Summary
Nicholas tries a couple of times to wriggle stealthily into the front garden, from where he can get to one of the two doors. However, he cannot escape the aunt’s watchful eye. The narrator reveals that in fact Nicholas has no intention of trying to get into the gooseberry garden, but it is extremely convenient for him that his aunt believes he does. With his aunt preoccupied trying to catch him getting into the gooseberry garden, Nicholas knows she will stand on her self-imposed sentry duty for much of the afternoon.
After confirming her suspicions by making it look as though he is trying to get to the gooseberry garden, Nicholas slips back into the house. He puts his plan into action—a plan he has been developing in his mind for a long time. The plan involves Nicholas standing on a chair in the library to reach a shelf where lies a fat, important-looking key. The key can unlock the mysteries of the lumber room, where only aunts and authorized adults are allowed entry.
Nicholas has been practicing fitting keys into keyholes with the schoolroom door. Having practiced, he manages to get the lumber room door open. He enters an unknown land. The gooseberry garden, by comparison, is a stale delight. Nicholas has often pictured what the lumber room might look like, particularly because it has been carefully sealed from his youthful eyes and no one answered any questions about it.
The room is large and dimly lit, with only one window, opening onto the forbidden garden, for a source of light. It is a storehouse of unimagined treasures. His aunt believes things spoil when used and so she puts them in the dusty lumber room to preserve them. Nicholas examines the wonderful objects kept out of the rest of the house. He sits on a roll of Indian hangings, whose wonderful colors glow under a layer of dust. He looks at a framed tapestry. The embroidered picture depicts a man in a hunting outfit; he has just shot a stag with an arrow. The image is illustrated with thick vegetation and spotted dogs at the huntsman’s feet.
Nicholas wonders if the huntsman sees what he sees: four wolves galloping over from the woods. Would the man be able to cope with an attack? He only has two arrows left in his quiver. Nicholas believes that the man isn’t a particularly skilled bowman because the stag he shot is very close, killed at a ridiculously short range. Nicholas sits for “many golden minutes,” considering all the possibilities of what might happen in the scene. He concludes that the huntsman and his dogs are “in a tight corner.”
Other delightful items capture Nicholas’s attention: candlesticks twisted into the shape of snakes, and a duck-shaped teapot with the beak as the spout. Nicholas thinks the nursery teapot seems dull and shapeless in comparison. He also finds a sandalwood box full of cottonwool and brass figurines of bulls, peacocks, and goblins. He finds a book of colorful bird pictures. He marvels at the variety of herons, kites, toucans, and brush turkeys, among many other never-dreamed-of creatures.
Nicholas is imagining the life history of a mandarin duck when he hears his aunt shrilly call his name from the gooseberry garden. Having grown suspicious, she climbs over the garden wall and begins a futile search through the raspberry canes. Nicholas’s aunt tells him to come out at once because there’s no use hiding: she can see him all the time. Nicholas smiles—probably the first time in twenty years someone has smiled in the lumber room.
Analysis
By putting his intelligence, mischievousness, and imagination into use, Nicholas decides to exploit his aunt’s obsession with curtailing his freedom and finally to put into action his scheme to enter the lumber room—an even more forbidden realm than the garden. Leveraging the aunt’s suspicions to his benefit, Nicholas pretends he is trying to wriggle his way toward the doors that lead to the garden. In doing so, he ensures that his aunt will continue to stand guard outside.
Having outsmarted her, Nicholas is free to take down the key to the lumber room from a high shelf in the library and let himself in. Although Nicholas’s exact age is never specified, Saki reveals that Nicholas must be very young by mentioning how the boy has no experience turning keys in the locks—an action belonging to the domain of authority figures. Because of his inexperience, Nicholas has practiced in advance of the lumber-room scheme by turning the key in the schoolroom lock.
The lumber room, which is a symbol for Nicholas’s imagination, meets all his expectations. Although lumber rooms were common in upper-class English houses, existing as storerooms for furniture and possessions not currently in use in the rest of the house, the lumber room is a treasure trove for Nicholas. Having been shut out of the room his entire life, Nicholas has grown up fantasizing about what might lie inside. He discovers all the delicate objects his aunt refuses to keep in the rest of the house, where the children might ruin them.
But far from ruin the objects, Nicholas has a deep appreciation and reverence as he marvels at what he finds. The fire-screen tapestry he discovers becomes particularly appealing. It is a functional object made to block excess heat from the fireplace, but to Nicholas, the fire screen is like a storybook. The woven image on the tapestry depicts a hunter who has just shot an arrow at a deer. Nicholas projects his imagination onto the scene, speculating on whether the huntsman know about the wolves approaching from the woods. He doubts the huntsman will escape unharmed.
Nicholas next turns his attention to a few more fine objects before finding a book full of illustrated birds. Growing up in Edwardian England, Nicholas only knows of the wild birds he has seen in the area around his home. The book of illustrations contains images of bird varieties he could not have dreamed of. With such objects to stimulate his imagination, Nicholas spends time peacefully ensconced in the tranquil lumber room. Although his aunt surely believes that he is too mischievous to be trusted with such delicate things, Nicholas proves, at least to the reader, that he possesses gentleness and respect.
