Read Online The Wish House and Other Stories by Rudyard Kipling - Free Book Online

haunted by appalling hallucinations. They exchange horrors. Conroy’s involves ‘a steamer – on a stifling hot night’. Innocuous details – like rolled-up carpets and hot, soapy swabbed decks – are interrupted by the hooting of scalded men in the engine room, one of whom taps Conroy on the shoulder and drops dead at his feet. It is a powerful scenario, but perhaps less so than Miss Henschil’s: she walks down a white sandy road near the sea, with broken fences on either side, and men with mildewy faces, ‘eaten away’, run after her and touch her. For a time, these horrors retain their undisclosed power and rank with Hummil’s vision, in ‘At the End of the Passage’, of ‘a blind face that cries and can’t wipe its eyes, a blind face that chases him down corridors’. One thinks, too, of ‘A Friend of the Family’, in which we hear briefly and inexplicably of ‘the man without a face – preaching’ on the beach at Gallipoli, before and
after
his death. It is a parenthesis which lurks in the mind long after the rest of the revenge tale has been forgotten. And it remains there because Kipling never explains. ‘In the Same Boat’, however, provides a joint explanation of the scalded engineers and the mildewy faces: their respective mothers, while pregnant, have brushed against an engine-room accident and a leper colony. Under the influence of their addiction, Conroy and the girl relive these traumas which have penetrated the womb. The pat psychology is an artistic blunder, and the tension in the tale, palpable as a blister, leaks away uncharacteristically. The reader is left with the thing that Kipling, miraculously often, managed to avoid – mere writing, Wardour Street psychology in which the mystery is plucked, trussed and oven-ready.
    Normally, the exigencies of the form prevent anything more than necessary assertion. Soon it will be over – the secret of the short story is known to everyone. From the moment it begins, it is about to die and the artist knows that every word, therefore, must tell.Digression is a luxury that must pay its way ten-fold. As it does in ‘The Gardener’, when Mrs Scarsworth begins her confession with the observation, ‘“What extraordinary wallpapers they have in Belgium, don’t you think?’” It is bizarre, yet convincing psychology – a last-minute reluctance to proceed with her embarrassing disclosure. But whenever Kipling is literary, he falters, as in the self-conscious reference which flaws ‘The House of Suddhoo’: ‘read Poe’s account of the voice that came from the mesmerized dying man, and you will realize less than one-half of the horror of that head’s voice.’ This is a rare failure.
    Kipling, more than any other writer, except perhaps Chekhov, mastered the stipulated economy. His openings are packed: ‘The house of Suddhoo, near the Taksali Gate, is two-storeyed, with four carved windows of old brown wood, and a flat roof. You may recognize it by five red hand-prints arranged like the Five of Diamonds on the whitewash between the upper windows.’ In ‘The Limitations of Pambé Serang’, Nurkeed is instantly established as ‘the big fat Zanzibar stoker who fed the second right furnace’. In that ‘second right’, what might seem an embellishment is actually a stringent economy. Chekhov outlines the principle in
The Seagull
when Kostya Treplev complains:
    The description of the moonlit evening is long and forced. Trigorin’s worked out his methods, it’s easy enough for him. He gives you the neck of a broken bottle glittering against a weir and the black shadow of a mill-wheel – and there’s your moonlit night all cut and dried. But I have a quivering light and the silent twinkling of the stars and the distant sound of a piano dying on the calm, scented air. This is agony.
    Or painful explanation.
    Because the short story is always haunted by the sense of its ending, there are things – convoluted plots, ambiguous motivation,