The Cobweb

"The Cobweb" by Hector Hugh Munro, also known by his pen name Saki, is a satirical short story that explores themes of social snobbery, human folly, and the complexities of human relationships. Set in a seemingly idyllic English countryside, the narrative follows an elaborate tea party hosted by the character of Mrs. Formica, whose attempts at sophistication and social climbing ultimately lead to unexpected and humorous consequences. The story is marked by Saki's signature wit and clever use of irony, revealing the absurdities of the social conventions of his time.

• Short story

								
The farmhouse kitchen probably stood where it did as a matter of accident
or haphazard choice; yet its situation might have been planned by a
master-strategist in farmhouse architecture.  Dairy and poultry-yard, and
herb garden, and all the busy places of the farm seemed to lead by easy
access into its wide flagged haven, where there was room for everything
and where muddy boots left traces that were easily swept away.  And yet,
for all that it stood so well in the centre of human bustle, its long,
latticed window, with the wide window-seat, built into an embrasure
beyond the huge fireplace, looked out on a wild spreading view of hill
and heather and wooded combe.  The window nook made almost a little room
in itself, quite the pleasantest room in the farm as far as situation and
capabilities went.  Young Mrs. Ladbruk, whose husband had just come into
the farm by way of inheritance, cast covetous eyes on this snug corner,
and her fingers itched to make it bright and cosy with chintz curtains
and bowls of flowers, and a shelf or two of old china.  The musty farm
parlour, looking out on to a prim, cheerless garden imprisoned within
high, blank walls, was not a room that lent itself readily either to
comfort or decoration.

“When we are more settled I shall work wonders in the way of making the
kitchen habitable,” said the young woman to her occasional visitors.
There was an unspoken wish in those words, a wish which was unconfessed
as well as unspoken.  Emma Ladbruk was the mistress of the farm; jointly
with her husband she might have her say, and to a certain extent her way,
in ordering its affairs.  But she was not mistress of the kitchen.

On one of the shelves of an old dresser, in company with chipped
sauce-boats, pewter jugs, cheese-graters, and paid bills, rested a worn
and ragged Bible, on whose front page was the record, in faded ink, of a
baptism dated ninety-four years ago.  “Martha Crale” was the name written
on that yellow page.  The yellow, wrinkled old dame who hobbled and
muttered about the kitchen, looking like a dead autumn leaf which the
winter winds still pushed hither and thither, had once been Martha Crale;
for seventy odd years she had been Martha Mountjoy.  For longer than
anyone could remember she had pattered to and fro between oven and
wash-house and dairy, and out to chicken-run and garden, grumbling and
muttering and scolding, but working unceasingly.  Emma Ladbruk, of whose
coming she took as little notice as she would of a bee wandering in at a
window on a summer’s day, used at first to watch her with a kind of
frightened curiosity.  She was so old and so much a part of the place, it
was difficult to think of her exactly as a living thing.  Old Shep, the
white-nozzled, stiff-limbed collie, waiting for his time to die, seemed
almost more human than the withered, dried-up old woman.  He had been a
riotous, roystering puppy, mad with the joy of life, when she was already
a tottering, hobbling dame; now he was just a blind, breathing carcase,
nothing more, and she still worked with frail energy, still swept and
baked and washed, fetched and carried.  If there were something in these
wise old dogs that did not perish utterly with death, Emma used to think
to herself, what generations of ghost-dogs there must be out on those
hills, that Martha had reared and fed and tended and spoken a last
good-bye word to in that old kitchen.  And what memories she must have of
human generations that had passed away in her time.  It was difficult for
anyone, let alone a stranger like Emma, to get her to talk of the days
that had been; her shrill, quavering speech was of doors that had been
left unfastened, pails that had got mislaid, calves whose feeding-time
was overdue, and the various little faults and lapses that chequer a
farmhouse routine.  Now and again, when election time came round, she
would unstore her recollections of the old names round which the fight
had waged in the days gone by.  There had been a Palmerston, that had
been a name down Tiverton way; Tiverton was not a far journey as the crow
flies, but to Martha it was almost a foreign country.  Later there had
been Northcotes and Aclands, and many other newer names that she had
forgotten; the names changed, but it was always Libruls and Toories,
Yellows and Blues.  And they always quarrelled and shouted as to who was
right and who was wrong.  The one they quarrelled about most was a fine
old gentleman with an angry face—she had seen his picture on the walls.
She had seen it on the floor too, with a rotten apple squashed over it,
for the farm had changed its politics from time to time.  Martha had
never been on one side or the other; none of “they” had ever done the
farm a stroke of good.  Such was her sweeping verdict, given with all a
peasant’s distrust of the outside world.

When the half-frightened curiosity had somewhat faded away, Emma Ladbruk
was uncomfortably conscious of another feeling towards the old woman.
She was a quaint old tradition, lingering about the place, she was part
and parcel of the farm itself, she was something at once pathetic and
picturesque—but she was dreadfully in the way.  Emma had come to the farm
full of plans for little reforms and improvements, in part the result of
training in the newest ways and methods, in part the outcome of her own
ideas and fancies.  Reforms in the kitchen region, if those deaf old ears
could have been induced to give them even a hearing, would have met with
short shrift and scornful rejection, and the kitchen region spread over
the zone of dairy and market business and half the work of the household.
Emma, with the latest science of dead-poultry dressing at her
finger-tips, sat by, an unheeded watcher, while old Martha trussed the
chickens for the market-stall as she had trussed them for nearly
fourscore years—all leg and no breast.  And the hundred hints anent
effective cleaning and labour-lightening and the things that make for
wholesomeness which the young woman was ready to impart or to put into
action dropped away into nothingness before that wan, muttering,
unheeding presence.  Above all, the coveted window corner, that was to be
a dainty, cheerful oasis in the gaunt old kitchen, stood now choked and
lumbered with a litter of odds and ends that Emma, for all her nominal
authority, would not have dared or cared to displace; over them seemed to
be spun the protection of something that was like a human cobweb.
Decidedly Martha was in the way.  It would have been an unworthy meanness
to have wished to see the span of that brave old life shortened by a few
paltry months, but as the days sped by Emma was conscious that the wish
was there, disowned though it might be, lurking at the back of her mind.

She felt the meanness of the wish come over her with a qualm of
self-reproach one day when she came into the kitchen and found an
unaccustomed state of things in that usually busy quarter.  Old Martha
was not working.  A basket of corn was on the floor by her side, and out

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