the little death

This changed how I think about Kipling.

Mary Postgate is a spinster companion-slash-governess character. She sort of loved her charge, Wynn, who went off to fly planes in WW1. He talked to her about bombs. When she hears of it, she says 'It's a great pity he didn't die in action after he had killed somebody.' Then she talks a lot about him, and all his things.

Then some Germans bomb near her, and a six-year old girl is killed horribly, cut to pieces. Soon afterwards, she is burning Wynn's things, and she comes across a downed and injured German airman. He groans for the doctor, and she says, 'Stop that!' and stamps her foot. 'Stop that, you bloody pagan!' Kipling goes on:

They were Wynn's own words, and Wynn was a gentleman who for no consideration on earth would have torn little Edna into those vividly coloured strips and strings. But this thing hunched under the oak-tree had done that thing.

Mary decides that she's going to wait until the German is dead.

She looks at the Destructor where Wynn's things are charring. Then:

she leaned on the poker and waited, while an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life. She leaned forward and listened, smiling. There could be no mistake. She closed her eyes and drank it in. Once it ceased abruptly.

"Go on," she murmured, half aloud. "That isn't the end."

Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two rain-gusts. Mary Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head to foot. "That's all right," said she contentedly, and went up to the house, where she scandalised the whole routine by taking a luxurious hot bath before tea, and came down looking, as Miss Fowler said when she saw her lying all relaxed on the other sofa, "quite handsome!"

Tell me this isn't about what I think it is. I have sort of not believed it several times, and gone back to it, but it is, isn't it? Isn't it? I don't think I have sex on the brain.