In the following excerpt, Lodge discusses the themes of love, death, and guilt in Kipling's "Mrs. Bathurst."

That is what Mrs Bathurst does when she appears on the screen: 'She walked on and on till she melted out of the picture.' And it is, metaphorically speaking, what Vickery does: he steps out of the frame of Pyecroft's perception at Simonstown station.

In this remarkable passage Kipling manages vividly to convey the disconcerting effect of the cinematic image—at once lifelike and insubstantial— when it was still a novelty, and to turn this experience into a poignant symbol of both the pain of disappointed desire and the mystery of human motivation. To Vickery, watching the newsreel, Mrs Bathurst is both present and absent, near and far. He can see her, but she, peering out of the screen with her 'blindish look,' cannot see him. From her...