As the name suggests, Saki’s propensity for introducing wild animals into sedate Edwardian society with comic, ironic or gruesome effect goes into overdrive in many of the stories in this collection. Beasts and Super-Beasts is a collection of 36 Saki short stories. I give brief plot summaries and one or two quotes from each story which either sum it up or are just good examples of Saki’s ironic humour. Many of them feature Saki’s fictional avatar, the slender, svelte and hyper-ironic young man, Clovis Sangrail. For interest, I indicate whether Clovis appears in a story, or not, in brackets after the title.

The She-Wolf (Clovis)

‘I think it very unkind of you not to carry out my suggestion of turning me into a wolf,’ said Mary Hampton, as she crossed over to the conservatory to give her macaws their usual tribute from the dessert dishes.

Leonard Bilsiter is a boring non-entity. He went travelling with a friend across Russia but got caught in the railway strike and spent longer than expected in the far East of the country. Upon returning he gave out dark hints that he had acquired secrets of Siberian magic. He attends a house party given by Colonel and Mrs Mary Hampton where the hostess, on impulse, asks Leonard to turn her into a wolf!

Her husband demurs but Saki’s trouble-making young man, Clovis Sangrail, is at table and afterwards asks Lord Pabham, famous for his private menagerie, whether he has a wolf he can borrow. Yes, Lord Pabham does possess such an animal, a fine timber wolf named Louisa. By dinner next day Clovis has also recruited Mary herself into an elaborate practical joke.

After dinner the guests retire to the conservatory where Mary once again asks Leonard to change her into a wolf, as she saunters among the palms, disappearing from view. Then the pet parrots start squawking and from among the palms emerges… a lean, evil-looking wolf! Women scream, the men leap to their feet! Everyone assumes Leonard has used his Siberian magic to turn Mary Hampton into a wolf and so they entreat Leonard to turn her back but, of course, he can’t.

‘What!’ shouted Colonel Hampton, ‘you’ve taken the abominable liberty of turning my wife into a wolf, and now you stand there calmly and say you can’t turn her back again!’…
‘I assure you I didn’t turn Mrs. Hampton into a wolf; nothing was farther from my intentions,’ [Leonard] protested.

Laura

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.’

Laura is dying, She tells her friend Amanda she’d like to be reincarnated as an otter. To Amanda’s amazement, soon after Laura’s death a cheeky otter starts terrorising the neighbour’s poultry. And that’s just the first in a series of unfortunate reincarnations.

The Boar-Pig

Mrs. Philidore Stossen leads her grown-up daughter on a short cut through a paddock in order to gatecrash Mrs Cuvering’s garden party, the garden party of the season, which ‘the Princess’ is attending. Everyone else in the county has been invited and Mrs Stossen is damned if she’s going to let herself be left out.

Unfortunately, Mrs Cuvering’s malicious 13-year-old daughter, Matilda, is watching from up in an apple tree. She knows the Stossens will find the back gate into the garden locked and will be forced to retrace their steps through the paddock. So she releases the Cuverings’ enormous, scary boar-pig, Tarquin Superbus, from its stye into the paddock which is where, as they disconsolately troop back from the locked back garden gate, Mrs. Philidore Stossen and her grown-up daughter encounter it and come to a dead halt out of fear.

Matilda then proceeds to shamelessly demand £2 from the hapless mother and daughter to clear the boar-pig out of their only route back to the main road. They argue her down to ten shillings.

The Brogue (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.’

The Brogue is a very rebellious, even dangerous, horse which the Mullet family have been trying to get rid of for years. Alas, they sell it to a rich neighbour Mr. Penricarde just as he starts to show an interest in one of Mrs Mullet’s endless brood of daughters, Jessie. They are all distraught that the mad horse will throw Penricarde and kill him before Jessie can marry him, so they turn for advice to the ever-resourceful Clovis Sangrail.

The Hen (Clovis)

‘But he might kill me at any moment,’ protested Jane.
‘Not at any moment; he’s busy with the silver all the afternoon.’

Dora sells Jane a bronze Leghorn or some such exotic breed of hen at a rather exotic price. The hen turns out not to lay eggs. The letters which subsequently pass between the two women were a revelation as to how much invective could be got on to a sheet of notepaper.

Which makes it awkward that Jane is staying with the Sangrails and Dora is due to come and visit before Jane has left. Clovis conceives a plan: He has a tete-a-tete with Jane in which he explains that the Sangrail family’s faithful old retainer, Sturridge, is an unpredictable homicidal maniac and has heard some irrational rumours about Jane, and might attack her at any moment.

Amazingly, even this direct threat is not enough to budge her. Not until Clovis sends the butler (all unwitting) into the drawing room with a ceremonial sword on the pretext that Jane is interested in its old inscription (which she isn’t). But when she spies the butler entering the drawing room where she’s sitting, bearing a heavy old sword, she scarpers out the back passage, and is packed and waiting to be driven to the station in half an hour dead!

The Open Window

‘The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent physical exercise,’ announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one’s ailments and infirmities, their cause and cure.

Framton Nuttel has been told to take a rest cure and go and stay in the country, so he’s making the rounds of a number of acquaintances and is currently staying with a Mrs Sappleton. One October afternoon the house is empty except for him and Mrs Sappleton’s 15-year-old niece, Vera. It is then that the niece tells him about the Great Tragedy. One day Mrs Sappleton’s husband and two brothers set off on a hunt and never came back, they were sucked down into the great bog and never returned.

Ever since that day her aunt has always kept the french windows open in the vain hope that they will magically return… She weaves such a persuasive story that when they both see three figures looming in the distance, the niece is suddenly struck dumb with horror and Framton catches her mood, is convinced they must be the ghosts, has a panic attack, grabs his stuff, bolts out the living room out the front door and along the lane (nearly knocking over a cyclist).

Meanwhile the menfolk walk back in through the door, accompanied by their loyal spaniel and muddy from their hunting, and ask who the man is who they saw bolting out of the room. Most peculiar chap, explains Mrs Sappleton, just upped and ran out for no reason at all. At which point Vera delivers the coup de grace of the story:

‘I expect it was the spaniel,’ said the niece calmly; ‘he told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve.’

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

Delicious.

The Treasure-Ship

Lulu, Duchess of Dulverton, is rich and interested in ancient treasure in old shipwrecks. She reads about a new device which can suck up debris from the ocean bed or sunken ships if you can locate them. She has a penniless nephew, Vasco Honiton, who’s quite handy and she commissions him to try out the equipment on the Irish coast, off a patch of land her family own. Unfortunately, Vasco locates the wreck of the Sub-Rosa, which went down when its owner, Billy Yuttley, was suspected of suicide. Vasco not only locates the Sub-Rosa but locates a watertight strongbox in its locker, scoops it up to the surface and discovers within it, papers proving a far-reaching scandal, papers which incriminate Lulu herself. Very calmly Vasco tells Lulu he is going to blackmail her and use the proceeds to buy a villa in Florence and live a life of leisure, possibly taking up as a hobby collecting the paintings of Raeburn.

The Cobweb

Haunting story of young Mrs. Ladbruk, wife of a young chap who inherits an ancient farm and the staff who run it which includes ninety-four-year old Martha Crale. She is an ancient, rake-thin, decrepit crone. The story is short on gags and very long on atmospheric descriptions of an Edwardian farm, its rhythms and how Martha Crale is always in the way of young Mrs. Ladbruk’s plans to decorate and update everything. One day young Mrs. Ladbruk comes across her staring out the window, muttering about death and misinterprets it as her final breakdown. But in fact it is an eerie and spooky vision of the death of young Mrs. Ladbruk’s husband, who is brought in having been crushed by a falling tree.

The skill in the story is how it cuts away at the moment Mrs Ladbruk learns of her father’s death, so that we do not see or hear young Mrs. Ladbruk’s response, or get any description at all of her feelings and the impact on her of the death of her husband. Instead the scene cuts to a week or so later as she stands with all her belongings packed, waiting for a cart to collect her, and has a last sight of old Martha Crale trussing a pair of chickens just as she has done any time this last 80 years.

It’s not a ghost story exactly, but it’s about an almost ghostly presence, and it is a tragedy. In this respect, it echoes a lot of Kipling’s stories from exactly the same period, which are about the uncanny presence, magic and psychology of old Sussex hussifs.

The Lull

Latimer Springfield is a boring young man standing in a county election. Mrs. Durmot invites him to come and stay to break up the final weeks of the campaign. Mrs Durmot tells her niece Vera that the man needs a rest. Instead, when the entire household has gone to bed, Vera interrupts Latimer at his late night speech-writing by telling him there has been a flood, the local dam has burst and the river has burst its banks, the house is full of Boy Scouts who have been cut off, and could he look after one of the pigs and one of the prize chickens which have been rained out of the farmyard.

Very reluctantly Latimer agrees, the animals fight and keep him up all night and, of course, in the morning, the housemaid comes in with his tea as normal, he throws back the curtains, and realises there has been no flood at all. It has all been an elaborate practical joke.

The Unkindest Blow

A Tory joke. The narrator fantasises that the present spate of strikes (which plagued late-Edwardian society) becomes universal until, eventually, every trade and industry known to man has finally had at least one strike.

Utterly exhausted, society returns to normal, and looks forward to the Divorce of the Century, between the fabulously wealthy Duke of Falvertoon and his wife. A vast cottage industry of reporters, commentators, columnists and even the film business hire rooms and seats in the divorce court, ready to make a fortune. Until – and here’s the punchline – the Duke and his wife go on strike, refusing to go through with the case until they get a slice of the action.

The Romancers

Morton Crosby is enjoying a cigarette in a secluded spot in Hyde Park when he is approached in a roundabout manner by an obvious beggar. But Morton is one of Saki’s heartless ironists and the beggar has barely got going with his spiel before Morton launches into a drolly absurd claim to be a Persian, born on the border with Afghanistan, and proceeds to bamboozle the beggar with ridiculous, made-up customs, in the end claiming his religion absolutely forbids him to give alms in the month of November, rising and walking off with a spring in his step.

The Schartz-Metterklume Method

Lady Carlotta steps out of her train at a little rural station for a breather, to stretch her legs, and the train unexpectedly pulls away without her, leaving her stranded without her luggage. However, a cart pulls up and in it is Mrs. Quabarl, who insists that Lady Carlotta must be Miss Hope, the governess, they were expecting. Lady Carlotta, having a droll, Sakiesque sense of humour, decides to go along with the mistake, letting herself be driven back to the Quabarl house, introduced to the household, fed and informed as to her duties posing as the governess.

Next morning Mrs. Quabarl is astonished to discover her children re-enacting the Rape of the Sabine Women by abducting the two little daughters of the gatekeeper’s wife and, when Mrs. Quabarl remonstrates with Lady C, the latter simply walks away, through the gates, back to the station and catches the next train to her intended destination. Soon after which the real Miss Hope arrives and is very confused by the consternation and vapours which greet her.

The Seventh Pullet

He was beginning to realise how safe and easy depravity can seem once one has the courage to begin…

Blenkinthrope is a boring commuter, catching the same train, sitting in the same carriage with the same bored companions. His only subject is the vegetables he grows in his garden. ‘Make something up’, suggests his friend, Gorworth, and on the spur of the moment invents a tale that six of his prize pullets were mesmerised and killed by a snake, but the seventh survived because it’s a rare breed with feathers over its eyes, hence not susceptible to the snake’s charms. Next day, Blenkinthrope tells his commuter colleagues the story and is astonished at how riveted they are. The story is even passed on to a poultry magazine and appears as a titbit in a national paper.

In successive attempts at fiction, however, Blenkinthrope quickly oversteps the bounds of plausibility and becomes known as the Baron Munchausen of his little set. Thus, when his wife really does die from playing a cursed card game from which her own mother and grandmother had died – when Blenkinthrope excitedly tells everyone about this most strange and exciting thing which has genuinely happened to him… Nobody believes him. Chastened, he returns to boring stories about his not-that-special vegetables.

The Blind Spot

‘My dear Egbert, between nearly killing a gardener’s boy and altogether killing a Canon there is a wide difference. No doubt you have often felt a temporary desire to kill a gardener’s boy; you have never given way to it, and I respect you for your self-control.’

Great-aunt Adelaide has died and left Egbert her heir and executor. Among her papers he comes across a letter from her brother, Peter, the canon, who was mysteriously murdered. His cook, Sebastien from the French Pyrenees, was accused and tried for the murder but the evidence wasn’t convincing and he was acquitted, at which point Egbert’s uncle, Sir Lulworth Quayne (who also appears in Laura), instantly hired him and has been enjoying the delights of his wonderful cuisine for several years.

Now, with a flourish, Egbert reveals that among Adelaide’s letters was one from her brother which described a violent argument he had with the hot-tempered Pyrennean, and how he was now going in fear of his life. This letter would supply the missing motive and be enough to convict the cook.

To Egbert’s horror Sir Lulworth takes the letter from his hand and tosses it into the heart of the fireplace.

‘What on earth did you do that for?’ gasped Egbert. ‘That letter was our one piece of evidence to connect Sebastien with the crime.’
‘That is why I destroyed it,’ said Sir Lulworth.
‘But why should you want to shield him?’ cried Egbert; ‘the man is a common murderer.’
‘A common murderer, possibly, but a very uncommon cook.’

Dusk

Norman Gortsby is sitting on a bench in Hyde Park at dusk. An old joxer is sitting there when he arrives but soon leaves, to be replaced by a likely young fellow who immediately starts telling a hard-luck story about how he booked into a hotel he was taken to, nipped out to buy a bar of soap at a chemists, then realised he was lost with no way of getting back to the hotel or money.

Note the extreme laconicism of the title. Saki had written scores of these stories by now. Arguably these mid-career stories are less funny than the earlier ones, in some ways more obvious in plot, but contain more subtle psychology and storytelling techniques.

A Touch of Realism

Blanche Boveal gives her friend Lady Blonze an idea for her Christmas house party: get everyone to adopt a character, not tell anyone what it is but act it out over the course of a few days, and the best one wins a prize.

So they go ahead, with various comic results: waspish Bertie van Tahn wakes up fat hypochondriac Waldo Plubley in the middle of the night to ransack his room for sheep, lost sheep. Yes, he is pretending to be Little Bo Peep. But the prize goes to Cyril Skatterly and Vera Durmot who, next morning before breakfast, drive the Klammersteins thirty miles to Slogberry Moor, and dump them there, in the snow. Why? Bertie van Tahn is the first to understand: Cyril and Vera were pretending to be Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain deporting the Jews from Spain!

Maybe I’m being over-sensitive, but having read Saki’s second novel, When William Came, with its antisemitic central character Murrey Yeovil, sensitised me to even fleeting mentions of Jews in Saki’s stories and so this deliberate, and even dangerous (dumped in midwinter, snowing, miles from anywhere), humiliation of the only Jews in the story, couldn’t help but ring my alarm bells.

Cousin Teresa (Clovis)

Sort of comic, this is more of a polemical satire with a bitingly jingoistic message, in the tone of When William Came.

Colonel Harrowcluff has two sons, Basset and Lucas. Basset has just returned from four years of worthy service in some colony and his father quietly hopes he might get an honour. His other son remained in England and is always coming up with half-cocked, hare-brained schemes. The story opens up with the younger son devising the lyrics and performance for a music-hall song titled “Cousin Teresa”. To everyone’s surprise, for once his dreams come off and the song is a roaring success.

In fact it’s so successful that the Minister decides he must be given a knighthood: not the Harrowcluff who spent years of his life shoring up the empire in a farflung colony, but the Harrowcluff who came up with a meaningless and irritating jingle.

So it’s a lampoon on a British society which is more interested in music-hall jingles than the solid defence of its empire and society. Saki invents a pompous society woman to give an idiotic speech in praise of the song:

‘Politics and patriotism are so boring and so out of date,’ said a revered lady who had some pretensions to oracular utterance; ‘we are too cosmopolitan nowadays to be really moved by them. That is why one welcomes an intelligible production like “Cousin Teresa”, that has a genuine message for one.’

And I am not at all surprised that when Saki ventures on this subject, he manages to squeeze in some antisemitism, which barely even makes sense. Lucas is the twittering idiot of the family, the superficial drone, the epitome of a social gadfly and so, for no logical reason, Saki says he looks Jewish!

His hair and forehead furnished a recessional note in a personality that was in all other respects obtrusive and assertive. There was certainly no Semitic blood in Lucas’s parentage, but his appearance contrived to convey at least a suggestion of Jewish extraction. Clovis Sangrail, who knew most of his associates by sight, said it was undoubtedly a case of protective mimicry.

I don’t quite understand that jab. Does it mean Lucas makes himself appear more Jewish in order to fit in with a show business dominated by Jews? I’m phrasing it like that because there are lines directly to that effect in When Wiliam Comes, that Jews are disproportionately represented in film and theatreland. As I wrote in my review of When William Came Saki’s antisemitism is a stain on his writing.

The Yarkand Manner

An odd satire on the notion that a wild fashion caught on for the editorial staffs of all London’s newspapers and magazines to remove to far-distant locations from where to edit and produce their periodicals. Thus one moves to Paris, but others quickly outdo it by moving to Nurenberg, Seville or Salonika, and then further East till one takes the biscuit by moving its entire editorial team to Yarkand.

Eventually all the newspapers come back to London, tired but with a new Oriental remoteness, a new tone. None more so than the Daily Intelligencer, which had begun to publish articles about foreign affairs of a noted bluntness and belligerence, many ostensibly based on leaks from the government.

The government gets fed up of issuing denials that the Intelligencer is leaking government policy, so one fine day the Prime Minister and a bunch of other ministers go round to the offices and are astonished to discover the true state of affairs: which is that the entire staff of the newspaper decamped for the East where they were promptly kidnapped by bandits who demanded a quarter of a million pounds ransom. The only member of staff left back in London, the office boy who received the bandits’ letter, decided that was too much and so hired some new staff and hid himself away in the Editor’s office, refusing to see anyone personally and issuing all kinds of orders via… himself!

This is presumably a satire on the newspaper industry which Saki knew so well. But here, as in many of the other stories, it’s crying out for intelligent notes to explain whether the story refers to specific incidents in Edwardian London: was there a fashion for one or more papers or magazines to up sticks and produce an entire edition from offices abroad? Or is this pure, whimsical fiction?

I doubt if it would justify the expense, but a fully Annotated Saki would be wonderful, with really good, long notes which thoroughly explained the background to all his many contemporary references.

The Byzantine Omelette

Satirical portrait of snobbish, superior champagne socialist Sophie Chattel-Monkheim. She is preparing herself for a grand dinner she is giving the Duke of Syria. But then disaster strikes. More precisely, the entire domestic staff go on strike. They have discovered that Gaspare, the chef, was himself a strike-breaker in the great strike at Lord Grimford’s two years ago. But he is the only one who knows how to make a byzantine omelette, which is the Duke’s favourite dish, wails Sophie.

All her female houseguests come begging her to do something, so she agrees to dismiss the chef. Half an hour later the guests, looking more or less presentable, are assembled round the dinner table when the butler enters with a sombre look, goes over to Sophie and announces there will be no dinner. The kitchen staff was of the same union as the chef and now they have downed tools in sympathy.

As so often, the story then cuts away completely, jumping forward in time and telling us that, 18 months later, Sophie Chattel-Monkheim is just about recovering from her nervous breakdown.

And so, like The Unkindest Blow, it’s another very topical satire on the widespread strikes which plagued late-Edwardian society.

The Feast of Nemesis (Clovis)

‘There is no outlet for demonstrating your feelings towards people whom you simply loathe. That is really the crying need of our modern civilisation.’

A broad and comic satire in which Clovis’s aunt, Mrs. Thackenbury, wearily laments how tiresome it is having to have to give presents to people one really doesn’t care for on so any feast days. This lament inspires her malicious nephew (Clovis) to concoct the idea of Nemesis Day when you take unbridled revenge on people you really hate.

Take, for example, the ghastly Webleys: wouldn’t it be a good idea to get up bright and early before everyone else on Nemesis Day and go and dig up their tennis court with a fork, later blaming it on ‘an unusually masterful mole or a badger in a hurry.’

How about taking greedy Agnes Blaik into the woods on the promise of a grand picnic and then contriving to lose her just before the eating starts. Or luring fat Waldo Plubley into the hammock in the orchard near where the wasps make their summer nest, getting him nice and comfortable, then throwing a firework into the wasps’ nest.

‘It takes some doing to get out of a hammock in a hurry.’
‘They might sting him to death,’ protested Mrs. Thackenbury.
‘Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death,’ said Clovis.

A masterpiece of malicious wit.

The Dreamer

Another laugh-out-loud funny story. Adela Chemping invites her sleek, pomaded 18-year-old nephew Cyprian with her to the sales. Most of the story is a satire on the wilful and illogical ways of a middle-aged, middle-class woman on a shopping expedition to a department store. But there is a delicious sting in the tail, when Adela leaves Cyprian for a while to go to the napkin department and, upon her return, discovers him posing as a shop assistant and selling sales goods amid the crush to harassed shoppers for cash and calmly pocketing the proceeds.

As in several of these stories the climax is wonderfully understated, almost omitted, for the next sentence describes Adela being helped into the fresh air and it takes the reader a moment to realise it’s because she’s fainted at the sight of her nephew pulling this impersonation, a fact Saki deliberately omits.

The deliberate omission doesn’t exactly add tension, it makes the effect more… more chiselled and exquisite. There is a tact in not stating what happens, leaving the reader to deduce it. And also a very understated, droll kind of comedy.

The Quince Tree

Heartless Mrs. Bebberly Cumble wants old Betty Mullen removed from her cottage because she never pays the rent and she’s fed up of subsidising her. On the spot her kinder niece, Vera, concocts a cock and bull story about how the jewels stolen in a recent high profile burglary have ended up in Betty’s cottage, and what a lot of people were involved on stealing them and passing them on, including Mrs Cumble’s daughter’s fiancé, that nice young Cuthbert, and also the Canon. Increasingly horrified at the web of crime she has untangled, Mrs. Bebberly Cumble decides to let Betty Mullen stay after all.

The Forbidden Buzzards (Clovis)

Clovis believed that if a lie was worth telling it was worth telling well.

A house party at Mrs Olston’s country home. Hugo Peterby takes Clovis aside and explains he’s rather keen on Betty Coulterneb but doesn’t stand much of a chance against dashing and very rich young Lanner.

‘Leave it with me,’ says Clovis, and proceeds to warn Mrs Olston in dark tones that Lanner has accepted her invitation, not to propose to the fragrant Miss Coulterneb, but to steal the eggs of the only nesting pair of rough-necked buzzards in the country. Clovis concocts an utter fiction about Lanner having one of the finest egg collections in Britain and how he has been associated with desperate measures to get his hands on rare eggs in the past.

‘What can we do?’ asks a horrified Mrs Olston, who promised her husband, before he left on a prolonged trip back to his native Norway, that she would do her uttermost to protect the buzzards. Clovis suggests that Lanner never be left alone for a minute day or night, but be permanently accompanied by a relay of chaperones, including: Mrs Olston herself, who sets out to show him every feature of the estate; her 14-year-old daughter Evelyn, who talks sombrely about how we must make the world a better place (plus ça change); her 9-year-old son who talks incessantly about the Balkan Wars; and the German governess who bombards the hapless Lanner with incessant talk about (the classic German poet) Schiller.

With the result that Lanner never gets a minute to himself, let alone five minutes with the fragrant Miss Coulterneb and so, after a couple of days, gives up and leaves early to return to London.

Leaving the field clear for his rival, Hugo Peterby, who inspired the whole whimsical fantasy in the first place. But, alas, Hugo, also, fails in his suit, and departs leaving the fragrant Miss Coulterneb as virginal and unmarried as ever. The conclusion.

Hugo did not bring off his affair with Betty Coulterneb. Whether she refused him or whether, as was more generally supposed, he did not get a chance of saying three consecutive words, has never been exactly ascertained. Anyhow, she is still the jolly Coulterneb girl.

And then the punchline.

The buzzards successfully reared two young ones, which were shot by a local hairdresser.

Stake

Eleanor Saxelby shuddered. She liked her meals to be of regular occurrence and assured proportions.

Mrs. Attray laments the character of her son Ronald to her friend Eleanor Saxelby. He is only 18 but already a gambling addict. She has deprived him of absolutely every source of money or credit he can possibly have, in order to quell his addiction. The punchline of the story is that Ronnie has excelled himself and managed to gamble away Mrs Attray’s cook to her landlords, the Norridrums, admittedly only for a few days, but this explains why the lunch served to them and Mrs Saxelby is execrable.

‘Then depend on it he was gambling,’ said Eleanor, with the assured air of one who has few ideas and makes the most of them.

Clovis on Parental Responsibilities (Clovis)

‘Now, my mother never bothered about bringing me up. She just saw to it that I got whacked at decent intervals and was taught the difference between right and wrong; there is some difference, you know, but I’ve forgotten what it is.’

Mrs Eggelby is trying to interest Clovis in the achievements of her children, Amy, Willie and Eric, an invitation to curiosity which he does his best to resist. replying to her every sally with sardonic improbabilities.

‘Aunts that have never known a day’s illness are very rare; in fact, I don’t personally know of any.’

A Holiday Task

A timid nobody, Kenelm Jerton, is buttonholed over luncheon in a country hotel by a posh young lady who claims to have forgotten her own name but is convinced she has a title, Lady something or other. ‘I say, would you mind awfully helping me try to remember?’

The unnamed woman asks him to look through old copies of Country Life to see if he can spot her photo, which he dutifully sets himself to do. They meet up again at 5 and she asks him to look after her luggage while she slips out to catch a cab.

A fellow guest walks by chatting to another and mentions that he knows the tall young woman in grey who’s just slipped out. Kenelm asks who she is and finds out she is plain Mrs. Stroope, a golfing lady from thereabouts who often loses her memory. This story is contrived and has some interesting social detail but is not particularly funny.

The Stalled Ox

‘My garden has just been put straight for the winter, and an ox roaming about in it won’t improve matters. Besides, there are the chrysanthemums just coming into flower.’

Theophil Eshley is a timid painter of the rather small landscape he can see from the end of his garden. One day his neighbour, Adela Pingsford, comes banging on his studio door and asks if he can help her shoo away a large ox which has somehow got into her garden. Theophil is useless and Adela is quite magnificently sarcastic.

Eshley took a step or two in the direction of the animal, clapped his hands, and made noises of the ‘Hish’ and ‘Shoo’ variety. If the ox heard them it gave no outward indication of the fact. ‘If any hens should ever stray into my garden,’ said Adela, ‘I should certainly send for you to frighten them out. You ‘shoo’ beautifully. Meanwhile, do you mind trying to drive that ox away?’

The story really lifts off when Eshley a) manages to shoo the ox out of the garden alright – straight through the french windows into Adela’s front room! and b) revolts against the woman’s hysterical imprecations, and instead goes and gets his painting equipment, makes himself comfortable, and paints the masterpiece which was to be the making of his career, Ox in a morning-room, late autumn,  which became one of the sensations of the next Paris Salon, and led on to the Royal Academy showing of its smash-hit sequel, Barbary Apes Wrecking a Boudoir.

The Story-Teller

A confirmed bachelor is stuck in a railway carriage with an aunt accompanying a small girl, an even smaller girl and a small boy. She tells them a feeble story to try and keep them quiet, but they keep asking stupid questions and the smallest girl repeats the first line of On The Road To Mandalay so many times that the bachelor snaps and says he bets he can tell a better story than the aunt.

The bored children immediately ask him to, and so he tells a story about a little girl who is so super-good she wins medals for goodness, and the Prince asks her to visit him in his castle and then to see his lovely park, but then a wolf breaks into the park, sees the girl in her spotless white dress and chases her. She hides in thick bushes and would have gotten away with it except she was trembling so much her medals jingled against each other, the wolf heard her, tracked her down, and ate her up, every morsel, except her shoes and her medals for being so good.

The aunt is, of course, appalled, but the children think it is the best story they’ve ever heard.

A Defensive Diamond

Treddleford is happily ensconced beside a fire on a rainy October evening at his club, settling down to read a book about faraway Samarkand when his peace is broken by the club bore Amblecope sidling up and trying to start conversation on a number of topics. The comedy of the story is that, on each topic, Amblecope has barely begun before Treddleford leaps in and tells huge, preposterous stories which outflank any anecdote Amblecope could tell him.

Eventually Amblecope gives up and sidles away but an hour or so later, as Treddleford makes to leave the room they both happen to arrive at the door at the same moment where, emboldened, Treddleford waves him back with the immortal remark:

‘I believe I take precedence,’ he said coldly; ‘you are merely the club Bore; I am the club Liar.’

The Elk

Teresa, Mrs. Thropplestance, was the richest and most intractable old woman in the county of Woldshire. She has outlived her son and now supervises her heir apparent, vague young Bertie.

‘Bertie might not be disposed to pay much attention to the consecrations of Fate, but he would not dream of opposing his grandmother.’

The story humorously chronicles the forlorn attempts of Mrs. Yonelet to marry off her daughter, Dora and her conversations with the vicar’s wife to whom she confides every stage in her campaigns, up to and including the exciting news that Bertie has just rescued Dora from the old elk Mrs T keeps in a field.

Teresa calmly informs Mrs Yonelet that Bertie has previously rescued two other maidens and the gardener’s son, none of whom he intends to marry. Later the vicar confides to Mrs Yonelet that the woman Teresa wants her grandson to marry is the Bickelbys’ German governess.

Which makes it all the more ironic when, a few months later, the family elk really does attack and kill the Bickelbys’ German governess, leading Teresa to die of heartbreak and frustration a few months later, after which Bertie does, indeed, finally, marry Dora Yonelet. All thanks to The Elk.

‘Down Pens’

Comedy about the gruelling torment of having to write thank you cards as a young couple, who have already written twenty between them, try to think of something genuine and not too insincere to write to the couple who sent them a calendar.

Abruptly the husband comes up with a plan: to write a letter to every newspaper in the land suggesting the abolition of Thank you notes and the declaration of a Writing Truce between Christmas and New Year. Notes of thanks can be attached as formatted counterfoils sent with invoices along with all presents, which only require a quick squiggle of the recipient’s pen.

Obviously a satire on middle-class social conventions.

The Name-Day

Constitutionally timid John James Abbleway works for his firm in Vienna. One winter his fiancée invites him to join her at Fiume. He takes the train south and it starts to snow, very heavily, turning the line into a snowdrift. The engine struggles harder and harder then there is a jolt and John James Abbleway’s carriage slows to a halt. Looking out the window he sees the rest of the train puffing into the distance.

He is left alone in his first class carriage and, on going through to the third class carriage, discovers a solitary old peasant woman. They hear wolves howling. Constitutionally timid John James Abbleway fears they will be eaten by the wolves. Or starve. The woman tells him it is her name day so she knows her saint will protect her. She sells him some of the food in her basket (blood sausages) for an extortionate rate.

Then she announces she knows a house nearby and is going to try to get there. Constitutionally timid John James Abbleway is petrified she will be massacred by the wolves which are howling all round the carriage, but the peasant woman insists it is her name day and she will be perfectly alright. She gets out and steps forth and next thing Abbleway knows, the ‘wolves’ are frolicking round her! He eases open a window and calls her. She shouts back that these are not wolves at all, but her cousin Karl’s dogs and he keeps a pub just beyond the trees. She’ll be back in a bit.

The Lumber Room

Young Nicholas is too clever by half, and for his latest escapade is excluded from the holiday trip which his cousins’ mother arranges for all the children to be taken to Jagborough sands. His aunt forbids him to go into the gooseberry garden. That’s fine by young Nicholas because today is the day he plans to take the big old key from its hiding place on top of some shelves and sneak up to the fearsome and legendary ‘lumber room’ at the top of the house.

When he lets himself into the lumber room it turns out to be precisely the treasure trove such a place should be, dim and dusty with a moth-eaten old fire screen showing an exciting hunting scene and a big old book full of pictures of exotic birds. He hears shouts from the aunt and quickly replaces the book, locks the lumber room door, replaces the key on the shelf and saunters back into the garden.

Missing him, the aunt had herself gone into the gooseberry garden in search and fallen into the empty water tank. Now she is shouting for help. Nicholas saunters over to the water tank and decides to have some fun. ‘How do I know you’re not the Evil One taunting me?’ he taunts. ‘My aunt told me I was forbidden to go in the gooseberry garden’, and so on. The more she protests her identity the more ironically Nicholas replies before casually strolling away.

It is some time before a kitchenmaid, in search of parsley, eventually rescues the aunt from the rain-water tank.

Fur

The sacrifices of friendship were beautiful in her eyes as long as she was not asked to make them.

Eleanor has a super-rich elderly cousin, Bertram Kneyght. She wants to persuade him to give her something really good for her birthday. Her friend Suzanne suggests they ambush the old boy as he walks to his club and inveigle him into the posh department store, Goliath and Mastodon’s where they can hint none too subtly about Eleanor’s birthday.

Indeed they do this but, unbeknown to Eleanor, Suzanne has a plan of her own. She tells Kneyght to buy her friend a fan, just any old fan will do, but then launches on a sad story about how it’s her (Suzanne’s) birthday, too, soon, and how a rich man once promised her a lovely fox-fur stole but never gave it to her.

So the result is that Kneyght gives Eleanor a disappointing fan but Suzanne gets just the luxury silver-fox stole she had been angling for. The friendship between the two women has never recovered. Women Beware Women.

The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat

Direct comparison between Jocantha Bessbury and her cat. Jocantha smugly thinks she has everything she needs, including a lovely house and a lovely garden. Her cat, Attab, spends all day sleeping and at night goes out to catch baby sparrows.

Jocantha falls to reflecting on all the poor around her, poor working girls, shop girls. On an impulse she decides to treat a pair of poor working girls to tickets to the theatre. Well, maybe one one would be better, no need to go mad.

So Jocantha walks to a ticket agency and buys a ticket for a current show, ‘The Yellow Peacock’, then wanders round till she finds an ABC tearooms. Here she spots a sad, pale, forlorn-looking girl sitting by herself, and is about to take pity and play Lady Bountiful when she is surprised by the arrival of the girl’s beau, who is strikingly handsome and self-assured. Jocantha watches them chat then, eventually, the girl has to go.

The story then turns to Jocantha’s half dozen ways of trying to get the dishy young man to catch her eye, including complaining loudly about a muffin, spilling her milk and generally making a commotion. Nothing works. The young man is deeply absorbed in a novel. Eventually Jocantha gives up and comes home, and for the first time regards her house as dull and overfurnished.

She looks at the bloody cat, curled up and smug as ever. ‘But then he had killed his sparrow.’ The droll implication is that Jocantha is every bit the pussy her cat is, but without the hunting abilities. The further implication being that the entire conscious motive of ‘helping the poor’ was a cover for the more self-seeking aim of finding a dishy lover. I.e. philanthropy is bunk, a right-wing (or satirist’s) point of view.

On Approval

None of the discerning patrons of the Restaurant Nuremberg, Owl Street, Soho, are quite sure whether Gebhard Knopfschrank, the young man who caught a ship from Pomerania to London, really is a genuine artist of genius or merely a self-promoting dabbler. He certainly creates striking works.

His pictures always represented some well-known street or public place in London, fallen into decay and denuded of its human population, in the place of which there roamed a wild fauna, which, from its wealth of exotic species, must have originally escaped from Zoological Gardens and travelling beast shows. ‘Giraffes drinking at the fountain pools, Trafalgar Square’ was one of the most notable and characteristic of his studies, while even more sensational was the gruesome picture of ‘Vultures attacking dying camel in Upper Berkeley Street’. There were also photographs of the large canvas on which he had been engaged for some months, and which he was now endeavouring to sell to some enterprising dealer or adventurous amateur. The subject was ‘Hyænas asleep in Euston Station’, a composition that left nothing to be desired in the way of suggesting unfathomed depths of desolation.

Sounds surprisingly science fiction, doesn’t it, a touch of H.G. Wells.

Anyway, over time the regulars notice that Gerhard’s orders at the restaurant are becoming simpler, wine gives way to lager and then to water. This is because Gebhard Knopfschrank is starving. Nothing is selling.

Then one evening he orders a massive, slap-up feast, the finest of everything and puts the Star-Spangled Banner on the music box. The restaurant regulars mutter that he must finally have been ‘discovered’ by a rich American, speculate that his prices will now shoot up, and they quickly hurry to buy up the sketches he’s brought along, as usual, in his portfolio, and at the asking price of ten shillings a pop.

It is only when he’s sold them all that Gerhard disabuses them. His benefactor is an American alright, but one who ploughed his car into the flock of pigs his parents back in Pomerania were walking along a road to market. Being American he promptly offered way over the asking price, making Mamma and Papa rich at a stroke, and they have sent their son in London some of the largesse. Nothing to do with his paintings.

God be thanked for rich Americans, who are always in a hurry to get somewhere else.

And his paintings? Oh, he thinks they’re worthless so he’s burnt them all. Tomorrow he catches the boat back to Pomerania and he’s never coming back. Leaving the restaurant regulars feeling very stupid at having splashed out so much money in a panic for now-worthless drawings.

Obviously a satire on the wild fads and inflated prices of the art world which is, of course, nothing like that 110 years later.

Animals

Obviously the title of the volume is justified by the centrality, in most of the stories, of an animal. In many instances the robust natural behaviour of the animal highlights the artificiality and hypocrisy of the humans. For example, just the blunt existence of the boar-pig highlights the sneakiness and snobbery and competitiveness and bitterness-at-not-being-invited-to-the-party of Mrs. Philidore Stossen.

Animals are innocent because they are not free to make choices. They just do what they do, and their lack of freedom of action somehow highlights the tremendous over-freedom which human beings suffer from, and all the silly snobberies and social restrictions and manners and conventions which we squander that freedom on.

Smart youth versus dumb age

She was a woman of few ideas, with immense powers of concentration.

This is not the first time Saki has expressed this idea and it prompts the reflection that the stories often present a pretty straightforward dichotomy between the simple-minded but obstinate older generation (the apparently never-ending series of prohibiting aunts) who insist on narrow, inflexible ideas of right and wrong and decency etc; and the nimble-witted, ironic and satirical young men and women, who dance ironical rings around them.

The most consistent embodiment of the latter is Clovis Sangrail, but the same spirit is at work in some of the other young adult characters, and often in Saki’s children. His children consistently lack the narrow-minded, good-mannered hypocrisy of their elders, and simply do and say what they fancy, and are all the more shocking for it.

For example,  Mrs Cuvering’s malicious 13-year-old daughter, Matilda, in The Boar-Pig or Mrs. Sappleton’s 15-year-old niece who makes up the story about her dead menfolk in The Open Window or youthfully malicious Nicholas in The Lumber Room.

Are these malicious children the ‘super-beasts’ of the title?

Is Clovis a knut?

In the story The Dreamer Adela Chemping worries that her sleek, pomaded 18-year-old nephew Cyprian might be a ‘nut’. In A Holiday Task the narrator compares Kenelm Jerton to a ‘supernut’. A what?

The term ‘nut’ was Edwardian slang for an idle, upper-class, man-about-town. The word was immortalised in the popular music-hall song Gilbert The Filbert, written and composed by Arthur Wimperis and Herman Finck in 1914 and made famous by the well-known singer Basil Hallam. Here it is from a 1966 disc featuring English character actor Arthur Treacher (on the right) and (improbably enough) the American host of a US TV chat show, Merv Griffin, both cashing in on the fashion for ‘Swinging London’.

Anyway, the point is the lyrics:

I am known round Town as a fearful blood
For I come straight down from the dear old flood
And I know who’s who, and I know what’s what
And between the two I’m a trifle hot
For I set the tone as you may suppose
For I stand alone when it comes to clothes
And as for gals just ask my pals
Why everybody knows.

Chorus: I’m Gilbert the Filbert, the Knut with a K,
The pride of Piccadilly the blasé roué,
Oh Hades, the ladies, who leave their wooden huts
For Gilbert the Filbert the Colonel of the Knuts.

You may look upon me as a waster, what?
But you ought to see how I fag and swot
For I’m called by two, and by five I’m out
Which I couldn’t do if I slacked about
Then I count my ties and I change my kit
And the exercise keeps me awfully fit
Once I begin I work like sin
I’m full of go and grit.

P.G. Wodehouse described the phenomenon of the ‘knut’ at length. In the preface to Joy in the Morning (1946) he wrote:

The Edwardian knut was never an angry young man. He would get a little cross, perhaps, if his man Meadowes sent him out some morning with odd spats on, but his normal outlook on life was sunny. He was humble, kindly soul, who knew he was a silly ass but hoped you wouldn’t mind. He liked everybody, and most people like him. Portrayed on the stage by George Grossmith and G. P. Huntley, he was a lovable figure, warming the hearts of all. You might disapprove of him not being a world’s worker, but you could not help being fond of him… Most knuts were younger sons, and in the reign of good King Edward the position of the younger son in aristocratic families was… what’s the word, Jeeves? Anomalous? You’re sure? Right ho, anomalous. Thank you, Jeeves.

So is Clovis a ‘nut’ or ‘knut’ (the spelling seems to have been unstable)? On the face of it, yes, and the aunts quoted above are right to be worried that their 18-year-old nephews may be turning into unemployed, hyper-well-dressed, unemployed young men-about-town.

In 1994 a new word, ‘metrosexual’, made its first appearance in print to describe: ‘a heterosexual urban man who enjoys shopping, fashion, and similar interests traditionally associated with women or gay men’. Maybe the metrosexual is a descendant of the k/nut which scandalised the older generation in the decadent 1890s and the Edwardian 1900s.

(Interesting to note, in passing, that the term ‘waster’, which in my teenage years was used to describe potheads, was in common use in 1914.)

Silly names

People remember Saki’s stories for their high society cast and settings, for the often exotic animal interventions, for the droll humour and the sometimes macabre turns of events. But Saki was also prolific in the creation of silly names:

Leonard Bilsiter, Mrs. Hoops, Clovis Sangrail, Sir Lulworth Quayne, Mrs. Philidore Stossen, Miss Matilda Cuvering, Sylvester Mullet, Toby Mullett, Mr. Penricarde, Dora Bittholz, Jane Martlet, Framton Nuttel, Mrs. Sappleton, Lulu, Duchess of Dulverton, Vasco Honiton, Mrs. Ladbruk, Martha Crale, Latimer Springfield, Duke of Falvertoon, Morton Crosby, Miss Hope, Mrs. Quabarl, Blenkinthrope, Edmund Smith-Paddon, Zoto Dobreen, Egbert, Norman Gortsby, Lady Blonze, Blanche Boveal, Rachel Klammerstein, Waldo Plubley, Basset Harrowcluff, Sophie Chattel-Monkheim, Mrs. Thackenbury, Agnes Blaik, Adela Chemping, Mrs. Bebberly Cumble, Betty Coulterneb, Mrs. Attray, the Norridrums, Eleanor Saxelby, Marion Eggelby, Editha Clubberley, Hildegarde Shrubley, Kenelm Jerton, Lady Starping, Lady Braddleshrub, Kestrel-Smith, Lady Mousehilton, Lady Ulwight, Lady Befnal, Mrs. Stroope, Theophil Eshley, Adela Pingsford, Treddleford, Amblecope, Mrs. Thropplestance, Mrs. Yonelet, Dora Yonelet, the Froplinsons, Mrs. Stephen Ludberry, Colonel Chuttle, John James Abbleway, Bertram Kneyght, Sylvia Strubble, Mrs Nougat-Jones,

Having taken the trouble to compile this list, at least two points arise. The names are obviously eccentric and unusual but they have neither the inspired grotesqueness of Dickens’s characters (Flintwich, Quilp, Uriah Heep, Ebenezer Scrooge) nor the silver mellifluousness of Oscar Wilde’s characters (Lady Windermere, Dorian Grey).

Instead Saki’s names are genuinely odd and bizarre – Waldo Plubley, Basset Harrowcluff, Mrs. Bebberly Cumble, Lady Braddleshrub – without actually being funny. They are more like explorations of the bizarre possibilities of combining English phonemes in unexpected ways than names anyone would ever actually bear.

The second thing I noticed as I collected the names, is the number of stories which start with the statement of a name, start by introducing a character in the very first sentence, go on to give them a swift paragraph of profile, and then plunge them headfirst into a plight.

My point being that Saki’s stories rarely start with descriptions or settings or anything symbolical or with the explanations of facts or events. They start with, their very first words, are silly names. And this emphasises the way his stories aren’t about issues or ideas or places or atmospheres or landscapes or cityscapes or politics or history, but are entirely about people, people from a very narrow stratum of society, who are immediately introduced, by the narrator or in dialogue with a spouse or friend. The almost immediate introduction of the main protagonist is a function of the way the stories are extremely short and crisp and very tightly wrapped.

In fact, to dig a bit deeper, a brief review of the openings of the stories in this collection suggest that they open in one of three ways:

1. immediate naming of a character
2. a line of dialogue which introduces a character and/or the speaking character
3. a brief description

1. Immediate naming

• Leonard Bilsiter was one of those people who have failed to find this world attractive or interesting, and who have sought compensation in an ‘unseen world’ of their own experience or imagination – or invention. (The She-Wolf)
• Norman Gortsby sat on a bench in the Park, with his back to a strip of bush-planted sward, fenced by the park railings, and the Row fronting him across a wide stretch of carriage drive. (Dusk)
• Lady Carlotta stepped out on to the platform of the small wayside station and took a turn or two up and down its uninteresting length (The Schartz-Metterklume Method)
• Basset Harrowcluff returned to the home of his fathers, after an absence of four years, distinctly well pleased with himself. (Cousin Teresa)
• Sir Lulworth Quayne was making a leisurely progress through the Zoological Society’s Gardens in company with his nephew, recently returned from Mexico. (The Yarkand Manner)
• Sophie Chattel-Monkheim was a Socialist by conviction and a Chattel-Monkheim by marriage. (The Byzantine Omelette)
• Marion Eggelby sat talking to Clovis on the only subject that she ever willingly talked about – her offspring and their varied perfections and accomplishments. (Clovis on Parental Responsibilities)
• Kenelm Jerton entered the dining-hall of the Golden Galleon Hotel in the full crush of the luncheon hour. (A Holiday Task)
• Theophil Eshley was an artist by profession, a cattle painter by force of environment. (The Stalled Ox)
• Treddleford sat in an easeful arm-chair in front of a slumberous fire… (A Defensive Diamond)
• Teresa, Mrs. Thropplestance, was the richest and most intractable old woman in the county of Woldshire. (The Elk)
• Jocantha Bessbury was in the mood to be serenely and graciously happy. (The Philanthropist and the Happy Cat)
• [Name at the end of the sentence] Of all the genuine Bohemians who strayed from time to time into the would-be Bohemian circle of the Restaurant Nuremberg, Owl Street, Soho, none was more interesting and more elusive than Gebhard Knopfschrank.

A line of dialogue introducing a character

• ‘You are not really dying, are you?’ asked Amanda.
• ‘I hope you’ve come full of suggestions for Christmas,’ said Lady Blonze to her latest arrived guest.’ (A Touch of Realism)
• ‘Dora Bittholz is coming on Thursday,’ said Mrs. Sangrail…’ (The Hen)
• ‘My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel.’ (The Open Window)
• ‘I’ve asked Latimer Springfield to spend Sunday with us and stop the night,’ announced Mrs. Durmot at the breakfast-table.’ (The Lull)
• ‘You’ve just come back from Adelaide’s funeral, haven’t you?’ said Sir Lulworth to his nephew. (The Blind Spot)
• ‘It’s a good thing that Saint Valentine’s Day has dropped out of vogue,’ said Mrs. Thackenbury. (The Feast of Nemesis)
• ‘I’ve just been to see old Betsy Mullen,’ announced Vera to her aunt, Mrs. Bebberly Cumble. (The Quince Tree)
• ‘Is matchmaking at all in your line?’ Hugo Peterby asked the question with a certain amount of personal interest. (The Forbidden Buzzards)
• ‘Ronnie is a great trial to me,’ said Mrs. Attray plaintively. (The Stake)
• ‘Have you written to thank the Froplinsons for what they sent us?’ asked Egbert. (‘Down Pens’)
• ‘You look worried, dear,’ said Eleanor.

Description

• The hunting season had come to an end, and the Mullets had not succeeded in selling the Brogue.
• The great galleon lay in semi-retirement under the sand and weed and water of the northern bay where the fortune of war and weather had long ago ensconced it. (The Treasure-Ship)
• The farmhouse kitchen probably stood where it did as a matter of accident or haphazard choice; yet its situation might have been planned by a master-strategist in farmhouse architecture. (The Cobweb)
• The season of strikes seemed to have run itself to a standstill. Almost every trade and industry and calling in which a dislocation could possibly be engineered had indulged in that luxury. (The Unkindest Blow)
• It was autumn in London, that blessed season between the harshness of winter and the insincerities of summer (The Romancers)
• It was the season of sales. The august establishment of Walpurgis and Nettlepink had lowered its prices for an entire week as a concession to trade observances (The Dreamer)
• It was a hot afternoon, and the railway carriage was correspondingly sultry, and the next stop was at Templecombe, nearly an hour ahead. (The Story Teller)

Related links

• Beasts and Super-Beasts online

Saki’s works

• Reginald (1904)
• Reginald in Russia, and other sketches (1910)
• The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)
• The Unbearable Bassington (novel) (1912)
• When William Came (novel) (1913)
• Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)
• The Toys of Peace (1919)
• The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924)