"The Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly" is a short story by

Rudyard Kipling Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work. ...

. It was first published in the ''

Civil and Military Gazette ''The Civil and Military Gazette'' was a daily English-language newspaper founded in 1872 in British India. It was published from Lahore, Simla and Karachi, some times simultaneously, until its closure in 1963.Plain Tales from the Hills ''Plain Tales from the Hills'' (published 1888) is the first collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. Out of its 40 stories, "eight-and-twenty", according to Kipling's ''Preface'', were initially published in the '' Civil and Military Ga ...

'' in 1888, and in subsequent editions of that collection. The story, published when Kipling was not quite 21 years old, is a well-crafted piece of writing about an essentially schoolboy version of ''

schadenfreude Schadenfreude (; ; 'harm-joy') is the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, or humiliation of another. It is a borrowed word from German, with no direct translation ...

'' - sheer pleasure, in this case, at seeing someone 'get his comeuppance' - with an element of

slapstick Slapstick is a style of humor involving exaggerated physical activity that exceeds the boundaries of normal physical comedy. Slapstick may involve both intentional violence and violence by mishap, often resulting from inept use of props such a ...

. Lieutenant Golightly is a young officer in the British Army in India who prides himself on "looking like 'an Officer and a Gentleman'". According to John McGivering, in the Notes to this story on the Kipling Society's website, Golightly is certainly an officer, but not at all certainly a gentleman. It is clear that he takes too much care over his appearance, and dresses rather too flashily, wearing, as he is, a "delicate olive-green suit" with a blue tie and a sola topee. As he hastens back from leave (having left all his money apart from loose change behind him), he is beset by misfortune: monsoon rains make him muddy and sweaty; his helmet dissolves in the rain; the dyes of its lining (purple) and his suit (green) run. He falls from his horse, which becomes so lame that he has to walk, whereon he throws away his tie, which has also run, and his (detachable) collar. He arrives at a railway station, buys a drink - and finds that he only has 6

Indian anna An anna (or ānna) was a currency unit formerly used in British India, equal to of a rupee. It was subdivided into four (old) Paisa or twelve pies (thus there were 192 pies in a rupee). When the rupee was decimalised and subdivided into 10 ...

left. On talking to the Station Master, he is taken for a deserter, one Private Binkle, and after some temporising is arrested and carried bodily off by four native policeman. They hand him over to a detachment of the British Army, who admire his fluency in bad language, but don't believe his insistence that he is an officer. Golightly is finally saved by a Major in his own Regiment, who recognises him and has him released - then, of course, relating the story to the army. Kipling says that he may now publish the story as Golightly has "gone Home". :All quotations in this article have been taken from the ''Uniform Edition'' of ''

Plain Tales from the Hills ''Plain Tales from the Hills'' (published 1888) is the first collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. Out of its 40 stories, "eight-and-twenty", according to Kipling's ''Preface'', were initially published in the '' Civil and Military Ga ...

'' published by Macmillan & Co., Limited in London in 1899. The text is that of the third edition (1890), and the author of the article has used his own copy of the 1923 reprint. Further comment, including page-by-page notes, can be found on the Kipling Society's website, at http://www.kipling.org.uk/rg_golightly1.htm

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Arrest of Lieutenant Golightly Short stories by Rudyard Kipling Rudyard Kipling stories about India 1886 short stories Works originally published in the Civil and Military Gazette