanciful. Apart from reference to Horace, a favourite author (see n. 15), and astrology, Kipling never uses classical myth as a medium of expression. (‘Venus Annodomini’ is a joke, and if we had to look for its inspiration, we should probably find it in a reproduction of Botticelli in the Burne-Jones house.) The sandy, sun-kissed beach with its gentle breeze has more to do with a tourist brochure than with Aprhodite as Kipling would have seen her. As for the Greeks, it is simply an allusion to the fact that Greeks sell things everywhere, including Africa, India, and Afghanistan.

More to the point, perhaps, is ‘I’s ‘missing the boat’. This might just be an occasion for the story, as the failure of the Admiral's gig to meet Admiral Heatleigh is the occasion for ‘A Naval Mutiny’. But this is a serious story, and there may be some hint in this opening of the way in which Vickery fears he may have ‘missed the boat’ as he watches the film of Mrs. Bathurst ‘looking for him at Paddington’. A better candidate for a significant clue is the incident of the Malay boys, rebuked by Hooper for interfering with the wagon-couplings. ‘“Don't be hard on 'em. The railway's a general refuge in Africa”’, ‘I’ replies. The incident seems pointless, the remark uncalled-for. The allusion might simply be to the actual importance of the railway in the story: it is by the railway that Vickery goes north to meet his end, and on the railway, at the end of the line, that he finds it. But railways are a sufficiently obvious symbol for destiny. In war (and this story is set in the aftermath of war), a fatalistic belief in destiny—‘the next shell either has my name on it or it hasn't’—is what saves the reason of the average man in action. Vickery's reason is saved by the belief that destiny has offered him an opportunity which he must find the means to take, that of reunion with his beloved. In the event, the reunion is to be his salvation in a wider sense.

There are two main objections to my reading of the story. Firstly, the significance of the lightning-stroke: to take the point I am postulating, the reader must be acquainted with an obscure piece of anthropological lore. This is not Kipling's usual practice, nor that of any serious writer.¹⁸ I would argue that some clues are certainly missing from the story, and that this is one of them. It might even be that for once the professional has put his art at risk for the sake of a private joke: one reader at least would have the required esoteric knowledge, his close friend Rider Haggard; so too, no doubt, would Cecil Rhodes, with whom Kipling was in touch at the time the story was written.

Secondly, my reading might seem to conflict with the deliberately macabre tone of the close. I have tried to meet this objection by suggesting that the half-comprehension of the narrator, which Kipling uses to great effect in ‘Love-o'-Women’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’—here becomes positive misunderstanding. The grim external circumstances are simply taken at their face value. The death of a syphilitic soldier in the brothel to which he has condemned his cast-off mistress is not, after all, a promising background to redemption through love, but this redemption Mulvaney, for all his lack of perception, can understand and convey. Nor are the horrors of the Western Front, the gas-screens and the creaking of frozen corpses, and the deliberate suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, an obvious setting for the eternal happiness vouchsafed to John Godsoe and Bella; yet paradoxically enough it is this, and not the external horrors, that has shaken the narrator's soul to its foundations, and so at last come to light. In ‘Mrs. Bathurst’ the misconception is allowed to stand; it is left to the reader to correct it by his understanding of the whole story.

There is however one pointer. The song of the picnickers is usually taken as a savagely ironical contrast with the grim and horrifying reality which Pyecroft and Hooper have revealed and Pritchard has recognised. But a reader who has divined the significance of the story and so seen through the macabre exterior to the compensating core, the lovers' reunion and redemption, may see in the song, as in the impersonal valediction of a Greek chorus, a confirmation of his insight.

On a summer afternoon, when the honeysuckle blooms,
          And all Nature seems at rest,
Underneath the bower, ‘mid the perfume of the flower,
          Sat a maiden with the one she loves the best—

This is not just black irony, but an affirmation of the positive aspect of the story: a woman's love may have the power to destroy, but sometimes, by a mysterious dispensation, is permitted also to save.

Notes

1. C. Axel Bodelsen, Aspects of Kipling's Art (1964), pp. 60, 67.

2. J. M. S. Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (1959) p. 90, n.1.

3. Something of Myself (1957), p. 101.

4. Cf. Bodelsen, p. 126.

5. Bodelsen, p. 141.

6. Bodelsen, p. 134.

7. In the original, Westminster Magazine version, his wife ‘dies in ‘er bed’. Bodelsen explains that ‘childbed’ and other references to sex in the story were expunged by the editor as unsuitable for family reading. This is possible, but I doubt if it could be done without the knowledge of the author, distinguished as he now was, and the phrase is unlikely therefore to be of great significance.

8. The Westminster Magazine version, ‘They are the very thing itself’, is not significantly different.

9. It has occurred to me that Mrs. Bathurst is herself the ‘legally wedded wife’, that she was not in fact widowed, but deserted by Vickery, and that the ‘fifteen-year-old daughter’ is the niece, Ada. But the ignorance of Pyecroft and Pritchard is then as inexplicable as Vickery's knowledge of how she died.

10. I owe this point to my wife. It is ‘at the end of the line’ that the lovers are condemned to look for their partners in ‘Uncovenanted Mercies’.

11. The end of the siding perhaps stands for the end of the line. Strictly speaking there is no teak in Africa, but there are hardwood forests in the area. The point is partly that tall trees tend to attract lightning, partly that such forests are suitably mysterious. Hooper says that the line runs straight through the forest for 72 miles, and adds (without explanation) that trains are constantly derailed there.

12. Tompkins, p. 242.

13. For the belief in Greek and Roman myth cf. the references in C. Collard, The Supplices of Euripides (1975), p. 341, and J. Diggle, Euripides Phaethon (1970), p. 179, esp. J. G. Frazer, Apollodorus (Loeb, 1921), i. 375ff. n. 3, and W. Burkert on ‘enēlysion’ in Glotta 39 (1961), pp. 208-13. The evidence for African belief is quoted by Frazer (loc. cit. and The Golden Bough, vi. 177, n. 1) from Colonel Maclean, Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs, pp. 82-84 (Cape Town, 1866).

14. Cf. Frazer, Apollodorus loc. cit.

15. Bodelsen takes these lines to refer to love, but Kipling knew Horace well, and the reference to Odes 1.35.5-12 is unmistakable. 1.34.12ff would have been even closer (Cf. Something of Myself, pp. 32-35: the Cleopatra Ode is 1:37, not 3:27 as Kipling remembers it.)

16. Since F. Dornseiff first applied the term ‘priamel’ (Latin praeambulum) to the rhetorical pattern ‘not A, not B, not C … but N,’ and the like (Pindars Stil [1921], pp. 97-8), it has been generally current in the criticism of ancient poetry, though not to that of modern literature.

17. Bodelsen, p. 128.

18. The Waste Land may be an exception, but Eliot did at least supply notes, whether seriously intended or not.