Lines I Wished I’d Written: The Death of Sylvia Seltoun, From Saki’s Short Story, “The Music on the Hill.”

I’ve been reading a few Saki (pseudonym for H. H. Munro)  short stories every year. You can click the link, "Saki," below to find my other posts on his short stories.  They are short, pitch perfect, and delightful, all written with an acerbic eye and style.

“The Music on the Hill” is about an overbearing woman, Sylvia Seltoun, who successful marries an upper class gentleman, and she gets him to move to his country home, known as “Yesney,” instead of continuing his listless days in his town watering holes.  Mortimer, her husband warns her about the pagan wood deity Pan who lurks in the woods.  She scoffs at it of course, and she comes to a sudden death one day while roaming through the woods and being horned by a large stag, all the while a devilish looking boy looks on. 

The story is only six or even pages long (Saki is remarkably condensed) and you can read it entirely here.  I’m not going to analyze it but do look for all the levels of irony in it, such as Sylvia’s name meaning is “woods” or “forest.”  I’m going to quote the final paragraphs that culminate in her death. 

Sylvia noted with dissatisfaction and some self-contempt that the course of her next afternoon's ramble took her instinctively clear of the network of woods. As to the horned cattle, Mortimer's warning was scarcely needed, for she had always regarded them as of doubtful neutrality at the best: her imagination unsexed the most matronly dairy cows and turned them into bulls liable to "see red" at any moment. The ram who fed in the narrow paddock below the orchards she had adjudged, after ample and cautious probation, to be of docile temper; today, however, she decided to leave his docility untested, for the usually tranquil beast was roaming with every sign of restlessness from corner to corner of his meadow. A low, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute, was coming from the depth of a neighbouring copse, and there seemed to be some subtle connection between the animal's restless pacing and the wild music from the wood. Sylvia turned her steps in an upward direction and climbed the heather-clad slopes that stretched in rolling shoulders high above Yessney. She had left the piping notes behind her, but across the wooded combes at her feet the wind brought her another kind of music, the straining bay of hounds in full chase. Yessney was just on the outskirts of the Devon-and-Somerset country, and the hunted deer sometimes came that way. Sylvia could presently see a dark body, breasting hill after hill, and sinking again and again out of sight as he crossed the combes, while behind him steadily swelled that relentless chorus, and she grew tense with the excited sympathy that one feels for any hunted thing in whose capture one is not directly interested. And at last he broke through the outermost line of oak scrub and fern and stood panting in the open, a fat September stag carrying a well-furnished head. His obvious course was to drop down to the brown pools of Undercombe, and thence make his way towards the red deer's favoured sanctuary, the sea. To Sylvia's surprise, however, he turned his head to the upland slope and came lumbering resolutely onward over the heather. "It will be dreadful," she thought, "the hounds will pull him down under my very eyes." But the music of the pack seemed to have died away for a moment, and in its place she heard again that wild piping, which rose now on this side, now on that, as though urging the failing stag to a final effort. Sylvia stood well aside from his path, half hidden in a thick growth of whortle bushes, and watched him swing stiffly upward, his flanks dark with sweat, the coarse hair on his neck showing light by contrast. The pipe music shrilled suddenly around her, seeming to come from the bushes at her very feet, and at the same moment the great beast slewed round and bore directly down upon her. In an instant her pity for the hunted animal was changed to wild terror at her own danger; the thick heather roots mocked her scrambling efforts at flight, and she looked frantically downward for a glimpse of oncoming hounds. The huge antler spikes were within a few yards of her, and in a flash of numbing fear she remembered Mortimer's warning, to beware of horned beasts on the farm. And then with a quick throb of joy she saw that she was not alone; a human figure stood a few paces aside, knee-deep in the whortle bushes.

"Drive it off!" she shrieked. But the figure made no answering movement.

The antlers drove straight at her breast, the acrid smell of the hunted animal was in her nostrils, but her eyes were filled with the horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death. And in her ears rang the echo of a boy's laughter, golden and equivocal.

I found the writing, especially in that long paragraph to be superb.  Finally you can also listen to the story being read. 

I found that to be the best of the several readings available.  However, the reader makes a glaring error.  She forgets to read “The antlers drove straight at her breast” in that last paragraph, a very important detail to say the least.  Still I enjoyed her voice and tone.  

Lines I Wished I’D Written: From “Tobermory” by Saki

I’ve been reading a bunch of Saki’s short stories, which is easy to do since his short stories are excellent, fun, and very short, so short that at seven pages in my edition, “Tobermory” is one of Saki’s longer stories.  Saki, the pen name of H. H. Munro, wrote satiric short stories at the turn of the 20^th century England, up to 1916, when unfortunately he was killed in World War One.  Last year I highlighted his story, “Sredni Vishtar” and said how talented one needed to be to write stories under a half dozen pages. 

“Tobermory” had me laughing out loud.  The situation is outrageously fantastic—a talking cat—and yet Saki convinces us immediately.  I wonder if Saki was inspired by H. G. Wells, the science fiction writer, who a few years earlier had written The Island of Doctor Moreau, where a mad scientist invents a machine to make animals speak.  While Wells’ novel is rather somber and serious, Saki’s short story satiric and hilarious. 

The story is set at Lady Blemely’s house-party, what I imagine is an upscale Victorian tea party of a near dozen guests.  One of the guests is a “homely” chap, a scientist named Mr. Cornelius Apin, who makes the astonishing claim that he has invented a process where he can make animals talk human language.  Here’s the opening paragraph;

It was a chill, rain-washed afternoon of a late August day, that indefinite season when partridges are still in security or cold storage, and there is nothing to hunt - unless one is bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, in which case one may lawfully gallop after fat red stags. Lady Blemley's house- party was not bounded on the north by the Bristol Channel, hence there was a full gathering of her guests round the tea-table on this particular afternoon. And, in spite of the blankness of the season and the triteness of the occasion, there was no trace in the company of that fatigued restlessness which means a dread of the pianola and a subdued hankering for auction bridge. The undisguised open-mouthed attention of the entire party was fixed on the homely negative personality of Mr. Cornelius Appin. Of all her guests, he was the one who had come to Lady Blemley with the vaguest reputation. Some one had said he was "clever," and he had got his invitation in the moderate expectation, on the part of his hostess, that some portion at least of his cleverness would be contributed to the general entertainment. Until tea-time that day she had been unable to discover in what direction, if any, his cleverness lay. He was neither a wit nor a croquet champion, a hypnotic force nor a begetter of amateur theatricals. Neither did his exterior suggest the sort of man in whom women are willing to pardon a generous measure of mental deficiency. He had subsided into mere Mr. Appin, and the Cornelius seemed a piece of transparent baptismal bluff. And now he was claiming to have launched on the world a discovery beside which the invention of gunpowder, of the printing-press, and of steam locomotion were inconsiderable trifles. Science had made bewildering strides in many directions during recent decades, but this thing seemed to belong to the domain of miracle rather than to scientific achievement.

I’m taking the quotes from The Literature Network’s electronic copy, where you can read the entire thing.  Please do, you’ll find it enjoyable.  Let me continue on a little more.  The guests must have been told of this outrageous invention by the scientist himself, and of course everyone is in disbelief.  I imagine the guests looking at this sort of geeky scientist and thinking he’s just trying to be pretentious to cover his lack of people skills by telling them he’s made their cat, Tobermory, speak English.  It’s Lady Blemely’s husband who challenges him.

"And do you really ask us to believe," Sir Wilfrid was saying, "that you have discovered a means for instructing animals in the art of human speech, and that dear old Tobermory has proved your first successful pupil?"

"It is a problem at which I have worked for the last seventeen years," said Mr. Appin, "but only during the last eight or nine months have I been rewarded with glimmerings of success. Of course I have experimented with thousands of animals, but latterly only with cats, those wonderful creatures which have assimilated themselves so marvellously with our civilization while retaining all their highly developed feral instincts. Here and there among cats one comes across an outstanding superior intellect, just as one does among the ruck of human beings, and when I made the acquaintance of Tobermory a week ago I saw at once that I was in contact with a `Beyond-cat' of extraordinary intelligence. I had gone far along the road to success in recent experiments; with Tobermory, as you call him, I have reached the goal."

Mr. Appin concluded his remarkable statement in a voice which he strove to divest of a triumphant inflection. No one said "Rats," though Clovis's lips moved in a monosyllabic contortion which probably invoked those rodents of disbelief.

If the guests seem rather stuck up, they are.  The story turns on intelligence—who has it and who doesn’t—with the cat being the superior to the humans, who are mostly lame.  The other guests start to chime in.

"And do you mean to say," asked Miss Resker, after a slight pause, "that you have taught Tobermory to say and understand easy sentences of one syllable?"

"My dear Miss Resker," said the wonder-worker patiently, "one teaches little children and savages and backward adults in that piecemeal fashion; when one has once solved the problem of making a beginning with an animal of highly developed intelligence one has no need for those halting methods. Tobermory can speak our language with perfect correctness."

This time Clovis very distinctly said, "Beyond-rats!" Sir Wilfrid was more polite, but equally sceptical.

"Hadn't we better have the cat in and judge for ourselves?" suggested Lady Blemley.

Sir Wilfrid went in search of the animal, and the company settled themselves down to the languid expectation of witnessing some more or less adroit drawing- room ventriloquism.

In a minute Sir Wilfrid was back in the room, his face white beneath its tan and his eyes dilated with excitement. "By Gad, it's true!"

His agitation was unmistakably genuine, and his hearers started forward in a thrill of awakened interest.

I found that so laugh-out-loud funny.  Sir Wilfred, a rather stiff man, comes in shocked and disconcerted.  Notice how Saki has built up the anticipation.  The outrageous claim is made while sitting around a living room where no one believes it; so one goes off stage to witness it and comes back to confirm it.  And suddenly the cat wonders into the room himself to prove it to the reader.  Not only is it funny but the drama itself makes “real” in the fiction what is actually impossible.

Collapsing into an armchair he continued breathlessly: "I found him dozing in the smoking-room and called out to him to come for his tea. He blinked at me in his usual way, and I said, 'Come on, Toby; don't keep us waiting'; and, by Gad! he drawled out in a most horribly natural voice that he'd come when he dashed well pleased! I nearly jumped out of my skin!"

Appin had preached to absolutely incredulous hearers; Sir Wilfred's statement carried instant conviction. A Babel-like chorus of startled exclamation arose, amid which the scientist sat mutely enjoying the first fruit of his stupendous discovery.

In the midst of the clamour Tobermory entered the room and made his way with velvet tread and studied unconcern across to the group seated round the tea- table.

Saki picked the perfect pet to do this with.  I don’t think a dog would have worked as well.  The cat is even more supercilious than the guests.  Now Saki has set this up perfectly. 

A sudden hush of awkwardness and constraint fell on the company. Somehow there seemed an element of embarrassment in addressing on equal terms a domestic cat of acknowledged mental ability.

"Will you have some milk, Tobermory?" asked Lady Blemley in a rather strained voice.

"I don't mind if I do," was the response, couched in a tone of even indifference. A shiver of suppressed excitement went through the listeners, and Lady Blemley might be excused for pouring out the saucerful of milk rather unsteadily.

And the story goes on to where Tobey starts telling things about the guests he has overheard that people would not want to have said in public.  It is a perfect situation from which to develop satire.  The guests ultimately decide they must have Tobey killed so their secrets won’t come out.  I will say that the very extreme shortness of the story made the ending a bit dissatisfying.  It was too much of a happenstance to bring it to a close.  I imagine Saki was word limited and couldn’t develop a proper conclusion.  But I might be wrong, you tell me.  Was the conclusion satisfying? 

If you wish, you can hear along with the story with this audio recording.  It’s always fun to hear a story.

Lines I Wished I’d Written: The Tool-Shed from Saki’s “Sredni Vashtar”

Last year I started reading the short stories of H. H. Munro, otherwise known by his pen name, Saki.  Saki’s short stories are typically five or so pages long and in some cases three.  It takes real talent to write such short shorts.  I am continuously amazed at how much information he packs in.  Sharp wit, deft eye for the exact detail, diction that accentuates the sarcasm under his tone, Munro is a satirist exploiting the foibles and arrogance of upper class Edwardian England, an England that was at the height of its empire.  Last year I read his story, "Esmé" and thought it a minor classic.  I just read “Sredni Vashtar,” and though I don’t think this rises to a classic, it’s still a fine story.  Perhaps others might elevate this to a classic; it has its own Wikipedia entry.    

This is the story of a sickly, ten year old boy, Conradin, apparently an orphan and being raised by his cousin, a Mrs. de Ropp.  Conradin hated his cousin as only a boy could hate a matronly overseer, and in his imagination exacted some sort of pleasurable enmity.  It is implied, though never stated, that the boy lives in his imagination because of his illness.  The passage I quote below is where he establishes a hideaway in a garden shed, sharing it with a Houdan hen and a ferret, elevating the ferret into a deity, and setting up a shrine. 

In the dull, cheerless garden, overlooked by so many windows that were ready to open with a message not to do this or that, or a reminder that medicines were due, he found little attraction.  The few fruit-trees that it contained were set jealously apart from his plucking, as though they were rare specimens of that kind of blooming in an arid waste; it would probably have been difficult to find a market-gardener who would have offered ten shillings for their entire yearly produce.  In a forgotten corner, however, almost hidden behind a dismal shrubbery, was a disused tool-shed of respectable proportions, and within its walls Conradin found a haven, something that took on the varying aspects of a playroom and a cathedral.  He had peopled it with a legion of familiar phantoms, evoked partly from fragments of history and partly from his own brain, but it also boasted two inmates of flesh and blood.  In one corner lived a ragged-plumaged Houdan hen, on which the boy lavished an affection that had scarcely another outlet.  Further back in the gloom stood a large hutch, divided into two compartments, one of which was fronted with close iron bars.  This was the abode of a large polecat-ferret, which a friendly butcher-boy had once smuggled, cage and all, into its present quarters, in exchange for a long-secreted hoard of small silver.  Conradin was dreadfully afraid of the lithe, sharp-fanged beast, but it was his most treasured possession.  Its very presence in the tool-shed was a secret and fearful joy, to be kept scrupulously from the knowledge of the Woman, as he privately dubbed his cousin.  And one day, out of Heaven knows what material, he spun the beast a wonderful name, and from that moment it grew into a god and a religion.  The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by, and took Conradin with her, but to him the church service was an alien rite in the House of Rimmon.  Every Thursday, in the dim and musty silence of the tool-shed, he worshipped with mystic and elaborate ceremonial before the wooden hutch where dwelt Sredni Vashtar, the great ferret.  Red flowers in their season and scarlet berries in the winter-time were offered at his shrine, for he was a god who laid special stress on the fierce impatient side of things, as opposed to the Woman’s religion, which as far as Conradin could observe, went to great lengths in the contrary direction.  And on great festivals powdered nutmeg was strewn in front of the hutch, an important feature of the offering being that the nutmeg had to be stolen.  These festivals were of regular occurrence, and were chiefly appointed to celebrate some passing event.  On one occasion, when Mrs. de Ropp suffered from acute toothache for three days, Conradin kept up the festival during the entire three days, and almost succeeded in persuading himself that Sredni Vashtar was personally responsible for the toothache.  If the malady had lasted another day the supply of nutmeg would have given out.

Notice the irony here.  A sickly orphan is a child one typically feels compassion for, and we presume Mrs. de Ropp has indulged in just that, but it’s that very coddling to his illness that he grows spiteful against.  And so he creates this sort of evil god, gives it some sort of exotic Hindu name, and performs some sort of black worship service to spite “the Woman.”  There’s a certain boyish misogyny in that term.  The boy seems to feel a sense of powerlessness, and so tries to gather power in his ritual.  The scene is rich with psychological depth.

You can read "Sredni Vashtar" on line at the Literature Network.  It's a short read.  You can read and listen along with this reading by a Tom Baker.