The Complete Short Stories

by Saki

  Septimus sat upright in his chair, with unmistakable alarm on his face.

  “How did you find out? I mean how did you know I was trying to get a rhyme to Florrie?” he asked sharply.

  “I didn’t know,” said Clovis, “I only guessed. When you wanted to turn the prosaic lorry of commerce into a feathered poem flitting through the verdure of a tropical forest, I knew you must be working up a sonnet, and Florrie was the only female name that suggested itself as rhyming with lorry.”

  Septimus still looked uneasy.

  “I believe you know more,” he said.

  Clovis laughed quietly, but said nothing.

  “How much do you know?” Septimus asked desperately.

  “The yew tree in the garden,” said Clovis.

  “There! I felt certain I’d dropped it somewhere. But you must have guessed something before. Look here, you have surprised my secret. You won’t give me away, will you? It is nothing to be ashamed of, but it wouldn’t do for the editor of the Cathedral Monthly to go in openly for that sort of thing, would it?”

  “Well, I suppose not,” admitted Clovis.

  “You see,” continued Septimus, “I get quite a decent lot of money out of it. I could never live in the style I do on what I get as editor of the Cathedral Monthly.”

  Clovis was even more startled than Septimus had been earlier in the conversation, but he was better skilled in repressing surprise.

  “Do you mean to say you get money out of—Florrie?” he asked.

  “Not out of Florrie, as yet,” said Septimus; “in fact, I don’t mind saying that I’m having a good deal of trouble over Florrie. But there are a lot of others.”

  Clovis’s cigarette went out.

  “This is very interesting,” he said slowly. And then, with Septimus Brope’s next words, illumination dawned on him.

  “There are heaps of others; for instance:

  “‘Cora with the lips of coral,

  You and I will never quarrel.’

  That was one of my earliest successes, and it still brings me in royalties. And then there is—‘Esmeralda, when I first beheld her,’ and ‘Fair Teresa, how I love to please her,’ both of those have been fairly popular. And there is one rather dreadful one,” continued Septimus, flushing deep carmine, “which has brought me in more money than any of the others:

  “‘Lively little Lucie

  With her naughty nez retrousee.’

  Of course, I loathe the whole lot of them; in fact, I’m rapidly becoming something of a woman-hater under their influence, but I can’t afford to disregard the financial aspect of the matter. And at the same time you can understand that my position as an authority on ecclesiastical architecture and liturgical subjects would be weakened, if not altogether ruined, if it once got about that I was the author of ‘Cora with the lips of coral’ and all the rest of them.”

  Clovis had recovered sufficiently to ask in a sympathetic, if rather unsteady, voice what was the special trouble with “Florrie.”

  “I can’t get her into lyric shape, try as I will,” said Septimus mournfully. “You see, one has to work in a lot of sentimental, sugary compliment with a catchy rhyme, and a certain amount of personal biography or prophecy. They’ve all of them got to have a long string of past successes recorded about them, or else you’ve got to foretell blissful things about them and yourself in the future. For instance, there is:

  “‘Dainty little girlie Mavis,

  She is such a rara avis.

  All the money I can save is

  All to be for Mavis mine.’

  It goes to a sickening namby-pamby waltz tune, and for months nothing else was sung and hummed in Blackpool and other popular centres.”

  This time Clovis’s self-control broke down badly.

  “Please excuse me,” he gurgled, “but I can’t help it when I remember the awful solemnity of that article of yours that you so kindly read us last night, on the Coptic Church in its relation to early Christian worship.”

  Septimus groaned.

  “You see how it would be,” he said; “as soon as people knew me to be the author of that miserable sentimental twaddle, all respect for the serious labours of my life would be gone. I dare say I know more about memorial brasses than any one living, in fact I hope one day to publish a monograph on the subject, but I should be pointed out everywhere as the man whose ditties were in the mouths of nigger minstrels along the entire coast-line of our Island home. Can you wonder that I positively hate Florrie all the time that I’m trying to grind out sugar-coated rhapsodies about her?”

  “Why not give free play to your emotions, and be brutally abusive? An uncomplimentary refrain would have an instant success as a novelty if you were sufficiently outspoken.”

  “I’ve never thought of that,” said Septimus, “and I’m afraid I couldn’t break away from the habit of fulsome adulation and suddenly change my style.”

  “You needn’t change your style in the least,” said Clovis; “merely reverse the sentiment and keep to the inane phraseology of the thing. If you’ll do the body of the song I’ll knock off the refrain, which is the thing that principally matters, I believe. I shall charge half-shares in the royalties, and throw in my silence as to your guilty secret. In the eyes of the world you shall still be the man who has devoted his life to the study of transepts and Byzantine ritual; only sometimes, in the long winter evenings, when the wind howls drearily down the chimney and the rain beats against the windows, I shall think of you as the author of ‘Cora with the lips of coral.’ Of course, if in sheer gratitude at my silence you like to take me for a much-needed holiday to the Adriatic or somewhere equally interesting, paying all expenses, I shouldn’t dream of refusing.”

  Later in the afternoon Clovis found his aunt and Mrs. Riversedge indulging in gentle exercise in the Jacobean garden.

  “I’ve spoken to Mr. Brope about F.,” he announced.

  “How splendid of you! What did he say?” came in a quick chorus from the two ladies.

  “He was quite frank and straightforward with me when he saw that I knew his secret,” said Clovis, “and it seems that his intentions were quite serious, if slightly unsuitable. I tried to show him the impracticability of the course that he was following. He said he wanted to be understood, and he seemed to think that Florinda would excel in that requirement, but I pointed out that there were probably dozens of delicately nurtured, pure-hearted young English girls who would be capable of understanding him, while Florinda was the only person in the world who understood my aunt’s hair. That rather weighed with him, for he’s not really a selfish animal, if you take him in the right way, and when I appealed to the memory of his happy childish days, spent amid the daisied fields of Leighton Buzzard (I suppose daisies do grow there), he was obviously affected. Anyhow, he gave me his word that he would put Florinda absolutely out of his mind, and he has agreed to go for a short trip abroad as the best distraction for his thoughts. I am going with him as far as Ragusa. If my aunt should wish to give me a really nice scarf-pin (to be chosen by myself), as a small recognition of the very considerable service I had done her, I shouldn’t dream of refusing. I’m not one of those who think that because one is abroad one can go about dressed anyhow.”

  A few weeks later in Blackpool and places where they sing, the following refrain held undisputed sway:

  “How you bore me, Florrie,

  With those eyes of vacant blue;

  You’ll be very sorry, Florrie,

  If I marry you.

  Though I’m easy-goin’, Florrie,

  This I swear is true,

  I’ll throw you down a quarry, Florrie,

  If I marry you.”

  “MINISTERS OF GRACE”

  ALTHOUGH he was scarcely yet out of his teens, the Duke of Scaw was already marked out as a personality widely differing from others of his caste and period. Not in externals; therein he conformed correctly to type. His hair was faintly reminiscent of Houbigant, and at the other end of h
im his shoes exhaled the right soupçon of harness-room; his socks compelled one’s attention without losing one’s respect; and his attitude in repose had just that suggestion of Whistler’s mother, so becoming in the really young. It was within that the trouble lay, if trouble it could be accounted, which marked him apart from his fellows. The Duke was religious. Not in any of the ordinary senses of the word; he took small heed of High Church or Evangelical standpoints, he stood outside of all the movements and missions and cults and crusades of the day, uncaring and uninterested. Yet in a mystical-practical way of his own, which had served him unscathed and unshaken through the fickle years of boyhood, he was intensely and intensively religious. His family were naturally, though unobtrusively, distressed about it. “I am so afraid it may affect his bridge,” said his mother.

  The Duke sat in a pennyworth of chair in St. James’s Park, listening to the pessimisms of Belturbet, who reviewed the existing political situation from the gloomiest of standpoints.

  “Where I think you political spade-workers are so silly,” said the Duke, “is in the misdirection of your efforts. You spend thousands of pounds of money, and Heaven knows how much dynamic force of brain power and personal energy, in trying to elect or displace this or that man, whereas you could gain your ends so much more simply by making use of the men as you find them. If they don’t suit your purpose as they are, transform them into something more satisfactory.”

  “Do you refer to hypnotic suggestion?” asked Belturbet, with the air of one who is being trifled with.

  “Nothing of the sort. Do you understand what I mean by the verb to koepenick? That is to say, to replace an authority by a spurious imitation that would carry just as much weight for the moment as the displaced original; the advantage, of course, being that the koepenick replica would do what you wanted, whereas the original does what seems best in its own eyes.”

  “I suppose every public man has a double, if not two or three,” said Belturbet; “but it would be a pretty hard task to koepenick a whole bunch of them and keep the originals out of the way.”

  “There have been instances in European history of highly successful koepenickery,” said the Duke dreamily.

  “Oh, of course, there have been False Dimitris and Perkin Warbecks, who imposed on the world for a time,” assented Belturbet, “but they personated people who were dead or safely out of the way. That was a comparatively simple matter. It would be far easier to pass oneself off as dead Hannibal than as living Haldane, for instance.”

  “I was thinking,” said the Duke, “of the most famous case of all, the angel who koepenicked King Robert of Sicily with such brilliant results. Just imagine what an advantage it would be to have angels deputizing, to use a horrible but convenient word, for Quinston and Lord Hugo Sizzle, for example. How much smoother the Parliamentary machine would work than at present!”

  “Now you’re talking nonsense,” said Belturbet; “angels don’t exist nowadays, at least, not in that way, so what is the use of dragging them into a serious discussion? It’s merely silly.”

  “If you talk to me like that I shall just do it,” said the Duke.

  “Do what?” asked Belturbet. There were times when his young friend’s uncanny remarks rather frightened him.

  “I shall summon angelic forces to take over some of the more troublesome personalities of our public life, and I shall send the ousted originals into temporary retirement in suitable animal organisms. It’s not every one who would have the knowledge or the power necessary to bring such a thing off—”

  “Oh, stop that inane rubbish,” said Belturbet angrily; “it’s getting wearisome. Here’s Quinston coming,” he added, as there approached along the almost deserted path the well-known figure of a young Cabinet Minister, whose personality evoked a curious mixture of public interest and unpopularity.

  “Hurry along, my dear man,” said the young Duke to the Minister, who had given him a condescending nod; “your time is running short,” he continued in a provocative strain; “the whole inept crowd of you will shortly be swept away into the world’s waste-paper basket.”

  “You poor little strawberry-leafed nonentity,” said the Minister, checking himself for a moment in his stride and rolling out his words spasmodically; “who is going to sweep us away, I should like to know? The voting masses are on our side, and all the ability and administrative talent is on our side too. No power of earth or Heaven is going to move us from our place till we choose to quit it. No power of earth or—”

  Belturbet saw, with bulging eyes, a sudden void where a moment earlier had been a Cabinet Minister; a void emphasized rather than relieved by the presence of a puffed-out bewildered-looking sparrow, which hopped about for a moment in a dazed fasion and then fell to a violent cheeping and scolding.

  “If we could understand sparrow-language,” said the Duke serenely, “I fancy we should hear something infinitely worse than ‘strawberry-leafed nonentity.’”

  “But good Heavens, Eugène,” said Belturbet hoarsely, “what has become of— Why, there he is! How on earth did he get there?” And he pointed with a shaking finger towards a semblance of the vanished Minister, which approached once more along the unfrequented path.

  The Duke laughed.

  “It is Quinston to all outward appearance,” he said composedly, “but I fancy you will find, on closer investigation, that it is an angel under-study of the real article.”

  The Angel-Quinston greeted them with a friendly smile.

  “How beastly happy you two look sitting there!” he said wistfully.

  “I don’t suppose you’d care to change places with poor little us,” replied the Duke chaffingly.

  “How about poor little me?” said the Angel modestly. “I’ve got to run about behind the wheels of popularity, like a spotted dog behind a carriage, getting all the dust and trying to look as if I was an important part of the machine. I must seem a perfect fool to you onlookers sometimes.”

  “I think you are a perfect angel,” said the Duke.

  The Angel-that-had-been-Quinston smiled and passed on his way, pursued across the breadth of the Horse Guards Parade by a tiresome little sparrow that cheeped incessantly and furiously at him.

  “That’s only the beginning,” said the Duke complacently; “I’ve made it operative with all of them, irrespective of parties.”

  Belturbet made no coherent reply; he was engaged in feeling his pulse. The Duke fixed his attention with some interest on a black swan that was swimming with haughty, stiff-necked aloofness amid the crowd of lesser water-fowl that dotted the ornamental water. For all its pride of bearing, something was evidently ruffling and enraging it; in its way it seemed as angry and amazed as the sparrow had been.

  At the same moment a human figure came along the pathway. Belturbet looked up apprehensively.

  “Kedzon,” he whispered briefly.

  “An Angel-Kedzon, if I am not mistaken,” said the Duke. “Look, he is talking affably to a human being. That settles it.”

  A shabbily dressed lounger had accosted the man who had been Viceroy in the splendid East, and who still reflected in his mien some of the cold dignity of the Himalayan snow-peaks.

  “Could you tell me, sir, if them white birds is storks or halbatrosses? I had an argyment—”

  The cold dignity thawed at once into genial friendliness.

  “Those are pelicans, my dear sir. Are you interested in birds? If you would join me in a bun and a glass of milk at the stall yonder, I could tell you some interesting things about Indian birds. Right oh! Now the hill-mynah, for instance—”

  The two men disappeared in the direction of the bun stall, chatting volubly as they went, and shadowed from the other side of the railed enclosure by a black swan, whose temper seemed to have reached the limit of inarticulate rage.

  Belturbet gazed in an open-mouthed wonder after the retreating couple, then transferred his attention to the infuriated swan, and finally turned with a look of scared comprehension at hi
s young friend lolling unconcernedly in his chair. There was no longer any room to doubt what was happening. The “silly talk” had been translated into terrifying action.

  “I think a prairie oyster on the top of a stiffish brandy-and-soda might save my reason,” said Belturbet weakly, as he limped towards his club.

  It was late in the day before he could steady his nerves sufficiently to glance at the evening papers. The Parliamentary report proved significant reading, and confirmed the fears that he had been trying to shake off. Mr. Ap Dave, the Chancellor, whose lively controversial style endeared him to his supporters and embittered him, politically speaking, to his opponents, had risen in his place to make an unprovoked apology for having alluded in a recent speech to certain protesting taxpayers as “skulkers.” He had realized on reflection that they were in all probability perfectly honest in their inability to understand certain legal technicalities of the new finance laws. The House had scarcely recovered from this sensation when Lord Hugo Sizzle caused a further flutter of astonishment by going out of his way to indulge in an outspoken appreciation of the fairness, loyalty, and straightforwardness not only of the Chancellor, but of all the members of the Cabinet. A wit had gravely suggested moving the adjournment of the House in view of the unexpected circumstances that had arisen.

  Belturbet anxiously skimmed over a further item of news printed immediately below the Parliamentary report: “Wild cat found in an exhausted condition in Palace Yard.”

  “Now I wonder which of them—” he mused, and then an appalling idea came to him. “Supposing he’s put them both into the same beast!” He hurriedly ordered another prairie oyster.

  Belturbet was known in his club as a strictly moderate drinker; his consumption of alcoholic stimulants that day gave rise to considerable comment.

  The events of the next few days were piquantly bewildering to the world at large; to Belturbet, who knew dimly what was happening, the situation was fraught with recurring alarms. The old saying that in politics it’s the unexpected that always happens received a justification that it had hitherto somewhat lacked, and the epidemic of startling personal changes of front was not wholly confined to the realm of actual politics. The eminent chocolate magnate, Sadbury, whose antipathy to the Turf and everything connected with it was a matter of general knowledge, had evidently been replaced by an Angel-Sadbury, who proceeded to electrify the public by blossoming forth as an owner of race-horses, giving as a reason his matured conviction that the sport was, after all, one which gave healthy open-air recreation to large numbers of people drawn from all classes of the community, and incidentally stimulated the important industry of horse-breeding. His colours, chocolate and cream hoops spangled with pink stars, promised to become as popular as any on the Turf. At the same time, in order to give effect to his condemnation of the evils resulting from the spread of the gambling habit among wage-earning classes, who lived for the most part from hand to mouth, he suppressed all betting news and tipsters’ forecasts in the popular evening paper that was under his control. His action received instant recognition and support from the Angel-proprietor of the Evening Views, the principal rival evening halfpenny paper, who forthwith issued an ukase decreeing a similar ban on betting news, and in a short while the regular evening Press was purged of all mention of starting prices and probable winners. A considerable drop in the circulation of all these papers was the immediate result, accompanied, of course, by a falling-off in advertisement value, while a crop of special betting broadsheets sprang up to supply the newly created want. Under their influence the betting habit became if anything rather more widely diffused than before. The Duke had possibly overlooked the futility of koepenicking the leaders of the nation with excellently intentioned angel under-studies, while leaving the mass of the people in its original condition.