Rewards and Fairies

"If—" and the man it was drawn from

"If—" is printed straight after "Brother Square-Toes", the story of George Washington holding out against his own public for America's good. The poem is one long sentence of advice from a father to a son, and nothing resolves until its last lines. Alastair Wilson, writing for the Kipling Society, points out that the placement fits a thread through the whole book: responsible leaders doing what is needed without fear or favour.

Kipling himself named the model. In his memoir he said the verses were drawn from the character of his friend Leander Starr Jameson, who stayed with the Kiplings in Sussex. Jameson, a close colleague of Cecil Rhodes, led the Jameson Raid of 1895 against the Boer republic of the Transvaal. The raid failed, and Jameson was tried and jailed. He later served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, from 1904 to 1908.

Kipling was startled by what happened next. He wrote that the poem escaped from the book and ran about the world. Schools set it as a punishment exercise, it was printed on cards for offices and bedrooms, and he counted translations into twenty-seven languages. Some of the schoolboys who had copied it out as lines later asked him why he had written it.

"What else could I have done?"

The first story sets the question. The Boy in "Cold Iron" has been raised by the fairies, and Thor has forged an iron slave-ring for him. He puts it round his own neck. The Lady Esclairmonde cries out that the catch is still open and he can still take it off. He puts up his hand, the snap locks home, and he says: "What else could I have done?"

The same words come back in at least five later stories: "The Wrong Thing", "Marklake Witches", "The Knife and the Naked Chalk", "A Priest in Spite of Himself" and "A Doctor of Medicine". Each time someone has made a hard choice, often a sacrifice, and does not regret it. Mackenzie reads the book as a study of leadership and service, and of what they cost.

Paris in Brumaire, 1799

"A Priest in Spite of Himself" ends in Paris. Pharaoh Lee, now a ship's captain with his own cargo of tobacco, is taken by a French warship. He follows the tobacco up the Seine on a barge and reaches the city in November 1799, during the revolutionary calendar month of Brumaire. The barge is laid up below Notre-Dame, and Pharaoh sleeps on board while he runs from office to office asking for justice and gets speeches about liberty.

Then a carriage crosses the bridge with General Bonaparte in it, and beside him Talleyrand, the exile Pharaoh once looked after in Philadelphia. Pharaoh runs after it playing a French tune on his fiddle. The scene falls just after the coup of November 1799, in which Bonaparte and his allies overthrew the Directory. Out of gratitude, and against Bonaparte's wishes, Talleyrand gives Pharaoh back his ship and twice the value of his cargo.

Paris also gave "If—" its French life. André Maurois put a French version into his novel Les Silences du colonel Bramble, published by Bernard Grasset in Paris in 1918. In the novel the French narrator, serving alongside British officers, sets himself one evening to put the poem into French. His version ends "Tu seras un homme, mon fils". The stories themselves appeared in Paris as Retour de Puck, translated by S. and J. Vallette.

What the book takes for granted

The two Philadelphia stories are told by Pharaoh Lee in his own voice, and his voice includes a racial slur. He uses it seven times for the Black servants and workers of the city, as if it were an ordinary word. The Kipling Society prints a warning on every Kipling text that contains the word, and explains its history in the commentary.