"Fairy-Kist"


(notes edited
by John McGivering)

notes on the text
[October 14th 2008]

Publication

First published in Maclean’s Magazine in Canada on 15 September 1927 with two illustrations by H. W. Taylor and reprinted in McCall’s Magazine in the United States for October the same year with an illustration by Walter Little. The first publication in the United Kingdom was in the Strand Magazine for February 1928 with four illustrations by Charles Edmund Brock (1870-1938) English artist and book illustrator. It is collected in Limits and Renewals (1932) preceded by "The Mother’s Son" and in the Sussex Edition, Volume 11, the Burwash Edition, Volume`10, and Scribner’s Edition Volume 33. In the Strand the title was in quotation-marks but not hyphenated. In most collected versions, however, there is just a hyphen.

The story

The Narrator and four other men, all Freemasons and members of a dining-club, meet one evening at Lemming’s house in Berkshire. The after-dinner conversation turns to detective-stories. Keede, a doctor, tells how the body of a girl had been found on a road just outside Lemming's village. A local boy is suspected but cleared. Soon after, the local policeman, standing on the bank where the body was found, is nearly killed himself by a skidding lorry carrying steel girders. The driver explains that lorries always skid on that corner in the wet, and admits that he was delivering a couple of girders on the night of the murder. They carry out trials which prove that the murder was, in fact, an accident. The case is thus solved half-way through Kipling's story.

Meanwhile, Keede, who had seen a motorcyclist at the scene of the girls death, decided to investigate independently of the police. A planting trowel had been found by the body, which could have been a murder weapon, and they trace the motorcycle to one Wollin, who lives in Surrey, thirty or forty miles away. Keede and Lemming visit him, and find that he is a keen gardener and survivor of the Great War, who had been badly wounded and gassed, and is much disturbed in his mind. They leave, and soon after Wollin disappears.

After the fact that it had been an accident is revealed, they go back and see Wollin again. Much relieved, he explains that by chance he had been at the scene soon after the girl's death, and had panicked, leaving his trowel behind. He had then been terrified by the thought of being arrested, and gone to ground. He is in doubt about his own sanity, and this reveals another mystery which is the real heart of Kipling's story.

Emerging from months of hospital, Wollin had been troubled by nightmare dreams, and voices which told him to go out and plant roots from his garden out around the countryside. He had done so, but had feared that he was out of his mind ('fairy-kist'). Putting together various clues, however, Lemming realises that Wollin had been playing back a story read to him in hospital, in which a young girl is told to plant flowers for the benefit of "Those who do not have gardens", a significant (if slightly misquoted) line from Mary’s Meadow by Mrs Ewing (Juliana Horatia Ewing, 1841-85, an author much read and admired by Kipling). When - like Conroy and Miss Henschil in "In the Same Boat" (A Diversity of Creatures) - he understands the source of his nightmares, he recovers his peace of mind.

Background

The characters Lemming, McKnight, Burges, and Keede, all appear in “In the Interests of the Brethren”, the latter also in “A Madonna of the Trenches” (both in Debits and Credits) and “The Tender Achilles” later in this volume. All these stories are concerned with the fearful memories of war, and their effects on men's minds.

See “An English School” (Land and Sea Tales, page 266 line 21) for reference to another of Mrs Ewing's books, The Story of a Short Life. She is also quoted in “The Last of the Stories”.

Critical comments

Kingsley Amis (page 104) calls this a 'neat detective story' but does not comment on the larger matters discussed.

However Angus Wilson (page 297) talks of:

Kipling’s continued concern for the rest of his life with the mental and nervous effects left by their war experiences upon ex-soldiers and ex-officers ... Eight of the stories are directly concerned with this subject ... His most terrible general evocation of madness, “The Mother’s Son", is used as a preface to one of the least successful of these stories, “Fairy-Kist”.
And Andrew Lycett (page 526) notes:

Rudyard makes much of the fact that in his war-blasted state, Wollin was potentially susceptible to any bizarre idea – ‘Jack-the Ripperism’ or religious mania - that he might encounter.
J M S Tompkins comments:

The complexity of approach here, and in other tales of the period, has given rise to the supposition that Kipling's control of his form slackened towards the end of his writing life. This is not so; the tales never wander, but the density of the interwoven patterns sometimes baffles the eye. We have to peer as if through lattice work to see Wollin as he sits in his cellar.
Philip Mason takes a rather patronising view (page 240), observing that: 'the story begins, for instance, with a piece of mock-pomposity which recalls Plain Tales'. Mason goes on to take exception to the later reference to a picture by 'an artist called Goya' (page 170, line 31), :

'a phrase which is either an insult to the reader or the kind of self-conscious after-dinner joke that is quite out of place at a serious point in the story. It turns back forty years and recalls the complicated attitude of the strangely clever youth, who was always saying ‘I don’t want to seem too clever – but on the other hand I don’t want you to forget how clever I am !’
Mason goes on to consider the breaking strain in Wollin and young Tigner; the former after his experiences in the war, and the latter who, feeling that he might have prevented the girl’s death, goes out of his mind, while Wollin recovers.

ORG (volume 7 page 3214) reports that this tale has been described as Kipling’s only detective-story, but observes that “Friendly Brook” (A Diversity of Creatures) has as good a claim. This Editor is also inclined to suggest “The Return of Imray” (Life’s Handicap); even though that case did not take much solving, it was at least investigated by a policeman, Strickland, who does not appear to great advantage in his other case “The Son of His Father “ (Land and Sea Tales).

See KJ 109/14 for April 1954, for a suggestion by W. G. B. Maitland (Kipling Librarian at the time) that this story might have been inspired by “Silver Blaze” one of Doyle’s mysteries collected in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1892), in which what appears to be a murder is actually caused by a kick from a horse. Maitland was a founder-member of the Kipling Society and an Old Boy of United Services College. See also KJ 130/20, 143/14, 240/43, and 242/50.


[J H McG]

©John McGivering 2008 All rights reserved