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 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 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 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 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 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 goodbye 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.

The writer behind the pen name

“Saki” was Hector Hugh Munro, born in Burma in 1870 and brought up in Devon by a pair of aunts whom, by most accounts, he did not remember fondly. The aunts in his fiction are seldom kind, and the children usually win. He made his name as a journalist and short-story writer in Edwardian London, publishing small, glittering, merciless tales of country houses and drawing rooms. He enlisted when the First World War began, although he was over the usual age, and was killed in France in 1916.

Behind the story

“The Open Window” was first published in 1911 and collected in Beasts and Super-Beasts in 1914. It is often taught in schools as a model of short-story construction, which could make it sound like a dry exercise. It isn’t. It belongs to a recognisable Saki world: a country house, a visitor with “nerves,” and a self-possessed young person who has been bored for far too long.

How it works

The story is a ghost story told from inside a hoax. For most of its length we are in Framton Nuttel’s position. He’s a nervous man sent to the country for a rest cure, carrying letters of introduction from his sister, and fifteen-year-old Vera is very good at reading what he needs. She asks whether he knows anyone in the area, and he doesn’t. That tiny exchange is the hinge of the whole story. Once she knows he has no way of checking her facts, she can make up anything she likes.

What she invents is a perfectly made ghost story in miniature. There’s the tragedy (three hunters lost in a bog), the haunted detail (the window left open every evening for their return), the specific, believable clothing (a white waterproof coat over the arm, a little brown spaniel) and the grief that seems to prove it (an aunt who still talks as if they’re coming home). Then Saki makes the ghosts walk in, and for one shuddering moment the reader is right there with Framton.

The twist in the final paragraph isn’t that there was no ghost. It’s that we watch Vera do it again, instantly, for a new audience, inventing a lurid backstory for the fleeing visitor. “Romance at short notice was her speciality.” The line works because it’s dry and admiring and slightly frightening all at once. The real uncanny thing in the story is a child who can manufacture reality on demand.

On a reread

Vera’s first line of real attack is a question, not a statement. Watch how much of her story is built from what Framton tells her.
Mrs. Sappleton, the aunt, is cheerfully ordinary, and her talk about shooting and the men coming home is exactly what a ghost-haunted widow would never say. It’s only sinister because Vera has primed us.
The open window works on two levels. It’s the frame Framton is made to stare through, and it’s the opening Vera’s imagination climbs in by.
Count the words. Saki wastes almost none, and even the comic names do work.

If you enjoyed this

Saki’s Sredni Vashtar offers another child who gets the better of an adult, with a far darker end, and The Interlopers shows him pulling the rug out in a forest instead of a drawing room. For a story built entirely on whether you trust the storyteller, try Bierce’s The Moonlit Road, or our original The Seven-Ten, where a small town’s familiar evening ritual is not what it seems.