Octavian Ruttle was one of those lively cheerful individuals on whom
amiability had set its unmistakable stamp, and, like most of his
kind, his soul's peace depended in large measure on the unstinted
approval of his fellows. In hunting to death a small tabby cat he
had done a thing of which he scarcely approved himself, and he was
glad when the gardener had hidden the body in its hastily dug grave
under a lone oak-tree in the meadow, the same tree that the hunted
quarry had climbed as a last effort towards safety. It had been a
distasteful and seemingly ruthless deed, but circumstances had
demanded the doing of it. 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. The tabby
cat from the large grey house that stood with its back to the meadow
had been detected in many furtive visits to the hen-coups, and after
due negotiation with those in authority at the grey house a sentence
of death had been agreed on. "The children will mind, but they need
not know," had been the last word on the matter.
The children in question were a standing puzzle to Octavian; in the
course of a few months he considered that he should have known their
names, ages, the dates of their birthdays, and have been introduced
to their favourite toys. They remained however, as non-committal as
the long blank wall that shut them off from the meadow, a wall over
which their three heads sometimes appeared at odd moments. They had
parents in India--that much Octavian had learned in the
neighbourhood; the children, beyond grouping themselves garment-wise
into sexes, a girl and two boys, carried their lifestory no further
on his behoof. And now it seemed he was engaged in something which
touched them closely, but must be hidden from their knowledge.
The poor helpless chickens had gone one by one to their doom, so it
was meet that their destroyer should come to a violent end; yet
Octavian felt some qualms when his share of the violence was ended.
The little cat, headed off from its wonted tracks of safety, had
raced unfriended from shelter to shelter, and its end had been
rather piteous. Octavian walked through the long grass of the
meadow with a step less jaunty than usual. And as he passed beneath
the shadow of the high blank wall he glanced up and became aware
that his hunting had had undesired witnesses. Three white set faces
were looking down at him, and if ever an artist wanted a threefold
study of cold human hate, impotent yet unyielding, raging yet masked
in stillness, he would have found it in the triple gaze that met
Octavian's eye.
"I'm sorry, but it had to be done," said Octavian, with genuine
apology in his voice.
"Beast!"
The answer came from three throats with startling intensity.
Octavian felt that the blank wall would not be more impervious to
his explanations than the bunch of human hostility that peered over
its coping; he wisely decided to withhold his peace overtures till a
more hopeful occasion.
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. The two first specimens that were shown him he hastily
rejected; one had a group of chickens pictured on its lid, the other
bore the portrait of a tabby kitten. A third sample was more simply
bedecked with a spray of painted poppies, and Octavian hailed the
flowers of forgetfulness as a happy omen. He felt distinctly more
at ease with his surroundings when the imposing package had been
sent across to the grey house, and a message returned to say that it
had been duly given to the children. The next morning he sauntered
with purposeful steps past the long blank wall on his way to the
chicken-run and piggery that stood at the bottom of the meadow. The
three children were perched at their accustomed look-out, and their
range of sight did not seem to concern itself with Octavian's
presence. As he became depressingly aware of the aloofness of their
gaze he also noted a strange variegation in the herbage at his feet;
the greensward for a considerable space around was strewn and
speckled with a chocolate-coloured hail, enlivened here and there
with gay tinsel-like wrappings or the glistening mauve of
crystallised violets. It was as though the fairy paradise of a
greedyminded child had taken shape and substance in the vegetation
of the meadow. Octavian's bloodmoney had been flung back at him in
scorn.
To increase his discomfiture the march of events tended to shift the
blame of ravaged chicken-coops from the supposed culprit who had
already paid full forfeit; the young chicks were still carried off,
and it seemed highly probable that the cat had only haunted the
chicken-run to prey on the rats which harboured there. Through the
flowing channels of servant talk the children learned of this
belated revision of verdict, and Octavian one day picked up a sheet
of copy-book paper on which was painstakingly written: "Beast.
Rats eated your chickens." More ardently than ever did he wish for
an opportunity for sloughing off the disgrace that enwrapped him,
and earning some happier nickname from his three unsparing judges.
And one day a chance inspiration came to him. Olivia, his two-year-
old daughter, was accustomed to spend the hour from high noon till
one o'clock with her father while the nursemaid gobbled and digested
her dinner and novelette. About the same time the blank wall was
usually enlivened by the presence of its three small wardens.
Octavian, with seeming carelessness of purpose, brought Olivia well
within hail of the watchers and noted with hidden delight the
growing interest that dawned in that hitherto sternly hostile
quarter. His little Olivia, with her sleepy placid ways, was going
to succeed where he, with his anxious well-meant overtures, had so
signally failed. He brought her a large yellow dahlia, which she
grasped tightly in one hand and regarded with a stare of benevolent
boredom, such as one might bestow on amateur classical dancing
performed in aid of a deserving charity. Then he turned shyly to
the group perched on the wall and asked with affected carelessness,
"Do you like flowers?" Three solemn nods rewarded his venture.
"Which sorts do you like best?" he asked, this time with a distinct
betrayal of eagerness in his voice.
"Those with all the colours, over there." Three chubby arms pointed
to a distant tangle of sweetpea. Child-like, they had asked for
what lay farthest from hand, but Octavian trotted off gleefully to
obey their welcome behest. He pulled and plucked with unsparing
hand, and brought every variety of tint that he could see into his
bunch that was rapidly becoming a bundle. Then he turned to retrace
his steps, and found the blank wall blanker and more deserted than
ever, while the foreground was void of all trace of Olivia. Far
down the meadow three children were pushing a go-cart at the utmost
speed they could muster in the direction of the piggeries; it was
Olivia's go-cart and Olivia sat in it, somewhat bumped and shaken by
the pace at which she was being driven, but apparently retaining her
wonted composure of mind. Octavian stared for a moment at the
rapidly moving group, and then started in hot pursuit, shedding as
he ran sprays of blossom from the mass of sweet-pea that he still
clutched in his hands. Fast as he ran the children had reached the
piggery before he could overtake them, and he arrived just in time
to see Olivia, wondering but unprotesting, hauled and pushed up to
the roof of the nearest sty. They were old buildings in some need
of repair, and the rickety roof would certainly not have borne
Octavian's weight if he had attempted to follow his daughter and her
captors on their new vantage ground.
"What are you going to do with her?" he panted. There was no
mistaking the grim trend of mischief in those flushed by sternly
composed young faces.
"Hang her in chains over a slow fire," said one of the boys.
Evidently they had been reading English history.
"Frow her down the pigs will d'vour her, every bit 'cept the palms
of her hands," said the other boy. It was also evident that they
had studied Biblical history.
The last proposal was the one which most alarmed Octavian, since it
might be carried into effect at a moment's notice; there had been
cases, he remembered, 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."
The inexorable child-logic rose like an unyielding rampart before
Octavian's scared pleadings. Before he could think of any fresh
line of appeal his energies were called out in another direction.
Olivia had slid off the roof and fallen with a soft, unctuous splash
into a morass of muck and decaying straw. Octavian scrambled
hastily over the pigsty wall to her rescue, and at once found
himself in a quagmire that engulfed his feet. Olivia, after the
first shock of surprise at her sudden drop through the air, had been
mildly pleased at finding herself in close and unstinted contact
with the sticky element that oozed around her, but as she began to
sink gently into the bed of slime a feeling dawned on her that she
was not after all very happy, and she began to cry in the tentative
fashion of the normally good child. Octavian, battling with the
quagmire, which seemed to have learned the rare art of giving way at
all points without yielding an inch, saw his daughter slowly
disappearing in the engulfing slush, her smeared face further
distorted with the contortions of whimpering wonder, while from
their perch on the pigsty roof the three children looked down with
the cold unpitying detachment of the Parcae Sisters.
"I can't reach her in time," gasped Octavian, "she'll be choked in
the muck. Won't you help her?"
"No one helped our cat," came the inevitable reminder.
"I'll do anything to show you how sorry I am about that," cried
Octavian, with a further desperate flounder, which carried him
scarcely two inches forward.
"Will you stand in a white sheet by the grave?"
"Yes," screamed Octavian.
"Holding a candle?"
"An' saying 'I'm a miserable Beast'?"
Octavian agreed to both suggestions.
"For a long, long time?"
"For half an hour," said Octavian. There was an anxious ring in his
voice as he named the time-limit; was there not the precedent of a
German king who did open-air penance for several days and nights at
Christmas-time clad only in his shirt? Fortunately the children did
not appear to have read German history, and half an hour seemed long
and goodly in their eyes.
"All right," came with threefold solemnity from the roof, and a
moment later a short ladder had been laboriously pushed across to
Octavian, who lost no time in propping it against the low pigsty
wall. Scrambling gingerly along its rungs he was able to lean
across the morass that separated him from his slowly foundering
offspring and extract her like an unwilling cork from it's slushy
embrace. A few minutes later he was listening to the shrill and
repeated assurances of the nursemaid that her previous experience of
filthy spectacles had been on a notably smaller scale.
That same evening when twilight was deepening into darkness Octavian
took up his position as penitent under the lone oak-tree, having
first carefully undressed the part. Clad in a zephyr shirt, which
on this occasion thoroughly merited its name, he held in one hand a
lighted candle and in the other a watch, into which the soul of a
dead plumber seemed to have passed. A box of matches lay at his
feet and was resorted to on the fairly frequent occasions when the
candle succumbed to the night breezes. The house loomed inscrutable
in the middle distance, but as Octavian conscientiously repeated the
formula of his penance he felt certain that three pairs of solemn
eyes were watching his moth-shared vigil.
And the next morning his eyes were gladdened by a sheet of copy-book
paper lying beside the blank wall, on which was written the message
"Un-Beast."
_________
-THE END-
[HH Munro] Saki's short story: The Penance
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