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

say ‘You see’, a total of sixteen times. The point is that his companions don’t see at all.
    The truth is concealed in the words of ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee’, sung by some picnickers on the beach, words by A.H. Fitz, music by W.H. Penn. They tell us what Vickery only hints at in the phrase ‘my
lawful
wife’, namely that he has married Mrs Bathurst bigamously, in a Moon-like way. A ‘lawful’ wife implies an unlawful wife and the song confirms this suspicion:
    As they sat there side by side.
He asked her to be his bride
She answered ‘Yes’ and sealed it with a kiss.
    Vickery’s eventual fate, death by lightning, tells us what happened after the bigamy, for it is paralleled in the framing story of Boy Niven. ‘Heavy thunder with continuous lightning’ is, according to Pyecroft, the punishment for
desertion.
Vickery, then, is a double-deserter, from Mrs Bathurst and the Navy. We don’t know much about Mrs Bathurst, but we know enough to understand why Vickery is afraid, ‘like an enteric at the last kick’: first, ‘she never scrupled to…set ’er foot on a scorpion’; secondly, as Pritchard’s anecdote of the beer-bottles demonstrates, she never forgets. After five years, she remembers Pritchard’s name and his ‘particular’ beer, unlike the servant girl who chucks him a bottle in mistake for someone else. The contrast is telling.
    Vickery has committed a crime, bigamy, and that presumably is why the captain connives at his absence without leave – desertion being less of a disgrace than legal proceedings from the Navy’s point of view. The element of criminality also explains why Vickery watches the film so compulsively, yet with such dread: in the oldest of traditions, he is revisiting the scene of his crime. The film explains, too, that Vickery, unlike the others, has found Mrs Bathurst forgettable. He takes Pyecroft along for confirmation – so much for their romantic interpretation.
    In ‘Mrs Bathurst’ nothing is wasted. Every digression contributes to the total meaning. It is like a closed economy, as parsimonious as a city under siege, despite its air of beery reminiscence. In ‘The Wrong Thing’, Kipling makes it clear that his art had no place for guesswork. Though he believed in his Daemon, as any writer must if he is not to force his talent, he was conscious and critical after theInner Voice had played its part: ‘Iron’s sweet stuff’, says Hal, ‘if you don’t torture her, and hammered work is all pure, truthful line, with a reason and a support for every curve and bar of it.’ Though one can scarcely imagine any child grasping this piece of aesthetic theory from
Rewards and Fairies
, it is a plain warning to adults that nothing can be skipped, that every detail is relevant – as it is in ‘Mrs Bathurst’.
    Does this affect the status of the charcoal figures? Ultimately, it does not. Are we to assume an accident? Or an act of God? Clearly, the fate of Vickery carries an element of poetic justice, but we cannot speculate beyond that point. The reader untangles the thread of the narrative only to discover that Kipling, at the crucial moment, has deliberately snapped it in order to preserve the shock at the heart of the tale. There is no insulating context, only raw voltage.
    The same thing, though less strikingly, is true of ‘Dayspring Mishandled’, when Manallace draws on his black gloves at the crematorium. The gesture has a power and solemnity which are unaccountable. This story illuminates one difference between Kipling’s early work and his late work. In
Something of Myself
, Kipling dilates briefly on his art: ‘The shortening of them, first to my own fancy after rapturous re-readings, and next to the space available, taught me that a tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked.’ Kipling, rightly in my view, never deviated from this prescription. Yet there are those who have argued that, whereas in the early work