The Madness of Private Ortheris (Unabridged)

Written by Rudyard Kipling

Narrated by Robin Nixon

First published in Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and in successive subsequent editions of this collection, in which it was the fourth of the Mulvaney stories.
Private Stanley Ortheris, small, tough, a crack shot, Cockney to his bones, and serving the Queen in India, is plunged in suicidal gloom. He is overcome with homesickness for London, '...sick for the sounds of 'er and the stinks of 'er; orange-peel and hasphalte an' gas comin' in over Vaux'all Bridge. Sick for the rail goin' down to Box 'ill, with your gal on your knee an' a new clay pipe to your face...'. To jerk him out of his depression, the narrator offers to help him desert, get to Karachi, and take ship for England. Ortheris agrees to rendezvous in the long grass by the riverbank, dressed in civlian clothes, to pick up a rail ticket. But when they meet him at dusk, the mood has left him, he is contrite and desperate to get back into uniform, to the life he knows with Mulvaney and Learoyd.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookstream Audiobooks
• Release date: Nov 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9783991177005

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay (now known as Mumbai), India, but returned with his parents to England at the age of five. Among Kipling’s best-known works are The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and the poems “Mandalay” and “Gunga Din.” Kipling was the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1907) and was among the youngest to have received the award.