The Lumber Room

                             H.H.Munro (Saki)

The children were to be driven, as a special treat, to the sands
at Jagborough. Nicholas was not to be of the party; he was in disgrace.
Only that morning he had refused to eat his wholesome bread-and-milk on
the seemingly frivolous ground that there was a frog in it. Older and
wiser and better people had told him that there could not possibly be a
frog in his bread-and-milk and that he was not to talk nonsense; he
continued, nevertheless, to talk what seemed the veriest nonsense, and
described with much detail the colouration and markings of the alleged
frog. The dramatic part of the incident was that there really was a frog
in Nicholas' basin of bread-and-milk; he had put it there himself, so he
felt entitled to know something about it. The sin of taking a frog from
the garden and putting it into a bowl of wholesome bread-and-milk was
enlarged on at great length, but the fact that stood out clearest in the
whole affair, as it presented itself to the mind of Nicholas, was that the
older, wiser, and better people had been proved to be profoundly in error
in matters about which they had expressed the utmost assurance.

"You said there couldn't possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk;
there WAS a frog in my bread-and-milk," he repeated, with the insistence
of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favourable
ground.

So his boy-cousin and girl-cousin and his quite uninteresting
younger brother were to be taken to Jagborough sands that afternoon and he
was to stay at home. His cousins' aunt, who insisted, by an unwarranted
stretch of imagination, in styling herself his aunt also, had hastily
invented the Jagborough expedition in order to impress on Nicholas the
delights that he had justly forfeited by his disgraceful conduct at the
breakfast- table. It was her habit, whenever one of the children fell from
grace, to improvise something of a festival nature from which the offender
would be rigorously debarred; if all the children sinned collectively they
were suddenly informed of a circus in a neighbouring town, a circus of
unrivalled merit and uncounted elephants, to which, but for their
depravity, they would have been taken that very day.

A few decent tears were looked for on the part of Nicholas when
the moment for the departure of the expedition arrived. As a matter of
fact, however, all the crying was done by his girl-cousin, who scraped her
knee rather painfully against the step of the carriage as she was
scrambling in.

"How she did howl," said Nicholas cheerfully, as the party drove
off without any of the elation of high spirits that should have
characterised it.

"She'll soon get over that," said the SOI-DISANT aunt; "it will be
a glorious afternoon for racing about over those beautiful sands. How they
will enjoy themselves!"

"Bobby won't enjoy himself much, and he won't race much either,"
said Nicholas with a grim chuckle; his boots are hurting him. They're too
tight."

"Why didn't he tell me they were hurting?" asked the aunt with
some asperity.

"He told you twice, but you weren't listening. You often don't
listen when we tell you important things."

"You are not to go into the gooseberry garden," said the aunt,
changing the subject.

"Why not?" demanded Nicholas.

"Because you are in disgrace," said the aunt loftily.

Nicholas did not admit the flawlessness of the reasoning; he felt
perfectly capable of being in disgrace and in a gooseberry garden at the
same moment. His face took on an expression of considerable obstinacy. It
was clear to his aunt that he was determined to get into the gooseberry
garden, "only," as she remarked to herself, "because I have told him he is
not to."

Now the gooseberry garden had two doors by which it might be
entered, and once a small person like Nicholas could slip in there he
could effectually disappear from view amid the masking growth of
artichokes, raspberry canes, and fruit bushes. The aunt had many other
things to do that afternoon, but she spent an hour or two in trivial
gardening operations among flower beds and shrubberies, whence she could
keep a watchful eye on the two doors that led to the forbidden paradise.
She was a woman of few ideas, with immense powers of concentration.

Nicholas made one or two sorties into the front garden, wriggling
his way with obvious stealth of purpose towards one or other of the doors,
but never able for a moment to evade the aunt's watchful eye. As a matter
of fact, he had no intention of trying to get into the gooseberry garden,
but it was extremely convenient for him that his aunt should believe that
he had; it was a belief that would keep her on self-imposed sentry-duty
for the greater part of the afternoon. Having thoroughly confirmed and
fortified her suspicions Nicholas slipped back into the house and rapidly
put into execution a plan of action that had long germinated in his brain.
By standing on a chair in the library one could reach a shelf on which
reposed a fat, important-looking key. The key was as important as it
looked; it was the instrument which kept the mysteries of the lumber-room
secure from unauthorised intrusion, which opened a way only for aunts and
such-like privileged persons. Nicholas had not had much experience of the
art of fitting keys into keyholes and turning locks, but for some days
past he had practised with the key of the schoolroom door; he did not
believe in trusting too much to luck and accident. The key turned stiffly
in the lock, but it turned. The door opened, and Nicholas was in an
unknown land, compared with which the gooseberry garden was a stale
delight, a mere material pleasure.

Often and often Nicholas had pictured to himself what the
lumber-room might be like, that region that was so carefully sealed from
youthful eyes and concerning which no questions were ever answered. It
came up to his expectations. In the first place it was large and dimly
lit, one high window opening on to the forbidden garden being its only
source of illumination. In the second place it was a storehouse of
unimagined treasures. The aunt-by-assertion was one of those people who
think that things spoil by use and consign them to dust and damp by way of
preserving them. Such parts of the house as Nicholas knew best were rather
bare and cheerless, but here there were wonderful things for the eye to
feast on. First and foremost there was a piece of framed tapestry that was
evidently meant to be a fire-screen. To Nicholas it was a living,
breathing story; he sat down on a roll of Indian hangings, glowing in
wonderful colours beneath a layer of dust, and took in all the details of
the tapestry picture. A man, dressed in the hunting costume of some remote
period, had just transfixed a stag with an arrow; it could not have been a
difficult shot because the stag was only one or two paces away from him;
in the thickly-growing vegetation that the picture suggested it would not
have been difficult to creep up to a feeding stag, and the two spotted
dogs that were springing forward to join in the chase had evidently been
trained to keep to heel till the arrow was discharged. That part of the
picture was simple, if interesting, but did the huntsman see, what
Nicholas saw, that four galloping wolves were coming in his direction
through the wood? There might be more than four of them hidden behind the
trees, and in any case would the man and his dogs be able to cope with the
four wolves if they made an attack? The man had only two arrows left in
his quiver, and he might miss with one or both of them; all one knew about
his skill in shooting was that he could hit a large stag at a ridiculously
short range. Nicholas sat for many golden minutes revolving the
possibilities of the scene; he was inclined to think that there were more
than four wolves and that the man and his dogs were in a tight corner.

But there were other objects of delight and interest claiming his
instant attention: there were quaint twisted candlesticks in the shape of
snakes, and a teapot fashioned like a china duck, out of whose open beak
the tea was supposed to come. How dull and shapeless the nursery teapot
seemed in comparison! And there was a carved sandal-wood box packed tight
with aromatic cottonwool, and between the layers of cottonwool were little
brass figures, hump-necked bulls, and peacocks and goblins, delightful to
see and to handle. Less promising in appearance was a large square book
with plain black covers; Nicholas peeped into it, and, behold, it was full
of coloured pictures of birds. And such birds! In the garden, and in the
lanes when he went for a walk, Nicholas came across a few birds, of which
the largest were an occasional magpie or wood-pigeon; here were herons and
bustards, kites, toucans, tiger-bitterns, brush turkeys, ibises, golden
pheasants, a whole portrait gallery of undreamed-of creatures. And as he
was admiring the colouring of the mandarin duck and assigning a
life-history to it, the voice of his aunt in shrill vociferation of his
name came from the gooseberry garden without. She had grown suspicious at
his long disappearance, and had leapt to the conclusion that he had
climbed over the wall behind the sheltering screen of the lilac bushes;
she was now engaged in energetic and rather hopeless search for him among
the artichokes and raspberry canes.

"Nicholas, Nicholas!" she screamed, "you are to come out of this
at once. It's no use trying to hide there; I can see you all the time."

It was probably the first time for twenty years that anyone had
smiled in that lumber-room.

Presently the angry repetitions of Nicholas' name gave way to a
shriek, and a cry for somebody to come quickly. Nicholas shut the book,
restored it carefully to its place in a corner, and shook some dust from a
neighbouring pile of newspapers over it. Then he crept from the room,
locked the door, and replaced the key exactly where he had found it. His
aunt was still calling his name when he sauntered into the front garden.

"Who's calling?" he asked.

"Me," came the answer from the other side of the wall; "didn't you
hear me? I've been looking for you in the gooseberry garden, and I've
slipped into the rain- water tank. Luckily there's no water in it, but the
sides are slippery and I can't get out. Fetch the little ladder from under
the cherry tree - "

"I was told I wasn't to go into the gooseberry garden," said
Nicholas promptly.

"I told you not to, and now I tell you that you may," came the
voice from the rain-water tank, rather impatiently.

"Your voice doesn't sound like aunt's," objected Nicholas; "you
may be the Evil One tempting me to be disobedient. Aunt often tells me
that the Evil One tempts me and that I always yield. This time I'm not
going to yield."

"Don't talk nonsense," said the prisoner in the tank; "go and
fetch the ladder."

"Will there be strawberry jam for tea?" asked Nicholas innocently.

"Certainly there will be," said the aunt, privately resolving that
Nicholas should have none of it.

"Now I know that you are the Evil One and not aunt," shouted
Nicholas gleefully; "when we asked aunt for strawberry jam yesterday she
said there wasn't any. I know there are four jars of it in the store
cupboard, because I looked, and of course you know it's there, but she
doesn't, because she said there wasn't any. Oh, Devil, you HAVE sold
yourself!"

There was an unusual sense of luxury in being able to talk to an
aunt as though one was talking to the Evil One, but Nicholas knew, with
childish discernment, that such luxuries were not to be over-indulged in.
He walked noisily away, and it was a kitchenmaid, in search of parsley,
who eventually rescued the aunt from the rain- water tank.

Tea that evening was partaken of in a fearsome silence. The tide
had been at its highest when the children had arrived at Jagborough Cove,
so there had been no sands to play on - a circumstance that the aunt had
overlooked in the haste of organising her punitive expedition. The
tightness of Bobby's boots had had disastrous effect on his temper the
whole of the afternoon, and altogether the children could not have been
said to have enjoyed themselves. The aunt maintained the frozen muteness
of one who has suffered undignified and unmerited detention in a
rain-water tank for thirty-five minutes. As for Nicholas, he, too, was
silent, in the absorption of one who has much to think about; it was just
possible, he considered, that the huntsman would escape with his hounds
while the wolves feasted on the stricken stag.


Read more