Shock Tactics

by Saki (Hector Hugh Munro)

On a late spring afternoon Ella McCarthy sat on a green-painted chair in Kensington Gardens, staring listlessly at an uninteresting stretch of park landscape, that blossomed suddenly into tropical radiance as an expected figure appeared in the middle distance.

“Hullo, Bertie!” she exclaimed sedately, when the figure arrived at the painted chair that was the nearest neighbour to her own, and dropped into it eagerly, yet with a certain due regard for the set of its trousers; “hasn’t it been a perfect spring afternoon?”

The statement was a distinct untruth as far as Ella’s own feelings were concerned; until the arrival of Bertie the afternoon had been anything but perfect.

Bertie made a suitable reply, in which a questioning note seemed to hover.

“Thank you ever so much for those lovely handkerchiefs,” said Ella, answering the unspoken question; “they were just what I’ve been wanting. There’s only one thing spoilt my pleasure in your gift,” she added, with a pout.

“What was that?” asked Bertie anxiously, fearful that perhaps he had chosen a size of handkerchief that was not within the correct feminine limit.

“I should have liked to have written and thanked you for them as soon as I got them,” said Ella, and Bertie’s sky clouded at once.

“You know what mother is,” he protested; “she opens all my letters, and if she found I’d been giving presents to any one there’d have been something to talk about for the next fortnight.”

“Surely, at the age of twenty—” began Ella.

“I’m not twenty till September,” interrupted Bertie.

“At the age of nineteen years and eight months,” persisted Ella, “you might be allowed to keep your correspondence private to yourself.”

“I ought to be, but things aren’t always what they ought to be. Mother opens every letter that comes into the house, whoever it’s for. My sisters and I have made rows about it time and again, but she goes on doing it.”

“I’d find some way to stop her if I were in your place,” said Ella valiantly, and Bertie felt that the glamour of his anxiously deliberated present had faded away in the disagreeable restriction that hedged round its acknowledgment.

“Is anything the matter?” asked Bertie’s friend Clovis when they met that evening at the swimming-bath.

“Why do you ask?” said Bertie.

“When you wear a look of tragic gloom in a swimming-bath,” said Clovis, “it’s especially noticeable from the fact that you’re wearing very little else. Didn’t she like the handkerchiefs?”

Bertie explained the situation.

“It is rather galling, you know,” he added, “when a girl has a lot of things she wants to write to you and can’t send a letter except by some roundabout, underhand way.”

“One never realises one’s blessings while one enjoys them,” said Clovis; “now I have to spend a considerable amount of ingenuity inventing excuses for not having written to people.”

“It’s not a joking matter,” said Bertie resentfully: “you wouldn’t find it funny if your mother opened all your letters.”

“The funny thing to me is that you should let her do it.”

“I can’t stop it. I’ve argued about it—”

“You haven’t used the right kind of argument, I expect. Now, if every time one of your letters was opened you lay on your back on the dining-table during dinner and had a fit, or roused the entire family in the middle of the night to hear you recite one of Blake’s ‘Poems of Innocence,’ you would get a far more respectful hearing for future protests. People yield more consideration to a mutilated mealtime or a broken night’s rest, than ever they would to a broken heart.”

“Oh, dry up,” said Bertie crossly, inconsistently splashing Clovis from head to foot as he plunged into the water.

It was a day or two after the conversation in the swimming-bath that a letter addressed to Bertie Heasant slid into the letter-box at his home, and thence into the hands of his mother. Mrs. Heasant was one of those empty-minded individuals to whom other people’s affairs are perpetually interesting. The more private they are intended to be the more acute is the interest they arouse. She would have opened this particular letter in any case; the fact that it was marked “private,” and diffused a delicate but penetrating aroma merely caused her to open it with headlong haste rather than matter-of-course deliberation. The harvest of sensation that rewarded her was beyond all expectations.

“Bertie, carissimo,” it began, “I wonder if you will have the nerve to do it: it will take some nerve, too. Don’t forget the jewels. They are a detail, but details interest me.

“Your mother must not know of my existence. If questioned swear you never heard of me.”

For years Mrs. Heasant had searched Bertie’s correspondence diligently for traces of possible dissipation or youthful entanglements, and at last the suspicions that had stimulated her inquisitorial zeal were justified by this one splendid haul. That any one wearing the exotic name “Clotilde” should write to Bertie under the incriminating announcement “as ever” was sufficiently electrifying, without the astounding allusion to the jewels. Mrs. Heasant could recall novels and dramas wherein jewels played an exciting and commanding role, and here, under her own roof, before her very eyes as it were, her own son was carrying on an intrigue in which jewels were merely an interesting detail. Bertie was not due home for another hour, but his sisters were available for the immediate unburdening of a scandal-laden mind.

“Bertie is in the toils of an adventuress,” she screamed; “her name is Clotilde,” she added, as if she thought they had better know the worst at once. There are occasions when more harm than good is done by shielding young girls from a knowledge of the more deplorable realities of life.

By the time Bertie arrived his mother had discussed every possible and improbable conjecture as to his guilty secret; the girls limited themselves to the opinion that their brother had been weak rather than wicked.

“Who is Clotilde?” was the question that confronted Bertie almost before he had got into the hall. His denial of any knowledge of such a person was met with an outburst of bitter laughter.

“How well you have learned your lesson!” exclaimed Mrs. Heasant. But satire gave way to furious indignation when she realised that Bertie did not intend to throw any further light on her discovery.

“You shan’t have any dinner till you’ve confessed everything,” she stormed.

Bertie’s reply took the form of hastily collecting material for an impromptu banquet from the larder and locking himself into his bedroom. His mother made frequent visits to the locked door and shouted a succession of interrogations with the persistence of one who thinks that if you ask a question often enough an answer will eventually result. Bertie did nothing to encourage the supposition. An hour had passed in fruitless one-sided palaver when another letter addressed to Bertie and marked “private” made its appearance in the letter-box. Mrs. Heasant pounced on it with the enthusiasm of a cat that has missed its mouse and to whom a second has been unexpectedly vouchsafed. If she hoped for further disclosures assuredly she was not disappointed.

“So you have really done it!” the letter abruptly commenced; “Poor Dagmar. Now she is done for I almost pity her. You did it very well, you wicked boy, the servants all think it was suicide, and there will be no fuss. Better not touch the jewels till after the inquest.

 
Anything that Mrs. Heasant had previously done in the way of outcry was easily surpassed as she raced upstairs and beat frantically at her son’s door.

“Miserable boy, what have you done to Dagmar?”

“It’s Dagmar now, is it?” he snapped; “it will be Geraldine next.”

“That it should come to this, after all my efforts to keep you at home of an evening,” sobbed Mrs. Heasant; “it’s no use you trying to hide things from me; Clotilde’s letter betrays everything.”

“Does it betray who she is?” asked Bertie; “I’ve heard so much about her, I should like to know something about her home-life. Seriously, if you go on like this I shall fetch a doctor; I’ve often enough been preached at about nothing, but I’ve never had an imaginary harem dragged into the discussion.”

“Are these letters imaginary?” screamed Mrs. Heasant; “what about the jewels, and Dagmar, and the theory of suicide?”

No solution of these problems was forthcoming through the bedroom door, but the last post of the evening produced another letter for Bertie, and its contents brought Mrs. Heasant that enlightenment which had already dawned on her son.

“Dear Bertie,” it ran; “I hope I haven’t distracted your brain with the spoof letters I’ve been sending in the name of a fictitious Clotilde. You told me the other day that the servants, or somebody at your home, tampered with your letters, so I thought I would give any one that opened them something exciting to read. The shock might do them good.

 
Mrs. Heasant knew Clovis slightly, and was rather afraid of him. It was not difficult to read between the lines of his successful hoax. In a chastened mood she rapped once more at Bertie’s door.

“A letter from Mr. Sangrail. It’s all been a stupid hoax. He wrote those other letters. Why, where are you going?”

Bertie had opened the door; he had on his hat and overcoat.

“I’m going for a doctor to come and see if anything’s the matter with you. Of course it was all a hoax, but no person in his right mind could have believed all that rubbish about murder and suicide and jewels. You’ve been making enough noise to bring the house down for the last hour or two.”

“But what was I to think of those letters?” whimpered Mrs. Heasant.

“I should have known what to think of them,” said Bertie; “if you choose to excite yourself over other people’s correspondence it’s your own fault. Anyhow, I’m going for a doctor.”

It was Bertie’s great opportunity, and he knew it. His mother was conscious of the fact that she would look rather ridiculous if the story got about. She was willing to pay hush-money.

“I’ll never open your letters again,” she promised. And Clovis has no more devoted slave than Bertie Heasant.

END