ld of manly men, it's assumed that the strong will struggle forward on the thinest of chances, and the weak will be swept away. Dick and Torpenhow become close friends in the course of the campaign, but in the midst of a battle Dick is wounded on the head and has a moment's flashback to the world of his childhood and Massie, whom he fell in love with shortly before they last parted. The bulk of the story is taken up by the life Dick and Torpenhow share in London, living pleasantly in each other's company, arguing about the value of their work, and helping each other fail romantically. Women are implicitly a great threat to their work, to their whole way of being, and yet they provide something that can't be done without, either. Dick describes his greatest work to date as being a mural he painted in the hold of a ship while involved in a tryst with the captain's mistress, Passion and sex feed the work, but love -- true love rooted in friendship and mutual respect -- challenge it. Kipling shows Dick facing an age-old dilemma, part of the horrific legacy of sexual discrimination. If love can only exist between equals, and women are basically inferior to men -- something that Kipling clearly believed -- then the only true love that can exist must be between men. But that love, amongst the Victorians, had to be chaste, non-sexual love. None of this is explicit in “The Light That Failed”, and I doubt Kipling would have seen it this way, but there are only two (thankfully non-exclusive) ways out of this dilemma: acknowledge women as equals to men, or accept the legitimacy of homosexual love. Men of Kipling's era found it virtually impossible to do either, thus ensuring themselves a nearly loveless existence. No wonder they flung themselves off to the further ends of the Empire as if driven by an insatiable thirst. Dick's pursuit of Massie, and Torpenhow's brief involvement with a waif named Bessie whom he helped out in a moment of...
