This is good sense. Nevertheless, difficulties remain. If the other corpse is indeed hers, how and when did she come to Africa? Had Vickery arranged to meet her there, or did he happen on her by chance? If their meeting was arranged, and if he indeed ‘deliberately attracted the lightning’, why? What has she refused him?

She was last seen in the film-clip alighting from the train at Paddington, and looking around as if she was expecting someone to meet her. Who? Vickery himself?

And that remark about his ‘lawful wife’: was he hinting that he had contracted a bigamous marriage with Mrs Bathurst? Harry Ricketts, in his biography of Kipling, calls the ‘cinematograph the device through which Vickery saw his lover on screen and was convinced he was being haunted.’ If that’s correct, and he met Mrs Bathurst by chance ‘up-country’ — but, again, how did she get there? — and he thought her a ghost — the ghost of the woman he had already killed, in England perhaps — that might explain why he attracted the lightning, if indeed he did.

Wodehouse was right to be puzzled. I’m puzzled myself, despite having read the story at least a dozen times. Yet I’m sure it’s a masterpiece, and I would hazard that its true theme is the ultimate impossibility of fully knowing another human being. That sounds banal; but it’s not when dramatically, if obscurely, expressed as it is here.

There are mysteries beyond explanation.

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