Dr Oliver Tearle's reading of H. H. Munro'south miniature masterpiece

'The Open up Window' is one of Saki'south shortest stories, and that's proverb something. Few of his perfectly crafted and deliciously written tales exceed 4 or 5 pages in length, but 'The Open Window', at barely three pages, outstrips even 'The Lumber-Room' or 'Tobermory' for verbal economy. Information technology is so brief it has almost the air of a parable about information technology, except that information technology's far from clear what the 'moral' of the story is, or even if there is one. Saki uses linguistic communication so deftly and to such issue, that it is worth unpicking and analysing 'The Open Window' (which tin can be read in full here) a little.

Although on get-go glance it seems different from some of Saki's amend-known stories, such as his classic werewolf tale 'Gabriel-Ernest' and his story about a polecat worshipped equally a god, 'Sredni Vashtar', 'The Open Window' follows the same essential setup as many of Saki'southward other stories, in having an boyish graphic symbol whose supposed innocence (supposed by the adult character, that is) turns out to exist guile, cunning, and the mischief in disguise.

But whereas Nicholas in 'The Lumber-Room', Conradin in 'Sredni Vashtar', or Gabriel-Ernest actively seek to crusade harm to their adult antagonists (or, in the instance of Nicholas, to refuse to assist an aunt who has got herself trapped in the h2o tank), Vera's only weapon is her imagination. Yet this lonely suggests that she shares some kinship with Conradin in 'Sredni Vashtar', whose cousin and guardian dislikes her ward'due south imaginative streak.

'The Open Window': plot summary

What happens in 'The Open Window', in summary, is this: a homo, who has the glorious name of Framton Nuttel, has newly arrived in a 'rural retreat', to help him settle his fretfulness. His sister, worried that he will hide himself away at that place and 'mope', thus making his nerves worse, has given him the names and addresses of all the people she knows in the area, and told him to become and introduce himself to them. (His sister had stayed at the rectory iv years earlier.)

'The Open up Window' takes identify at the house of one of Framton's sis'southward contacts, a woman named Mrs Sappleton and her 15-year-former niece, Vera, whom Framton has gone round to visit then he might introduce himself.

While Mrs Sappleton is upstairs making herself ready to meet their new guest, Vera entertains Framton. After she learns that Framton knows barely anything about her aunt, Vera tells him that three years ago Mrs Sappleton'southward husband and her ii brothers went out through the French window on a shooting trip, and never returned. They drowned in a 'treacherous slice of bog' and their bodies were never recovered. The spaniel they took with them was lost, also. Vera tells Framton that her aunt has kept the French window open ever since, in the conventionalities that her married man and brothers are going to walk back through the open up window whatever moment, alive and well.

Mrs Sappleton then arrives from upstairs and apologises for existence late coming downwards. She mentions the open window and explains that her married man and brothers are out shooting but will be dorsum any minute. They substitution small talk about shooting and birds, and Framton iterates that he has been told to have consummate rest and avoid 'mental excitement', when Mrs Sappleton announces that her husband and brothers are returning home.

Framton looks with horror at the sight of three men and a 'tired brown spaniel' approaching the open window – he sees that Vera shares his await of stupor. Believing he is seeing three ghosts (4 if you include the domestic dog!), he picks up his lid and coat and runs from the house equally fast as he can.

Back at the house, Mrs Sappleton remarks that Mr Nuttel was an odd homo – all he could do was talk nigh his ailments, and so he 'dashed off' every bit soon every bit the men arrived. Vera suggests that he was scared of dogs, and the sight of the spaniel caused him to run off. The last sentence of the story refers to Vera: 'Romance at short notice was her speciality.'

'The Open Window': analysis

'The Open Window' is an amusing lilliputian story; only is it more than than this? Closer analysis of Saki's tale reveals that the devil is in the detail. Note that Framton is non presented as a gullible fool, and if he is, we as readers are encouraged to be gulled, likewise, for we are supposed to be taken in past Vera's lie about the dead married man and brothers too. Simply every bit Framton is wondering whether Mrs Sappleton is married or widowed, he senses a male presence in the firm: 'An undefinable something about the room seemed to suggest masculine habitation.' His first instinct is correct, just Vera's entirely fabricated narrative leads him to believe he was mistaken about the 'masculine' temper.

And she convinces him that she should be believed by a number of subtle details: the spaniel that accompanied the men on their obviously ill-blighted trip, for instance, and the white waterproof coat which the married man was carrying over his arm when they left. Vera patently saw the men leaving with the dog and coat, and weaves them into the narrative she feeds to Framton, then that when the men return – with the canis familiaris and the coat, as described – the idea that Framton is seeing dead men walking is all the more powerful.

Vera's expect of horror when they see the men returning to the house is also a nice touch. Of course, being nevertheless technically a child, female, and named Vera (meaning literally 'truth'), all assistance, too. Merely yous tin can never trust children in Saki, those 'feral ephebes' in Sandie Byrne's memorable phrase.

But does 'The Open Window' mean annihilation else beyond itself? That is, can it be analysed every bit a commentary on anything other than lying teenage girls? Well, the story does raise questions which, we might argue, prefigure the concerns of the modernist writers who were active a few years after Saki, in the immediate postal service-WWI period.

There is no absolute truth or absolute reality, writers such every bit James Joyce and Virginia Woolf propose, because everything is mediated through personal human experience, and we cannot know everything. Virginia Woolf's first not bad novel, Jacob's Room (1922), is a good case of this: no one graphic symbol fully knows or understands the title character, and anybody gets a slightly different glimpse of who he is. Framton has only Vera'southward word to get on nearly Mrs Sappleton's husband and brothers.

Merely, conversely, Mrs Sappleton, unaware that her niece has been spinning their invitee a spider web of lies, has a different perception of him, too, believing him to exist an odd man who has an excessive reaction to the sight of her male person relatives. Vera, the fiction-chief (and thus the author-surrogate in the story), is the simply one who knows both sides and can enjoy playing these two characters, with their partial glimpses of the whole story, off each other. Although Saki's style and approach are very different from someone like Virginia Woolf, the preoccupation with 'fiction' and 'perception' is the same – simply Saki's take on this outcome is funnier.

Vera's lie in 'The Open Window' well-nigh 3 members of ane family – all of them male person – going off together on a shooting trip and never returning, leaving the female characters at dwelling house to grieve for them, seems eerily to prefigure the events of a few years later on, when hundreds of thousands of Englishmen – including, in many cases, every unmarried man in a particular family – would go off to fight in the First World War and never come back. (When we consider that, in Vera's fictional account, the iii men meet their end by drowning in boggy mud, and their bodies are never recovered, the foreshadowing of the Western Forepart becomes downright spooky.)

Saki himself would be one of them, killed in action in 1916. With him, and many like him, the Edwardian way of life that Saki and then ruthlessly skewers in his stories would die, as well. Just 'The Open up Window' remains more than a window (to attain for the inevitable metaphor) onto a vanished world. Information technology is a timeless tale about truth and fiction, and, yes, a parable without a moral. For that reason, it deserves to exist revisited, analysed and studied, discussed, and celebrated.

Yous tin pick upwardly all of Saki's wonderful stories in the very affordable collection, The Collected Short Stories of Saki (Wordsworth Classics) , and lose yourself in the writing of one of Edwardian literature's wittiest storytellers.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great State of war, The Waste product State and the Modernist Long Verse form.