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

excision creates intensity, in the later stories it merely creates obscurity. However, in the later work, the reader is often expected, as in ‘Mrs Bathurst’, to reinstate what Kipling has eliminated. Links are suppressed to involve the reader in the tale: close reading implicates the reader as he deciphers the encoded text. In Henry James’s formula from
The Golden Bowl
, the writer forgoes ‘the muffled majesty of authorship’ – in order to compel us to ‘live and breathe and rub shoulders and converse with the persons engaged in the struggle’. ‘Dayspring Mishandled’ is a case in point.
    The plot is as neat in its way as the resolution of Tom’s antecedents in
Tom Jones.
Alured Castorley has, in his youth, been a member of a literary syndicate which provided pulp fiction for the undiscriminating mass-market. Manallace, another member of the group, decides to ruin Castorley’s carefully nurtured reputation as a Chaucer expert by getting him to authenticate a planted forgery of a previously unknown Chaucer fragment. While Castorley has risen in the world of letters, Manallace has made a reputation of a differentkind in ‘the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure’. Manallace’s income goes towards nursing ‘Dal Benzaquen’s mother through her final illness, ‘when her husband ran away’. For about half the length of the tale, Kipling conceals the revenge plot so that, like the narrator, we believe that when ‘Dal’s mother dies, ‘she seemed to have emptied out his life, and left him only fleeting interest in trifles’.
    Part of our pleasure resides in the simple realization that the series of apparently pointless hobbies are, in fact, related to each other and have a profound purpose – that of revenge. Each step is lucid and mesmerizingly technical – Kipling’s impersonation of the insider with special knowledge was never put to better use. Everything comes together – the experiments with ink, the medieval paste, the handwriting, the early Chaucerian tale – as if Kipling was demonstrating to his readership that, in his work, the diversion is always in fact central and germane. In this tale of revenge and literary hoax, where the avenger is finally compassionate, Kipling is careful not to explain two things – the motive for Manallace’s subterfuge and the reason why he finally forbears. Castorley’s careerism, his lack of generosity, his ‘gifts of waking dislike’ – these are all inadequate reasons for a scheme which is designed to kill its victim. The narrator is told the real motive, but we are not: ‘He told it. “That’s why,” he said. “Am I justified?” He seemed to me entirely so.’ Most readers assume that Castorley grossly insulted the mother of ‘Dal Benzaquen, in conversation with Manallace during the war, because she had turned down his proposal of marriage: ‘He went out before the end, and, it was said, proposed to ‘Dal Benzaquen’s mother who refused him.’
    That parenthetical ‘it was said’ carries its own charge of doubt and, taken with the warnings against passive readership that are scattered through the story – like Manallace’s reiterated ‘if you save people thinking, you can do anything with ’em’ – it should put us on our guard. The truth about Castorley and ‘Dal’s mother comes out under the influence of illness and Gleeag’s liver tonics. (Kipling was always willing, perhaps too much so, to use drugs as a way of speeding up necessary disclosure, as in ‘“Wireless”’ and ‘A Madonna of the Trenches’.) The fuddled, dying but truthful Castorley begins by saying that ‘there was an urgent matter to be set right, and now he had the Title and knew his own mind it would all end happily.’ His rambling monologue concludes with his naming ‘Dal’s mother. The crucial words are
‘and knew his own mind’.
Castorley, then, is the person who
didn’t
know his own mind. Thephrase would be meaningless if