Quartette is an intriguing collaboration between all four of the Kiplings living in Lahore, including poems by Alice Kipling (Rudyard's mother), Lockwood Kipling (four stories), Trix Kipling (poems and a short story), and Rudyard Kipling (five poems and three stories). The book was printed in December 1885 using the printing press of the Civil & Military Gazette, and was distributed as a Christmas supplement to the Civil & Military Gazette newspaper, which circulated widely around northern Indian cities in the Punjab province. Rudyard took the lead on the project, and had permission from the owners of the CMG, but no involvement from the head editor of the newspaper at the time, Stephen Wheeler. As a result, the young reporter (Rudyard was only twenty years old at the time) was in charge of copy-editing, proofing, and supervising the printing of a quite sizeable book project. 

Quartette was actually the second collaborative book Rudyard printed with the CMG press. The first, Echoes, was a collection of poems by Trix and himself that had appeared in 1884. 

Availability. A few hundred copies of Quartette were printed in Lahore in 1885; to our knowledge, the book has not been subsequently reprinted, nor have many of the stories appeared online. There is a "page image" version of the text at the University of Virginia's repository, but no Ebook copy is presently available at Google Books or Archive.org. Thus, the present digital edition represents the first full edition of Quartette to have appeared since its initial printing. 

Authorship. The individual contributions are not marked and authorship is not indicated. The book as a whole is attributed to "Four Anglo-Indian Writers." There is widespread consensus about the authorship of most of the stories in the collection, with the one exception being "My Christmas at the Ajaibgaum Exhibition." While some biographers and critics attribute this story to Rudyard, it seems to be more directly connected to Lockwood's scholarly interests and temperament. 

The full Table of Contents of "Quartette" is as follows:

The Mirror of Two Worlds (LOCKWOOD KIPLING)
Divided Allegiance (poem by RUDYARD KIPLING)
An Anglo-Indian Episode (LOCKWOOD KIPLING)
At the Distance (poem by RUDYARD KIPLING)
The Unlimited 'Draw' of 'Tick' Boileau (RUDYARD KIPLING)
A Tragedy of Teeth (poem by RUDYARD KIPLING)
The Haunted Cabin (ALICE "TRIX" KIPLING / A. M. FLEMING)
The Second Wooing (poem by RUDYARD KIPLING)
The Strange ride of Morrowbie Jukes, C.E. (RUDYARD KIPLING)
Two Sonnets (Poems by ALICE MACDONALD KIPLING)
My Christmas at the Ajaibgaum Exhibition (Debated Authorship: some sources suggest LOCKWOOD KIPLING, while others suggest RUDYARD)
Rivals (poem  by ALICE MACDONALD KIPLING)
The Phantom 'Rickshaw (RUDYARD KIPLING)
From the Hills (poem by RUDYARD KIPLING)
Mofussil Jurisdiction (LOCKWOOD KIPLING)
Parted (poem by ALICE MACDONALD KIPLING)

 

Printing 

Not surprisingly, with a twenty year old cub reporter as the head manager of this project, the actual printing of Quartette at the CMG printing press in December 1885 turned out to be a bit chaotic. There were many typesetting errors that Rudyard had to aggressively work to correct, and the actual labor of printing the book took much longer than anticipated. Charles Allen describes the process as follows: 

The printing of Quartette consumed Ruddy's every spare moment for the better part of six weeks. Set after set of the 124 pages of proofs came back from the CMG's typesetters riddled with errors, and time after time the head printer, Ram Das, had to be cajoled into resetting them. [...] The printing of Quartette was finally completed at five in the morning on 18 December. At ten the previous evening ruddy had gone home, leaving the paper's Scottish foreman, Chalmers, to supervise the final print run and the binding. He had returned at midnight to find the workmen on the verge of mutiny. By allowing them to bring in their hookahs and smoke ten at a time, and supplying the tobacco himself, ruddy brought the men back to work. (Allen 100-101)

And Rudyard himself wrote about the process at length in a letter to Margaret Burne-Jones (postmarked January 11 1886; but Rudyard treated the letter as a kind of diary, written over more than two weeks). Here is one section where Rudyard details the difficulties he is having with the copy-editing of the book: 

Ram Das, excellent Hindu that he is, brings me pages on pages each viler than the first: - 'Sar I cannot understand' says he; and I have to go through it all again. If Quartette comes out without a howling misprint in every other line it will be by the blessing of Providence alone. I never met such awful proofs in my life. Thank Heaven that Quartette only comes once a year. Otherwise my eyes (what's left of 'em) would shrivel out. Imagine 513 mistakes in one galley of five pages! (Pinney 102)
 

After the book was printed, Rudyard took time to read through the finished version and discovered approximately twenty printer's errors. 

What are these stories about?  Charles Allen describes two contributions by Rudyard Kipling, "The Phantom 'Rickshaw" and "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" as signs of the future potential of Rudyard Kipling as a fiction writer. And indeed, those two stories do stand out in this collection as Anglo-Indian ghost stories that hold up both as portraits of the fears and ideologies undergirding Anglo-Indian society in India in the late 19th century, and as fairly impressive ghost stories in the tradition of Poe. Both Rudyard and Trix seem to have been strongly under the influence of Poe at the time of the writing of these stories; Trix's own contribution, "A Haunted Cabin," is a Poe-like ghost story. In contrast to Rudyard and Lockwood's respective contributions, Trix's story refers to no Indian characters (indeed, it's set on a ship that is on its way to India). 

In his comments on Quartette in Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, Charles Allen describes the four stories authored by John Lockwood Kipling as "feeble," (Allen, 198) which seems unfair to us. Lockwood's contributions are certainly uneven -- Allen indicates Lockwood had apparently first drafted them a decade earlier, when he was bedridden from typhoid -- but there is much of interest in them, particularly the dense interest in Indian folk culture we see in stories like "The Mirror of Two Worlds." And there is a thought-provoking account of the complexity of working as a museum curator in "My Christmas at the Ajaibgaum Exhibition," which reflects a large extracurricular curatorial project Lockwood Kipling had been commissioned for that same year. 

The stories by Lockwood Kipling might also be interesting because they demonstrate Lockwood's influence over Rudyard's emerging style and thematic interests (the interest in collecting artifacts related to Indian culture would be one that Rudyard would come back to often in his own writing). 

Brief summaries:

"The Mirror of Two Worlds" (Lockwood Kipling)

Summary: A first-person account in the voice of a circus proprietor. The attention to specific cultural curation and the knowledge of Indian society all point to the senior curator Lockwood Kipling.

Brief passage quote:

"I have no 'agent in advance,' and my experience is that in this country such a person is not necessary. We find our visitors are the best agents, and they work a kind of underground post that carries news of such a tamasha as mine faster and farther than any newspapers or letters. and as for bills and posters, we distribute thousands of these small pictures slips lithographed, as you see, on thin paper. Some are taviz or jantars, arrangements of figures in squares, you know; others are marked with elephants, interlaced fishes, peacocks, geese, tigers and other auspicious creatures, and others have the Swastika or Gunesh sign, while others have figures of Krishna and popular divinities, but all enjoin on the reader that his first duty is to go and see 'The Mirror of Two Worlds.' and they accept the invitation in thousands, people of all sorts and conditions; and what is strangest of all, large numbers of Mussulmans as well as Hindus. The fact is, Sir, among the lower orders they are rather more mixed in the matter of their religious notions, and more practically tolerant than you would suspect, from what you hear and read.

Keywords: Western knowledge of Indian culture and religion; circus

Racial make-up: White British protagonist, Indian assistant

"An Anglo-Indian Episode"

Authorship: Lockwood Kipling

Summary:  A young man named Scott is sent out from England with the promise of a job at a remote tea plantation in India. He arrives at the plantation, where the only other Europeans are a family of three -- the proprietor, his wife Laura, and their young daughter Nora. Scott begins to develop feelings toward Nora which he dare not express aloud. But before that romantic drama can be brought to a head, cholera strikes the plantation. The daughter is nearly instantly killed, and the planter sends Scott with Nora to escape the plantation. Nora dies en route to Calcutta, and Scott sends a letter to the planter informing him. The letter is returned; it turns out that the planter himself has died of cholera. The story ends with Scott boarding a ship to return to England.

Keywords: cholera; adultery; tea plantation; provincial life (Mofussil); romance

Racial make-up: All white main cast of characters. Some Indian servants do appear briefly

Connection to the Kiplings' journalism / real life: Unknown

"The Unlimited 'Draw' of 'Tick' Boileau"

Authorship: Rudyard Kipling

Summary: A new man comes to the regiment. At first he is unpopular owing to certain personality traits (his "dark horsiness"). Later, he seems more sober, and he reveals the reason in an account that constitutes the bulk of the second half of the story. During a leave, he had gone to Mussoorie to spend time with a woman in whom he had an interest. He dances with her at the Ball, and after the "last pukka waltz" she comes to him on the veranda. He proposes to her and professes his love, and she reciprocates. But then it is discovered that in fact she had died of a freak seizure in the coat room and must have been dead before the conversation she apparently had had with Tick Boileau. The mean listening to the story take it seriously and seem to believe the narrator, but later it is made clear that the tale was a hoax. The subalterns at Mian Mir are now widely mocked for being overly gullible.

Keywords: Military life; ghost stories; romance

Racial make-up: All white

Connection to the Kiplings' journalism / real life: Unknown

"The Haunted Cabin"

Authorship: Alice "Trix" Kipling

Summary: A young mother and her three year old boy are on a steamer heading from England to Bombay when they encounter a mysterious little girl. They are the only ones who can see or hear her. The mother is convinced that there's a rational explanation for the mystery, but her son concludes that the girl is a fairy and stops trying to talk to her. Just before docking at the end of the voyage, the narrator encounters the little girl sitting in an odd way on a railing. The girl then falls into the water. The narrator initially attempts to find help and rescue the child but a stranger interposes herself and informs the narrator about the story of the young girl who died in this location years earlier.

Keywords: Horror, steamship travel

Racial make-up: All white

Connections to the Kiplings' journalism / real life: Unknown / none

"The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes, C.E." 

Authorship: Rudyard Kipling

Summary: A man named Morrowbie Jukes is in a remote part of India. Out hunting alone at night, he has an accident on his horse and falls into a kind of pit-village that is entirely inhabited with Indians who have been condemned to live there on account of being thought ill. The village is in effect a kind of permanent quarantine, ignored by the outside world and policed by soldiers who shoot on sight anyone who tries to leave. Morrowbie Jukes befriends a shady Indian character named Gunga Dass, a Brahmin who has been forced to abandon caste and who now catches and eats crows like the rest. Jukes learns that an earlier Englishman had been in the pit, and had been killed by Gunga Dass. Jukes discovers that the Englishman had drawn up a map of a way out of the pit-village on foot that goes through the quicksand. Dass betrays Jukes as they attempt to escape together, but Jukes is rescued by his Indian servant from outside the pit, who had tracked him to the edge of the slope constituting one of the barriers around the village.

Representative passage:

“In epidemics of the cholera you are carried to be burned almost before you are dead. When you come to the riverside the cold air, perhaps, makes you alive, and then, if you are only little alive, mud is put on your nose and mouth and you die conclusively. If you are rather more alive, more mud is put; but if you are too lively they let you go and take you away. I was too lively, and made protestation with anger against the indignities that they endeavored to press upon me. In those days I was Brahmin and proud man. Now I am dead man and eat”— here he eyed the well-gnawed breast bone with the first sign of emotion that I had seen in him since we met —“crows, and other things. They took me from my sheets when they saw that I was too lively and gave me medicines for one week, and I survived successfully.

And another passage, which illustrate the racial paranoia quite nicely:

When I was in the open, I saw Pornic, my poor old Pornic, lying dead on the sandy soil. How they had killed him I cannot guess. Gunga Dass explained that horse was better than crow, and “greatest good of greatest number is political maxim. We are now Republic, Mister Jukes, and you are entitled to a fair share of the beast. If you like, we will pass a vote of thanks. Shall I propose?”

Keywords: Horror; cholera; Racial paranoia; Hindu rituals; Caste

Racial make-up: Mixed English and Indian; Racial paranoia

Connections to the Kiplings' journalism / real life: Unknown

"My Christmas At the Ajaibgaum Exhibition"

Authorship: LIKELY LOCKWOOD KIPLING

Summary and commentary: A comment on the debated authorship of "My Christmas at the Ajaibgaum Exhibition" might be in order. Worldcat.org's Table of Contents for this volume lists the authorship as R. Kipling; when Rudyard sent a copy of the book to a family friend, he apparently marked a black dot next to the title to indicated a claim of authorship. That said, later in life Rudyard denied the story was his, and Pinney, in The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, makes clear he believes the story was authored by Lockwood Kipling (see The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Volume 1, p. 113).

Based on the theme of the story, I would tend to share Pinney's opinion in general.

The story is in two chapters, with the first chapter focused on an account of a young newspaper man named Mudsworth, sent to a town called Ajaibgaum to work on an Exhibition. (Both father and son wrote for newspapers, so the choice of occupation doesn't point in any particular direction, though the focus on the "Exhibition" seems to point more towards Lockwood Kipling -- he was engaged in a very similar task in the fall of 1885. The general tone and style of this part of the story also seems a bit too mature and embedded in the Indian setting for it to be authored by Rudyard Kipling at least circa 1885; later, his style would shift and become more confidently "Indian."

The second half of the story shifts gears, and becomes a simple Anglo-Indian romantic / marriage plot along the lines of other Rudyard Kipling stories from this period (i.e., the simple Romantic stories from Plain Tales from the Hills). (Then again, "Mofussil Jurisdiction" does have a Romantic farce quality, so perhaps this format was something Lockwood enjoyed after all).

Themes: Mistaken identity; Small town ("Mofussil") Anglo-Indian life; journalism

Racial make-up: All white characters; significant usage of Hindustani phrases and bilingual puns ("Ajaibgaum"; "Pagalnugger"; "Bewafqoofabad").

Links to Kipling's journalism / real-life: The protagonist is a reporter for a Mofussil newspaper, and can thus be said to resemble Rudyard. He is sent to curate a museum exhibition, which suggests a resemblance to Lockwood.