MRS. BATHURST
by Rudyard Kipling, 1904

Although Rudyard Kipling wrote Kim, arguably the greatest novel of India by a non-Indian writer, it is as a writer of short fiction that he is best remembered. Of all of Kipling's stories perhaps the most famous, and the most argued about, is the haunting, enigmatic story "Mrs. Bathurst." Set in South Africa, it was first collected, along with some of Kipling's most abominably jingoistic fiction, in Traffics and Discoveries (1904).

Kipling is rightly most frequently associated with India, but his travels took him to a great many other countries, including South Africa and New Zealand. In his autobiographical Something of Myself he recalls the origin of "Mrs. Bathurst" in his visit to Auckland:

All I carried away from the magic town of Auckland was the face and voice of a woman who sold me beer at a little hotel there. They stayed at the back of my head till ten years later when, in a local train of the Cape Town suburbs, I heard a petty officer from Simonstown telling a companion about a woman in New Zealand who "never scrupled to help a lame duck or put her foot on a scorpion." Then—precisely as the removal of the key-log in a timber-jam starts the whole pile—those words gave me the key to the face and voice at Auckland, and a tale called "Mrs. Bathurst" slid into my mind, smoothly and orderly as floating timber on a bank-high river.

This passage highlights the fact that "Mrs. Bathurst" owes its genesis to the memory of specific images, and the emphasis on seemingly random images is maintained in the story.

The story opens with an accident, a series of coincidences that bring together the narrator, who is never named, Hooper, Pycroft, and Pritchard in an empty railway carriage at a place called False Bay, a name that warns us to be wary of false impressions, false starts, and false surfaces. The emphasis at the outset of the story is clearly on chance, on accident, on the random nature of life.

Having met, the four men drink beer and tell one another a series of stories that at first glance appear to have little in common. Yet the story of the maidservant who gave Sergeant Pritchard a bottle of beer because she mistook him for someone called MacClean and the story of Boy Niven, who lured a group of eight seamen and marines, including Pycroft and Pritchard, into the woods on an uninhabited island off the coast of British Columbia with a story of a generous uncle and the promise of free land, effectively act as frame narratives They precisely anticipate the themes of mistaken identity and desertion that pervade the central story of Vickery and Mrs. Bathurst.

Some critics, notably C. S. Lewis, have suggested that Kipling cut too much out of the story and that it is impenetrable as a result. But Elliot Gilbert has convincingly suggested that the peculiar structure of "Mrs. Bathurst" follows the lines of a movie newsreel. Indeed, many critics have commented on the excellent use Kipling makes of what was then a new phenomenon and an untested metaphor. A newsreel presents a series of stories that at first appear to have little connection with one another but that actually serve to emphasize once more the randomness of life, which has already been seen in the chance meetings that bring the four storytellers together.

The narrative is also linked throughout by what is effectively an unseen leitmotiv—Vickery's false teeth. Early in the story Hooper is about to take something out of his waistcoat pocket when he is interrupted by the arrival of Pyecroft and Pritchard. His hand returns to his pocket in the middle of the tale, at the outset of the central narrative, when Vickery's nickname, Click, is explained and his false teeth mentioned. Then, as the story draws to its conclusion, his hand travels to his waistcoat pocket once more, but it is brought out empty for a third time. It is only as the story of Vickery and Mrs. Bathurst is told that the mystery of the "curiosity" or "souvenir" in Hooper's waistcoat pocket is explained. Yet because we never actually see the teeth, we never know for certain that they are there. In this way the teeth also highlight the essential mystery of "Mrs. Bathurst" and the unanswered questions the reader is left to consider at the close: What happens to Mrs. Bathurst after she walks out of the movie? Who is the second burned-out corpse? And, of course, does Hooper really have Vickery's false teeth in his waistcoat pocket? Thus, Kipling neatly juxtaposes the inexplicable—the false teeth, the corpses, and, of course, Mrs. Bathurst.

In the story Kipling shuns the traditional Victorian ideology of description and rational explanation in favor of random memories and newsreel techniques. The magical yet disturbing image of Mrs. Bathurst walking out of a newsreel of images and the equally disturbing and conclusive yet inconclusive image of the two charred corpses in the teak forest, one of them undoubtedly Vickery, the other unknown—though there is just a hint, albeit one that should quickly be dismissed, that it may, in fact, be Mrs. Bathurst herself—are at the heart of Kipling's story. Far from being impenetrable, "Mrs. Bathurst," with its emphasis on the enigmatic nature of life over rational explanation, is a triumph of storytelling that anticipates the advent of modernism.

—Ralph J. Crane