: Rudyard Kipling
: The Light That Failed
: Dead Dodo Presents Rudyard Kipling
: 9781508017714
: 1
: CHF 0.70
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 284
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Rudyard Kipling, 'The Light That Failed.'

 

The Light That Failed is about a war correspondent and an artist, known for the drawings he sends home to the London papers from wars in exotic places like Sudan. When he returns to London, he attempts to make a career for himself as a serious artist and encounters his childhood sweetheart, Maisie. They fall in love. Then he learns that a minor problem with his eyes is actually the onset of blindness, incurable--the result of a head wound he took during the war. As his vision fails, the light of everything around him--his life, his hopes, his dreams--fail with it. There are terrible choices to be made between the love of the woman he treasures and the love of the men who stood by him at the front.

 

Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including 'The Man Who Would Be King' (1888). His poems include 'Mandalay' (1890), 'Gunga Din' (1890), 'The Gods of the Copybook Headings' (1919), 'The White Man's Burden' (1899), and 'If-' (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature; and one critic described his work as exhibiting 'a versatile and luminous narrative gift'.

 

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: 'Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known.' In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and its youngest recipient to date Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.

CHAPTER I


~

SO WE SETTLED IT all when the storm was done As comf’y as comf’y could be; And I was to wait in the barn, my dears, Because I was only three; And Teddy would run to the rainbow’s foot, Because he was five and a man; And that’s how it all began, my dears, And that’s how it all began. —Big Barn Stories.

~

‘WHAT do you think she’d do if she caught us? We oughtn’t to have it, you know,’ said Maisie.

‘Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom,’ Dick answered, without hesitation. ‘Have you got the cartridges?’

‘Yes; they’re in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire cartridges go off of their own accord?’

‘Don’t know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry them.’

‘I’m not afraid.’ Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver.

The children had discovered that their lives would be unendurable without pistol-practice. After much forethought and self-denial, Dick had saved seven shillings and sixpence, the price of a badly constructed Belgian revolver. Maisie could only contribute half a crown to the syndicate for the purchase of a hundred cartridges. ‘You can save better than I can, Dick,’ she explained; ‘I like nice things to eat, and it doesn’t matter to you. Besides, boys ought to do these things.’

Dick grumbled a little at the arrangement, but went out and made the purchase, which the children were then on their way to test. Revolvers did not lie in the scheme of their daily life as decreed for them by the guardian who was incorrectly supposed to stand in the place of a mother to these two orphans. Dick had been under her care for six years, during which time she had made her profit of the allowances supposed to be expended on his clothes, and, partly through thoughtlessness, partly through a natural desire to pain,—she was a widow of some years anxious to marry again,—had made his days burdensome on his young shoulders.

Where he had looked for love, she gave him first aversion and then hate.

Where he growing older had sought a little sympathy, she gave him ridicule. The many hours that she could spare from the ordering of her small house she devoted to what she called the home-training of Dick Heldar. Her religion, manufactured in the main by her own intelligence and a keen study of the Scriptures, was an aid to her in this matter. At such times as she herself was not personally displeased with Dick, she left him to understand that he had