The Saki Megapack

by H. H. Munro

  But in your need remember well

  He gave you speed, or guile—or claws.

  Some laud a life of mild content:

  Content may fall, as well as Pride.

  The Frog who hugged his lowly Ditch

  Was much disgruntled when it dried.

  ‘You are not on the Road to Hell,’

  You tell me with fanatic glee:

  Vain boaster, what shall that avail

  If Hell is on the road to thee?

  A Poet praised the Evening Star,

  Another praised the Parrot’s hue:

  A Merchant praised his merchandise,

  And he, at least, praised what he knew.”

  It was this verse which gave the critics and commentators some clue as to the probable date of the composition; the parrot, they reminded the public, was in high vogue as a type of elegance in the days of Hafiz of Shiraz; in the quatrains of Omar it makes no appearance.

  The next verse, it was pointed out, would apply to the political conditions of the present day as strikingly as to the region and era for which it was written—

  “A Sultan dreamed day-long of Peace,

  The while his Rivals’ armies grew:

  They changed his Day-dreams into sleep

  —The Peace, methinks, he never knew.”

  Woman appeared little, and wine not at all in the verse of the hunter-poet, but there was at least one contribution to the love-philosophy of the East—

  “O Moon-faced Charmer, and Star-drownèd Eyes,

  And cheeks of soft delight, exhaling musk,

  They tell me that thy charm will fade; ah well,

  The Rose itself grows hue-less in the Dusk.”

  Finally, there was a recognition of the Inevitable, a chill breath blowing across the poet’s comfortable estimate of life—

  “There is a sadness in each Dawn,

  A sadness that you cannot rede:

  The joyous Day brings in its train

  The Feast, the Loved One, and the Steed.

  Ah, there shall come a Dawn at last

  That brings no life-stir to your ken,

  A long, cold Dawn without a Day,

  And ye shall rede its sadness then.”

  The verses of Ghurab came on the public at a moment when a comfortable, slightly quizzical philosophy was certain to be welcome, and their reception was enthusiastic. Elderly colonels, who had outlived the love of truth, wrote to the papers to say that they had been familiar with the works of Ghurab in Afghanistan, and Aden, and other suitable localities a quarter of a century ago. A Ghurab-of-Karmanshah Club sprang into existence, the members of which alluded to each other as Brother Ghurabians on the slightest provocation. And to the flood of inquiries, criticisms, and requests for information, which naturally poured in on the discoverer, or rather the discloser, of this long-hidden poet, the Rev. Wilfrid made one effectual reply: Military considerations forbade any disclosures which might throw unnecessary light on his nephew’s movements.

  After the war the Rector’s position will be one of unthinkable embarrassment, but for the moment, at any rate, he has driven The Forbidden Horsepond out of the field.

  ABOUT “REGINALD”

  The short story collection Reginald was originally published in 1904.

  REGINALD

  I did it—I who should have known better. I persuaded Reginald to go to the McKillops’ garden-party against his will.

  We all make mistakes occasionally.

  “They know you’re here, and they’ll think it so funny if you don’t go. And I want particularly to be in with Mrs. McKillop just now.”

  “I know, you want one of her smoke Persian kittens as a prospective wife for Wumples—or a husband, is it?” (Reginald has a magnificent scorn for details, other than sartorial.) “And I am expected to undergo social martyrdom to suit the connubial exigencies”—

  “Reginald! It’s nothing of the kind, only I’m sure Mrs. McKillop Would be pleased if I brought you. Young men of your brilliant attractions are rather at a premium at her garden-parties.”

  “Should be at a premium in heaven,” remarked Reginald complacently.

  “There will be very few of you there, if that is what you mean. But seriously, there won’t be any great strain upon your powers of endurance; I promise you that you shan’t have to play croquet, or talk to the Archdeacon’s wife, or do anything that is likely to bring on physical prostration. You can just wear your sweetest clothes and moderately amiable expression, and eat chocolate-creams with the appetite of a blasé parrot. Nothing more is demanded of you.”

  Reginald shut his eyes. “There will be the exhaustingly up-to-date young women who will ask me if I have seen San Toy; a less progressive grade who will yearn to hear about the Diamond Jubilee—the historic event, not the horse. With a little encouragement, they will inquire if I saw the Allies march into Paris. Why are women so fond of raking up the past? They’re as bad as tailors, who invariably remember what you owe them for a suit long after you’ve ceased to wear it.”

  “I’ll order lunch for one o’clock; that will give you two and a half hours to dress in.”

  Reginald puckered his brow into a tortured frown, and I knew that my point was gained. He was debating what tie would go with which waistcoat.

  Even then I had my misgivings.

  * * * * *

  During the drive to the McKillops’ Reginald was possessed with a great peace, which was not wholly to be accounted for by the fact that he had inveigled his feet into shoes a size too small for them. I misgave more than ever, and having once launched Reginald on to the McKillops’ lawn, I established him near a seductive dish of marrons glacés, and as far from the Archdeacon’s wife as possible; as I drifted away to a diplomatic distance I heard with painful distinctness the eldest Mawkby girl asking him if he had seen San Toy.

  It must have been ten minutes later, not more, and I had been having quite an enjoyable chat with my hostess, and had promised to lend her The Eternal City and my recipe for rabbit mayonnaise, and was just about to offer a kind home for her third Persian kitten, when I perceived, out of the corner of my eye, that Reginald was not where I had left him, and that the marrons glacés were untasted. At the same moment I became aware that old Colonel Mendoza was essaying to tell his classic story of how he introduced golf into India, and that Reginald was in dangerous proximity. There are occasions when Reginald is caviare to the Colonel.

  “When I was at Poona in ’76”—

  “My dear Colonel,” purred Reginald, “fancy admitting such a thing! Such a give-away for one’s age! I wouldn’t admit being on this planet in ’76.” (Reginald in his wildest lapses into veracity never admits to being more than twenty-two.)

  The Colonel went to the colour of a fig that has attained great ripeness, and Reginald, ignoring my efforts to intercept him, glided away to another part of the lawn. I found him a few minutes later happily engaged in teaching the youngest Rampage boy the approved theory of mixing absinthe, within full earshot of his mother. Mrs. Rampage occupies a prominent place in local Temperance movements.

  As soon as I had broken up this unpromising tête-à-tête and settled Reginald where he could watch the croquet players losing their tempers, I wandered off to find my hostess and renew the kitten negotiations at the point where they had been interrupted. I did not succeed in running her down at once, and eventually it was Mrs. McKillop who sought me out, and her conversation was not of kittens.

  “Your cousin is discussing Zaza with the Archdeacon’s wife; at least, he is discussing, she is ordering her carriage.”

  She spoke in the dry, staccato tone of one who repeats a French exercise, and I knew that as far as Millie McKillop was concerned, Wumples was devoted to a lifelong celibacy.

  “If you don’t mind,” I said hurriedly, “I think we’d like our carriage ordered too,” and I made a forced march in the direction of the croquet-ground.

  I found everyone talking nervously and feverishly of the w
eather and the war in South Africa, except Reginald, who was reclining in a comfortable chair with the dreamy, far-away look that a volcano might wear just after it had desolated entire villages. The Archdeacon’s wife was buttoning up her gloves with a concentrated deliberation that was fearful to behold. I shall have to treble my subscription to her Cheerful Sunday Evenings Fund before I dare set foot in her house again.

  At that particular moment the croquet players finished their game, which had been going on without a symptom of finality during the whole afternoon. Why, I ask, should it have stopped precisely when a counter-attraction was so necessary? Everyone seemed to drift towards the area of disturbance, of which the chairs of the Archdeacon’s wife and Reginald formed the storm-centre. Conversation flagged, and there settled upon the company that expectant hush that precedes the dawn—when your neighbours don’t happen to keep poultry.

  “What did the Caspian Sea?” asked Reginald, with appalling suddenness.

  There were symptoms of a stampede. The Archdeacon’s wife looked at me. Kipling or someone has described somewhere the look a foundered camel gives when the caravan moves on and leaves it to its fate. The peptonised reproach in the good lady’s eyes brought the passage vividly to my mind.

  I played my last card.

  “Reginald, it’s getting late, and a sea-mist is coming on.” I knew that the elaborate curl over his right eyebrow was not guaranteed to survive a sea-mist.

  * * * *

  “Never, never again, will I take you to a garden-party. Never… You behaved abominably… What did the Caspian see?”

  A shade of genuine regret for misused opportunities passed over Reginald’s face.

  “After all,” he said, “I believe an apricot tie would have gone better with the lilac waistcoat.”

  REGINALD ON CHRISTMAS PRESENTS

  I wish it to be distinctly understood (said Reginald) that I don’t want a “George, Prince of Wales” Prayer-book as a Christmas present. The fact cannot be too widely known.

  There ought (he continued) to be technical education classes on the science of present-giving. No one seems to have the faintest notion of what anyone else wants, and the prevalent ideas on the subject are not creditable to a civilised community.

  There is, for instance, the female relative in the country who “knows a tie is always useful,” and sends you some spotted horror that you could only wear in secret or in Tottenham Court Road. It might have been useful had she kept it to tie up currant bushes with, when it would have served the double purpose of supporting the branches and frightening away the birds—for it is an admitted fact that the ordinary tomtit of commerce has a sounder æsthetic taste than the average female relative in the country.

  Then there are aunts. They are always a difficult class to deal with in the matter of presents. The trouble is that one never catches them really young enough. By the time one has educated them to an appreciation of the fact that one does not wear red woollen mittens in the West End, they die, or quarrel with the family, or do something equally inconsiderate. That is why the supply of trained aunts is always so precarious.

  There is my Aunt Agatha, par exemple, who sent me a pair of gloves last Christmas, and even got so far as to choose a kind that was being worn and had the correct number of buttons. But—they were nines! I sent them to a boy whom I hated intimately: he didn’t wear them, of course, but he could have—that was where the bitterness of death came in. It was nearly as consoling as sending white flowers to his funeral. Of course I wrote and told my aunt that they were the one thing that had been wanting to make existence blossom like a rose; I am afraid she thought me frivolous—she comes from the North, where they live in the fear of Heaven and the Earl of Durham. (Reginald affects an exhaustive knowledge of things political, which furnishes an excellent excuse for not discussing them.) Aunts with a dash of foreign extraction in them are the most satisfactory in the way of understanding these things; but if you can’t choose your aunt, it is wisest in the long-run to choose the present and send her the bill.

  Even friends of one’s own set, who might be expected to know better, have curious delusions on the subject. I am not collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyam. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald’s notes, to his aged mother. Lift-boys always have aged mothers; shows such nice feeling on their part, I think.

  Personally, I can’t see where the difficulty in choosing suitable presents lies. No boy who had brought himself up properly could fail to appreciate one of those decorative bottles of liqueurs that are so reverently staged in Morel’s window—and it wouldn’t in the least matter if one did get duplicates. And there would always be the supreme moment of dreadful uncertainty whether it was crême de menthe or Chartreuse—like the expectant thrill on seeing your partner’s hand turned up at bridge. People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.

  And then, of course, there are liqueur glasses, and crystallised fruits, and tapestry curtains, and heaps of other necessaries of life that make really sensible presents—not to speak of luxuries, such as having one’s bills paid, or getting something quite sweet in the way of jewellery. Unlike the alleged Good Woman of the Bible, I’m not above rubies. When found, by the way, she must have been rather a problem at Christmas-time; nothing short of a blank cheque would have fitted the situation. Perhaps it’s as well that she’s died out.

  The great charm about me (concluded Reginald) is that I am so easily pleased. But I draw the line at a “Prince of Wales” Prayer-book.

  REGINALD ON THE ACADEMY

  “One goes to the Academy in self-defence,” said Reginald. “It is the one topic one has in common with the Country Cousins.”

  “It is almost a religious observance with them,” said the Other. “A kind of artistic Mecca, and when the good ones die they go”—

  “To the Chantrey Bequest. The mystery is what they find to talk about in the country.”

  “There are two subjects of conversation in the country: Servants, and Can fowls be made to pay? The first, I believe, is compulsory, the second optional.”

  “As a function,” resumed Reginald, “the Academy is a failure.”

  “You think it would be tolerable without the pictures?”

  “The pictures are all right, in their way; after all, one can always look at them if one is bored with one’s surroundings, or wants to avoid an imminent acquaintance.”

  “Even that doesn’t always save one. There is the inevitable female whom you met once in Devonshire, or the Matoppo Hills, or somewhere, who charges up to you with the remark that it’s funny how one always meets people one knows at the Academy. Personally, I don’t think it funny.”

  “I suffered in that way just now,” said Reginald plaintively, “from a woman whose word I had to take that she had met me last summer in Brittany.”

  “I hope you were not too brutal?”

  “I merely told her with engaging simplicity that the art of life was the avoidance of the unattainable.”

  “Did she try and work it out on the back of her catalogue?”

  “Not there and then. She murmured something about being ‘so clever.’ Fancy coming to the Academy to be clever!”

  “To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.”

  “Which reminds me that I can’t remember whether I accepted an invitation from you to dine at Kettner’s to-night.”

  “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 to-morrow 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.”

  “Someone 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.”