The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water

Saki

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munroe (1870-1916), a British writer, primarily of short stories. The name “Saki” seems to have been taken from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is mentioned in his work. “The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water: A West Country Epic” (1910) is an excellent if not especially representative example of his brief fictions. For something briefer still, one can start with some choice aphorisms and definitions elsewhere in his work: “brevity is the soul of widowhood”; “Scandal is merely the passionate allowance which the gay make to the humdrum,”; “she shut her lips with the resolute finality of one who enjoys the blessed certainty of being implored to open them again”; “there was a wide distinction between hospitality and care of the feeble-minded”. There is obviously an influence from and sometime resemblance to Oscar Wilde in these epigrammatic flourishes. They are often quoted and attributed to Saki’s drawing room heroes, Reginald and Clovis Sangrail, but “The Blood-Feud of Toad-Water”, which was collected as part of Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches, is a self-contained story not featuring either of these favorites. In the foreword to Saki’s novel The Unbearable Bassington Evelyn Waugh wrote that “the stories too often have the air of being fancies and passing jests unduly expanded, or of dramatic themes unduly cramped”, but that a few times the theme “exactly fits the prescribed dimensions and the result is a masterpiece”. Such is the case with this tale of squabbling neighbors.

The prose is always elegant and witty. Saki places the Saunderses and the Cricks, vegetable farmers and poultry farmers respectively, in an “lonely upland spot”, Toad-Water. Their isolation is this severe: “for miles around these two dwellings there was never a neighbor or a chimney or even a burial ground to bring a sense of cheerful communion or social intercourse” (The ironic dissonance there between “burial ground” and “cheerful” is standard of Saki). Even the sentence fragment in the first paragraph has its own graceful rhythm: “Nothing but fields and spinneys and barns, lanes and waste-lands.” The promised feud between these two families is introduced with a touch of the schoolmaster, a bit of condescension alongside instruction: “the grudge between the man of herbs and the man of live stock is no new thing; you will find traces of it in the fourth chapter of Genesis.” The action begins with a predictable assault on the herb by the livestock, and Saki practices a different kind of prose talent. The Cricks’ hen gets into the soil bed where some onions are growing, and there she “scratched and scraped and beaked and delved.” This is surely redundant, and the apparent verb “to beak” is an oddity, but the sound of the passage works well because of the order and the consistent rhythm. There’s a lavish description of “earth-mold and root fibres” spraying in all directions, as “every minute the area of her operations widened”, and then follows brevity as the soul of understatement: “The onions suffered considerably.” This is not actually understatement in the sense of inaccuracy, being only understated relative to the description that preceded it.

The story has more parallelism than is usual with Saki, a more schematic approach to the sentence. This was I think prompted by the outline of the story, his premise of herb vs. livestock farmers without a moral, with little else to distinguish the Cricks from the Saunderses. Mrs. Saunders, right after happening upon the hen and her ravages, starts throwing soil: “With a terrible sincerity of purpose, though with a contemptible inadequacy of aim, she rained her earth bolts at the intruder.” Mrs. Crick “had a long family, and was therefore licensed, in the eyes of her world, to have a short temper”. Their anger is to reach something of a symmetrical consecration when “each belligerent informed the other that she was no lady—after which they withdrew in a great silence, feeling that nothing further remained to be said.” In this aftermath, “The chaffinches clinked in the apple trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes, and the waning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots.” By the short coda, unnumbered years later, “other onions have arisen, have flourished, have gone their way”. Saki is taking the long view of his own fiction, seeing the symmetries and patterns in a way the hapless Cricks and Saunderses cannot.

There is a lot of violence in Saki, and here the insults thrown over the garden wall will not be enough. Saki adds that the Cricks’ he-cat has fathered a few kittens by the Saunders’ she-cat, and that they are drowned, though “the disgrace remained”. For more violence against cats, see the story “Tobermory”, and for Saki’s more frequent human targets, “The Hounds of Fate”, “Sredni Vashtar”, or his most famous story, “Gabriel-Ernest”. In “The Blood-Feud of Toadwater”, besides the drowned kittens, there is a regicide attributed to Mrs. Saunders’ brothers’ wifes’ mother (probably calumny), and we learn at the end that the Cricks’ hen who started all the trouble has “expiated her misdeeds and lain with trussed feet and look of ineffable peace under the arched roof of Barnstaple market.” (The omission of an article before “ineffable peace” is another bit of parallelism, linking the look to the “trussed feet”, but forced.) Even if the titular feud won’t go as far as the Cain and Abel business, death marks this story as it does so many of Saki’s stories.