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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
In 'The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition)', readers are invited into the multifaceted world of one of the most celebrated writers of the British Empire. This comprehensive collection encompasses Kipling's diverse literary output, including renowned stories like 'The Jungle Book', 'Kim', and 'The Man Who Would Be King'. The illustrated edition enriches the text with visual interpretations that complement Kipling's vivid and often exotic imagery, showcasing his talent for weaving intricate narratives steeped in Victorian sensibilities yet brimming with thematic depth. Kipling's distinctive use of rhythm, colloquial language, and rich symbolism captures the complexities of British colonial identity, melding history and fiction seamlessly. Rudyard Kipling, born in 1865 in India, was profoundly affected by his upbringing and experiences, which deeply influenced his writing. An acute observer of social dynamics and cultural intersections, Kipling's life experiences, including his return to England and subsequent travels, allowed him an invaluable perspective on issues of imperialism, identity, and adventure. His ability to articulate the conflicts and moral dilemmas of his time resonates throughout the works included in this collection. This illustrated edition is a must-read for anyone interested in the intricacies of colonial literature, offering both a stunning visual and literary journey that invites readers to explore Kipling's imaginative landscapes as well as his controversial themes. Scholars and casual readers alike will find value in this anthology, making it an essential addition to any literary collection. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition)
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition) assembles, within a single compass, the principal books of a writer whose imagination surveyed continents, professions, and ages. It brings together the full run of his novels, an extensive sequence of short story collections, the major poetry volumes, travel narratives, military writings, and personal reflections. The aim is to present a coherent view of a long career, allowing readers to trace the evolution of his subjects and methods across differing forms. The illustrations are intended to enrich this encounter, illuminating settings, technologies, and characters that recur throughout his work with visual contexts that complement the texts.
This collection embraces multiple literary modes. It includes novels of adventure and formation; compact short stories and linked cycles; children’s tales and animal fables; ballads, songs, and longer poems; sketches of travel and place; eyewitness journalism and frontline reportage; naval and regimental histories; addresses and essays; and an autobiographical memoir. The range extends from domestic comedy and schoolroom satire to supernatural intrigue, from historical recreations to depictions of modern machinery, from lyric meditation to marching verse. The breadth highlights a writer equally at home with narrative, lyric, and documentary prose, and it offers readers several entry points according to interest and experience.
Taken together, these books map a distinctive and influential voice in English letters. Kipling’s pages move between India, Britain, and the wider imperial world, attentive to the languages, trades, and loyalties that knit far-flung places together. He wrote with a reporter’s eye for detail and a storyteller’s instinct for character and cadence. Humor, technical exactness, and a feel for popular speech mark his style, as does a readiness to braid myth with machinery. The result is work that is accessible yet intricately made, hospitable to readers of many ages while sustaining close scrutiny for its craft and its historical textures.
The novels here display his narrative scope. The Light That Failed studies art, friendship, and the costs of conflict through a painter’s career. Kim follows an orphan navigating multiple worlds in the Subcontinent, drawn into intelligence work and spiritual seeking. One novel offers a maritime coming-of-age on the Grand Banks, testing privilege against labor and weather. The Naulahka: A Story of West and East explores cross-cultural ambitions and misunderstandings; it was written in collaboration, an uncommon mode for him. Across them, readers will find tensions between duty and desire, the allure of risk, and an abiding interest in how professions shape identity.
The short story collections are a cornerstone. Plain Tales From the Hills, Soldier’s Three (and its continuation), Under the Deodars, Wee Willie Winkie, Life’s Handicap, and Many Inventions gather glimpses of Anglo-Indian society, barrack-room camaraderie, and the strains of administration, seen with irony and sympathy. The City of Dreadful Night brings urban observation into high relief, while The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories adds supernatural unease to everyday life. Compression, deft plotting, and sharply drawn voices anchor these volumes, which move effortlessly from comedy to tragedy and from portraits of routine work to sudden crises and moral trial.
The imaginative reach of his stories extends to celebrated animal and children’s tales. The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book set figures of the forest against codes of belonging and law, and Just So Stories delights in origin tales told with playful precision. ‘Thy Servant a Dog’ turns a domestic perspective into narrative charm. These works show his gift for creating self-contained worlds governed by recognizable rules, moral shading, and musical language. They are hospitable to younger readers while resonating with adults through craft, humor, and a steady sense of consequences that never overwhelms their inventive, fable-like designs.
Later collections broaden his canvas. The Day’s Work and Traffics and Discoveries attend to engineers, sailors, and machines at sea and ashore. Stalky and Co. turns to schoolroom strategy and mischief as a study of training and character. Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies weave historical episodes into present-day encounters, making the past speak in intimate tones. Actions and Reactions, A Diversity of Creatures, Land and Sea Tales, Debits and Credits, Limits and Renewals, Abaft the Funnel, and The Eyes of Asia carry his interests into experiment and aftermath, balancing technical exactness, emotional restraint, and the pressures of modernity and war.
The poetry collections reveal a complementary art. Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads established his command of colloquial rhythm and refrain. The Seven Seas and The Five Nations extend his maritime and international horizons, while Songs From Books gathers verse tied to narratives. The Years Between reflects the unsettled temper of its time. An Almanac of Twelve Sports pairs verse with scenes of play, and Other Poems rounds out the body with occasional and reflective pieces. Across them, strong pulse, memorable stanza shapes, and a keen ear for spoken language support themes of duty, risk, loss, craft, and endurance.
His military writings document ships, regiments, training, and remembrance. A Fleet in Being, France at War, The New Army in Training, Sea Warfare, and The War in the Mountains combine on-the-spot description with attention to materiel, discipline, and landscape. The Graves of the Fallen turns to commemoration and design, linking words and places of memory. The Irish Guards in the Great War I and II offers a detailed regimental history. The tone is precise and respectful, shaped by close observation of practice and structure. These volumes stand as records of service, institutions, and the human costs that accompany them.
The travel books collect journeys and encounters. American Notes and From Sea to Sea register impressions of cities, railways, and work in motion, often through brief, vivid sketches. Letters of Travel: 1892–1913 spans venues and seasons, while Souvenirs of France and Brazilian Sketches: 1927 focus on particular countries. How Shakespeare Came to Write the ‘Tempest’ is an essayistic excursion, adding literary curiosity to geographic range. These pieces prize infrastructure and ordinary labor alongside spectacle, and they turn to conversation, anecdote, and quick technical noticing. Their energy lies in movement: across borders, dialects, and the devices by which people meet and build.
A Book of Words and Something of Myself frame the corpus from within. The first gathers addresses that show him speaking directly to audiences about subjects practical and literary. The second, an autobiographical memoir, reflects on reading, apprenticeship, travel, and methods, offering a measured account of how stories and poems were made. Together, they set the public voice beside the private workshop. They do not seek confession; rather, they provide context, principles, and recollection, allowing readers to hear the cadence behind his prose and verse and to see, in outline, the habits and convictions that steadied a remarkably productive career.
Across forms, unifying elements emerge. Craft is paramount: concise structure, telling detail, and an ear for varied speech. Themes recur—work well done; loyalty under strain; the appeal and burden of duty; the seduction and cost of power; the marvels and hazards of modern technology. The settings range widely, yet the attention to how things function, and to how people belong or fail to belong, is constant. These pages have endured for narrative vitality and technical mastery, and for the debates they continue to invite. The illustrations in this edition offer a visual thread, guiding readers through places, tools, and lives vividly imagined.
Author Biography
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British writer whose career bridged the late Victorian and early twentieth-century periods. Born in colonial India and later working across Asia, Europe, and North America, he became one of the most widely read authors of his time. He wrote poetry, short stories, novels, and children’s books, bringing popular attention to soldier life, imperial administration, and wonder tales set in India and beyond. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, he was the first English-language recipient. His work remains both influential and contested, celebrated for narrative energy and craftsmanship while criticized for its imperial attitudes.
His formative years were divided between India and Britain, giving him an enduring sense of cultural crossings that shaped his subjects, diction, and imagery. Educated at the United Services College in Devon, he absorbed a school culture oriented toward service and discipline, later reflected in his depictions of soldiers and officials. Early exposure to newspapers and the ballad tradition influenced his terse rhythms and eye for telling detail. He did not belong to a single literary movement, but worked within late Victorian realism and popular verse, drawing on travel writing, adventure fiction, and folklore without abandoning a journalist’s habit of observation.
In the mid-to-late 1880s he returned to India as a young journalist, writing for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and later for the Pioneer in Allahabad. Journalism honed his speed, ear for dialogue, and command of Anglo-Indian idiom. Short fiction poured from this period, notably Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) and companion collections such as Soldiers Three and Wee Willie Winkie. These works explored barrack rooms, club life, and frontier stations, presenting a brisk, sardonic window onto colonial society. Though popular, they also drew debate for their portraits of power, race, and class embedded in the imperial setting.
By the early 1890s Kipling settled in London and quickly became a literary celebrity, while traveling widely and spending several years in the United States. He consolidated his reputation with the Barrack-Room Ballads, including memorable monologues in soldier’s voices, and with the novel The Light That Failed. For younger readers he composed The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, compact fables and adventures that entered global popular culture, followed by Captains Courageous. His prose grew more supple and fantastical without losing journalistic economy, and his reputation broadened from colonial chronicler to a writer capable of mythic, humorous, and moral invention.
In the early 1900s he produced Kim, a coming-of-age and espionage tale set in India that many consider his finest novel. He also issued Just So Stories for children and the linked tale-cycles Puck of Pook’s Hill and Rewards and Fairies, the latter containing the widely quoted poem If—. Public esteem reached a peak with the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognizing his narrative mastery rather than any doctrinal position. Readers admired his technical control, vivid scene-setting, and ability to sketch character in a few strokes, even as critics began to note the ideological contours of his imperial and patriotic themes.
Kipling’s political outlook favored the British Empire, a stance crystallized in works such as The White Man’s Burden and reinforced by patriotic verse during the First World War. Personal bereavement during the conflict intensified his engagement with themes of sacrifice and memory, echoed in the collection The Years Between and in poems like My Boy Jack. He contributed language to war commemoration through the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission. His position has long been debated: admired for clarity and courage by some, faulted for imperialism by others. This tension remains central to how his poetry and stories are read.
In his later years Kipling continued to publish accomplished stories and essays, notably in Debits and Credits and Limits and Renewals, and he worked on an autobiographical account released posthumously. He died in 1936, and his remains were interred at Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, signaling his canonical status in English letters. Subsequent generations reassessed his work through changing political and literary lenses, balancing critique with appreciation of craft. He influenced the modern short story’s concision, children’s literature, and popular verse. Today he is studied for narrative technique, linguistic play, and historical insight as much as for the controversies he embodies.
Historical Context
Rudyard Kipling’s career (1865–1936) spans the high noon of the British Empire through the upheavals of the First World War and into the unsettled interwar years. His collected works arise from a life spent moving between Bombay, Lahore, Allahabad, London, South Africa, Vermont, and Sussex, and from service as reporter, poet, storyteller, and essayist. They reflect the technologies, polities, and ideologies of a world linked by steamships, railways, and telegraphs, and disciplined by armies and bureaucracies. The edition’s breadth—novels, short stories, poems, travelogues, military reportage, and autobiography—records the institutions and imaginations by which the late Victorian and Edwardian worlds explained themselves, argued with themselves, and remembered themselves.
Kipling’s formative milieu was the Anglo-Indian world after the 1857 Uprising, when the Raj’s civil and military structures were consolidating under the Indian Civil Service and the British Indian Army. Born in Bombay on 30 December 1865, he returned to India in 1882 to work in Lahore and Allahabad. Hill-station society in Simla, cantonment life along the North-West Frontier, and the rituals of district administration shaped his early satires and sketches. Hill capitals, club verandas, and cantonment bazaars form the social coordinates for tales of bureaucrats, soldiers, and memsahibs, while the expanding railway and telegraph networks linked these provincial worlds to the imperial center.
Late Victorian journalism underwrote Kipling’s technique and pace. As subeditor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore (1882–1887) and special correspondent for the Pioneer in Allahabad (1887–1889), he learned to compress observation into the short story, ballad, and feuilleton. His arrival in London in 1889 coincided with a transatlantic magazine boom driven by The Strand, McClure’s, Century, and others, enabling rapid serial circulation of fiction, verse, and reportage. Many texts in this collection first appeared in periodicals, with their tight deadlines and global readership shaping recurring devices—framed narratives, recurring characters, topical satire, and the mingling of documentary surface with mythic undercurrents.
The barracks world that informs numerous stories and ballads emerges from post-Cardwell reforms and an army deployed to frontier campaigns: the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–1880), the Third Anglo-Burmese War (1885–1887), and the Nile expeditions against the Mahdists (1884–1885, 1896–1898). Demotic speech, canteen humor, and transport trains coexist with regimental codes and imperial logistics. This environment generated a vernacular poetics that moved beyond salon verse to capture the cadence of drill square and bivouac. It also fed a reportage instinct that treats the soldier’s view—marching order, ration line, and casualty list—as the ground truth against which political rhetoric and metropolitan sentiment are measured.
Maritime power frames the late Victorian and Edwardian worldview that Kipling mined—merchant marine, fishing fleets, and the Royal Navy as guarantors of imperial commerce. The 1890s naval race, coaling stations from Simon’s Town to Halifax, and the Channel Fleet’s maneuvers provide the material context for sea narratives and essays. The Grand Banks fishery, Atlantic shipping lanes, and Admiralty exercises are not mere scenery but the infrastructure by which labor, discipline, and risk are understood. After 1898, when he observed fleet evolutions, naval preparedness became a recurring public theme, tying Atlantic fisheries to global strategy and the rhythms of port, dockyard, and watch bill.
Kipling wrote at a moment when machines remade work and imagination. Railways spanned continents; telegraph and cable truncated distance; steam transformed ship and mill; and early automobiles and wireless suggested new orders of speed and command. His engineering stories and essays render the material culture of drawings, gauges, rivets, and failures—bridges over sacred rivers, dredges biting at silt bars, and tugs nosing liners. Later pieces register submarines, wireless discipline, and motor columns, while speculative fictions imagine airship lanes and administrative futures. The interplay of human judgment with mechanical regularity—craft pride, fatigue, accident, and repair—anchors narratives that treat technology as both emancipating and exacting.
The strategic anxiety called the Great Game—Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia—provides a geopolitical horizon for espionage, survey, and disguise across the Punjab, the Himalayas, and beyond. Frontier forts, vernaculars learned for service, and the bureaucratic intelligence apparatus coalesce in depictions of couriers, mapmakers, and mendicant agents. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 formalized spheres of influence but only after decades of rumor and reconnaissance. Museums, cantonments, hill roads, and caravanserais, viewed through an ethnographic lens inherited from survey officers and museum curators such as John Lockwood Kipling, become waypoints in a story-world where empire relies on attention, memory, and improvisation.
After returning from America and settling first at Rottingdean in Sussex and then at Bateman’s in Burwash (purchased 1902), Kipling reoriented his imagination toward English landscapes and deep time. Antiquarian Sussex—ironworking lanes, Roman roads, Norman manors—met Edwardian debates about nationhood, education, and inheritance. Folklore, archaeology, and local speech inflect narratives where the spirit of place mediates between past and present. The poems and tales associated with Puck and with village histories explore the continuity of work and craft from medieval smithy to modern engine house, while the celebrated counsel poem If— crystallizes an ethic of self-command shaped by late imperial crises.
Children’s literature in Kipling’s hands binds natural history, fable, and imperial pedagogy. The Jungle Book stories, composed during his Vermont years in the mid-1890s, draw on Indian forestry, wolf lore, and the law of the pack to explore governance, exile, and belonging. Just So Stories, finalized in 1902, arise from family storytelling and Victorian illustration culture, marrying nonsense, etymology, and zoological curiosity. Earlier child-centered sketches from Indian cantonments show the imperial nursery as a social institution. Together these works mark a late Victorian moment when science writing, missionary primer, and fairy tale overlapped, shaping how young readers imagined animals, peoples, and rules.
The transatlantic dimension is central. Kipling’s collaboration with the American writer-publisher Wolcott Balestier in 1891–1892, marriage to Caroline Balestier on 18 January 1892, and residence at Naulakha near Brattleboro, Vermont (1892–1896), embedded him in Gilded Age publishing and New England networks. North Atlantic steamship travel, American journalism, and New World industries inform sea narratives and factory sketches alike. The United States appears both as market and subject—from Grand Banks fishing grounds to debates on expansion after 1898, when his admonitory poem about burdens and empire entered American political discourse. The ease of movement across the ocean shaped his mixed readership and his tone.
The South African War (1899–1902) altered imperial self-assurance. Kipling traveled to Cape Town and Bloemfontein, contributed to a soldiers’ newspaper, and observed siege warfare, blockhouses, and scorched earth. That experience revised his understanding of morale, mobilization, and home-front rhetoric, and it reframed his long-standing interest in logistics, transport columns, and irregular fighting. The controversies of that war—camps, press propaganda, and diplomatic isolation—shadow subsequent prose essays and stories that weigh courage against cost. South Africa also reinforced his sympathy for settler communities and his belief in drill, engineering, and sea power as remedies for imperial drift and political irresolution.
The First World War dominates the later volumes. Britain’s volunteer surge under Kitchener produced the New Army in 1914–1915, which Kipling visited in training camps and later at the Western Front in 1915. He reported on France at war, on sea warfare including the Dover Patrol, and on Italy’s mountain front in 1917. His son John, an officer in the Irish Guards, was killed at Loos in September 1915, a loss that turned his public prose toward commemoration. As a member and advocate of the Imperial War Graves Commission under Fabian Ware, he helped frame the language and design ethos of uniform headstones and registers.
Postwar writing engages grief, memory, and the moral ledger of victory. The Years Between collects poems written during and just after the war, including epitaphs and indictments of negligence in campaigns like Mesopotamia. Debits and Credits (1926) and Limits and Renewals (1932) blend war hauntings, medieval parables, and tales of business, faith, and failure, often returning to themes of delayed recognition and intergenerational duty. Britain’s altered landscape—expanded suffrage in 1918 and 1928, Irish partition after 1922, economic downturns—forms a muted backdrop. The tension between stoic endurance and private lament, sharpened by the missing and the unknown grave, shapes their tonal gravity.
Travel writing in this collection traces global circuits before and after 1914. American Notes and From Sea to Sea record journeys through Japan, North America, and South and Southeast Asia during 1889–1891, mapping steamship routes, railway hotels, and immigrant cities. Letters of Travel 1892–1913 surveys Egypt, South Africa, Canada, and more as imperial waypoints. Wartime Souvenirs of France honors the ally’s landscapes and labors. Brazilian Sketches arises from a 1927 visit amid coffee economies and urban modernization, showing how new republics negotiated global markets. A late essay on Shakespeare and the Tempest links Elizabethan voyaging to modern sea power, aligning literary genealogy with maritime history.
Religious and scientific debates of the fin de siècle and after run through the tales. Encounters with Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, and Sikh practices, learned in Indian cities and along pilgrim roads, inform reflections on ritual, law, and syncretism. Ghost stories and uncanny sketches draw on psychological medicine and spiritualism’s popularity, while stories of surgeons, optics, and plague camps test the border between empiricism and taboo. The Eyes of Asia adopts the letter home to express Indian soldiers’ perceptions of European war. Engineering parables stage collisions between scientific method and mythic order, suggesting that modern authority depends on humility before both evidence and memory.
Kipling’s networks and reputation shaped his reach. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, the first English-language recipient, recognized for narrative power and poetic innovation. Editors such as W. E. Henley championed early London publications; later alliances spanned The Strand and American magazines. Illustrators mattered—from John Lockwood Kipling’s Indian pedagogy and museum work to William Nicholson’s prints for the sporting almanac. Public controversies over imperialism, race, and class accompanied his success, especially after 1899 and again after 1919. Yet children’s literature, naval essays, and speculative futures ensured multiple entry points, sustaining a readership across dominions, the United States, and Europe.
The autobiographical and occasional prose in this edition clarifies method and milieu. A Book of Words (1928) preserves lectures to universities, guilds, and imperial institutes from Canada to South Africa, revealing his admiration for engineers, craftsmen, and schoolmasters as culture bearers. Something of Myself, drafted in 1935 and published after his death in 1937, revisits Bombay childhood, United Services College at Westward Ho, Indian journalism, and the move to Bateman’s. Kipling died in London on 18 January 1936 and was buried in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. The corpus left behind documents a world-system’s ascent, strain, and reckoning, and the voices by which it remembered itself.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Light That Failed
A war artist returns from the Sudan to pursue his craft and an unrequited love in London, confronting the costs of ambition, friendship, and failing eyesight. A somber study of art, loyalty, and the price of success.
Captain Courageous: A Story of the Grand Banks
A spoiled millionaire’s son is swept overboard and rescued by Gloucester fishermen, spending a season learning seamanship, discipline, and character. A sea tale of apprenticeship and earned maturity.
Kim
An Irish orphan in British India becomes apprentice to a spy while accompanying a Tibetan lama on a spiritual quest. The novel blends coming-of-age adventure with the ‘Great Game’ of imperial espionage.
The Naulahka: A Story of West and East
An American seeks a priceless Indian jewel to win his beloved and fund civic ambitions, crossing paths with a missionary doctor amid court intrigue. A romance of cultural encounter, ambition, and risk.
The City of Dreadful Night
Vivid sketches and reportage of nocturnal life, heat, and hardship in colonial Lahore. An atmospheric portrait of a city’s shadows, crowds, and endurance.
Plain Tales From the Hills
Short stories of Anglo-Indian society—bureaucrats, marriages, and misalliances—told with sharp wit and sympathy. Early portraits of colonial life’s foibles and pressures.
Soldier’s Three
Linked tales about three British privates—Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd—whose camaraderie and exploits illuminate army life in India. Humor, grit, and barracks wisdom drive the narratives.
Soldier’s Three - Part II
Further episodes of the trio and their circle, mixing mess-room yarns with frontier incidents and domestic interludes. Continuation of Kipling’s soldierly vignettes.
The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories
Supernatural and psychological tales in which guilt, obsession, and colonial settings breed hauntings and uncanny events. Classic pieces of eerie atmosphere and moral tension.
Under the Deodars
Stories of Simla hill-station society—flirtations, politics, and gossip—where propriety and desire quietly collide. A cool-eyed look at social maneuvering under the pines.
Wee Willie Winkie
Tales centered on children and soldiers in India, where courage and duty emerge in unexpected forms. Adventures from nurseries to frontiers with clear, brisk storytelling.
Life’s Handicap
A wide-ranging collection set largely in India, blending tragedy, irony, and cross-cultural encounters. Characters face fate, duty, and misunderstanding in stark relief.
Many Inventions
Stories exploring innovation, chance, and the unforeseen consequences of human ingenuity. Maritime, mechanical, and domestic settings test character and craft.
The Jungle Book
Animal stories headlined by Mowgli, the human child raised by wolves, and including ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi’ and other classics. Fables of law, belonging, and survival in the wild.
The Second Jungle Book
Further Mowgli adventures and other animal tales that deepen the jungle’s lore and moral code. Themes of identity, leadership, and the costs of freedom recur.
The Day’s Work
Industrial and maritime tales—bridges, ships, engines—where craftsmanship, discipline, and teamwork meet adversity. Moral fables about pride in work and quiet heroism.
Stalky and Co.
Boarding-school capers of three sharp-witted boys whose pranks double as exercises in strategy and leadership. A sardonic prelude to service and responsibility.
Just So Stories
Playful origin tales explaining how animals got their features, told in rhythmic, inventive prose. Whimsical fables for children with sly wisdom for adults.
Traffics and Discoveries
Stories and poems about new technologies, early motoring, naval prowess, and intelligence work. Modernity’s wonders and anxieties mingle with mystery and adventure.
Puck of Pook’s Hill
Two children meet Puck, who conjures figures from English history to tell their stories firsthand. A mosaic of the nation’s past woven into living encounters.
Actions and Reactions
Tales and verse about cause, consequence, and responsibility in a changing world. Supernatural turns and social satire sit alongside portraits of duty.
Abaft the Funnel
A miscellany of early sketches and stories from Kipling’s journalism, often set among ships and ports. Lively snapshots of travel, trade, and talk at sea.
Rewards and Fairies
A companion to Puck of Pook’s Hill offering new historical visitations and reflective interludes. English craft, memory, and character are illuminated through tale and song.
The Eyes of Asia
Dramatic monologues in the voices of Indian soldiers writing home from the Western Front. Intimate perspectives on war, distance, and loyalty.
A Diversity of Creatures
Varied tales and poems probing social tension, technology, and the shadow of war. Notable for its range of tones—from satire to stark tragedy.
Land and Sea Tales
Adventure stories for younger readers featuring scouts, sailors, and soldiers. Straightforward narratives that emphasize skill, service, and fair play.
Debits and Credits
Stories and poems marked by postwar memory, loss, and the search for meaning. Quiet masterpieces consider friendship, ritual, and the unseen burdens of conflict.
‘Thy Servant a Dog’
Animal tales narrated by a loyal dog whose voice brings humor and pathos to domestic life. A gentle, affectionate portrait of human foibles from a canine vantage.
Limits and Renewals
Late stories and poems confronting mortality, science, and spiritual renewal. Spare, searching pieces that close Kipling’s long career.
Departmental Ditties
Satirical verses about Anglo-Indian bureaucracy, gossip, and small ambitions. Light in tone, sharp in observation.
Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads
Ballads in the voices of common soldiers and campaigners, mixing dialect, irony, and sentiment. Signature poems of camaraderie, hardship, and imperial service.
The Seven Seas
Poems celebrating sea power, trade, and the global weave of the British world. Maritime rhythms underscore confidence in technology and reach.
An Almanac of Twelve Sports
Month-by-month verses paired with sporting scenes. Brief, playful pieces on pastime and season.
The Five Nations
Poems of empire and war, often reflecting on responsibility and cost in the Boer War era. Public themes blend with private misgiving.
Songs From Books
A curated selection of verses originally embedded in Kipling’s fiction. Contextual songs and ballads given independent life.
The Years Between
Poems from the years around World War I that grapple with sacrifice, politics, and aftermath. Sober, public-minded, and elegiac.
Other Poems
Miscellaneous verse across Kipling’s career beyond the main volumes. Themes range from nature and craft to satire and epitaph.
A Fleet in Being
Firsthand accounts of Royal Navy maneuvers at the fin de siècle. A journalist’s close look at ships, crews, and sea power.
France at War
Wartime journalism from France portraying organization, morale, and effort behind the lines. Observations aim to inform and steady the home front.
The New Army in Training
Reports on Britain’s volunteer forces as they prepare for World War I. Camp life, instruction, and spirit are rendered in plain detail.
Sea Warfare
Essays on naval conflict in World War I—destroyers, submarines, and convoy work. Technology, tactics, and everyday courage at sea.
The War in the Mountains
Dispatches from the Italian Front describing mountain warfare and engineering feats. A focused portrait of terrain, logistics, and resolve.
The Graves of the Fallen
A brief exposition of the principles guiding Imperial War Graves cemeteries. Design, inscription, and remembrance are set forth with clarity.
The Irish Guards in the Great War I & II
A detailed regimental history of the Irish Guards through World War I. Operations, orders, and personal valor are chronicled with documentary care.
American Notes
Observations from a tour of the United States and Canada, surveying press, politics, and manners. Wry, sometimes acerbic snapshots of a rising nation.
From Sea to Sea
Travel letters tracing a route from India through East Asia to America. A panorama of cities, customs, and modernity on the move.
Letters of Travel: 1892 – 1913
Collected travel pieces from tours across the Empire and beyond. Varied, brisk impressions of places, peoples, and policies.
Souvenirs of France
Short wartime sketches honoring French resilience and culture. A compact tribute amid conflict.
Brazilian Sketches: 1927
Travel essays on Brazil’s cities, industry, and landscapes. Curious, observational pieces from a late journey.
How Shakespeare Came to Write the ‘Tempest’
A fanciful essay imagining the circumstances and sources that might have shaped The Tempest. A playful exercise in literary reconstruction.
A Book of Words
Collected speeches and addresses on literature, education, civic duty, and empire. Reveals Kipling’s public arguments and style as an orator.
Something of Myself
A restrained memoir of Kipling’s life, craft, and times—from Indian journalism to international fame and private loss. Insights into his methods and convictions frame the narrative.
The Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated Edition)
Novels:
The Light That Failed
Chapter I
"What do you think she'd do if she caught us? We oughtn't to have it, you know," said Maisie.
"Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom," Dick answered, without hesitation. "Have you got the cartridges?"
"Yes; they're in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire cartridges go off of their own accord?"
"Don't know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry them."
"I'm not afraid." Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver.
The children had discovered that their lives would be unendurable without pistol-practice. After much forethought and self-denial, Dick had saved seven shillings and sixpence, the price of a badly constructed Belgian revolver. Maisie could only contribute half a crown to the syndicate for the purchase of a hundred cartridges. "You can save better than I can, Dick," she explained; "I like nice things to eat, and it doesn't matter to you. Besides, boys ought to do these things."
Dick grumbled a little at the arrangement, but went out and made the purchase, which the children were then on their way to test. Revolvers did not lie in the scheme of their daily life as decreed for them by the guardian who was incorrectly supposed to stand in the place of a mother to these two orphans. Dick had been under her care for six years, during which time she had made her profit of the allowances supposed to be expended on his clothes, and, partly through thoughtlessness, partly through a natural desire to pain,—she was a widow of some years anxious to marry again,—had made his days burdensome on his young shoulders.
Where he had looked for love, she gave him first aversion and then hate.
Where he growing older had sought a little sympathy, she gave him ridicule. The many hours that she could spare from the ordering of her small house she devoted to what she called the home-training of Dick Heldar. Her religion, manufactured in the main by her own intelligence and a keen study of the Scriptures, was an aid to her in this matter. At such times as she herself was not personally displeased with Dick, she left him to understand that he had a heavy account to settle with his Creator; wherefore Dick learned to loathe his God as intensely as he loathed Mrs. Jennett; and this is not a wholesome frame of mind for the young. Since she chose to regard him as a hopeless liar, when dread of pain drove him to his first untruth he naturally developed into a liar, but an economical and self-contained one, never throwing away the least unnecessary fib, and never hesitating at the blackest, were it only plausible, that might make his life a little easier. The treatment taught him at least the power of living alone,—a power that was of service to him when he went to a public school and the boys laughed at his clothes, which were poor in quality and much mended. In the holidays he returned to the teachings of Mrs. Jennett, and, that the chain of discipline might not be weakened by association with the world, was generally beaten, on one account or another, before he had been twelve hours under her roof.
The autumn of one year brought him a companion in bondage, a long-haired, gray-eyed little atom, as self-contained as himself, who moved about the house silently and for the first few weeks spoke only to the goat that was her chiefest friend on earth and lived in the back-garden. Mrs. Jennett objected to the goat on the grounds that he was un-Christian,—which he certainly was. "Then," said the atom, choosing her words very deliberately, "I shall write to my lawyer-peoples and tell them that you are a very bad woman. Amomma is mine, mine, mine!" Mrs. Jennett made a movement to the hall, where certain umbrellas and canes stood in a rack. The atom understood as clearly as Dick what this meant. "I have been beaten before," she said, still in the same passionless voice; "I have been beaten worse than you can ever beat me. If you beat me I shall write to my lawyer-peoples and tell them that you do not give me enough to eat. I am not afraid of you." Mrs. Jennett did not go into the hall, and the atom, after a pause to assure herself that all danger of war was past, went out, to weep bitterly on Amomma's neck.
Dick learned to know her as Maisie, and at first mistrusted her profoundly, for he feared that she might interfere with the small liberty of action left to him. She did not, however; and she volunteered no friendliness until Dick had taken the first steps. Long before the holidays were over, the stress of punishment shared in common drove the children together, if it were only to play into each other's hands as they prepared lies for Mrs. Jennett's use. When Dick returned to school, Maisie whispered, "Now I shall be all alone to take care of myself; but," and she nodded her head bravely, "I can do it. You promised to send Amomma a grass collar. Send it soon." A week later she asked for that collar by return of post, and was not pleased when she learned that it took time to make. When at last Dick forwarded the gift, she forgot to thank him for it.
Many holidays had come and gone since that day, and Dick had grown into a lanky hobbledehoy more than ever conscious of his bad clothes. Not for a moment had Mrs. Jennett relaxed her tender care of him, but the average canings of a public school—Dick fell under punishment about three times a month—filled him with contempt for her powers. "She doesn't hurt," he explained to Maisie, who urged him to rebellion, "and she is kinder to you after she has whacked me." Dick shambled through the days unkempt in body and savage in soul, as the smaller boys of the school learned to know, for when the spirit moved him he would hit them, cunningly and with science. The same spirit made him more than once try to tease Maisie, but the girl refused to be made unhappy. "We are both miserable as it is," said she. "What is the use of trying to make things worse? Let's find things to do, and forget things."
The pistol was the outcome of that search. It could only be used on the muddiest foreshore of the beach, far away from the bathing-machines and pierheads, below the grassy slopes of Fort Keeling. The tide ran out nearly two miles on that coast, and the many-coloured mud-banks, touched by the sun, sent up a lamentable smell of dead weed. It was late in the afternoon when Dick and Maisie arrived on their ground, Amomma trotting patiently behind them.
"Mf!" said Maisie, sniffing the air. "I wonder what makes the sea so smelly? I don'tlike it!"
"You never like anything that isn't made just for you," said Dick bluntly. "Give me the cartridges, and I'll try first shot. How far does one of these little revolvers carry?"
"Oh, half a mile," said Maisie, promptly. "At least it makes an awful noise. Be careful with the cartridges; I don't like those jagged stick-up things on the rim. Dick, do be careful."
"All right. I know how to load. I'll fire at the breakwater out there."
He fired, and Amomma ran away bleating. The bullet threw up a spurt of mud to the right of the wood-wreathed piles.
"Throws high and to the right. You try, Maisie. Mind, it's loaded all round."
Maisie took the pistol and stepped delicately to the verge of the mud, her hand firmly closed on the butt, her mouth and left eye screwed up.
Dick sat down on a tuft of bank and laughed. Amomma returned very cautiously. He was accustomed to strange experiences in his afternoon walks, and, finding the cartridge-box unguarded, made investigations with his nose. Maisie fired, but could not see where the bullet went.
"I think it hit the post," she said, shading her eyes and looking out across the sailless sea.
"I know it has gone out to the Marazion Bell-buoy," said Dick, with a chuckle. "Fire low and to the left; then perhaps you'll get it. Oh, look at Amomma!—he's eating the cartridges!"
Maisie turned, the revolver in her hand, just in time to see Amomma scampering away from the pebbles Dick threw after him. Nothing is sacred to a billy-goat. Being well fed and the adored of his mistress, Amomma had naturally swallowed two loaded pin-fire cartridges. Maisie hurried up to assure herself that Dick had not miscounted the tale.
"Yes, he's eaten two."
"Horrid little beast! Then they'll joggle about inside him and blow up, and serve him right.... Oh, Dick! have I killed you?"
Revolvers are tricky things for young hands to deal with. Maisie could not explain how it had happened, but a veil of reeking smoke separated her from Dick, and she was quite certain that the pistol had gone off in his face. Then she heard him sputter, and dropped on her knees beside him, crying, "Dick, you aren't hurt, are you? I didn't mean it."
"Of course you didn't," said Dick, coming out of the smoke and wiping his cheek. "But you nearly blinded me. That powder stuff stings awfully." A neat little splash of gray led on a stone showed where the bullet had gone. Maisie began to whimper.
"Don't," said Dick, jumping to his feet and shaking himself. "I'm not a bit hurt."
"No, but I might have killed you," protested Maisie, the corners of her mouth drooping. "What should I have done then?"
"Gone home and told Mrs. Jennett." Dick grinned at the thought; then, softening, "Please don't worry about it. Besides, we are wasting time. We've got to get back to tea. I'll take the revolver for a bit."
Maisie would have wept on the least encouragement, but Dick's indifference, albeit his hand was shaking as he picked up the pistol, restrained her. She lay panting on the beach while Dick methodically bombarded the breakwater. "Got it at last!" he exclaimed, as a lock of weed flew from the wood.
"Let me try," said Maisie, imperiously. "I'm all right now."
They fired in turns till the rickety little revolver nearly shook itself to pieces, and Amomma the outcast—because he might blow up at any moment—browsed in the background and wondered why stones were thrown at him. Then they found a balk of timber floating in a pool which was commanded by the seaward slope of Fort Keeling, and they sat down together before this new target.
"Next holidays," said Dick, as the now thoroughly fouled revolver kicked wildly in his hand, "we'll get another pistol,—central fire,—that will carry farther."
"There won't be any next holidays for me," said Maisie. "I'm going away."
"Where to?"
"I don't know. My lawyers have written to Mrs. Jennett, and I've got to be educated somewhere,—in France, perhaps,—I don'tknow where; but I shall be glad to go away."
"I shan't like it a bit. I suppose I shall be left. Look here, Maisie, is it really true you're going? Then these holidays will be the last I shall see anything of you; and I go back to school next week. I wish——"
The young blood turned his cheeks scarlet. Maisie was picking grass-tufts and throwing them down the slope at a yellow sea-poppy nodding all by itself to the illimitable levels of the mud-flats and the milk-white sea beyond.
"I wish," she said, after a pause, "that I could see you again sometime. You wish that, too?"
"Yes, but it would have been better if—if—you had—shot straight over there—down by the breakwater."
Maisie looked with large eyes for a moment. And this was the boy who only ten days before had decorated Amomma's horns with cut-paper ham-frills and turned him out, a bearded derision, among the public ways! Then she dropped her eyes: this was not the boy.
"Don't be stupid," she said reprovingly, and with swift instinct attacked the side-issue. "How selfish you are! Just think what I should have felt if that horrid thing had killed you! I'm quite miserable enough already."
"Why? Because you're going away from Mrs. Jennett?"
"No."
"From me, then?"
No answer for a long time. Dick dared not look at her. He felt, though he did not know, all that the past four years had been to him, and this the more acutely since he had no knowledge to put his feelings in words.
"I don't know," she said. "I suppose it is."
"Maisie, you must know. I'm not supposing."
"Let's go home," said Maisie, weakly.
But Dick was not minded to retreat.
"I can't say things," he pleaded, "and I'm awfully sorry for teasing you about Amomma the other day. It's all different now, Maisie, can't you see? And you might have told me that you were going, instead of leaving me to find out."
"You didn't. I did tell. Oh, Dick, what's the use of worrying?"
"There isn't any; but we've been together years and years, and I didn't know how much I cared."
"I don't believe you ever did care."
"No, I didn't; but I do,—I care awfully now, Maisie," he gulped,—"Maisie, darling, say you care too, please."
"I do, indeed I do; but it won't be any use."
"Why?"
"Because I am going away."
"Yes, but if you promise before you go. Only say—will you?" A second "darling" came to his lips more easily than the first. There were few endearments in Dick's home or school life; he had to find them by instinct. Dick caught the little hand blackened with the escaped gas of the revolver.
"I promise," she said solemnly; "but if I care there is no need for promising."
"And do you care?" For the first time in the past few minutes their eyes met and spoke for them who had no skill in speech....
"Oh, Dick, don't! Please don't! It was all right when we said good-morning; but now it's all different!" Amomma looked on from afar.
He had seen his property quarrel frequently, but he had never seen kisses exchanged before. The yellow sea-poppy was wiser, and nodded its head approvingly. Considered as a kiss, that was a failure, but since it was the first, other than those demanded by duty, in all the world that either had ever given or taken, it opened to them new worlds, and every one of them glorious, so that they were lifted above the consideration of any worlds at all, especially those in which tea is necessary, and sat still, holding each other's hands and saying not a word.
"You can't forget now," said Dick, at last. There was that on his cheek that stung more than gunpowder.
"I shouldn't have forgotten anyhow," said Maisie, and they looked at each other and saw that each was changed from the companion of an hour ago to a wonder and a mystery they could not understand. The sun began to set, and a night-wind thrashed along the bents of the foreshore.
"We shall be awfully late for tea," said Maisie. "Let's go home."
"Let's use the rest of the cartridges first," said Dick; and he helped Maisie down the slope of the fort to the sea,—a descent that she was quite capable of covering at full speed. Equally gravely Maisie took the grimy hand. Dick bent forward clumsily; Maisie drew the hand away, and Dick blushed.
"It's very pretty," he said.
"Pooh!" said Maisie, with a little laugh of gratified vanity. She stood close to Dick as he loaded the revolver for the last time and fired over the sea with a vague notion at the back of his head that he was protecting Maisie from all the evils in the world. A puddle far across the mud caught the last rays of the sun and turned into a wrathful red disc. The light held Dick's attention for a moment, and as he raised his revolver there fell upon him a renewed sense of the miraculous, in that he was standing by Maisie who had promised to care for him for an indefinite length of time till such date as——A gust of the growing wind drove the girl's long black hair across his face as she stood with her hand on his shoulder calling Amomma "a little beast," and for a moment he was in the dark,—a darkness that stung. The bullet went singing out to the empty sea.
"Spoilt my aim," said he, shaking his head. "There aren't any more cartridges; we shall have to run home." But they did not run. They walked very slowly, arm in arm. And it was a matter of indifference to them whether the neglected Amomma with two pin-fire cartridges in his inside blew up or trotted beside them; for they had come into a golden heritage and were disposing of it with all the wisdom of all their years.
"And I shall be——" quoth Dick, valiantly. Then he checked himself: "I don't know what I shall be. I don't seem to be able to pass any exams, but I can make awful caricatures of the masters. Ho! Ho!"
"Be an artist, then," said Maisie. "You're always laughing at my trying to draw; and it will do you good."
"I'll never laugh at anything you do," he answered. "I'll be an artist, and I'll do things."
"Artists always want money, don'tthey?"
"I've got a hundred and twenty pounds a year of my own. My guardians tell me I'm to have it when I come of age. That will be enough to begin with."
"Ah, I'm rich," said Maisie. "I've got three hundred a year all my own when I'm twenty-one. That's why Mrs. Jennett is kinder to me than she is to you. I wish, though, that I had somebody that belonged to me,—just a father or a mother."
"You belong to me," said Dick, "for ever and ever."
"Yes, we belong—for ever. It's very nice." She squeezed his arm. The kindly darkness hid them both, and, emboldened because he could only just see the profile of Maisie's cheek with the long lashes veiling the gray eyes, Dick at the front door delivered himself of the words he had been boggling over for the last two hours.
"And I—love you, Maisie," he said, in a whisper that seemed to him to ring across the world,—the world that he would tomorrow or the next day set out to conquer.
There was a scene, not, for the sake of discipline, to be reported, when Mrs. Jennett would have fallen upon him, first for disgraceful unpunctuality, and secondly for nearly killing himself with a forbidden weapon.
"I was playing with it, and it went off by itself," said Dick, when the powder-pocked cheek could no longer be hidden, "but if you think you're going to lick me you're wrong. You are never going to touch me again. Sit down and give me my tea. You can't cheat us out of that, anyhow."
Mrs. Jennett gasped and became livid. Maisie said nothing, but encouraged Dick with her eyes, and he behaved abominably all that evening. Mrs. Jennett prophesied an immediate judgment of Providence and a descent into Tophet later, but Dick walked in Paradise and would not hear. Only when he was going to bed Mrs. Jennett recovered and asserted herself. He had bidden Maisie good night with down-dropped eyes and from a distance.
"If you aren't a gentleman you might try to behave like one," said Mrs. Jennett, spitefully. "You've been quarrelling with Maisie again."
This meant that the usual good-night kiss had been omitted. Maisie, white to the lips, thrust her cheek forward with a fine air of indifference, and was duly pecked by Dick, who tramped out of the room red as fire. That night he dreamed a wild dream. He had won all the world and brought it to Maisie in a cartridge-box, but she turned it over with her foot, and, instead of saying "Thank you," cried—"Where is the grass collar you promised for Amomma? Oh, how selfish you are!"
Chapter II
"I'm not angry with the British public, but I wish we had a few thousand of them scattered among these rooks. They wouldn't be in such a hurry to get at their morning papers then. Can't you imagine the regulation householder—Lover of Justice, Constant Reader, Paterfamilias, and all that lot—frizzling on hot gravel?"
"With a blue veil over his head, and his clothes in strips. Has any man here a needle? I've got a piece of sugar-sack."
"I'll lend you a packing-needle for six square inches of it then. Both my knees are worn through."
"Why not six square acres, while you're about it? But lend me the needle, and I'll see what I can do with the selvage. I don't think there's enough to protect my royal body from the cold blast as it is. What are you doing with that everlasting sketch-book of yours, Dick?"
"Study of our Special Correspondent repairing his wardrobe," said Dick, gravely, as the other man kicked off a pair of sorely worn riding-breeches and began to fit a square of coarse canvas over the most obvious open space. He grunted disconsolately as the vastness of the void developed itself.
"Sugar-bags, indeed! Hi! you pilot man there! lend me all the sails for that whale-boat."
A fez-crowned head bobbed up in the stern-sheets, divided itself into exact halves with one flashing grin, and bobbed down again. The man of the tattered breeches, clad only in a Norfolk jacket and a gray flannel shirt, went on with his clumsy sewing, while Dick chuckled over the sketch.
Some twenty whale-boats were nuzzling a sand-bank which was dotted with English soldiery of half a dozen corps, bathing or washing their clothes. A heap of boat-rollers, commissariat-boxes, sugar-bags, and flour—and small-arm-ammunition-cases showed where one of the whale-boats had been compelled to unload hastily; and a regimental carpenter was swearing aloud as he tried, on a wholly insufficient allowance of white lead, to plaster up the sun-parched gaping seams of the boat herself.
"First the bloomin' rudder snaps," said he to the world in general; "then the mast goes; an' then, s' help me, when she can't do nothin' else, she opens 'erself out like a cock-eyed Chinese lotus."
"Exactly the case with my breeches, whoever you are," said the tailor, without looking up. "Dick, I wonder when I shall see a decent shop again."
There was no answer, save the incessant angry murmur of the Nile as it raced round a basalt-walled bend and foamed across a rock-ridge half a mile upstream. It was as though the brown weight of the river would drive the white men back to their own country. The indescribable scent of Nile mud in the air told that the stream was falling and the next few miles would be no light thing for the whale-boats to overpass. The desert ran down almost to the banks, where, among gray, red, and black hillocks, a camel-corps was encamped. No man dared even for a day lose touch of the slow-moving boats; there had been no fighting for weeks past, and throughout all that time the Nile had never spared them. Rapid had followed rapid, rock rock, and island-group island-group, till the rank and file had long since lost all count of direction and very nearly of time. They were moving somewhere, they did not know why, to do something, they did not know what. Before them lay the Nile, and at the other end of it was one Gordon, fighting for the dear life, in a town called Khartoum. There were columns of British troops in the desert, or in one of the many deserts; there were yet more columns waiting to embark on the river; there were fresh drafts waiting at Assioot and Assuan; there were lies and rumours running over the face of the hopeless land from Suakin to the Sixth Cataract, and men supposed generally that there must be some one in authority to direct the general scheme of the many movements. The duty of that particular river-column was to keep the whale-boats afloat in the water, to avoid trampling on the villagers' crops when the gangs "tracked" the boats with lines thrown from midstream, to get as much sleep and food as was possible, and, above all, to press on without delay in the teeth of the churning Nile.
With the soldiers sweated and toiled the correspondents of the newspapers, and they were almost as ignorant as their companions. But it was above all things necessary that England at breakfast should be amused and thrilled and interested, whether Gordon lived or died, or half the British army went to pieces in the sands. The Soudan campaign was a picturesque one, and lent itself to vivid word-painting. Now and again a "Special" managed to get slain,—which was not altogether a disadvantage to the paper that employed him,—and more often the hand-to-hand nature of the fighting allowed of miraculous escapes which were worth telegraphing home at eighteenpence the word. There were many correspondents with many corps and columns,—from the veterans who had followed on the heels of the cavalry that occupied Cairo in '82, what time Arabi Pasha called himself king, who had seen the first miserable work round Suakin when the sentries were cut up nightly and the scrub swarmed with spears, to youngsters jerked into the business at the end of a telegraph-wire to take the places of their betters killed or invalided.
Among the seniors—those who knew every shift and change in the perplexing postal arrangements, the value of the seediest, weediest Egyptian garron offered for sale in Cairo or Alexandria, who could talk a telegraph-clerk into amiability and soothe the ruffled vanity of a newly appointed staff-officer when press regulations became burdensome—was the man in the flannel shirt, the black-browed Torpenhow. He represented the Central Southern Syndicate in the campaign, as he had represented it in the Egyptian war, and elsewhere. The syndicate did not concern itself greatly with criticisms of attack and the like. It supplied the masses, and all it demanded was picturesqueness and abundance of detail; for there is more joy in England over a soldier who insubordinately steps out of square to rescue a comrade than over twenty generals slaving even to baldness at the gross details of transport and commissariat.
He had met at Suakin a young man, sitting on the edge of a recently abandoned redoubt about the size of a hat-box, sketching a clump of shell-torn bodies on the gravel plain.
"What are you for?" said Torpenhow. The greeting of the correspondent is that of the commercial traveller on the road.
"My own hand," said the young man, without looking up. "Have you any tobacco?"
Torpenhow waited till the sketch was finished, and when he had looked at it said, "What's your business here?"
"Nothing; there was a row, so I came. I'm supposed to be doing something down at the painting-slips among the boats, or else I'm in charge of the condenser on one of the water-ships. I've forgotten which."
"You've cheek enough to build a redoubt with," said Torpenhow, and took stock of the new acquaintance. "Do you always draw like that?"
The young man produced more sketches. "Row on a Chinese pig-boat," said he, sententiously, showing them one after another.—"Chief mate dirked by a comprador.—Junk ashore off Hakodate.—Somali muleteer being flogged.—Star-shell bursting over camp at Berbera.—Slave-dhow being chased round Tajurrah Bah.—Soldier lying dead in the moonlight outside Suakin.—throat cut by Fuzzies."
