Editor’s
note: This short story is in the public domain.
It was posted originally by www. http://americanliterature.com/
ROMANCE AT SHORT NOTICE--"My aunt will be down
presently, Mr. Nuttel," said a very self-possessed young lady of 15;
"in the meantime you must try and put up with me."
Framton
Nuttel endeavored 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 much towards helping the nerve cure which he was
supposed to be undergoing
***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
![]() |
H.H. Munro aka Saki |
Hector Hugh Munro (Dec. 18, 1870 –
Nov. 13, 1916), better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H.
Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre
stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of
the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced
by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A.
Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse. “The
Open Window” is considered by many to be his finest short story. He was killed in WWI by a German sniper near
Beaumont-Hamel, France. He was 45 year
old and had enlisted despite being considered over age.
***
"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 favorite 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 labored 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.
Source: http://americanliterature.com/short-story-of-the-day
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