“He struck a match soundlessly on the edge of his mattress.”
That, in some insidiously oblique way, triggers what now happens to the boy who struck the match. The eventual mock-up of a suicide by hanging from a rope the dead body next to a craftsman’s ‘master-touch’ of a kicked-over chair.
The story of a boy who remembers his beloved mother dying, and who now, while having been put to bed by his father and showy step-mother before they went out for ‘entertainment’, ventures from his bedroom with his swashbuckling belt and toy dagger, into the creepy darkness of the large house, eager to dodge the notice of Jacobs, some surly, ferrety servant who hums nauseatingly and often catches the boy and canes his legs for taking eatables from the larder when he should be in bed.
“This passage, if followed to the end, turned abruptly at right angles; and at the inner angle near the fusty entry to the cellars he paused to breathe and then to listen again. […] But before reaching it [the larder]. the boot cupboard, sour den of long-legged spiders and worse abominations, must be passed,…” — in which cupboard he later finds the rope. But suddenly hears panting…. “Even when, with sleeves turned up and sharp elbows bared, Jacobs was engrossed in any job, he never breathed like that.”
And he finds a fat woman in the kitchen who was panting. Who is she? And he helps her recover from a fit, as he might have done once, I guess, for his now dead mother, by burning something under her nose. “She walked in angles to a chair and sat there rocking her body to and fro and smiling at him – an odd contorted smile of blandishment and stupidity sicklied over with fear.”
With her “whites gone up”, I thought of ‘A MOTE’, above, and, so, was this her inner vision, expunging the sense of omniscience we had heretofore received from the boy?
SPOILER: And Jacobs is somehow in the cupboard, was he dead already, and had she been brought into the house to gratify him? He had said she wasn’t the first. Or had she murdered him, a crime of some unknown passion? And the boy (somehow, under whose influence? his own? the author’s? or the woman’s?) mocks things up by crafting a hanging? Although her offer of sixpence was declined, with later reference to the whistling of the gas, and the boy’s own florin… “And all the blind things of the house took wooden voices.”
Eventually the boy frightens her. And eventually he frightens himself. And certainly he frightens me, as this story’s reader, its latest victim, most of which readers have self-evidently never lasted long enough to tell others about it. Its own ‘soundless’ ‘gaslit’ ‘master-touch’ as struck from paper.
“Something had gone wrong – the house was changed; and he didn’t know how or why. He glanced up at the clock, which thereupon at once began to tick. […] The whisper in the dark outside of the uncertain wind, the soft bubbling whistle of the gas, the thousand and one minute dumb things around him in the familiar kitchen – nothing had changed. Yet now every object had become suddenly real, stark, menacing, and hostile. Panic…”
***
Full context here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/1005-2/
The Gestalt Real-Time Reviews of Books 
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