The open window – Saki

The open window – Saki (H. H. Munro)

“My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” said self-possessed young lady of 15. “In the meantime you must put up with me.”

Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something to flatter the nice without unduly discounting the aunt. Privately he doubted whether these formal visits on total strangers would help the nerve cure which he supposed to be undergoing in the rural retreat.

“I’ll give you letters to everyone I know there.” His sister had said.

“Or else you’ll bury yourself and not speak to a soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from moping.”

“Do you know many people around here?” asked the niece when she judged they had had sufficient communion.

“Hardly a soul,” said Framton. “My sister visited here four years ago, and she gave me letters of introduction.”

“Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?” pursued the young lady.

“Only her name and address.”

“Her great tragedy happened just three years ago,” said the child.

“That would be since your sister’s time.”

“Her tragedy?” asked Framton. Somehow in this restful spot tragedies seemed out of place.

“You may wonder why we keep that window open so late in the year,” said the niece, indicating a large french window that opened on the lawn. “Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband and her two brothers went off for their day’s shooting. In crossing the moor, they were engulfed in a treacherous bog. Their bodies were never recovered.”

Here the child’s voice faltered. “Poor Aunt always thinks that they’ll come back someday, they and little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at the window. That is why it is kept open every evening till dusk. She has often told me how they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm. You know, sometimes on still evenings like this, I get a creepy feeling that they will all walk in through that widow….”

She broke off with a little shudder. It was a relief to Framton when the aunt bustled into the room with a whirl of apologies for being late.

“I hope you don’t mind the open window,” she said. “My husband and brothers will be home from shooting, and they always come in this way.”

She rattled on cheerful about the prospects for duck in the winter. Framton made a desperate effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly topic, conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of her attention, and that her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open window.

“The doctors order me a complete rest from mental excitement and physical exercise,” announced Framton, who labored under the widespread delusion that total strangers are hungry for the last detail of one’s infirmities.

“Oh?” responded Mrs. Sappleton, vaguely. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention — but not what was saying.

“Here they are at last!” she cried. “In time for tea.”

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look of sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes. Framton swung round and looked in the same direction.

In the deepening twilight, three figures were walking noiselessly across the lawn, a tired brown spaniel close at their heels. They all carried guns and one had a white coat over his shoulders.

 Framton grabbed his waking stick; the hall door and the gravel drive were dimly noted stages in his headlong retreat.

“Here we are, my dear,” said the bearer of the white mackintosh, coming in through the window. “Who was that who bolted out as we came up?”

“A Mr. Nuttel,” said Mrs. Sappleton, “who dashed off without a word of apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost.”

“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 on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and foaming above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve.”

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

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