Kipling – slight mourning and mitigated affliction

 Three and – an Extra by Rudyard Kipling

short story, magazine publication 1886, in Plain Tales from the Hills 1888

 

 

[excerpt] About half-past five in the evening a large leather-covered basket came in from Phelps’s for Mrs. Bremmil. She was a woman who knew how to dress; and she had not spent a week on designing that dress and having it gored, and hemmed, and herring-boned, and tucked and rucked (or whatever the terms are), for nothing. It. was a gorgeous dress - slight mourning. I can’t describe it, but it was what The Queen calls ‘a creation ’—a thing that hit you straight between the eyes and made you gasp. She had not much heart for what she was going to do; but as she glanced at the long mirror she had the satisfaction of knowing that she had never looked so well in her life. She was a large blonde and, when she chose, carried herself superbly.

 

 

comments: A kind reader pointed this story out to me, when I recently wrote about mourning clothes. It is one of Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, and tells of a young couple, out in India, who have lost a child. The wife grieves so whole-heartedly that her husband becomes restless, and is drawn into the orbit of Mrs Hauksbee, an adventuress who appears in several Kipling stories.  Our heroine, Mrs Bremmil, realizes what is happening, and digs herself out of her bereavement to fight back. In the previous posts we have had semi-bereavement wear, and I have seen references to a ‘famous London shop’ with a Mitigated Affliction Department: though this even at the time was seen as either a good joke or a step too far in euphemism. I haven’t seen any proof that such a department actually existed, and it may be an urban myth. The phrase ‘mitigated affliction’ was widely used ironically.

Here it is slight mourning. (I found a book that distinguished among ordinary, secondary and deep mourning, along with slight mourning, half-mourning and complimentary mourning. But my research suggests that such a variety was not widespread, and a simpler structure was normal.)

It is a short straightforward story, very much Kipling in his bluff gent mode, where woman are mysterious and men cannot deal with them. The final lines of the story include this: ‘Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool’ – the kind of superficially appealing conclusion that makes less sense the more you think about it.

But – Kipling is always a good easy read, and obviously I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to try to imagine exactly what Mrs Bremmil wore.

You can read the story on the website of The Kipling Society, which is a great, generous resource, and they always have background – such as that this is the first appearance of Mrs Hauksbee. I asked the society if they could tell me what the title meant, and I got a reply from Michael Kipling, (he shares a common ancestor with Rudyard…) who says that it is thought to be the number of dances that Mr Bremmil is going to give, eventually, to his wife. The dash is in an odd place, to my eyes: I would expect it to be Three – and an Extra.

Kipling featured on the blog recently because I was considering (as I often do) his mysterious short story Mrs Bathurst – blogpost here – which also discussed Kim, and the Just So Stories have also had a post. Mrs B was written nearly 20 years later than this one, and is a lot more complex. A lot. No quick conclusions about foolish men.

And in the comments on this post (one of this series on mourning, though this is just coincidence…), there is a discussion of both Kipling and George Orwell’s take on him. (I have the smartest readers)

Very happy to find the top picture for the post. It’s from the NY MetropolitanMuseum fashion collection  and has the caption 'Mr Waddles arrives late and finds her card filled’, which is very much in the spirit of this story.

At Christmas I used another in the same series

A Boring Christmas from Trollope (clothesinbooks.blogspot.com)

They are both from a collection illustrating mourning practices

There’s a surprisingly modern and disrespectful feel about the pictures, by Charles Dana Gibson, which show a widow rather longing to get back to a normal life.   Gibson was a very well-known illustrator in his day, famed for creating the iconic Gibson Girl.

In both cases it is later than the original story, but seemed right…and a widow can stand in for a bereaved mother.

The other pictures are fashion plates from the correct era.