Algernon Blackwood's The Kit-Bag: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

Blackwood commonly utilizes psychological vulnerability to evoke high terror – usually by putting his young, male protagonists in either morally dehumanizing urban slums or the physically punishing wastes of wilderness. But this story achieves its goal not through a kind of place, but through a kind of person: a rapacious woman-killer whose inexplicable attention to one young clerk on his defense team immediately raises questions about gender and masculinity. Its protagonist, a secretary named Johnson, finds himself stalked and dominated by the psychic impressions left by a man who brutally killed and butchered a woman.

Blackwood’s particular use of feminizing descriptors (“girlish,” “like a girl”) and mannerisms places Johnson in jeopardy of finding himself isolated in the periphery of a society which had clearly defined standards for masculinity and prosecuted homosexuality with the law. Victorian England had largely ignored homosexuality’s existence (and the social problems and abuses which rose from its marginalization) until the Cleveland Street Scandal and the Oscar Wilde trial – two events in Blackwood’s recent memory – forced it to finally respond to what we now might refer to as queer culture: the entire gamut of gender identification, from uncloseted homosexuality to straight men with mannerisms and constitutions which fall outside of society’s definitions, expectations, and ideals of male identity.

Falling outside of the stereotype of Edwardian masculinity, regardless of his sexual orientation, Johnson is vulnerable: unprotected by the fraternity of British manhood, and subject to its abuses.

SUMMARY

The story follows the vacation plans of Mr. Johnson – the young, unimaginative private secretary of the famous defense attorney Arthur Wilbraham. It is a dark, December night, and Wilbraham has just won a case defending a psychopath named John Turk, who had been accused of gruesomely murdering and dismembering a woman. Turk’s guilt was evident and unquestioned, but he was found not guilty by reason of insanity after a ten-day trial. Johnson, who joined Wilbraham each day at the Old Bailey is relieved to be rid of Turk forever, having been uncharacteristically disturbed by the trial’s details and haunted by Turk’s white, ghoulish face, sadistic eyes, and lank, black hair.

To celebrate, he has planned a Yuletide vacation to the Alps, and is busy packing a massive, canvas kit-bag – a loan from Wilbraham himself – in his lonely, Bloomsbury apartment. At ten o’clock one of Wilbraham’s servants personally delivered the kit-bag (a huge, flat-bottomed, open-ended, sack-like duffel bag secured by a drawstring laced through brass gromets at the top), and Johnson begins to load it with sport gear, winterwear, and toiletries.

He rents the upper floor, but the suite below him is empty, and he knows none of the renters on the lower stories. That evening the building is distinctly quiet, and he is surprised by the sound of footsteps ascending the stairs. He assumes they belong to the landlady, Mrs. Monks, but they stop suddenly and he moves on with packing.

As he does this, he is struck by the poor condition of the kit-bag: it is dirty, tattered, and stained, almost foul, and his pride at having been loaned it by Wilbraham begins to turn into offense at what now seems like an insult. As he moves about the room, the unfilled top of the bag flops over, and he is surprised to note its similarity in appearance to a human face: the creases and folds seem to have arranged themselves like brows, cheekbones, lips, and a nose, and the hollows into dark sockets, with one gromet ring taking on the aspect of an eye, and an oily stain along the top looking oddly like a fringe of greasy hair. It looks exactly like John Turk. Johnson shakes it off and blames his nerves, looking even more forward to a holiday of skiing and skating far from England.

Meanwhile, he once more hears footsteps in the unoccupied flat, and decides to check it out. Turning on the bright light fixtures, he probes each room, but finds nothing and returns to his task, but is all the while bothered by an impression that he is in the middle of doing something that he shouldn’t, or something about which someone disapproves – someone watching him grudgingly.

He crosses the room to retrieve a forgotten item, and is shocked by the brief glimpse – through his doorway – of a hunched figure scowling at him from the landing at the top of the stairs. As soon as he rushes to the door, the vision is gone, but when he turns, the sound of running footsteps is unmistakable, and he trips over the kit-bag in his fright. It is not where he left it.

Shaken, Johnson sits by the fire, and finds his imagination consumed by Turk’s leering face. Resolved to finish packing and immediately go to sleep, he heads to the bedroom where he is horrified to see that – not only has the kit-bag once again moved, this time closer to the door – now he distinctly sees a white face duck behind it, accompanied by a baleful sigh. Johnson rushes to its side, but no one is to be seen. That doesn’t mean, however, that nothing is to be seen: he notices, for the first time, that the dark, brown stains are clearly blood.

Staggering back in shock, he accidentally falls over, banging the door shut behind him, and knocking out the light. He desperately waves around in search of the light switch, all the while petrified by the sound of the kit-bag scuffing heavily along the floorboards, moving by itself. Finally he feels the switch, but when he turns it on, John Turk is standing at full height in front of him. He wheezes out a sighing demand: “It’s my bag. And I want it.” Then it dawns on Johnson: he has seen the kit-bag before, when it was admitted into evidence. It was this very bag where the chopped up woman was discovered, clumsily packed away with quicklime and buried.

Johnson surges for the door, flees the room, and faints in the hallway. Bright and early in the morning, one of Wilbraham’s manservants arrives carrying a clean, sturdy kit-bag, along with his apologies: apparently the wrong bag had been delivered to him last night. Johnson is not surprised, of course, but he does sense that there is more to this message based on the servant’s nervous demeanor. There is: in spite of his favorable verdict, John Turk killed himself the previous night – at ten o’clock – and left one request in his suicide note: that he be buried in the identical kit-bag where he had attempted to hide his victim’s corpse. In short, Wilbraham needs the other bag back.  

ANALYSIS

Johnson’s alienation may have mirrored Blackwood’s own struggle to feel secure within the solid boundaries of Edwardian masculinity: as a member of the New York journalism’s hardscrabble boy’s club, and a member of innumerable hunting and camping expeditions into eastern Canada’s woolly frontier, he was granted admission into a variety of male societies renowned for their machismo, posturing, and codes of manly standoffishness. In such situations (as illustrated in “The Wendigo”), hints of femininity, sensitivity, or lack of nerve could spell professional and social peril. In the Canadian wilds they could spell desertion or death.

Mike Ashley – in his foundational biography, An Extraordinary Life – suggests that Blackwood’s lifelong bachelorhood and apparent later-life celibacy was due to a humiliating homosexual affair, a fact which he would have been eager to hide from his macho cronies. Johnson – physiologically and constitutionally coded as feminine – is neither afforded the hearty and inclusive fraternity of his peers, nor is he spared the predatory attentions of Turk, a man who butchered a woman and escaped the death penalty (assisted by Wilbraham’s professional fraternity).

Failing to fit in with your peers is lonely, painful, frustrating, and confusing. Failing to fit in to the privileged classes is also dangerous. Johnson is unable to shake Turk’s subjecting gaze from his memory – it is dominating, challenging, and belittling. Away from the protection of his socially honored friends, nothing can restrain the rapacious threat that Turk represents from spilling over from unconscious insecurity to supernatural manifestation: namely, the threat of being recognized as different, stripped of the securities that homogeneity offers.     

You can read the original story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated collection of Blackwood’s best horror stories HERE!