Plain Tales from the Hills

Kipling wrote most of these forty pieces as a working journalist for Lahore's Civil and Military Gazette, filed at whatever length the day's column allowed, and the constraint shows in the method more than the length: a terse, knowing narrator who claims only to be passing along office gossip, and stories that end on a clipped final line rather than a resolved one. Two figures recur often enough to hold the book together without ever getting a story fully to themselves. Mrs. Hauksbee, the reigning schemer of Simla's hill-station season, engineers marriages, wrecks reputations, and rescues foolish young men from their own bad judgment across several stories, most directly in 'Three and, an Extra' and 'The Rescue of Pluffles.' Strickland, a police officer who has made a study of going native, learning dialects, disguises, and criminal argot the rest of the civil service disdains, solves 'Miss Youghal's Sais' precisely by discarding the manners that mark him as English.

Kipling opens the collection with 'Lispeth,' about a Hill girl raised and educated by missionaries who nurses a wounded Englishman back to health, falls in love with him, and is handed back to her own abandoned village once he's gone home to marry an Englishwoman, the missionaries' dishonesty about his intentions doing more damage than his indifference ever could. Placed first, it warns the reader not to trust the club-verandah irony that follows. 'The Story of Muhammad Din' does the same work from the other direction, tracking an Englishman's fondness for his servant's small son that only surfaces after the boy's sudden death from fever, too late to notice the daily invented kingdom of broken crockery and marigolds the narrator had been quietly ignoring.

Mrs. Hauksbee holds no office and answers to nobody, yet she reroutes careers, marriages, and reputations across the hill station's short season with more real effect than most of the men who administer the province from a desk. Kipling gives her the book's sharpest lines and treats her scheming as a kind of unlicensed government, the real business of Simla conducted at dinner parties while the official business happens down in the plains, mostly unread and unfelt by the people it governs.

A fragile young officer the story calls only 'the Boy' shoots himself after a run of small station humiliations he was never prepared to survive, and his friends spend the rest of 'Thrown Away' constructing a convincing fever death and burying the truth along with him. The narrator explains the forgery as a kindness owed to the boy's parents back in England, and just as plainly as a kindness owed to the machinery of empire's own reputation for producing men who cope, a lie the whole station agrees to keep because the alternative would cost more than one family's grief.