by Saki
‘She can be Cassandra, and she need only take flying leaps into the future, in a metaphorical sense.’
‘Cassandra; rather a pretty name. What kind of character is she?’
‘She was a sort of advance-agent for calamities. To know her was to know the worst. Fortunately for the gaiety of the age she lived in, no one took her very seriously. Still, it must have been fairly galling to have her turning up after every catastrophe with a conscious air of “perhaps another time you’ll believe what I say.”’
‘I should have wanted to kill her.’
‘As Clytemnestra I believe you gratify that very natural wish.’
‘Then it has a happy ending, in spite of it being a tragedy?’
‘Well, hardly,’ said Clovis; ‘you see, the satisfaction of putting a violent end to Cassandra must have been considerably damped by the fact that she had foretold what was going to happen to her. She probably dies with an intensely irritating “what-did-I-tell-you” smile on her lips. By the way, of course all the killing will be done in the Sumurun manner.’
‘Please explain again,’ said the Baroness, taking out a notebook and pencil.
‘Little and often, you know, instead of one sweeping blow. You see, you are at your own home, so there’s no need to hurry over the murdering as though it were some disagreeable but necessary duty.’
‘And what sort of end do I have? I mean, what curtain do I get?’
‘I suppose you rush into your lover’s arms. That is where one of the flying leaps will come in.’
The getting-up and rehearsing of the play seemed likely to cause, in a restricted area, nearly as much heart-burning and ill-feeling as the election petition. Clovis, as adapter and stage-manager, insisted, as far as he was able, on the charioteer being quite the most prominent character in the play, and his panther-skin tunic caused almost as much trouble and discussion as Clytemnestra’s spasmodic succession of lovers, who broke down on probation with alarming uniformity. When the cast was at length fixed beyond hope of reprieve matters went scarcely more smoothly. Clovis and the Baroness rather overdid the Sumurun manner, while the rest of the company could hardly be said to attempt it at all. As for Cassandra, who was expected to improvise her own prophecies, she appeared to be as incapable of taking flying leaps into futurity as of executing more than a severely plantigrade walk across the stage.
‘Woe! Trojans, woe to Troy!’ was the most inspired remark she could produce after several hours of conscientious study of all the available authorities.
‘It’s no earthly use foretelling the fall of Troy,’ expostulated Clovis, ‘because Troy has fallen before the action of the play begins. And you mustn’t say too much about your own impending doom either, because that will give things away too much to the audience.’
After several minutes of painful brain-searching, Cassandra smiled reassuringly.
‘I know. I’ll predict a long and happy reign for George the Fifth.’
‘My dear girl,’ protested Clovis, ‘have you reflected that Cassandra specialised in foretelling calamities?’
There was another prolonged pause and another triumphant issue.
‘I know. I’ll foretell a most disastrous season for the foxhounds.’
‘On no account,’ entreated Clovis, ‘do remember that all Cassandra’s predictions came true. The M.F.H. and the Hunt Secretary are both awfully superstitious, and they are both going to be present.’
Cassandra retreated hastily to her bedroom to bathe her eyes before appearing at tea.
The Baroness and Clovis were by this time scarcely on speaking terms. Each sincerely wished their respective role to be the pivot round which the entire production should revolve, and each lost no opportunity for furthering the cause they had at heart. As fast as Clovis introduced some effective bit of business for the charioteer (and he introduced a great many), the Baroness would remorselessly cut it out, or more often dovetail it into her own part, while Clovis retaliated in a similar fashion whenever possible. The climax came when Clytemnestra annexed some highly complimentary lines, which were to have been addressed to the charioteer by a bevy of admiring Greek damsels, and put them into the mouth of her lover. Clovis stood by in apparent unconcern while the words:
‘Oh, lovely stripling, radiant as the dawn,’ were transposed into:
‘Oh, Clytemnestra, radiant as the dawn,’ but there was a dangerous glitter in his eye that might have given the Baroness warning. He had composed the verse himself, inspired and thoroughly carried away by his subject; he suffered, therefore, a double pang in beholding his tribute deflected from its destined object, and his words mutilated and twisted into what became an extravagant panegyric on the Baroness’s personal charms. It was from this moment that he became gentle and assiduous in his private coaching of Cassandra.
The County, forgetting its dissensions, mustered in full strength to witness the much-talked-of production. The protective Providence that looks after little children and amateur theatricals made good its traditional promise that everything should be right on the night. The Baroness and Clovis seemed to have sunk their mutual differences, and between them dominated the scene to the partial eclipse of all the other characters, who, for the most part, seemed well content to remain in the shadow. Even Agamemnon, with ten years of strenuous life around Troy standing to his credit, appeared to be an unobtrusive personality compared with his flamboyant charioteer. But the moment came for Cassandra (who had been excused from any very definite outpourings during rehearsals) to support her role by delivering herself of a few well-chosen anticipations of pending misfortune. The musicians obliged with appropriately lugubrious wailings and thumpings, and the Baroness seized the opportunity to make a dash to the dressing-room to effect certain repairs in her make-up. Cassandra nervous but resolute, came down to the footlights and, like one repeating a carefully learned lesson, flung her remarks straight at the audience:
‘I see woe for this fair country if the brood of corrupt, self-seeking, unscrupulous, unprincipled politicians’ (here she named one of the two rival parties in the State) ‘continue to infest and poison our local councils and undermine our Parliamentary representation; if they continue to snatch votes by nefarious and discreditable means –’
A humming as of a great hive of bewildered and affronted bees drowned her further remarks and wore down the droning of the musicians. The Baroness, who should have been greeted on her return to the stage with the pleasing invocation, ‘Oh, Clytemnestra, radiant as the dawn,’ heard instead the imperious voice of Lady Thistledale ordering her carriage, and something like a storm of open discord going on at the back of the room.
The social divisions in the County healed themselves after their own fashion; both parties found common ground in condemning the Baroness’s outrageously bad taste and tactlessness.
She has been fortunate in sub-letting for the greater part of her seven years’ lease.
The Peace of Mowsle Barton
Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease, an ease alike of body and soul, in the little patch of ground, half-orchard and half-garden, that abutted on the farmyard at Mowsle Barton. After the stress and noise of long years of city life, the repose and peace of the hillbegirt homestead struck on his senses with an almost dramatic intensity. Time and space seemed to lose their meaning and their abruptness; the minutes slid away into hours, and the meadows and fallows sloped away into middle distance, softly and imperceptibly. Wild weeds of the hedgerow straggled into the flower garden, and wallflowers and garden bushes made counter-raids into farmyard and lane. Sleepy-looking hens and solemn preoccupied ducks were equally at home in yard, orchard, or roadway; nothing seemed to belong definitely to anywhere; even the gates were not necessarily to be found on their hinges. And over the whole scene brooded the sense of a peace that had almost a quality of magic in it. In the afternoon you felt that it had always been afternoon, and must always remain afternoon; in the twilight you knew that it could never have been anything else but twili
ght. Crefton Lockyer sat at his ease in the rustic seat beneath an old medlar tree, and decided that here was the life-anchorage that his mind had so fondly pictured and that latterly his tired and jarred senses had so often pined for. He would make a permanent lodging-place among these simple friendly people, gradually increasing the modest comforts with which he would like to surround himself, but falling in as much as possible with their manner of living.
As he slowly matured this resolution in his mind an elderly woman came hobbling with uncertain gait through the orchard. He recognised her as a member of the farm household, the mother or possibly the mother-in-law of Mrs Spurfield, his present landlady, and hastily formulated some pleasant remark to make to her. She forestalled him.
‘There’s a bit of writing chalked up on the door over yonder. What is it?’
She spoke in a dull impersonal manner, as though the question had been on her lips for years and has best be got rid of. Her eyes, however, looked impatiently over Crefton’s head at the door of a small barn which formed the outpost of a straggling line of farm buildings.
‘Martha Pillamon is an old witch’ was the announcement that met Crefton’s inquiring scrutiny, and he hesitated a moment before giving the statement wider publicity. For all he knew to the contrary, it might be Martha herself to whom he was speaking. It was possible that Mrs Spurfield’s maiden name had been Pillamon. And the gaunt, withered old dame at his side might certainly fulfil local conditions as to the outward aspect of a witch.
‘It’s something about some one called Martha Pillamon,’ he explained cautiously.
‘What does it say?’
‘It’s very disrespectful,’ said Crefton; ‘it says she’s a witch. Such things ought not to be written up.’
‘It’s true, every word of it,’ said his listener with considerable satisfaction, adding as a special descriptive note of her own, ‘the old toad.’
And as she hobbled away through the farmyard she shrilled out in her cracked voice, ‘Martha Pillamon is an old witch!’
‘Did you hear what she said?’ mumbled a weak, angry voice somewhere behind Crefton’s shoulder. Turning hastily, he beheld another old crone, thin and yellow and wrinkled, and evidently in a high state of displeasure. Obviously this was Martha Pillamon in person. The orchard seemed to be a favourite promenade for the aged women of the neighbourhood.
‘ ’Tis lies, ’tis sinful lies,’ the weak voice went on, ‘ ’Tis Betsy Croot is the old witch. She and her daughter, the dirty rat. I’ll put a spell on ’em, the old nuisances.’
As she limped slowly away her eye caught the chalk inscription on the barn door.
‘What’s written up there?’ she demanded, wheeling round on Crefton.
‘Vote for Soarker,’ he responded, with the craven boldness of the practised peacemaker.
The old woman grunted, and her mutterings and her faded red shawl lost themselves gradually among the tree-trunks. Crefton rose presently and made his way towards the farmhouse. Somehow a good deal of the peace seemed to have slipped out of the atmosphere.
The cheery bustle of tea-time in the old farm kitchen, which Crefton had found so agreeable on previous afternoons, seemed to have soured today into a certain uneasy melancholy. There was a dull, dragging silence around the board, and the tea itself, when Crefton came to taste it, was a flat, lukewarm concoction that would have driven the spirit of revelry out of a carnival.
‘It’s no use complaining of the tea,’ said Mrs Spurfield hastily, as her guest stared with an air of polite inquiry at his cup. ‘The kettle won’t boil, that’s the truth of it.’
Crefton turned to the hearth, where an unusually fierce fire was banked up under a big black kettle, which sent a thin wreath of steam from its spout, but seemed otherwise to ignore the action of the roaring blaze beneath it.
‘It’s been there more than an hour, and boil it won’t,’ said Mrs Spurfield, adding, by way of complete explanation, ‘we’re bewitched.’
‘It’s Martha Pillamon as has done it,’ chimed in the old mother; ‘I’ll be even with the old toad. I’ll put a spell on her.’
‘It must boil in time,’ protested Crefton, ignoring the suggestions of foul influences. ‘Perhaps the coal is damp.’
‘It won’t boil in time for supper, nor for breakfast tomorrow morning, not if you was to keep the fire a-going all night for it,’ said Mrs Spurfield. And it didn’t. The household subsisted on fried and baked dishes, and a neighbour obligingly brewed tea and sent it across in a moderately warm condition.
‘I suppose you’ll be leaving us now that things has turned up uncomfortable,’ Mrs Spurfield observed at breakfast; ‘there are folks as deserts one as soon as trouble comes.’
Crefton hurriedly disclaimed any immediate change of plans; he observed, however, to himself that the earlier heartiness of manner had in a large measure deserted the household. Suspicious looks, sulky silences, or sharp speeches had become the order of the day. As for the old mother, she sat about the kitchen or the garden all day, murmuring threats and spells against Martha Pillamon. There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigour and intensity where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay. And the uncanny part of it was that some horrid unwholesome power seemed to be distilled from their spite and their cursings. No amount of sceptical explanation could remove the undoubted fact that neither kettle nor saucepan would come to boiling-point over the hottest fire. Crefton clung as long as possible to the theory of some defect in the coals, but a wood fire gave the same result, and when a small spirit-lamp kettle, which he ordered out by carrier, showed the same obstinate refusal to allow its contents to boil he felt that he had come suddenly into contact with some unguessed-at and very evil aspect of hidden forces. Miles away, down through an opening in the hills, he could catch glimpses of a road where motor-cars sometimes passed and yet here, so little removed from the arteries of the latest civilisation, was a bat-haunted old homestead, where something unmistakably like witchcraft seemed to hold a very practical sway.
Passing out through the farm garden on his way to the lanes beyond, where he hoped to recapture the comfortable sense of peacefulness that was so lacking around house and hearth – especially hearth – Crefton came across the old mother, sitting mumbling to herself in the seat beneath the medlar tree. ‘Let un sink as swims, let un sink as swims,’ she was repeating over and over again, as a child repeats a half-learned lesson. And now and then she would break off into a shrill laugh, with a note of malice in it that was not pleasant to hear. Crefton was glad when he found himself out of earshot, in the quiet and seclusion of the deep overgrown lanes that seemed to lead away to nowhere; one, narrower and deeper than the rest, attracted his footsteps, and he was almost annoyed when he found that it really did act as a miniature roadway to a human dwelling. A forlorn-looking cottage with a scrap of ill-tended cabbage garden and a few aged apple trees stood at an angle where a swift-flowing stream widened out for a space into a decent-sized pond before hurrying away again through the willows that had checked its course. Crefton leaned against a tree-trunk and looked across the swirling eddies of the pond at the humble little homestead opposite him; the only sign of life came from a small procession of dingy-looking ducks that marched in single file down to the water’s edge. There is always something rather taking in the way a duck changes itself in an instant from a slow, clumsy waddler of the earth to a graceful buoyant swimmer of the waters, and Crefton waited with a certain arrested attention to watch the leader of the file launch itself on to the surface of the pond. He was aware at the same time of a curious warning instinct that something strange and unpleasant was about to happen. The duck flung itself confidently forward into the water, and rolled immediately under the surface. Its head appeared for a moment and went under again,
leaving a train of bubbles in its wake, while wings and legs churned the water in a helpless swirl of flapping and kicking. The bird was obviously drowning. Crefton thought at first that it had caught itself in some weeds, or was being attacked from below by a pike or water-rat. But no blood floated to the surface, and the wildly bobbing body made the circuit of the pond current without hindrance from any entanglement. A second duck had by this time launched itself into the pond, and a second struggling body rolled and twisted under the surface. There was something peculiarly piteous in the sight of the gasping beaks that showed now and again above the water, as though in terrified protest at this treachery of a trusted and familiar element. Crefton gazed with something like horror as a third duck poised itself on the bank and splashed in, to share the fate of the other two. He felt almost relieved when the remainder of the flock, taking tardy alarm from the commotion of the slowly drowning bodies, drew themselves up with tense outstretched necks, and sidled away from the scene of danger, quacking a deep note of disquietude as they went. At the same moment Crefton became aware that he was not the only human witness of the scene; a bent and withered old woman, whom he recognised at once as Martha Pillamon, of sinister reputation, had limped down the cottage path to the water’s edge, and was gazing fixedly at the gruesome whirligig of dying birds that went in horrible procession round the pool. Presently her voice rang out in a shrill note of quavering rage:
‘ ’Tis Betsy Croot adone it, the old rat. I’ll put a spell on her, see if I don’t.’
Crefton slipped quietly away, uncertain whether or no the old woman had noticed his presence. Even before she had proclaimed the guiltiness of Betsy Croot, the latter’s muttered incantation ‘Let un sink as swims’ had flashed uncomfortably across his mind. But it was the final threat of a retaliatory spell which crowded his mind with misgiving to the exclusion of all other thoughts or fancies. His reasoning powers could no longer afford to dismiss these old-wives’ threats as empty bickerings. The household at Mowsle Barton lay under the displeasure of a vindictive old woman who seemed able to materialise her personal spites in a very practical fashion, and there was no saying what form her revenge for three drowned ducks might not take. As a member of the household Crefton might find himself involved in some general and highly disagreeable visitation of Martha Pillamon’s wrath. Of course he knew that he was giving way to absurd fancies, but the behaviour of the spirit-lamp kettle and the subsequent scene at the pond had considerably unnerved him. And the vagueness of his alarm added to its terrors; when once you have taken the Impossible into your calculations its possibilities become practically limitless.