W. W. Jacobs' His Brother's Keeper: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- 3 hours ago
- 6 min read
Jacobs’ penultimate horror tale belongs firmly to the esteemed tradition of the nervous homicide—a genre in which he had already shown a generous and skillful hand in works such as The Well, In the Library, and Three Sisters. It is no wonder he returned so often to this form: Jacobs possessed a rare, sharply attuned gift for portraying the psychological distress of a murderer, particularly the private erosion of composure that follows the act.
Like its predecessors, this final story advances in the spirit of other classics in the form: Charles Dickens’ “The Mother’s Eyes,” “The Trial for Murder,” and “The Hanged Man’s Bride”; M. R. James’ “Two Doctors” (especially its garden dream sequences), “The Story of a Disappearance and an Appearance,” “Martin’s Close,” and “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral”; and Poe’s “The Black Cat,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” among many others. These works share a common architecture: the careful unpicking and gradual demolition of the criminal’s confidence and mental resolve, until the wrongdoer is unraveled—not by the probing of police or the machinery of law, but by the inexorable workings of their own conscience.
Jacobs understands, as these other masters did, that the most terrifying detective is the mind of the guilty party itself. He draws the reader into an oppressive intimacy with the killer’s thoughts, magnifying stray sounds, passing expressions, and half-glimpsed shapes into instruments of psychological torture. The result is less a whodunit than a how long can they endure it?—a drama of self-betrayal where suspense grows not from the question of whether the deed will be discovered, but from how soon the murderer will break under the strain.
The protagonist of His Brother’s Keeper is not far removed from Cain—the Biblical namesake of the title, who slew his brother Abel—though here the reasons for the crime remain deliberately murky. As in many of Jacobs’ best works, motive is less important than aftermath. The story’s true focus lies in three interwoven forces: the corrosive power of guilt, the inevitability of discovery, and the all-consuming terror of exposure. By denying us a clear motive, Jacobs strips the killing of any possible justification and turns our full attention to the killer’s unraveling—an unflinching study of the way a single, irreversible act can rot the mind from within.
SUMMARY
“Only half an hour ago he had entered the room with Henry Martle, and now Martle would never leave it again…” So our story begins, without any explanation of who Martle was or what led to his murder – for Jacobs, the “who” and “why” don’t matter a jot: it is all the same. Anthony Keller emerges “white and dazed” from his study, where Henry Martle now lies dead after an encounter that Keller desperately wishes he could undo. With “ten hours” before his housekeeper arrives, Keller struggles to think clearly, drinking whisky in an attempt to still his shaking limbs. The normal appearance of the house feels incongruous with the horror behind the study door.
His panic spikes when a friend arrives unexpectedly, nearly opening the study door before Keller stops him. The visitor misinterprets Keller’s behavior as a sign of some romantic or illicit tryst and departs, leaving Keller alone with the gruesome task ahead. Resolving to hide Martle’s body, Keller forces himself into the study, confronting the “quiet and peaceful” corpse. Envy momentarily replaces fear—Martle is beyond guilt or dread. Keller drags the body to his bicycle shed, locks it, and begins cleaning the scene, rationalizing that his injured hand “would account for much.” At midnight he turns off the lights, too tense to sleep, haunted by the thought of Martle’s spirit “wandering around the house.” Through the night he alternates between pacing and listening until dawn.
Daylight brings renewed composure, and Keller plans a permanent concealment: a shallow trench at the end of the garden, disguised as a rockery. When Mrs. Howe, his housekeeper, arrives, he explains his bleeding hand as an accident. But when she searches for the shed key to retrieve some dusters, Keller panics, snatching it away with an outburst that alarms her. Conscious that his behavior is suspicious, he spends the day alternating between guarding the shed and working on the trench. After dark, Keller wheels a barrow to the shed, drags Martle’s body to the garden, and buries him under the beginnings of the rockery. With the corpse submerged beneath earth and bricks, Keller feels some relief, believing time may allow for repentance and forgetting. That night he drinks heavily, deadening his nerves into sleep.
Over the following days, Keller adds more stones and plants, his sense of safety growing with the rockery’s size. Yet the garden has become a prison, binding him to the property. He avoids newspapers and friends, haunted only by memory. One night, he dreams vividly of the rockery shaking as something tries to escape, only to realize in the dream that he is the one buried there. Awaking in terror, he is soon roused by Mrs. Howe—someone has destroyed the rockery overnight. In the garden, Keller finds the stones scattered “all over the place,” but the grave itself untouched. The truth dawns on him: he had been sleepwalking, wrecking his own work, just as in his youth. Mrs. Howe suggests calling the police, but Keller refuses, rebuilding the rockery by evening. That night he fights to stay awake with coffee, fearing another nocturnal episode. Convinced the only hope is to leave, he decides on a trip to Exeter and perhaps Cornwall, telling Mrs. Howe it’s for his neuralgia and lack of sleep.
In Exeter, the bustling streets and crowded hotel dining room briefly restore his spirits. But in the night, he is awakened by knocking from the adjacent room. A fellow guest later tells him that he had been shouting the words “Mockery” and “Mortal” in his sleep “a hundred times.” Keller realizes his attempt at escape has failed—his dreams and unconscious actions will follow him anywhere. He returns home, resigned. Back in his silent house, Keller feels an unexpected “abiding peace.” The horror has dissipated, replaced by calm detachment. He sits in the study, reads poetry with unusual clarity, and later dreams again—but this time Martle appears “grave and noble,” watching approvingly as Keller digs, not in panic but as an act of “reparation.”
The dream abruptly changes when blinding light hits him; a voice calls his name. Keller wakes to find a constable standing nearby with a flashlight, having discovered him in the act of dismantling the rockery again while sleepwalking. The constable jokes about the “mess” Keller makes nightly, then notices something in the disturbed earth. Scraping away soil, he tugs at something hidden and suddenly regards Keller with “a voice cold and official.” “Are you coming quietly?” the constable asks. Keller, seeing that his secret is uncovered, steps forward with both hands outstretched: “I am coming quietly… Thank God!” In this final moment, relief outweighs fear—his long nightmare of concealment is over, replaced by the certainty of capture.
ANALYSIS
Keller ultimately seems almost relieved to surrender himself and be led—inevitably—to the gallows. His story is not one of conventional haunting (though he fully expects it, dreading shadows, jealously hoarding light, and fearing the helpless vulnerability of sleep), but rather one of self-haunting: psychological, not spectral. The ghosts that torment him are entirely of his own creation, raging against their imprisonment in his guilty unconscious. In time, they break free in a self-betraying act that Poe famously referred to as the “imp of the perverse.” The horrors he has committed seep from his dreams like a dark tide, performing—despite his will—the service he owes to society during the moments when his repressive faculties are at their weakest: namely, in slumber. In this way, the act of confession is not a conscious moral choice but the inevitable product of his own fractured psyche. Jacobs is once more at his finest here, omitting entirely the cause of the murder—a brilliant exercise in authorial restraint and economy. The motive is irrelevant. What matters is not why or how Keller killed, but the nightmarish trials of his guilt-sick mind that follow the offstage killing of a man named Martle, whose only mistake—so far as we are told—was casually remarking that his visit had been “a whim.” The omission of motive forces the reader’s attention onto the more universal, more chilling theme: that guilt’s corrosive power needs no moral justification to begin its work.
II.
One final piece of wry craftsmanship deserves mention before we part: the nature of Keller’s nocturnal outbursts. As the reader eventually realizes, the old gentleman’s supposed hearing of “MORTAL and MOCKERY” is in fact a mishearing of “MARTLE and ROCKERY.” Yet Jacobs deftly sidesteps the trap of a flat pun by investing the phrase with double weight. For just as Martle is literally buried in the rockery, Keller’s desperate bid to evade his mortal sins—and the MORTAL punishment they invite—is a hollow, self-deceiving mockery of fate. In this sense, the old man’s misunderstanding is not truly a misunderstanding at all. Jacobs is, as ever, treating his readers with intellectual respect, trusting them to detect the coded message: whether or not the wordplay is consciously grasped, it will convey its intended truth—that MARTLE is destined to emerge from his hiding place beneath the ROCKERY, and Keller’s shaky confidence in escaping justice is nothing more than a sham-faced MOCKERY of the MORTRAL punishment that awaits him.