id="pgepubid00030">245

The Oversight

255

Hyacinth

265

The Image of the Lost Soul

277

The Purple of the Balkan Kings

281

The Cupboard of the Yesterdays

287

For the Duration of the War

295

HECTOR HUGH MUNRO

“When peace comes,” wrote an officer of the 22nd Royal Fusiliers, the regiment in which Munro was a private and in which he rose to the rank of lance-sergeant, “Saki will give us the most wonderful of all the books about the war.”  But that book of the war will not be written; for Munro has died for King and country.  In this volume are his last tales.  And it is because these tales, brilliant and elusive as butterflies, hide, rather than reveal, the character of the man who wrote them, give but a suggestion of his tenderness and simplicity, of his iron will, of his splendour in the grip of war, that it is my duty to write these pages about him, now that he lies in the kind earth of France.  It is but to do what his choice of a pen-name makes me sure he himself would have done for a friend.

“Yon rising Moon that looks for us again,
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
How oft hereafter, rising, look for us!
Through this same Garden—and for one in vain.

“And when like her, O Saki, you shall pass
Among the Guests, star-scattered on the grass,
And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made one—turn down an empty glass.”

The first time that Munro used the name of Saki was, I believe, in 1890, when he published in the Westminster Gazette the second of the political satires, which were afterwards collected in a volume, called Alice in Westminster.  It was, I think, because the wistful philosophy of FitzGerald appealed to him, as it did to so many of his contemporaries, that he chose a pen-name from his verses.  He loved the fleeting beauty of life.  “There is one thing I care for and that is youth,” he once said.  And he always remained youthful.  It was perfectly natural for him, although he was then a man of forty, to celebrate the coming in of a new year by seizing the hands of strangers and flying round in a great here-we-go-round-the-mulberry-bush at Oxford Circus, and, later in the year, to dance in the moonlight round a bonfire in the country, invoking Apollo with entreaties for sunshine to waken the flowers.  His last tale, For the Duration of the War, written when he was at the front, shows that his spirit remained youthful to the end.  But if he gloried in the beauty of life, he was conscious of its sadness.  Have we any book in which the joy and pain of life are so intimately blended as they are in The Unbearable Bassington?  Munro himself laughed when he was looking through a collection of criticisms of that novel, some of which emphasised its gaiety and others its poignancy, and remarked that they would bewilder the people who read them.

It is not my present purpose to write a biography of my friend.  That is a task which must be discharged later, and an account of his life will be given in the first volume of the collected edition of his works, which it is proposed to publish after the war.  Nevertheless, before writing of the transformation wrought in him by the war, it may be well to give a brief outline of his career.

Munro was born in 1870 in Burmah, where his father, the late Colonel C. A. Munro, was stationed.  At his christening he was named Hector Hugh.  He belonged to a family with traditions of the two services.  His paternal grandfather had been in the army, and his mother was a daughter of Rear-Admiral Mercer.  Mrs. Munro died when her children were very young, and Hector, his elder brother and his sister were brought up by their father’s sisters, two maiden ladies, who were devoted to the children, but had old-fashioned Scottish ideas of discipline.  Their home was near Barnstaple, a lonely house in a garden shut in by high stone walls with meadows beyond.  The three children had no companions, and were thrown on their own resources for amusement.  One of their diversions was to produce a newspaper.  All through his childhood Hector professed violent Tory opinions, and at a very early age he began to take an interest in politics and to read any books or papers dealing with them that came his way.  He loved, above all, the woodlands and the wild things in them, especially the birds.  His delicate health caused his aunts somewhat to temper their severity in his case, but I fancy they must have had some difficulty in curbing his high spirits; for he was a thoroughly human boy and up to every sort of prank.  He was sent for a time to a private school at Exmouth, and when he left it did lessons at home with his sister’s governess.  Later he was sent to Bedford College.

When school-days were over and Colonel Munro had returned to England for good, Hector and his sister were taken abroad by their father.  They lived in Normandy and then in Dresden, where the first German words that Hector learnt were the names of birds, sometimes picked up from strangers in the zoological gardens.  Then came a strenuous series of visits to German and Austrian cities, which Colonel Munro arranged as much for the education as the pleasure of his son and daughter.  Museums and picture-galleries were visited everywhere.  Hector amused himself by counting up the number of St. Sebastians in each gallery and making bets with his sister as to which would have the most.  Berlin won with eighteen.  The impression made on Munro by this tour is to be seen in his books, and in the present volume there are two tales, The Interlopers and The Wolves of Cernogratz, which seem to have been inspired by the memory of some romantic castle in the heart of Europe.  A short play, Karl Ludwig’s Window, which will be published later, is based on an idea given by a visit to a castle near Prague.

After a