The Chronicles of Clovis: The Match-Maker (Learn English through Stories) (CEFR: C2 Level)

Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916), better known by the pen name Saki and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered by English teachers and scholars as a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse. The pen name "Saki" is a reference to the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. Both Rothay Reynolds and Ethel Munro confirm this. Emlyn Williams states as much in his introduction to a Saki anthology published in 1978. In this story, Saki's recurring hero Clovis Sangrail, a clever, mischievous young man, in a bid to stop his mother from cramping his style, decides to get his mother married off again to a “military Johnny”! Saki also mocks people who can’t enjoy good food like oysters, and who go on eating “sawdust”. He observes that such people have neither a soul nor a stomach.

Whether you are a non-native speaker trying to learn British native-speaker-like accent, or an accent coach or actor looking for samples of posh upper RP, this excerpt will help you learn British accent effortlessly, by just listening to a small reading sample. Active listening and copying or imitation is the perfect way to acquire any accent and that is how a child learns a new language as well. Just focus on the vowels and consonants (phonetics) and the overall intonation and you will soon begin to speak like someone from the royal family or the aristocracy! This recording can also be used by ESL learners preparing for the listening and speaking part of TOEFL, IELTS, GRE, CAE, etc.

Transcript:
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THE MATCH-MAKER

The grill-room clock struck eleven with the respectful unobtrusiveness of one whose mission in life is to be ignored. When the flight of time should really have rendered abstinence and migration imperative the lighting apparatus would signal the fact in the usual way. Six minutes later Clovis approached the supper-table, in the blessed expectancy of one who has dined sketchily and long ago.

"I'm starving," he announced, making an effort to sit down gracefully and read the menu at the same time. "So I gathered;" said his host, "from the fact that you were nearly punctual. I ought to have told you that I'm a Food Reformer. I've ordered two bowls of bread-and-milk and some health biscuits. I hope you don't mind." Clovis pretended afterwards that he didn't go white above the collar-line for the fraction of a second.

"All the same," he said, "you ought not to joke about such things. There really are such people. I've known people who've met them. To think of all the adorable things there are to eat in the world, and then to go through life munching sawdust and being proud of it." "They're like the Flagellants of the Middle Ages, who went about mortifying themselves." "They had some excuse," said Clovis. "They did it to save their immortal souls, didn't they? You needn't tell me that a man who doesn't love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed."

Clovis relapsed for a few golden moments into tender intimacies with a succession of rapidly disappearing oysters. "I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion," he resumed presently. "They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. Do you like my new waistcoat? I'm wearing it for the first time to-night."

"It looks like a great many others you've had lately, only worse. New dinner waistcoats are becoming a habit with you." ....

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Video Credits - I just couldn't have made this video without input from these wonderful, highly-talented filmmakers:
Photo by Stefan Stefancik

[elizae]

I'm ashamed to say this, but I had never read any Saki prior to this one. If you can, do more from him. I know my list of requests for you is already too long! 😉