The Lumber Room

"The Lumber Room" is a short story by Hector Hugh Munro, also known as Saki. It tells the tale of a clever young boy who outsmarts his strict governess, who forbids him from entering the mysterious and seemingly forbidden lumber room. Through his resourcefulness and imagination, the boy discovers not only the hidden treasures of the room but also a deeper sense of freedom and agency. The story explores themes of authority, rebellion, and the contrast between childhood innocence and adult control, ultimately highlighting the importance of creativity and curiosity in the face of rigid expectations.

• Short story

								
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

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