The Open Window

H.H.Munro (Saki)

"My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a very
self-possessed young lady of fifteen; "in the meantime you must try and
put up with me."

Framton Nuttel endeavoured to say the correct something which
should duly flatter the niece of the moment without unduly discounting the
aunt that was to come. Privately he doubted more than ever whether these
formal visits on a succession of total strangers would do very much
towards helping the nerve cure which he was supposed to be undergoing.

"I know how it will be," his sister had said when he was preparing
to migrate to this rural retreat; "you will bury yourself down there and
not speak to a living soul, and your nerves will be worse than ever from
moping. I shall just give you letters of introduction to all the people I
know there. Some of them, as far as I can remember, were quite nice."

Framton wondered whether Mrs. Sappleton, the lady to whom he was
presenting one of the letters of introduction came into the nice division.

"Do you know many of the people round here?" asked the niece, when
she judged that they had had sufficient silent communion.

"Hardly a soul," said Framton. "My sister was staying here, at the
rectory, you know, some four years ago, and she gave me letters of
introduction to some of the people here." He made the last statement in a
tone of distinct regret.

"Then you know practically nothing about my aunt?" pursued the
self-possessed young lady.

"Only her name and address," admitted the caller. He was wondering
whether Mrs. Sappleton was in the married or widowed state. An undefinable
something about the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.

"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 country spot 
tragedies seemed out of place.

"You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an October
afternoon," said the niece, indicating a large French window that opened
on to a lawn.

"It is quite warm for the time of the year," said Framton; "but
has that window got anything to do with the tragedy?"

"Out through that window, three years ago to a day, her husband
and her two young brothers went off for their day's shooting. They never
came back. In crossing the moor to their favourite snipe-shooting ground
they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog. It had been
that dreadful wet summer, you know, and places that were safe in other
years gave way suddenly without warning. Their bodies were never
recovered. That was the dreadful part of it."

Here the child's voice lost its self-possessed note and became
falteringly human.

"Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back someday, they
and the little brown spaniel that was lost with them, and walk in at that
window just as they used to do. That is why the window is kept open every
evening till it is quite dusk. "Poor dear aunt, she has often told me how
they went out, her husband with his white waterproof coat over his arm,
and Ronnie, her youngest brother, singing 'Bertie, why do you bound?' as
he always did to tease her, because she said it got on her nerves. Do you
know, sometimes on still, quiet evenings like this, I almost get a creepy
feeling that they will all walk in through that window--"

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 in making her appearance.

"I hope Vera has been amusing you?" she said.

"She has been very interesting," said Framton.

"I hope you don't mind the open window," said Mrs. Sappleton
briskly; "my husband and brothers will be home directly from shooting, and
they always come in this way. They've been out for snipe in the marshes
today, so they'll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you
menfolk, isn't it?"

She rattled on cheerfully about the shooting and the scarcity of
birds, and the prospects for duck in the winter.

To Framton it was all purely horrible. He made a desperate but
only partially successful effort to turn the talk on to a less ghastly
topic, he was conscious that his hostess was giving him only a fragment of
her attention, and her eyes were constantly straying past him to the open
window and the lawn beyond. It was certainly an unfortunate coincidence
that he should have paid his visit on this tragic anniversary.

"The doctors agree in ordering me complete rest, an absence of
mental excitement, and avoidance of anything in the nature of violent
physical exercise," announced Framton, who laboured under the tolerably
widespread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are
hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities, their cause
and cure. "On the matter of diet they are not so much in agreement," he
continued.

"No?" said Mrs. Sappleton, in a voice which only replaced a yawn
at the last moment. Then she suddenly brightened into alert attention--but
not to what Framton was saying.

"Here they are at last!" she cried. "Just in time for tea, and
don't they look as if they were muddy up to the eyes!"

Framton shivered slightly and turned towards the niece with a look
intended to convey sympathetic comprehension. The child was staring out
through the open window with a dazed horror in her eyes. In a chill shock
of nameless fear Framton swung round in his seat and looked in the same
direction.

In the deepening twilight three figures were walking across the
lawn towards the window, they all carried guns under their arms, and one
of them was additionally burdened with a white coat hung over his
shoulders. A tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly
they neared the house, and then a hoarse young voice chanted out of the
dusk: "I said, Bertie, why do you bound?"

Framton grabbed wildly at his stick and hat; the hall door, the
gravel drive, and the front gate were dimly noted stages in his headlong
retreat. A cyclist coming along the road had to run into the hedge to
avoid imminent collision.

"Here we are, my dear," said the bearer of the white mackintosh,
coming in through the window, "fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was
that who bolted out as we came up?"

"A most extraordinary man, a Mr. Nuttel," said Mrs. Sappleton;
"could only talk about his illnesses, and dashed off without a word of
goodby or 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 somewhere on
the banks of the Ganges by a pack of pariah dogs, and had to spend the
night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning and
foaming just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve."

Romance at short notice was her speciality.

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