The Complete Works of Saki (Illustrated). Saki

      It was quite improbable that anyone had, you know, and that’s where it stimulated the imagination and took people out of their narrow, humdrum selves. No one has ever called me narrow or humdrum, but even I felt worked up now and then at the thought of that house with the stricken wombats in it. It simply wasn’t nice. But the editors were unanimous in leaving it alone; they said the thing had been done before and done worse, and that the market for that sort of work was extremely limited.

      It was just on the top of that discouragement that the Duchess wanted me to write something in her album—something Persian, you know, and just a little bit decadent—and I thought a quatrain on an unwholesome egg would meet the requirements of the case. So I started in with—

      “Cackle, cackle, little hen,

       How I wonder if and when

       Once you laid the egg that I

       Met, alas! too late. Amen.”

      The Duchess objected to the Amen, which I thought gave an air of forgiveness and chose jugée to the whole thing; also she said it wasn’t Persian enough, as though I were trying to sell her a kitten whose mother had married for love rather than pedigree. So I recast it entirely, and the new version read—

      “The hen that laid thee moons ago, who knows

       In what Dead Yesterday her shades repose;

       To some election turn thy waning span

       And rain thy rottenness on fiscal foes.”

      I thought there was enough suggestion of decay in that to satisfy a jackal, and to me there was something infinitely pathetic and appealing in the idea of the egg having a sort of St. Luke’s summer of commercial usefulness. But the Duchess begged me to leave out any political allusions; she’s the president of a Women’s Something or other, and she said it might be taken as an endorsement of deplorable methods. I never can remember which Party Irene discourages with her support, but I shan’t forget an occasion when I was staying at her place and she gave me a pamphlet to leave at the house of a doubtful voter, and some grapes and things for a woman who was suffering from a chill on the top of a patent medicine. I thought it much cleverer to give the grapes to the former and the political literature to the sick woman, and the Duchess was quite absurdly annoyed about it afterwards. It seems the leaflet was addressed “To those about to wobble”—I wasn’t responsible for the silly title of the thing—and the woman never recovered; anyway, the voter was completely won over by the grapes and jellies, and I think that should have balanced matters. The Duchess called it bribery, and said it might have compromised the candidate she was supporting; he was expected to subscribe to church funds and chapel funds, and football and cricket clubs and regattas, and bazaars and beanfeasts and bellringers, and poultry shows and ploughing matches, and reading-rooms and choir outings, and shooting trophies and testimonials, and anything of that sort; but bribery would not have been tolerated.

      I fancy I have perhaps more talent for electioneering than for poetry, and I was really getting extended over this quatrain business. The egg began to be unmanageable, and the Duchess suggested something with a French literary ring about it. I hunted back in my mind for the most familiar French classic that I could take liberties with, and after a little exercise of memory I turned out the following:—

      “Hast thou the pen that once the gardener had?

       I have it not; and know, these pears are bad.

       Oh, larger than the horses of the Prince

       Are those the general drives in Kaikobad.”

      Even that didn’t altogether satisfy Irene; I fancy the geography of it puzzled her. She probably thought Kaikobad was an unfashionable German spa, where you’d meet matrimonial bargain-hunters and emergency Servian kings. My temper was beginning to slip its moorings by that time. I look rather nice when I lose my temper. (I hoped you would say I lose it very often. I mustn’t monopolise the conversation.)

      “Of course, if you want something really Persian and passionate, with red wine and bulbuls in it,” I went on to suggest; but she grabbed the book away from me.

      “Not for worlds. Nothing with red wine or passion in it. Dear Agatha gave me the album, and she would be mortified to the quick”—

      I said I didn’t believe Agatha had a quick, and we got quite heated in arguing the matter. Finally, the Duchess declared I shouldn’t write anything nasty in her book, and I said I wouldn’t write anything in her nasty book, so there wasn’t a very wide point of difference between us. For the rest of the afternoon I pretended to be sulking, but I was really working back to that quatrain, like a fox-terrier that’s buried a deferred lunch in a private flower-bed. When I got an opportunity I hunted up Agatha’s autograph, which had the front page all to itself, and, copying her prim handwriting as well as I could, I inserted above it the following Thibetan fragment:—

      “With Thee, oh, my Beloved, to do a dâk

       (a dâk I believe is a sort of uncomfortable post-journey)

       On the pack-saddle of a grunting yak,

       With never room for chilling chaperone,

       ’Twere better than a Panhard in the Park.”

      That Agatha would get on to a yak in company with a lover even in the comparative seclusion of Thibet is unthinkable. I very much doubt if she’d do it with her own husband in the privacy of the Simplon tunnel. But poetry, as I’ve remarked before, should always stimulate the imagination.

      By the way, when you asked me the other day to dine with you on the 14th, I said I was dining with the Duchess. Well, I’m not. I’m dining with you.

      The Innocence of Reginald

       Table of Contents

      Reginald slid a carnation of the newest shade into the buttonhole of his latest lounge coat, and surveyed the result with approval. “I am just in the mood,” he observed, “to have my portrait painted by someone with an unmistakable future. So comforting to go down to posterity as ‘Youth with a Pink Carnation’ in catalogue—company with ‘Child with Bunch of Primroses,’ and all that crowd.”

      “Youth,” said the Other, “should suggest innocence.”

      “But never act on the suggestion. I don’t believe the two ever really go together. People talk vaguely about the innocence of a little child, but they take mighty good care not to let it out of their sight for twenty minutes. The watched pot never boils over. I knew a boy once who really was innocent; his parents were in Society, but they never gave him a moment’s anxiety from his infancy. He believed in company prospectuses, and in the purity of elections, and in women marrying for love, and even in a system for winning at roulette. He never quite lost his faith in it, but he dropped more money than his employers could afford to lose. When last I heard of him, he was believing in his innocence; the jury weren’t. All the same, I really am innocent just now of something everyone accuses me of having done, and so far as I can see, their accusations will remain unfounded.”

      “Rather an unexpected attitude for you.”

      “I love people who do unexpected things. Didn’t you always adore the man who slew a lion in a pit on a snowy day? But about this unfortunate innocence. Well, quite long ago, when I’d been quarrelling with more people than usual, you among the number—it must have been in November, I never quarrel with you too near Christmas—I had an idea that I’d like to write a book. It was to be a book of personal reminiscences, and was to leave out nothing.”

      “Reginald!”

      “Exactly what the Duchess said when I mentioned it to her. I was provoking and said nothing, and the next thing, of course, was that everyone heard that I’d written the book and got it in the press. After that, I might have been a gold-fish in a glass bowl for all the privacy I got. People attacked me about it in the most unexpected places, and implored or commanded me to leave out things that