It's not the first edition, unfortunately, but the second, and was picked up in a rumpled old used bookstore along the coast, I think, had before and has since then seen a lot of wear. The spine is broken and the pages are hanging on by the threads of the sewn binding. I've cared for it gently, but it's not in great shape.
And...it's an...odd little book.
There's thirteen stories within it and they're all rather slantendicular and many are paranormal, ranging from the truly weird The Brushwood Boy (where our hero, the stock-Kipling stalwart young infantry officer, meets the woman of his dreams literally in the surrealist dreams which they share) to some Anglo-Indian romanticizing (The Bridge Builders, where a similar British hero - bridge engineer rather than subaltern - is subsumed in a conclave of the talking creatures that represent the old Indian gods his creation has disturbed) to straight-up anthropomorphism in the Jungle Book-style.
Some of them I enjoy more than others (I've never actually managed to struggle through .007 or William The Conqueror Part 1 and my tolerance for his full-throated paeans to colonialism like The Tomb of His Ancestors - as clever and touching a tale as it is, and it is clever, and parts of it are touching -is fairly limited; I've read too many Indian authors to elide the "faithful native" claptrap that comes with Kipling in paint-the-map-red mode.
Though not as impatient as George Orwell was; his takedown of the guy is pretty epic (has ever a writer or poet been dismissed as brutally and summarily as this: "He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks."? Daaaaamn...)
The Kipling I loved as a child and the least harrumph-able are his animal tales. The echoes of imperial hubris are faint in the Jungle Books (although I have my eye on Bagheera, that fusty old colonial mug...) and there's a version in The Day's Work - a story about polo.
I know absolutely nothing about the game other than it's a ballgame played on horseback and supposedly the Argentines are now the bosses of it. I know that to play at any sort of high level today you have to be filthy rich, because it's a horse thing and all horse things are rich now that horses are a luxury good and not a working tool.
Not in the 1890s, though (or more likely the 1880s, the period when the guy was working in British India); a British officer rode to work, and keeping an extra hayburner or three wasn't so much of a big deal.
Hence the story; our hero, the gray polo pony of the title, and his equine teammates are carrying the British officers of an Indian engineer outfit (they're called "pioneers", which were the 19th Century version of combat engineers - the guys who built fortifications and bridges and all that. "Sappers" were the tunnel guys, which was a separate specialty...). They're playing a fancy cavalry (meaning: rich) outfit for the Big Casino, and the story is the story of that game.
That's it, that's the bones. The real meat is in the telling, and that's where our guy Kipling gets to cut loose.
"The question was which pony should make way for the other; each rider was perfectly willing to risk a fall in a good cause. The black who had been driven nearly crazy by his blinkers trusted to his weight and his temper; but Benami knew how to apply his weight and how to keep his temper.
They met, and there was a cloud of dust. The black was lying on his side with all the breath knocked out of his body. The Rabbit was a hundred yards up the ground with the ball, and Benami was sitting down. He had slid nearly ten yards, but he had had his revenge, and sat cracking his nostrils till the black pony rose.
‘That’s what you get for interfering. Do you want any more?’ said Benami, and he plunged into the game.
Nothing was done because Faiz Ullah would not gallop, though Macnamara beat him whenever he could spare a second. The fall of the black pony had impressed his companions tremendously, and so the Archangels could not profit by Faiz Ullah’s bad behaviour."
A little over 7,000 words paints a vivid little picture of a place and a time and a day and the people - including the four-hooved people - in it. In that short space Kipling gives you a whole cast of characters, from Lutyens and Macnamara and Powell above the saddles to grumpy Benami and slippery Faiz Ullah and Who's Who snorting through his nose in Australian below.
So buried in this largely-forgotten volume from a now-widely dismissed author is this perfect little gem of a tale; brightly and briskly told, sharply drawn, thoroughly engaging and entertaining even to a reader who, over a century later, knows almost nothing about the subject and the setting.
Goddamn it, that's writing.
That's why it's hard to just toss Kipling into the dustbin of history as just another imperial relic. Yes, he's all the things his detractors, that Orwell, say he is. But, dammit, the man could write when the humor was on him, and he's left us with stories like this. That has to count for something.
As we discussed in the last post here; life is complicated, and sometimes we just have to accept that there is worth to be found in some dark places, and darkness in the shiniest of vistas. Sometimes you have to take in the flaws to accept the value. Or, as the Cat himself says:
"Keep yourselves to yourselves," said the Maltese Cat to his companions. "We don’t want to rub noses with all those goose-rumped halfbreeds of Upper India. When we’ve won this cup they’ll give their shoes to know us."
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