The Complete Short Stories of Saki Read online

  ‘Which reminds me that I can’t remember whether I accepted an invitation from you to dine at Kettner’s tonight.’

  ‘On the other hand, I can remember with startling distinctness not having asked you to.’

  ‘So much certainty is unbecoming in the young; so we’ll consider that settled. What were you talking about? Oh, pictures. Personally, I rather like them; they are so refreshingly real and probable, they take one away from the unrealities of life.’

  ‘One likes to escape from oneself occasionally.’

  ‘That is the disadvantage of a portrait; as a rule, one’s bitterest friends can find nothing more to ask than the faithful unlikeness that goes down to posterity as oneself. I hate posterity – it’s so fond of having the last word. Of course, as regards portraits, there are exceptions.’

  ‘For instance?’

  ‘To die before being painted by Sargent is to go to heaven prematurely.’

  ‘With the necessary care and impatience, you may avoid that catastrophe.’

  ‘If you’re going to be rude,’ said Reginald, ‘I shall dine with you tomorrow night as well. The chief vice of the Academy,’ he continued, ‘is its nomenclature. Why, for instance, should an obvious trout-stream with a palpable rabbit sitting in the foreground be called “an evening dream of unbeclouded peace”, or something of that sort?’

  ‘You think,’ said the Other, ‘that a name should economise description rather than stimulate imagination?’

  ‘Properly chosen, it should do both. There is my lady kitten at home, for instance; I’ve called it Derry.’

  ‘Suggests nothing to my imagination but protracted sieges and religious animosities. Of course, I don’t know your kitten –’

  ‘Oh, you’re silly. It’s a sweet name, and it answers to it – when it wants to. Then, if there are any unseemly noises in the night, they can be explained succinctly: Derry and Toms.’

  ‘You might almost charge for the advertisement. But as applied to pictures, don’t you think your system would be too subtle, say, for the Country Cousins?’

  ‘Every reformation must have its victims. You can’t expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal’s return. Another darling weakness of the Academy is that none of its luminaries must “arrive” in a hurry. You can see them coming for years, like a Balkan trouble or a street improvement, and by the time they have painted a thousand or so square yards of canvas, their work begins to be recognised.’

  ‘Some one who Must Not be Contradicted said that a man must be a success by the time he’s thirty, or never.’

  ‘To have reached thirty,’ said Reginald, ‘is to have failed in life.’

  Reginald at the Theatre

  ‘After all,’ said the Duchess vaguely, ‘there are certain things you can’t get away from. Right and wrong, good conduct and moral rectitude, have certain well-defined limits.’

  ‘So, for the matter of that,’ replied Reginald, ‘has the Russian Empire. The trouble is that the limits are not always in the same place.’

  Reginald and the Duchess regarded each other with mutual distrust, tempered by a scientific interest. Reginald considered that the Duchess had much to learn; in particular, not to hurry out of the Carlton as though afraid of losing one’s last ’bus. A woman, he said, who is careless of disappearances is capable of leaving town before Goodwood, and dying at the wrong moment of an unfashionable disease.

  The Duchess thought that Reginald did not exceed the ethical standard which circumstances demanded.

  ‘Of course,’ she resumed combatively, ‘it’s the prevailing fashion to believe in perpetual change and mutability, and all that sort of thing, and to say we are all merely an improved form of primeval ape – of course you subscribe to that doctrine?’

  ‘I think it decidedly premature; in most people I know the process is far from complete.’

  ‘And equally of course you are quite irreligious?’

  ‘Oh, by no means. The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience: you get the medieval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other.’

  The Duchess suppressed a sniff. She was one of those people who regard the Church of England with patronising affection, as if it were something that had grown up in their kitchen garden.

  ‘But there are other things,’ she continued, ‘which I suppose are to a certain extent sacred even to you. Patriotism, for instance, and Empire, and Imperial responsibility, and blood-is-thicker-than water, and all that sort of thing.’

  Reginald waited for a couple of minutes before replying, while the Lord of Rimini temporarily monopolised the acoustic possibilities of the theatre.

  ‘That is the worst of a tragedy,’ he observed, ‘one can’t always hear oneself talk. Of course I accept the Imperial idea and the responsibility. After all, I would just as soon think in Continents as anywhere else. And some day, when the season is over and we have the time, you shall explain to me the exact blood-brotherhood and all that sort of thing that exists between a French Canadian and a mild Hindoo and a Yorkshireman, for instance.’

  ‘Oh, well, “dominion over palm and pine”, you know,’ quoted the Duchess hopefully; ‘of course we mustn’t forget that we’re all part of the great Anglo-Saxon Empire.’

  ‘Which for its part is rapidly becoming a suburb of Jerusalem. A very pleasant suburb, I admit, and quite a charming Jerusalem. But still a suburb.’

  ‘Really, to be told one’s living in a suburb when one is conscious of spreading the benefits of civilisation all over the world! Philanthropy – I suppose you will say that is a comfortable delusion; and yet even you must admit that whenever want or misery or starvation is known to exist, however distant or difficult of access, we instantly organise relief on the most generous scale, and distribute it, if need be, to the uttermost ends of the earth.’

  The Duchess paused, with a sense of ultimate triumph. She had made the same observation at a drawing-room meeting, and it had been extremely well received.

  ‘I wonder,’ said Reginald, ‘if you have ever walked down the Embankment on a winter night?’

  ‘Gracious, no, child. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I didn’t; I only wondered. And even your philanthropy, practised in a world where everything is based on competition, must have a debit as well as a credit account. The young ravens cry for food.’

  ‘And are fed.’

  ‘Exactly. Which presupposes that something else is fed upon.’

  ‘Oh, you’re simply exasperating. You’ve been reading Nietzsche till you haven’t got any sense of moral proportion left. May I ask if you are governed by any laws of conduct whatever?’

  ‘There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one’s own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive, grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.’

  ‘The restraint must be dreadfully irksome to you. When I was younger, boys of your age used to be nice and innocent.’

  ‘Now we are only nice. One must specialise in these days. Which reminds me of the man I read of in some sacred book who was given a choice of what he most desired. And because he didn’t ask for titles and honours and dignities, but only for immense wealth, these other things came to him also.’

  ‘I am sure you didn’t read about him in any sacred book.’

  ‘Yes; I fancy you will find him in Debrett.’

  Reginald’s Peace Poem

  ‘I’m writing a poem on Peace,’ said Reginald, emerging from a sweeping operation through a tin of mixed biscuits, in whose depths a macaroon or two might yet be lurking.

  ‘Something of the kind seems to have been attempted already,’ said the Other.

  ‘Oh, I know; but I may never have the chance again. Besides, I’ve got a new fountain-pen. I don’t pretend to have gone on any very original lines; in writing about Peace the t
hing is to say what everybody else is saying, only to say it better. It begins with the usual ornithological emotion:

  When the widgeon westward winging

  Heard the folk Vereeniginging,

  Heard the shouting and the singing –’

  ‘Vereeniginging is good, but why widgeon?’

  ‘Why not? Anything that winged westward would naturally begin with a w.’

  ‘Need it wing westward?’

  ‘The bird must go somewhere. You wouldn’t have it hang around and look foolish. Then I’ve brought in something about the heedless hartebeest galloping over the deserted veldt.’

  ‘Of course you know it’s practically extinct in those regions?’

  ‘I can’t help that, it gallops so nicely. I make it have all sorts of unexpected yearnings:

  Mother, may I go and maffick,

  Tear around and hinder traffic?

  Of course you’ll say there would be no traffic worth bothering about on the bare and sun-scorched veldt, but there’s no other word that rhymes with maffick.’

  ‘Seraphic?’

  Reginald considered. ‘It might do, but I’ve got a lot about angels later on. You must have angels in a Peace poem; I know dreadfully little about their habits.’

  ‘They can do unexpected things, like the hartebeest.’

  ‘Of course. Then I turn on London, the City of Dreadful Nocturnes, resonant with hymns of joy and thanksgiving:

  And the sleeper, eye unlidding,

  Heard a voice for ever bidding

  Much farewell to Dolly Gray;

  Turning weary on his truckle-

  Bed he heard the honey-suckle

  Lauded in apiarian lay.

  Longfellow at his best wrote nothing like that.’

  ‘I agree with you.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t. I’ve a sweet temper, but I can’t stand being agreed with. And I’m so worried about the aasvogel.’

  Reginald stared dismally at the biscuit-tin, which now presented an unattractive array of rejected cracknels.

  ‘I believe,’ he murmured, ‘if I could find a woman with an unsatisfied craving for cracknels, I should marry her.’

  ‘What is the tragedy of the aasvogel?’ asked the Other sympathetically.

  ‘Oh, simply that there’s no rhyme for it. I thought about it all the time I was dressing – it’s dreadfully bad for one to think whilst one’s dressing – and all lunch-time, and I’m still hung up over it. I feel like those unfortunate automobilists who achieve an unenviable notoriety by coming to a hopeless stop with their cars in the most crowded thoroughfares. I’m afraid I shall have to drop the aasvogel, and it did give such lovely local colour to the thing.’

  ‘Still you’ve got the heedless hartebeest.’

  ‘And quite a decorative bit of moral admonition – when you’ve worried the meaning out –

  Cease, War, thy bubbling madness that the wine shares,

  And bid thy legions turn their swords to mine shares.

  Mine shares seems to fit the case better than ploughshares. There’s lots more about the blessings of Peace, shall I go on reading it?’

  ‘If I must make a choice, I think I would rather they went on with the war.’

  Reginald’s Choir Treat

  ‘Never,’ wrote Reginald to his most darling friend, ‘be a pioneer. It’s the Early Christian that gets the fattest lion.’

  Reginald, in his way, was a pioneer.

  None of the rest of his family had anything approaching Titian hair or a sense of humour, and they used primroses as a table decoration.

  It follows that they never understood Reginald, who came down late to breakfast, and nibbled toast, and said disrespectful things about the universe. The family ate porridge, and believed in everything, even the weather forecast.

  Therefore the family was relieved when the vicar’s daughter undertook the reformation of Reginald. Her name was Annabel; it was the vicar’s one extravagance. Annabel was accounted a beauty and intellectually gifted; she never played tennis, and was reputed to have read Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee. If you abstain from tennis and read Maeterlinck in a small country village, you are of necessity intellectual. Also she had been twice to Fécamp to pick up a good French accent from the Americans staying there; consequently she had a knowledge of the world which might be considered useful in dealings with a worldling.

  Hence the congratulations in the family when Annabel undertook the reformation of its wayward member.

  Annabel commenced operations by asking her unsuspecting pupil to tea in the vicarage garden; she believed in the healthy influence of natural surroundings, never having been in Sicily, where things are different.

  And like every woman who has ever preached repentance to unregenerate youth, she dwelt on the sin of an empty life, which always seems so much more scandalous in the country, where people rise early to see if a new strawberry has happened during the night.

  Reginald recalled the lilies of the field, ‘which simply sat and looked beautiful, and defied competition’.

  ‘But that is not an example for us to follow,’ gasped Annabel.

  ‘Unfortunately, we can’t afford to. You don’t know what a world of trouble I take in trying to rival the lilies in their artistic simplicity.’

  ‘You are really indecently vain of your appearance. A good life is infinitely preferable to good looks.’

  ‘You agree with me that the two are incompatible. I always say beauty is only sin deep.’

  Annabel began to realise that the battle is not always to the strong-minded. With the immemorial resource of her sex, she abandoned the frontal attack and laid stress on her unassisted labours in parish work, her mental loneliness, her discouragements – and at the right moment she produced strawberries and cream. Reginald was obviously affected by the latter, and when his preceptress suggested that he might begin the strenuous life by helping her to supervise the annual outing of the bucolic infants who composed the local choir, his eyes shone with the dangerous enthusiasm of a convert.

  Reginald entered on the strenuous life alone, as far as Annabel was concerned. The most virtuous women are not proof against damp grass, and Annabel kept to her bed with a cold. Reginald called it a dispensation; it had been the dream of his life to stage-manage a choir outing. With strategic insight, he led his shy, bullet-headed charges to the nearest woodland stream and allowed them to bathe; then he seated himself on their discarded garments and discoursed on their immediate future, which, he decreed, was to embrace a Bacchanalian procession through the village. Forethought had provided the occasion with a supply of tin whistles, but the introduction of a he-goat from a neighbouring orchard was a brilliant afterthought. Properly, Reginald explained, there should have been an outfit of panther skins; as it was, those who had spotted handkerchiefs were allowed to wear them, which they did with thankfulness. Reginald recognised the impossibility, in the time at his disposal, of teaching his shivering neophytes a chant in honour of Bacchus, so he started them off with a more familiar, if less appropriate, temperance hymn. After all he said, it is the spirit of the thing that counts. Following the etiquette of dramatic authors on first nights, he remained discreetly in the background while the procession, with extreme diffidence and the goat, wound its way lugubriously towards the village. The singing had died down long before the main street was reached, but the miserable wailing of pipes brought the inhabitants to their doors. Reginald said he had seen something like it in pictures; the villagers had seen nothing like it in their lives, and remarked as much freely.

  Reginald’s family never forgave him. They had no sense of humour.

  Reginald on Worries

  I have (said Reginald) an aunt who worries. She’s not really an aunt – a sort of amateur one, and they aren’t really worries. She is a social success, and has no domestic tragedies worth speaking of, so she adopts any decorative sorrows that are going, myself included. In that way she’s the antithesis, or whatever you call it, to tho
se sweet, uncomplaining women one knows who have seen trouble, and worn blinkers ever since. Of course, one just loves them for it, but I must confess they make me uncomfy; they remind one so of a duck that goes flapping about with forced cheerfulness long after its head’s been cut off. Ducks have no repose. Now, my aunt has a shade of hair that suits her, and a cook who quarrels with the other servants, which is always a hopeful sign, and a conscience that’s absentee for about eleven months of the year, and only turns up at Lent to annoy her husband’s people, who are considerably Lower than the angels, so to speak: with all these natural advantages – she says her particular tint of bronze is a natural advantage, and there can be no two opinions as to the advantage – of course she has to send out for her afflictions, like those restaurants where they haven’t got a licence. The system has this advantage, that you can fit your unhappinesses in with your other engagements, whereas real worries have a way of arriving at meal-times, and when you’re dressing, or other solemn moments. I knew a canary once that had been trying for months and years to hatch out a family, and every one looked upon it as a blameless infatuation, like the sale of Delagoa Bay, which would be an annual loss to the Press agencies if it ever came to pass; and one day the bird really did bring it off, in the middle of family prayers. I say the middle, but it was also the end: you can’t go on being thankful for daily bread when you are wondering what on earth very new canaries expect to be fed on.

  At present she’s rather in a Balkan state of mind about the treatment of the Jews in Roumania. Personally, I think the Jews have estimable qualities; they’re so kind to their poor – and to our rich. I daresay in Roumania the cost of living beyond one’s income isn’t so great. Over here the trouble is that so many people who have money to throw about seem to have such vague ideas where to throw it. That fund, for instance, to relieve the victims of sudden disasters – what is a sudden disaster? There’s Marion Mulciber, who would think she could play bridge, just as she would think she could ride down a hill on a bicycle; on that occasion she went to a hospital, now she’s gone into a Sisterhood – lost all she had, you know, and gave the rest to Heaven. Still, you can’t call it a sudden calamity; that occurred when poor dear Marion was born. The doctors said at the time that she couldn’t live more than a fortnight, and she’s been trying ever since to see if she could. Women are so opinionated.