Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday

  Mine were assuredly urgent, but I found as the days went on that to believe what I “liked” was to believe what I was more and more intimately convinced of. I found also that I didn’t like it so much as that came to, or that the pleasure at all events was far from being the cause of my conviction. My obsession, as I may really call it and as I began to perceive, refused to be elbowed away, as I had hoped, by my sense of paramount duties. If I had a great deal to do I had still more to think about, and the moment came when my occupations were gravely menaced by my thoughts. I see it all now, I feel it, I live it over. It’s terribly void of joy, it’s full indeed to overflowing of bitterness; and yet I must do myself justice—I couldn’t possibly be other than I was. The same strange impressions, had I to meet them again, would produce the same deep anguish, the same sharp doubts, the same still sharper certainties. Oh, it’s all easier to remember than to write, but even if I could retrace the business hour by hour, could find terms for the inexpressible, the ugliness and the pain would quickly stay my hand. Let me then note very simply and briefly that a week before our wedding-day, three weeks after her death, I became fully aware that I had something very serious to look in the face and that if I was to make this effort I must make it on the spot and before another hour should elapse. My unextinguished jealousy—that was the Medusa-mask. It hadn’t died with her death, it had lividly survived, and it was fed by suspicions unspeakable. They would be unspeakable to-day, that is, if I hadn’t felt the sharp need of uttering them at the time. This need took possession of me—to save me, as it appeared, from my fate. When once it had done so I saw—in the urgency of the case, the diminishing hours and shrinking interval—only one issue, that of absolute promptness and frankness. I could at least not do him the wrong of delaying another day; I could at least treat my difficulty as too fine for a subterfuge. Therefore very quietly, but none the less abruptly and hideously, I put it before him on a certain evening that we must reconsider our situation and recognise that it had completely altered.

  He stared bravely. “How has it altered?”

  “Another person has come between us.”

  He hesitated a moment. “I won’t pretend not to know whom you mean.” He smiled in pity for my aberration, but he meant to be kind. “A woman dead and buried!”

  “She’s buried, but she’s not dead. She’s dead for the world—she’s dead for me. But she’s not dead for you”

  “You hark back to the different construction we put on her appearance that evening?”

  “No,” I answered, “I hark back to nothing. I’ve no need of it. I’ve more than enough with what’s before me.”

  “And pray, darling, what is that?”

  “You’re completely changed.”

  “By that absurdity?” he laughed.

  “Not so much by that one as by other absurdities that have followed it.”

  “And what may they have been?”

  We had faced each other fairly, with eyes that didn’t flinch; but his had a dim, strange light, and my certitude triumphed in his perceptible paleness. “Do you really pretend,” I asked, “not to know what they are?”

  “My dear child,” he replied, “you describe them too sketchily!”

  I considered a moment. “One may well be embarrassed to finish the picture! But from that point of view—and from the beginning—what was ever more embarrassing than your idiosyncrasy?”

  He was extremely vague. “My idiosyncrasy?”

  “Your notorious, your peculiar power.”

  He gave a great shrug of impatience, a groan of overdone disdain. “Oh, my peculiar power!”

  “Your accessibility to forms of life,” I coldly went on, “your command of impressions, appearances, contacts closed—for our gain or our loss—to the rest of us. That was originally a part of the deep interest with which you inspired me—one of the reasons I was amused, I was indeed positively proud to know you. It was a magnificent distinction; it’s a magnificent distinction still. But of course I had no prevision then of the way it would operate now; and even had that been the case I should have had none of the extraordinary way in which its action would affect me.”

  “To what in the name of goodness,” he pleadingly inquired, “are you fantastically alluding?” Then as I remained silent, gathering a tone for my charge, “How in the world does it operate?” he went on; “and how in the world are you affected?”

  “She missed you for five years,” I said, “but she never misses you now. You’re making it up!”

  “Making it up?” He had begun to turn from white to red.

  “You see her—you see her: you see her every night!” He gave a loud sound of derision, but it was not a genuine one. “She comes to you as she came that evening,” I declared; “having tried it she found she liked it!” I was able, with God’s help, to speak without blind passion or vulgar violence; but those were the exact words—and far from “sketchy” they then appeared to me—that I uttered. He had turned away in his laughter, clapping his hands at my folly, but in an instant he faced me again with a change of expression that struck me. “Do you dare to deny,” I asked, “that you habitually see her?”

  He had taken the line of indulgence, of meeting me halfway and kindly humouring me. At all events to my astonishment he suddenly said: “Well, my dear, what if I do?”

  “It’s your natural right; it belongs to your constitution and to your wonderful if not perhaps quite enviable fortune. But you will easily understand that it separates us. I unconditionally release you.”

  “Release me?”

  “You must choose between me and her.”

  He looked at me hard. “I see.” Then he walked away a little, as if grasping what I had said and thinking how he had best treat it. At last he turned upon me afresh. “How on earth do you know such an awfully private thing?”

  “You mean because you’ve tried so hard to hide it? It is awfully private, and you may believe I shall never betray you. You’ve done your best, you’ve acted your part, you’ve behaved, poor dear! loyally and admirably. Therefore I’ve watched you in silence, playing my part too; I’ve noted every drop in your voice, every absence in your eyes, every effort in your indifferent hand: I’ve waited till I was utterly sure and miserably unhappy. How can you hide it when you’re abjectly in love with her, when you’re sick almost to death with the joy of what she gives you?” I checked his quick protest with a quicker gesture. “You love her as you’ve never loved, and, passion for passion, she gives it straight back! She rules you, she holds you, she has you all! A woman, in such a case as mine, divines and feels and sees; she’s not an idiot who has to be credibly informed. You come to me mechanically, compunctiously, with the dregs of your tenderness and the remnant of your life. I can renounce you, but I can’t share you; the best of you is hers; I know what it is and I freely give you up to her for ever!”

  He made a gallant fight, but it couldn’t be patched up; he repeated his denial, he retracted his admission, he ridiculed my charge, of which I freely granted him moreover the indefensible extravagance. I didn’t pretend for a moment that we were talking of common things; I didn’t pretend for a moment that he and she were common people. Pray, if they had been, how should I ever have cared for them? They had enjoyed a rare extension of being and they had caught me up in their flight; only I couldn’t breathe in such an air and I promptly asked to be set down. Everything in the facts was monstrous, and most of all my lucid perception of them; the only thing allied to nature and truth was my having to act on that perception. I felt after I had spoken in this sense that my assurance was complete; nothing had been wanting to it but the sight of my effect on him. He disguised indeed the effect in a cloud of chaff, a diversion that gained him time and covered his retreat. He challenged my sincerity, my sanity, almost my humanity, and that of course widened our breach and confirmed our rupture. He did everything in short but convince me either that I was wrong or that he was unhappy: we separated and I left him to his inconce
ivable communion.

  He never married, any more than I’ve done. When six years later, in solitude and silence, I heard of his death I hailed it as a direct contribution to my theory. It was sudden, it was never properly accounted for, it was surrounded by circumstances in which—for oh, I took them to pieces!—I distinctly read an intention, the mark of his own hidden hand. It was the result of a long necessity, of an unquenchable desire. To say exactly what I mean, it was a response to an irresistible call.

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  The Bridge-Builders

  (1898)

  The fantastic in the stories of Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) derives from the contrast between two worlds: the cultures of India with all the wealth of their religious and philosophical traditions and lifestyle, and the morality of the English, convinced they are building a new civilization in India and feeling the responsibility such a task entails as well as the anguish derived from the incomprehension of the Hindus and many of their fellow English. In Kipling, both worlds are the object of a profound knowledge and a profound passion.

  Emblematic among his works is this story based on the chronicle of a technological enterprise, the construction of a bridge over the Ganges (the volume in which it appears is titled The Day’s Work), which conflicts both with the forces of nature and with the religion inspired by those forces—there is a visionary evocation of the gods of India. The dialogue among the gods, which we witness, is an ideological debate about the possible integration of both civilizations, in the sense that the much more ancient Hindu culture would be perfectly able to absorb English culture.

  THE LEAST THAT Findlayson, of the Public Works Department, expected was a C. I. E.; he dreamed of a C. S. I.: indeed, his friends told him that he deserved more. For three years he had endured heat and cold, disappointment, discomfort, danger, and disease, with responsibility almost too heavy for one pair of shoulders; and day by day, through that time, the great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges had grown under his charge. Now, in less than three months, if all went well, his Excellency the Viceroy would open the bridge in state, an archbishop would bless it, and the first trainload of soldiers would come over it, and there would be speeches.

  Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction line that ran along one of the main revetments—the huge stone-faced banks that flared away north and south for three miles on either side of the river—and permitted himself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work was one mile and three-quarters in length; a lattice-girder bridge, trussed with the Findlayson truss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick piers. Each one of those piers was twenty-four feet in diameter, capped with red Agra stone and sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the Ganges’ bed. Above them was a railway-line fifteen feet broad; above that, again, a cart-road of eighteen feet, flanked with footpaths. At either end rose towers, of red brick, loopholed for musketry and pierced for big guns, and the ramp of the road was being pushed forward to their haunches. The raw earth-ends were crawling and alive with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny asses climbing out of the yawning borrow-pit below with sackfuls of stuff; and the hot afternoon air was filled with the noise of hooves, the rattle of the drivers’ sticks, and the swish and roll-down of the dirt. The river was very low, and on the dazzling white sand between the three centre piers stood squat cribs of railway-sleepers, filled within and daubed without with mud, to support the last of the girders as those were riveted up. In the little deep water left by the drought, an overhead-crane travelled to and fro along its spile-pier, jerking sections of iron into place, snorting and backing and grunting as an elephant grunts in the timber-yard. Riveters by the hundred swarmed about the lattice side-work and the iron roof of the railway-line, hung from invisible staging under the bellies of the girders, clustered round the throats of the piers, and rode on the overhang of the footpath-stanchions; their fire-pots and the spurts of flame that answered each hammer-stroke showing no more than pale yellow in the sun’s glare. East and west and north and south the construction-trains rattled and shrieked up and down the embankments, the piled trucks of brown and white stone banging behind them till the sideboards were unpinned, and with a roar and a grumble a few thousand tons more material were flung out to hold the river in place.

  Findlayson, C. E., turned on his trolley and looked over the face of the country that he had changed for seven miles around. Looked back on the humming village of five thousand workmen; up stream and down, along the vista of spurs and sand; across the river to the far piers, lessening in the haze; overhead to the guard-towers—and only he knew how strong those were—and with a sigh of contentment saw that his work was good. There stood his bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking only a few weeks’ work on the girders of the three middle piers—his bridge, raw and ugly as original sin, but pukka—permanent—to endure when all memory of the builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson truss, had perished. Practically, the thing was done.

  Hitchcock, his assistant, cantered along the line on a little switch-tailed Kabuli pony who through long practice could have trotted securely over a trestle, and nodded to his chief.

  “All but,” said he, with a smile.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” the senior answered. “’Not half a bad job for two men, is it?”

  “One—and a half. ‘Gad, what a Cooper’s Hill cub I was when I came on the works!” Hitchcock felt very old in the crowded experiences of the past three years, that had taught him power and responsibility.

  “You were rather a colt,” said Findlayson. “I wonder how you’ll like going back to office-work when this job’s over.”

  “I shall hate it!” said the young man, and as he went on his eye followed Findlayson’s, and he muttered, “Is n’t it damned good?”

  “I think we’ll go up the service together,” Findlayson said to himself. “You’re too good a youngster to waste on another man. Cub thou wast; assistant thou art. Personal assistant, and at Simla, thou shalt be, if any credit comes to me out of the business!”

  Indeed, the burden of the work had fallen altogether on Findlayson and his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his rawness to break to his own needs. There were labour contractors by the half-hundred—fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from the railway workshops, with, perhaps, twenty white and half-caste subordinates to direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen—but none knew better than these two, who trusted each other, how the underlings were not to be trusted. They had been tried many times in sudden crises—by slipping of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of cranes, and the wrath of the river—but no stress had brought to light any man among men whom Findlayson and Hitchcock would have honoured by working as remorselessly as they worked themselves. Findlayson thought it over from the beginning: the months of office-work destroyed at a blow when the Government of India, at the last moment, added two feet to the width of the bridge, under the impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and so brought to ruin at least half an acre of calculations—and Hitchcock, new to disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; the heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England; the futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commissions if one, only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war that followed the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other end that followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month’s leave to another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent his poor little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as his own tongue asserted and the later consignments proved, put the fear of God into a man so great that he feared only Parliament and said so till Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner-table, and—he feared the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Then there was the cholera that came in the night to the village by the bridge works; and after the cholera smote the small-pox. The fever they had always with them. Hitchcock had been appointed a magistrate of the third class with whipping powers, for the bette
r government of the community, and Findlayson watched him wield his powers temperately, learning what to overlook and what to look after. It was a long, long reverie, and it covered storm, sudden freshets, death in every manner and shape, violent and awful rage against red tape half frenzying a mind that knows it should be busy on other things; drought, sanitation, finance; birth, wedding, burial, and riot in the village of twenty warring castes; argument, expostulation, persuasion, and the blank despair that a man goes to bed upon, thankful that his rifle is all in pieces in the gun-case. Behind everything rose the black frame of the Kashi Bridge—plate by plate, girder by girder, span by span—and each pier of it recalled Hitchcock, the all-round man, who had stood by his chief without failing from the very first to this last.