Why Saki Rocks

"'What are we to do?' asked Constance.  

"'What a person you are for questions,' I said.  

"'Well, we can't stay here all night with a hyaena,' she retorted.  

"'I don't know what your ideas of comfort are,' I said; 'but I shouldn't think of staying here all night even without a hyaena. My home may be an unhappy one, but at least it has hot and cold water laid on, and domestic service, and other conveniences which we shouldn't find here.'"  

from "Esme"  

Arlington Stringham made a joke in the House of Commons. It was a thin House, and a very thin joke; something about the Anglo-Saxon race having a great many angles. It is possible that it was unintentional, but a fellow-member, who did not wish it to be supposed that he was asleep because his eyes were shut, laughed. One or two of the papers noted "a laugh" in brackets, and another, which was notorious for the carelessness of its political news, mentioned "laughter." Things often begin in that way.  

"Arlington made a joke in the House last night," said Eleanor Stringham to her mother; "in all the years we've been married neither of us has made jokes, and I don't like it now. I'm afraid it's the beginning of the rift in the lute."  

"What lute?" said her mother.  

"It's a quotation," said Eleanor. To say that anything was a quotation was an excellent method, in Eleanor's eyes, for withdrawing it from discussion, just as you could always defend indifferent lamb late in the season by saying "It's mutton." 

****** 

Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn coloured collie at a time when every one else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.  

****** 

Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often. It was perhaps the yearning of a woman who had no children of her own.  

 

From "The Jesting of Arlington Stringham."  

"You are not really dying, are you?" asked Amanda.  

"I have the doctor's permission to live till Tuesday," said Laura.  

"But to-day is Saturday; this is serious!" gasped Amanda.  

"I don't know about it being serious; it is certainly Saturday," said Laura.  

From "Laura"  

"Do you mean to tell me that you are meditating violence against a man like Sir Leon Birberry," stammered Huddle; "he's one of the most respected men in the country."  

"He's down on our list," said Clovis carelessly; "after all, we've got men we can trust to do our job, so we shan't have to rely on local assistance. And we've got some Boy-scouts helping us as auxiliaries."  

"Boy-scouts!"  

"Yes; when they understood there was real killing to be done they were even keener than the men."  

From "The Unrest Cure"  

"I expect you don't know me with my moustache," said the new- comer; "I've only grown it during the last two months." 

"On the contrary," said Clovis, "the moustache is the only thing about you that seemed familiar to me. I felt certain that I had met it somewhere before."  

"My name is Tarrington," resumed the candidate for recognition. 

"A very useful kind of name," said Clovis; "with a name of that sort no one would blame you if you did nothing in particular heroic or remarkable, would they? And yet if you were to raise a troop of light horse in a moment of national emergency, 'Tarrington's Light Horse' would sound quite appropriate and pulse-quickening; whereas if you were called Spoopin, for instance, the thing would be out of the question. No one, even in a moment of national emergency, could possibly belong to Spoopin's Horse."  

The new-comer smiled weakly, as one who is not to be put off by mere flippancy, and began again with patient persistence: 

"I think you ought to remember my name--"  

"I shall," said Clovis, with an air of immense sincerity. "My aunt was asking me only this morning to suggest names for four young owls she's just had sent her as pets. I shall call them all Tarrington; then if one or two of them die or fly away, or leave us in any of the ways that pet owls are prone to, there will be always one or two left to carry on your name."  

From "The Talking-Out of Tarrington"