A Kipling novel that still defies comprehension
‘Listen, Bill,’ wrote P. G. Wodehouse (in a letter published in Performing Flea), ‘something really must be done about Kip’s “Mrs Bathurst”. I read it years ago and didn’t understand a word of it. I thought to myself, “Ah, youthful ignorance!”
A week ago I re-read it. Result: precisely the same.’
Wodehouse is not alone in finding the story baffling. At once rambling and compressed, told entirely in reminiscent and speculative conversation, it is powerful but murky. You may feel it is a masterpiece yet be unable to determine just what happens. Summarising it is difficult, but, for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know the story, here goes.
Four men meet on a beach in South Africa and talk as they drink beer: an unnamed narrator (Kipling himself?), Inspector Hooper of the Cape Government Railways who has just come down from up-country, Pyecroft of the Royal Navy, an old acquaintance of the narrator, and Sergeant Pritchard of the Royal Marines. They speak first about old shipmates and an experience in Vancouver for which Pyecroft was court-martialled. Then the talk turns to one Vickery, known as ‘Click’, on account of his ill-fitting false teeth, a detail that arouses Hooper’s curiosity. Vickery, it seems, had deserted ship and never been seen or heard of again.
‘Who was she?’ the narrator asks. ‘She kep’ a little hotel at Hauraki — near Auckland’, is the reply. This is Mrs Bathurst, a widow, who ‘never scrupled to feed a lame duck or set ’er foot on a scorpion at any time of ’er life.’ Mrs Bathurst, with her ‘blindish way o’ looking’, has ‘It’ . (First use of the expression?) Vickery, a married man with a 15-year-old daughter, becomes obsessed with her, on the strength of a couple of meetings.
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