The Saki Megapack

by H. H. Munro

  The Master of the Ceremonies was nearly delirious from rage and mortification. Placidus Superbus, who remained calm and unruffled as ever, beckoned to him and spoke a word or two in his ear. For the first time that afternoon the sorely-tried official was seen to smile.

  A trumpet rang out from the Imperial Box; an instant hush fell over the excited throng. Perhaps the Emperor, as a last resort, was going to announce some concession to the Suffragetae.

  “Close the stable gates,” commanded the Master of the Ceremonies, “and open all the menagerie dens. It is the Imperial pleasure that the second portion of the programme be taken first.”

  It turned out that the Master of the Ceremonies had in no wise exaggerated the probable brilliancy of this portion of the spectacle. The wild bulls were really wild, and the hyaena reputed to be mad thoroughly lived up to its reputation.

  THE INFERNAL PARLIAMENT

  In an age when it has become increasingly difficult to accomplish anything new or original, Bayton Bidderdale interested his generation by dying of a new disease. “We always knew he would do something remarkable one of these days,” observed his aunts; “he has justified our belief in him.” But there is a section of humanity ever ready to refuse recognition to meritorious achievement, and a large and influential school of doctors asserted their belief that Bidderdale was not really dead. The funeral arrangements had to be held over until the matter was settled one way or the other, and the aunts went provisionally into half-mourning.

  Meanwhile, Bidderdale remained in Hell as a guest pending his reception on a more regular footing. “If you are not really supposed to be dead,” said the authorities of that region, “we don’t want to seem in an indecent hurry to grab you. The theory that Hell is in serious need of population is a thing of the past. Why, to take your family alone, there are any number of Bidderdales on our books, as you may discover later. It is part of our system that relations should be encouraged to live together down here. From observations made in another world we have abundant evidence that it promotes the ends we have in view. However, while you are a guest we should like you to be treated with every consideration and be shown anything that specially interests you. Of course, you would like to see our Parliament?”

  “Have you a Parliament in Hell?” asked Bidderdale in some surprise.

  “Only quite recently. Of course, we’ve always had chaos, but not under Parliamentary rules. Now, however, that Parliaments are becoming the fashion, in Turkey and Persia, and I suppose before long in Afghanistan and China, it seemed rather ostentatious to stand outside the movement. That young Fiend just going by is the Member for East Brimstone; he’ll be delighted to show you over the institution.”

  “You will just be in time to hear the opening of a debate,” said the Member, as he led Bidderdale through a spacious outer lobby, decorated with frescoes representing the fall of man, the discovery of gold, the invention of playing cards, and other traditionally appropriate subjects. “The Member for Nether Furnace is proposing a motion ‘that this House do arrogantly protest to the legislatures of earthly countries against the wrongful and injurious misuse of the word “fiendish,” in application to purely human misdemeanours, a misuse tending to create a false and detrimental impression concerning the Infernal Regions.’”

  A feature of the Parliament Chamber itself was its enormous size. The space allotted to Members was small and very sparsely occupied, but the public galleries stretched away tier on tier as far as the eye could reach, and were packed to their utmost capacity.

  “There seems to be a very great public interest in the debate,” exclaimed Bidderdale.

  “Members are excused from attending the debates if they so desire,” the Fiend proceeded to explain; “it is one of their most highly valued privileges. On the other hand, constituents are compelled to listen throughout to all the speeches. After all, you must remember, we are in Hell.”

  Bidderdale repressed a shudder and turned his attention to the debate.

  “Nothing,” the Fiend-Orator was observing, “is more deplorable among the cultured races of the present day than the tendency to identify fiendhood, in the most sweeping fashion, with all manner of disreputable excesses, excesses which can only be alleged against us on the merest legendary evidence. Vices which are exclusively or predominatingly human are unblushingly described as inhuman, and, what is even more contemptible and ungenerous, as fiendish. If one investigates such statements as ‘inhuman treatment of pit ponies or ‘fiendish cruelties in the Congo,’ so frequently to be heard in our brother Parliaments on earth, one finds accumulative and indisputable evidence that it is the human treatment of pit ponies and Congo natives that is really in question, and that no authenticated case of fiendish agency in these atrocities can be substantiated. It is, perhaps, a minor matter for complaint,” continued the orator, “that the human race frequently pays us the doubtful compliment of describing as ‘devilish funny’ jokes which are neither funny nor devilish.”

  The orator paused, and an oppressive silence reigned over the vast chamber.

  “What is happening?” whispered Bidderdale.

  “Five minutes Hush,” explained his guide; “it is a sign that the speaker was listened to in silent approval, which is the highest mark of appreciation that can be bestowed in Pandemonium. Let’s come into the smoking-room.”

  “Will the motion be carried?” asked Bidderdale, wondering inwardly how Sir Edward Grey would treat the protest if it reached the British Parliament; an entente with the Infernal Regions opened up a fascinating vista, in which the Foreign Secretary’s imagination might hopelessly lose itself.

  “Carried? Of course not,” said the Fiend; “in the Infernal Parliament all motions are necessarily lost.”

  “In earthly Parliaments nowadays nearly everything is found,” said Bidderdale, “including salaries and travelling expenses.”

  He felt that at any rate he was probably the first member of his family to make a joke in Hell.

  “By the way,” he added, “talking of earthly Parliaments, have you got the Party system down here?”

  “In Hell? Impossible. You see, we have no system of rewards. We have specialized so thoroughly on punishments that the other branch has been entirely neglected. And besides, Government by delusion, as you practise it in your Parliament, would be unworkable here. I should be the last person to say anything against temptation, naturally, but we have a proverb down here ‘in baiting a mouse-trap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.’ Such a party-cry, for instance, as your ‘ninepence for fourpence’ would be absolutely inoperative; it not only leaves no room for the mouse, it leaves no room for the imagination. You have a saying in your country, I believe, ‘there’s no fool like a damned fool’; all the fools down here are, necessarily, damned, but—you wouldn’t get them to nibble at ninepence for fourpence.”

  “Couldn’t they be scolded and lectured into believing it, as a sort of moral and intellectual duty?” asked Bidderdale.

  “We haven’t all your facilities,” said the Fiend; “we’ve nothing down here that exactly corresponds to the Master of Elibank.”

  At this moment Bidderdale’s attention was caught by an item on a loose sheet of agenda paper: “Vote on account of special Hells.”

  “Ah,” he said, “I’ve often heard the expression ‘there is a special Hell reserved for such-and-such a type of person.’ Do tell me about them.”

  “I’ll show you one in course of preparation,” said the Fiend, leading him down the corridor. “This one is designed to accommodate one of the leading playwrights of your nation. You may observe scores of imps engaged in pasting notices of modern British plays into a huge press-cutting book, each under the name of the author, alphabetically arranged. The book will contain nearly half a million notices, I suppose, and it will form the sole literature supplied to this specially doomed individual.”

  Bidderdale was not altogether impressed.

  “Some dramatic authors wouldn’t s
o much very mind spending eternity poring over a book of contemporary press-cuttings,” he observed.

  The Fiend, laughing unpleasantly, lowered his voice. “The letter ‘S’ is missing.”

  For the first time Bidderdale realized that he was in Hell.

  THE SQUARE EGG

  A BADGER’S-EYE VIEW OF THE WAR; MUD IN THE TRENCHES

  Assuredly a badger is the animal that one most resembles in this trench warfare, that drab-coated creature of the twilight and darkness, digging, burrowing, listening; keeping itself as clean as possible under unfavourable circumstances, fighting tooth and nail on occasion for possession of a few yards of honeycombed earth.

  What the badger thinks about life we shall never know, which is a pity, but cannot be helped; it is difficult enough to know what one thinks about, oneself, in the trenches. Parliament, taxes, social gatherings, economies, and expenditure, and all the thousand and one horrors of civilization seem immeasurably remote, and the war itself seems almost as distant and unreal. A couple of hundred yards away, separated from you by a stretch of dismal untidy-looking ground and some strips of rusty wire-entanglement, lies a vigilant, bullet-spitting enemy; lurking and watching in those opposing trenches are foemen who might stir the imagination of the most sluggish brain, descendants of the men who went to battle under Moltke, Blücher, Frederick the Great, and the Great Elector, Wallenstein, Maurice of Saxony, Barbarossa, Albert the Bear, Henry the Lion, Witekind the Saxon. They are matched against you there, man for man and gun for gun, in what is perhaps the most stupendous struggle that modern history has known, and yet one thinks remarkably little about them. It would not be advisable to forget for the fraction of a second that they are there, but one’s mind does not dwell on their existence; one speculates little as to whether they are drinking warm soup and eating sausage, or going cold and hungry, whether they are well supplied with copies of the Meggendorfer Blätter and other light literature or bored with unutterable weariness.

  Much more to be thought about than the enemy over yonder or the war all over Europe is the mud of the moment, the mud that at times engulfs you as cheese engulfs a cheesemite. In Zoological Gardens one has gazed at an elk or bison loitering at its pleasure more than knee-deep in a quagmire of greasy mud, and one has wondered what it would feel like to be soused and plastered, hour-long, in such a muck-bath. One knows now. In narrow-dug support-trenches, when thaw and heavy rain have come suddenly atop of a frost, when everything is pitch-dark around you, and you can only stumble about and feel your way against streaming mud walls, when you have to go down on hands and knees in several inches of souplike mud to creep into a dug-out, when you stand deep in mud, lean against mud, grasp mud-slimed objects with mud-caked fingers, wink mud away from your eyes, and shake it out of your ears, bite muddy biscuits with muddy teeth, then at least you are in a position to understand thoroughly what it feels like to wallow—on the other hand the bison’s idea of pleasure becomes more and more incomprehensible.

  When one is not thinking about mud one is probably thinking about estaminets. An estaminet is a haven that one finds in agreeable plenty in most of the surrounding townships and villages, flourishing still amid roofless and deserted houses, patched up where necessary in rough-and-ready fashion, and finding a new and profitable tide of customers from among the soldiers who have replaced the bulk of the civil population. An estaminet is a sort of compound between a wine-shop and a coffee-house, having a tiny bar in one corner, a few long tables and benches, a prominent cooking stove, generally a small grocery store tucked away in the back premises, and always two of three children running and bumping about at inconvenient angles to one’s feet. It seems to be a fixed rule that estaminet children should be big enough to run about and small enough to get between one’s legs. There must, by the way, be one considerable advantage in being a child in a war-zone village; no one can attempt to teach it tidiness. The wearisome maxim, “A place for everything and everything in its proper place,” can never be insisted on when a considerable part of the roof is lying in the backyard, when a bedstead from a neighbour’s demolished bedroom is half buried in the beetroot pile, and the chickens are roosting in a derelict meat-safe because a shell has removed the top and sides and front of the chicken-house.

  Perhaps there is nothing in the foregoing description to suggest that a village wine-shop, frequently a shell-nibbled building in a shell-gnawed street, is a paradise to dream about, but when one has lived in a dripping wilderness of unrelieved mud and sodden sandbags for any length of time one’s mind dwells on the plain-furnished parlour with its hot coffee and vin ordinaire as something warm and snug and comforting in a wet and slushy world. To the soldier on his trench-to-billets migration, the wineshop is what the tavern rest-house is to the caravan nomad of the East. One comes and goes in a crowd of chance-foregathered men, noticed or unnoticed as one wishes, amid the khaki-clad, be-putteed throng of one’s own kind one can be as unobtrusive as a green caterpillar on a green cabbage leaf; one can sit undisturbed, alone or with one’s own friends, or if one wishes to be talkative and talked to, one can readily find a place in a circle where men of divers variety of cap badges are exchanging experiences, real or improvised.

  Besides the changing throng of mud-stained khaki there is a drifting leaven of local civilians, uniformed interpreters, and men in varying types of foreign military garb, from privates in the Regular Army to Heaven-knows-what in some intermediate corps that only an expert in such matters could put a name to, and, of course, here and there are representatives of that great army of adventurer purse-sappers, that carries on its operations uninterruptedly in time of peace or war alike, over the greater part of the earth’s surface. You meet them in England and France, in Russia and Constantinople; probably they are to be met with also in Iceland, though on that point I have no direct evidence.

  In the estaminet of the Fortunate Rabbit I found myself sitting next to an individual of indefinite age and nondescript uniform, who was obviously determined to make the borrowing of a match serve as a formal introduction and a banker’s reference. He had the air of jaded jauntiness, the equipment of temporary amiability, the aspect of a foraging crow, taught by experience to be wary and prompted by necessity to be bold; he had the contemplative downward droop of nose and moustache and the furtive sidelong range of eye—he had all those things that are the ordinary outfit of the purse-sapper the world over.

  “I am a victim of the war,” he exclaimed after a little preliminary conversation.

  “One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs,” I answered, with the appropriate callousness of a man who had seen some dozens of square miles of devastated countryside and roofless homes.

  “Eggs!” he vociferated, “but it is precisely of eggs that I am about to speak. Have you ever considered what is the great drawback in the excellent and most useful egg—the ordinary, everyday egg of commerce and cookery?”

  “Its tendency to age rapidly is sometimes against it,” I hazarded; “unlike the United States of North America, which grow more respectable and self-respecting the longer it lasts, an egg gains nothing by persistence; it resembles your Louis the Fifteenth, who declined in popular favour with every year he lived—unless the historians have entirely misrepresented his record.”

  “No,” replied the Tavern Acquaintance seriously, “it is not a question of age. It is the shape, the roundness. Consider how easily it rolls. On a table, a shelf, a shop counter, perhaps, one little push, and it may roll to the floor and be destroyed. What catastrophe for the poor, the frugal!”

  I gave a sympathetic shudder at the idea; eggs here cost 6 sous apiece.

  “Monsieur,” he continued, “it is a subject I had often pondered and turned over in my mind, this economical malformation of the household egg. In our little village of Verchey-les-Torteaux, in the Department of the Tarn, my aunt has a small dairy and poultry farm, from which we drew a modest income. We were not poor, but there was always the necessity to labour, to cont
rive, to be sparing. One day I chanced to notice that one of my aunt’s hens, a hen of the mop-headed Houdan breed, had laid an egg that was not altogether so round-shaped as the eggs of other hens; it could not be called square, but it had well-defined angles. I found out that this particular bird always laid eggs of this particular shape. The discovery gave a new stimulus to my ideas. If one collected all the hens that one could find with a tendency to lay a slightly angular egg and bred chickens only from those hens, and went on selecting and selecting, always choosing those that laid the squarest egg, at last, with patience and enterprise, one would produce a breed of fowls that laid only square eggs.”

  “In the course of several hundred years one might arrive at such a result,” I said; “it would more probably take several thousands.”

  “With your cold Northern conservative slow-moving hens that might be the case,” said the Acquaintance impatiently and rather angrily; “with our vivacious Southern poultry it is different. Listen. I searched, I experimented, I explored the poultry-yards of our neighbours, I ransacked the markets of the surrounding towns, wherever I found a hen laying an angular egg, I bought her. I collected in time a vast concourse of fowls all sharing the same tendency; from their progeny I selected only those pullets whose eggs showed the most marked deviation from the normal roundness. I continued, I persevered. Monsieur, I produced a breed of hens that laid an egg which could not roll, however much you might push or jostle it. My experiment was more than a success—it was one of the romances of modern industry.”

  Of that I had not the least doubt, but I did not say so.

  “My eggs became known,” continued the soi-disant poultry-farmer; “at first they were sought after as a novelty, something curious, bizarre. Then merchants and housewives began to see that they were a utility, an improvement, an advantage over the ordinary kind. I was able to command a sale for my wares at a price considerably above market rates. I began to make money. I had a monopoly. I refused to sell any of my ‘square-layers,’ and the eggs that went to market were carefully sterilized, so that no chickens should be hatched from them. I was on the way to become rich, comfortably rich. Then this war broke out, which has brought misery to so many. I was obliged to leave my hens and my customers and go to the Front. My aunt carried on the business as usual, sold the square eggs, the eggs that I had devised and created and perfected, and received the profits; can you imagine it, she refuses to send me one centime of the takings! She says that she looks after the hens, and pays for their corn, and sends the eggs to market, and that the money is hers. Legally, of course, it is mine; if I could afford to bring a process in the Courts, I could recover all the money that the eggs have brought in since the war commenced, many thousands of francs. To bring a process would only need a small sum; I have a lawyer friend who would arrange matters cheaply for me. Unfortunately, I have not sufficient funds in hand; I need still about eighty francs. In war-time, alas! it is difficult to borrow.”