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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Mrs. Bathurst“ may not be the most puzzling of Rudyard Kipling's ‘obscure’ stories, but it has surely become the one most puzzled over by admirers and critics alike. A number of articles have been printed about it in the pages of the Kipling Journal, and many of the important Kipling critics have alluded, a bit tentatively perhaps, to this fine story—Edmund Wilson calls it a ”remarkable story“ and then hurries on—but so far no one has ever really accounted for what happens in ”Mrs. Bathurst“ or has suggested fully what the story is about. There has been much interest in characters and incidents, of course, but almost no consideration of theme. A good deal has been made of Kipling's fondness for cryptic utterance, the implication being that ”Mrs. Bathurst“ is an elaborate puzzle game in which the reader must try to determine, from artfully concealed clues, what the characters in the story are really up to. Other commentators have dealt with Kipling's method of composition, his habit of repeatedly and drastically cutting his manuscripts in general, and the manuscript of this story in particular. C.S. Lewis, among others, has suggested that the momentum of cutting ”Mrs. Bathhurst“ may have carried Kipling, all unaware, past the point of intelligibility and that the obscurity of the story may therefore be accidental. What no critic has reasoned, however, is that Kipling's struggle for compression and his pruning away of representational elements in ”Mrs. Bathurst,“ to permit concentration on other values, justifies the closest possible reading of the text and makes the critic responsible not only for clarifying the surface action of the story but also for discovering the significance of that action. Such a detailed study of ”Mrs. Bathurst“ reveals a powerful tale embodying one of Kipling's profoundest visions of life and composed in a style far enough ahead of its time to account for the story's reputation as a perennial puzzler.
1 Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow (New York, 1947), p. 166.
2 C. S. Lewis, “Kipling's World,” Kipling Journal (September 1958), p. 8.
3 J. M. S. Tompkins, The Art of Rudyard Kipling (London, 1959), p. 89. I am indebted to Professor Tompkins for her many illuminating comments about “Mrs. Bathurst.”
4 Barwick Browne, “What Happened in ‘Mrs. Bathurst?‘” Kipling Journal (July 1949), p. 10.
5 B. S. Browne, “The Unsolved Problem of ‘Mrs. Bathurst’,” Kipling Journal (December 1959), p. 18.
6 Professor Robert Adams questions whether lightning could have had the effect described. There doesn't seem to be any very pleasant way of checking up on this, but perhaps we might graciously grant Kipling his carbonization as we grant Dickens his spontaneous combustion.
7 We will ignore for a moment the possibility, advanced by Miss Tompkins, that Vickery may have stood up in order to attract the lightning—in order, like the groom in the epigraph, to throw life from him for a little sleep.
8 Quoted by Tom F. Driver, “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum (Summer 1961), p. 22.
9 First, and quite conclusive by itself, is the fact that a railroad inspector friend of Hooper's had seen the two tramps shortly before the storm and had given them food and quinine. A man and a woman travelling together under those circumstances would surely have been conspicuous and would have made a first-rate story. The inspector could hardly have resisted telling such a story to Hooper, had there been one, and Hooper would have had no reason to conceal the information from the other three men in the railroad car. But there was no story to tell. Later Hooper himself saw the pair and while identification might have been complicated by the condition of the bodies, it is plain that he took for granted that the two were men. “The man who was standin' up had the false teeth,” he said casually, clearly implying that as far as he was concerned the squatting figure was also a man. It is difficult to think why Kipling would have put these details into his story had he intended the reader to think that the second tramp was Mrs. Bathurst.
10 Tompkins, p. 89.
11 Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce's Ulysses (New York, 1955), pp. 25–26.
