In the Presence

"In the
Presence"

(notes edited
by John McGivering)

[May 18 2008]

Publication

First published in Pearson’s Magazine and Everybody’s Magazine in March 1912, and collected in A Diversity of Creatures in 1917 where it is followed by the verse “Jobson’s Amen”, part of which had appeared in 1914.

Critical comments

Of the thirty commentators and biographers we have consulted only two had anything significant to say about this story: C A Bodelsen (page 104) sees it as oddly constructed:

...where the theme is the Sikh code of honour illustrated by a story of revenge, the frame is almost as long as the story it leads up to (which deals with another aspect of the Sikh concept of honour), so that frame and story really constitute two separate tales loosely joined together.

Dr Tompkins in her Chapter 4, “Simplicity and Complexity” (pp. 102–3), explains how the two, at first sight extremely different anecdotes, are linked together :

The priest of a Sikh regiment tells how two of his men accomplished, at the cost of their lives, a ritual revenge: and the young corporal, returned from England, tells how the four Gurkha aides-de-camp kept their exhausting watch, with unremitted rigour of observance, at the lying-in-state of Edward VII. The underlying conception is honour, and the accepted rituals through which it is preserved.