Saki's story of a girl of fifteen, a nervous visitor, and a lie constructed in under four minutes.
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Ten words unlock the story. Work through the four activities — say your answer out loud before you reveal it.
Three words from the story: fabricate · plausible · pretext. Say the right word, then reveal.
Read each part. After it, there's a quick comprehension check (try the questions from memory first), then one thing to discuss.
Framton Nuttel had been dispatched to the country by his doctor, who prescribed absolute rest, an absence of mental excitement, and nothing in the way of violent physical exercise. His sister, who had lived in the district years earlier, took a dim view of the plan. He would bury himself in a rented house, speak to nobody for a month, and return with his nerves in a worse condition than before. She therefore armed him with letters of introduction to every family she could remember, and extracted a promise that he would deliver them.
He was on his fourth such visit when a niece of fifteen came into the drawing room, announced that her aunt would be down presently, and observed that in the meantime he would have to make do with her. Framton produced the correct noises. Privately he was beginning to doubt whether a programme of formal calls on total strangers constituted a rest cure at all.
The girl allowed the silence to stretch until it had done its work, and then began, with an air of mild curiosity, to establish two facts. Did he know many people in the neighbourhood? Hardly a soul, he admitted; his sister had stayed here four years ago, and the letters were the sum of his knowledge. So he knew practically nothing about her aunt? Only a name and an address. She received this with a small nod, and Framton, had he been paying attention, might have noticed that the conversation had just changed hands. Her aunt's great tragedy, she said, had taken place three years ago — since his sister's time, then. Tragedy seemed an unlikely word for so restful a house. And with that, she directed his eye to the long French window standing open on to the lawn, and wondered aloud whether he had asked himself why it was left that way on an afternoon in October.
1. What has Framton been told to do, and why is he making these visits at all?
2. What two facts does the niece establish before she begins, and why does each one matter to her?
1. Complete rest, no excitement, no strenuous exercise — a nerve cure. His sister insisted on the letters of introduction so that he would not spend the month in total isolation.
2. That he knows almost nobody locally, and that he knows nothing whatever about her aunt. Together they guarantee that nothing she invents can be checked or contradicted.
Three years ago to this very day, she said, her aunt's husband and her two young brothers had gone out through that window for a day's shooting. They had crossed towards the marsh, where a stretch of ground gives way without warning under a man's weight, and not one of the three had come back. Her voice had dropped into the flat, careful register people use for facts they would rather not handle.
That, she explained, was why the window was left open until dusk every evening of the year. Her poor aunt persisted in the belief that they would walk back across the lawn one day exactly as they had gone, with the little brown spaniel trotting at their heels. The youngest of them used to sing a foolish song to irritate his sister; her aunt sometimes said she could still hear it. At this point the girl broke off, and Framton felt a distinct relief when the aunt herself came bustling in, apologising volubly for the delay.
She spoke about the open window as though it were the most ordinary thing in the house. Her husband and brothers would be in from shooting at any moment now, straight across the lawn, and they invariably ruined her carpets. Framton listened with a growing sense of horror, and attempted — as a drowning man reaches for anything — to change the subject to his own condition, expounding at some length on what the doctors had ordered and forbidden. His hostess was manifestly bored. Her eyes travelled repeatedly past him to the window and the darkening lawn beyond it, and Framton reflected on the terrible coincidence of his having chosen this anniversary for his call.
1. According to the niece, what happened three years ago, and why does the window stay open?
2. How does the aunt's arrival deepen Framton's horror rather than relieving it?
1. Her aunt's husband and two young brothers went out shooting through that window and were lost in treacherous ground near the marsh. The window is left open each evening because the aunt still believes they will return.
2. Because the aunt chatters cheerfully about the men coming home at any moment and muddying her carpets — which Framton can only interpret as the delusion of a woman unhinged by grief.
Framton was mid-sentence on the subject of diet when his hostess broke in with evident satisfaction: here they were at last, and only just in time for tea, and look at the state of them. He turned to the niece intending to convey sympathy for a woman visibly unwell, and found her staring out through the window with an expression of dawning horror. He swung round in his seat and looked in the same direction.
In the deepening dusk three figures were crossing the lawn towards the window. Each carried a gun beneath his arm; one had a white coat slung across his shoulders; a tired brown spaniel kept close at their heels. Noiselessly they approached the house, and then a young voice began, out of the dark, to sing that foolish song.
Framton seized his hat and stick and bolted. He was through the hall, out of the front door and into the gravel drive without a word of farewell, and a cyclist on the road beyond had to run into the hedge to avoid a collision. "Here we are, my dear," said the man with the white coat, coming in through the window. "Fairly muddy, but most of it's dry. Who was that who bolted out as we came up?" "A most extraordinary man," said his wife, "a Mr Nuttel. Could talk about nothing but his ailments, and dashed off without a word of goodbye or apology when you arrived. One would think he had seen a ghost." "I expect it was the spaniel," said the niece composedly. "He told me he had a horror of dogs. He was once hunted into a cemetery somewhere on the banks of the Ganges by a pack of stray dogs, and had to spend the night in a newly dug grave with the creatures snarling and grinning just above him. Enough to make anyone lose their nerve." Romance at short notice was her speciality.
1. What does Framton see, and what does he do about it?
2. What does the niece produce the moment an explanation is required — and what does the final sentence tell us?
1. Three men crossing the lawn in the dusk with guns and a spaniel, one of them singing the song from her story. Convinced he is watching the dead return, he bolts from the house without a word.
2. A second, entirely different fiction — a terror of dogs acquired in a graveyard by the Ganges — delivered instantly and accepted without question. The final line tells us this is not an isolated performance: invention at a moment's notice is simply what she does.
The niece's lie is a piece of engineering, and tense is the engineering. At this level the interesting work is in aspect — the difference between what happened, what was happening, and what had been happening — and in the inversions English keeps for suspense.
Put the verb in brackets into the past simple, past continuous, past perfect or past perfect continuous.
1. By the time the aunt appeared, the girl (already / construct) an entire family tragedy.
2. Framton (describe) his symptoms at some length when the three figures crossed the lawn.
3. He (deliver) letters of introduction all week, and he was thoroughly sick of it.
1. had already constructed (completed before that moment)
2. was describing (the frame interrupted by the event)
3. had been delivering (duration up to that point, with a present result — his exhaustion)
Rewrite each sentence beginning with the words given. Write only the words that follow.
1. He did not suspect for a moment that she was inventing it. → Little that she was inventing it.
2. She had hardly finished speaking when her aunt came into the room. → Hardly when her aunt came into the room.
3. Nobody questioned her version at any point. → At no point her version.
1. did he suspect 2. had she finished speaking 3. did anyone question
The auxiliary jumps in front of the subject — exactly as in a question, but the sentence stays a statement.
Fill each gap with the form the meaning requires, then read the whole paragraph aloud.
Framton (sit) uncomfortably in a stranger's drawing room when a girl of fifteen (decide) to entertain herself at his expense. She first established that he (never / meet) her aunt and that he (know) nobody in the district. No sooner (she / satisfy) herself on both points than the tragedy began. Little (he / imagine) that the men he would shortly see on the lawn (shoot) all afternoon, and that by the time he reached the road he (become) the subject of a second story altogether.
was sitting · decided · had never met · knew · had she satisfied · did he imagine · had been shooting · had become
Note the two inversions carrying the suspense, and "had been shooting" — duration up to the moment of the reveal, which is precisely what makes the reveal land.
Hold on to these structures — in the Speak tab you'll narrate this story and then build a plausible fiction of your own.
Saki — the pen name of H. H. Munro — published this in 1914, months before he went to the front, where he was killed in 1916. His comic method is consistent: a self-important adult, a composed and merciless young person, and a final sentence that reorganises everything preceding it.
This is the heart of the lesson — do all of it out loud. The timer is there to keep you going: fill the time with detail rather than racing through it.
Tell The Open Window as if to someone who has never read it, and make the telling do the work the story does: hold the reveal until the figures cross the lawn. Move through the arc: the prescribed rest cure and the letters → the niece's two questions → the tragedy, the date, the spaniel → the aunt's cheerful chatter → dusk, three figures, the song → the flight → the second story.
Use at least one past perfect continuous, one inversion (little did he… / no sooner had she…) and at least five key words (self-possessed, treacherous, bolt, plausible, pretext, fabricate, feign, unnerve, at short notice, romance).
Build an argument. One reading: a bored, brilliant child amusing herself, and no harm done. Another: someone who has discovered that she can install a false reality in an adult's head in four minutes, and has clearly done it before. Take a side, give three reasons, deal with the strongest objection to your position, and say what you think she is like at thirty.
Then argue the opposite for one minute — the harder direction is where the language comes from.
The story is a manual for making things believed. Talk about how that works outside fiction.
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: