Mr. Kipling now became a regular harnessed member of the four-in-hand team that pulled the paper. With pen in hand and pipe in mouth he sat at the larger of the two tables in our editorial poke-hole, and beginning with a "Now, what shall I do? Write a poem, fill out cables, or correct proofs?" would fall to and toil away with an enthusiasm born of the long time it had been since he had "smelled the sawdust of the ring."
"Oh, how good it is to be at work in a newspaper office again!" he exclaimed on the first day, doubtless with recollections of the sanctum of the _Allahabad Pioneer_ strong upon him, and the memory of the time when the precursors of the "Plain Tales" and of the Barrack Room Ballads were demanded of him almost every day, and gave him the practice to produce the carefully finished and matured work we are now seeing in the novel "Kim," at which he was at work--in the laboratory of his mind--even as he sat with us in Bloemfontein.
We wondered at his enthusiasm, and, perhaps, had it not been of his doing, we should have resented the impetus it gave us to toil as never war correspondents worked before--all day for THE FRIEND and far into the nights to catch the mails with our home correspondence. But we soon came to see that the same tremendous energy and ceaseless flow of wit and fancy were his by nature, and would have found expression as well in a tent on the veldt as in that office. He was always while with us like a great healthy boy in spirits and vitality, good humour, and enterprise.
With us he yelled "Haven't any; go to Barlow's shop around the corner," to the Tommies who trod on one another's heels to get copies of the paper from us who had not got them. With us he consigned the Dutch compositor to æons of boiling torment for the trouble his errors gave us. With us he entertained Lord Stanley, who now came, out of kindness, at noon every day, to save us the trouble of sending our proof-sheets over to him at his office. And from us he insisted upon taking all the "Tommy poetry," as we called it, that came to the office. When we derided much of it as outrageous twaddle, he praised its quality. On this day, I remember, we were belittling a particular poem that he was reading, and he called out, "Why, that is splendid stuff! Listen to these lines--'Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves: Britons never, never, never shall be slaves!'" The reader will not find this particular poem in this book, though it was put in THE FRIEND by our distinguished poetry editor.