Beasts and Un-Beasts: On Saki’s ‘The Penance’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Penance’ has everything we expect from a quintessential Saki story: cruel and borderline feral children, misunderstood animals, and some of the wittiest prose ever committed to paper. If you’ve never read Saki before, I previously compiled a list of ten of my favourite stories of his, though ten really isn’t a big enough number. On some level, every short story by Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916) is worth reading (it’s thought he took his pen name Saki from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam).

And this 1910 story is definitely a classic. The protagonist is a man named Octavian Ruttle who discovers that his chickens are being killed. As ever with a Saki story, half the joy is in the way Saki beautifully describes things:

Octavian kept chickens; at least he kept some of them; others vanished from his keeping, leaving only a few bloodstained feathers to mark the manner of their going.

That beautiful twist on the phrase ‘keeping chickens’ ushers in the unjust killing of the neighbour’s cat, a small tabby belonging to the three children next door which had been spotted making ‘furtive visits to the hen-coops’. Having spoken to the adults at the neighbouring house (the children’s parents aware in India, presumably on colonial work) and ‘a sentence of death’ having been ‘agreed on’, Octavian hunts down the poor cat and kills it. ‘The children will mind,’ they tell Octavian, ‘but they need not know.’

You can perhaps guess where this is going. The three neighbouring children have witnessed the killing from a wall overlooking the property and shout a single word at him: ‘Beast!’

Octavian tries to make amends with the three children by giving them peace offerings, but they reject them all. He busy them a big box of chocolates but they throw them all over the neighbouring wall onto his grass: ‘Octavian’s blood-money had been flung back at him in scorn.’

The chocolates themselves seem a poor compensation for the loss of a beloved cat. Although Saki doesn’t quite use free indirect discourse, his third-person omniscient narrative voice ironically invites us as readers to question Octavian’s sense of moral proportion:

Two days later he ransacked the best sweet shop in the neighbouring market town for a box of chocolates that by its size and contents should fitly atone for the dismal deed done under the oak tree in the meadow.

To think that any box of chocolates, no matter what the size, could ‘fitly atone’ for the killing of the children’s pet shows a degree of chumpy obliviousness (if not outright callousness) on Octavian’s part. He seems to be kidding himself, since he had taken no delight in the act of felicide he’d carried out and had only done so reluctantly, to save his chickens.

Soon after this, Octavian discovers to his dismay that his chicks are still being carried off, so the cat wasn’t to blame after all. The real culprits, he subsequently learns, are rats. The poor tabby cat was innocent and unjustly condemned: it had only been haunting the hen-coop because it was interested in the rats, so ironically, if it had lived it might have eventually helped to solve the problem of chicken-theft. The children become aware of this miscarriage of justice too, for they send him a missive on which they’ve written, ‘Beast. Rats eated your chickens.’

In desperation, he presents his two-year-old daughter, Olivia, to them, in the hope of improving their perception of him, but while he’s off gathering flowers for them, they kidnap Olivia and in her go-cart and make off with her. They take her over to Octavian’s piggeries and hoist her onto the rickety roof of a pigsty, threatening to drop her into the muck below. This terrifies Octavian, who has heard of pigs eating babies:

‘You surely wouldn’t treat my poor little Olivia in that way?’ he pleaded.

‘You killed our little cat,’ came in stern reminder from three throats.

‘I’m sorry I did,’ said Octavian, and if there is a standard measurement in truths Octavian’s statement was assuredly a large nine.

‘We shall be very sorry when we’ve killed Olivia,’ said the girl, ‘but we can’t be sorry till we’ve done it.’

We might feel shock at the children’s casual equating of a human child’s life with the life of their pet cat, but we also recall how, a short while earlier in the narrative, Octavian had more or less equated a box of chocolates with the life of their cat. But there’s something chilling, as well as hilarious, about the girl’s prediction that she ‘be very sorry’ for killing Octavian’s blameless daughter even though she hasn’t actually committed the deed yet that she predicts she’ll regret.

But then to ‘be very sorry’ for something is subtly different from ‘regretting having done’ something, especially in a child’s eyes: it’s a performative act of sorriness, which the children have already witnessed from the adult Octavian. He knew he’d feel ‘sorry’ about killing their cat, but he did it anyway; what he felt more sorry over was their witnessing the killing.

Olivia slips and falls directly into mud and straw, and Octavian manages to reach over and pull her out of the quagmire just as she begins to sink while the children look on. He petitions them to help him, but they remind him that nobody helped their cat when it was being killed. Octavian asks him what he can possibly do to atone for his crime, and they demand that he stand in a white sheet by the unfortunate cat’s grave, holding a candle and saying ‘I’m a miserable Beast’ for half an hour.

The children provide him with a ladder with which he is able to extricate his daughter from the muck. That evening, he performs his penance at the cat’s grave, and although he cannot see them in the house, he is certain he is being watched by the children. The next morning, he finds a new note lying by the wall, bearing a single, redemptive word from the children: ‘Un-Beast.’

Saki’s story is about morality, and the arbitrary morals governing Edwardian society. The cat must be killed because it’s suspected of killing his chickens. For dispatching the animal, Octavian is dubbed a ‘Beast’ by the children. They themselves, of course, respond in a decidedly ‘beastly’ way when opportunity presents itself and they have something of Octavian’s – his daughter – in their possession. But as so often in a Saki story, the morals of the adults are really no better than those of the children, or are at least as questionable in their foundations.

Indeed, in some respects, the children force Octavian to reassess his own attitude to animals and view a living creature as more than just a nuisance or threat to his property (and, in this case, a wrongly judged threat). The fact that they reject the material offerings he presents to them – the chocolates and the flowers – in favour of a blood-sacrifice rouses horror in us, but it turns out they just want recognition from him that he was wrong to kill their cat and is willing to pay his respects over its grave.

There’s something quasi-religious about the act of penance (itself a religious term, of course) the children order Octavian to perform: a candlelit vigil involving a mantra or incantation (‘I’m a miserable Beast’, over and over) over the dead pet’s grave, in a ‘zephyr shirt’ reminiscent of the hairshirt of many ascetics undergoing penance. What’s more, Octavian doesn’t even know if he’s definitely being watched by the children as he performs the penance, but he puts his faith in the idea that, godlike, they are watching, even though he cannot see them. Like God, they remain inscrutable to him, as Saki makes clear at several points throughout the story. The children perform the role of a deity which demands the mortal Octavian make amends for his unwarranted sin and crime.