Chapter 9 mystery

"Mr. Vickery went inland on Monday night to take over a postwar shipment of naval ammunition left at Broomefantingburg. No detachment was sent with Mr. Vickery. He was sent alone—alone for One unit—himself." The Marine blew a string of harsh whistles.Pycroft said: "I thought so too. I went ashore with him and he asked me to accompany him through the station, and his teeth rattled, but he seemed happy. "He said: 'You know what? The Phyllis Circus is playing in Worcester tomorrow night. I can catch up and go see another one.' And he said, 'You've been patient with me.'

"I said, 'Look, Vickery, I'm really tired of this. Take it to yourself. I don't ask any more.' "He said: 'Come on! What do you have to say?—You're just watching the show. I'm in it.' And he said: 'But it doesn't matter,' he said.' Before parting I just have one word with you, remember,' said he,--we came to the general's garden gate--'and remember, I am not a murderer, and my legal wife was confinement six weeks after I left home. I'm dead," he said, "at least I'm innocent of the matter." "I said: 'What did you do? What happened?'

"He said: 'Afterwards, it was all quiet,' and he shook my hand and went into Simmons Town Station, teeth still chattering." I asked Pycroft: "Did he go to Worcester to see Mrs. Bathurst?" "Don't know. He reported to Broomefun, watched ammunition loaded into the truck, and disappeared. Gone--deserted, as you say--soldiers for eighteen months Well, if what he said about his wife is true, then he's a carefree man. What do you think?" R. Kipling, Mrs. Bathurst (1904) When I was discussing "suspense" (Thomas Hardy's "A Pair of Blue Eyes"), I mentioned that the heroine finally rescued the hero. As for how, I only provide one clue.For readers who haven't read the novel, I've turned "suspense" (what happens next?) into mystery or mystery (how did she do it?).These two problems are the main factors that make up the novel's interest, and their history is as old as the novel itself.

A major component of traditional romance is mystery, which concerns the birth and parental circumstances of characters and always ends in the protagonist's favour.Nineteenth-century novels largely revolved around this theme, and this approach is still common in popular fiction today (in the more artistic novels, novelists often parodied this pattern, as Anthony Borges' "Man/Woman" and my own novel "A Small World").Victorian novelists such as Dickens and Virgie Collins linked the mystery to crime and misconduct, eventually leading to a separate subgenre, the classical detective of Conan Doyle and his followers Fiction.

The unraveling of the mystery is equal to the final elimination of the reader's doubts, and it is a declaration that reason overcomes instinct and order overcomes chaos.The detective novels of Sherlock Holmes and the case histories of Sigmund Freud, which have strikingly similar features, both exemplify this characteristic.Therefore, whether it is a novel, a movie, or a TV soap opera, there is always an element of mystery in popular stories.In contrast, the literary modern novelist, weary of the happy formula of happy resolutions and happy endings, tends to mix ambiguities with mysteries and never unravel them.What did Macy know about the sexual behavior of the adults around her with each other?Is Kurtz a tragic hero or a human devil in Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness"?Of the several endings in John Firth's The French Lieutenant's Woman, which one is the "real" one?We don't know these things.

Kipling's story "Mrs. Bathurst" is a good example of this kind of text. It is interesting that Kipling's works are loved by a large number of general readers. You are bound to be puzzled or even annoyed by the mysteries you know.For the same reason, it also shows that as an experimental novelist, Kipling's self-awareness and artistry are far higher than people imagined. The story takes place in South Africa just after the Hill War and tells the story of the mysterious disappearance of a British naval soldier named Vickery.Vickery, also known as Cata, rattled because his dentures were not fitting properly.The few facts about this disappearance case were slowly rolled out from the chats of four people who happened to meet on the branch line of the railway near Cape Beach.These four people are: Vickery's shipmate Pycroft, Marine Sergeant Pritchard, Railway Inspector Hooper, and an anonymous "I", the narrator (Kipling himself), who Explain the scene where the four met and relay the content of their conversation.Pycroft said Vickery had insisted on taking him repeatedly to watch a newsreel in the days leading up to his disappearance as part of a tourist entertainment show for troops by the Phyllis Circus.The reason Vickery watched repeatedly was because of the brief shot of a woman stepping out of a train at Paddington station.The woman was a widow, known as Mrs. Bathurst, known to both Pycroft and Pritchard, and a friendly proprietress of a small hotel in New Zealand.Vickery apparently had a scandalous relationship with her (although Pritchard testifies that she was of impeccable character).Pycroft's (or Kipling himself's) brilliant description of the film - the first time he saw it - is one of the earliest literary descriptions of the film - also suggests that at the heart of the story is the elusive of:

Then the door opens, the passenger comes out, and the porter picks up the luggage—just like the real thing.It's just—it's just that when we get too close, we walk out of the frame from where we are looking, as others say...slowly, from behind the two porters—holding a small bag in his hand, looking here and there Look—here comes Mrs Bathurst.Even after ten thousand steps, you can recognize the way she walks.She came straight towards us, didn't turn the corner—she looked at us with the same glassy eyes, just like Pridge said.She walks and walks, and finally walks out of frame - like - like a shadow jumping onto a candle...

Vickery thought that Mrs. Bathurst was "looking for him everywhere" after seeing this scene, so he was disturbed, and finally even the commander was alarmed, so he sent him ashore alone to perform an official duty, and he never returned.In this excerpt, Piccolo Date describes the last time he saw Vickery and raises the mystery of Vickery's disappearance, since he was the one who accompanied Vickery ashore. Mysterious effects cannot be created by a short quote, for maintaining a mystery requires a series of hints, clues, and deceptive data.In the case of "Mrs. Bathurst," there is another mystery, namely, which of the many puzzling phenomena is the key?The frame story of the four men's encounters, their jokes, arguments, and endless reminiscences of old anecdotes seems to take up more space than Vickery's.This excerpt explicitly addresses the mystery of Vickery's disappearance, which is usually placed at the beginning of Sherlock Holmes' novels, but in fact, this excerpt is placed at the end of the book.

Just as Vickery refers to murder only to acquit himself, so Kipling uses the detective story only to break out of the detective story.Inspector Hooper (the title might have been mistaken for a sheriff or something) had in his pocket a pair of false teeth recovered from a body burned in an outback teak forest fire, and another body at the scene.This seemed to be an indisputable proof of how Vickery had died."False teeth are something that last forever," Hooper said. "All murder trials bring up these things." But by the end of the story, he "removed his hand from his pocket — it was empty."While this detail helps to reveal Hooper's attention to demeanor, the fact that his pockets are empty symbolizes the frustration of the reader's hopes of unraveling the mystery.Even if we were certain of Vickery's death, there would still be no explanation for what brought him to an end; moreover, the identity of the second body remains a mystery (many scholars have debated these questions and proposed some original, sometimes grotesque explanations, but all explanations are unfounded and it is difficult to draw conclusions).Vickery, like Mrs. Bathurst in the newsreel, has disappeared from the frame, out of the frame of the story, and the ultimate truth about him will never be known.

Why did Kipling tease his readers in this way?I think there is only one reason, that Mrs Bathurst is not a mystery in the usual sense, but a tragedy.Vickery's last words are quoted as a quote from Hamlet ("All be quiet"); his earlier utterances also have the tone of Marlowe's character Faust (which is Hell, but I'm already in it), "You're just watching the show, I'm in it." These words have a distinctly tragic color.Here (and elsewhere) Kipling showed that the patois, the bad teeth, the lowly ranks of the common people were deeply emotional, lustful, more destructive and most mysterious than the human heart.