THE SHE-WOLF
by Saki, 1914

Throughout 1912 Saki published a series of stories in the Morning Post and the glossy weekly Bystander at the rate of one or two per month. In 1914, when 36 tales had been written, John Lane published the collection known as Beasts and Super-Beasts (an ironic hint at George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman, which had appeared in 1905). "The She-Wolf" is the first story in the collection.

An upper class of witty, deprecating, and ironic people whose habitat is the country house before the onset of World War I—these are the characters and context of "The She-Wolf." Its humor is perfectly measured, poised upon the brink of awful revelation, dissolving into reassurance as the joke is played out to its audience. It is a world both fragile in its constructions of imagination and resourceful in its devious scorn for platitude.

Though Saki is often thought of as an English writer, he was born H. H. Munro in Burma of Scottish parents, and, as with many of his best stories, "The She-Wolf" displays themes and attitudes typical of Scottish fiction. Saki's short fiction is related to that of James Hogg, Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson in its balance upon the edge of some terrible supernatural manifestation, in its double focus on materialist society and the imminent metaphysical world, which is conspicuous by its absence but always on the point of breaking through, in its use of comic convention to abet a serious argument, and in its attitude toward its characters, simultaneously ironic and sympathetic.

"The She-Wolf" concerns the comeuppance of Leonard Bilsiter, a "drawing-room visionary" whose brief acquaintance with eastern European folklore turns him into a house party bore on the subject of the "esoteric forces" of "Siberian magic." Baited by his hostess and challenged to turn her into a she-wolf ("it would be too confusing to change one's sex as well as one's species at a moment's notice"), Bilsiter is thrown into horrified distress, along with the rest of the company, when the hostess disappears behind a setting of fern and azaleas and a large, evil-looking timber wolf appears in her place.

The reader has been in on the game. A third party, Clovis Sangrail, overhearing the initial conversation, has acquired a tame wolf from the menagerie of Lord Pabham. In connivance with the hostess he has brought the she-wolf to take her place in an impish practical jape that has the desired effect of producing shocked consternation in Bilsiter. Lord Pabham decoys the animal out of the room, and when Mrs. Hampton reappears, she claims to have woken from mesmerized sleep, finding herself in the game larder, being fed with sugar by Lord Pabham. After protesting his innocence, Bilsiter has now lost the opportunity to claim responsibility for the magical changes the company has witnessed. Clovis comes forward and takes his bow, explaining not the facts of the subterfuge but that he himself had lived for years in northeastern Russia, becoming quite conversant with the strange powers of "Siberian magic," and doesn't like to hear "a lot of nonsense being talked about them." This leaves Bilsiter feeling that if he could have transformed Clovis at that moment "into a cockroach and then have stepped on him he would gladly have performed both operations."

At one level "The She-Wolf" is an adult version of the nursery tale "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," but it is also full of delightfully self-conscious language whose precision the reader may savor. On Bilsiter's visit to eastern Europe the railway strike leaves him "in a state of suspended locomotion." The euphonious quality of Bilsiter's own name is itself wickedly suggestive of a conversationalist of spurious value. Moreover, vulnerable creatures are a veiled presence beneath the elegant humor and moral imperatives of the tale. Bilsiter's Aunt Cecilia ("who loved sensation perhaps rather better than she loved the truth") has already paved the way for his indulgences in vanity, averring that she had already seen him turn a vegetable marrow into a wood pigeon. And it is a nice touch when Mrs. Hampton feeds the macaws in the conservatory just before she appears to turn into the wolf that looks as though it might eat the same birds. Such a sense of creatural vulnerability and human susceptibility and vanity counterpoint the network of planning, cooperation, and trust by which characters rise above their weaker fellows. This is the significance of the ironic title of the book in which "The She-Wolf" first appeared.

The conspiracy of Clovis, Mary Hampton, and Lord Pabham is ultimately benign, for it is a justified game to trounce the hapless Bilsiter, and it is played with the reader as one of the silent conspirators. The reader's engagement confirms the justice of the judgment, and his sense of the credibility of the action enhances the pleasure in the comic effects of its performance.

—Alan Riach