Easter With Saki

Easter With Saki

To me—and to most Christians—Easter is the biggest religious holiday of the year. But I still enjoy the fun side of it: chocolate bunnies (I eat the feet first, not the ears.), marshmallow peeps, and rainbow-colored eggs--though I haven’t been on an egg hunt in years. My most hilarious childhood memory is of a basket of live baby chicks overturning at a relative’s house, and my phobic mother running, screaming, into a closet.

The origins of Easter really do date back to early Christianity. But, according to The Holiday Spot, Easter itself is a merging of three traditions: Christian, pagan, and Hebrew.

Back then, the Anglo-Saxons had a goddess called “Eostre.” While the early English Christians were trying to convert the Anglo-Saxons, they called the holiday “Easter,” so the pagans would more readily accept Christianity. Easter is also celebrated the same week as the Jewish Passover, as Christ was crucified during Passover.

Now, if you google “Easter stories,” or “Easter short stories,” most of your hits will be about the Resurrection of Christ, or bunny stories like Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Obsessed as I am with locating classic Easter literature, I finally found a story by one of the greats: Saki’s “The Easter Egg.”

British writer Saki (Hector Hugh Monroe) specialized in satirical—and sometimes disturbing—stories about Edwardian society. Many of these stories ended with a twist, and the ending to this one packed some punch.

“The Easter Egg” (1911) is about cowardly Lester, a wealthy “Mama’s boy.” Lester’s mother, Lady Barbara, loves continental traveling, and this Easter finds them in Knobaltheim, a place the reader senses right off is trouble.

Anyway, it’s up to Lady Barbara to devise a special treat for the aging Prince, who’s to open a sanitarium outside the town. A mysterious couple suggests dressing up their young child (who’s blond and angelic-looking, while his parents are dark and suspicious-looking) like an Easter angel, bearing a gift: a huge white egg filled (supposedly) with plover eggs, the Prince’s favorite.

Lady Barbara falls for this, but even cowardly Lester feels it’s a bad idea. The day of the big celebration, he spots the Easter angel’s “parents” sneaking off in a cab, just as the gift is being presented to the delighted old Prince!

In a flash, and because he is a coward, Lester realizes instinctively what’s up: why the couple took off, why they looked so different from the child, and, most of all, what is really inside that Easter egg . . . a bomb!

Suddenly Lester is running—and not away from danger, but toward it! For the first time ever, he acts heroically. He falls onto the giant egg, and tries to wrestle it away from the kid, but the kid won’t let go! The Prince is confused, and spectators are horrified, thinking it’s a bad joke.

“A questioning, threatening ring formed around him,” Saki writes, “then shrank back in recoil as he shrieked out one hideous word.” Lady Barbara sees all this, and sees the Prince dragged away to safety.

Her son isn’t that lucky:

“It was only for the fraction of a minute that she stood watching the two entangled figures, the infant with its woodenly obstinate face and body tense with dogged resistance, and the boy limp and already nearly dead with a terror that almost stifled his screams; and over them the long gala streamers flapping gaily in the sunshine.”

And neither is she, since the explosion blinds her. “Lady Barbara,” Saki concludes, “carries her scarred face with its sightless eyes as bravely as ever in the world, but at Eastertide her friends are careful to keep from her ears any mention of the children's Easter symbol.”

Me, I’ll stick to chocolate bunnies.