18. ‘The little smoke of a candle that goes out’: ‘Its little smoke in pallid moonlight died’, ibid., stanza 23.
19. the raw material … of his poem: In the stanzas mentioned, Porphyro watches Madeleine undress and lie down in bed.
20. in what manner a red, black, and yellow Austrian blanket coloured his dreams: See ‘a cloth of woven crimson, gold and jet’, ibid., stanza 29.
21. ‘Candied apple, quince and plum and gourd … to cedared Lebanon’: Ibid., 30.
22. ‘The sharp rain falling on the window-pane … the wind-blown sleet’: ‘Meantime the frost-wind blows / Like Love’s alarum pattering the sharp sleet / Against the window-panes’, ibid., stanza 36.
23. ‘A fairyland for you and me … a perilous sea’: Cf. ‘magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn’, Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, stanza 7.
24. ‘A savage place! … her demon-lover’: Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’, lines 14–16.
THE VILLAGE THAT VOTED THE EARTH WAS FLAT
First published in A Diversity of Creatures (1917).
1. coir-matting-coloured hair: Hair the colour of brown coconut matting.
2. knacker’s yard: Slaughterhouse.
3. aft: At the back.
4. twenty-three pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence: The equivalent of more than £1,000 in today’s currency, therefore a very large fine for speeding.
5. his home address at Jerusalem: Anti-Semitic gibe, implying that Masquerier does not belong in England.
6. dub: Puddle, meaning that Sir Thomas is a red-faced dullard (NRG).
7. privileged: Members of Parliament are exempt from prosecution.
8. Sodom and Gomorrah: Cities devastated by fire and brimstone; Genesis 19: 24–5.
9. Brasenose: Oxford college, founded 1509.
10. eheu ab angulo!: Alas for the nook (Latin).
11. the Spec. had a middle: The Spectator had an article in the middle portion.
12. Non nobis gloria!: Not unto us the glory (Latin).
13. adenoids: Glands in the throat.
14. panel doctor: A doctor prepared to accept as patients those registered under the National Insurance Act, 1911; here, the village doctor.
15. an Irish afternoon: The House of Commons was dealing with Irish matters, a hot topic for Irish MPs elected to Westminster. This story was written before Irish independence.
16. By the grace of God, Master Ridley: Alluding to Hugh Latimer’s famous remark to Nicholas Ridley as they went to be burnt at the stake in 1555: ‘By the grace of God, Master Ridley, we have lit such a candle in England this day as shall never be put out.’
17. went off at score: Broke out suddenly into impetuous speech.
18. Hone’s Every-Day Book: William Hone’s Everlasting Calendar of Popular Sports and Pastimes (1827).
19. Nellie Farren: A genuine music-hall star (1848–1904). The other names and plays are invented.
20. Ionic style: As in Greek robes.
21. lockstep: Step in which the heel of one dancer is struck by the toe of the dancer behind.
22. Peter’s vision at Joppa: ‘a certain vessel descending … wherein were all manner of four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things’; Acts of the Apostles 10: 11–12.
23. electrolier: Electric lamp.
24. ‘The Holy City’: Song by F. E. Weatherley, with the refrain ‘Jerusalem! Jerusalem! Lift up your voice and sing / Hosanna in the highest! Hosanna to your King!’ (NRG).
25. a grateful South Kensington: The Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
26. ‘Margaritas ante Porcos’: ‘Pearls before swine’, a Latin pen name.
27. Haussmania: Craze for modernizing, after Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris, 1853–70.
28. “Like that strange song … When Ilion like a mist rose into towers”: Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’, lines 62–3.
29. suffragettes: Women vigorously campaigning for the vote.
30. Gehazi passed forth: Gehazi was a servant of Elisha, punished for lying by being afflicted with leprosy; 2 Kings 5:20–27; cf. Kipling’s own 1912 poem ‘Gehazi’, violently attacking Sir Rufus Isaacs for corruption.
31. Rads: Radicals.
32. cross-bencher: Used here, incorrectly, to mean one who changes his party allegiance. In the House of Lords, cross-benchers are members who have renounced party ties.
33. syndicalism: Left-wing extremism.
34. private interview with his Chief Whip: Probably to request Sir Thomas to resign his seat.
THE HOUSE SURGEON
First published in Harper’s Magazine, September 1909; collected in Actions and Reactions (1909).
1. the Curse on the family’s first-born: Alludes to the final plague sent on Egypt, in the death of first-born children and animals: Exodus 11:5.
2. Queen Anne pavilion: Built in the Queen Anne Revival style of the 1860s.
3. cloisonné: Decorated with coloured enamels separated by metal wires and fired, an expensive process.
4. Horror of great darkness: Genesis 15:12.
5. diving-bell: Vessel for descending into deep water.
6. The dressing-gong roared: Reminding ladies and gentlemen to put on evening dress for dinner.
7. what De Quincey … ‘the oppression of inexpiable guilt’: De Quincey says he dreamed that ‘the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt’; Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822; Penguin Classics edition, 2006, p. 113).
8. Mr Perseus … ‘He has seen the Medusa’s head!’: Perseus was a mythical Greek hero who rescued the princess Andromeda from a devouring monster. He had previously escaped the Medusa, avoiding being turned to stone as he did so.
9. spelicans: Spillikins, a belittling term for golf-clubs. In the game of spillikins, players must detach small rods from a pile one by one, without disturbing the others.
10. skelped our divoted way: Whacked our way hitting bits (divots) from the turf.
11. Arthurs … you are an hireling: Miss Baxter, addressing her maid by her surname only, alludes contemptuously to John 10:12: ‘he that is an hireling … seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep’.
12. “ As the tree falls – ”: Allusion to Ecclesiastes 11:3: ‘As the tree falleth, there it shall be.’
13. fly: Cab drawn by one horse.
MARY POSTGATE
First published in Nash’s Magazine, September 1915; collected in A Diversity of Creatures (1917).
1. cassowary: A tall flightless bird; ‘dowey’ means dismal.
2. ‘rolling’ … ‘taxi’: Mary muddles the terms here. Wynn has evidently progressed from ‘rolling’ or ‘taxi-ing’ the machine on the ground to a solo flight.
3. Contrexéville: French mineral water.
4. Salisbury: The Central Flying School was then at Netheravon, Wiltshire, on the edge of Salisbury Plain (NRG).
5. glebe: Land assigned to the Rector.
6. used Hentys … Garvices: Books by G.A. Henty, Captain F. Marryat, Charles Lever, R. L. Stevenson and Charles Garvice: authors of adventure-stories popular with Edwardian British schoolboys.
7. prep. school: Fee-paying boarding school for boys aged 8 to 14, preparing them for entrance examinations to public schools.
8. assegai: Zulu spear.
9. OTC: Officers’ Training Corps.
10. cart-lodge: A shed for carts. This scene may owe something to Kipling’s own experience of being required as a young reporter to investigate and write up the deaths of three schoolboys who were crushed when the roof of Lahore High School collapsed at midnight on 28 May 1886. Kipling, who had known one of the dead boys, vividly described the horror of the experience and his nightmares afterwards in a letter to Margaret Burne Jones (Letters, ed. Pinney, vol.1, pp.131–2). Dr Hennis’s suggestion that Edna has suffered from a similar accident is contradicted by her ‘ripped and shredded body’, which indicates blast damage.
11. certain Belgian repo
rts: Newspaper reports of atrocities committed by the German army in Belgium: often exaggerated, but atrocities, such as the sacking of Louvain in 1914, did take place.
12. ‘Cassée. … Che me rends. Le médecin!’: ‘Broken, all broken … I surrender. Doctor!’
13. ‘Nein! … Ich haben der todt Kinder gesehn’: Ungrammatical version of ‘Nein, ich habe das todt Kind gesehn’: ‘No, I have seen the dead child.’ As an educated lady, Mary has a smattering of French and German.
14. pavior: One who rams down paving stones.
A MADONNA OF THE TRENCHES
First published in MacLean’s Magazine, August 1924; collected in Debits and Credits (1926). In Debits and Credits and the Sussex edition, this story is preceded by the poem ‘Gipsy Van’ and followed by Act 5 Scene 3 of Kipling’s unfinished Browningesque play ‘Gow’s Watch’, revealing Gow’s lifelong fidelity to his hidden love.
1. Swinburne, Les Noyades: The first and sixteenth stanzas of A. C. Swinburne’s poem, a hauntingly sexy and perverse ballad about socially divided lovers bound ‘bosom to bosom, to drown and die’ (stanza 5).
2. ‘Faith and Works EC 5837’: Masonic Lodge invented by Kipling.
3. sal volatile: Solution of ammonium carbonate in alcohol or water, a restorative after fainting-fits.
4. paregoric: A soothing mixture.
5. BHQ: Battalion Headquarters.
6. beasts of officers … out of the Burial Service: A garbled quotation from 1 Corinthians 15:32: ‘If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantageth it me, if the dead rise not?’, part of the Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer. Keede quotes the same text later in the story.
7. Whatever a man shall say in his heart … Gawd hath shown man: Strangwick, who thinks of the Swinburne poem as a ‘hymn’, turns it into a scriptural-sounding paraphrase, conflating Swinburne’s ‘they have shown man, verily’ with Jesus saying ‘Yea, verily, I say unto you, Whatsoever you shall ask the Father in my name, he shall give it you’: John 16:23.
8. the twenty-first Jan.: St Agnes’ Day (cf. Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, also quoted widely in ‘Wireless’).
9. pipped: Hit by a shot.
10. poy-looz: That is, poilus, French private soldiers.
11. the Angels of Mons: A popular myth that angels had appeared to save two divisions of the British Expeditionary Force during the retreat from Mons, 26–7 August 1914.
12. ‘why stand we in jeopardy every hour?’: 1 Corinthians 15:30; also in the Burial Service.
THE JANEITES
First published in MacLean’s Magazine, May 1924; collected in Debits and Credits (1926).
1. Jane lies in Winchester … England’s Jane!: This verse became the last verse of Kipling’s poem ‘Jane’s Marriage’.
2. PM: Past Master, i.e. a former Master of the Lodge.
3. chapiters: A biblical term referring to the Masonic pillars.
4. Lazarus: Raised from the dead by Jesus, John 11: 1–46.
5. Eatables: British army slang for Étaples.
6. Gothas: German bombing planes.
7. Victoria: London terminus, targeted because of troop-trains leaving it for the Western Front.
8. Lar Pug Noy: Larpugnoy, near Arras (British army slang; NRG).
9. ’Enery James: The novelist Henry James (1843–1916), much admired and respected by Kipling. Macklin’s literary genealogy anticipates the famous opening sentence of F. R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition (Chatto & Windus, 1962): ‘The great English novelists and Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad and Henry James’ (p. 9).
10. Password of the First Degree: Humberstall thinks of Jane Austen fans as a Masonic order.
11. Tilniz an’ trap-doors: In chapter XI of Northanger Abbey, Catherine’s mind is full of ‘Tilneys and trap-doors’.
12. marcellin’: Waving. Hairdressers called an artificial wave a ‘marcel’ after the Paris hairdresser Marcel Grateau (NRG).
13. Charges: Ritual exhortations read to a Mason on initiation (NRG).
14. some Abbey or other: That is, Northanger Abbey.
15. Reverend Collins … Lady Catherine … De Bugg: Mr Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, in Pride and Prejudice.
16. Miss Bates: A character from Emma, ‘a great talker upon little matters’.
17. Laura: Laura Place in Bath, mentioned in both Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.
18. pukka: Solid.
19. bringin’ forth abundant fruit: See Matthew 13: 18–23 the parable of the sower.
20. our old loco’: Heavy guns were moved about by railway locomotives (NRG).
21. British warm: A woollen overcoat worn by British officers.
22. Roman Eagles or the Star an’ Garter: Alludes to Masonic investiture ceremony (NRG).
HIS GIFT
First published in Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides (1923).
1. French-polisher: French-polish is a solution of resin in alcohol used for polishing furniture.
2. Wolf-Cub: Junior Scout.
3. against which Scout uniforms offer small protection: Scouts wore shorts.
4. vittles: A phonetic pronunciation of ‘victuals’, or food.
5. ‘nature-faking’: A joking allusion to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1907 attack on Jack London’s animal stories as exaggerated ‘nature-faking’, a media cause célèbre.
6. Walrus, whose proper name was Carpenter: Alludes to ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass; probably also to this ‘placid and easy-going’ boy’s large size.
7. the path of duty … the road to glory: A joking allusion to Tennyson’s patriotic ‘Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington’: ‘Not once or twice in our rough island’s story / The path to duty was the way to glory’ (lines 201–2).
8. small brush-stuff from the oven: Mr Marsh bakes in a traditional brick oven heated by firing with brushwood or furze.
9. Sawyer … Glasse: Alexis Soyer (1809–58), famous chef who reorganized army cooking in the Crimean War (1854–6); Hannah Glasse (1709–70), eighteenth-century cookery writer best known for The Art of Cookery (1747).
10. Mr Jorrocks, Master of Foxhounds: See ‘At the End of the Passage’, n.28, above.
11. ‘dampers’ … ‘lobscouse’ … ‘salmagundi’: Dampers are flour-and-water cakes baked in wood ashes; lobscouse is a stew of salt meat, potatoes and onions simmered together; salmagundi is a stew including salt fish and onions.
THE WISH HOUSE
First published in MacLean’s Magazine, October 1924; collected in Debits and Credits (1926).
1. aireated wash-poles: Outdoor aerials.
2. whisk-drive: Whist-drive, an evening of competitive whist (card game), a form of village entertainment.
3. shruck: Shrieked.
4. a long-standing ulcer on her shin: Kipling relates in Something of Myself that a reviewer noted Grace Ashcroft’s resemblance to the Chaucer’s Wife of Bath ‘even to the mormal [sore] on her shinne’, at which ‘I gave myself “out – caught to leg” ’ (Something of Myself, ed. Pinney, p.124). It is in fact Chaucer’s Cook who has the ‘mormal’; but as Nora Crook has pointed out, Grace Ashcroft does resemble the Wife of Bath in her candid recounting of sexual liaisons culminating with the struggle for ‘mastery’ with a much younger man (Kipling’s Myths of Love and Death, Macmillan, 1990, p. 120); moreover, she is a retired cook.
5. be called with a handle to me name: A maid would be called by her surname (cf. ‘The House Surgeon’, n.11, above), whereas a cook was entitled to be called ‘Mrs’.
6. stubbin’ hens: Plucking chickens.
7. rugg: Tug violently (dialect).
8. scutchel up: Gather hurriedly (dialect).
9. hoppin’: Hops, which ripen in September, were picked by hand until 1959. It used to be common for working-class Londoners to take part in the annual hop-picking in Kent and Sussex as a working holiday.
10. roastin’-jack: Metal roasting spit. br />
11. I’d stood up too much to me work: Mrs Ashcroft suffers from varicose veins in her legs. Her wound, being close to a swollen vein, has turned to a varicose ulcer, which should be treated by raising and resting the leg (NRG).
12. fifteen bob a week: Fifteen shillings weekly, a generous pension for a servant in 1926. It is five shillings more than the Old Age Pension, then ten shillings weekly, and amounts to nearly four times the annual allowance of £10 which Virginia Woolf gave the Stephens family cook Nellie Farrell in 1930 (Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, Penguin Fig Tree, 2007).
13. when the edges are all heaped up: A classic sign of an ulcer turned cancerous (NRG).
THE GARDENER
First published in McCall’s Magazine, April 1924; collected in Debits and Credits (1926).
1. One grave … And rolled the stone away!: From Kipling’s poem ‘The Burden’, the complete text of which follows this story in the Sussex Edition of Debits and Credits. The last line recalls the angel who ‘descended from heaven and rolled the stone from the door’ of Christ’s tomb; Matthew 28: 2.
2. prep. school: See ‘Mary Postgate’, n. 7, above.
3. William the Conqueror: King William I of England.
4. OTC: Officers’ Training Corps.
5. K.: Kitchener of Khartoum.
6. the wastage of Loos: The Battle of Loos 1915, notorious for heavy losses, including Kipling’s son John.
7. Somme: The Battle of the Somme, July 1916.
8. the Armistice: Signed 11 November 1918.
9. ASC: Army Service Corps.
10. Cook’s: Thomas Cook, the travel agent.
11. Hooge: Between Ypres and the Menin Gate in northern France (NRG).
12. supposing him to be the gardener: Quoted directly from John 20: 14–15, when the distraught Mary Magdalene meets the risen Chirst and ‘saw Jesus standing, and knew not that it was Jesus … supposing him to be the gardener’.
DAYSPRING MISHANDLED