Гектор Манро: The Complete Short Stories of Saki

‘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.’

‘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.

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 those 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.