The Complete Short Stories of Saki

by Saki

  ‘Well, I never! The little minx!’ exclaimed Mrs Stossen when she was safely on the high road. ‘The animal wasn’t savage at all, and as for the ten shillings, I don’t believe the Fresh Air Fund will see a penny of it!’

  There she was unwarrantably harsh in her judgment. If you examine the books of the fund you will find the acknowledgment: ‘Collected by Miss Matilda Cuvering, 2s. 6d.’.

  The Brogue

  The hunting season had come to an end, and the Mullets had not succeeded in selling the Brogue. There had been a kind of tradition in the family for the past three or four years, a sort of fatalistic hope, that the Brogue would find a purchaser before the hunting was over; but seasons came and went without anything happening to justify such ill-founded optimism. The animal had been named Berserker in the earlier stages of its career; it had been rechristened the Brogue later on, in recognition of the fact that, once acquired, it was extremely difficult to get rid of. The unkinder wits of the neighbourhood had been known to suggest that the first letter of its name was superfluous. The Brogue had been variously described in sale catalogues as a light-weight hunter, a lady’s hack, and, more simply, but still with a touch of imagination, as a useful brown gelding, standing 15.1. Toby Mullet had ridden him for four seasons with the West Wessex; you can ride almost any sort of horse with the West Wessex as long as it is an animal that knows the country. The Brogue knew the country intimately, having personally created most of the gaps that were to be met with in banks and hedges for many miles round. His manners and characteristics were not ideal in the hunting field, but he was probably rather safer to ride to hounds than he was as a hack on country roads. According to the Mullet family, he was not really road-shy, but there were one or two objects of dislike that brought on sudden attacks of what Toby called swerving sickness. Motors and cycles he treated with tolerant disregard, but pigs, wheelbarrows, piles of stones by the roadside, perambulators in a village street, gates painted too aggressively white, and sometimes, but not always, the newer kind of beehives, turned him aside from his tracks in vivid imitation of the zigzag course of forked lightning. If a pheasant rose noisily from the other side of a hedgerow the Brogue would spring into the air at the same moment, but this may have been due to a desire to be companionable. The Mullet family contradicted the widely prevalent report that the horse was a confirmed crib-biter.

  It was about the third week in May that Mrs Mullet, relict of the late Sylvester Mullet, and mother of Toby and a bunch of daughters, assailed Clovis Sangrail on the outskirts of the village with a breathless catalogue of local happenings.

  ‘You know our new neighbour, Mr Penricarde?’ she vociferated; ‘awfully rich, owns tin mines in Cornwall, middle-aged and rather quiet. He’s taken the Red House on a long lease and spent a lot of money on alterations and improvements. Well, Toby’s sold him the Brogue!’

  Clovis spent a moment or two in assimilating the astonishing news; then he broke out into unstinted congratulation. If he had belonged to a more emotional race he would probably have kissed Mrs Mullet.

  ‘How wonderful lucky to have pulled it off at last! Now you can buy a decent animal. I’ve always said that Toby was clever. Ever so many congratulations.’

  ‘Don’t congratulate me. It’s the most unfortunate thing that could have happened!’ said Mrs Mullet dramatically.

  Clovis stared at her in amazement.

  ‘Mr Penricarde,’ said Mrs Mullet, sinking her voice to what she imagined to be an impressive whisper, though it rather resembled a hoarse, excited squeak, ‘Mr Penricarde has just begun to pay attentions to Jessie. Slight at first, but now unmistakable. I was a fool not to have seen it sooner. Yesterday, at the Rectory garden party, he asked her what her favourite flowers were, and she told him carnations, and today a whole stack of carnations has arrived, clove and malmaison and lovely dark red ones, regular exhibition blooms, and a box of chocolates that he must have got on purpose from London. And he’s asked her to go round the links with him tomorrow. And now just at this critical moment, Toby has sold him that animal. It’s a calamity!’

  ‘But you’ve been trying to get the horse off your hands for years,’ said Clovis.

  ‘I’ve got a houseful of daughters,’ said Mrs Mullet, ‘and I’ve been trying – well, not to get them off my hands, of course, but a husband or two wouldn’t be amiss among the lot of them; there are six of them, you know.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Clovis, ‘I’ve never counted, but I expect you’re right as to the number; mothers generally know these things.’

  ‘And now,’ continued Mrs Mullet, in her tragic whisper, ‘when there’s a rich husband-in-prospect imminent on the horizon Toby goes and sells him that miserable animal. It will probably kill him if he tries to ride it; anyway it will kill any affection he might have felt towards any member of our family. What is to be done? We can’t very well ask to have the horse back; you see, we praised it up like anything when we thought there was a chance of his buying it, and said it was just the animal to suit him.’

  ‘Couldn’t you steal it out of his stable and send it to grass at some farm miles away?’ suggested Clovis. ‘Write “Votes for Women” on the stable door, and the thing would pass for a Suffragette outrage. No one who knew the horse could possibly suspect you of wanting to get it back again.’

  ‘Every newspaper in the country would ring with the affair,’ said Mrs Mullet; ‘can’t you imagine the headline, “Valuable Hunter Stolen by Suffragettes”? The police would scour the countryside till they found the animal.’

  ‘Well, Jessie must try and get it back from Penricarde on the plea that it’s an old favourite. She can say it was only sold because the stable had to be pulled down under the terms of an old repairing lease, and that now it has been arranged that the stable is to stand for a couple of years longer.’

  ‘It sounds a queer proceeding to ask for a horse back when you’ve just sold him,’ said Mrs Mullet, ‘but something must be done, and done at once. The man is not used to horses, and I believe I told him it was as quiet as a lamb. After all, lambs go kicking and twisting about as if they were demented, don’t they?’

  ‘The lamb has an entirely unmerited character for sedateness,’ agreed Clovis.

  Jessie came back from the golf links next day in a state of mingled elation and concern.

  ‘It’s all right about the proposal,’ she announced, ‘he came out with it at the sixth hole. I said I must have time to think it over. I accepted him at the seventh.’

  ‘My dear,’ said her mother, ‘I think a little more maidenly reserve and hesitation would have been advisable, as you’ve known him so short a time. You might have waited till the ninth hole.’

  ‘The seventh is a very long hole,’ said Jessie; ‘besides, the tension was putting us both off our game. By the time we’d got to the ninth hole we’d settled lots of things. The honeymoon is to be spent in Corsica, with perhaps a flying visit to Naples if we feel like it, and a week in London to wind up with. Two of his nieces are to be asked to be bridesmaids, so with our lot there will be seven, which is rather a lucky number. You are to wear your pearl grey, with any amount of Honiton lace jabbed into it. By the way, he’s coming over this evening to ask your consent to the whole affair. So far all’s well, but about the Brogue it’s a different matter. I told him the legend about the stable, and how keen we were about buying the horse back, but he seems equally keen on keeping it. He said he must have horse exercise now that he’s living in the country, and he’s going to start riding tomorrow. He’s ridden a few times in the Row on an animal that was accustomed to carry octogenarians and people undergoing rest cures, and that’s about all his experience in the saddle – oh, and he rode a pony once in Norfolk, when he was fifteen and the pony twenty-four; and tomorrow he’s going to ride the Brogue! I shall be a widow before I’m married, and I do so want to see what Corsica’s like; it looks so silly on the map.’

  Clovis was sent for in haste, and the developments of the situati
on put before him.

  ‘Nobody can ride that animal with any safety,’ said Mrs Mullet, ‘except Toby, and he knows by long experience what it is going to shy at, and manages to swerve at the same time.’

  ‘I did hint to Mr Penricarde – to Vincent, I should say – that the Brogue didn’t like white gates,’ said Jessie.

  ‘White gates!’ exclaimed Mrs Mullet; ‘did you mention what effect a pig has on him? He’ll have to go past Lockyer’s farm to get to the high road, and there’s sure to be a pig or two grunting about in the lane.’

  ‘He’s taken rather a dislike to turkeys lately,’ said Toby.

  ‘It’s obvious that Penricarde mustn’t be allowed to go out on that animal,’ said Clovis, ‘at least not till Jessie has married him, and tired of him. I tell you what: ask him to a picnic tomorrow, starting at an early hour; he’s not the sort to go out for a ride before breakfast. The day after I’ll get the rector to drive him over to Crowleigh before lunch, to see the new cottage hospital they’re building there. The Brogue will be standing idle in the stable and Toby can offer to exercise it; then it can pick up a stone or something of the sort and go conveniently lame. If you hurry on the wedding a bit the lameness fiction can be kept up till the ceremony is safely over.’

  Mrs Mullet belonged to an emotional race, and she kissed Clovis.

  It was nobody’s fault that the rain came down in torrents the next morning, making a picnic a fantastic impossibility. It was also nobody’s fault, but sheer ill-luck, that the weather cleared up sufficiently in the afternoon to tempt Mr Penricarde to make his first essay with the Brogue. They did not get as far as the pigs at Lockyer’s farm; the rectory gate was painted a dull unobtrusive green, but it had been white a year or two ago, and the Brogue never forgot that he had been in the habit of making a violent curtsey, a back-pedal and a swerve at this particular point of the road. Subsequently, there being apparently no further call on his services, he broke his way into the rectory orchard, where he found a hen turkey in a coop; later visitors to the orchard found the coop almost intact, but very little left of the turkey.

  Mr Penricarde, a little stunned and shaken, and suffering from a bruised knee and some minor damages, good-naturedly ascribed the accident to his own inexperience with horses and country roads, and allowed Jessie to nurse him back into complete recovery and golf-fitness within something less than a week.

  In the list of wedding presents which the local newspaper published a fortnight or so later appeared the following item:

  ‘Brown saddle-horse, “The Brogue”, bridegroom’s gift: to bride.’

  ‘Which shows,’ said Toby Mullet, ‘that he knew nothing.’

  ‘Or else,’ said Clovis, ‘that he has a very pleasing wit.’

  The Hen

  ‘Dora Bittholz is coming on Thursday,’ said Mrs Sangrail.

  ‘This next Thursday?’ asked Clovis.

  His mother nodded.

  ‘You’ve rather done it, haven’t you?’ he chuckled. ‘Jane Martlet has only been here five days, and she never stays less than a fortnight, even when she’s asked definitely for a week. You’ll never get her out of the house by Thursday.’

  ‘Why should I?’ asked Mrs Sangrail. ‘She and Dora are good friends, aren’t they? They used to be, as far as I remember.’

  ‘They used to be; that’s what makes them all the more bitter now. Each feels that she has nursed a viper in her bosom. Nothing fans the flame of human resentment so much as the discovery that one’s bosom has been utilised as a snake sanatorium.’

  ‘But what has happened? Has some one been making mischief?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Clovis; ‘a hen came between them.’

  ‘A hen? What hen?’

  ‘It was a bronze Leghorn or some such exotic breed, and Dora sold it to Jane at a rather exotic price. They both go in for prize poultry, you know, and Jane thought she was going to get her money back in a large family of pedigree chickens. The bird turned out to be an abstainer from the egg habit, and I’m told that the letters which passed between the two women were a revelation as to how much invective could be got on to a sheet of notepaper.’

  ‘How ridiculous!’ said Mrs Sangrail. ‘Couldn’t some of their friends compose the quarrel?’

  ‘People tried,’ said Clovis, ‘but it must have been rather like composing the storm music of the “Fliegende Holländer”. Jane was willing to take back some of her most libellous remarks if Dora would take back the hen, but Dora said that would be owning herself in the wrong, and you know she’d as soon think of owning slum property in Whitechapel as do that.’

  ‘It’s a most awkward situation,’ said Mrs Sangrail. ‘Do you suppose they won’t speak to one another?’

  ‘On the contrary, the difficulty will be to get them to leave off. Their remarks on each other’s conduct and character have hitherto been governed by the fact that only four ounces of plain speaking can be sent through the post for a penny.’

  ‘I can’t put Dora off,’ said Mrs Sangrail. ‘I’ve already postponed her visit once, and nothing short of a miracle would make Jane leave before her self-allotted fortnight is over.’

  ‘Miracles are rather in my line,’ said Clovis. ‘I don’t pretend to be very hopeful in this case, but I’ll do my best.’

  ‘As long as you don’t drag me into it –’ stipulated his mother.

  ‘Servants are a bit of a nuisance,’ muttered Clovis, as he sat in the smoking-room after lunch, talking fitfully to Jane Martlet in the intervals of putting together the materials of a cocktail, which he had irreverently patented under the name of an Ella Wheeler Wilcox. It was partly compounded of old brandy and partly of curaçao; there were other ingredients, but they were never indiscriminately revealed.

  ‘Servants a nuisance!’ exclaimed Jane, bounding into the topic with the exuberant plunge of a hunter when it leaves the high road and feels turf under its hoofs; ‘I should think they were! The trouble I’ve had in getting suited this year you would hardly believe. But I don’t see what you have to complain of – your mother is so wonderfully lucky in her servants. Sturridge, for instance – he’s been with you for years, and I’m sure he’s a paragon as butlers go.’

  ‘That’s just the trouble,’ said Clovis. ‘It’s when servants have been with you for years that they become a really serious nuisance. The “here today and gone tomorrow” sort don’t matter – you’ve simply got to replace them; it’s the stayers and the paragons that are the real worry.’

  ‘But if they give satisfaction –’

  ‘That doesn’t prevent them from giving trouble. Now, you’ve mentioned Sturridge – it was Sturridge I was particularly thinking of when I made the observation about servants being a nuisance.’

  ‘The excellent Sturridge a nuisance! I can’t believe it.’

  ‘I know he’s excellent, and we just couldn’t get along without him; he’s the one reliable element in this rather haphazard household. But his very orderliness has had an effect on him. Have you ever considered what it must be like to go on unceasingly doing the correct thing in the correct manner in the same surroundings for the greater part of a lifetime? To know and ordain and superintend exactly what silver and glass and table linen shall be used and set out on what occasions, to have cellar and pantry and plate-cupboard under a minutely devised and undeviating administration, to be noiseless, impalpable, omnipresent, and, as far as your own department is concerned, omniscient?’

  ‘I should go mad,’ said Jane with conviction.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Clovis thoughtfully, swallowing his completed Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

  ‘But Sturridge hasn’t gone mad,’ said Jane with a flutter of inquiry in her voice.

  ‘On most points he’s thoroughly sane and reliable,’ said Clovis, ‘but at times he is subject to the most obstinate delusions, and on those occasions he becomes not merely a nuisance but a decided embarrassment.’

  ‘What sort of delusions?’

  ‘Unfortunately the
y usually centre round one of the guests of the house party, and that is where the awkwardness comes in. For instance, he took it into his head that Matilda Sheringham was the Prophet Elijah, and as all that he remembered about Elijah’s history was the episode of the ravens in the wilderness he absolutely declined to interfere with what he imagined to be Matilda’s private catering arrangements, wouldn’t allow any tea to be sent up to her in the morning, and if he was waiting at table he passed her over altogether in handing round the dishes.’

  ‘How very unpleasant. Whatever did you do about it?’

  ‘Oh, Matilda got fed, after a fashion, but it was judged to behest for her to cut her visit short. It was really the only thing to be done,’ said Clovis with some emphasis.

  ‘I shouldn’t have done that,’ said Jane, ‘I should have humoured him in some way. I certainly shouldn’t have gone away.’

  Clovis frowned.

  ‘It is not always wise to humour people when they get these ideas into their heads. There’s no knowing to what lengths they may go if you encourage them.’

  ‘You don’t mean to say he might be dangerous, do you?’ asked Jane with some anxiety.

  ‘One can never be certain,’ said Clovis; ‘now and then he gets some idea about a guest which might take an unfortunate turn. That is precisely what is worrying me at the present moment.’

  ‘What, has he taken a fancy about some one here now?’ asked Jane excitedly. ‘How thrilling! Do tell me who it is.’

  ‘You,’ said Clovis briefly.

  ‘Me?’

  Clovis nodded.

  ‘Who on earth does he think I am?’

  ‘Queen Anne,’ was the unexpected answer.

  ‘Queen Anne! What an idea. But, anyhow, there’s nothing dangerous about her; she’s such a colourless personality.’

  ‘What does posterity chiefly say about Queen Anne?’ asked Clovis rather sternly.