A major theme of this enigmatic story by Rudyard Kipling is the potential destructive power of love. Interestingly, we never meet the two central characters: Mrs. Bathurst, a New Zealand hotel keeper renowned for her kindness to needy sailors, and “Click” Vickery, a naval warrant officer who once had a serious affair with her. Vickery becomes so obsessed with a cinematograph clip in a traveling circus showing Mrs. Bathurst in London that he deserts his ship and follows the circus to the next town. Other themes include alienation, chance and accident, ambiguity, passion, death and guilt.
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It can reasonably be assumed that Vickery died a fiery death with another “tramp” beside a railway line. The unanswered question, which has led some reviewers to describe this as Kipling’s first ghost story, is what happened to Mrs. Bathurst.
Vickery believes that she was in England looking for him, and makes this cryptic comment to Pyecroft before disappearing: remember that I am not a murderer, because my lawful wife died in childbed six weeks after I came out. That much at least I am clear of. This implies several things. First, the inclusion of the word lawful suggests that he may also have had an unlawful wife (Mrs. Bathurst?) Second, the emphasis on being innocent of murder suggests that someone close to him other than his wife died in questionable circumstances (Mrs, Bathurst?). Finally, the sentence: That much at least I am clear of. suggests that some aspects of what happened are a blur in his mind.
If Vickery knew that Mrs. Bathurst had died, perhaps by suicide when she found he was already married with a baby daughter, seeing her face on the cinematograph would have been traumatic enough to cause the already mentally unstable man to think she is looking for him.