Summary
One hot day, a woman rides the train with three young children - her two nieces and nephew. A man is also in the train car. The children are rambunctious, and though the prim woman tries to control them, they refuse to sit still and quiet down. The children are especially fond of asking questions beginning with "Why?" (2). The aunt does not have good answers to these questions, which both she and the children see. The man in the train car is annoyed by the children and scowls at all of them. In return, the aunt decides that he is a "mean, unfriendly man" (2).
The younger of the two girls begins to recite the same line of a poem over and over loudly, annoying the man further. The aunt calls over the children to tell them a story, and they sit down begrudgingly because they don't think she is a good storyteller.
The aunt begins to tell a story about "a little girl who was good" (3). The little girl made a lot of friends and these people save her from a wild bull because she is good. The children interrupt the story to ask more curious, humorous questions such as "Would they have saved her if she hadn't been good?" (3), which the aunt is again unable to answer well. The children call the story stupid.
Suddenly, the man speaks, saying to the aunt, "You don't seem to be a very good storyteller" (4). The aunt tells him that it is hard to tell a story for children and he sets out to prove her wrong by telling a story of his own. The man begins to tell his own story about a girl who was good.
In the man's story, there is a little girl named Bertha. He describes how good she was, saying, "She ate food that was good for her... got good grades in school, and was polite to everyone" (4). When the older girl asks if Bertha was pretty, the man replies that she was not pretty, but she was "horribly good" (5), which the children find a fascinating and enjoyable phrase.
The man goes on to say that Bertha had gotten a lot of medals for being good and she wore them proudly, letting them make noises as she walked around town. One day, the prince of the country heard about how good Bertha was and decided to let her walk in his park, which was normally reserved for adults, once a week.
The children ask the man whether there were sheep in the park and the man gives an immediate, interesting answer: there were no sheep because the Queen had a dream that the Prince would be killed by either a clock or a sheep, so she banned both in the park and the palace. The aunt is impressed by this answer.
Analysis
The author, Saki, makes an interesting choice by not providing much information about the characters of the story. The reader knows only the names of one of the train-riders (one of the children), though the man on the train gives the name of the child in the story. Because the reader knows as many, perhaps even more, details about the story within the story, the reader's focus is split between the two parts of the story. In addition, the reader doesn't know any facts about why the children are with their aunt or where they are going. This has the effect of focusing the reader on the plot and moral of the short story, rather than the characters and their relationships.
The major question asked by this story is about the responsibility of adults with regard to children's upbringing. The aunt seems to believe that disciplining children is the most important thing, and she clearly does not value fostering the children's natural curiosity. The man, on the other hand, does not seem to feel responsibility at all for teaching the children to behave a certain way, except perhaps to question authority. The story does not explicitly say that one point of view is correct, and both the aunt and the bachelor are shown as problematic characters. Thus, the reader is left to determine a moral for themselves and contemplate their views on raising children.
The man's story can be seen as a satire of the aunt's story, and the author demonstrates that the reader's focus should be on the man's story by describing it in detail, while he only briefly summarizes the aunt's story. The man's story undermines the idea that behaving well will lead to good fortune, and even suggests that an obsession with being "good" can be a fatal flaw. This is symbolized by Bertha's location being revealed to the wolf first by her clean dress and then by her noisy medals.
However, there are also deeper questions about raising children and human nature in general hidden in the bachelor's choice of words and details. In the aunt's story, the children are told of a "little girl who was good, and made friends with every one on account of her goodness, and was finally saved from a mad bull by a number of rescuers who admired her moral character" (3). The Aunt does not describe any of the little girl's supposedly "good" (3) actions or detail what she sees as having "moral character" (3). However, in the bachelor's parody, he does give these details: "she was always truthful, she kept her clothes clean, ate milk puddings as though they were jam tarts, learned her lessons perfectly, and was polite in her manners... she won several medals for goodness, which she always wore, pinned on to her dress. There was a medal for obedience, another medal for punctuality, and a third for good behaviour" (4-5). In giving these details, the bachelor subtly criticizes both the aunt's standards for goodness in children and people in general as well as her apparent belief that children will be able to achieve such goodness without knowing the standards by which they are being judged.
An allusion is made in this section to the poem "On the Road to Mandalay" by Kipling. One of the young girls recites the first line of the poem repeatedly because she does not know the rest. There are two reasons this detail is notable. First, the detail can be seen as another subtle gibe at the British system of education, which famously included a good deal of rote memorization. Second, the first four lines of the poem reads: "By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,/ There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;/ For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:/ 'Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!'" As H. H. Munro was born in Burma and felt a good deal of connection to the place in comparison to England, where he was sent after the sudden death of his mother, this poem connects Saki to the children, putting the author in direct opposition to the aunt.
