Esme

"Esme" by Saki (H.H. Munro) is a darkly comic hunting story narrated by the Baroness to her companion Clovis. During a fox hunt, the Baroness and her friend Constance Broddle become separated from the pack and encounter an escaped hyena from Lord Pabham's estate. They name the creature Esme and ride on with it following at their heels. When they pass a young Romani child picking blackberries, the hyena snatches and kills the child. Eventually a motorist accidentally strikes and kills the hyena, and the Baroness convinces him it was a valuable dog. She later receives a diamond brooch as compensation, which she sells, refusing to share the proceeds with Constance. The story is a masterclass in Saki's signature style of horror concealed beneath elegant social comedy.

The central themes of "Esme" include:

Class Hypocrisy and Moral Indifference — The Baroness and Constance witness a child's death but are wholly unconcerned, prioritizing their own comfort and profit. The Romani child's life is treated as worthless by the upper-class narrators, exposing the callous indifference beneath Edwardian gentility.

Misdirected Empathy — The Baroness shows more emotion over the hyena's death than the child's, exclaiming "You have killed my Esme!" to the motorist. Her grief is entirely performative and self-serving.

Greed and Self-Interest — The story ends with the Baroness selling the diamond brooch and refusing to share proceeds with Constance, who herself wanted a cut. Both women see the tragedy only as a business opportunity.

Deception — The Baroness lies about the hyena being a prize-winning dog, Lord Pabham conceals his escaped animal, and the Romani community never reports the missing child. Every social class participates in cover-ups. These themes of aristocratic selfishness and dark social comedy recur throughout Saki's work, particularly in Tobermory and Sredni Vashtar.

The hyena in "Esme" operates on multiple levels. On the surface, it is literally an escaped exotic animal from Lord Pabham's private park—a detail inspired by Lord Rothschild's real estate at Tring, which kept exotic animals. Symbolically, the hyena represents the predatory nature lurking beneath civilized Edwardian society. The Baroness and Constance are just as predatory as the hyena—they simply express their appetites through social manipulation and financial exploitation rather than physical violence.

The hyena also functions as an agent of dark comedy. Its friendliness toward the women, its casual snatching of the child, and its "air of patient understanding" after killing the child all mirror the cool detachment with which the Baroness narrates these events. Saki uses animals as mirrors of human nature throughout his fiction, most famously in Tobermory, where a talking cat exposes upper-class secrets, and Gabriel-Ernest, where a werewolf preys on children.

Saki employs several distinctive literary devices in "Esme":

Dramatic Irony — The reader grasps the horror of the situation long before the characters acknowledge it. When Constance says "I don't like the way it cried," the reader already suspects what the Baroness will confirm moments later.

Understatement — The Baroness's narration is relentlessly understated. She describes the child's death by saying "This part of the story I always hurry over," and when asked if the child suffered, replies that "on the other hand, of course, it may have been crying from sheer temper." This technique transforms genuine horror into dark comedy.

Frame Narrative — The story-within-a-story structure, with Clovis as the skeptical audience, adds layers of irony. Clovis's interruptions ("I knew it—in every fox-hunting story there's been a fox") prime the reader to expect a conventional tale, making the dark twist more shocking.

Unreliable Narration — The Baroness shapes events to her advantage, and her breezy tone invites the reader to question whether she is as detached as she pretends. This device is characteristic of Saki's work, echoing the deceptive storytelling in The Open Window.

In "Esme," the Baroness and Constance pass a young Romani child picking blackberries by the roadside. The child screams at the sight of the horsewomen and the hyena. Shortly after, the women realize the persistent wailing they hear is coming from behind them—the hyena has seized the child in its jaws. Despite the Baroness's attempts to intervene ("I stormed and scolded and coaxed in English and French and gamekeeper language"), the hyena bounds into thick bushes where the horses cannot follow. "The wail rose to a shriek and then stopped altogether." The Baroness hurries over this part, saying only that it is "really rather horrible."

What makes the scene so chilling is not the violence itself—which happens offstage—but the Baroness's moral indifference afterward. She speculates the child "may have been crying from sheer temper," and notes that the Romani community never reported the disappearance because "in large encampments they really know to a child or two how many they've got." Saki uses this same technique of placing horror just beyond the reader's sight in Sredni Vashtar, where a child's revenge also unfolds off-page.

At the end of "Esme," the motorist who killed the hyena sends the Baroness a diamond brooch inscribed with the name "Esme" set in a sprig of rosemary. When the Baroness sells the brooch, Constance Broddle demands a share of the proceeds, but the Baroness refuses on the grounds that "the Esme part of the affair was my own invention, and the hyena part of it belonged to Lord Pabham." In other words, the naming of the hyena was her creative contribution, and the animal itself belonged to someone else entirely—so Constance has no claim.

This ending is pure Saki: the moral outrage is not about a child's death but about the division of spoils. Both women reveal themselves as equally mercenary—Constance's anger at being excluded is no more noble than the Baroness's refusal to share. The story's final irony is that the friendship dissolves over money, not over the horror they witnessed together. This cynical view of social bonds appears throughout Saki's stories, including The Storyteller, where adults fail to grasp the darker realities children instinctively understand.

Clovis Sangrail is one of Saki's most famous recurring characters—a witty, mischievous young man who appears in dozens of stories collected primarily in The Chronicles of Clovis (1911). In "Esme," Clovis serves as the Baroness's audience, opening the story with his sardonic observation that "all hunting stories are the same." His interjections puncture the Baroness's narrative with irreverent commentary, creating the frame-narrative structure that gives the story its ironic edge.

Clovis is far more than a passive listener in other stories. In Tobermory, he is present when a cat learns to speak. In The Storyteller, a bachelor (often associated with the Clovis archetype) demolishes an aunt's moral tale with a far more compelling and subversive story. Clovis embodies Saki's own worldview: detached, devastatingly witty, and allergic to sentimentality.

While "Esme" is fiction, Saki drew on real elements of Edwardian England. Lord Pabham, whose estate houses the escaped hyena, is widely understood as a satirical portrait of Lord Rothschild, whose real estate at Tring in Hertfordshire was England's first private zoo, home to exotic animals including zebras, kangaroos, and cassowaries. Escapes from private menageries were not uncommon in the period, and landowners dreaded the compensation claims that followed.

The story's fox-hunting setting reflects the world Saki knew intimately as a member of the upper-middle class. The casual attitude toward the Romani child, while shocking to modern readers, reflects genuine Edwardian prejudices that Saki both satirized and, to some degree, shared. Unlike Oscar Wilde, whose satire was tempered by compassion, Saki's comedy maintains an icy detachment that refuses to moralize—leaving readers to supply their own outrage.

"Esme" occupies a distinctive place in Saki's body of work by combining his signature social satire with genuine horror. While many Saki stories feature comeuppance or embarrassment, "Esme" involves the death of a child—placing it alongside his darkest tales.

The closest comparisons within Saki's work are:

Sredni Vashtar — Another story where a child's fate (or a guardian's) unfolds through implication rather than explicit description, and where the emotional response is deliberately inverted.

Gabriel-Ernest — A supernatural story where a werewolf-like figure preys on children, sharing "Esme's" theme of predation hidden behind a charming exterior.

The Open Window — Like "Esme," this story features a brilliantly deceptive narrator who manipulates others through storytelling, though its tone is lighter and more playful.

Tobermory — Uses an animal (a talking cat) to expose the moral bankruptcy of polite society, mirroring how the hyena in "Esme" reveals the characters' true natures.

Saki resists offering a simple moral in "Esme," and that resistance is itself the point. The Baroness narrates a story involving a child's gruesome death with the same breezy tone she might use to describe a spoiled luncheon. No character expresses genuine remorse. No one faces consequences. The child's death is not even the climax—the diamond brooch is.

If there is a moral, it is an uncomfortable one: the upper classes in Saki's world view other people—especially those of lower social standing—as scenery at best and inconveniences at worst. The Baroness values the hyena more than the child, and values the brooch most of all. The story forces readers to confront their own complicity: we laugh at the Baroness's wit even as we recognize her moral emptiness.

This refusal to moralize is central to Saki's literary identity. Unlike the didactic children's stories mocked in The Storyteller, Saki's fiction trusts readers to draw their own conclusions—and those conclusions are rarely comfortable.