The Complete Short Stories of Saki

by Saki

  ‘Will you have cold pork for your supper,’ asked the hard-faced maid, as she cleared the table, ‘or will you have it hotted up?’

  ‘Hot, with onions,’ said Stoner. It was the only time in his life that he had made a rapid decision. And as he gave the order he knew that he meant to stay.

  Stoner kept rigidly to those portions of the house which seemed to have been allotted to him by a tacit treaty of delimitation. When he took part in the farm-work it was as one who worked under orders and never initiated them. Old George, the roan cob, and Bowker’s pup were his sole companions in a world that was otherwise frostily silent and hostile. Of the mistress of the farm he saw nothing. Once, when he knew she had gone forth to church, he made a furtive visit to the farm parlour in an endeavour to glean some fragmentary knowledge of the young man whose place he had usurped, and whose ill-repute he had fastened on himself. There were many photographs hung on the walls, or stuck in prim frames, but the likeness he sought for was not among them. At last, in an album thrust out of sight, he came across what he wanted. There was a whole series, labelled ‘Tom,’ a podgy child of three, in a fantastic frock, an awkward boy of about twelve, holding a cricket bat as though he loathed it, a rather good-looking youth of eighteen with very smooth, evenly parted hair, and, finally, a young man with a somewhat surly dare-devil expression. At this last portrait Stoner looked with particular interest; the likeness to himself was unmistakable.

  From the lips of old George, who was garrulous enough on most subjects, he tried again and again to learn something of the nature of the offence which shut him off as a creature to be shunned and hated by his fellow-men.

  ‘What do the folk around here say about me?’ he asked one day as they were walking home from an outlying field.

  The old man shook his head.

  ‘They be bitter agen you, mortal bitter. Ay, ’tis a sad business, a sad business.’

  And never could he be got to say anything more enlightening.

  On a clear frosty evening, a few days before the festival of Christmas, Stoner stood in a corner of the orchard which commanded a wide view of the countryside. Here and there he could see the twinkling dots of lamp or candle glow which told of human homes where the goodwill and jollity of the season held their sway. Behind him lay the grim, silent farm-house, where no one ever laughed, where even a quarrel would have seemed cheerful. As he turned to look at the long grey front of the gloom-shadowed building, a door opened and old George came hurriedly forth. Stoner heard his adopted name called in a tone of strained anxiety. Instantly he knew that something untoward had happened, and with a quick revulsion of outlook his sanctuary became in his eyes a place of peace and contentment, from which he dreaded to be driven.

  ‘Master Tom,’ said the old man in a hoarse whisper, ‘you must slip away quiet from here for a few days. Michael Ley is back in the village, and he swears to shoot you if he can come across you. He’ll do it, too, there’s murder in the look of him. Get away under cover of night, ’tis only for a week or so, he won’t be here longer.’

  ‘But where am I to go?’ stammered Stoner, who had caught the infection of the old man’s obvious terror.

  ‘Go right away along the coast to Punchford and keep hid there. When Michael’s safe gone I’ll ride the roan over to the Green Dragon at Punchford; when you see the cob stabled at the Green Dragon ’tis a sign you may come back agen.’

  ‘But –’ began Stoner hesitatingly.

  ‘’Tis all right for money,’ said the other; ‘the old Missus agrees you’d best do as I say, and she’s given me this.’

  The old man produced three sovereigns and some odd silver.

  Stoner felt more of a cheat than ever as he stole away that night from the back gate of the farm with the old woman’s money in his pocket. Old George and Bowker’s pup stood watching him a silent farewell from the yard. He could scarcely fancy that he would ever come back, and he felt a throb of compunction for those two humble friends who would wait wistfully for his return. Some day perhaps the real Tom would come back, and there would be wild wonderment among those simple farm folks as to the identity of the shadowy guest they had harboured under their roof. For his own fate he felt no immediate anxiety; three pounds goes but little way in the world when there is nothing behind it, but to a man who has counted his exchequer in pennies it seems a good starting-point. Fortune had done him a whimsically kind turn when last he trod these lanes as a hopeless adventurer, and there might yet be a chance of his finding some work and making a fresh start; as he got further from the farm his spirits rose higher. There was a sense of relief in regaining once more his lost identity and ceasing to be the uneasy ghost of another. He scarcely bothered to speculate about the implacable enemy who had dropped from nowhere into his life; since that life was now behind him one unreal item the more made little difference. For the first time for many months he began to hum a careless light-hearted refrain. Then there stepped out from the shadow of an overhanging oak tree a man with a gun. There was no need to wonder who he might be; the moonlight falling on his white set face revealed a glare of human hate such as Stoner in the ups and downs of his wanderings had never seen before. He sprang aside in a wild effort to break through the hedge that bordered the lane, but the tough branches held him fast. The hounds of Fate had waited for him in those narrow lanes, and this time they were not to be denied.

  The Recessional

  Clovis sat in the hottest zone but two of a Turkish bath, alternately inert in statuesque contemplation and rapidly manoeuvring a fountain-pen over the pages of a note-book.

  ‘Don’t interrupt me with your childish prattle,’ he observed to Bertie van Tahn, who had slung himself languidly into a neighbouring chair and looked conversationally inclined; ‘I’m writing deathless verse.’

  Bertie looked interested.

  ‘I say, what a boon you would be to portrait painters if you really got to be notorious as a poetry writer. If they couldn’t get your likeness hung in the Academy as “Clovis Sangrail, Esq., at work on his latest poem”, they could slip you in as a Study of the Nude or Orpheus descending into Jermyn Street. They always complain that modern dress handicaps them, whereas a towel and a fountain-pen –’

  ‘It was Mrs Packletide’s suggestion that I should write this thing,’ said Clovis, ignoring the bypaths to fame that Bertie van Tahn was pointing out to him. ‘You see, Loona Bimberton had a Coronation Ode accepted by the New Infancy, a paper that has been started with the idea of making the New Age seem elder and hidebound. “So clever of you, dear Loona,” the Packletide remarked when she had read it; “of course, any one could write a Coronation Ode, but no one else would have thought of doing it.” Loona protested that these things were extremely difficult to do, and gave us to understand that they were more or less the province of a gifted few. Now the Packletide has been rather decent to me in many ways, a sort of financial ambulance, you know, that carries you off the field when you’re hard hit, which is a frequent occurrence with me, and I’ve no use whatever for Loona Bimberton, so I chipped in and said I could turn out that sort of stuff by the square yard if I gave my mind to it. Loona said I couldn’t, and we got bets on, and between you and me I think the money’s fairly safe. Of course, one of the conditions of the wager is that the thing has to be published in something or other, local newspapers barred; but Mrs Packletide has endeared herself by many little acts of thoughtfulness to the editor of the Smoky Chimney, so if I can hammer out anything at all approaching the level of the usual Ode output we ought to be all right. So far I’m getting along so comfortably that I begin to be afraid that I must be one of the gifted few.’

  ‘It’s rather late in the day for a Coronation Ode, isn’t it?’ said Bertie.

  ‘Of course,’ said Clovis; ‘this is going to be a Durbar Recessional, the sort of thing that you can keep by you for all time if you want to.’

  ‘Now I understand your choice of a place to write it in,’ said Bertie van Tahn, with the air of o
ne who has suddenly unravelled a hitherto obscure problem; ‘you want to get the local temperature.’

  ‘I came here to get freedom from the inane interruptions of the mentally deficient,’ said Clovis, ‘but it seems I asked too much of fate.’

  Bertie van Tahn prepared to use his towel as a weapon of precision, but reflecting that he had a good deal of unprotected coast-line himself, and that Clovis was equipped with a fountain-pen as well as a towel, he relapsed pacifically into the depths of his chair.

  ‘May one hear extracts from the immortal work?’ he asked. ‘I promise that nothing that I hear now shall prejudice me against borrowing a copy of the Smoky Chimney at the right moment.’

  ‘It’s rather like casting pearls into a trough,’ remarked Clovis pleasantly, ‘but I don’t mind reading you bits of it. It begins with a general dispersal of the Durbar participants:

  ‘“Back to their homes in Himalayan heights

  The stale pale elephants of Cutch Behar

  Roll like great galleons on a tideless sea –”’

  ‘I don’t believe Cutch Behar is anywhere near the Himalayan region,’ interrupted Bertie. ‘You ought to have an atlas on hand when you do this sort of thing; and why stale and pale?’

  ‘After the late hours and the excitement, of course,’ said Clovis; ‘and I said their homes were in the Himalayas. You can have Himalayan elephants in Cutch Behar, I suppose, just as you have Irish-bred horses running at Ascot.’

  ‘You said they were going back to the Himalayas,’ objected Bertie.

  ‘Well, they would naturally be sent home to recuperate. It’s the usual thing out there to turn elephants loose in the hills, just as we put horses out to grass in this country.’

  Clovis could at least flatter himself that he had infused some of the reckless splendour of the East into his mendacity.

  ‘Is it all going to be in blank verse?’ asked the critic.

  ‘Of course not; “Durbar” comes at the end of the fourth line.’

  ‘That seems so cowardly; however, it explains why you pitched on Cutch Behar.’

  ‘There is more connection between geographical place-names and poetical inspiration than is generally recognised one of the chief reasons why there are so few really great poems about Russia in our language is that you can’t possibly get a rhyme to names like Smolensk and Tobolsk and Minsk.”

  Clovis spoke with the authority of one who has tried.

  ‘Of course, you could rhyme Omsk with Tomsk,’ he continued; ‘in fact, they seem to be there for that purpose, but the public wouldn’t stand that sort of thing indefinitely.’

  ‘The public will stand a good deal,’ said Bertie malevolently, ‘and so small a proportion of it knows Russian that you could always have an explanatory footnote asserting that the last three letters in Smolensk are not pronounced. It’s quite as believable as your statement about putting elephants out to grass in the Himalayan range.’

  ‘I’ve got rather a nice bit,’ resumed Clovis with unruffled serenity, ‘giving an evening scene on the outskirts of a jungle village:

  ‘“Where the coiled cobra in the gloaming gloats,

  And prowling panthers stalk the wary goats.”’

  ‘There is practically no gloaming in tropical countries,’ said Bertie indulgently; ‘but I like the masterly reticence with which you treat the cobra’s motive for gloating. The unknown is proverbially the uncanny. I can picture nervous readers of the Smoky Chimney keeping the light turned on in their bedrooms all night out of sheer sickening uncertainty as to what the cobra might have been gloating about.’

  ‘Cobras gloat naturally,’ said Clovis, ‘just as wolves are always ravening from mere force of habit, even after they’ve hopelessly overeaten themselves. I’ve got a fine bit of colour painting later on,’ he added, ‘where I describe the dawn coming up over the Brahmaputra river:

  ‘“The amber dawn-drenched East with sun-shafts kissed,

  Stained sanguine apricot and amethyst,

  O’er the washed emerald of the mango groves

  Hangs in a mist of opalescent mauves,

  While painted parrot-flights impinge the haze

  With scarlet, chalcedon and chrysoprase.”’

  ‘I’ve never seen the dawn come up over the Brahma-putra river,’ said Bertie, ‘so I can’t say if it’s a good description of the event, but it sounds more like an account of an extensive jewel robbery. Anyhow, the parrots give a good useful touch of local colour. I suppose you’ve introduced some tigers into the scenery? An Indian landscape would have rather a bare, unfinished look without a tiger or two in the middle distance.’

  ‘I’ve got a hen-tiger somewhere in the poem,’ said Clovis, hunting through his notes. ‘Here she is:

  ‘“The tawny tigress ’mid the tangled teak

  Drags to her purring cubs’ enraptured ears

  The harsh death-rattle in the pea-fowl’s beak,

  A jungle lullaby of blood and tears.”’

  Bertie van Tahn rose hurriedly from his recumbent position and made for the glass door leading into the next compartment.

  ‘I think your idea of home life in the jungle is perfectly horrid,’ he said. ‘The cobra was sinister enough, but the improvised rattle in the tiger-nursery is the limit. If you’re going to make me turn hot and cold all over I may as well go into the steam room at once.’

  ‘Just listen to this line,’ said Clovis; ‘it would make the reputation of any ordinary poet:

  ‘“and overhead

  The pendulum-patient Punkah, parent of stillborn breeze.”’

  ‘Most of your readers will think “punkah” is a kind of iced drink or half-time at polo,’ said Bertie, and disappeared into the steam.

  The Smoky Chimney duly published the ‘Recessional’, but it proved to be its swan song, for the paper never attained to another issue.

  Loona Bimberton gave up her intention of attending the Durbar and went into a nursing-home on the Sussex Downs. Nervous breakdown after a particularly strenuous season was the usually accepted explanation, but there are three or four people who know that she never really recovered from the dawn breaking over the Brahma-putra river.

  A Matter of Sentiment

  It was the eve of the great race, and scarcely a member of Lady Susan’s house-party had as yet a single bet on. It was one of those unsatisfactory years when one horse held a commanding market position, not by reason of any general belief in its crushing superiority, but because it was extremely difficult to pitch on any other candidate to whom to pin one’s faith. Peradventure II was the favourite, not in the sense of being a popular fancy, but by virtue of a lack of confidence in any one of his rather undistinguished rivals. The brains of club-land were much exercised in seeking out possible merit where none was very obvious to the naked intelligence, and the house-party at Lady Susan’s was possessed by the same uncertainty and irresolution that infected wider circles.

  ‘It is just the time for bringing off a good coup,’ said Bertie van Tahn.

  ‘Undoubtedly. But with what?’ demanded Clovis for the twentieth time.

  The women of the party were just as keenly interested in the matter, and just as helplessly perplexed; even the mother of Clovis, who usually got good racing information from her dressmaker, confessed herself fancy free on this occasion. Colonel Drake, who was professor of military history at a minor cramming establishment, was the only person who had a definite selection for the event, but as his choice varied every three hours he was worse than useless as an inspired guide. The crowning difficulty of the problem was that it could only be fitfully and furtively discussed. Lady Susan disapproved of racing. She disapproved of many things; some people went as far as to say that she disapproved of most things. Disapproval was to her what neuralgia and fancy needlework are to many other women. She disapproved of early morning tea and auction bridge, of ski-ing and the two-step, of the Russian ballet and the Chelsea Arts Club ball, of the French policy in Morocco and the British policy e
verywhere. It was not that she was particularly strict or narrow in her views of life, but she had been the eldest sister of a large family of self-indulgent children, and her particular form of indulgence had consisted in openly disapproving of the foibles of the others. Unfortunately the hobby had grown up with her. As she was rich, influential, and very, very kind, most people were content to count their early tea as well lost on her behalf. Still, the necessity for hurriedly dropping the discussion of an enthralling topic, and suppressing all mention of it during her presence on the scene, was an affliction at a moment like the present, when time was slipping away and indecision was the prevailing note.

  After a lunch-time of rather strangled and uneasy conversation, Clovis managed to get most of the party together at the further end of the kitchen gardens, on the pretext of admiring the Himalayan pheasants. He had made an important discovery. Motkin, the butler, who (as Clovis expressed it) had grown prematurely grey in Lady Susan’s service, added to his other excellent qualities an intelligent interest in matters connected with the Turf. On the subject of the forthcoming race he was not illuminating, except in so far that he shared the prevailing unwillingness to see a winner in Peradventure II. But where he outshone all the members of the house-party was in the fact that he had a second cousin who was head stable-lad at a neighbouring racing establishment, and usually gifted with much inside information as to private form and possibilities. Only the fact of her ladyship having taken it into her head to invite a house-party for the last week of May had prevented Mr Motkin from paying a visit of consultation to his relative with respect to the big race; there was still time to cycle over if he could get leave of absence for the afternoon on some specious excuse.