
False Dawn |
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‘Tomorrow I go to a big meeting of the local Masonic Lodge’, wrote Rudyard, early in 1888. ‘Let us hope they’ll give me some decent material’, he went on. ‘I’m in low water again.’ His anxiety was prompted by a big promotion that had made him editor of The Week’s News, a new supplement to the Allahabad Pioneer. He was also expected to provide the paper’s fiction. It was not a good time to run out of his stock of stories. But he got a grip and ‘False Dawn’ was one of the first of a flood of stories he would create in the weeks to follow. He had to come up with the goods, it was life or death: he knew he had to get his work known outside India if he was to present himself as a successful writer in London and he’d done all he could with the opportunities India offered. Lying awake at night, as he told us, he would ponder what kind of work, what sort of story, would ‘take’ with the reading public in England. I won’t spoil the story for you by saying too much about it. I still take pleasure in its invitation to enter a world touched with glamour by its Indian setting, even while the author also wants to rob me of any delusions concerning the British inhabitants. I turn to it for an account of extreme experience in the storm, ‘roaring whirling darkness’ and ‘lightning spurting like water from a sluice’, details that give the scale of what is going on between the lovers. There’s one bit of background that I will add as a footnote: Rudyard had particular reason to be thinking about the psychological stakes around getting engaged. His sister Trix, to whom he was devoted, had recently broken off an engagement that her family had always thought ill-judged. Yet she remained tearful and uncertain, giving John Fleming, her tenacious ex-fiancé, hope and baffling her brother. (After many of these hesitations she went on to marry Fleming, an outcome which brought little happiness to either.) |