The Story of the Kipling Table

The Kipling Table

Rudyard paced around "Naulakha", the house he and his wife had built near Brattleboro Vermont, like a caged tiger. "Why is it always so cold here?"

His wife Caroline smiled to herself. "Darling, it"s June." She replied.

"There's no summer here, just differing degrees of winter. And I thought San Francisco was bad! I wish I was back in the Punjab."

"With the snakes and the mahdis?" She teased.

"My bones ache! In Calcutta, if a man dies of the heat in the summer, when he reaches hell, they say the devil sends him back to fetch a blanket. I could use some of that heat right now."

"But you write well here, dear."

"What else can a man do? We're in Vermont."

Caroline gets up to leave, and just as the door creaks shut behind her, she drops the elephantine hint:

"He could raise a family. In say, six months."

He's always been a contemplative sort, and it takes a moment for it to sink in. Before he can reach the door and pull it near off the hinges, she has skipped half across the field.

"Write a book for our little princess- or our little frog!" she calls to him over her shoulder.

He returned to the parlor. Write a book! Easy for her to say. Sometimes it would pour out in a torrent, like dictation from an unseen friend. Mostly it was like tugging at a tooth that had to come out. Here he was so far away from all that he knew. What to write about?

Then his eye caught the table his brother in law had given them for their housewarming. Kipling knew Hepplewhite's style when he saw it, but this was so, so AMERICAN. No satinwood or holly inlay. No spade feet. Plain as porridge. But the lines were there, no doubt, and, what was it made from? The wood was striped in the most extraordinary way, the hard, dense grain undulating into the pattern of something familiar. A Bengal Tiger would be jealous he thought, and then he remembered what his wife had called his "maybe" son- "our little frog". What was the Indian word for that? His nanny, or aya, used it all those years ago in his nursery in Bombay.

Ah, yes- Mowgli.