by Saki
‘I don’t see what’s wrong with Egbert,’ protested Amanda.
‘Oh, I dare say the wrongness has been on my part,’ admitted Laura dispassionately; ‘he has merely been the extenuating circumstance. He made a thin, peevish kind of fuss, for instance, when I took the collie puppies from the farm out for a run the other day.
‘They chased his young broods of speckled Sussex and drove two sitting hens off their nests, besides running all over the flower beds. You know how devoted he is to his poultry and garden.’
‘Anyhow, he needn’t have gone on about it for the entire evening and then have said, “Let’s say no more about it” just when I was beginning to enjoy the discussion. That’s where one of my petty vindictive revenges came in,’ added Laura with an unrepentant chuckle; ‘I turned the entire family of speckled Sussex into his seedling shed the day after the puppy episode.’
‘How could you?’ exclaimed Amanda.
‘It came quite easy,’ said Laura; ‘two of the hens pretended to be laying at the time, but I was firm.’
‘And we thought it was an accident!’
‘You see,’ resumed Laura, ‘I really have some grounds for supposing that my next incarnation will be in a lower organism. I shall be an animal of some kind. On the other hand, I haven’t been a bad sort in my way, so I think I may count on being a nice animal, some thing elegant and lively, with a love of fun. An otter, perhaps.’
‘I can’t imagine you as an otter,’ said Amanda.
‘Well, I don’t suppose you can imagine me as an angel, if it comes to that,’ said Laura.
Amanda was silent. She couldn’t.
‘Personally I think an otter life would be rather enjoyable,’ continued Laura; ‘salmon to eat all the year around, and the satisfaction of being able to fetch the trout in their own homes without having to wait for hours till they condescend to rise to the fly you’ve been dangling before them; and an elegant svelte figure –’
‘Think of the other hounds,’ interposed Amanda, ‘how dreadful to be hunted and harried and finally worried to death!’
‘Rather fun with half the neighbourhood looking on, and anyhow not worse than this Saturday-to-Tuesday business of dying by inches; and then I should go on into something else. If I had been a moderately good otter I suppose I should get back into human shape of some sort; probably something rather primitive – a little brown, unclothed Nubian boy, I should think.’
‘I wish you would be serious,’ sighed Amanda; ‘you really ought to be if you’re only going to live till Tuesday.’
As a matter of fact Laura died on Monday.
‘So dreadfully upsetting,’ Amanda complained to her uncle-in-law, Sir Lulworth Quayne. ‘I’ve asked quite a lot of people down for golf and fishing, and the rhododendrons are just looking their best.’
‘Laura always was inconsiderate,’ said Sir Lulworth; ‘she was born during Goodwood week, with an Ambassador staying in the house who hated babies.’
‘She had the maddest kind of ideas,’ said Amanda; ‘do you know if there was any insanity in her family?’
‘Insanity? No, I never heard of any. Her father lives in West Kensington, but I believe he’s sane on all other subjects.’
‘She had an idea that she was going to be reincarnated as an otter,’ said Amanda.
‘One meets with those ideas of reincarnation so frequently, even in the West,’ said Sir Lulworth, ‘that one can hardly set them down as being mad. And Laura was such an unaccountable person in this life that I should not like to lay down definite rules as to what she might be doing in an after state.’
‘You think she really might have passed into some animal form?’ asked Amanda. She was one of those who shape their opinions rather readily from the standpoint of those around them.
Just then Egbert entered the breakfast-room, wearing an air of bereavement that Laura’s demise would have been insufficient, in itself, to account for.
‘Four of my speckled Sussex have been killed,’ he exclaimed; ‘the very four that were to go to the show on Friday. One of them was dragged away and eaten right in the middle of that new carnation bed that I’ve been to such trouble and expense over. My best flower bed and my best fowls singled out for destruction; it almost seems as if the brute that did the deed had special knowledge how to be as devastating as possible in a short space of time.’
‘Was it a fox, do you think?’ asked Amanda.
‘Sounds more like a polecat,’ said Sir Lulworth.
‘No,’ said Egbert, ‘there were marks of webbed feet all over the place, and we followed the tracks down to the stream at the bottom of the garden; evidently an otter.’
Amanda looked quickly and furtively across at Sir Lulworth.
Egbert was too agitated to eat any breakfast, and went out to superintend the strengthening of the poultry yard defences.
‘I think she might at least have waited till the funeral was over,’ said Amanda in a scandalised voice.
‘It’s her own funeral, you know,’ said Sir Lulworth; ‘it’s a nice point in etiquette how far one ought to show respect to one’s own mortal remains.’
Disregard for mortuary convention was carried to further lengths next day; during the absence of the family at the funeral ceremony the remaining survivors of the speckled Sussex were massacred. The marauder’s line of retreat seemed to have embraced most of the flower beds on the lawn, but the strawberry beds in the lower garden had also suffered.
‘I shall get the otter hounds to come here at the earliest possible moment,’ said Egbert savagely.
‘On no account! You can’t dream of such a thing!’ exclaimed Amanda. ‘I mean, it wouldn’t do, so soon after a funeral in the house.’
‘It’s a case of necessity,’ said Egbert; ‘once an otter takes to that sort of thing it won’t stop.’
‘Perhaps it will go elsewhere now that there are no more fowls left,’ suggested Amanda.
‘One would think you wanted to shield the beast,’ said Egbert.
‘There’s been so little water in the stream lately,’ objected Amanda; ‘it seems hardly sporting to hunt an animal when it has so little chance of taking refuge anywhere.’
‘Good gracious!’ fumed Egbert, ‘I’m not thinking about sport. I want to have the animal killed as soon as possible.’
Even Amanda’s opposition weakened when, during church time on the following Sunday, the otter made its way into the house, raided half a salmon from the larder and worried it into scaly fragments on the Persian rug in Egbert’s studio.
‘We shall have it hiding under our beds and biting pieces out of our feet before long,’ said Egbert, and from what Amanda knew of this particular otter she felt that the possibility was not a remote one.
On the evening preceding the day fixed for the hunt Amanda spent a solitary hour walking by the banks of the stream, making what she imagined to be hound noises. It was charitably supposed by those who overheard her performance, that she was practising for farmyard imitations at the forthcoming village entertainment.
It was her friend and neighbour, Aurora Burret, who brought her news of the day’s sport.
‘Pity you weren’t out; we had quite a good day. We found it at once, in the pool just below your garden.’
‘Did you – kill?’ asked Amanda.
‘Rather. A fine she-otter. Your husband got rather badly bitten in trying to “tail it”. Poor beast, I felt quite sorry for it, it had such a human look in its eyes when it was killed. You’ll call me silly, but do you know who the look reminded me of? My dear woman, what is the matter?’
When Amanda had recovered to a certain extent from her attack of nervous prostration Egbert took her to the Nile Valley to recuperate. Change of scene speedily brought about the desired recovery of health and mental balance. The escapades of an adventurous otter in search of a variation of diet were viewed in their proper light. Amanda’s normally placid temperament reasserted itself. Even a hurricane of shouted curses, coming from
her husband’s dressing-room, in her husband’s voice, but hardly in his usual vocabulary, failed to disturb her serenity as she made a leisurely toilet one evening in a Cairo hotel.
‘What is the matter? What has happened?’ she asked in amused curiosity.
‘The little beast has thrown all my clean shirts into the bath! Wait till I catch you, you little –’
‘What little beast?’ asked Amanda, suppressing a desire to laugh; Egbert’s language was so hopelessly inadequate to express his outraged feelings.
‘A little beast of a naked brown Nubian boy,’ spluttered Egbert.
And now Amanda is seriously ill.
The Boar-Pig
‘There is a back way on to the lawn,’ said Mrs Philidore Stossen to her daughter, ‘through a small grass paddock and then through a walled fruit garden full of gooseberry bushes. I went all over the place last year when the family were away. There is a door that opens from the fruit garden into a shrubbery, and once we emerge from there we can mingle with the guests as if we had come in by the ordinary way. It’s much safer than going in by the front entrance and running the risk of coming bang up against the hostess; that would be so awkward when she doesn’t happen to have invited us.’
‘Isn’t it a lot of trouble to take for getting admittance to a garden party?’
‘To a garden party, yes; to the garden party of the season, certainly not. Every one of any consequence in the county, with the exception of ourselves, has been asked to meet the Princess, and it would be far more troublesome to invent explanations as to why we weren’t there than to get in by a roundabout way. I stopped Mrs Cuvering in the road yesterday and talked very pointedly about the Princess. If she didn’t choose to take the hint and send me an invitation it’s not my fault, is it? Here we are: we just cut across the grass and through that little gate into the garden.’
Mrs Stossen and her daughter, suitably arrayed for a county garden party function with an infusion of Almanack de Gotha, sailed through the narrow grass paddock and the ensuing gooseberry garden with the air of state barges making an unofficial progress along a rural trout stream. There was a certain amount of furtive haste mingled with the stateliness of their advance as though hostile searchlights might be turned on them at any moment; and, as a matter of fact, they were not unobserved. Matilda Cuvering, with the alert eyes of thirteen years and the added advantage of an exalted position in the branches of a medlar tree, had enjoyed a good view of the Stossen flanking movement and had foreseen exactly where it would break down in execution.
‘They’ll find the door locked, and they’ll jolly well have to go back the way they came,’ she remarked to herself. ‘Serves them right for not coming in by the proper entrance. What a pity Tarquin Superbus isn’t loose in the paddock. After all, as every one else is enjoying themselves, I don’t see why Tarquin shouldn’t have an afternoon out.’
Matilda was of an age when thought is action; she slid down from the branches of the medlar tree, and when she clambered back again, Tarquin the huge white Yorkshire boar-pig had exchanged the narrow limits of his sty for the wider range of the grass paddock. The discomfited Stossen expedition, returning in recriminatory but otherwise orderly retreat from the unyielding obstacle of the locked door, came to a sudden halt at the gate dividing the paddock from the gooseberry garden.
‘What a villainous-looking animal,’ exclaimed Mrs Stossen; ‘it wasn’t there when we came in.’
‘It’s there now, anyhow,’ said her daughter. ‘What on earth are we to do? I wish we had never come.’
The boar-pig had drawn nearer to the gate for a closer inspection of the human intruders, and stood champing his jaws and blinking his small red eyes in a manner that was doubtless intended to be disconcerting, and, as far as the Stossens were concerned, thoroughly achieved that result.
‘Shoo!! Hish! Hish! Shoo!’ cried the ladies in chorus.
‘If they think they’re going to drive him away by reciting lists of the kings of Israel and Judah they’re laying themselves out for disappointment,’ observed Matilda from her seat in the medlar tree. As she made the observation aloud Mrs Stossen became for the first time aware of her presence. A moment or two earlier she would have been anything but pleased at the discovery that the garden was not as deserted as it looked, but now she hailed the fact of the child’s presence on the scene with absolute relief. ‘Little girl, can you find some one to drive away –’ she began hopefully.
‘Comment? Comprends pas,’ was the response.
‘Oh, are you French? Êtes vous française?’
‘Pas de tous. ’Suis anglaise.’
‘Then why not talk English? I want to know if –
‘Permettez-moi expliquer. You see, I’m rather under a cloud,’ said Matilda. ‘I’m staying with my aunt, and I was told I must behave particularly well today, as lots of people were coming for a garden party, and I was told to imitate Claude, that’s my young cousin, who never does anything wrong except by accident, and then is always apologetic about it. It seems they thought I ate too much raspberry trifle at lunch, and they said Claude never eats too much raspberry trifle. Well, Claude always goes to sleep for half an hour after lunch, because he’s told to, and I waited till he was asleep, and tied his hands and started forcible feeding with a whole bucketful of raspberry trifle that they were keeping for the garden party. Lots of it went on to his sailor-suit and some of it on to the bed, but a good deal went down Claude’s throat, and they can’t say again that he has never been known to eat too much raspberry trifle. That is why I am not allowed to go to the party, and as an additional punishment I must speak French all the afternoon. I’ve had to tell you all this in English, as there were words like “forcible feeding” that I didn’t know the French for; of course I could have invented them, but if I had said nourriture obligatoire you wouldn’t have had the least idea what I was talking about. Mais maintenant, nous parlons français.’
‘Oh, very well, très bien,’ said Mrs Stossen reluctantly; in moments of flurry such French as she knew was not under very good control. ‘Là, à l’autre côté de la porte, est un cochon –’
‘Un cochon? Ah, le petit charmant!’ exclaimed Matilda with enthusiasm.
‘Mais non, pas du tout petit, et pas du tout charmant; un bête féroce –’
‘Une bête,’ corrected Matilda, ‘a pig is masculine as long as you call it a pig, but if you lose your temper with it and call it a ferocious beast it becomes one of us at once. French is a dreadfully unsexing language.’
‘For goodness’ sake let us talk English then,’ said Mrs Stossen. ‘Is there any way out of this garden except through the paddock where the pig is?’
‘I always go over the wall, by way of the plum tree,’ said Matilda.
‘Dressed as we are we could hardly do that,’ said Mrs Stossen; it was difficult to imagine her doing it in any costume.
‘Do you think you could go and get some one who would drive the pig away?’ asked Miss Stossen.
‘I promised my aunt I would stay here till five o’clock; it’s not four yet.’
‘I am sure, under the circumstances, your aunt would permit –’
‘My conscience would not permit,’ said Matilda with cold dignity.
‘We can’t stay here till five o’clock,’ exclaimed Mrs Stossen with growing exasperation.
‘Shall I recite to you to make the time pass quicker?’ asked Matilda obligingly. ‘“Belinda, the little Breadwinner” is considered my best piece, or, perhaps, it ought to be something in French. Henri Quatre’s address to his soldiers is the only thing I really know in that language.’
‘If you will go and fetch some one to drive that animal away I will give you something to buy yourself a nice present,’ said Mrs Stossen.
Matilda came several inches lower down the medlar tree.
‘That is the most practical suggestion you have made yet for getting out of the garden,’ she remarked cheerfully; ‘Claude and I are collecting money for the C
hildren’s Fresh Air Fund, and we are seeing which of us can collect the biggest sum.’
‘I shall be very glad to contribute half a crown, very glad indeed,’ said Mrs Stossen, digging that coin out of the depths of a receptacle which formed a detached outwork of her toilet.
‘Claude is a long way ahead of me at present,’ continued Matilda, taking no notice of the suggested offering; ‘you see, he’s only eleven, and has golden hair, and those are enormous advantages when you’re on the collecting job. Only the other day a Russian lady gave him ten shillings. Russians understand the art of giving far better than we do. I expect Claude will net quite twenty-five shillings this afternoon; he’ll have the field to himself, and he’ll be able to do the pale, fragile, not-long-for-this-world business to perfection after his raspberry trifle experience. Yes, he’ll be quite two pounds ahead of me by now.’
With much probing and plucking and many regretful murmurs the beleaguered ladies managed to produce seven-and-sixpence between them.
‘I am afraid this is all we’ve got,’ said Mrs Stossen.
Matilda showed no sign of coming down either to the earth or to their figure.
‘I could not do violence to my conscience for anything less than ten shillings,’ she announced stiffly.
Mother and daughter muttered certain remarks under their breath, in which the word ‘beast’ was prominent, and probably had no reference to Tarquin.
‘I find I have got another half-crown,’ said Mrs Stossen in a shaking voice; ‘here you are. Now please fetch some one quickly.’
Matilda slipped down from the tree, took possession of the donation, and proceeded to pick up a handful of over-ripe medlars from the grass at her feet. Then she climbed over the gate and addressed herself affectionately to the boar-pig.
‘Come, Tarquin, dear old boy; you know you can’t resist medlars when they’re rotten and squashy.’
Tarquin couldn’t. By dint of throwing the fruit in front of him at judicious intervals Matilda decoyed him back to his sty, while the delivered captives hurried across the paddock.