Limits and Renewals

Limits and Renewals

by

Rudyard Kipling

eBooks@Adelaide
2009

This web edition published by eBooks@Adelaide.

Rendered into HTML by Steve Thomas.

Last updated Sunday March 29 2009.

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Table of Contents

  1. Dayspring Mishandled
  2. Gertrude’s Prayer
  3. Dinah in Heaven
  4. The Woman in His Life
  5. Four–Feet
  6. The Totem
  7. The Tie
  8. The Church that was at Antioch
  9. The Disciple
  10. The Playmate
  11. Aunt Ellen
  12. Naaman’s Song
  13. The Mother’s Son
  14. Fairy–Kist
  15. The Coiner
  16. A Naval Mutiny
  17. The Debt
  18. Akbar’s Bridge
  19. The Manner of Men
  20. At His Execution
  21. Unprofessional
  22. The Threshold
  23. Neighbours
  24. Beauty Spots
  25. The Expert
  26. The Curé
  27. The Miracle of Saint Jubanus
  28. Song of Seventy Horses
  29. Hymn to Physical Pain
  30. The Tender Achilles
  31. The Penalty
  32. Uncovenanted Mercies
  33. Azrael’s Count

Table of Contents Next

Last updated on Mon Mar 30 13:26:36 2009 for eBooks@Adelaide.

Rudyard Kipling

Limits and Renewals

Dayspring Mishandled

C’est moi, c’est moi, c’est moi!
  Je suis la Mandragore!
La file des beaux jours qui s’éveille à l’aurore—
  Et qui chante pour toi!

C. NODIER.

IN the days beyond compare and before the Judgments, a genius called Graydon foresaw that the advance of education and the standard of living would submerge all mind-marks in one mudrush of standardised reading-matter, and so created the Fictional Supply Syndicate to meet the demand.

Since a few days’ work for him brought them more money than a week’s elsewhere, he drew many young men—some now eminent—into his employ. He bade them keep their eyes on the Sixpenny Dream Book, the Army and Navy Stores Catalogue (this for backgrounds and furniture as they changed), and The Hearthstone Friend, a weekly publication which specialised unrivalledly in the domestic emotions. Yet, even so, youth would not be denied, and some of the collaborated love-talk in ‘Passion Hath Peril,’ and ‘Ena’s Lost Lovers,’ and the account of the murder of the Earl in ‘The Wickwire Tragedies’—to name but a few masterpieces now never mentioned for fear of blackmail—was as good as anything to which their authors signed their real names in more distinguished years.

Among the young ravens driven to roost awhile on Graydon’s ark was James Andrew Manallace—a darkish, slow northerner of the type that does not ignite, but must be detonated. Given written or verbal outlines of a plot, he was useless; but, with a half-dozen pictures round which to write his tale, he could astonish.

And he adored that woman who afterwards became the mother of Vidal Benzaquen,[*] and who suffered and died because she loved one unworthy. There was, also, among the company a mannered, bellied person called Alured Castorley, who talked and wrote about ‘Bohemia,’ but was always afraid of being ‘compromised’ by the weekly suppers at Neminaka’s Cafes in Hestern Square, where the Syndicate work was apportioned, and where everyone looked out for himself. He, too, for a time, had loved Vidal’s mother, in his own way.

[* ‘The Village that voted the Earth was Flat.’ A Diversity of Creatures.]

Now, one Saturday at Neminaka’s, Graydon, who had given Manallace a sheaf of prints—torn from an extinct children’s book called Philippa’s Queen—on which to improvise, asked for results. Manallace went down into his ulster-pocket, hesitated a moment, and said the stuff had turned into poetry on his hands.

‘Bosh!’

‘That’s what it isn’t,’ the boy retorted. ‘It’s rather good.’

‘Then it’s no use to us.’ Graydon laughed. ‘Have you brought back the cuts?’

Manallace handed them over. There was a castle in the series; a knight or so in armour; an old lady in a horned head-dress; a young ditto; a very obvious Hebrew; a clerk, with pen and inkhorn, checking wine-barrels on a wharf; and a Crusader. On the back of one of the prints was a note, ‘If he doesn’t want to go, why can’t he be captured and held to ransom?’ Graydon asked what it all meant.

‘I don’t know yet. A comic opera, perhaps,’ said Manallace.

Graydon, who seldom wasted time, passed the cuts on to someone else, and advanced Manallace a couple of sovereigns to carry on with, as usual; at which Castorley was angry and would have said something unpleasant but was suppressed. Half-way through supper, Castorley told the company that a relative had died and left him an independence; and that he now withdrew from ‘hackwork’ to follow ‘Literature.’ Generally, the Syndicate rejoiced in a comrade’s good fortune, but Castorley had gifts of waking dislike. So the news was received with a vote of thanks, and he went out before the end, and, it was said, proposed to ‘Dal Benzaquen’s mother, who refused him. He did not come back. Manallace, who had arrived a little exalted, got so drunk before midnight that a man had to stay and see him home. But liquor never touched him above the belt, and when he had slept awhile, he recited to the gas-chandelier the poetry he had made out of the pictures; said that, on second thoughts, he would convert it into comic opera; deplored the Upas-tree influence of Gilbert and Sullivan; sang somewhat to illustrate his point; and—after words, by the way, with a negress in yellow satin—was steered to his rooms.

In the course of a few years, Graydon’s foresight and genius were rewarded. The public began to read and reason upon higher planes, and the Syndicate grew rich. Later still, people demanded of their printed matter what they expected in their clothing and furniture. So, precisely as the three guinea hand-bag is followed in three weeks by its thirteen and sevenpence ha’penny, indistinguishable sister, they enjoyed perfect synthetic substitutes for Plot, Sentiment, and Emotion. Graydon died before the Cinemacaption school came in, but he left his widow twenty-seven thousand pounds.

Manallace made a reputation, and, more important, money for Vidal’s mother when her husband ran away and the first symptoms of her paralysis showed. His line was the jocundly-sentimental Wardour Street brand of adventure, told in a style that exactly met, but never exceeded, every expectation.

As he once said when urged to ‘write a real book’: ‘I’ve got my label, and I’m not going to chew it off. If you save people thinking, you can do anything with ’em.’ His output apart, he was genuinely a man of letters. He rented a small cottage in the country and economised on everything, except the care and charges of Vidal’s mother.

Castorley flew higher. When his legacy freed him from ‘hackwork,’ he became first a critic—in which calling he loyally scalped all his old associates as they came up—and then looked for some speciality. Having found it (Chaucer was the prey), he consolidated his position before he occupied it, by his careful speech, his cultivated bearing, and the whispered words of his friends whom he, too, had saved the trouble of thinking. It followed that, when he published his first serious articles on Chaucer, all the world which is interested in Chaucer said: ‘This is an authority.’ But he was no impostor. He learned and knew his poet and his age; and in a month-long dogfight in an austere literary weekly, met and mangled a recognised Chaucer expert of the day.