Hector Munro The Mouse

Theodoric Voter had been brought up, from infancy to the middle age, by a fond mother whose chief wish had been to keep him away from what she called the coarser realities of life. When she died she left Theodoric alone in a world that was as real as ever, and a good deal coarser than he had thought. To a man of his temperament and upbringing even a simple railway journey was an annoying experience, and as he settled himself down in a second-class compartment one September morning he felt very uneasy. He had been staying at a country house. The pony carriage that was to take him to the station had never been properly ordered and when the moment for his departure drew near, the coachman was nowhere to be found. In this emergency Theodoric, to his disgust, had to harness the pony himself in an ill-lighted outhouse called a stable, and smelling very like one – except in patches where it smelt of mice. Theodoric was not actually afraid of mice, yet classed them among the coarser incidents of life. As the train glided out of the station Theodoric’s nervous imagination accused him of smelling of stable-yard, and possibly of having a straw or two on his usually well-brushed garments. Fortunately the only other occupant of the compartment, a lady of about the same age as himself, was sleeping; the train was not due to stop till the terminus was reached, in about an hour’s time, and the carriage was of the old-fashioned sort, that had no communication with a corridor, therefore nobody could intrude on Theodoric’s semi-privacy. And yet the train had scarcely gained speed before be became aware that he was not alone with the sleeping lady; he was not even alone in his own clothes. A warm, creeping movement over his flesh betrayed the unwelcome presence of a strayed mouse, that had evidently got in during the episode of the pony harnessing. Shakes and wildly directed pinches failed to drive out the intruder, and soon Theodoric understood that nothing but undressing would save him of his tormentor, and to undress in the presence of a lady, even for so excusable a purpose, was an idea that made him blush. He had never been able to bring himself even to the mild exposure of socks in the presence of the fair sex. And yet – the lady in this case was to all appearances soundly asleep; the mouse, on the other hand, seemed to be trying to crowd a Wanderjahr into a few minutes. Theodoric decided on the bravest undertaking in his life. Blushing like a beetroot and keeping an agonized watch on his sleeping fellow-traveller, he swiftly and noiselessly fastened the ends of his railway-rug to the racks on either side of the carriage, so that a substantial curtain hung across the compartment. In the narrow dressing-room that he had thus improvised he began with violent haste to extricate himself and the mouse from his clothes. As the mouse jumped wildly to the floor, the rug, slipping its fastenings at either end, also came down with a flap, and almost simultaneously the awakened sleeper opened her eyes. With a movement almost quicker than the mouse’s, Theodoric seized the rug and hid himself under it in the further corner of the carriage. The blood raced and beat in the veins of his neck and forehead, while he waited dumbly for the lady to speak. She, however, continued staring at him in silence. How much had she seen, Theodoric asked himself, and in any case what on earth must she think of his present position?

“I think I have caught a chill,” he said desperately.

“Really, I’m sorry,” she replied. “I was just going to ask you to open the window.”

“I fancy it’s malaria,” he added; his teeth were chattering slightly, as much from fright as from a desire to support his theory.

“I’ve got some brandy in my bag, if you kindly reach it down for me,” said his companion.

“No – I mean, I never take anything for it.” he assured her earnestly.

“I suppose you caught it in the Tropics?” Theodoric, whose acquaintance with the Tropics was limited to Ceylon tea, felt that even the malaria was slipping from him. Would it be possible, he wondered, to disclose the real state of affairs to her?

“Are you afraid of mice?” he asked, growing more scarlet in the face.

“Not unless they conic in quantities. Why do you ask?”

“I had one crawling inside my clothes just now,” said Theodoric in a voice that hardly seemed his own. “It was a most awkward situation.”

“It must have been, if you wear your clothes very tight,” she observed; “but mice have strange ideas of comfort.”

“I had to get rid of it while you were asleep,” he continued; then, with a gulp, he added, “and getting rid of it brought me to – to this.”

“Surely one small mouse wouldn’t cause a chill,” she gaily.

Evidently she had detected something in his situation and was enjoying his confusion. All the blood of his body seemed to have mobilized in one blush. And then, as he thought of it, he was seized with terror. With every minute that passed the train was rushing nearer to the crowded terminus where he would be watched by dozens of eyes instead of the one paralysing pair that watched him from the further corner of the carriage. There was a chance that his fellow-traveller might fall asleep again, but every time Theodoric stole a glance at her he saw her open unwinking eyes.

“I think we must be getting near now,” she presently observed.

The words acted like a signal. Like a hunted beast he threw aside the rug and struggled frantically into his clothes. He saw small suburban stations racing past the window and felt an icy silence in that corner towards which he dared not look. Then as he sank back in his seat, dressed and almost delirious, the train slowed down, and the woman spoke.

“Would you be so kind,” she asked, “as to get me a porter to put me into a cab? It’s a shame to trouble you when you’re feeling unwell, but my blindness makes me so helpless at railway stations.”

Biographies

Cummings, Edward Estlin 1894 – 1962. One of the most technically innovative poets of this century, Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1916. He drove an ambulance in Paris after the armistice. His first published work was a novel, The Enormous Room (1922), based on his mistaken imprisonment in a French detention centre during the war. This was followed by collections of verse, Tulips and Chimneys (1923) and XLI Poems (1925).

Cummings’s new style, was influenced by jazz and contemporary slang and characterized by an innovative use of punctuation and typography, as in the use of lower case letters for his own name. Features of this poetry include the use of capital letters and punctuation in the middle of single words, phrases split by parentheses, and stanzas arranged to create a visual design on the page. Formal devices were often used as visual manifestations of theme or tone; the poem’s typographical dimension itself becomes a new level of meaning.

Rossetti, Christina (Georgina) 1830 – 94 Poet. The sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Michael Rossetti, she was born in London and educated at home by her mother. She showed early promise as a poet, and her grandfather had small collections printed when she was 12 and 15. She was a delicate and religious girl, her devotion to High Anglicanism later moulding much of her finest verse. Her religious convictions seem also to have caused the eventual collapse of her prolonged engagement to the Pre-Raphaelite painter James Collinson.

Christina Rossetti’s lyrics ‘An End’ and ‘Dream Lane’ were published in the first number of The Germ (1850) under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne. She contributed further poems to this and other journals. Her first major collection was Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), followed in 1866 by The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872) was illustrated by Arthur Hughes. By the 1880s bouts of ill health had made her an invalid, but she continued to write and publish. A Pageant and Other Poems (1881) contained the sonnet sequence ‘Monna Innominata’, celebrating the superiority of divine love over human passion, while (1885) consisted of 130 poems and thoughts for each day. The last original work published in her lifetime was The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). Her brother, William Michael, edited her complete works (1904).

Her verse is remarkable for its love of verbal invention and of metrical experiment. In both her religion and her secular poetry she shows a keen interest in natural, pictorial imagery, while her addresses to an unnamed lover or suitor suggest both a determination and a carefully controlled ambiguity. Her delicate, frank meditations on death and Heaven are balanced by the imaginative vigour of poems like Goblin Market.

Kate Choping (1851 – 1904) Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Kate Chopin came of French-Creole parentage on her mother’s side and Irish immigrants on her father’s side. She grew up in a household dominated by generations of women, and it was from her great-grandmother that she heard the tales of the early French settlers to St. Louis that were later to influence many of her short stories with their colorful descriptions of Creole and Acadian life.

Much of Chopin’s writing deals with women searching for freedom from male domination, and she is considered to be an early feminist writer. She wrote over a hundred short stories, many of which were published in two collections: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadia (1897). Her two novels, At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899), deal with the controversial themes of divorce and adultery, respectively. Denounced as immoral, The Awakening caused a public uproar, which left Chopin deeply depressed and discouraged. As a result, she wrote very little in the last five years of her life.

Saki Pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), short-story writer and novelist. He was born in Akyab, the son of an officer in the Burma police, and brought up by two maiden aunts in Devon. After being educated at a school in Exmouth and at Bedford grammar school, he followed his father into the Burma police but was invalided home. In 1896 he settled in London, contributing political satires to The Westminster Gazette (collected in The Westminster Alice, 1902). Between 1902 and 1908 he acted as correspondent for The Morning Post in Poland, Russia and Paris.

His first book, The Rise of the Russian Empire (1899), was the only one written in a serious vein. Thereafter he adopted the pseudonym ‘Saki’ (the name of the cup-bearer in the last stanza of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam) for his collections of short stories: Reginald (1904). Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910). The Chronicles of Clovis (1912) and Beasts and Superbeasts (1914). Whimsical in their plots and light-heartedly cynical in their lone, these stories arc also given a darker side by Munro’s memories of his unhappy childhood with his aunts. He also published two novels. The Unbearable Bassingon (1912) and When William Came (1913), the latter a satirical fantasy subtitled ‘A Story of London under the Hohenzollerns’.

Munro served with the Royal Fusiliers in World War I and was killed on the Western Front in 1910. Two collections of stories and sketches appeared posthumously, The Toys of Pence and Other Papers (1919) and The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924).

MARK TWAIN (1835-1910). Early years Mark Twain, the pen-name of Samuel Longhorne Clemens, was born in a small village in Missouri in 1835. Four years later he moved with his family to Hannibal, a town on the banks of the Mississippi River. After his father's death in 1847 he left school and became an apprentice to a printer.

A variety of jobs When his older brother bought out a small newspaper in Hannibal, he went to work for him, first as a printer and later he contributed humorous articles about local characters and events. In 1853, not yet eighteen years old, he decided he wanted to expand his horizons. He travelled in the East and the Midwest visiting New York, Philadelphia and Washington and settling for a time in Iowa and New Orleans, where he got a job as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. When the Civil War broke out in 1860 he served for a brief period as a volunteer in the Confederate army, before deserting and heading first for Nevada and then fur California, where he became a miner.

Success as a writer In 1862 he was asked to become the editor of a newspaper to which he had contributed some humorous essays. He started signing his articles 'Mark Twain', a cry used in river piloting to refer to the river's depth. His articles became popular and the publication of a collection of his stories, (1865), consolidated his reputation as a humorous writer.

Family life and success In 1870 he married Olivia Langon and settled into a comfortable lifestyle in Connecticut, which was occasionally interrupted by trips to Europe or lecture tours. For the next fifteen years he dedicated himself to his family and writing. He produced an account of his years as a miner, Roughing It (1872), the best-selling (1876), a historical fantasy The Prince and the Pauper (18S2), and the sequel to Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

More travels and anti-imperialism In 1886 he travelled to Hawaii where he stated that the 'disease' of civilisation was destroying the islands' inhabitants. He took a strong stand against his country's foreign policy of acquiring of new territories outside mainland USA. He was a busy activist in the Anti-Imperialist League and championed freedom for the colonies of the British Empire in his lectures.

Last years In the final two decades of his life he became involved in a series of bad business ventures which left him nearly bankrupt. He tried to recover his losses by carrying out exhausting lecture tours which included visits to India, South Africa and Australia. His desperation was compounded by the death of his wife and two of his three daughters. He continued writing up until his death in 1910.