The Phantom Rickshaw
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
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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.
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