Dull Red

Abstract

When Kipling returned from India to England he took lodgings in a down-at-heel area of London. From his window he witnessed one day a particularly brutal incident:

Once I faced the reflection of my own face in the jet-black mirror of the window panes for five days. When the fog thinned, I looked out and saw a man standing opposite the pub where the barmaid lived: on a sudden his breast turned dull red like a robin’s, and he crumpled, having cut his throat. In a few minutes — seconds it seemed — a hand-ambulance arrived and took up the body. A pot boy with a bucket of steaming water sluiced the blood off into the gutter, and what little crowd had collected went its way.¹