Story Four The Open Window
“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 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 rectory1, 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 snipe2 -shooting ground they were all three engulfed in a treacherous piece of bog3. 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 human4. “Poor aunt always thinks that they will come back some day, 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 to-day, so they'll make a fine mess over my poor carpets. So like you men-folk, 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 wide-spread delusion that total strangers and chance acquaintances are hungry for the least detail of one's ailments and infirmities5, 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 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 an imminent6 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 good-bye 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.
Notes
1．rectory: n. a house provided by the church for a rector (a clergyman) and his family to live
2．snipe: n. a bird with a very long thin beak that lives in wet places and is often shot for sport.
3．bog: n. soft, waterlogged ground; a marsh
4．the child's voice ...became falteringly human: meaning the girl's voice trembles when saying that the men's bodies were never found, and this trembling voice shows how painful and sad she is to talk about the tragic event
5．infirmities: n. frailties; disabilities
6．imminent: a. about to occur; impending
Questions for discussion
1．What details about Framton does the writer give readers in the second and third paragraphs?
2．What is the setting of Framton's visit? How does the setting add to the atmosphere of the girl's story?
3．How does Mrs. Sappleton's words and behavior increase Framton's fear and when does the climax of the story come?
4．Why do you think Framton reacts so intensely to the appearance of the three figures?
5．Explain the last sentence of the story and tell what you think of the girl.
6．How might Saki's story have been different if it had been told from the girl's point of view?
About the author
Hector Hugh Munro (1870—1916), better known by the pen name Saki, was a British writer, whose witty and sometimes macabre stories satirized Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story and is often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. His tales feature delicatelydrawn characters and finely-judged narratives. “The Open Window”may be his most famous, with a closing line (“Romance at short notice was her speciality”) that has entered the lexicon.
In addition to his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was the custom of the time, and then collected into several volumes) he also wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with another writer;two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire, the only book published under his own name; two novels, The Unbearable Bassington and When William Came; and the episodic The Westminster Alice(a Parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland). He was influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and Kipling.
Saki's world contrasts the effete conventions and hypocrisies of Edwardian England with the ruthless but straightforward life-and-death struggles of nature. Nature generally wins in the end.
Saki's work is now in the public domain, and all or most of these stories are available on the Internet.
Commentary on the point of view of this story
The stories of Saki often verge off into a type of writing that qualifies itself for inclusion in horror anthologies. One such story is “The Open Window”.
The plot of the story is not complicated. A man with the name of Framton Nuttel comes to a country village for some peace and rest from a nervous breakdown. He calls on a lady named Mrs. Sappleton whom his sister used to know. For a few minutes he is left alone with the lady's niece Vera, who has quite an active imagination. After ascertaining that Mr. Nuttel knows virtually nothing of her family or the neighborhood, the 15-year-old girl tells Framton a terrifying story about the tragedy of the lady's husband, two brothers and their little Spaniel, who had gone hunting one day three years earlier and never returned. The bodies were never found, and because of this the window from which they left is always kept open. So when indeed they do return that very night, Framton, who had suffered from nerves, runs out of the house in a panic.The story ends with a twist of irony when the girl is asked why their guest ran out that way, the teenager coolly explains his sudden departure with an equally imaginative tale.
The story is a third-person narrative from the point of view of Mr. Nuttel, but he is not an active speaker in the conversation. The young girl, instead, opens and conducts the conversation. “My aunt will be down presently, Mr. Nuttel,” and “in the meantime you must try and put up with me.”So she says self-possessedly. Then she asks two questions and learns that Mr. Nuttel knows nothing about her aunt and the villagers. It is most likely that at this moment an idea comes into the girl's mind that she may as well make a tale to fool this nervous stranger. Familiar with her aunt's talking habit, the girl turns to mention her aunt's tragedy casually. As expected, this arouses Mr. Nuttel's immediate interest. He asks whether the open window has anything to do with the tragedy. This is invitation enough. The young girl begins her practical joke. Her self-possession and exaggeration of the significance of the open window makes Mr. Nuttel believe the whole story; her staring out through the open window with dazed horror in her eyes adds to the story the unnerving atmosphere. All these send the visitor to flee when he mistakes the returning people for ghosts. Another surprise to the reader is the girl's cool explanation to Mr. Nuttel's running away, which is another tale made up to the occasion.
The structure of the story is also worth a word or two. It is actually a story-within-a-story s tructure. The larger narrative frame is that of Mr. Nuttel's arrival at Mrs. Sappleton's house for the purpose of introducing himself to her. Within this narrative frame is the second story told by Mrs. Sappleton's niece, a quick inventor of stories.