“The Story of St. Vespaluus”
Saki is known as one of the great masters of irony and one of the most delicious ironic tales ever written is that of how Vespaluus becomes a king and then a canonized saint. The title character a young man who, like his king, is a pagan whose religion worships snakes. Vespaluus is chosen by the king as heir to his throne until suddenly he renounces snake worshiping and converts to Christianity. For this he is sentenced to death by the quite unusual method of being stung by bees. However, a beekeeper surreptitiously removes each of the stingers which saves his life which is viewed as a miracle by the people who decide that Vespaluus must be onto something with conversion and decide en masse to become Christians themselves. The ironic twist is that Vespaluus only made a show of converting as a means of ticking off king; in reality he still worships snakes and is completely undone by the unintended outcome of his little joke.
Sredni Vashtar
The ironic ending of “Sredni Vashtar” has doubtlessly lost some of its power to shock and disturb, but when first published in 1911 it must have caused jaws to hit the floor around the English-speaking world. Little Conradin is ten years old and is not given much of a chance of making it to fifteen. In the meantime, the years that he has given are made a terrible ordeal by his adult cousin who has also been made his guardian. The story ends with revenge being served not just warm, but with butter: after praying that a ferret will kill his cousin, he calmly sits at the table eating toast when informed that this is exactly the fate which has befallen his cousin. The effect of knowing that young children can really be cold-blooded killers has unfairly reduced the shock value of this ironic ending.
The Schartz-Metterklume Method
The title of this story refers to a supposed method of educating a children which a young governess has announced she will employ to teach the children of an overbearing woman with pretensions toward aristocratic manners. The governess is rather shocking at every turn as she rejects instructions from the woman and proceeds to spend her first night and morning on the job confounding the matron’s expectations. Finally, when a “recreation” of the rape of the Sabine Women goes just a little too far, the governess is told to leave immediately. The ironic twist here a commentary upon the British class system that it, in itself, ironic. In a double irony, then, Lady Carlotta has only been mistaken for a governess by the mother while the sharper blade beneath suggests that that aristocratic manners really is something that must be bred and cannot be learned.
The Hounds of Fate
This is the story of a man who apparently is the exactly double of another man; a man hated by nearly everyone in the community. Those who welcome Martin as “Tom” warn him that people have not forgotten what he did and that Martin sees this is true in the dirty looks he gets from those who didn’t like “Tom.” Martin is warned he should be leave town for a while when a man arrives who had promised to shoot “Tom” on sight if he ever saw him and Martin leaves and, sure enough, he gets shot. In many of Saki’s story, the irony arrives like a bolt with a twist ending, but there is not twist here. Everything leads to Martin getting shot. The irony is actually that the reader knows this is coming. Martin is described early on as always being the fetid odor that the hounds of fate are constantly tracking. The irony is that anyone—ANYONE—with the slightest sense would have left long before the man with the guns shows up because even though he never learns that “Tom” did to make everyone so angry with him, it must have been bad enough to not tempt fate.
"The Interlopers"
Of course, if there is one uncontested example of irony in the short stories of Saki, it is the perfectly horrifying and utterly deserving irony that concludes “The Interlopers.” Two men battling over real estate boundaries and rights end up pinned together, unable to extricate themselves, beneath a large tree limb which lightning has had the discourtesy of strike. The final judgment on who owns the particular strip of land on which their feud comes to an end is also made by nature when they call out toward small dots on the horizon for help only to learn the dots are not men, but bears.
