No Exit: An Explication of Kipling's "A Wayside Comedy"

180 NO EXIT: AN EXPLICATION OF KIPLING'S "A WAYSIDE COMEDY" By Elsie B. Adams (Wisconsin State University, Whitewater) Kipling's "A Wayside Comedy," with its theme of spiritual isolation and torment, offers students of the late-Victorian period an excellent example of the transitional nature of the literature of the period, for the story anticipates by over fifty years a modern treatment of the same theme, in Jean-Paul Sartre's play, Huls-clos (No Exit. 1944). The parallels between Kipling's story and Sartre's play are so striking as to suggest literary influence, but my purpose here is not to trace this influence, but to explicate Kipling's story as an early portrayal of the existentialist hell dramatized in Huls-clos.1 The hell of Sartre's play is a drawing room where three people are to torture each other for eternity. The three, who did not know each other in life, are ushered to the room by a Valet, who disappears once the company is assembled. They find that the pain of hell does not derive from brimstone and instruments of torture, but from the selfinflicted torment of unsatisfied human desires. Thus Estelle, a vain and sensual woman, requires the love and approval of Garcln; Inez, an Intellectual Lesbian, requires the love of Estelle; the guilt-ridden Garcin requires absolution in the eyes of Inez, who, unlike Estelle, is intelligent and sensitive enough to perceive his problem and his need. None of these can have what he desires: Garcin hates Estelle for her superficiality, Inez hates Garcin for his maleness, Estelle hates Inez for her perversity. And the three are trapped in the room, forever, to tempt and torture each other. The hell of Kipling's "A Wayside Comedy" is similarly a social phenomenon, involving the European population of Kashima, a station in British India. The symbolic import of the station is clear from the opening sentence, where Kashima is called "a prison" for "the poor souls . . . now lying there in torment."2 The opening paragraphs emphasize the isolation of Kashima, "bounded on all sides by the rock-tipped circle of the Dosehri hills"; Kashima, one hundred forty-three miles from Narkarra, the nearest station, is "as out of the world as Heaven or the Other Place."3 it is monotonous ("a stretch of perfectly flat pasture and plough-land, running up to the gray-blue scrub of the Dosehri hills") and devastating (the roses which are "ablaze" in spring die from "hot winds" in summer; mists rise in the autumn, and winter frosts kill "everything young and tender"). Kashima is for its inhabitants a "prison," a "rat-pit" (p. 405), * "cage" (p. 407). Nevertheless, the setting of "A Wayside Comedy," like the setting of Huls-clos. contains the trappings of civilization; Sartre's play takes place in a drawing room in Second Empire style; Kipling's story includes a ceremonial tea welcoming the Vansuythens, a house-warming, and a daily tea when "all Kashima" meets to "discuss the trivialities of the day." As the narrator explains, "There is a pretense of civilisation even in Kashima" (p. 400). 181 The "souls in torment," like Sartre's souls, are tortured by each other. The narratore traces the present pain of "all Kashima" to the arrival of Mrs. Vansuythen, before which "There was deep peace in Kashima," and "Kashima was the Garden of Eden" (p. 399). The arrival of Major and Mrs. Vansuythen brings on the Judgment and subsequent misery alluded to in the epigraph to the story; the narrator specifically associates their arrival with "the Judgment of God," saying that "Kashima was happy then [before their arrival] when the Judgment of God seemed almost as distant as Narkarra." After their arrival, the self-inflicted torture begins. First Mrs. Boulte confesses to her husband, whom she hates, that she is having an adulterous affair with Captain Kurrell; her confession brings no absolution, however, but leads to greater frustration as Boulte, undisturbed, suggests that his wife elope with Kurrell. Boulte then goes to Mrs. Vansuythen to declare his love; Mrs. Vansuythen rejects Boulte's love and assures him that Kurrell cares nothing for Mrs. Boulte. Mrs. Boulte overhears all...