The Complete Short Stories of Saki Page 10

  And then a simultaneous idea flashed on himself and Mrs Hoopington. Their faces flushed to distinct but harmonious tones of purple, and with one accusing voice they screamed, ‘You’ve shot the fox!’

  Norah tried hastily to palliate Vladimir’s misdeed in their eyes, but it is doubtful whether they heard her. The Major’s fury clothed and reclothed itself in words as frantically as a woman up in town for one day’s shopping tries on a succession of garments. He reviled and railed at fate and the general scheme of things, he pitied himself with a strong, deep pity too poignant for tears, he condemned every one with whom he had ever come in contact to endless and abnormal punishments. In fact, he conveyed the impression that if a destroying angel had been lent to him for a week it would have had very little time for private study. In the lulls of his outcry could be heard the querulous monotone of Mrs Hoopington and the sharp staccato barking of the fox-terrier. Vladimir, who did not understand a tithe of what was being said, sat fondling a cigarette and repeating under his breath from time to time a vigorous English adjective which he had long ago taken affectionately into his vocabulary. His mind strayed back to the youth in the old Russian folk-tale who shot an enchanted bird with dramatic results. Meanwhile, the Major, roaming round the hall like an imprisoned cyclone, had caught sight of and joyfully pounced on the telephone apparatus, and lost no time in ringing up the hunt secretary and announcing his resignation of the Mastership. A servant had by this time brought his horse round to the door, and in a few seconds Mrs Hoopington’s shrill monotone had the field to itself. But after the Major’s display her best efforts at vocal violence missed their full effect; it was as though one had come straight out from a Wagner opera into a rather tame thunderstorm. Realising, perhaps, that her tirades were something of an anticlimax, Mrs Hoopington broke suddenly into some rather necessary tears and marched out of the room, leaving behind her a silence almost as terrible as the turmoil which had preceded it.

  ‘What shall I do with – that?’ asked Vladimir at last.

  ‘Bury it,’ said Norah.

  ‘Just plain burial?’ said Vladimir, rather relieved. He had almost expected that some of the local clergy would have insisted on being present, or that a salute might have to be fired over the grave.

  And thus it came to pass that in the dusk of a November evening the Russian boy, murmuring a few of the prayers of his Church for luck, gave hasty but decent burial to a large polecat under the lilac trees at Hoopington.

  The Strategist

  Mrs Jallatt’s young people’s parties were severely exclusive; it came cheaper that way, because you could ask fewer to them. Mrs Jallatt didn’t study cheapness, but somehow she generally attained it.

  ‘There’ll be about ten girls,’ speculated Rollo, as he drove to the function, ‘and I suppose four fellows, unless the Wrotsleys bring their cousin, which Heaven forbid. That would mean Jack and me against three of them.’

  Rollo and the Wrotsley brethren had maintained an undying feud almost from nursery days. They only met now and then in the holidays, and the meeting was usually tragic for whichever happened to have the fewest backers on hand. Rollo was counting tonight on the presence of a devoted and muscular partisan to hold an even balance. As he arrived he heard his prospective champion’s sister apologising to the hostess for the unavoidable absence of her brother; a moment later he noted that the Wrotsleys had brought their cousin.

  Two against three would have been exciting and possibly unpleasant; one against three promised to be about as amusing as a visit to a dentist. Rollo ordered his carriage for as early as was decently possible, and faced the company with a smile that he imagined the better sort of aristocrat would have worn when mounting to the guillotine.

  ‘So glad you were able to come,’ said the elder Wrotsley heartily.

  ‘Now, you children will like to play games, I suppose,’ said Mrs Jallatt, by way of giving things a start, and as they were too well-bred to contradict her there only remained the question of what they were to play at.

  ‘I know of a good game,’ said the elder Wrotsley innocently. ‘The fellows leave the room and think of a word; then they come back again, and the girls have to find out what the word is.’

  Rollo knew that game. He would have suggested it himself if his faction had been in the majority.

  ‘It doesn’t promise to be very exciting,’ sniffed the superior Dolores Sneep as the boys filed out of the room. Rollo thought differently. He trusted to Providence that Wrotsley had nothing worse than knotted handkerchiefs at his disposal.

  The word-choosers locked themselves in the library to ensure that their deliberations should not be interrupted. Providence turned out to be not even decently neutral; on a rack on the library wall were a dog-whip and a whalebone riding switch. Rollo thought it criminal negligence to leave such weapons of precision lying about. He was given a choice of evils, and chose the dog-whip; the next minute or so he spent in wondering how he could have made such a stupid selection. Then they went back to the languidly expectant females.

  ‘The word’s “camel”,’ announced the Wrotsley cousin blunderingly.

  ‘You stupid!’ screamed the girls, ‘we’ve got to guess the word. Now you’ll have to go back and think of another.’

  ‘Not for worlds,’ said Rollo; ‘I mean, the word isn’t really camel; we were rotting. Pretend it’s dromedary!’ he whispered to the others.

  ‘I heard them say “dromedary”! I heard them. I don’t care what you say; I heard them,’ squealed the odious Dolores. ‘With ears as long as hers one would hear anything,’ thought Rollo savagely.

  ‘We shall have to go back, I suppose,’ said the elder Wrotsley resignedly.

  The conclave locked itself once more into the library. ‘Look here, I’m not going through that dog-whip business again,’ protested Rollo.

  ‘Certainly not, dear,’ said the elder Wrotsley; ‘we’ll try the whalebone switch this time, and then you’ll know which hurts most. It’s only by personal experience that one finds out these things.’

  It was swiftly borne in upon Rollo that his earlier selection of the dog-whip had been a really sound one. The conclave gave his under-lip time to steady itself while it debated the choice of the necessary word. ‘Mustang’ was no good, as half the girls wouldn’t know what it meant; finally ‘quagga’ was pitched on.

  ‘You must come and sit down over here,’ chorused the investigating committee on their return; but Rollo was obdurate in insisting that the questioned person always stood up. On the whole, it was a relief when the game ended and supper was announced.

  Mrs Jallatt did not stint her young guests, but the more expensive delicacies of her supper-table were never unnecessarily duplicated, and it was usually good policy to take what you wanted while it was still there. On this occasion she had provided sixteen peaches to ‘go round’ among fourteen children; it was really not her fault that the two Wrotsleys and their cousin, foreseeing the long foodless drive home, had each quietly pocketed an extra peach, but it was distinctly trying for Dolores and the fat and good-natured Agnes Blaik to be left with one peach between them.

  ‘I suppose we had better halve it,’ said Dolores sourly.

  But Agnes was fat first and good-natured afterwards; those were her guiding principles in life. She was profuse in her sympathy for Dolores, but she hastily devoured the peach, explaining that it would spoil it to divide it; the juice ran out so.

  ‘Now what would you all like to do?’ demanded Mrs Jallatt by way of a diversion. ‘The professional conjurer whom I had engaged has failed me at the last moment. Can any of you recite?’

  There were symptoms of a general panic. Dolores was known to recite ‘Locksley Hall’ on the least provocation. There had been occasions when her opening line, ‘Comrades, leave me here a little,’ had been taken as a literal injunction by a large section of her hearers. There was a murmur of relief when Rollo hastily declared that he could do a few conjuring tricks. He had never done one in his
life, but those two visits to the library had goaded him to unusual recklessness.

  ‘You’ve seen conjuring chaps take coins and cards out of people,’ he announced; ‘well, I’m going to take more interesting things out of some of you. Mice, for instance.’

  ‘Not mice!’

  A shrill protest rose, as he had foreseen, from the majority of his audience.

  ‘Well, fruit, then.’

  The amended proposal was received with approval. Agnes positively beamed.

  Without more ado Rollo made straight for his trio of enemies, plunged his hand successively into their breast-pockets, and produced three peaches. There was no applause, but no amount of hand-clapping would have given the performer as much pleasure as the silence which greeted his coup.

  ‘Of course, we were in the know,’ said the Wrotsley cousin lamely.

  ‘That’s done it,’ chuckled Rollo to himself.

  ‘If they had been confederates they would have sworn they knew nothing about it,’ said Dolores, with piercing conviction.

  ‘Do you know any more tricks?’ asked Mrs Jallatt hurriedly.

  Rollo did not. He hinted that he might have changed the three peaches into something else, but Agnes had already converted one into girl-food, so nothing more could be done in that direction.

  ‘I know a game,’ said the elder Wrotsley heavily, ‘where the fellows go out of the room, and think of some character in history; then they come back and act him, and the girls have to guess who it’s meant for.’

  ‘I’m afraid I must be going,’ said Rollo to his hostess.

  ‘Your carriage won’t be here for another twenty minutes,’ said Mrs Jallatt.

  ‘It’s such a fine evening I think I’ll walk and meet it.’

  ‘It’s raining rather steadily at present. You’ve just time to play that historical game.’

  ‘We haven’t heard Dolores recite,’ said Rollo desperately; as soon as he had said it he realised his mistake. Confronted with the alternative of ‘Locksley Hall,’ public opinion declared unanimously for the history game.

  Rollo played his last card. In an undertone meant apparently for the Wrotsley boy, but carefully pitched to reach Agnes, he observed:

  ‘All right, old man; we’ll go and finish those chocolates we left in the library.’

  ‘I think it’s only fair that the girls should take their turn in going out,’ exclaimed Agnes briskly. She was great on fairness.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said the others; ‘there are too many of us.’

  ‘Well, four of us can go. I’ll be one of them.’

  And Agnes darted off towards the library, followed by three less eager damsels.

  Rollo sank into a chair and smiled ever so faintly at the Wrotsleys, just a momentary baring of the teeth; an otter, escaping from the fangs of the hounds into the safety of a deep pool, might have given a similar demonstration of its feelings.

  From the library came the sound of moving furniture. Agnes was leaving nothing unturned in her quest for the mythical chocolates. And then came a more blessed sound, wheels crunching wet gravel.

  ‘It has been a most enjoyable evening,’ said Rollo to his hostess.

  Cross Currents

  Vanessa Pennington had a husband who was poor, with few extenuating circumstances, and an admirer who, though comfortably rich, was cumbered with a sense of honour. His wealth made him welcome in Vanessa’s eyes, but his code of what was right impelled him to go away and forget her, or at the most to think of her in the intervals of doing a great many other things. And although Alaric Clyde loved Vanessa, and thought he should always go on loving her, he gradually and unconsciously allowed himself to be wooed and won by a more alluring mistress; he fancied that his continued shunning of the haunts of men was a self-imposed exile, but his heart was caught in the spell of the Wilderness, and the Wilderness was kind and beautiful to him. When one is young and strong and unfettered the wild earth can be very kind and very beautiful. Witness the legion of men who were once young and unfettered and now eat out their souls in dustbins, because, having erstwhile known and loved the Wilderness, they broke from her thrall and turned aside into beaten paths.

  In the high waste places of the world Clyde roamed and hunted and dreamed, death-dealing and gracious as some god of Hellas, moving with his horses and servants and four-footed camp followers from one dwelling ground to another, a welcome guest among wild primitive village folk and nomads, a friend and slayer of the fleet, shy beasts around him. By the shores of misty upland lakes he shot the wild fowl that had winged their way to him across half the old world; beyond Bokhara he watched the wild Aryan horsemen at their gambols; watched, too, in some dim-lit tea-house one of those beautiful uncouth dances that one can never wholly forget; or, making a wide cast down to the valley of the Tigris, swam and rolled in its snow-cooled racing waters. Vanessa, meanwhile, in a Bayswater back street, was making out the weekly laundry list, attending bargain sales, and, in her more adventurous moments, trying new ways of cooking whiting. Occasionally she went to bridge parties, where, if the play was not illuminating, at least one learned a great deal about the private life of some of the Royal and Imperial Houses. Vanessa, in a way, was glad that Clyde had done the proper thing. She had a strong natural bias towards respectability, though she would have preferred to have been respectable in smarter surroundings, where her example would have done more good. To be beyond reproach was one thing, but it would have been nicer to have been nearer to the Park.

  And then of a sudden her regard for respectability and Clyde’s sense of what was right were thrown on the scrapheap of unnecessary things. They had been useful and highly important in their time, but the death of Vanessa’s husband made them of no immediate moment.

  The news of the altered condition of things followed Clyde with leisurely persistence from one place of call to another, and at last call him to a standstill somewhere in the Orenburg Steppe. He would have found it exceedingly difficult to analyse his feelings on receipt of the tidings. The Fates had unexpectedly (and perhaps just a little officiously) removed an obstacle from his path. He supposed he was overjoyed, but he missed the feeling of elation which he had experienced some four months ago when he had bagged a snow-leopard with a lucky shot after a day’s fruitless stalking. Of course he would go back and ask Vanessa to marry him, but he was determined on enforcing a condition: on no account would he desert his newer love. Vanessa would have to agree to come out into the Wilderness with him.

  The lady hailed the return of her lover with even more relief than had been occasioned by his departure. The death of John Pennington had left his widow in circumstances which were more straitened than ever, and the Park had receded even from her notepaper, where it had long been retained as a courtesy title on the principle that addresses are given to us to conceal our whereabouts. Certainly she was more independent now than heretofore, but independence, which means so much to many women, was of little account to Vanessa, who came under the heading of the mere female. She made little ado about accepting Clyde’s condition, and announced herself ready to follow him to the end of the world; as the world was round she nourished a complacent idea that in the ordinary course of things one would find oneself in the neighbourhood of Hyde Park Corner sooner or later no matter how far afield one wandered.

  East of Budapest her complacency began to filter away, and when she saw her husband treating the Black Sea with a familiarity which she had never been able to assume towards the English Channel, misgivings began to crowd in upon her. Adventures which would have presented an amusing and enticing aspect to a better-bred woman aroused in Vanessa only the twin sensations of fright and discomfort. Flies bit her, and she was persuaded that it was only sheer boredom that prevented camels from doing the same. Clyde did his best, and a very good best it was, to infuse something of the banquet into their prolonged desert picnics, but even snow-cooled Heidsieck lost its flavour when you were convinced that the dusky cupbearer who served it with such reveren
t elegance was only waiting a convenient opportunity to cut your throat. It was useless for Clyde to give Yussuf a character for devotion such as is rarely found in any Western servant. Vanessa was well enough educated to know that all dusky-skinned people take human life as unconcernedly as Bayswater folk take singing lessons.

  And with a growing irritation and querulousness on her part came a further disenchantment, born of the inability of husband and wife to find a common ground of interest. The habits and migrations of the sand grouse, the folklore and customs of Tartars and Turkomans, the points of a Cossack pony – these were matters which evoked only a bored indifference in Vanessa. On the other hand Clyde was not thrilled on being informed that the Queen of Spain detested mauve, or that a certain Royal duchess, for whose tastes he was never likely to be called on to cater, nursed a violent but perfectly respectable passion for beef olives.

  Vanessa began to arrive at the conclusion that a husband who added a roving disposition to a settled income was a mixed blessing. It was one thing to go to the end of the world; it was quite another thing to make oneself at home there. Even respectability seemed to lose some of its virtue when one practised it in a tent.

  Bored and disillusioned with the drift of her new life, Vanessa was undisguisedly glad when distraction offered itself in the person of Mr Dobrinton, a chance acquaintance whom they had first run against in the primitive hostelry of a benighted Caucasian town. Dobrinton was elaborately British, in deference perhaps to the memory of his mother, who was said to have derived part of her origin from an English governess who had come to Lemberg a long way back in the last century. If you had called him Dobrinski when off his guard he would probably have responded readily enough; holding, no doubt, that the end crowns all, he had taken a slight liberty with the family patronymic. To look at, Mr Dobrinton was not a very attractive specimen of masculine humanity, but in Vanessa’s eyes he was a link with that civilisation which Clyde seemed so ready to ignore and forgo. He could sing ‘Yip-I-Addy’ and spoke of several duchesses as if he knew them – in his more inspired moments almost as if they knew him. He even pointed out blemishes in the cuisine or cellar departments of some of the more august London restaurants, a species of Higher Criticism which was listened to by Vanessa in awestricken admiration. And, above all, he sympathised, at first discreetly, afterwards with more latitude, with her fretful discontent at Clyde’s nomadic instincts. Business connected with oil-wells had brought Dobrinton to the neighbourhood of Baku. The pleasure of appealing to an appreciative female audience induced him to deflect his return journey so as to coincide a good deal with his new acquaintances’ line of march. And while Clyde trafficked with Persian horse-dealers or hunted the wild grey pigs in their lairs and added to his notes on Central Asian game-fowl, Dobrinton and the lady discussed the ethics of desert respectability from points of view that showed a daily tendency to converge. And one evening Clyde dined alone, reading between the courses a long letter from Vanessa, justifying her action in flitting to more civilised lands with a more congenial companion.