Phantom Rickshaw , livre ebook

Rudyard Kipling

THE PHANTOM RICKSHAW AND OTHER EERIE TALES
With an Introduction by Ruskin Bond
Contents
About the Author
Introduction
Preface to the Original Edition
The Phantom Rickshaw
The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
The Return of Imray
My Own True Ghost Story
At the End of the Passage
The Man Who Would Be King
Without Benefit of Clergy
Footnotes
Without Benefit of Clergy
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE PHANTOM RICKSHAW AND OTHER EERIE TALES
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in Bombay and educated in England. Kipling returned to India in 1882 and worked as a newspaper reporter and part-time writer. The seven years that he spent in India, from 1882 to 1889, were an experience that helped him gain rich insights into colonial life, which he presented in many of his classic stories and poems. Kipling went on to write several books for children as well as post war stories and non fiction for adults.
The Jungle Book , a classic of children s literature, appeared in 1894, while Kim , the story of Kimball O Hara and his adventures in the Himalayas, was published in 1901. Kipling s other works include Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Under the Deodars (1888), The Second Jungle Book (1895), Stalky & Co . (1899), Just So Stories for Little Children (1902) and Puck of Pook s Hill (1906).
One of the few writers to have gained popular and critical success, Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 and the Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Literature in 1926. His autobiography was published posthumously in 1937.
I have counted forty stars, and I am tired.
Without Benefit of Clergy
Introduction
I FIRST HEARD the story of The Phantom Rickshaw from my father, in the course of a rickshaw-ride around Simla s Elysium Hill, in the summer of 1943. He had recently admitted me to the Bishop Cotton Preparatory School, then situated in Chota Simla , and later that year he came to take me out during the summer break. It was my last summer with him. He died a few months later in Calcutta. But I was left with treasured memories of rickshaw-rides, cakes and merigues at Davico s restaurant, visits to the Rivoli and other cinemas, loads of English comic papers and story-telling sessions under the deodars on Jakko Hill.
At the age of eight I still preferred listening to reading, and other Kipling tales that I received orally from my father were the Mowgli stories, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and the exploits of those soldiers three -Ortheris, Mulvaney and Learoyd. They were contemporaries of my grandfather, another soldier boy who had come out to India with his regiment at the time young Kipling was penning his Barrack-room Ballads and Plain Tales from the Hills .
It was only when I was much older that I began reading Kipling for myself- Kim, Captains Courageous , and innumerable poems and stories, not all of them set in India. He was to become a world traveller, but it is generally agreed that his best work emerged from his Indian period -the years 1882 to 1889 when he worked as a journalist at the Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore and the Pioneer of Allahabad.
He travelled extensively over north India, picking up stories along the way and printing many of the shorter ones in these papers. His more ambitious stories went into a series of books first published by A.H. Wheeler in their Indian Railway Library. The railways were then penetrating to almost every corner of India; journeys could be long and arduous; and long-distance travellers needed good reading matter to alleviate the monotony of chugging across the plains, deserts, hills and forests of the subcontinent. Railway bookstalls sprang up at every major station-Wheeler in the north and Higginbotham in the south being the pioneers. No less than six collections of Kipling s stories were published by Wheeler in 1888, and The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales was probably the most popular title.
The Phantom Rickshaw was one of Kipling s own favourites ( my daemon was upon me when I wrote it, he says in Something of Myself ), but over the years critics have rated Without Benefit of Clergy and The Man Who Would Be King as superior examples of his story-telling skills. J.M. Barrie described The Man Who Would Be King as the most audacious thing in fiction .
Without Benefit of Clergy appears in almost everyone s list of Kipling s twelve best . I have included it in this collection, although it was not in the original Wheeler edition but published later. The Return of Imray and The End of the Passage are two of his most successful tales of the supernatural, the latter a brilliant study in the psychology of fear.
Rudyard Joseph Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, and baptized in Bombay Cathedral. His father was John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and designer of some distinction and the author of Beast and Man in India . His mother, Alice, was sister-in-law to the painter and designer Sir Edward Burne-Jones.
At the age of six, Rudyard was sent to school in England; he was seventeen when he returned to India. He was appointed assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette on a salary of 6.10c. per month and he served that paper for five years before he was transferred to the Pioneer . After two years on this paper, he conceived the idea of literature as a career and decided that writing in a big way involved an assault upon London. In this he was instantly successful. But those seven years hard in India were in themselves so formative and resulted in so much of his reputation, even though they were only seven years in the life of a young man. He never returned to India, except for a very brief visit in 1891 in the course of a world tour. So it must be remembered that Kipling s India was the impression of a youth (from the age of seventeen to twenty-four) with quick observation but few scruples, great assurance but little conscience, eager enthusiasm but a judgement immature, to quote an early biographer, Hilton Brown, who had spent many years in India.
It is Kipling s brilliance as a story-teller and stylist that carries the reader along and obscures some of his faults. He was an enthusiastic and unapologetic chronicler of the British Empire at the zenith of its power. As that power declined, Kipling was reviled by liberals at home in England, and the quality of his work was better appreciated in Europe; he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907. This distressed and annoyed a number of Kipling s British contemporaries. They called him a jingoist, a music-hall entertainer. The French hailed him as the Professor of Energy !
Perhaps it is time to say that Kipling described India not as it was, but as he wanted it to be, and this is particularly true of the books he wrote after leaving India, such as Kim and The Jungle Books . He saw India in bright, vivid colours and beguiled us into seeing it the same way. But in his short stories, the stories he wrote during his seven years hard , he looks at British colonial society with a sharply satirical eye; his sympathy is with the ordinary soldier, the railwayman, the cultivator, the ascetic, the eccentric, the Lama in search of his river, the opium-addict in search of his rainbow . . . As V.S. Naipaul says in An Area of Darkness : No writer more honest or accurate (than Kipling), no writer more revealing of himself and his society. It is 125 years since these stories were first published, and the fact that they are still being read today is proof of their timelessness. Some of Kipling s work may have been mannered and didactic; but he had an infallible eye and an infallible ear. At times his own heart may have remained hidden, but he looked closely into the hearts of others. And the rest was genius.
Landour, Mussoorie
Ruskin Bond
Preface to the Original Edition
THIS IS NOT exactly a book of downright ghost-stories as the cover makes believe. It is rather a collection of facts that never quite explained themselves. All that the collector is certain of is, that one man insisted upon dying because he believed himself to be haunted; another man either made up a wonderful lie and stuck to it, or visited a very strange place; while the third man was indubitably crucified by some person or persons unknown, and gave an extraordinary account of himself.
The peculiarity of ghost-stories is that they are never told first-hand. I have managed, with infinite trouble, to secure one exception to this rule. It is not a very good specimen, but you can credit it from beginning to end. The other three stories you must take on trust; as I did.
The Phantom Rickshaw
May no ill dreams disturb my rest,
Nor Powers of Darkness me molest.
Evening Hymn
ONE OF THE few advantages that India has over England is a great Knowability. After five years service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the two or three hundred Civilians in his Province, all the Messes of ten or twelve Regiments and Batteries and some 1500 other people of the non-official caste. In ten years his knowledge should be doubled, and at the end of twenty he knows, or knows something about, every Englishman in the Empire, and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel-bills.
Globe-trotters who expect entertainment as a right have, even within my memory, blunted this open-heartedness, but none the less today, if you belong to the Inner Circle and are neither a Bear nor a Black Sheep, all houses are open to you, and our small world is very, very kind and helpful.
Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of Kumaon some fifteen years ago. He meant to stay two nights, but was knocked down by rheumatic fever, and for six weeks disorganized Polder s establishment, stopped Polder s work and nearly died in Polder s bedroom. Polder behaves as though he had been placed under eternal obligation by Rickett, and yearly sends the little Rickett a box of presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. The