“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

Скачать книгу