Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (666 page)

Save for one Seraph whom no charge employed,

With folden wings and slumber-threatened brow.

To whom The Word: ‘Beloved, what dost thou?’

‘By the Permission,’ came the answer soft,

‘Little I do nor do that little oft.

As is The Will in Heaven so on Earth

Where by The Will I strive to make men mirth.’

He ceased and sped, hearing The Word once more:

‘Beloved, go thy way and greet the Four.’

Systems and Universes overpast,

The Seraph came upon the Four, at last,

Guiding and guarding with devoted mind

The tedious generations of mankind

Who lent at most unwilling ear and eye

When they could not escape the ministry....

Yet, patient, faithful, firm, persistent, just

Toward all that gross, indifferent, facile dust,

The Archangels laboured to discharge their trust

By precept and example, prayer and law,

Advice, reproof, and rule, but, labouring, saw

Each in his fellow’s countenance confessed,

The Doubt that sickens: ‘Have I done my best?’

Even as they sighed and turned to toil anew,

The Seraph hailed them with observance due;

And after some fit talk of higher things

Touched tentative on mundane happenings.

This they permitting, he, emboldened thus,

Prolused of humankind promiscuous.

And, since the large contention less avails

Than instances observed, he told them tales — Tales

of the shop, the bed, the court, the street,

Intimate, elemental, indiscreet:

Occasions where Confusion smiting swift

Piles jest on jest as snow-slides pile the drift.

Whence, one by one, beneath derisive skies,

The victims bare, bewildered heads arise:

Tales of the passing of the spirit, graced

With humour blinding as the doom it faced:

Stark tales of ribaldry that broke aside

To tears, by laughter swallowed ere they dried:

Tales to which neither grace nor gain accrue,

But only (Allah be exalted!) true,

And only, as the Seraph showed that night,

Delighting to the limits of delight.

These he rehearsed with artful pause and halt,

And such pretence of memory at fault,

That soon the Four — so well the bait was thrown —

Came to his aid with memories of their own —

Matters dismissed long since as small or vain,

Whereof the high significance had lain

Hid, till the ungirt glosses made it plain.

Then as enlightenment came broad and fast,

Each marvelled at his own oblivious past

Until — the Gates of Laughter opened wide —

The Four, with that bland Seraph at their side,

While they recalled, compared, and amplified,

In utter mirth forgot both zeal and pride.

High over Heaven the lamps of midnight burned

Ere, weak with merriment, the Four returned,

Not in that order they were wont to keep —

Pinion to pinion answering, sweep for sweep,

In awful diapason heard afar,

But shoutingly adrift ‘twixt star and star.

Reeling a planet’s orbit left or right

As laughter took them in the abysmal Night;

Or, by the point of some remembered jest,

Winged and brought helpless down through gulfs unguessed,

Where the blank worlds that gather to the birth

Leaped in the womb of Darkness at their mirth,

And e’en Gehenna’s bondsmen understood.

They were not damned from human brotherhood.

Not first nor last of Heaven’s high Host, the Four

That night took place beneath The Throne once more.

O lovelier than their morning majesty,

The understanding light behind the eye!

O more compelling than their old command,

The new-learned friendly gesture of the hand!

O sweeter than their zealous fellowship,

The wise half-smile that passed from lip to lip!

O well and roundly, when Command was given,

They told their tale against themselves to Heaven,

And in the silence, waiting on The Word,

Received the Peace and Pardon of The Lord!

‘My Son’s Wife’

(1913)

He had suffered from the disease of the century since his early youth, and before he was thirty he was heavily marked with it. He and a few friends had rearranged Heaven very comfortably, but the reorganisation of Earth, which they called Society, was even greater fun. It demanded Work in the shape of many taxi-rides daily; hours of brilliant talk with brilliant talkers; some sparkling correspondence; a few silences (but on the understanding that their own turn should come soon) while other people expounded philosophies; and a fair number of picture-galleries, tea-fights, concerts, theatres, music-halls, and cinema shows; the whole trimmed with love-making to women whose hair smelt of cigarette-smoke. Such strong days sent Frankwell Midmore back to his flat assured that he and his friends had helped the World a step nearer the Truth, the Dawn, and the New Order.

His temperament, he said, led him more towards concrete data than abstract ideas. People who investigate detail are apt to be tired at the day’s end. The same temperament, or it may have been a woman, made him early attach himself to the Immoderate Left of his Cause in the capacity of an experimenter in Social Relations. And since the Immoderate Left contains plenty of women anxious to help earnest inquirers with large independent incomes to arrive at evaluations of essentials, Frankwell Midmore’s lot was far from contemptible.

At that hour Fate chose to play with him. A widowed aunt, widely separated by nature, and more widely by marriage, from all that Midmore’s mother had ever been or desired to be, died and left him possessions. Mrs. Midmore, having that summer embraced a creed which denied the existence of death, naturally could not stoop to burial; but Midmore had to leave London for the dank country at a season when Social Regeneration works best through long, cushioned conferences, two by two, after tea. There he faced the bracing ritual of the British funeral, and was wept at across the raw grave by an elderly coffin-shaped female with a long nose, who called him ‘Master Frankie’; and there he was congratulated behind an echoing top-hat by a man he mistook for a mute, who turned out to be his aunt’s lawyer. He wrote his mother next day, after a bright account of the funeral:

‘So far as I can understand, she has left me between four and five hundred a year. It all comes from Ther Land, as they call it down here. The unspeakable attorney, Sperrit, and a green-eyed daughter, who hums to herself as she tramps but is silent on all subjects except “huntin’,” insisted on taking me to see it. Ther Land is brown and green in alternate slabs like chocolate and pistachio cakes, speckled with occasional peasants who do not utter. In case it should not be wet enough there is a wet brook in the middle of it. Ther House is by the brook. I shall look into it later. If there should be any little memento of Jenny that you care for, let me know. Didn’t you tell me that mid-Victorian furniture is coming into the market again? Jenny’s old maid — it is called Rhoda Dolbie — tells me that Jenny promised it thirty pounds a year. The will does not. Hence, I suppose, the tears at the funeral. But that is close on ten per cent of the income. I fancy Jenny has destroyed all her private papers and records of her
vie intime
, if, indeed, life be possible in such a place. The Sperrit man told me that if I had means of my own I might come and live on Ther Land. I didn’t tell him how much I would pay not to! I cannot think it right that any human being should exercise mastery over others in the merciless fashion our tom-fool social system permits; so, as it is all mine, I intend to sell it whenever the unholy Sperrit can find a purchaser.’

And he went to Mr. Sperrit with the idea next day, just before returning to town.

‘Quite so,’ said the lawyer. ‘I see your point, of course. But the house itself is rather old-fashioned — hardly the type purchasers demand nowadays. There’s no park, of course, and the bulk of the land is let to a life-tenant, a Mr. Sidney. As long as he pays his rent, he can’t be turned out, and even if he didn’t’ — Mr. Sperrit’s face relaxed a shade — ’you might have a difficulty.’

‘The property brings four hundred a year, I understand,’ said Midmore.

‘Well, hardly — ha-ardly. Deducting land and income tax, tithes, fire insurance, cost of collection and repairs of course, it returned two hundred and eighty-four pounds last year. The repairs are rather a large item — owing to the brook. I call it Liris — out of Horace, you know.’

Midmore looked at his watch impatiently.

‘I suppose you can find somebody to buy it?’ he repeated.

‘We will do our best, of course, if those are your instructions. Then, that is all except’ — here Midmore half rose, but Mr. Sperrit’s little grey eyes held his large brown ones firmly — ’except about Rhoda Dolbie, Mrs. Werf’s maid. I may tell you that we did not draw up your aunt’s last will. She grew secretive towards the last — elderly people often do — and had it done in London. I expect her memory failed her, or she mislaid her notes. She used to put them in her spectacle-case.... My motor only takes eight minutes to get to the station, Mr. Midmore ... but, as I was saying, whenever she made her will with
us
, Mrs. Werf always left Rhoda thirty pounds per annum. Charlie, the wills!’ A clerk with a baldish head and a long nose dealt documents on to the table like cards, and breathed heavily behind Midmore. ‘It’s in no sense a legal obligation, of course,’ said Mr. Sperrit. ‘Ah, that one is dated January the 11th, eighteen eighty-nine.’

Midmore looked at his watch again and found himself saying with no good grace: ‘Well, I suppose she’d better have it — for the present at any rate.’

He escaped with an uneasy feeling that two hundred and fifty-four pounds a year was not exactly four hundred, and that Charlie’s long nose annoyed him. Then he returned, first-class, to his own affairs.

Of the two, perhaps three, experiments in Social Relations which he had then in hand, one interested him acutely. It had run for some months and promised most variegated and interesting developments, on which he dwelt luxuriously all the way to town. When he reached his flat he was not well prepared for a twelve-page letter explaining, in the diction of the Immoderate Left which rubricates its I’s and illuminates its T’s, that the lady had realised greater attractions in another Soul. She re-stated, rather than pleaded, the gospel of the Immoderate Left as her justification, and ended in an impassioned demand for her right to express herself in and on her own life, through which, she pointed out, she could pass but once. She added that if, later, she should discover Midmore was ‘essentially complementary to her needs,’ she would tell him so. That Midmore had himself written much the same sort of epistle — barring the hint of return — to a woman of whom his needs for self-expression had caused him to weary three years before, did not assist him in the least. He expressed himself to the gas-fire in terms essential but not complimentary. Then he reflected on the detached criticism of his best friends and her best friends, male and female, with whom he and she and others had talked so openly while their gay adventure was in flower. He recalled, too — this must have been about midnight — her analysis from every angle, remote and most intimate, of the mate to whom she had been adjudged under the base convention which is styled marriage. Later, at that bad hour when the cattle wake for a little, he remembered her in other aspects and went down into the hell appointed; desolate, desiring, with no God to call upon. About eleven o’clock next morning Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite called upon him ‘for they had made appointment together’ to see how he took it; but the janitor told them that Job had gone — into the country, he believed.

Midmore’s relief when he found his story was not written across his aching temples for Mr. Sperrit to read — the defeated lover, like the successful one, believes all earth privy to his soul — was put down by Mr. Sperrit to quite different causes. He led him into a morning-room. The rest of the house seemed to be full of people, singing to a loud piano idiotic songs about cows, and the hall smelt of damp cloaks.