Summary
Nicholas’s aunt’s angry repetitions of Nicholas’s name give way to a shriek and then a cry for somebody to come quickly. Nicholas shuts the bird book, returns it carefully in its place, and shakes a bit of dust off a newspaper onto it. He then creeps out of the room, locks the door, and replaces the key where he found it.
He saunters into the front garden while his aunt is still calling his name. His aunt explains that she was looking for him and slipped into the rain-water tank. Luckily there’s no water, but the sides are slippery and she can’t get out. He asks her to bring the ladder from under the cherry tree. Nicholas tells her he was told not to go into the gooseberry garden. Impatiently his aunt says that’s true, but now she tells him he may.
Nicholas says her voice doesn’t sound like his aunt’s: she might be the Evil One, tempting him to be disobedient. He says that his aunt often tells him that he always yields when the Evil One tempts him. This time, he says, he won’t yield. His aunt tells him not to talk nonsense and to go get the ladder. He asks innocently if there will be strawberry jam for tea. She says there certainly will be, although she privately decides that Nicholas will have none of it.
Nicholas shouts gleefully that now he knows she is the Evil One; when he asked for strawberry jam the day before, there wasn’t any. He says he knows there are four jars in the store cupboard because he saw them there, but his aunt must not know because she said there wasn’t any. This means he must be talking to the Devil, who has given himself away.
Although there is a sense of luxury in addressing his aunt as though she is the devil, Nicholas knows that he shouldn’t over-indulge. He walks away noisily. Eventually the kitchen maid, coming to the garden in search of parsley, rescues the aunt from the water tank.
The story ends that evening at tea. There is a fearsome silence at the table. The narrator explains that the tide at Jagborough Cove was at its highest when the children arrived, meaning the sands were covered in water and they couldn’t play. The aunt had overlooked this eventually in the hasty way she planned the trip. Bobby’s boots had been too tight after all, and his mood had been sour the entire time. The other children hadn’t enjoyed the day either.
The aunt is mute after having been stuck in the rain-water tank for thirty-five minutes. Nicholas is silent because he is absorbed in thought. It is possible, he thinks, that the huntsman might escape with his hounds while the wolves feast on the wounded stag.
Analysis
Nicholas’s imaginative reverie in the lumber room is disrupted when he hears through the high window his aunt calling for him in the garden. First covering his tracks by shaking dust onto the bird-book cover and carefully replacing the lumber-room key in the library, Nicholas walks casually out to the garden to discover that his aunt has fallen into the rain-water tank.
The comic moment presents an ironic twist in the two primary character’s power dynamic. Although she has sought to oppress and punish Nicholas with her rigid authority, the aunt is now at Nicholas’s mercy, as she needs him to fetch a ladder so she may climb out of her incidental prison. Touching on the theme of defiance, Saki creates another instance of situational irony, as Nicholas reminds his aunt that he cannot fetch the ladder because it is in the gooseberry garden, which he has been barred from entering.
Nicholas exploits the inverted power relationship further with more imaginative mischief. Pretending he does not believe his aunt sounds like herself, Nicholas acts as though she is the Devil, trying to tempt him to misbehave. Nicholas even uses the occasion to let his aunt know that he knows she lied the day before about there being no strawberry jam. Having looked in the cupboard and found four jars, Nicholas catches her out in her lie and insists she must be the “Evil One,” because his aunt could not have known of the supply.
After exacting his revenge using the aunt’s own logic against her, Nicholas leaves her in the tank, making sure to walk away noisily so that she knows he is gone. The narrator reveals that it is only once the kitchen maid happens to go into the garden for parsley that the aunt is found and rescued. With this detail, Saki implies that Nicholas would have been happy to leave his aunt in the tank for longer than the thirty-five minutes she spent in it.
The story ends where it began: around a table. Saki injects several instances of situational irony by revealing that the children had a bad day at the beach. The aunt, in her hasty desire for revenge against Nicholas, had not considered the tides, and the sand flats at Jagborough were flooded. Nicholas had also been correct about Bobby’s boots, which were too tight, causing the boy to have an especially miserable day.
The unhappy children sit in silence while the aunt, humiliated from getting trapped in the water tank, is also mute. The only one of them who has enjoyed his day is Nicholas, who contentedly ponders the tapestry huntsman, thinking about how the man just might escape. With this moment of interiority, Saki closes the story in the imagination of Nicholas, who remains free in his mind despite the strictures of living with an authoritarian aunt.
