In perhaps the best-crafted of his later short stories, “Dayspring Mishandled,” Rudyard Kipling transposes his readers back into the London of the early 1890s and presents them with a nostalgic glimpse of the loves of a group of young writers who gather once a week for supper at a popular café. All of them are talented and ambitious but impoverished and glad to write pot-boilers for the magazines of a new-style entrepreneur who supplies them with basic ideas, plot-outlines, and characters for the work. Among these young writers are the story’s protagonists, Manallace and Castorley. Castorley is a “mannered, bellied person” with a “high affected voice” and “gifts of waking dislike.” Manallace is “a darkish slow Northerner of the type that does not ignite but must be detonated.” On the occasion during which we meet both of them, Manallace admits that he has produced nothing for the syndicate this week. He had been given a batch of prints to weave a story around – stereotyped medieval subjects, “a knight, a castle, a young girl,” but they “have turned to poetry in his hands.” Only the narrator of the story, who takes the drunken Manallace home that night, learns that the poetry he was bragging about was Chaucerian verse. In a parallel development, Castorley leaves the syndicate. He has come into money and devotes himself to gentlemanly scholarship with Geoffrey Chaucer as his chosen subject.

In their youth, both men had loved the same woman. She, however, La Bohème-style, had loved a third man, rejecting alike Castorley’s attempt to get her to bed and Manallace’s declaration of love. Castorley never forgives her and, when she becomes paralyzed, refuses to subscribe to a fund necessary for a vital operation. Manallace nurses her until her death in 1915. One night, when Manallace and Castorley are working together again in a government department during World War I, Castorley, in a confident mood, had spoken of the dead woman in terms that Kipling, probably for censorship reasons, cannot quote. Whatever Castorley said – Angus Wilson suggests that Kipling hints at the woman’s paralysis as being due to syphilis contracted by whoring – it suffices for Manallace to dedicate the rest of his life to exacting vengeance.