But a warning enters here.  Mr Kipling, celebrating Imperial India, has shown us the English at close war with the India of black magic and secret murder, of cruelty and fear.  But he has balanced the account.  There is another set of stories, showing us how the white man comes to disaster, who, not content with his exact and simple duty, insolently overleaps the breach between East and West—­the breach which Mr Kipling himself so scrupulously observes.  There was Trajego: 

“He knew too much in the first instance; and he saw too much in the second.  He took too deep an interest in native life; but he will never do so again.”

His story is entitled Beyond the Pale, and is to be found among Plain Tales from the Hills.  There is also The Man Who Would Be King.  He, too, neglected the barriers.  India may be ruled by the resolute and challenged by the brave; but India may never be embraced.

India, who strikes out of a brazen sky; who poisons with her infected breath and is served to the death without reward; who physically cows her people with dust and fever and heat, and is possessed with devils who must be pacified; where successive civilisations have left their bones upon the soil and a hundred religions have decayed, leaving the old air heavy with exhalations—­this India slowly takes shape in Mr Kipling’s native stories.  Her physical immensity and pressure is felt in stories like The End of the Passage and William the Conqueror.  Her sleepless tyranny, which has made men intricate and incalculable, driving them to subterranean ways of thought and fancy, rules in every page of a tale like The Return of Imray.  Imray was an amiable Englishman who incautiously patted the head of his servant’s child.  Bahadur Khan speaks of it thus to Strickland of the Police: 

“’Walking among us, his servants, he cast his eyes upon my child who was four years old.  Him he bewitched, and in ten days he died of the fever, my child!’

“‘What said Imray Sahib?’

“’He said he was a handsome child and patted him on the head; wherefore my child died.  Wherefore I killed Imray Sahib in the twilight, when he had come, and was sleeping.  Wherefore I dragged him up into the roof-beams and made all fast behind him—­the Heaven-born knows all things.  I am the servant of the Heaven-born. . . .  Be it remembered that the Sahib’s shirts are correctly enumerated, and that there is an extra piece of soap in his wash-basin.  My child was bewitched and I slew the wizard.’”

There is here just that blend of simplicity and incalculable darkness found in all Mr Kipling’s native tales.  If the premises of life in India are tortuous, conduct and reasoning are as naively innocent as a problem in geometry.

It follows that, when the devils are out of the story, no story breathes more delightfully of Eden than a story of the East.  The white side of the black story of Imray Sahib is shown in Kim, and in all the hints and small studies for Kim that preceded Mr Kipling’s best of all Indian tales.