Beasts and Super-Beasts

by Saki

  THE FEAST OF NEMESIS

  “It’s a good thing that Saint Valentine’s Day has dropped out of vogue,”said Mrs. Thackenbury; “what with Christmas and New Year and Easter, notto speak of birthdays, there are quite enough remembrance days as it is.I tried to save myself trouble at Christmas by just sending flowers toall my friends, but it wouldn’t work; Gertrude has eleven hot-houses andabout thirty gardeners, so it would have been ridiculous to send flowersto her, and Milly has just started a florist’s shop, so it was equallyout of the question there. The stress of having to decide in a hurrywhat to give to Gertrude and Milly just when I thought I’d got the wholequestion nicely off my mind completely ruined my Christmas, and then theawful monotony of the letters of thanks: ‘Thank you so much for yourlovely flowers. It was so good of you to think of me.’ Of course in themajority of cases I hadn’t thought about the recipients at all; theirnames were down in my list of ‘people who must not be left out.’ If Itrusted to remembering them there would be some awful sins of omission.”

  “The trouble is,” said Clovis to his aunt, “all these days of intrusiveremembrance harp so persistently on one aspect of human nature andentirely ignore the other; that is why they become so perfunctory andartificial. At Christmas and New Year you are emboldened and encouragedby convention to send gushing messages of optimistic goodwill and servileaffection to people whom you would scarcely ask to lunch unless some oneelse had failed you at the last moment; if you are supping at arestaurant on New Year’s Eve you are permitted and expected to join handsand sing ‘For Auld Lang Syne’ with strangers whom you have never seenbefore and never want to see again. But no licence is allowed in theopposite direction.”

  “Opposite direction; what opposite direction?” queried Mrs. Thackenbury.

  “There is no outlet for demonstrating your feelings towards people whomyou simply loathe. That is really the crying need of our moderncivilisation. Just think how jolly it would be if a recognised day wereset apart for the paying off of old scores and grudges, a day when onecould lay oneself out to be gracefully vindictive to a carefullytreasured list of ‘people who must not be let off.’ I remember when Iwas at a private school we had one day, the last Monday of the term Ithink it was, consecrated to the settlement of feuds and grudges; ofcourse we did not appreciate it as much as it deserved, because, afterall, any day of the term could be used for that purpose. Still, if onehad chastised a smaller boy for being cheeky weeks before, one was alwayspermitted on that day to recall the episode to his memory by chastisinghim again. That is what the French call reconstructing the crime.”

  “I should call it reconstructing the punishment,” said Mrs. Thackenbury;“and, anyhow, I don’t see how you could introduce a system of primitiveschoolboy vengeance into civilised adult life. We haven’t outgrown ourpassions, but we are supposed to have learned how to keep them withinstrictly decorous limits.”

  “Of course the thing would have to be done furtively and politely,” saidClovis; “the charm of it would be that it would never be perfunctory likethe other thing. Now, for instance, you say to yourself: ‘I must showthe Webleys some attention at Christmas, they were kind to dear Bertie atBournemouth,’ and you send them a calendar, and daily for six days afterChristmas the male Webley asks the female Webley if she has remembered tothank you for the calendar you sent them. Well, transplant that idea tothe other and more human side of your nature, and say to yourself: ‘NextThursday is Nemesis Day; what on earth can I do to those odious peoplenext door who made such an absurd fuss when Ping Yang bit their youngestchild?’ Then you’d get up awfully early on the allotted day and climbover into their garden and dig for truffles on their tennis court with agood gardening fork, choosing, of course, that part of the court that wasscreened from observation by the laurel bushes. You wouldn’t find anytruffles but you would find a great peace, such as no amount ofpresent-giving could ever bestow.”

  “I shouldn’t,” said Mrs. Thackenbury, though her air of protest sounded abit forced; “I should feel rather a worm for doing such a thing.”

  “You exaggerate the power of upheaval which a worm would be able to bringinto play in the limited time available,” said Clovis; “if you put in astrenuous ten minutes with a really useful fork, the result ought tosuggest the operations of an unusually masterful mole or a badger in ahurry.”

  “They might guess I had done it,” said Mrs. Thackenbury.

  “Of course they would,” said Clovis; “that would be half the satisfactionof the thing, just as you like people at Christmas to know what presentsor cards you’ve sent them. The thing would be much easier to manage, ofcourse, when you were on outwardly friendly terms with the object of yourdislike. That greedy little Agnes Blaik, for instance, who thinks ofnothing but her food, it would be quite simple to ask her to a picnic insome wild woodland spot and lose her just before lunch was served; whenyou found her again every morsel of food could have been eaten up.”

  “It would require no ordinary human strategy to lose Agnes Blaik whenluncheon was imminent: in fact, I don’t believe it could be done.”

  “Then have all the other guests, people whom you dislike, and lose theluncheon. It could have been sent by accident in the wrong direction.”

  “It would be a ghastly picnic,” said Mrs. Thackenbury.

  “For them, but not for you,” said Clovis; “you would have had an earlyand comforting lunch before you started, and you could improve theoccasion by mentioning in detail the items of the missing banquet—thelobster Newburg and the egg mayonnaise, and the curry that was to havebeen heated in a chafing-dish. Agnes Blaik would be delirious longbefore you got to the list of wines, and in the long interval of waiting,before they had quite abandoned hope of the lunch turning up, you couldinduce them to play silly games, such as that idiotic one of ‘the LordMayor’s dinner-party,’ in which every one has to choose the name of adish and do something futile when it is called out. In this case theywould probably burst into tears when their dish is mentioned. It wouldbe a heavenly picnic.”

  Mrs. Thackenbury was silent for a moment; she was probably making amental list of the people she would like to invite to the Duke Humphreypicnic. Presently she asked: “And that odious young man, Waldo Plubley,who is always coddling himself—have you thought of anything that onecould do to him?” Evidently she was beginning to see the possibilitiesof Nemesis Day.

  “If there was anything like a general observance of the festival,” saidClovis, “Waldo would be in such demand that you would have to bespeak himweeks beforehand, and even then, if there were an east wind blowing or acloud or two in the sky he might be too careful of his precious self tocome out. It would be rather jolly if you could lure him into a hammockin the orchard, just near the spot where there is a wasps’ nest everysummer. A comfortable hammock on a warm afternoon would appeal to hisindolent tastes, and then, when he was getting drowsy, a lighted fuseethrown into the nest would bring the wasps out in an indignant mass, andthey would soon find a ‘home away from home’ on Waldo’s fat body. Ittakes some doing to get out of a hammock in a hurry.”

  “They might sting him to death,” protested Mrs. Thackenbury.

  “Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death,”said Clovis; “but if you didn’t want to go as far as that, you could havesome wet straw ready to hand, and set it alight under the hammock at thesame time that the fusee was thrown into the nest; the smoke would keepall but the most militant of the wasps just outside the stinging line,and as long as Waldo remained within its protection he would escapeserious damage, and could be eventually restored to his mother, kipperedall over and swollen in places, but still perfectly recognisable.”

  “His mother would be my enemy for life,” said Mrs. Thackenbury.

  “That would be one greeting less to exchange at Christmas,” said Clovis.