THEY
by Rudyard Kipling, 1904

Rudyard Kipling's short story "They," collected in Traffics and Discoveries (1904), has acquired additional interest as one source of the first section of T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton" ("for the leaves were full of children,/Hidden excitedly, containing laughter"). The story occupies a central place among Kipling's more than 300 stories. It is one of only a handful with a clear autobiographical impulse, much of its imaginative energy deriving from Kipling's attempt to find in his new life in rural Sussex comfort for the death of his daughter Josephine in 1899. It brings together two themes, healing and the supernatural, that were to dominate much of his later writing. It is the most developed example of those first-person stories, such as the early "The Story of Muhammad Din" that disclose more than the narrator is himself able to bring to order. Like many of Kipling's later stories, it is accompanied by a poem, "The Return of the Children," that offers an alternative reading of the same experience and suggests the provisional nature of the text.

The narrator of the story, whom we gradually realize is a bereaved father, makes three visits between the beginning and the end of a single summer to a mysterious but beautiful house. The house is inhabited by a blind woman and filled with the laughter of children seen only momentarily, as a "glint" of blue shirt or a girl's form behind a window. The first visit suggests the entry into a fairy tale, its highly wrought beauty owing something to Kipling's Pre-Raphaelite background. This contrasts sharply with the second visit, in which a disheveled woman, "loose-haired, purple, almost lowing with agony," beseeches the blind woman's help for her sick grandchild, leading the narrator into a frantic search for a doctor and nurse. On the third visit the narrator for the first time enters the house, but despite all his stratagems he is unable to do more than glimpse the children. Only as he suspends his efforts, while watching the blind woman deal with a devious tenant, does he feel a child's kiss pressed into the palm of his hand: "a gift on which the fingers were, once, expected to close … a fragment of a mute code devised long ago." At once he realizes what has already become clear to the reader, that the inhabitants are spirits living in the house as children, even able to walk in the woods with their parents. Yet this discovery is for the narrator the sign that he can never return: "For me it would be wrong. For me only." No explanation is offered as to why, but the suggestion seems to be that for the narrator the pain of his bereavement has become an absolute, a part of his being that he cannot give up. Perhaps only the bereaved can recognize the truth of this.

From the beginning there have been clues that the story will be shaped by the emotional and psychological needs of the narrator. He is led to the house as if by the road itself ("one view called to another, one hill-top to its fellow") through a landscape that already hints at the miraculous, a word used in the first paragraph. He explains that he comes from "the other side of the country," and the blind woman acknowledges that the house is "so out of the world." He later is unable to find it on any of his maps. And from the first there are signs that in the end he will be held back from what he seeks, as when, for example, he pulls his car up before the yew trees clipped into armed horsemen barring his way ("a green spear laid at my breast"). His conversation with the blind woman is shot through with a similar ambivalence. She is unable to tell him how many children there are in the house. Her literal blindness foreshadows his inability to see the children, while her hesitancy and his lack of understanding are both played off against the familiar clutter of children's toys—a rocking horse, a wooden cannon—and furniture and still more against the calm acceptance of Jenny, who tells the narrator, "You'll find yours indoors, I reckon." The effect is to poise the story on a boundary that seems always about to be crossed.

The sense of a boundary that is powerful yet somehow permeable is repeated on the second visit, which begins with the narrator's car seeming to take the road to the house "of her own volition" and ends with a desperate effort to get help for the dying child. The visit also suggests what it is in the narrator that debars him from seeing his own lost child. He takes advantage of a mechanical fault in his car to set out his tools, as if playing shop: "It was a trap to catch all childhood." He later speaks of "child's law," meaning the rules of play children are bound to observe, and he had earlier prefaced a remark to the blind woman with the expression "if I know children." The narrator evidently knows children and loves them, but he expresses his knowledge in terms of rules, traps, and stratagems. Is it this cast of mind, his need for mental control of his deepest feelings of love, that binds him to his grief and that eventually exiles him from the house and its woods? Kipling himself was a reticent man. Perhaps it is for this reason that the three stories we can associate most closely with his own life—"Baa, Baa, Black Sheep," dealing with his childhood; "They," following the death of his daughter; and "The Gardener," after the death of his son at Loos in 1915—are laceratingly personal.

The distinction between conscious knowing and other, more intuitive forms of understanding is raised elsewhere in "They." The blind woman, for example, responds with pain to an angry mood in the narrator that she perceives as a "bad colour," black zigzagging across red. Urged on by his questions, she also outlines the contours of the egg, an arcane symbol of the universe enclosed in a single shell. Her knowledge of the colors and of the egg is innate, but the source of the narrator's knowledge is not explained. In fact, Kipling was fascinated with nonphysical modes of perception. He believed that his own artistic inspiration was given and that his responsibility as a writer was to follow the instructions of his "daemon." "We are only telephone wires," he told Rider Haggard in 1919. In this story the child whose absence is so deeply felt, yet at the same time so firmly held to by the narrator, becomes Kipling's demon. "They" both depends on and seeks to close the gap opened up by the loss of the daughter. In the pain of this paradox lies the intensity of the story and the narrator's recognition that he can never return.

—Phillip Mallett