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If Winter Comes

by A. S. M. Hutchinson · English · Gutenberg #14145 · 663,069 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: If Winter Comes

Author: A. S. M. Hutchinson


        
Release date: November 24, 2004 [eBook #14145]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IF WINTER COMES ***

BY A.S.M. HUTCHINSON

     THE HAPPY WARRIOR

     ONCE ABOARD THE LUGGER--

     THE CLEAN HEART

     IF WINTER COMES




IF WINTER COMES
BY
A.S.M. HUTCHINSON


BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1921


Published, August, 1921
Reprinted, August, 1921 (twice)
Reprinted, September, 1921 (four times)
Reprinted, October, 1921


PRINTED BY C.H. SIMONDS COMPANY
BOSTON, MASS., U.S.A.




                "...O Wind,
    If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

                        --SHELLEY




CONTENTS

PART ONE
                      PAGE
MABEL                   1


PART TWO

NONA                   77


PART THREE

EFFIE                 187


PART FOUR

MABEL--EFFIE--NONA    317




PART ONE

MABEL





IF WINTER COMES



CHAPTER I


I

To take Mark Sabre at the age of thirty-four, and in the year 1912, and
at the place Penny Green is to necessitate looking back a little towards
the time of his marriage in 1904, but happens to find him in good light
for observation. Encountering him hereabouts, one who had shared school
days with him at his preparatory school so much as twenty-four years
back would have found matter for recognition.

A usefully garrulous person, one Hapgood, a solicitor, found much.

"Whom do you think I met yesterday? Old Sabre! You remember old Sabre at
old Wickamote's?... Yes, that's the chap. Used to call him Puzzlehead,
remember? Because he used to screw up his forehead over things old
Wickamote or any of the other masters said and sort of drawl out, 'Well,
I don't see that, sir.'... Yes, rather!... And then that other
expression of his. Just the opposite. When old Wickamote or some one had
landed him, or all of us, with some dashed punishment, and we were
gassing about it, used to screw up his nut in the same way and say,
'Yes, but I see what he _means_.' And some one would say, 'Well, what
does he mean, you ass?' and he'd start gassing some rot till some one
said, 'Good lord, fancy sticking up for a master!' And old Puzzlehead
would say, 'You sickening fool, I'm not sticking _up_ for him. I'm only
saying he's right from how he looks at it and it's no good saying he's
wrong.'... Ha! Funny days.... Jolly nice chap, though, old Puzzlehead
was.... Yes, I met him.... Fact, I run into him occasionally. We do a
mild amount of business with his firm. I buzz down there about once a
year. Tidborough. He's changed, of course. So have you, you know. That
Vandyke beard, what? Ha! Old Sabre's not done anything outrageous like
that. Real thing I seemed to notice about him when I bumped into him
yesterday was that he didn't look very cheery. Looked to me rather as
though he'd lost something and was wondering where it was. Ha!
But--dashed funny--I mentioned something about that appalling speech
that chap made in that blasphemy case yesterday.... Eh? yes, absolutely
frightful, wasn't it?--well, I'm dashed if old Sabre didn't puzzle up
his nut in exactly the same old way and say, 'Yes, but I see what he
_means_.' I reminded him and ragged him about it no end. Absolutely the
same words and expression. Funny chap ... nice chap....

"What did he say the blasphemy man meant? Oh, I don't know; some bilge,
just as he used to about the masters. You know the man talked some
rubbish about how the State couldn't have it both ways--couldn't
blaspheme against God by flatly denying that all men were equal and
basing all its legislation on keeping one class up and the other class
down; couldn't do that and at the same time prosecute him because he
said that religion was--well, you know what he said; I'm dashed if I
like to repeat it. Joke of it was that I found myself using exactly the
same expression to old Sabre as we used to use at school. I said, 'Good
lord, man, fancy sticking up for a chap like that!' And old Sabre--by
Jove, I tell you there we all were in a flash back in the playground at
old Wickamote's, down in that corner by the workshop, all kids again and
old Puzzlehead flicking his hand out of his pocket--remember how he used
to?--like _that_--and saying, 'You sickening fool, I'm not sticking _up_
for him, I'm only saying he's right from how he looks at it and it's no
good saying he's wrong!' Rum, eh, after all those years.... No, he
didn't say, 'You sickening fool' this time. I reminded him how he used
to, and he laughed and said, 'Yes; did I? Well, I still get riled, you
know, when chaps can't see--' And then he said 'Yes, "sickening fool";
so I did; odd!' and he looked out of the window as though he was looking
a thousand miles away--this was in his office, you know--and chucked
talking absolutely....

"Yes, in his office I saw him.... He's in a good business down there at
Tidborough. Dashed good. 'Fortune, East and Sabre'... Never heard of
them? Ah, well, that shows you're not a pillar of the Church, old son.
If you took the faintest interest in your particular place of worship,
or in any Anglican place of worship, you'd know that whenever you want
anything for the Church from a hymn book or a hassock or a pew to a
pulpit or a screen or a spire you go to Fortune, East and Sabre,
Tidborough. Similarly in the scholastic line, anything from a birch rod
to a desk--Fortune, East and Sabre, by return and the best. No, they're
_the_ great, _the_ great, church and school-furnishing people.
'Ecclesiastical and Scholastic Furnishers and Designers' they call
themselves. And they're IT. No really decent church or really
gentlemanly school thinks of going anywhere else. They keep at
Tidborough because they were there when they furnished the first church
in the year One or thereabouts. I expect they did the sun-ray fittings
at Stonehenge. Ha! Anyway, they're one of the stately firms of old
England, and old Sabre is the Sabre part of the firm. And his father
before him and so on. Fortune and East are both bishops, I believe. No,
not really. But I tell you the show's run on mighty pious lines. One of
them's a 'Rev.', I know. I mean, the tradition of the place is to be in
keeping with the great and good works it carries out and for which,
incidentally, it is dashed well paid. Rather. Oh, old Sabre has butter
with his bread all right....

"Married? Oh, yes, he's married. Has been some time, I believe, though
they've no kids. I had lunch at his place one time I was down Tidborough
way. Now there's a place you ought to go to paint one of your
pictures--where he lives--Penny Green. Picturesque, quaint if ever a
place was. It's about seven miles from Tidborough; seven miles by road
and about seven centuries in manners and customs and appearance and all
that. Proper old village green, you know, with a duck pond and cricket
pitch and houses all round it. No two alike. Just like one of Kate
Greenaway's pictures, I always think. It just sits and sleeps. You
wouldn't think there was a town within a hundred miles of it, let alone
a bustling great place like Tidborough. Go down. You really ought to.
Yes, and by Jove you'll have to hurry up if you want to catch the
old-world look of the place. It's 'developing' ... 'being developed.'...
Eh?... Yes; God help it; I agree. After all these centuries sleeping
there it's suddenly been 'discovered.' People are coming out from
Tidborough and Alton and Chovensbury to get away from their work and
live there. Making a sort of garden suburb business of it. They've got a
new church already. Stupendous affair, considering the size of the
place--but that's looking forward to this development movement, the new
vicar chap says. He's doing the developing like blazes. Regular tiger
he is for shoving things, particularly himself. Chap called
Bagshaw--Boom Bagshaw. Character if ever there was one. But they're all
characters down there from what I've seen of it....

"Yes, you go down there and have a look, with your sketch-book. Old
Sabre'll love to see you.... His wife?... Oh, very nice, distinctly
nice. Pretty woman, very. Somehow I didn't think quite the sort of woman
for old Puzzlehead. Didn't appear to have the remotest interest in any
of the things he was keen about; and he seemed a bit fed with her sort
of talk. Hers was all gossip--all about the people there and what a rum
crowd they were. Devilish funny, I thought, some of her stories. But old
Sabre--well, I suppose he'd heard 'em before. Still, there was
something--something about the two of them. You know that sort of--sort
of--what the devil is it?--sort of stiffish feeling you sometimes feel
in the air with two people who don't quite click. Well, that was it.
Probably only my fancy. As to that, you can pretty well cut the welkin
with a knife at my place sometimes when me and my missus get our tails
up; and we're fearful pals. Daresay I just took 'em on an off day. But
that was my impression though--that she wasn't just the sort of woman
for old Sabre. But after all, what the dickens sort of woman would be?
Fiddling chap for a husband, old Puzzlehead. Can imagine him riling any
wife with wrinkling up his nut over some plain as a pikestaff thing and
saying, 'Well, I don't quite see that.' Ha! Rum chap. Nice chap. Have a
drink?"



CHAPTER II


I

Thus, by easy means of the garrulous Hapgood, appear persons, places,
institutions; lives, homes, activities; the web and the tangle and the
amenities of a minute fragment of human existence. Life. An odd
business. Into life we come, mysteriously arrived, are set on our feet
and on we go: functioning more or less ineffectively, passing through
permutations and combinations; meeting the successive events, shocks,
surprises of hours, days, years; becoming engulfed, submerged, foundered
by them; all of us on the same adventure yet retaining nevertheless each
his own individuality, as swimmers carrying each his undetachable burden
through dark, enormous and cavernous seas. Mysterious journey!
Uncharted, unknown and finally--but there is no finality! Mysterious and
stunning sequel--not end--to the mysterious and tremendous adventure!
Finally, of this portion, death, disappearance,--gone! Astounding
development! Mysterious and hapless arrival, tremendous and mysterious
passage, mysterious and alarming departure. No escaping it; no volition
to enter it or to avoid it; no prospect of defeating it or solving it.
Odd affair! Mysterious and baffling conundrum to be mixed up in!...
Life!

Come to this pair, Mark Sabre and his wife Mabel, at Penny Green, and
have a look at them mixed up in this odd and mysterious business of
life. Some apprehension of the odd affair that it was was characteristic
of Mark Sabre's habit of mind, increasingly with the years,--with
Mabel.


II

Penny Green--"picturesque, quaint if ever a place was", in garrulous Mr.
Hapgood's words--lies in a shallow depression, in shape like a narrow
meat dish. It runs east and west, and slightly tilted from north to
south. To the north the land slopes pleasantly upward in pasture and
orchards, and here was the site of the Penny Green Garden Home
Development Scheme. Beyond the site, a considerable area, stands
Northrepps, the seat of Lord Tybar. Lord Tybar sold the Development site
to the developers, and, as he signed the deed of conveyance, remarked in
his airy way, "Ah, nothing like exercise, gentlemen. That's made every
one of my ancestors turn in his grave." The developers tittered
respectfully as befits men who have landed a good thing.

Westward of Penny Green is Chovensbury; behind Tidborough the sun rises.

Viewed from the high eminence of Northrepps, Penny Green gave rather the
impression of having slipped, like a sliding dish, down the slope and
come to rest, slightly tilted, where its impetus had ceased. It was
certainly at rest: it had a restful air; and it had certainly slipped
out of the busier trafficking of its surrounding world, the main road
from Chovensbury to Tidborough, coming from greater cities even than
these and proceeding to greater, ran far above it, beyond Northrepps.
The main road rather slighted than acknowledged Penny Green by the
nerveless and shrunken feeler which, a mile beyond Chovensbury, it
extended in Penny Green's direction.

This splendid main road in the course of its immense journey across
Southern England, extended feelers to many settlements of man,
providing them as it were with a talent which, according to the energy
of the settlement, might be increased a hundredfold--drained, metalled,
tarred, and adorned with splendid telegraph poles and wires--or might be
wrapped up in a napkin of neglect, monstrous overgrown hedges and
decayed ditches, and allowed to wither: the splendid main road, having
regard to its ancient Roman lineage, disdainfully did not care tuppence
either way; and for that matter Penny Green, which had ages ago put its
feeler in a napkin, did not care tuppence either.

It was now, however, to have a railway.

And meanwhile there was this to be said for it: that whereas some of the
dependents of the splendid main road constituted themselves abominably
ugly carbuncles on the end of shapely and well-manicured fingers of the
main road, Penny Green, at the end of a withered and entirely neglected
finger, adorned it as with a jewel.


III

A Kate Greenaway picture, the garrulous Hapgood had said of Penny Green;
and it was well said. At its eastern extremity the withered talent from
the splendid main road divided into two talents and encircled the Green
which had, as Hapgood had said, a cricket pitch (in summer) and a duck
pond (more prominent in winter); also, in all seasons, and the survivors
of many ages, a clump of elm trees surrounded by a decayed bench; a well
surrounded by a decayed paling, so decayed that it had long ago thrown
itself flat on the ground into which it continued venerably to decay;
and at the southeastern extremity a village pound surrounded by a
decayed grey wall and now used by the youth of the village for the
purpose of impounding one another in parties or sides in a game well
called "Pound I."

At the southwestern extremity of the Green, and immediately opposite the
Tybar Arms, was a blacksmith's forge perpetually inhabited and directed
by a race named Wirk. The forge was the only human habitation or
personal and individual workshop actually on the Green, and it was said,
and freely admitted by the successive members of the tribe of Wirk, that
it had "no right" to be there. There it nevertheless was, had been for
centuries, so far as anybody knew to the contrary, and administered
always by a Wirk. In some mysterious way which nobody ever seemed to
recognize till it actually happened there was always a son Wirk to
continue the forge when the father Wirk died and was carried off to be
deposited by his fathers who had continued it before him. It was also
said in the village, as touching this matter of "no right", that nobody
could understand how the forge ever came to be there and that it
certainly would be turned off one day; and with this also the current
members of the tribe of Wirk cordially agreed. They understood less than
anybody how they ever came to be there, and they knew perfectly well
they would be turned off one day; saying which--and it was a common
subject of debate among village sires of a summer evening, seated
outside the Tybar Arms--saying which, the Wirk of the day would gaze
earnestly up the road and look at his watch as if the power which would
turn him off was then on its way and was getting a bit overdue.

The present representatives of the tribe of Wirk were known as Old Wirk
and Young Wirk. Young Wirk was sixty-seven. No one knew where a still
younger Wirk would come from when Old Wirk died and when Young Wirk
died. But no one troubled to know. No one knows, precisely, where the
next Pope is coming from, but he always comes, and successive Wirks
appeared as surely. Old Wirk was past duty at the forge now. He sat on a
Windsor chair all day and watched Young Wirk. When the day was finished
Old Wirk and Young Wirk would walk across the Green to the pound, not
together, but Old Wirk in front and Young Wirk immediately behind him;
both with the same gait, bent and with a stick. On reaching the pound
they would gaze profoundly into it over the decayed, grey wall, rather
as if they were looking to see if the power that was going to turn out
the forge was there, and then, the power apparently not being there,
they would return, trailing back in the same single file, and take up
their reserved positions on the bench before the Tybar Arms.


IV

Mark Sabre, intensely fond of Penny Green, had reflected upon it
sometimes as a curious thing that there was scarcely one of the
village's inhabitants or institutions but had evidenced little
differences of attitude between himself and Mabel, who was not intensely
fond of Penny Green. The aged Wirks had served their turn. Mabel had
once considered the Wirks extremely picturesque and, quite early in
their married life, had invited them to her house that she might
photograph them for her album.

They arrived, in single file, but she did not photograph them for her
album. The photograph was not taken because Mark, when they presented
themselves, expressed surprise that the aged pair were led off by the
parlour maid to have tea in the kitchen. Why on earth didn't they have
tea with them, with himself and Mabel, in the garden?

Mabel did what Sabre called "flew up"; and at the summit of her flight
up inquired, "Suppose some one called?"

"Well, suppose they did?" Sabre inquired.

Mabel in a markedly calm voice then gave certain orders to the maid, who
had brought out the tea and remained while the fate of the aged Wirks
was in suspense.

The maid departed with the orders and Sabre commented, "Sending them
off? Well, I'm dashed!"

Half an hour later the aged pair, having been led into the kitchen and
having had tea there, were led out again and released by the maid on to
the village Green rather as if they were two old ducks turned out to
grass.

Sabre, watching them from the lawn beside the teacups, laughed and said,
"What a dashed stupid business. They might have had tea on the roof for
all I care."

Mabel tinkled a little silver bell for the maid. _Ting-a-ling-ting!_


V

The houses of Penny Green carried out the Kate Greenaway effect that the
Green itself established. Along the upper road of the tilted dish were
the larger houses, and upon the lower road mostly the cottages of the
villagers; also upon the lower road the five shops of Penny Green: the
butcher's shop which was opened on Tuesdays and Fridays by a butcher who
came in from Tidborough with a spanking horse in front of him and half a
week's supply of meat behind and beneath him; the grocer's shop and the
draper's shop which, like enormous affairs in London, were also a large
number of other shops but, unlike the London affairs, dispensed them all
within the one shop and over the one counter. In the grocer's shop you
could be handed into one hand a pound of tea and into the other a pair
of boots, a convenience which, after all, is not to be had in all Oxford
Street. The draper's shop, carrying the principle further, would not
only dress you; post-office you; linoleum, rug and wall paper you; ink,
pencil and note paper you; but would also bury you and tombstone you, a
solemnity which it was only called upon to perform for anybody about
once in five years--Penny Green being long-lived--but was always ready
and anxious to carry out. Indeed in the back room of his shop, the
draper, Mr. Pinnock, had a coffin which he had been trying (as he said)
"to work off" for twenty-two years. It represented Mr. Pinnock's single
and disastrous essay in sharp business. Two and twenty years earlier Old
Wirk had been not only dying but "as good as dead." Mr. Pinnock on a
stock-replenishing excursion in Tidborough, had bought a coffin, at the
undertaker's, of a size to fit Old Wirk, and for the reason that, buying
it then, he could convey it back on the wagon he had hired for the day
and thus save carriage. He had brought it back, and the first person he
had set eyes on in Penny Green was no other than Old Wirk himself,
miraculously recovered and stubbornly downstairs and sunning at his
door. The shock had nearly caused Mr. Pinnock to qualify for the coffin
himself; but he had not, nor had any other inhabitant of suitable size
since demised. Longer persons than Old Wirk had died, and much shorter
and much stouter persons than Old Wirk had died. But the coffin had
remained. Up-ended and neatly fitted with shelves, it served as a store
cupboard, without a door, pending its proper use. But it was a terribly
expensive store cupboard and it stood in Mr. Pinnock's parlour as a
gloomy monument to the folly of rash and hazardous speculation.


VI

Penny Green, like Rome, had not been built in a day. The houses of the
Penny Green Garden Home, on the other hand, were being run up in as near
to a day as enthusiastic developers, feverish contractors (vying one
with another) and impatient tenants could encompass. Nor was Penny Green
built for a day. The houses and cottages of Penny Green had been built
under the influence of many and different styles of architecture; and
they had been built not only by people who intended to live in them, and
proposed to be roomy and well cup boarded and stoutly beamed and floored
in them, but who, not foreseeing restless and railwayed generations,
built them to endure for the children of their children's children and
for children yet beyond. Sabre's house was of grey stone and it
presented over the doorway the date 1667.

"Nearly two hundred and fifty years," Mabel had once said.

"And I bet," Sabre had replied, "it's never been better kept or run than
you run it now, Mabel."

The tribute was well deserved. Mabel, who was in many ways a model
woman, was preëminently a model housewife. "Crawshaws" was spotlessly
kept and perfectly administered. Four living rooms, apart from the
domestic offices, were on the ground floor. One was the morning room, in
which they principally lived; one the dining room and one the
drawing-room. They were entered by enormously heavy doors of oak, fitted
with latches, the drawing-room up two steps, the dining room down one
step and the morning room and the fourth room on the level. All were
low-beamed and many-windowed with lattice windows; all were stepped into
as stepping into a very quiet place, and somehow into a room which one
had not expected to be there, or not quite that shape if a room were
there. Sabre never quite lost that feeling of pleasant surprise on
entering them. They had moreover, whether due to the skill of the
architect or the sagacity of Mabel, the admirable, but rare attribute of
being cool in summer and warm in winter.

The only room in the house which Sabre did not like was the fourth
sitting room on the ground floor; and it was his own room, furnished and
decorated by Mabel for his own particular use and comfort. But she
called it his "den", and Sabre loathed and detested the word den as
applied to a room a man specially inhabits. It implied to him a
masculine untidiness, and he was intensely orderly and hated untidiness.
It implied customs and manners of what he called "boarding-house
ideas",--the idea that a man must have an untidily comfortable apartment
into which he can retire and envelop himself in tobacco smoke, and where
he "can have his own things around him", and "have his pipes and his
pictures about him", and where he can wear "an old shooting jacket and
slippers",--and he loathed and detested all these phrases and the ideas
they connoted. He had no "old shooting jacket" and he would have given
it to the gardener if he had; and he detested wearing slippers and never
did wear slippers; it was his habit to put on his boots after his bath
and to keep them on till he put on shoes when changing for dinner. Above
all, he loathed and detested the vision which the word "den" always
conjured up to him. This was a vision of the door of a typical den being
opened by a wife, and of the wife saying in a mincing voice, "This is
George in his den," and of boarding-house females peering over the
wife's shoulder and smiling fatuously at the denizen who, in an old
shooting jacket and slippers, grinned vacuously back at them. To Mark
this was a horrible and unspeakable vision.

Mabel could not in the least understand it, and common sense and common
custom were entirely on her side; Mark admitted that. The ridiculous and
trivial affair only took on a deeper significance--not apparent to Mark
at the time, but apparent later in the fact that he could not make Mabel
understand his attitude.

The matter of the den and another matter, touching the servants, came up
between them in the very earliest days of their married life. From
London, on their return from their honeymoon, Mark had been urgently
summoned to the sick-bed of his father, in Chovensbury. Mabel proceeded
to Crawshaws. He joined her a week later, his father happily recovered.
Mabel had been busy "settling things", and she took him round the house
with delicious pride and happiness. Mark, sharing both, had his arm
linked in hers. When they came to the fourth sitting room Mabel
announced gaily, "And this is your den!"

Mark gave a mock groan. "Oh, lord, not den!"

"Yes, of course, den. Why ever not?"

"I absolutely can't stick den." He glanced about "Who on earth's left
those fearful old slippers there?"

"They're a pair of father's. I took them specially for you for this
room. You haven't got any slippers like that."

He gazed upon the heels downtrodden by her heavy father. He did not much
like her heavy father. "No, I haven't," he said, and thought grimly,
"Thank God!"

"But, Mark, what do you mean, you can't stick 'den'?"

He explained laughingly. He ended, "It's just like lounge hall. Lounge
hall makes me feel perfectly sick. You're not going to call the hall a
lounge hall, are you?"

She was quite serious and the least little bit put out. "No--I'm not.
But I can't see why. I've never heard such funny ideas."

He was vaguely, transiently surprised at her attitude towards his funny
ideas. "Well, come on, let's see upstairs."

"Yes, let's, dear."

He stepped out, and she closed the door after them. "Well, that's your
den."

As if he had never spoken! A vague and transient discomfort shot through
him.


VII

It was when they came down again, completely happy and pleased, that the
servant incident occurred. Mabel was down the stairs slightly before him
and turned a smiling face up to him as he descended. "By Jove, it's
jolly," he said. "We'll be happy here," and he kissed her.

"You'd better see the kitchen. It's awfully nice;" and they went along.

At the kitchen door she paused and began in a mysterious whisper a long
account of the servants. "I think they'll turn out quite nice girls.
They're sisters, you know, and they're glad to be in a place together.
They've both got young men in the village. Fancy, the cook told me that
at Mrs. Wellington's where she was, at Chovensbury, she wasn't allowed
to use soda for washing up because Mrs. Wellington fussed so frightfully
about the pattern on her china! Fancy, in their family they've got
eleven brothers and sisters. Isn't it awful how those kind of people--"

Her voice got lower and lower. She seemed to Mark to be quivering with
some sort of repressed excitement, as though the two maids were some
rare exhibit which she had captured with a net and placed in the
kitchen, and whom it was rather thrilling to open the door upon and peep
at. He could hardly hear her voice and had to bend his head. It was dim
in the lobby outside the kitchen door. The dimness, her intense whispers
and her excitement made him feel that he was in some mysterious
conspiracy with her. The whole atmosphere of the house and of this tour
of inspection, which had been deliciously absorbing, became mysteriously
conspiratorial, unpleasing.

"...She's been to a school of cookery at Tidborough. She attended the
whole course!"

"Good. That's the stuff!"

"Hush!"

Why hush? What a funny business this was!


VIII

Mabel opened the kitchen door. "The master's come to see how nice the
kitchen looks."

Two maids in black dresses and an extraordinary amount of stiffly
starched aprons and caps and streamers rose awkwardly and bobbed awkward
little bows. One was very tall, the other rather short. The tall one
looked extraordinarily severe and the short one extraordinarily glum,
Mark thought, to have young men. Mabel looked from the girls to Mark and
from Mark to the girls, precisely as if she were exhibiting rare
specimens to her husband and her husband to her rare specimens. And in
the tone of one exhibiting pinned, dried, and completely impersonal
specimens, she announced, "They're sisters. Their name is Jinks."

Mark, examining the exhibits, had been feeling like a fool. Their name
humanized them and relieved his awkward feeling. "Ha! Jinks, eh? High
Jinks and Low Jinks, what?" He laughed. It struck him as rather comic;
and High Jinks and Low Jinks tittered broadly, losing in the most
astonishing way the one her severity and the other her glumness.

Mabel seemed suddenly to have lost her interest in her exhibits and
their cage. She rather hurried Mark through the kitchen premises and,
moving into the garden, replied rather abstractedly to his plans for the
garden's development.

Suddenly she said, "Mark, I do wish you hadn't said that in the
kitchen."

He was mentally examining the possibilities of a makeshift racket court
against a corner of the stable and barn. "Eh, what in the kitchen,
dear?"

"That about High Jinks and Low Jinks."

"Mabel, I swear we could fix up a topping sort of squash rackets in that
corner. Those cobbles are worn absolutely smooth--"

"I wish you'd listen to me, Mark."

He caught his arm around her and gave her a playful squeeze. "Sorry, old
girl, what was it? About High Jinks and Low Jinks? Ha! Dashed funny
that, don't you think?"

"No, I don't. I don't think it's a bit funny."

Her tone was such that, relaxing his arm, he turned and gazed at her.
"_Don't_ you? Don't you really?"

"No, I don't. Far from funny."

Some instinct told him he ought not to laugh, but he could not help it.
The idea appealed to him as distinctly and clearly comic. "Well, but it
_is_ funny. Don't you see? High Jinks alone is such a funny
expression--sort of--well, you know what I mean. Apart altogether from
Low Jinks," and he laughed again.

Mabel compressed her lips. "I simply don't. Rebecca is not a bit like
High Jinks."

He burst out laughing. "No, I'm dashed if she is. That's just it!"

"I really do not see it."

"Oh, go on, Mabel! Of course you do. You make it funnier. High Jinks and
Low Jinks! I shall call them that."

"Mark." She spoke the word severely and paused severely. "Mark. I do
most earnestly hope you'll do nothing of the kind."

He stared, puzzled. He had tried to explain the absurd thing, and she
simply could not see it. "I simply don't."

And again that vague and transient discomfort shot through him.


IX

Sabre awoke in the course of that night and lay awake. The absurd
incident came immediately into his mind and remained in his mind. High
Jinks and Low Jinks _was_ comic. No getting over it. Incontestably
comic. Stupid, of course, but just the kind of stupid thing that tickled
him irresistibly. And she couldn't see it. Absolutely could not see it.
But if she were never going to see any of these stupid little things
that appealed to him--? And then he wrinkled his brows. "You remember
how he used to wrinkle up his old nut," as the garrulous Hapgood had
said.

A night-light, her wish, dimly illumined the room. He raised himself and
looked at her fondly, sleeping beside him. He thought, "Dash it, the
thing's been just the same from her point of view. That den business.
She likes den, and I can't stick den. Just the same for her as for me
that High Jinks and Low Jinks tickles me and doesn't tickle her."

He very gently moved with his finger a tress of her hair that had fallen
upon her face.... Mabel!... His wife!... How gently beneath her filmy
bedgown her bosom rose and fell!... How utterly calm her face was. How
at peace, how secure, she lay there. He thought, "Three weeks ago she
was sleeping in the terrific privacy of her own room, and here she is
come to me in mine. Cut off from everything and everybody and come here
to me."

An inexpressible tenderness filled him. He had a sudden sense of the
poignant and tremendous adventure on which they were embarked together.
They had been two lives, and now they were one life, altering completely
the lives they would have led singly: a new sea, a new ship on a new,
strange sea. What lay before them?

She stirred.

His thoughts continued: One life! One life out of two lives; one nature
out of two natures! Mysterious and extraordinary metamorphosis. She had
brought her nature to his, and he his nature to hers, and they were to
mingle and become one nature.... Absurdly and inappropriately his mind
picked up and presented to him the grotesque words, "High Jinks and Low
Jinks." A note of laughter was irresistibly tickled out of him.

She said very sleepily, "Mark, are you laughing? What are you laughing
at?"

He patted her shoulder. "Oh, nothing."

One nature?



CHAPTER III


I

One nature? In the fifth year of their married life thoughts of her and
of the poignant and tremendous adventure on which they were embarked
together were no longer possible while she lay in bed beside him. They
had come to occupy separate rooms.

In the fifth year of their married life measles visited Penny Green.
Mabel caught it. Their bedroom was naturally the sick room. Sabre went
to sleep in another room,--and the arrangement prevailed. Nothing was
said between them on the matter, one way or the other. They naturally
occupied different rooms during her illness. She recovered. They
continued to occupy different rooms. It was the most natural business in
the world.

The sole reference to recognition of permanency in this development of
the relations between them was made when Sabre, on the first Saturday
afternoon after Mabel's recovery--he did not go to his office at
Tidborough on Saturdays--carried out his idea, conceived during her
sickness, of making the bedroom into which he had moved serve as his
study also. He had never got rid of his distaste for his "den." He had
never felt quite comfortable there.

At lunch on this Saturday, "I tell you what I'm going to do this
afternoon," he said. "I'm going to move my books up into my room."

He had been a little afraid the den business would be reopened by this
intention, but Mabel's only reply was, "You'd better have the maids help
you."

"Yes, I'll get them."

"No, I'll give the order, if you don't mind."

"Right!"

And in the afternoon the books were moved, the den raped of them, his
bedroom awarded them. High Jinks and Low Jinks rather enjoyed it,
passing up and down the stairs with continuous smirks at this new
manifestation of the master's ways. The bookshelves proved rather a
business. There were four of them, narrow and high. "We'll carry these
longways," Sabre directed, when the first one was tackled. "I'll shove
it over. You two take the top, and I'll carry the foot."

In this order they struggled up the stairs, High Jinks and Low Jinks
backwards, and the smirks enlarged into panting giggles. Halfway up came
a loud crack.

"What the devil's that?" said Sabre, sweating and gasping.

"I think it's the back of my dress, sir," said High Jinks.

"Good lord!" (Convulsive giggles.) "You know, Low, you're practically
sitting on the dashed thing. You've twisted yourself round in some
extraordinary way--"

Agonising giggles.

Mabel appeared in the hail beneath. "Raise it up, Rebecca. Raise it,
Sarah. How can you expect to move, stooping like that?"

They raised it to the level of their waists, and progression became
seemly.

"There you are!" said Sabre.

There was somehow a feeling at both ends of the bookcase of having been
caught.


II

Sabre liked this room. Three latticed windows, in the same wall, looked
on to the garden. In the spaces between them, and in the two spaces
between the end windows and the end walls, he placed his bookshelves, a
set of shelves in each space.

Mabel displayed no interest in the move nor made any reference to it at
teatime. In the evening, hearing her pass the door on her way to dress
for dinner, he called her in.

He was in his shirt sleeves, arranging the books. "There you are! Not
bad?"

She regarded them and the room. "They look all right. All the same, I
must say it seems rather funny using your bedroom for your things when
you've got a room downstairs."

"Oh, well, I never liked that room, you know. I hardly ever go into it."

"I know you don't."

And she went off.


III

But the significance of the removal rested not in the definite
relinquishment of the den, but in her words "using your bedroom": the
definite recognition of separate rooms.

And neither commented upon it.

After all, landmarks, in the course of a journey, are more frequently
observed and noted as landmarks, when looking back along the journey,
than when actually passing them. They belong generically to the past
tense; one rarely says, "This is a landmark"; usually "That was a
landmark."


IV

The bookcases were of Sabre's own design. He was extraordinarily fond of
his books and he had ideas about their arrangement. The lowest shelf was
in each case three feet from the ground; he hated books being "down
where you can't see them." Also the cases were open, without glass
doors; he hated "having to fiddle to get out a book." He liked them to
be just at the right height and straight to his hand. In a way he could
not quite describe (he was a bad talker, framing his ideas with
difficulty) he was attached to his books, not only for what was in them,
but as entities. He had written once in a manuscript book in which he
sometimes wrote things, "I like the feel of them and I know the feel of
them in the same way as one likes and knows the feel of a friend's hand.
And I can look at them and read them without opening them in the same
way as, without his speaking, one looks at and can enjoy the face of a
friend. I feel towards them when I look at them in the shelves,--well,
as if they were feeling towards me just as I am feeling towards them."
And he had added this touch, which is perhaps more illuminating. "The
other day some one had had out one of my books and returned it upside
down. I swear it was as grotesque and painful to me to see it upside
down as if I had come into the room and found my brother standing on his
head against the wall, fastened there. At least I couldn't have sprung
to him to release him quicker than I did to the book to upright it."

The first book he had ever bought "specially"--that is to say not as one
buys a bun but as one buys a dog--was at the age of seventeen when he
had bought a Byron, the Complete Works in a popular edition of very
great bulk and very small print. He bought it partly because of what he
had heard during his last term at school of Don Juan, partly because he
had picked up the idea that it was rather a fine thing to read poetry;
and he kept it and read it in great secrecy because his mother (to whom
he mentioned his intention) told him that Byron ought not to be read and
that her father, in her girlhood, had picked up Byron with the tongs and
burnt him in the garden. This finally determined him to buy Byron.

He began to read it precisely as he was accustomed to read books,--that
is to say at the beginning and thence steadily onwards. "On the Death of
a Young Lady" (Admiral Parker's daughter, explained a footnote); "To
E----"; "To D----" and so on. There were seven hundred and eight pages
of this kind of thing and Don Juan was at the end, in the five hundreds.

When he had laboriously read thirty-six pages he decided that it was not
a fine thing to read poetry, and he moved on to Don Juan, page five
hundred and thirty-three. The rhymes surprised him. He had no idea that
poetry--_poetry_--rhymed "annuities" with "true it is" and "Jew it is."
He turned on and numbered the cantos,--sixteen; and then the number of
verses in each canto and the total,--two thousand one hundred and
eighty.... _Who-o-o!..._ It was as endless as the seven hundred and
eight pages had appeared when he had staggered as far as page
thirty-six. He began to hunt for the particular verses which had caused
Don Juan to be recommended to him and presumably had caused his
grandfather to carry out Byron with the tongs and burn him in the
garden. He could not find them. He chucked the rotten thing.

But as he was putting the rotten thing away, his eye happened upon two
lines that struck into him--it was like a physical blow--the most
extraordinary sensation:

    The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece
    Where burning Sappho loved and sung.

He caught his breath. It was extraordinary. What the dickens was it? A
vision of exquisite and unearthly and brilliantly coloured beauty seemed
to be before his eyes. Islands, all white and green and in a sea of
terrific blue.... And music, the thin note of distant trumpets....
Amazing! He read on. "Where Delos rose and Phoebus sprung! Eternal
Summer gilds them yet." Terrific, but not quite so terrific. And then
again the terrific, the stunning, the heart-clutching thing. On a
different note, with a different picture, coloured in grays.

    The mountains look on Marathon--
    And Marathon looks on the sea.

Music! The trumpets thinned away, exquisitely thin, tiny, gone! And high
above the mountains and far upon the sea an organ shook.

He said, "Well, I'm dashed!" and put the book away.


V

It was years after the Byron episode--after he had come down from
Cambridge, after he had travelled fairly widely, and luckily, as tutor
to a delicate boy, and after he had settled down, from his father's
house at Chovensbury, to learn the Fortune, East and Sabre business that
he began to collect the books which now formed his collection. His
intense fondness for books had come to him late in life, as love of
literature goes. He was reading at twenty-eight and thirty literature
which, when it is read at all, is as a rule read ten years younger
because the taste is there and is voracious for satisfaction,--as a
young and vigorous animal for its meals. But at twenty-eight and thirty,
reading for the first time, he read sometimes with a sense of
revelation, always with an enormous satisfaction. Especially the poets.
And constantly in the poets he was coming across passages the sheer
beauty of which shook him precisely as the Byron lines had first shaken
him.

His books appeared to indicate a fair number and a fair diversity of
interests; but their diversity presented to him a common quality or
group of qualities. Some history, some sociology, some Spencer, some
Huxley, some Haeckel, a small textbook of geology, a considerable
proportion of pure literature, Morley's edition of lives of literary
men, the English essayists in a nice set, Shakespeare in many forms and
so much poetry that at a glance his library was all poetry. All the
books were picked up at second-hand dealers' in Tidborough, none had
cost more than a few shillings. The common quality that bound them was
that they stirred in him imaginative thought: they presented images,
they suggested causes, they revealed processes; the common group of
qualities to which they ministered were beauty and mystery, sensibility
and wonder. They made him think about things, and he liked thinking
about things; the poets filled his mind with beauty, and he was
strangely stirred by beauty.


VI

Here, in the effect upon him of beauty and of ideas communicated to his
mind by his reading--first manifested to him by the Byron
revelation--was the mark and label of his individuality: here was the
linking up of the boy who as Puzzlehead Sabre would wrinkle up his nut
and say, "Well, I can't quite see that, sir," with the man in whom the
same habit persisted; he saw much more clearly and infinitely more
intensely with his mind than with his eye. Beauty of place imagined was
to him infinitely more vivid than beauty seen. And so in all affairs:
it was not what the eye saw or the ear heard that interested him; it was
what his mind saw, questing behind the scene and behind the speech, that
interested him, and often, by the intensity of its perception, shook
him. And precisely as beauty touched in him the most exquisite and
poignant depths, so evil surroundings, evil faces dismayed him to the
point of mysterious fear, almost terror--

On a Sunday of his honeymoon in London he had conceived with Mabel the
idea of a bus ride through the streets,--"anywhere, the first bus that
comes." The first bus that came took them through South London, dodged
between main roads and took them through miles of mean and sordid
dwelling houses. At open windows high up sat solitary women, at others
solitary, shirt-sleeved men; behind closed windows were the faces of
children. All staring,--women and men and children, impassively
prisoned, impassively staring. Each house door presented, one above the
other, five or six iron bell-knobs, some hanging out and downwards, as
if their necks were broken. On the pavements hardly a soul. Just street
upon street of these awful houses with their imprisoned occupants and
the doors with their string of crazy bells.

An appalling and abysmal depression settled upon Sabre. He imagined
himself pulling the dislocated neck of one of those bells and stepping
into what festered behind those sinister doors: the dark and malodorous
stairways, the dark and malodorous rooms, their prisoned occupants
opening their prisons and staring at him,--those women, those men, those
children. He imagined himself in one of those rooms, saw it, felt it,
smelt it. He imagined himself cutting his throat in one of those rooms.

At tea in their hotel on their return Mabel chattered animatedly on all
they had seen. "I'm awfully glad we went. I think it's a very good thing
to know for oneself just how that side of life lives. Those awful people
at the windows!"--and she laughed. He noticed for the first time what a
sudden laugh she had, rather loud.

Sabre agreed. "Yes, I think it's a good thing to have an idea of their
lives. I can't say I'm glad I went, though. You've no idea how awfully
depressed that kind of thing makes me feel."

She laughed again. "Depressed! How ever can it? How funny you must be!"

Then she said, "Yes, I'm glad I've seen for myself. You know, when those
sort of people come into your service--the airs they give themselves and
the way they demand the best of everything--and then when you see the
kind of homes they come from--!"

"Yes, it makes you think, doesn't it?"

"It _does_!"

But what it made Sabre think was entirely different from what it made
Mabel think.


VII

"Puzzlehead" they had called him at his preparatory school,--Old
Puzzlehead Sabre, the chap who always wrinkled up his nut over things
and came out with the most extraordinary ideas. He had remained, and
increasingly become, the puzzler. And precisely as he ceased to share a
room with Mabel and carried himself with satisfaction to his own
apartment, so, by this fifth year of his married life, he had come to
know well that he shared no thoughts with her: he carried them, with
increasing absorption in their interest, to the processes of his own
mind.

An incident of those early school days had always remained with him, in
its exact words. The exact words of a selectly famous professor of
philosophy who, living the few years of his retirement in the
neighbourhood of the preparatory school, had given--for pure love of
seeing young things and feeling the freshness of young minds--a weekly
"talk on things" to the small schoolboys. And whatever the subject of
his talk, he almost invariably would work off his familiar counsel:

"And a very good thing (he used to say), an excellent thing, the very
best of practices, is to write a little every day. Just a little scrap,
but cultivate the habit of doing it every day. I don't mean what is
called keeping a diary, you know. Don't write what you do. There's no
benefit in that. We do things for all kinds of reasons and it's the
reasons, not the things, that matter. Let your little daily scrap be
something you've thought. What you've done belongs partly to some one
else; often you're made to do it. But what you think is you yourself:
you write it down and there it is, a tiny little bit of you that you can
look at and say, 'Well, really!' You see, a little bit like that,
written every day, is a mirror in which you can see your real self and
correct your real self. A looking-glass shows you your face is dirty or
your hair rumpled, and you go and polish up. But it's ever so much more
important to have a mirror that shows you how your real self, your mind,
your spirit, is looking. Just see if you can't do it. A little scrap.
It's very steadying; very steadying...."

And his small hearers, desiring, like young colts in a field, nothing so
little as anything steadying, paid as much attention to this "jaw" as to
any precept not supported by cane or imposition. They made of it,
indeed, a popular school joke, "Oh, go and write a little every day and
boil yourself, you ass!" But it appealed, dimly, to the reflective
quality in the child Sabre's mind. He contracted the habit of writing,
in a "bagged" exercise book, sentences beginning laboriously with "I
thought to-day--." It remained with him, as he grew up, in the practice
of writing sometimes ideas that occurred to him, as in the case of his
feelings about his books and--much more strongly--in deliberately
thinking out ideas.

"You yourself. The real you."

In the increasing solitariness of his married life, it came to be
something into which he could retire, as into a private chamber; which
he could put on, as a garment: and in the privacy of the chamber, or
within the sleeves of the garment, he received a sense of detachment
from normal life in which, vaguely, he pondered things.


VIII

Vaguely,--without solution of most of the problems that puzzled him, and
without even definite knowledge of the line along which solution might
lie. Here, in these cloisters of another world--his own world--he paced
among his ideas as a man might pace around the dismantled and scattered
intricacies of an intricate machine, knowing the parts could be put
together and the thing worked usefully, not knowing how on earth it
could be done.... "This goes in there, and that goes in there, but how
on earth--?" Here, into these cloisters, he dragged the parts of all the
puzzles that perplexed him; his relations with Mabel; his sense, in a
hundred ways as they came up, of the odd business that life was; his
strong interest in the social and industrial problems, and in the
political questions from time to time before the public attention.

He could be imagined assembling the parts, dragging them in, checking
them over, slamming the door, and--"How on earth? What on earth?" There
was a key to all these problems. There was a definite way of
coördinating the parts of each. But what?

He began to have the feeling that in all the puzzles, not only, though
particularly, of his own life as he had come to live it, but of life in
general as it is lived, some mysterious part was missing.

That was as far as he could get. He was like a man groping with his hand
through a hole in a great door for a key lying on the other side.
Nothing was to be seen through the hole, and only the arm to the elbow
could get through it. Not the shape of the key nor its position was
known.

But he was absolutely certain it was there.

One day he might put his hand on it.



CHAPTER IV


I

Mabel was two years younger than Sabre, twenty-five at the time of her
marriage and just past her thirtieth birthday when the separate rooms
were first occupied. Her habit of sudden laughter, rather loud, which
Sabre first noticed in connection with their differing views on the mean
streets visit, was rather characteristic of her. Her laugh came
suddenly, and very heartily, at anything that amused her and without her
first smiling or suggesting by any other sign that she was amused. And
it came thus abruptly out of a face whose expression was normally rather
severe. Probably of the same mentality was her habit of what Sabre
called "flying up." She "flew up" without her speech first warming up;
but of her flying up, unlike her sudden burst of laughter, Sabre came to
know certain premonitory symptoms in her face. Her face what he called
"tightened." In particular he used to notice a curious little
constriction of the sides of her nose, rather as though invisible
tweezers were pressing it.

She had rather a long nose and this pleased her, for she once read
somewhere that long noses were aristocratic. She stroked her nose as she
read.

Her complexion was pale, though this was perhaps exaggerated by her
colouring, which was dark. Her features were noticeably regular and
noticeably refined, though her eyes were the least little bit inclined
to be prominent: when Sabre married the Dean of Tidborough's only
daughter, it was said that he had married "a good-looking girl"; also
that he had married "a very nice girl"; those were the expressions used.
She liked the company of men and she was much liked by men (the opinion
of the garrulous Hapgood may be recalled in this connection). She very
much liked the society of women of her own age or older than herself,
and she was very popular with such. She did not like girls, married or
unmarried.


II

Mabel belonged to that considerable class of persons who, in
conversation, begin half their sentences with "And just imagine--"; or
"And only fancy--"; or "And do you know--." These exclamations,
delivered with much excitement, are introductory to matters considered
extraordinary. Their users might therefore be imagined somewhat easily
astonished. But they have a compensatory steadiness of mind in regard to
much that mystifies other people. To Mabel there was nothing mysterious
in birth, or in living, or in death. She simply would not have
understood had she been told there was any mystery in these things. One
was born, one lived, one died. What was there odd about it? Nor did she
see anything mysterious in the intense preoccupation of an insect, or
the astounding placidity of a primrose growing at the foot of a tree. An
insect--you killed it. A flower--you plucked it. What's the mystery?

Her life was living among people of her own class. Her measure of a man
or of a woman was, Were they of her class? If they were, she gladly
accepted them and appeared to find considerable pleasure in their
society. Whether they had attractive qualities or unattractive qualities
or no qualities at all did not affect her. The only quality that
mattered was the quality of being well-bred. She called the classes
beneath her own standard of breeding "the lower classes", and so long as
they left her alone she was perfectly content to leave them alone. In
certain aspects the liked them. She liked "a civil tradesman" immensely;
she liked a civil charwoman immensely; and she liked a civil workman
immensely. It gave her as much pleasure, real pleasure that she felt in
all her emotions, to receive civility from the classes that ministered
to her class--servants, tradespeople, gardeners, carpenters, plumbers,
postmen, policemen--as to meet any one in her own class. It never
occurred to her to reckon up how enormously varied was the class whose
happy fortune it was to minister to her class and she would not have
been in the remotest degree interested if any one had told her how
numerous the class was. It never occurred to her that any of these
people had homes and it never occurred to her that the whole of the
lower classes lived without any margin at all beyond keeping their homes
together, or that if they stopped working they lost their homes, or that
they looked forward to nothing beyond their working years because there
was nothing beyond their working years for them to look forward to. Nor
would it have interested her in the remotest degree to hear this. The
only fact she knew about the lower classes was that they were
disgustingly extravagant and spent every penny they earned. The woman
across the Green who did her washing had six children and a husband who
was an agricultural labourer and earned eighteen and sixpence a week.
These eight lived in three rooms and "if you please" they actually
bought a gramophone! Mabel instanced it for years after she first heard
it. The idea of that class of person spending money on anything to make
their three rooms lively of an evening was scandalous to Mabel. She
heard of the gramophone outrage in 1908 and she was still instancing it
in 1912. "And those are the people, mind you," she said in 1912, "that
we have to buy these National Insurance stamps for!"


III

Mabel was not demonstrative. She had no enthusiasms and no sympathies.
Enthusiasms and sympathies in other people made her laugh with her
characteristic burst of sudden laughter. It was not, as with some
persons, that matters calling for sympathy made her impatient,--as very
robust people are often intensely impatient with sickness and infirmity.
She never would say, "I have no patience with such and such or so and
so." She had plenty of patience. It was simply that she had no
imagination whatsoever. Whatever she saw or heard or read, she saw or
heard or read exactly as the thing presented itself. If she saw a door
she saw merely a piece of wood with a handle and a keyhole. It may be
argued that a door is merely a piece of wood with a handle and a
keyhole, and that is what Mabel would have argued. But a door is in fact
the most intriguing mystery in the world because of what may be the
other side of it and of what goes on behind it. To Mabel nothing was on
the other side of anything she saw and nothing went on behind it.

A person or a creature in pain was to Mabel a person or a creature "laid
up." Laid up--out of action--not working properly: like a pencil without
a point. A picture was a decoration in paint and was either a pretty
decoration in paint or a not pretty decoration in paint. Music was a
tune, and was either a tune or merely music. A book was a story, and if
it was not a story it was simply a book. A flower was a decoration.
Poetry, such as

    "While the still morn went out with sandals grey,"

was simply writing which, obviously, had no real meaning whatsoever, and
obviously--well, read the thing--was not intended to have any meaning. A
fine deed was fine precisely in proportion to the social position of the
person who performed it. Scott's death at the South Pole, when that was
announced in 1913, was fine because he was a gentleman. The disaster of
the colliers entombed in the Welsh Senghenydd mine which happened in the
same year was sad. "How sad!" She read the account, on the first day,
with the paper held up wide open and said "How sad!" and turned on to
something for which the paper might be folded back at the place and read
comfortably. Scott's death she read with the paper folded back at the
account. She liked seeing the pictures of Lady Scott and of Scott's
little boy. She read the caption under one of the pictures of the wives
and families of the four hundred and twenty-nine colliers killed in the
Senghenydd mine, but not under any of the others. The point she noted
was that all the women "of that class" wore "those awful cloth
caps",--the colliers' women just the same as the women in the mean
streets of Tidborough Old Town.

She was never particularly grateful for anything given to her or done
for her; not because she was not pleased and glad but because she could
invest a gift with no imagination of the feelings of the giver. The
thing was a present just as a pound of bacon was a pound of bacon. You
said thank you for the present just as you ate the bacon. What more was
to be said?

She revelled in gossip, that is to say in discussion with her own class
of the manners and doings of other people. She thought charity meant
giving jelly and red flannel to the poor; she thought generosity meant
giving money to some one; she thought selfishness meant not giving money
to some one. She had no idea that the only real charity is charity of
mind, and the only real generosity generosity of mind, and the only real
selfishness selfishness of mind. And she simply would not have
understood it if it had been explained to her. As people are judged, she
was entirely nice, entirely worthy, entirely estimable. And with that,
for it does not enter into such estimates, she had neither feelings of
the mind nor of the heart but only of the senses. All that her senses
set before her she either overvalued or undervalued: she was the
complete and perfect snob in the most refined and purest meaning of the
word.

She was much liked, and she liked many.



CHAPTER V


I

The Penny Green Garden House Development Scheme was begun in 1910. In
1908, the year of the measles and the separated bedrooms, no shadow of
it had yet been thrown. It never occurred to any one that a railway
would one day link Penny Green with Tidborough and all the rest of the
surrounding world, or that a railway to Tidborough was desirable. Sabre
bicycled in daily to Fortune, East and Sabre's, and the daily ride to
and fro had become a curious pleasure to him.

There had once occurred to him as he rode, and thereafter had persisted
and accumulated, the feeling that, on the daily, solitary passage
between Tidborough and Penny Green, he was mysteriously detached from,
mysteriously suspended between, the two centres that were his two
worlds,--his business world and his home world.

With its daily recurrence the thought developed: it enlarged to the
whimsical notion that here, on his bicycle on the road, he was magically
escaped out of his two worlds, not belonging to or responsible to either
of his two worlds, which amounted to delicious detachment from all the
universe. A mysteriously aloof, free, irresponsible attitude of mind was
thus obtained: it was a condition in which--as one looking down from a
high tower on scurrying, antlike human beings--their oddness, their
futility, the apparent aimlessness of their excited scurrying became
apparent; hence frequent thought, on these rides, on the rather odd
thing that life was.

He was not in the least aware that so simple, so practical and so
obviously essential a thing as his daily ride--as simple, practical and
obviously essential as getting out of bed in the morning and returning
to bed at night--was moulding a mind always prone to develop meditative
grooves. But it did develop his mind in the extraordinary way in which
minds are moulded by the most simple habits. In this mere matter of
conveyance a philosopher might trace back a singularly brutal and
callous murder to the moulding into callous and brutal regard of other
people's sufferings rendered into a perfectly gentle mind by the habit
of daily travelling to business in London on the top of a motor omnibus.
It would only need to be shown that the gentle mind secured his seat
with dignity and comfort at the bus's starting point and daily for years
watched with amusement, and then with callousness and so with brutality
the struggles of the unhappy fellow creatures who fought to assail it at
its stopping places on the way to the City.

Mark Sabre was not in the least aware of any steadily permeating
influence from his sense of detachment on this daily habit of years. But
he was influenced. On entering his Penny Green world on the return home,
or on entering his Tidborough office world, on the way out, he had
sometimes a curious feeling of descending into this odd affair of life
to which he did not really belong. And for the few moments while the
feeling persisted he sometimes, more or less unconsciously, took towards
affairs a rather whimsical attitude, as though they did not really
matter: an irritating attitude, unpractical, it was sometimes hinted by
his partners; an irritating attitude--"You really are very difficult to
understand sometimes"--it was often told him by Mabel.


II

This very matter of the bicycle ride, indeed, apart altogether from its
effect upon his mood, supplied an instance of the kind of thing Mabel
found it so difficult to understand in her husband.

He made what she called a childish game of it. Every day on the ride
home, Sabre ceased pedalling at precisely the same point on the slope
down into Penny Green and coasted until the machine came to a standstill
within a few yards of his own gate. This point of cessation was never
twice in a week at the same spot; and Sabre found great interest in
seeing every day exactly where it would be, and by intense wriggling of
his front wheel and prodigious feats of balancing, squeezing out of the
machine's momentum the last possible fraction of an inch. There was a
magnificent distance record when, on one single occasion only, he had
been deposited plumb in line with his own gate; and there was a
divertingly lamentable shortage record, touched on more than one
occasion, when he had come to ground plumb in line with the gate of Mr.
Fargus, his neighbour on that side.

Each of these records, though marked by the gates, was also and more
exactly marked by a peg hammered into the edge of the Green.

This was childish; and Mabel said it was childish when her attention was
drawn to the diversion. On the day the great distance record was created
he came rather animatedly into the kitchen where she happened to be. "I
say, what's happened to that small wood axe? Is it in here?"

Mabel followed the direction of the convulsive start made by Low Jinks
and produced the small wood axe from under the dresser, also directing
at Low Jinks a glance which told Low Jinks what she perfectly well
knew: namely that under the dresser was not the place for the small
wood axe. "Whatever do you want it for all of a sudden?" Mabel asked.

He felt the edge with his thumb. "Low"--Mabel's face twitched. He had
persisted in the idiotic and indecorous names, and her face always
twitched when he used them--"Low, do you keep my axe for chopping coal
or what?" And he addressed Mabel. "I'm getting fat, I think. I don't
want the axe to cut lumps off myself, though. I'm going to chop a
marking peg. I've done a heavyweight world's record on that run in on my
bike--"

"Oh, _that_!" said Mabel.

And when he had gone out into the wood yard, Low Jinks staring after him
with the uplifted eyebrows with which both sisters, the glum and the
grim, commonly received the master's "ways", Mabel said in the gently
pained way which was her admirable method of administering rebukes in
the kitchen: "The woodshed is the place for the small wood axe,
Rebecca."

Rebecca promptly unsmirked her smirk. "Yes, m'm."

A little later the sound of loud hammering took Mabel to the gate.
Across the road, at the edge of the Green, Sabre was energetically
driving in the peg with the back of the axe. He was squatting and he
looked up highly pleased with himself and, his words implied, with her.
"Come to see it? Good! How's that for an effort, eh? Look here now.
Yesterday I only got as far as here," and he walked some paces towards
Mr. Fargus's gate and struck his heel in the ground and looked at her,
smiling. "Absolutely the same conditions, mind you. No wind. And I
always start from the top practically at rest; and yet always finish up
different. Jolly funny, eh?"

She opened the gate for him. "What you can see in it!" she murmured.

He said, "Oh, well!"


III

But on the following day he was surprised and intensely pleased to see
his champion peg gleaming white in the sunshine. Mabel was in the
morning room, sewing.

"Hullo, sewing? I say, did you paint my peg? How jolly nice of you!"

She looked up. "Your peg? Whatever do you mean?"

"That record distance peg of mine. Painted it white, haven't you?"

"No, I didn't paint it!"

"Who the dickens--? Well, I'll just wash my hands. Not had tea, have
you? Good."

When Low Jinks came to his room with hot water--a detail of the perfect
appointment of the house under Mabel's management was her rule that
Rebecca always came to the door for the master's bicycle, handed him the
brush for his shoes and trousers, and then took hot water to his
room--he asked her, "I say, Low Jinks, did you paint that peg of mine?"

Low Jinks coloured and spoke apologetically: "Well, I thought it would
show up better, sir. There was a drop of whitewash in--"

"By Jove, it does. It looks like a regular winning-post. Jolly nice of
you, Low."

Two months afterwards the bicycle did the worst on record. This was a
surprising affair; the runs had recently been excitingly good; and when
Low Jinks came out to take the bicycle he greeted her: "I say, Low
Jinks, I only got just up to Mr. Fargus's gate just now. Worst I've
ever done."

Low Jinks was enormously concerned. "Well! I never did!" exclaimed Low
Jinks. "If those bicycles aren't just things! You'll want a peg for
that, sir. Like you had one for the best."

"That's an idea, Low. What about painting it?"

"Oh, I _will_, sir!"

But he did not mention the new record to Mabel.



CHAPTER VI


I

The other end of the daily bicycle ride, the Tidborough end, provided no
feats of cycling interest. The extremely narrow, cobbled thoroughfare in
which the offices of Fortune, East and Sabre were situated usually
caused Sabre's approach to them to be made on foot, wheeling his
machine.

Fortune, East and Sabre, Ecclesiastical and Scholastic Furnishers and
Designers, had in Tidborough what is called, in business and
professional circles, a good address. A good address for a metropolitan
money lender is the West End in the neighbourhood of Bond Street; a good
address for a solicitor is Bloomsbury in the neighbourhood of Bedford
Square: for an architect Westminster in the neighbourhood of Victoria
Street, for commerce the City in the neighbourhood of the Bank. The idea
is that, though clothes do not make the man, a good address makes, or
rather bestows the reputation, and conveys the impression that the owner
of the good address, being in that neighbourhood, is not within many
thousands of miles (or pounds) of the neighbourhood of Bankruptcy.

The address of Fortune, East and Sabre was emphatically a good address
because its business was with the Church and for the Church; with
colleges, universities and schools and for colleges, universities and
schools; with bishops, priests and clergy, churchwardens, headmasters,
headmistresses, governors and bursars, and for bishops, priests and
clergy, churchwardens, headmasters, headmistresses, governors and
bursars.

Its address was The Precincts,--Fortune, East and Sabre, The Precincts,
Tidborough.

The Precincts has a discreet and beautiful sound, a discreet and
beautiful suggestiveness. High Street, Tidborough, or Cheapside,
Tidborough, or Commercial Street, Tidborough, have only to be compared
with The Precincts, Tidborough, to establish the discretion and beauty
of the situation of the firm. And the names of the firm were equally
euphonious and equally suggestive of high decorum and cultured
efficiency. Fortune, East and Sabre had a discreet and beautiful sound.
Finally Tidborough, the last line of the poem, though not in itself
either discreet or beautiful, being intensely busy, suggested to all the
cultured persons from bishops to bursars, with whom business was done,
the discreet and beautiful lines of Tidborough Cathedral and of
Tidborough School, together with all that these venerable and famous
institutions connoted. Not Winchester itself conveys to the cultured
mind thoughts more discreet and beautiful than are conveyed by
Tidborough. The care of the cathedral, for many years in a highly
delicate state of health, and the care of the school, yearly ravaged by
successive generations of the sons of those who could afford to educate
their sons there were, it may be mentioned, established sources of
income to the firm.

Thus the whole style and title of the firm had a discreet and beautiful
sound, in admirable keeping with its business. Fortune, East and Sabre,
The Precincts, Tidborough. Was any one so utterly removed from affairs
as not to know them as ecclesiastical furnishers? "They're at
Tidborough. They _do_ Tidborough" (meaning the world-famous cathedral).
Or as scholastic providers? "They're at Tidborough. They _do_
Tidborough" (meaning the empire-famous school).

The frontage of Fortune, East and Sabre on The Precincts consisted of a
range of three double-fronted shops. The central shop gave one window to
a superb lectern in the style of a brass eagle whose outstretched wings
supported a magnificent Bible; to a richly embroidered altar cloth on
which stood a strikingly handsome set of communion plate; to a font
chastely carried out in marble; to an altar chair in oak and velvet that
few less than a suffragan bishop would have dared take seat in; and to
an example or two of highest art in needlework and embroidery in the
form of offertory bags and testament markers. The other window of the
central shop was a lesson to the profane in the beauty, the dignity and
the variety of vestments. It also informed rural choirboys, haply in
Tidborough on a treat, what surplices can be like if the funds and the
faith are sufficiently high to support them.

The windows of the shop to the left (as you faced the lectern and the
vestments) displayed school furniture and school fittings bearing the
characteristic "F.E. & S." stamp. Here were adjustable desks for boys at
which no boy could possibly sit round-shouldered, which could be
adjusted upwards for tall boys and downwards for short boys, and the
seats of which could be advanced for boys afflicted with short legs and
retired for boys in the possession of long legs. It was believed by
those who had seen the full range of "F.E. & S." desk models that, if a
headmaster or bursar had telegraphed to Fortune, East and Sabre the
arrival of a Siamese twin boy at his school, a desk specially contrived
for the nice accommodation of a Siamese twin boy would have been put on
the railway before the telegraph messenger had loitered his way out of
the shadow of The Precincts.

By an ingenious contrivance ink could not be spilt from the inkwells of
the "F.E. & S." models; rubber beading most properly nullified the
boyish idea that desk lids were made for the purpose of slamming to
blazes the nerves of masters and the calm in which alone high education
can be served.

Equal skill, science, art, and the experience of generations had
produced the model of a master's desk which partnered the desks of the
pupil. Maps of as many countries as might be desired showed in frames up
and down which they followed one another by the silent turning of a
handle. A blackboard on an easel looked across the desks at a wall into
which was let a solid slab of blackboard. The window adjoining this
display exhibited a miniature classroom in which the "F.E. & S." system
of classroom ventilation maintained air so pure and fresh that the most
comatose pupil could not but keep alert and receptive in it.

The shop front to the right paid testimony to the standing of Fortune,
East and Sabre in their capacity as educational and ecclesiastical book
publishers and binders. One window gave chastely, on purple velvet, not
more than two or at most three exquisitely wrought Bibles and prayer
books for lectern and altar; the other showed severely, on green baize,
school textbooks of every subject and degree grouped about superbly
handsome prize volumes in blue calf displaying the classic arms of
Tidborough School.

Public entrance to these premises was gained by doors of the central
shop only. It was considered proper and in keeping with the times to
have window displays, but it was considered improper and out of keeping
with the traditions of Fortune, East and Sabre to present more than the
extreme minimum of shoppish appearance. You entered therefore by but one
door, which was, moreover, not a shop door but a church door and one of
the several models which Fortune, East and Sabre had designed and
executed; you entered, between the vestments and the lecterns, not a
shop but a vestry; and you passed, on the left, not into a shop but into
a classroom, and on the right not into a shop but into a book-lined
study.

It is said that if you loitered long enough in Fortune, East and Sabre's
you would meet every dignitary of the Church and of education in the
United Kingdom; and it was added that you would not have to wait long.

Fortune, East and Sabre, The Precincts, Tidborough.


II

Maintaining the unshoplike character of the ground-floor rooms upon
which the plate-glass windows looked, virtually no business, in the
vulgar form of buying and selling, was carried on in the vestry, in the
classroom or in the book-lined study. Many modern and entirely worthy
businesses are conducted under the strident banner of "Cash Only."
Fortune, East and Sabre's did not know the word cash. One would as soon
look for or expect a till, to say nothing of one of those terrific
machines known as cash registers, in the vestry, the classroom or the
study as one would look for a lectern or an adjustable school desk in a
beer-house. "Credit only" was here the principle, and accounts were
rendered, never on delivery, but quarterly. One does not, after all, pay
for a font out of one's trouser pocket and carry it off under one's arm;
nor for a school desk out of a purse and bear it away on one's head.
Only in the book-lined study were trifling transactions occasionally
carried out and these very rarely, constituting something of an event
(and an event greatly deprecated by the Reverend Sebastian Fortune), the
tactless misadventure of some pedagogue or student on excursion to the
sights of Tidborough.

No one, in any case, committed twice the indiscretion of purchasing a
single volume for cash. The book-lined study was in the care of a Mr.
Tombs, a gentleman who combined the appearance of a mute at a funeral
with the aloof and mysterious manner of a man waiting for his wife in a
ladies' underwear department, and the peculiar faculty of making the
haphazard visitor feel that he had strayed into a ladies' underwear shop
also. "Have you an account with us, sir?" Mr. Tombs would inquire; and
on being told "No" would look guiltily all around (as it were at
partially undressed ladies) and whisper, "Except to the masters at the
School, sir, who all have accounts, we are not supposed to sell single
volumes. It is against our rule, sir."

And no one, once escaped, made Mr. Tombs break the rule on a second
occasion.


III

Business--on credit only--was conducted on the first floor whereon were
apartmented the three principals--the Reverend Sebastian Fortune, Mr.
Twyning and Sabre. There was no longer an East in the firm. From the
central, vestry-like showroom a broad and shallow stairway led to a
half-landing, containing the clerks' office, and thence to the spacious
apartment of Mr. Fortune with which, by doors at either end,
communicated the offices of Sabre and of Mr. Twyning. Many stately and
eminent persons--and no ill-to-do or doubtful persons--passed up and
down this stairway on visits to the principals. It was not used by the
clerks, the half-landing communicating with the outer world by the
clerks' stairs leading to the clerks' entrance at the back of the
building, and with the showrooms by the clerks' stairs leading at one
end to the book-lined study and at the other to the model classroom. The
clerks' office, by the taking down of original walls, ran the whole
length of the building, and accommodated not only the clerks, but the
designing room, the checking room and the dispatch room. This
arrangement was highly inconvenient to the performers of the various
duties thus carried on, but was essential to the more rapid execution of
Mr. Fortune's habit of "keeping an eye" on everything. This habit of the
Reverend Sebastian Fortune was roundly detested by all on whom his eye
fell. He was called Jonah by his employees; and he was called Jonah
partly because his visits to the places of their industry invariably
presaged disaster, but principally for the gross-minded and
wrongly-adduced reason that he had (in their opinion) a whale's belly.


IV

He bore a certain resemblance to a stunted whale. He was chiefly
abdominal. His legs appeared to begin, without thighs, at his knees, and
his face, without neck, at his chest. His face was large, both wide and
long, and covered as to its lower part with a tough scrub of grey beard.
The line of his mouth showed through the scrub and turned extravagantly
downwards at the corners. He had a commanding, heavily knobbed brow, and
small grey eyes of intense severity. His voice was cold, and his manner,
though intensely polished and suave, singularly stern and decisive. He
had an expression of "I have decided" and Sabre said that he kept this
expression on ice. It had an icy sound and it certainly had the rigidity
and imperviousness of an iceberg. Hearing it, one might believe that it
could have a cruel sound.

The Reverend Sebastian Fortune had come into the business at the age of
twenty-eight. He was now sixty-two. He had come in to find the
controlling interest almost entirely in the hands of the Fortune branch
of the firm, and in his thirty-four years of association, indeed in the
first twenty, he had, by fortuitous circumstances, and by force of his
decisive personality, achieved what amounted to sole and single control.
Coming in as a young man of force and character, he had added to these
qualities, by marriage, a useful sum of money (to which was attached a
widow) and proceeded to deal decisively with the East and the Sabre
(Mark Sabre's grandfather) of that day. Both were old men. The East,
young Mr. Fortune bought out neck and crop. The Sabre, who owned then a
fifth instead of a third interest in the business, and had developed, as
an obsession, an unreasonable fear of bankruptcy, he relieved of all
liability for the firm at the negligible cost of giving himself a free
hand in the conduct of the business. The deed of partnership was altered
accordingly. It was to this fifth share, without control, that Sabre's
father and, in his turn, Sabre succeeded.


V

Sabre had been promised full partnership by Mr. Fortune. He desired it
very greatly. The apportionment of duties in the establishment was that
Sabre managed the publishing department. Twyning supervised the factory
and workshops wherein the ecclesiastical and scholastic furniture was
produced, and Fortune supervised his two principals and every least
employee and smallest detail of all the business. Particularly orders.
He very strongly objected to clients dealing directly with either Sabre
or Twyning. His view was that it was the business of Sabre and of
Twyning to produce the firm's commodities. It was his place to sell
them. It was his place, to deal with clients who came to buy them, and
it was his place to sign all letters that went out concerning them.

Sabre, in so far as his publications were concerned, resented this.

"If I bring out a new textbook," he had said on the occasion of a formal
protest, "it stands to reason that I am the person to interest clients
in it; to discuss it with them if they call and to correspond with those
who take up our notices of it."

Mr. Fortune wheeled about his revolving chair by a familiar trick of his
right leg against his desk. It presented his whale-like front to
impressive advantage. "You do correspond with them."

"But you sign the letters. You frequently make alterations."

"That is what I am here for. They are my letters. It will be time to
bring up this matter again when you are admitted to partnership."

Sabre gave the short laugh of one who has heard a good thing before.
"When will that be?"

"Not to-day."

"Well, all I can say is--"

Mr. Fortune raised a whale-like but elegantly white fin. "Enough, I have
decided."

With the same clever motion of his feet he spun his chair and his
whale-like front to the table. A worn patch on the carpet and an
abraised patch on the side of the desk marked the frequent daily use of
these thrusting points.

Sabre kicked out of the room, using a foot to open the door, which stood
ajar, and hooking back a foot to shut it, because he knew that this
slovenly method of dealing with a door much annoyed Mr. Fortune.

He was not in the least in awe of Mr. Fortune, though Mr. Fortune had
power to sever him from the firm. Mr. Fortune was aware that he struck
no awe into Sabre, and this caused him on the one hand to dislike Sabre,
and on the other (subconsciously, for he would emphatically have denied
it) to respect him.

Twyning, Sabre's fellow sub-principal, did stand in awe of Mr. Fortune
and did not resent having his letters signed for him and his callers
interviewed for him. Indeed he frequently took opportunity to thank Mr.
Fortune for alterations made in his letters and for dealings carried out
with his clients, also for direct interference in his workshops. Mr.
Fortune liked Twyning, but he did not respect Twyning, consciously or
subconsciously.


VI

Sabre greatly desired the promised admission to partnership. He desired
it largely for what he knew he would make it bring in the form of
greater freedom from Mr. Fortune's surveillance, but much more for the
solid personal satisfaction its winning would give him. It would be a
tribute to his work, of all the greater value because he knew it would
be bestowed grudgingly and unwillingly, and he was keenly interested in
and proud of his work. The publishing of educational textbooks "for the
use of schools" had been no part of the firm's business until he came
into it. The idea had been his own, and Mr. Fortune, because the idea
was not _his_ own, had very half-heartedly assented to it and very
disencouragingly looked upon it in the fiddlingly small way in which he
permitted it to be begun.

From the outset it had been a very considerable success. Sabre was
interested in books and interested in education. He had many friends
among the large staff of Tidborough School masters and had developed
many acquaintances among the large body of members of the teaching
profession with whom the firm was in touch. He was fond of discussing
methods and difficulties of encouraging stubborn youth in the arid paths
of assimilating knowledge, and he had a peculiarly fresh and sympathetic
recollection of his own boyish flounderings in those paths. To these
tastes and qualities, and perhaps because of them, he found he was able
to bring what was incontestably a flair for discovering the sort of book
that needed to be compiled and, what was equally important, the sort of
man to compile it. Also, in his capacity of general editor of the
volumes, to give much stimulating suggestion and advice to the authors.

He had never been so pleased as on the day when the _Spectator_, in an
extended notice of four new textbooks, had written, "It is always a
pleasure to open one of the school textbooks bearing the imprint of
Fortune, East and Sabre and issued in the pleasing format which this
firm have made their own. Their publications give the impression of a
directing mind inspired with the happy thought of presenting textbooks,
not for the master, but for the pupil, and of carrying out this design
with singular freshness and originality."

On the day when that notice appeared, Mr. Fortune, who considered that
his mind was--or would be supposed to be--the directing mind referred
to, had repeated his promise of partnership, first made when the
enterprise began to show unexpected signs of responding to Sabre's
enthusiasm. "Very good, Sabre, very good indeed. I am bound to say
capital. I may tell you, as your father probably told you, that it was
always understood between him and me that you should be taken into
partnership if you showed signs of promise. Unquestionably you do. When
you have brought the publishing into line with our established
departments we will go into the matter and--" he made one of his nearest
approaches to pleasantry--"take steps to restore the house of Sabre in
some part to its ancient glories in the firm--in some part."

And when Sabre expressed his gratification, "Enough, I have decided."

In 1912 Sabre felt that he had now brought the publishing into line with
the established departments. He had emphasized the firm's reputation in
this activity by the considerable success that attended two textbooks
bearing (one in collaboration) his own name. "Sabre and Owen's
Elementary Mathematics" had been notably taken up by the schools.
"Sabre's Modern History", shunned by the public schools in accordance
with their principle of ignoring all history mellowed by fewer than
three thousand years, had been received enthusiastically by the lesser
schools wherein was then dawning the daring idea of presenting to the
rising generation some glimmering conception of the constitutional and
sociological facts into which it was arising.

The tributes with which this slim primer of one hundred and fifty pages
for eighteen pence had been greeted inspired Sabre towards a much bolder
work, on which the early summer of 1912 saw him beginning and into which
he found himself able to pour in surprising volume thoughts and feelings
which he had scarcely known to be his until the pen and the paper began
to attract them. The title he had conceived alone stirred them in his
mind and drew them from it as a magnet stirs and draws iron filings.
"England." Just "England." He could see it printed and published and
renowned as "Sabre's England." Kings were to enter this history but
incidentally, as kings have in fact ever been but incidental to
England's history. It was to be just "England"; the England of the
English people and how and why. And the first sentence said so.

"This England" (it said) "is _yours_. It belongs to _you_. Many enemies
have desired to take it because it is the most glorious and splendid
country in the world. But they have never taken it, because it is
_yours_ and has been kept for you. This book is to tell you how it has
come to be yours and how it has been kept for you,--not by kings or by
statesmen, or by great men alone, but by the English people. Down the
long years they have handed it on to you, as a torch is sent from hand
to hand, and you in your turn will hand it on down the long years before
you. They made the flame of England bright and ever brighter for you;
and you, stepping into all that they have made for you, will make it
bright and brighter yet. They passed and are gone; and you will pass and
go. But England will continue. Your England. _Yours._"



CHAPTER VII


I

Mabel called Sabre's school textbooks "those lesson books." After she
had thus referred to them two or three times he gave up trying to
interest her in them. The expression hurt him, but when he thought upon
it he reasoned with himself that he had no cause to be hurt. He thought,
"Dash it, that's what they are, lesson books. What on earth have I got
to grouse about?" But they meant to him a good deal more than what was
implied in the tone and the expression "those lesson books."

However, "England" was going to be something very different. No one
would call "England" a lesson book. Even Mabel would see that; and in
his enthusiasm he spoke of it to her a good deal, until the day when it
came up--of all unlikely connections in the world--in a discussion with
her on the National Insurance Act, then first outraging the country.

One day when English society was first shaken to its depths by the
disgusting indignity of what Mabel, in common with all nice people,
called "licking stamps for that Lloyd George", she mentioned to Sabre
that, "Well, thank goodness some of us know better than to steal the
money out of the poor creatures' wages."

She knew that this would please her husband because he was always doing
what she called "sticking up for the servants and all that class."

That it did not please him was precisely an example of his "absolutely
un-understandable" ways of looking at things that so desperately annoyed
her.

Sabre asked, "How do you mean--knowing better than to steal the money
out of their wages?"

"Why, making them pay their thruppence for those wretched stamps. I
believe Mrs. Castor does. How she's got the face to I can't imagine."

"Why, aren't you going to make them pay, Mabel?"

Mabel was quite indignant. "Is it likely? I should hope not!"

"Really? Haven't you been making High and Low pay their share of the
stamps all this time?"

"Of course I've not."

"You've been paying their contribution?"

"Of course I have."

"Well, but Mabel, that's wrong, awfully wrong."

She simply stared at him. "You really are beyond me, Mark. What do you
mean 'wrong'?"

"Well, it's not fair--not fair on the girls--"

"Not fair to pay them more than their wages!"

"No, of course it's not. Don't you see half the idea of the Act is to
help these people to learn thrift and forethought--to learn the wisdom
of putting by for a rainy day. And to encourage their independence. When
you go and pay what they ought to pay, you're simply taking away their
independence."

She gave her sudden burst of laughter. "You're the first person I've
ever heard say that the lower classes want their independence
encouraged. It's just what's wrong with them--independence."

He began to talk with animation. This was one of the things that much
interested him. He seemed to have quite forgotten the origin of the
conversation. "No, it isn't, Mabel--it isn't. That's jolly interesting,
that point. It's their _dependence_ that's wrong with them. They're
nearly all of them absolutely dependent on an employer, and that's bad,
fatal, for anybody. It's the root of the whole trouble with the
less-educated classes, if people would only see it. What they want is
pride in themselves. They just slop along taking what they can get, and
getting so much for nothing--votes and free this, that and the
other--that they don't value it in the least. They're dependent all the
time. What you want to help them to is independence, pride in themselves
and confidence in themselves--that sort of independence. You know, all
this talk that they put up, or that's put up for them, about their right
to this and their right to that--of course you can't have a right to
anything without earning it. That's what they want to be shown, see? And
that's what they want to be given--the chance to earn the right to
things, see? Well, this Insurance Act business--"

She laughed again. "I was beginning to wonder if you were ever coming
back to that."

He noticed nothing deprecatory in her remark. "Yes, rather. Well, this
Insurance Act business--that's really a jolly good example of the way to
do things. You see, it's not giving them the right to free treatment
when they're ill; it's giving them the chance to earn the right. That's
what you want to explain to High and Low. See--you want to say to them,
'This is your show. Your very own. Fine. You're building this up, I'm
helping. You're helping all sorts of poor devils and you're helping
yourself at the same time. You're stacking up a great chunk of the State
and it belongs to you. England's yours and you want to pile it up all
you know'--"

He was quite flushed.

"That's the sort of thing I'm putting into that book of mine. 'England's
yours', you know. Precious beyond price; and therefore grand to be
making more precious and more your own. I wish you'd like to see how the
book's getting on; would you?"

"What book?"

"Why 'England.' I told you, you know. That history."

"Oh, that lesson book! I wish you'd write a novel."

He looked at her. "Oh, well!" he said.


II

After that he never mentioned "England" again to her. But he most
desperately wanted to talk about it to some one. There was no one in
Penny Green from whom he could expect helpful suggestions; but it was
not helpful suggestions he wanted. He wanted merely to talk about it to
a sympathetic listener. And not only about the book,--about all sorts of
things that interested him. And indirectly they all helped the book. To
talk with one who responded sympathetically was in some curious way a
source of enormous inspiration to him. Not always precisely
inspiration,--comfort. All sorts of warming feelings stirred pleasurably
within him when he could, in some sympathetic company, open out his
mind.

He was not actively aware of it, but what, in those years, he came to
crave for as a starved child craves for food was sympathy of mind.

He found it, in Penny Green, with what Mabel called "the most
extraordinary people." "What you can find in that Mr. Fargus and that
young Perch and his everlasting mother," she used to say, "I simply
cannot imagine."

He found a great deal.


III

Mr. Fargus, who lived next door down the Green, and outside whose gate
the bicycle had made its celebrated shortage record, was a grey little
man with grey whiskers and always in a grey suit. He had a large and
very red wife and six thin and rather yellowish daughters. Once a day,
at four in summer and at two in winter, the complete regiment of
Farguses moved out in an immense mass and proceeded in a dense crowd for
a walk. The female Farguses, having very long legs, walked very fast,
and the solitary male Fargus, having very short legs, walked very
slowly, and was usually, therefore, trotting to keep up with the pack.
He had, moreover, not only to keep pace but also to keep place. He was
forever getting squeezed out from between two tall Farguses and trotting
agitatedly around the heels of the battalion to recover a position in
it. He always reminded Sabre of a grey old Scotch terrier toddling along
behind and around the flanks of a company of gaunt, striding mastiffs.
He returned from those walks panting slightly and a little perspiring,
and at the door gave the appearance of being dismissed, and trotted away
rather like a little grey old Scotch terrier toddling off to the
stables. The lady Farguses called this daily walk "exercise"; and it
certainly was exercise for Mr. Fargus.

The eldest Miss Fargus was a grim thirty-nine and the youngest Miss
Fargus a determined twenty-eight. They called their father "Papa" and
used the name a good deal. When Sabre occasionally had tea at the
Farguses' on a Sunday afternoon Mr. Fargus always appeared to be sitting
at the end of an immense line of female Farguses. Mrs. Fargus would pour
out a cup and hand it to the Miss Fargus at her end of the line
with the loud word "Papa!" and it would whiz down the chain from
daughter to daughter to the clamorous direction, each to each,
"Papa!--Papa!--Papa!--Papa!" The cup would reach Mr. Fargus at the speed
of a thunderbolt; and Mr. Fargus, waiting for it with agitated hands as
a nervous fielder awaits a rushing cricket ball, would stop it
convulsively and usually drop and catch at and miss the spoon, whereupon
the entire chain of Farguses would give together a very loud "_Tchk_!"
and immediately shoot at their parent a plate of buns with
"Buns--Buns--Buns--Buns" all down the line. Similarly when Mr. Fargus's
grey little face would sometimes appear above the dividing wall to Sabre
in the garden there would come a loud cry of "Papa, the plums!" and from
several quarters of the garden this would he echoed "Papa, the plums!"
"Papa, the plums!" and the grey little head, in the middle of a
sentence, would disappear with great swiftness.

The Farguses kept but one servant, a diminutive and startled child with
one hand permanently up her back in search of an apron shoulder string,
and permanently occupied in frantically pursuing loud cracks, like
pistol shots, of "Kate!--Kate!--Kate!" Each Miss Fargus "did" something
in the house. One "did" the lamps, another "did" the silver, another
"did" the fowls. And whatever it was they "did" they were always doing
it. Each Miss Fargus, in addition, "did" her own room, and unitedly they
all "did" the garden. Every doing was done by the clock; and at any hour
of the day any one Miss Fargus could tell a visitor precisely what, and
at what point of what, every other Miss Fargus was doing.

In this well-ordered scheme of things what Mr. Fargus principally "did"
was to keep out of the way of his wife and daughters, and this duty took
him all his time and ingenuity. From the back windows of Sabre's house
the grey little figure was frequently to be seen fleeting up and down
the garden paths in wary evasion of daughters "doing" the garden, and
there was every reason to suppose that, within the house, the grey
figure similarly fleeted up and down the stairs and passages. "Where
_is_ Papa?" was a constant cry from mouth to mouth of the female
Farguses; and fatigue parties were constantly being detached from their
duties to skirmish in pursuit of him.

In his leisure from these flights Mr. Fargus was intensely absorbed in
chess, in the game of Patience, and in the solution of acrostics. Sabre
was also fond of chess and attracted by acrostics; and regular evenings
of every week were spent by the two in unriddling the problems set in
the chess and acrostic columns of journals taken in for the purpose.
They would sit for hours solemnly staring at one another, puffing at
pipes, in quest of a hidden word beginning with one letter and ending
with another, or in search of the two master moves that alone would
produce Mate. (It was a point of honour not to work out chess problems
on a board but to do them in your head.) Likewise for hours the two in
games of chess and in competitive Patience, one against the other, to
see who would come out first. And to all these mental exercises--chess,
acrostics and Patience--an added interest was given by Mr. Fargus's
presentation of them as illustrative of his theory of life.

Mr. Fargus's theory of life was that everybody was placed in life to
fulfil a divine purpose and invested with the power to fulfil it. "No,
no, it's not fatalism," Mr. Fargus used to say. "Not predestination.
It's just exactly like a chess problem or an acrostic. The Creator sets
it. He knows the solution, the answer. You've got to work it out. It's
all keyed for you just as the final move in chess or the final discovery
in an acrostic is keyed up to right from the start." And on this
argument Mr. Fargus introduced Sabre to the great entertainment in
"working back" when a game of Patience failed to come out or after a
defeat in chess. You worked back to the immense satisfaction of finding
the precise point at which you went wrong. Up to that point you had
followed the keyed path; precisely there you missed it.

"Tremendous, eh?" Mr. Fargus used to say. "Terrific. If you hadn't done
that you'd have got it. That one move, all that way back, was calamity.
Calamity! What a word!"

And they would stare bemused eyes upon one another.

"You put that into life," Mr. Fargus used to say. "Imagine if every
life, at death, was worked back, and where it went wrong, where it made
its calamity, and the date, put on the tombstone. Eh? What a record!
Who'd dare walk through a churchyard?"

Sabre's objection was, "Of course no one would ever know. Suppose your
idea's correct, who's to say what a man's purpose in life was, let alone
whether he'd fulfilled it? How can you work towards a purpose if you
don't know what it is?"

Then little old Mr. Fargus would grow intense. "Why, Sabre, that's just
where you are with an acrostic or in chess. How can you work out the
solution when you don't know what the solution is?"

"Yes, but you know there is a solution."

Mr. Fargus's eyes would shine. "Well, there you are! And you know that
in life there is a purpose."

And what attracted and interested Sabre was that the little man, living
here his hunted life among the terrific "doings" of the seven female
Farguses, firmly believed that he was working out and working towards
his designed purpose. He had "worked back" his every event in life, he
said, and it had brought him so inevitably to Penny Green and to
skipping about among the seven that he was assured it was the keyed path
to his purpose. He amazed Sabre by telling him, without trace of
self-consciousness and equally without trace of religious mania, that he
was waiting, daily, for God to call upon him to fulfil the purpose for
which he was placed there. He expected it as one expects a letter by the
post. When he talked about it to Sabre he positively trembled and shone
with eagerness as a child trembling and shining with excitement before
an unopened parcel.

One day Sabre protested. "But look here, Fargus. Look here, how are you
going to know when it comes? It might be anything. You don't know what
it is and--well, you won't know, will you?"

The little man said, "I believe I shall, Sabre. I've 'worked back' for
years, as far as ever my memory will carry, and everything has been so
exactly keyed that I'm convinced I'm in the way of my purpose. I believe
you can feel it if you've waited for it like that. I believe you're
asked 'Ready?' and I want to say, whatever it is, 'Aye, Ready!'"

Mysterious and awful suggestion, Sabre thought. To believe yourself at
any moment to be touched as by a finger and asked "Ready?" "Aye, Ready!"

Mysterious and awful intimacy with God!


IV

And then there were the Perches--"Young Perch and that everlasting old
mother of his", as Mabel called them.

Sabre always spoke of them as "Young Rod, Pole or Perch" and "Old Mrs.
Rod, Pole or Perth." This was out of what Mabel called his childish and
incomprehensible habit of giving nicknames,--High Jinks and Low Jinks
the outstanding and never-forgiven example of it. "Whatever's the joke
of it?" she demanded, when one day she found Sabre speaking of Major
Millet, another neighbour and a great friend of hers, as "Old Hopscotch
Millet."

"Whatever's the joke of it? He doesn't play hopscotch."

"No, but he bounds about," Sabre explained. "You know the way he bounds
about, Mabel. He's about ninety--"

"I'm sure he isn't, nor fifty."

"Well, anyway, he's past his first youth, but he's always bounding about
to show how agile he is. He's always calling out 'Ri--te _O_!' and
jumping to do a thing when there's no need to jump. Hopscotch. What can
you call him but Hopscotch?"

"But why call him _anything_?" Mabel said. "His name's Millet."

Her annoyance caused her voice to squeak. "Why call him _anything_?"

Sabre laughed. "Well, you know how a ridiculous thing like that comes
into your head and you can't get rid of it. You know the way."

Mabel declared she was sure she did not know the way. "They don't come
into _my_ head. Look at the Perches--not that I care what name you call
them. Rod, Pole or Perch! What's the sense of it? What does it _mean_?"

Sabre said it didn't mean anything. "You just get some one called Perch
and then you can't help thinking of that absurd thing rod, pole or
perch. It just comes."

"I call it childish and rude," Mabel said.


V

Mrs. Perch was a fragile little body whose life should have been and
could have been divided between her bed and a bath chair. She was,
however, as she said, "always on her legs." And she was always on her
legs and always doing what she had not the strength to do, because, as
she said, she "had always done it." She conducted her existence in the
narrow space between the adamant wall of the things she had always done,
always eaten, and always worn, and the adamant wall of the things she
had never done, never eaten, and never worn. There was not much room
between the two.

She was intensely weak-sighted, but she never could find her glasses;
and she kept locked everything that would lock, but she never could find
her keys. She held off all acquaintances by the rigid handle of "that"
before their names, but she was very fond of "that Mr. Sabre", and Sabre
returned a great affection for her. With his trick of seeing things with
his mental vision he always saw old Mrs. Perch toddling with moving lips
and fumbling fingers between the iron walls of her prejudices, and this
was a pathetic picture to him, for ease or pleasure were not discernible
between the walls. Nevertheless Mrs. Perch found pleasures therein, and
the way in which her face then lit up added, to Sabre, an indescribable
poignancy to the pathos of the picture. She never could pass a baby
without stopping to adore it, and an astounding tide of rejuvenation
would then flood up from mysterious mains, welling upon her silvered
cheeks and through her dim eyes, stilling the movement of her lips and
the fumbling motions of her fingers.

Also amazing tides of glory when she was watching for her son, and saw
him.

Young Perch was a tall and slight young man with a happy laugh and an
air which suggested to Sabre, after puzzlement, that his spirit was only
alighted in his body as a bird alights and swings upon a twig, not
engrossed in his body. He did not look very strong. His mother said he
had a weak heart. He said he had a particularly strong heart and used to
protest, "Oh, Mother, I do wish you wouldn't talk that bosh about me."
To which Mrs. Perch would say, "It's no good saying you _haven't_ got a
weak heart because you _have_ got a weak heart and you've always _had_ a
weak heart. Surely I ought to know."

Young Perch would reply, "You ought to know, but you don't know. You get
an idea in your head and nothing will ever get it out. Some day you'll
probably get the idea that I've got two hearts and if Sir Frederick
Treves swore before the Lord Chief Justice that I only had one heart
you'd just say, 'The man's a perfect fool.' You're awful, you know,
Mother."

He used to reprove his mother like that.

Mrs. Perch would give a grim little laugh, relishing her strength, and
then Young Perch would give an involuntary little laugh, accepting his
weakness.

That was how they lived.

Young Perch always carried about in one pocket a private pair of
spectacles for his mother and in another a private set of keys for her
most used receptacles. When the search for her spectacles had exhausted
even her own energy, Young Perch would say, "Well, you'd better use
these, Mother." It was of no use to offer them till she was weakening in
the search, and she would take them grudgingly with, "They don't suit
me." Similarly with the keys, accepted only after prolonged and
maddening search. "Well, you'd better try these, Mother."--"They injure
the lock."

Sabre often witnessed and took part in these devastating searches.
Young Perch would always say, "Now just sit down, Mother, instead of
rushing about, and try to think quite calmly when you last used them."

Mrs. Perch, intensely fatigued, intensely worried:

"How very silly you are, Freddie! I don't know when I last used them. If
I knew when I used them, I should know where they are now."

"Well, you'd better use these now, Mother."

"They don't suit me. They ruin my eyes."

Yet Mrs. Rod, Pole or Perch, who confided much in Sabre, and who had no
confidences of any kind apart from her son, would often say to Sabre:
"Freddie always finds my keys for me, you know. He finds everything for
me, Mr. Sabre."

And the tide of glory would flood amazingly upon her face, transfiguring
it, and Sabre would feel an immensely poignant clutch at the heart.


VI

The Perchs' house was called Puncher's--Puncher's Farm, a few hundred
yards along the lane leading to the great highroad--and it was the
largest and by far the most untidy house in Penny Green. Successive
Punchers of old time, when it had been the most considerable farm in all
the country between Chovensbury and Tidborough, had added to it in
stubborn defiance of all laws of comfort and principles of domestic
architecture, and now, shorn alike of its Punchers and of its pastures,
the homestead that might easily have housed twenty, was mysteriously
filled to overflowing by two. Mrs. Perch was fond of saying she had
lived in nineteen houses "in her time", and Sabre had the belief that
the previous eighteen had all been separately furnished and the entire
accumulation, together with every newspaper taken in during their
occupation, brought to Puncher's. Half the rooms of Puncher's were so
filled with furniture that no more furniture, and scarcely a living
person, could be got in; and half the rooms were so filled with boxes,
packages, bundles, trunks, crates, and stacks of newspapers that no
furniture at all could be got in. Every room was known to Mrs. Perch and
to Young Perch by the name of some article it contained and Mrs. Perch
was forever "going to sort the room with your Uncle Henry's couch in
it", or "the room with the big blue box with the funny top in it", or
some other room similarly described.

Mrs. Perch was always "going to", but as the task was always contingent
upon either "when I have got a servant into the house", or "when I have
turned the servant out of the house"--these two states representing Mrs.
Perch's occupation with the servant problem--the couch of Uncle Henry,
the big blue box with the funny top, and all the other denizens of the
choked rooms remained, like threatened men, precariously but securely.

But not unvisited!

Sabre once spent a week in the house, terminating a summer holiday a
little earlier than Mabel, and he had formed the opinion that mother and
son never went to bed at night and never got up in the morning. In
remote hours and in remote quarters of the house mysterious sounds
disturbed his sleep. Eerily peering over the banisters, he discerned the
pair moving, like lost souls, about the passages, Mrs. Perch with the
skirts of a red dressing-gown in one hand and a candle in the other,
Young Perch disconsolately in her wake, yawning, with another candle.
Young Perch called this "Prowling about the infernal house all night";
and one office of the prowl appeared to Sabre to be the attendance of
pans of milk warming in a row on oil stoves and suggesting, with the
glimmer of the stoves and the steam of the pans, mysterious oblations to
midnight gods.


VII

Mrs. Perch believed her son could do anything and, in the matter of his
capabilities, had the strange conviction that he had only to write and
ask anybody, from Mr. Asquith downwards, for employment in the highest
offices in order to obtain it. Young Perch--who used to protest, "Well,
but I've _got_ my work, Mother"--was in fact a horticulturist of very
fair reputation. He specialised in sweet peas and roses; and Sabre, in
the early days of his intimacy with the Rod, Pole or Perch household,
was surprised at the livelihood that could apparently be made by the
disposal of seeds, blooms and cuttings.

"Fred's getting quite famous with his sweet peas," Sabre once said to
Mrs. Perch. "I've been reading an illustrated interview with him in _The
Country House_."

Tides of glory into Mrs. Perch's face. "Ah, if only he hadn't worn that
dreadful floppy hat of his, Mr. Sabre. It couldn't have happened on a
more unfortunate day. I fully intended to see how he looked before the
photographs were taken and of course it so happened I was turning a
servant out of the house and couldn't attend to it. That dreadful floppy
hat doesn't suit him. It never did suit him. But he will wear it. It's
no good my saying anything to him."

This was an opinion that old Mrs. Perch was constantly reiterating.
Young Perch was equally given to declaring, "I can't do anything with my
Mother, you know." And yet it was Sabre's observation that each life was
entirely guided and administered by the other. Young Perch once told
Sabre he had never slept a night away from his mother since he was
seventeen, and he was never absent from her half a day but she was at
the window watching for his return.

Sabre was extraordinarily attracted by the devotion between the pair.
Their interests, their habits, their thoughts were as widely sundered as
their years, yet each was wholly and completely bound up in the other.
When Sabre sat and talked with Young Perch of an evening, old Mrs. Perch
would sit with them, next her son, in an armchair asleep. At intervals
she would start awake and say querulously, "Now I suppose I must be
driven off to bed."

Young Perch, not pausing in what he might be saying, would stretch a
hand and lay it on his mother's. Mrs. Perch, as though Freddie's hand
touched away enormous weariness and care, would sigh restfully and sleep
again. It gave Sabre extraordinary sensations.

       *       *       *       *       *

If he had been asked to name his particular friends these were the
friends he would have named. He saw them constantly. Infrequently he saw
another. Quite suddenly she came back into his life.

Nona returned into his life.




PART TWO

NONA




CHAPTER I


I

Sabre, ambling his bicycle along the pleasant lanes towards Tidborough
one fine morning in the early summer of 1912, was met in his thoughts by
observation, as he topped a rise, of the galloping progress of the light
railway that was to link up the Penny Green Garden Home with Tidborough
and Chovensbury. In the two years since Lord Tybar had, as he had said,
beneficially exercised his ancestors in their graves by selling the land
on which the Garden Home Development was to develop, Penny Green Garden
Home had sprung into being at an astonishing pace.

The great thing now was the railway.

And the railway's unsightly indications strewn across the
countryside--ballast heaps, excavations, noisy stationary engines,
hand-propelled barrows bumping along toy lines, gangs of men at labour
with pick and shovel--met Sabre's thoughts on this June morning because
he was thinking of the Penny Green Garden Home and of Mabel, and of
Mabel and of himself in connection with the Penny Green Garden Home.
Puzzling thoughts.

Here was a subject, this ambitiously projected and astonishingly popular
Garden Home springing up at their very doors, that interested him and
that intensely interested Mabel, and yet it could never be mentioned
between them without.... Only that very morning at breakfast.... And
June--he always remembered it--was the anniversary month of their
wedding.... Eight years ago.... Eight years....


II

What interested Sabre in the Garden Home was not the settlement
itself--he rather hated the idea of Penny Green being neighboured and
overrun by crowds of all sorts of people--but the causes that gave rise
to the modern movement of which it was a shining example. The causes had
their place in one of the sections he had planned for "England" and it
encouraged his ideas for that section to see the results here at his
doors. Overcrowding in the towns; the desire of men to get away from
their place of business; the increasing pressure of business and the
increasing recreational variety of life that, deepening and widening
through the years, actuated the desire; the extension of traffic
facilities that permitted the desire; all the modern tendencies that
made work less of a pleasure and more of a toil,--and out of that the
whole absorbing question of the decay of joy in craftsmanship, and
why.--Jolly interesting!

These were the pictures and the stories that Sabre saw in the roads and
avenues and residences and public buildings leaping from mud and chaos
into order and activity in the Garden Home; these were the reasons the
thing interested him and why he rather enjoyed seeing it springing up
about him. But these, he thought as he rode along, were not the reasons
the thing interested Mabel. And when he mentioned them to her.... And
when she, for her part, spoke of it to him--and she was always speaking
of it--the reasons for her enthusiasm retired him at once into a shell.
Funny state of affairs!

Mabel was convinced he loathed and detested the Penny Green Garden Home
Development; and actually he rather liked the Penny Green Garden Home
Development; and yet he couldn't tell her so; and she did not understand
in the least when he tried to tell her so. Funny--eight years ago this
month....

His thoughts went on. And, come to think of it, the relations between
them were precisely similar in regard to nearly everything they ever
discussed. And yet they would be called, and were, a perfectly happy
couple. Perfectly? Was every happy married couple just what they were?
Was married happiness, then, merely the negation of violent unhappiness?
Merely not beating your wife, and your wife not drinking or running up
debts? He thought: "No, no, there's something more in it than that." And
then his forehead wrinkled up in his characteristic habit and he
thought: "Of course, it's my fault. It isn't only this dashed Garden
Home. It's everything. It isn't only once. It's always. It can't
possibly be her fault always. It's mine. I can see that.

"Take this morning at breakfast. Perfectly good temper both of us. Then
she said, 'Those houses in King's Close are going to be eighty pounds a
year; and, what do you think, Mrs. Toller is going to take one!'
Immediately I was riled. Why should I get riled because she says that
Mrs. Toller is going to take a house for eighty pounds a year? I just
rustled the newspaper. Why on earth couldn't I say, 'Good lord, is she?'
or something like that? Why on earth couldn't I even not rustle the
newspaper? She knows what it means when I rustle the paper. I meant her
to know. Why should I? It's the easiest thing on earth for me to respond
to what she says. I know perfectly well what she's getting at. I could
easily have said that Mrs. Toller would have old Toller in the workhouse
one of these days if he didn't watch it. I could have said, 'She'll be
keeping three servants next, and she can't keep one as it is.' Mabel
would have loved that. She'd have laughed."

He thought, "Why should she love that sort of tripe--gossip?"

He thought, "Damn it, why shouldn't she? Why should I mind? Why should I
rustle the newspaper? She can't enter into things that interest me; but
I can, I could enter into things that interest her. Why don't I? Of
course I can see perfectly clearly how she looks at things. It's just as
rotten for her that I can't talk with her about her ideas as it is
rotten for me that she doesn't see my ideas. And it isn't rotten for me.
I don't mind it. I don't expect it. I don't expect it...."

And at that precise moment of his thoughts, the garrulous Hapgood,
seeing his face, could have said to another, as he said before, "There!
See what I mean? Looks as though he'd lost something and was wondering
where it was. Ha!"


III

A genial shouting and the clatter of agitated hoofs jerked Sabre from
his thoughts.

"Hullo! Hi! Help! Out collision-mats! Stop the cab! Look out, Sabre!
_Sabre!_"

He suddenly became aware--and he jammed on his brakes and dismounted by
straddling a leg to the ground--that in the narrow lane he was between
two plunging horses. Their riders had divided to make way for his
bemused approach. They had violently sundered, expecting him to stop,
until he was almost on top of them, and one of the pair was now engaged
in placating his horse, which resented this sudden snatching at bit and
prick of spur, and persuading it to return to the level road.

On one side the lane was banked steeply up in a cutting. The horse of
the rider on this side stood on its hind legs and appeared to be
performing a series of postman's double knocks on the bank with its
forelegs. Lord Tybar, who bestrode it, and who did not seem to be at all
concerned by his horse copying a postman, looked over his shoulder at
Sabre, showing an amused grin, and said, "Thanks, Sabre. This is jolly.
I like this. Come on, old girl. This way down. Keep passing on, please."

The old girl, an extraordinarily big and handsome chestnut mare, dropped
her forelegs to the level of the road, where she exchanged the postman's
knocking for a complicated and exceedingly nimble dance, largely on two
legs.

Lord Tybar, against her evident intentions, skilfully directed the steps
of this dance into a turning movement so that she and her rider now
faced Sabre; and while she bounded through the concluding movements of
the _pas seul_ he continued in the same whimsical tone and with the same
engaging smile, "Thanks still more, Sabre. This is extraordinarily good
for the liver. Devilish graceful, aren't I? See, I'm only holding on
with one hand! Marvellous. No charge for this." And as the mare came to
rest and quivered at Sabre with her beautiful nostrils, "Ah, the music's
stopped. Delicious. How well your step suits mine!"

"Ass!" laughed a voice above them; and Sabre, who had almost forgotten
there was another horse when he had abruptly wakened and dismounted,
looked up at it.

The other horse was standing with complete and entirely unconcerned
statuesqueness on the low bank which bounded the lane on his other side.
Lady Tybar had taken it--or it had taken Lady Tybar--out of danger in a
sideways bound, and horse and rider remained precisely where the
sideways bound had taken them as if it were exactly where they had
intended to go all that morning, and as if they were now settled there
for all time as a living equestrian statue,--a singularly striking and
beautiful statue.

"We are up here," said Lady Tybar. Her voice had a very clear, fine
note. "We are rather beautiful up here, don't you think? Rather
darlings? No one takes the faintest notice of us; we might be off the
earth. But we don't mind a bit. Hullo, Derry and Toms, Marko is actually
taking off his hat to us. Bow, Derry."

Her horse, as if he perfectly understood, tossed his head, and she drew
attention to it with a deprecatory little gesture of her hand and then
said, "Shall we come down now? Is your dance quite finished, Tony? Are
you content, Marko? All right. We'll descend. This is us descending.
Lady Tybar, who is a superb horsewoman, descending a precipice on her
beautiful half-bred Derry and Toms, a winner at several shows."

Derry and Toms stepped down off the bank with complete assurance and
superb dignity. With equal precision, moving his feet as though there
were marked for them certain exact spots which he covered with infinite
lightness and exactitude, he turned about and stood beside his partner
in exquisite and immobile pose.


IV

Thus the two riders faced Sabre, smiling upon him. He stood holding his
bicycle immediately in front of them. The mare continued to quiver her
beautiful nostrils at him; every now and then she blew a little agitated
puff through them, causing them to expand and reveal yet more
exquisitely their glorious softness and delicacy.

Sabre thought that the riders, with their horses, made the most
striking, and somehow affecting picture of virile and graceful beauty he
could ever have imagined.

Lord Tybar, who was thirty-two, was debonair and attractive of
countenance to a degree. His eyes, which were grey, were extraordinarily
mirthful, mischievous. A supremely airy and careless and bold spirit
looked through those eyes and shone through their flashes and glints and
sparkles of diamond light. His face was thin and of tanned olive.
His face seemed to say to the world, challengingly, "I am here!
I have arrived! Bring out your best and watch me!" There were
people--women--who said he had a cruel mouth. They said this, not with
censure or regret, but with a deliciously fearful rapture as though the
cruel mouth (if it were cruel) were not the least part of his
attraction.

Lord Tybar's lady, who was twenty-eight, carried in her countenance and
in her hair the pleasing complement of her lord's tan and olive hue and
of his cropped black poll. She was extraordinarily fair. Her skin was of
the hue and of the sheen of creamy silk, and glowed beneath its hue. It
presented amazing delicacy and yet an exquisite firmness. Children,
playing with her, and she delighted in playing with children (but she
was childless), often asked to stroke her face. They would stare at her
face in that immensely absorbed way in which children stare, and then
ask to touch her face and just stroke it; their baby fingers were not
more softly silken. Of her hair Lady Tybar had said frequently, from her
girlhood upwards, that it was "a most sickening nuisance." She bound it
tightly as if to punish and be firm with the sickening nuisance that it
was to her. And these close, gleaming plaits and coils children also
liked to touch with their soft fingers.

Her name was Nona.

Out of a hundred people who passed her by quite a considerable number
would have denied that she was beautiful. Her face was round and saucy
rather than oval and classical. Incontestable the striking attraction of
her complexion and of her hair; but not beautiful,--quite a number would
have said, and did say. Oh, no; pretty, perhaps, in a way, but that's
all.

But her face was much more than beautiful to Sabre.


V

Until this moment, standing there with his bicycle, she on her beautiful
horse, he had not seen her, nor Lord Tybar, for two years. They had been
travelling. Now seeing her, thus unexpectedly and thus gallantly
environed, his mind, with that astonishing precision of detail and
capriciousness of selection with which the mind retains pictures,
reproduced certain masculine discussion of her looks at a time when, as
Nona Holiday of Chovensbury Court, daughter of Sir Hadden Holiday, M.P.
for Tidborough, she had contributed to local gossip by becoming engaged
to Lord Tybar.

"Pretty girl, you know," masculine discussion had said; and Sabre had
thought, "Fools!"

"Oh, hardly pretty," others had maintained; and again "Fools!" he had
thought. "Pretty--_pretty_! Hardly pretty--hardly--!" Furious, he had
flung away from them.

The time and the place of the discussion had been when the news of her
engagement had just been brought into the clubhouse of the Penny Green
Golf Club. He had flung out into the rain which had caused the pavilion
to be crowded. Fools! Was she pretty! Did they mean to say they couldn't
see in her face what he saw in her face? And then he thought, "But of
course they haven't loved her. It's nothing to them what they've only
just heard, but what she told me herself this morning.... And she knew
what it meant to me when she told me.... Although we said nothing. Of
course I see her differently."

He saw her "differently" now after two years of not seeing her, and ten
years since that day of gossip at the golf club. Pretty!... Strange how
he could always remember that smell of the rain as he had come out of
the clubhouse ... and a strange fragrance in the air as now he looked
upon her.

Upon the warm and trembling air, as he stood with his bicycle before the
horses, were borne to him savour of hay newly turned in the fields
about, and of high spring-tide blowing in the hedgerows; and with them
delicious essence from the warm, gleaming bodies of the horses, and
pungent flavour of the saddlery, and the mare's sweet breath puffed
close to his face in little gusty agitations.

The shining, tingling picture of strength and beauty superbly modelled
that the riders and their horses made, seemed, as it were, to arise out
of and be suspended shimmering in the heart of the warm incense that he
savoured. So when a sorcerer casts spiced herbs upon the flame, and
scented vapour uprises, and in the vapour images appear.

Exquisite picture of strength and beauty superbly modelled: the horses'
glossy coats glinting all a polished chestnut's hues; the perfect
artistry and symmetry of slender limbs, and glorious, arching necks, and
noble heads, and velvet muzzles; the dazzling bits and chains and
buckles; the glinting bridles, reins and saddles; Lord Tybar's
exquisitely poised figure, so perfectly maintaining and carrying up the
symmetry of his horse as to suggest the horse would be disfigured,
truncated, were he to dismount; his taking swagger, his gay, fine face;
and she....

An incantation: jingle of bits mouthed in those velvet muzzles; a hoof
pawed sharply on the road; swish of long, restless tails; creaking of
saddlery; and sudden bursts of all the instruments in unison when heads
were tossed and shaken. Remotely the whirr of a reaping machine. And
somewhere birds....

Pretty!


VI

Greetings had been exchanged; his apologies for his blundering descent
upon them laughed at. Lord Tybar was saying, "Well, it's a tiger of a
place, this Garden Home of yours, Sabre--"

"It's not mine," said Sabre. "God forbid."

"Ah, you've not got the same beautiful local patriotism that I have.
It's one of my most elegant qualities, my passionate devotion to my
countryside. That was what that corker of a vicar of yours, Boom
Bagshaw, told me I was when I wept with joy while he was showing me
round. Yes, and now I'm a patron of the Garden Home Trust or a governor
or a vice-priest or something. I am really. What is it I am, Nona?"

"You're a bloated aristocrat and a bloodsucker," Nona told him in her
clear, fine voice. "And you're living on estates which your brutal
ancestors ravaged from the people. That's what you are, Tony. I showed
it you in the _Searchlight_ yesterday. And, I say, don't use 'elegant';
that's mine."

"Oh, by gad, yes, so I am," said Lord Tybar. "Bloodsucker! Good lord,
fancy being a bloodsucker!"

He looked so genuinely rueful and abashed that Sabre laughed; and then
said to Nona, "Why is elegant 'yours', Lady Tybar?"

She made a little pouting motion at him with her lips. "Marko, I wish to
goodness you wouldn't call me Lady Tybar. Dash it, we've called one
another Nona and Marko for about a thousand years, long before I ever
knew Tony. And just because I'm married--"

"And to a mere loathsome bloodsucker, too," Lord Tybar interposed.

"Yes, especially to a bloodsucker. Just remember to say Nona, will you,
otherwise there'll be a cruel scene between us. I told you about it
before I went away. You don't suppose Tony minds, do you?"

"And Sabre," said Lord Tybar, "what the devil does it matter what a
bloated robber minds, anyway? That's the way to look at me, Sabre.
Trample me underfoot, my boy. I'm a pestilent survivor of the feudal
system, aren't I, Nona?"

"Absolutely. So, Marko, don't be a completer noodle than you already
are."

"Ah, you're getting it now." Lord Tybar murmured. "I'm a noodle, too,
the _Searchlight_ says."

He somehow gave Sabre the impression of taking an even deeper enjoyment
in the incident between his wife and Sabre than the enjoyment he clearly
had in his own facetiousness. He was slightly turned in his saddle so as
to look directly at Nona, and he listened and interposed, and turned his
eyes from her face to Sabre's, and from Sabre's back to hers, with his
handsome head slightly cocked to one side and with much gleaming in his
eyes; rather as if he had on some private mock.

Fantastical notion! What mock could he have?

"Well, about my word 'elegant'," Nona was going on, "and why it is
mine--weren't you asking?"

Sabre said he had. "Yes, why yours?"

"Why, you see, Derry and Toms is a case of it." She tickled her horse's
ears with her riding switch, and he stamped a hoof on the ground and
arched his neck as though he knew he was a case of it and was proud of
being a case of it. "I wanted an elegant name for him and I always think
two names are so elegant for a firm--"

"Bloodsucker and Noodle are mine," said Lord Tybar in a very gloomy
voice; and they laughed.

"--So I called him Derry and Toms."

Sabre pointed out that this still left her own possession of the word
unexplained.

"Oh, Marko, you're dreadfully matter-of-fact. You always were. Why, Tony
and I get fond of a word and then we have it for our own, whichever of
us it is, and use it for everything. And elegant's mine just now. I'm
dreadfully fond of it. It's so--well, elegant: there you are, you see!"

Lord Tybar announced that he had just become attached to a new word and
desired to possess it. He was going to have blood. "You see, if I live
by sucking blood--"

"Tony, you're disgusting!"

"I know. I'm the most frightful things. I'm just beginning to realise
it. Yes, blood's mine, Nona. Copyright. All rights reserved. Blood."

"Well, so long as you stick to the noun and don't use the adjective,"
she said; and they all laughed again.

Lord Tybar gathered up his reins and stroked his left hand along them.
"Well, kindness to animals!" he said. "That's another of my beautiful
qualities. The perfect understanding between me and my horses tells me
the mare has seen enough of you, Sabre. She tells me all her thoughts in
her flanks and they Marconi up my nervous and receptive legs. I must
write and tell the _Searchlight_ that. Perhaps they'll think better of
me."--The mare, feeling his hand, began to dance coquettishly. "You'll
come up and see us often, now you know we're back, won't you? Nona likes
seeing you, don't you, Nona?" And again he looked from Nona to Sabre and
back at Nona again with that look of mocking drollery.

"Oh, you're all right, Marko," Nona agreed, "when you're not too
matter-of-fact. Yes, do come up. There's always a harsh word and a blow
for you at Northrepps."

The mare steadied again. She stretched out her neck towards Sabre and
quivered her nostrils at him, sensing him. He put up a hand to stroke
her beautiful muzzle and she threw up her head violently and swerved
sharply around.

Not in the least discomposed, Lord Tybar, his body in perfect rhythm
with her curvettings, laughed at Sabre over his shoulder. "She thinks
you're up to something, Sabre. She thinks you've got designs on us.
Marvellous how I know! Whisper and I shall hear, loved one. You'll hurt
yourself in a minute."

The light in his smiling eyes was surely a mocking light. "Thinks you're
up to something! Thinks you've got designs on us!"

The mare was wheedled round again to her former position; against her
will, but somehow as the natural result of her dancing. Marvellous how
he directed her caprices into his own intentions and against her own.
But Lord Tybar was now looking away behind him to where the adjoining
meadow sloped far away and steeply to a copse. In the hollow only the
tops of the trees could be seen. His eyes were screwed up in distant
vision. He said, "Dash it, there's that old blighter Sooper. He's been
avoiding me. Now I've got him. Nona, you won't mind getting back alone?
I must speak to Sooper. I'm going to have his blood over that fodder
business. Blood! My word! Good!"

He twisted the mare in a wonderfully quick and dexterous movement.
"Good-by, Sabre. You don't mind, Nona?" And he flashed back a glance. He
lifted the mare over the low bank with a superbly easy motion. He turned
to wave his hand as she landed nimbly in the meadow, and he cantered
away, image of grace, poetry of movement. Fortune's favourite!

The two left watched him. At the brow of the meadow he turned again in
his saddle and waved again jauntily. They waved reply. He was over the
brow. Out of sight.


VII

The features of the level valley beyond the brow where only he could
have seen the individual he sought, were, at that distance, of Noah's
Ark dimensions. "How he could have recognised any one!" said Nona, her
gaze towards the valley. "I can't even see any one. He's got eyes like
about four hawks!"

Sabre said, "And rides like a--what do they call those things?--like a
centaur."

She turned her head towards him. "He does everything better than any one
else," she said. "That's Tony's characteristic. Everything. He's
perfectly wonderful."

These were enthusiastic words; but she spoke them without enthusiasm;
she merely pronounced them. "Well, I'm off too," she said. "And what
about you, Marko? You're going to work, aren't you? I don't think you
ought to be able to stop and gossip like this. You're not getting an
idler, are you? You used to be such a devoted hard-worker. My word!" and
she laughed as though at some amused memory of his devotion to work.

He laughed too. They certainly had many recollections in common, though
not all laughable. "I don't think I'm quite so--so earnest as I used to
be," he smiled.

"Ah, but I like you earnest, Marko."

There was the tiniest silence between them. Yet it seemed to Sabre a
very long silence.

She was again the one to speak, and her tone was rather abrupt and
high-pitched as if she, too, were conscious of a long silence and broke
it deliberately, as one breaks, with an effort, constraint.

"And how's Mabel?"

"She's all right. She's ever so keen on this Garden Home business."

"She would be," said Nona.

"And so am I!" said Sabre. Something in her tone made him say it
defiantly.

She laughed. "I'm sure you are, Marko. Well, good-by"; and as Derry and
Toms began to turn with his customary sedateness of motion she made the
remark, "I'm so glad you don't wear trouser clips, Marko. I do loathe
trouser clips."

He told her that he rode "one of those chainless bikes."

He said it rather mumblingly. Exactly in that tone she used to say
things like, "I do like you in that brown suit, Marko."


VIII

He resumed his ride. A mile farther on he overtook, on a slight rise, an
immense tree trunk slung between three pairs of wheels and dragged by
two tremendous horses, harnessed tandemwise. As he passed them came the
smell of warm horseflesh and his thought was "Pretty!"

He shot ahead and a line came into his mind:

    "_Was this the face that launched a thousand ships_?"

Well, he had had certain aspirations, dreams, visions....

He was upon the crest whence the road ran down into Tidborough. Beneath
him the spires of the Cathedral lifted exquisitely above the surrounding
city.

"Those houses in King's Close are going to be eighty pounds a year, and
what do you think, Mrs. Toller is going to take one!"...



CHAPTER II


I

Sabre found but little business awaiting him when he got to his office.
When he had disposed of it he sat some little time staring
absent-mindedly at the cases whereon were ranged the books of his
publication. Then he took out the manuscript of "England" and turned
over the pages. He wondered what Nona would think of it. He would like
to tell her about it.

Twyning came in.

Twyning rarely entered Sabre's room. Sabre did not enter Twyning's twice
in a year. Their work ran on separate lines and there was something,
unexpressed, the reverse of much sympathy between them. Twyning was an
older man than Sabre. He was only two years older in computation by age
but he was very much more in appearance, in manner and in business
experience. He had been in the firm as a boy checker when Sabre was
entering Tidborough School. He had attracted Mr. Fortune's special
attention by disclosing a serious scamping of finish in a set of desks
and he had risen to head clerk when Sabre was at Oxford. On the day that
Sabre entered the firm he had been put "on probation" in the position he
now held, and on the day that Sabre's father retired he had been
confirmed in the position. He regarded Sabre as an amateur and he was
privately disturbed by the fact that a man who "did not know the ropes"
and had not "been through the mill" should come to a position equal in
standing to his own. Nevertheless he accepted the fact, showing not the
smallest animosity. He was always very ready to be cordial towards
Sabre; but his cordiality took a form in which Sabre had never seen eye
to eye with him. The attitude he extended to Sabre was that he and Sabre
were two young fellows under a rather pig-headed old employer and that
they could have many jokes and grievances and go-ahead schemes in
companionship together. Sabre did not accept this view. He gave Twyning,
from the first, the impression of considering himself as working
alongside Mr. Fortune instead of beneath him; and he was cold to and
refused to participate in the truant schoolboy air which Twyning adopted
when they were together. Twyning called this "sidey." He was anxious to
show Sabre, when Sabre first came to the firm, the best places to lunch
in Tidborough, but Sabre was frequently lunching with one of the School
housemasters or at the Masters' common room. Twyning thought this
stand-offish.


II

Twyning was of middle height, very thin, black-haired. His clean-shaven
face was deeply furrowed in rigid-looking furrows which looked as though
shaving would be an intricate operation. He held himself very stiffly
and spoke stiffly as though the cords of his larynx were also rigidly
inclined. When not speaking he had a habit of breathing rather noisily
through his nose as if he were doing deep breathing exercises. He was
married and had a son of whom he was immensely proud, aged eighteen and
doing well in a lawyer's office.

He came in and closed the door. He had a sheet of paper in his hand.

Sabre, engrossed, glanced up. "Hullo, Twyning." He wrote a word and then
put down his pen. "Anything you want me about?" He lay back in his chair
and stared, frowning, at the manuscript before him.

"Nothing particular, if you're busy," Twyning said. "I just looked in."
He advanced the paper in his hand and looked at it as if about to add
something else. But he said nothing and stood by Sabre's chair, also
looking at the manuscript. "That that book?"

"M'm." Sabre was trying to retain his thoughts. He felt them slipping
away before Twyning's presence. He could hear Twyning breathing through
his nose and felt incensed that Twyning should come and breathe through
his nose by his chair when he wanted to write.

But Twyning continued to stand by the chair and to breathe through his
nose. He was reading over Sabre's shoulder.

The few pages of "England" already written lay in front of Sabre's pad,
the first page uppermost. Twyning read and interjected a snort into his
nasal rhythm.

"Well, that book's not written for me, anyway," he remarked.

Sabre agreed shortly. "It isn't. But why not?"

Twyning read aloud the first words. "'This England you live in is
yours.' Well, I take my oath it isn't mine. Not a blooming inch of it.
D'you know what's happening to me? I'm being turned out of my house.
The lease is out and the whole damned house and everything I've put on
to it goes to one of these lordlings--this Lord Tybar--just because one
of his ancestors, who'd never even dreamt of the house, pinched the land
it stands on from the public common and started to pocket ground rent.
Now I'm being pitched into the street to let Lord Tybar have a house
that's no more his than the man in the moon's. D'you call that right?"

"No, I don't," said Sabre, but with a tinge of impatience. "I call it
rotten."

Twyning seemed surprised. "Do you, though? Well, how about that book? I
mean to say--"

"I shall say so in the book. Or as good as say so."

Twyning pondered. "Shall you, by Jove? Well, but I say, that's
liberalism, radicalism, you know. That's not the sort of pap for kids."

"Well, the book isn't going to be pap for kids."

Twyning snorted a note of laughter through his nose. "Sorry, old man.
Don't get shirty. But I say though, seriously, we can't put out that
sort of stuff, you know. Radicalism. Not with our connection. I mean to
say--"

Sabre gathered up the papers and dropped them into a drawer. "Look here,
Twyning, suppose you wait till the book's written before you criticise
it. How about that for an idea?"

"All right, all right, old man. I'm not criticising. What's it going to
be called?"

"England."

Silence.

Sabre, appreciating, with the author's intense suspicion for his child,
something in the silence, looked up at Twyning. "Anything wrong about
that? 'England.' You read the first sentence?"

Twyning said slowly, "Yes, I know I did. I thought of it then."

"Thought of what?"

"Well--'England'--'this England.' I mean to say--What about Scotland?"

"Well, what about Scotland?"

Twyning seemed really concerned. The puckers on his face had visibly
deepened. He used a stubborn tone. "Well, you know what people are. You
know how damned touchy those Scotchmen are. I mean to say, if we put
out a book like that, the Scotch--"

Sabre smote the desk. This kind of thing from Twyning made him furious,
and he particularly was not in the mood for it this morning. He struck
his hand down on the desk: "Well, damn the Scotch. What's it got to do
with the Scotch? This book isn't about Scotland. It's about England.
England. I'll tell you another thing. You say if 'we' put out a book
like that. It isn't 'we.' Excuse me saying so, but it certainly isn't
you. It's I." He stopped, and then laughed. "Sorry, Twyning."


III

Twyning's face had gone very dark. His jaw had set. "Oh, all right." He
turned away, but immediately returned again, his face relaxed. "That's
all right. Only my chipping, you know. I say though," and he laughed
nervously. "That 'not we.' You've said it! I'd come in to tell you. It's
going to be 'we.'" He advanced the paper he had been holding in his
hand, his thumb indicating the top left-hand corner. "What do you think
of me above the line, my boy?"

The paper was a sheet of the firm's notepaper. In the upper left-hand
corner was printed in small type, "The Rev. Sebastian Fortune." Beneath
the name was a short line and beneath the line, "Mr. Shearman Twyning.
Mr. Mark Sabre":

The Rev. Sebastian Fortune.
   ----------
Mr. Shearman Twyning.
Mr. Mark Sabre.

Sabre said slowly, "What do you mean--you 'above the line'?"

Twyning indicated the short line with a forefinger. "That line, my boy.
Jonah's going to take me into partnership. Just told me."

He had released the paper into Sabre's hand. Sabre handed it back with a
single word, "Good."

Twyning's face darkened again and darkened worse. He crumpled the paper
violently in his hand and spoke also but a single word, "Thanks!" He
turned sharply on his heel and went to the door.

"I say, Twyning!" Sabre jumped to his feet and went to Twyning with
outstretched hand. "I didn't mean to take it like that. Don't think I'm
not--I congratulate you. Jolly good. Splendid. I tell you what--I don't
mind telling you--it was a bit of a smack in the eye for me for a
moment. You know, I've rather sweated over this business,"--his glance
indicated the stacked bookshelves, the firm's publications, _his_
publications.... "See what I mean?"

A certain movement in his throat and about his mouth indicated, more
than his words, what he meant. A slight.

Twyning took the hand and gripped it with a firmness characteristic of
his handshake.

"Thanks, old man. Thanks awfully. Of course I know what you mean. But
after all, look at the thing, eh? I mean to say, you've been
here--what--ten or twelve years. Well, I've been over twenty-five.
Natural, eh? And you're doing splendidly. Every one knows that. It's
only a question of time. Thanks awfully." He reached for Sabre's hand
again and again gripped it hard.

Sabre went back and sat against his desk. "What rather got me, you know,
coming all of a sudden like that, was that Fortune promised me
partnership, twice, quite a bit ago."

Twyning, who had been speaking with an emotion in consonance with the
grip of his hand, said a little blankly, "Did he? That so?"

"Yes, twice. And this looked like, when you told me--well, like
dissatisfaction since, see? Eh?"

Twyning did not take up the point. "I say, you never told me."

"I'm telling you now," Sabre said. And he laughed ruefully. "It comes to
much the same thing--as it turns out."

"Yes, but still.... I wish we worked in a bit more together, Sabre. I'm
always ready to, you know. Let's, shall we?"

Sabre made no reply. Twyning repeated "Let's" and nodded and left the
room. Immediately he opened the door again and reappeared. "I say, you
won't say anything to Jonah, of course?"

Sabre smiled grimly. "I'm going to."

Again the darkening. "Dash it, that's not quite playing the game, is
it?"

"Rot, Twyning. Fortune's made me a promise, and I'm going to ask if he
has any reason for withdrawing it, that's all. It's nothing to do with
your show."

"You're bound to tell him I've told you."

"Well, man alive, I'm bound to know, aren't I?"

"Yes--in a way. Oh, well, all right. Remember about working in more
together." He withdrew and closed the door.

Outside the door he clenched his hands. He thought, "Smack in the eye
for you, was it? You'll get a damn sight worse smack in the eye one of
these days. Dirty dog!"


IV

Immediately the door was closed Sabre went what he would have called
"plug in" to Mr. Fortune; that is to say, without hesitation and without
reflection. He went in by the communicating door, first giving a single
tap but without waiting for a reply to the tap. Mr. Fortune, presenting
a whale-like flank, was at his table going through invoices and making
notes in a small black book which he carried always in a tail pocket of
his jacket.

"Can I speak to you a minute, Mr. Fortune?"

Mr. Fortune entered a note in the small black book: "Twenty-eight,
sixteen, four." He placed a broad elastic band round the book and with
the dexterity of practice passed the book round his bulk and into the
tail pocket. He flicked his hands away and extended them for an instant,
palms upward, much as a conjurer might to show there was nothing in
them. "Certainly you may speak to me, Sabre." He performed his neat
revolving trick. "As a matter of fact, I rather wanted to speak to you."
He pointed across the whale-like front to the massive leathern armchair
beside his desk.

The seat of the armchair marked in a vast hollow the cumulative
ponderosity of the pillars of Church and School who were wont to sit in
it. Sabre seated himself on the arm. "Was it about this partnership
business?"

Mr. Fortune had already frowned to see Sabre upon the arm of the chair,
a position for which the arm was not intended. His frown deepened. "What
partnership business?"

"Well, you recollect promising me--being good enough to promise
me--_twice_--that I was going to come into partnership--"

Mr. Fortune folded his hands upon the whale-like front. "I certainly do
not recollect that, Sabre." He raised a hand responsive to a gesture.
"Allow me. I recollect no _promise_. Either twice or any other number of
times, greater or fewer. I _do_ recollect mentioning to you the
_possibility_ of my making you such a proposal in my good time. Is that
what you refer to as 'this partnership business'?"

"Yes--partly. Well, look here, sir, it's _been_ a pretty good time,
hasn't it? I mean since you spoke of it."

Mr. Fortune tugged strongly at his watch by its gold chain and looked at
the watch rather as though he expected to see the extent of the good
time there recorded. He forced it back with both hands rather as though
it had failed of this duty and was being crammed away in disgrace. "I am
expecting Canon Toomuch." He hit the watch, cowering (as one might
suppose) in his pocket. "You know, my dear Sabre, I do think this is a
little odd. A little unusual. You cannot _bounce_ into a partnership,
Sabre. I know your manner. I know your manner well. Oblige me by not
fiddling with that paper knife. Thank you. And I make allowances for
your manner. But believe me a partnership is not to be _bounced_ into.
You give me the impression--I do not say you mean it, I say you _give_
it--of suddenly and without due cause or just im--just opportunity,
trying to _bounce_ me into taking you into partnership. I most
emphatically am not to be _bounced_, Sabre. I never have been bounced
and you may quite safely take it from me that I never propose or intend
to be _bounced_."

Sabre thought, "Well, it would take a steam crane to bounce you,
anyway." He said. "I hadn't the faintest intention of doing any such
thing. If I made you think so, I'm sorry. I simply wanted to ask if you
have changed your mind, and if so why. I mean, whether I have given you
any cause for dissatisfaction since you prom--since you first mentioned
it to me."

Mr. Fortune's whale-like front had laboured with some agitation during
his repudiation of liability to being bounced. It now resumed its normal
dignity. "You certainly have not, Sabre. No cause for dissatisfaction.
On the contrary. You know quite well that there are certain
characteristics of yours of which, constituted as I am, I do not
approve. I really must beg of you not to fiddle with those scissors.
Thank you. But they are, happily, quite apart from your work. I do not
permit them to influence my opinion of you by one jot or tittle. You may
entirely reassure yourself. May I inquire why you should have supposed I
had changed my mind?"

"Because I've just heard that you've told Twyning you're going to take
_him_ into partnership."

The whale-like front gave a sudden leap and quiver precisely as if it
had been struck by a cricket ball. Mr. Fortune's voice hardened very
remarkably. "As to that, I will permit myself two remarks. In the first
place, I consider it highly reprehensible of Twyning to have
communicated this to you--"

Sabre broke in. "Well, he didn't. I'd like you to be quite clear on that
point, if you don't mind. Twyning didn't tell me. It came out quite
indirectly in the course of something I was saying to him. I doubt if he
knows that I know even. I inferred it. It seems I inferred correctly."

There flashed through Mr. Fortune's mind a poignant regret that, this
being the case, he had not denied it. He said, "I am exceedingly glad to
hear it. I might have known Twyning would not be capable of such a
breach of discretion. Resuming what I had to say--and, Sabre, I shall
indeed be most intensely obliged if you will refrain from fiddling with
the things on my table--resuming what I had to say, I will observe in
the second and last place that I entirely deprecate, I will go further,
I most strongly resent any questioning by any one member of my staff
based on any intentions of mine relative to another member of my staff.
This business is my business. I think you are sometimes a little prone
to forget that. If it seems good to me to strengthen your hand in your
department that has nothing whatever to do with Twyning. And if it seems
good to me to strengthen Twyning's hand in Twyning's department that has
nothing whatever to do with you."

Sabre, despite his private feelings in the matter, characteristically
followed this reasoning completely, and said so. "Yes, that's your way
of looking at it, sir, and I don't say it isn't perfectly sound--from
your point of view--"

Mr. Fortune inclined his head solemnly: "I am obliged to you."

"--Only other people look at things on the face of them, just as they
appear. You know--it's difficult to express it--I've put my heart into
those books." He made a gesture towards his room. "I can't quite explain
it, but I felt that the slight, or what looks like a slight, is on them,
not on me." He put his hand to the back of his head, a habit
characteristic when he was embarrassed or perplexed. "I'm afraid I can't
quite express it, but it's the books. Not myself. I'm--fond of them.
They're not just paper and print to me. I feel that they feel it. You
won't quite understand, I'm afraid--"

"No, I confess that is a little beyond me," said Mr. Fortune, smoothing
his front; and they remained looking at one another.

A sudden and unearthly moan sounded through the room. Mr. Fortune spun
himself with relief to his desk and applied his lips to a flexible
speaking tube. "Yes?" He dodged the tube to his ear, then to his lips
again.

"Beg Canon Toomuch to step up to my room." He laid down the tube.

Sabre roused himself and stood up abruptly. "Ah, well! All right, sir."
He moved towards his door.

"Sabre," inquired Mr. Fortune, "you get on well with Twyning, I trust?"

"Get on? Oh yes. We don't have much to do with each other."

"Do you dislike Twyning?"

"I don't dislike him. I'm indifferent to him."

"I regret to hear that," said Mr. Fortune.

From the door Sabre put a question in his turn: "When are you going to
make this change with Twyning?"

"Not to-day."

"Am I still to remember that you held out partnership to me?"

"Certainly you may."

"When is it likely to be?"

"Not to-day."

Maddening expression!

Sabre, in his room, went towards his chair. He was about to drop into it
when he recollected something. He went out into the corridor and along
the corridor, past Mr. Fortune's door (Canon Toomuch coming heavily up
the stairs) to Twyning's room. He put in his head. "Oh, I say, Twyning,
if Fortune should ever ask you if you told me about that business, you
can tell him you didn't."

"Oh--oh, right-o," said Twyning; and to himself when the door closed,
"Funked speaking to him!"


V

Arrived again in his room, Sabre dropped into his chair. In his eyes was
the look that had been in them when he had tried to explain to Mr.
Fortune about the books, what Mr. Fortune had confessed he found a
little beyond him. He thought: "The books.... Of course Fortune hasn't
imagined them ... seen them grow helped them to grow.... But it hurts.
Like hell it hurts.... And I can't explain to him how I feel about
them.... I can't explain to any one."

His thoughts moved on: "I've been twelve years with him. Twelve years
we've been daily together, and when I said that about the books I sat
there and he sat there--and just looked. Stared at each other like
masks. Masks! Nothing but a mask to be seen for either of us. I sit
behind my mask and he sits behind his and that's all we see. Twelve
mortal years! And there're thousands of people in thousands of
offices ... thousands of homes ... just the same. All behind masks.
Mysterious business. Extraordinary. How do we keep behind? Why do we
keep behind? We're all going through the same life. Come the same way.
Go the same way. You look at insects, ants, scurrying about, and not
two of them seem to have a thing in common, not two of them seem to
know one another; and you think it's odd, you think it's because they
don't know they're all in the same boat. But we're just the same. They
might think it of us. And we _do_ know. And yet you get two lives and
put them together twelve years in an office ... in a house.... Mabel
and I ... practically we just sit and look at each other. Her mask. My
mask...."

He thought: "One knows what it is, what it looks like, with ants.
They're all plugging about like mad like that, not knowing one another,
nor caring, because they all seem to be looking for something. I
wonder.... I wonder--are we? Is that the trouble? All looking for
something.... You can see it in half the faces you see. Some wanting,
and knowing they are wanting something. Others wanting something but
just putting up with it, just content to be discontented. You can see
it. Yes, you can. Looking for what? Love? But lots have love. Happiness?
But aren't lots happy? But are they?"

He knitted his brows: "It goes deeper than that. It's some universal
thing that's wanting. Is it something that religion ought to give, but
doesn't? Light? Some new light to give every one certainty in religion,
in belief. Light?"

His thoughts went to Mabel. "Those houses in King's Close are going to
be eighty pounds a year, and what do you think, Mrs. Toller is going to
take one." And he had not answered her but had rustled the newspaper and
had intended her to know why he had rustled the paper: to show he
couldn't stick it! Unkind. His heart smote him for Mabel. Such a
pathetically simple thing for Mabel to find enjoyment in! Why, he might
just as reasonably rustle the newspaper at a baby because it had
enjoyment in a rattle. A rattle would not amuse him, and Mrs. Toller
taking a house beyond her means did not amuse him; but why on earth
should he--?

He put the thing to himself in his reasoning way, his brow wrinkled up:
She was his wife. She had left her home for his home. She had a right to
his interest in her ideas. He had a duty towards her ideas. Unkind.
Rotten.

Upon a sudden impulse he looked at his watch. Only just after twelve. He
could get back in time for lunch. Lonely for her, day after day, and
left as he had left her that morning. They could have a jolly afternoon
together. He could make it a jolly afternoon. Nona kept coming into his
thoughts--and more so after this Twyning business. He would have Mabel
in his thoughts.

He went in and told Mr. Fortune he rather thought of taking the
afternoon off if he was not wanted. He mounted his bicycle and rode
purposefully back to Mabel.



CHAPTER III


I

The free-wheel run down into Perry Green landed him a little short of
his gate,--not bad! Pirrip, the postman, whom he had passed in the
bicycle's penultimate struggles, overtook him in its death throes and
watched with interest the miracles of balancing with which, despite his
preoccupation of mind, habit made him prolong them to the uttermost
inch.

He dismounted. "Anything for me, Pirrip?"

"One for you, Mr. Sabre."

Sabre took the letter and glanced at the handwriting.

It was from Nona.

Her small, neat, masculine script had once been as familiar to him as
his own. It was curiously like his own. She had the same trick of not
linking all the letters in a word. Her longer words, like his own,
looked as if they were two or three short words close together. To this
day, when he did not get a letter from her once in a year--or in five
years--his address on an envelope in her handwriting was a thing he
could bring, and sometimes did bring with perfect clearness before his
mental vision.

He glanced at it, regarded it for slightly longer than a glance, and
with a little pucker of brows and lips, then made the action of putting
it, unopened, in his pocket. Then he rested the bicycle against his hip
and opened her letter.

"Northrepps. Tuesday." She never dated her letters. He used to be
always telling her about that. Tuesday was yesterday.

     Dear Marko--We're back. We've been from China to Peru--almost. Come
     up one day and be bored about it. How are you?

     Nona.

He thought: "Funny she didn't mention she'd written just now. Perhaps
she thought it was funny I didn't say I'd had it. I must tell her."

He returned her letter to its envelope and put the envelope in his
pocket. Then wheeled his bicycle into his gate. He smiled. "Mabel will
be surprised at me back like this."

Mabel was descending the stairs as he entered the hall. In the white
dress she wore she made a pleasant picture against the broad, shallow
stairway and the dark panelling. But she did not appear particularly
pleased to see him. But he thought, "Why should she be? That's just it.
That's why I've come back."

"Hullo?" she greeted him. "Have you forgotten something?"

He smiled invitingly. "No, I've just come back. I suddenly thought we'd
have a holiday."

She showed puzzlement. "A holiday? What, the office? All of you?"

She had paused three steps from the foot of the stairs, her right hand
on the banisters.

His wife!...

He slid his hand up the rail and rested it on hers. "Good lord, no. Not
the office. No, I suddenly thought we'd have a holiday. You and I."

He half hoped she would respond to the touch of his hand by turning the
palm of her own to it. But he thought, "Why should she?" and she did
not. She said, "But how extraordinary! Whatever for?"

"Well, why not?"

"But what did you say at the office? What reason did you give?"

"Didn't give any. I just said I thought I wouldn't be back."

"But whatever will Mr. Fortune think?"

"Oh, what does it matter what he thinks? He won't think anything about
it."

"But he'll think it's funny."

He thought, "Dash these buts!" This was what he called "niggling." It
was on the tip of his tongue to say, "Why niggle about the thing?" but
he recollected his purpose; that was him all over and that was just it!
He said brightly, "Let him. Do him good. The idea suddenly came to me as
a bit of a lark to have an unexpected holiday with you, and I just
cleared off and came!"

She had descended and he moved along the hall with her towards the
morning room.

"It's rather extraordinary," she said.

She certainly was not enthusiastic over it. She asked, "Well, what are
you going to do?"

He wished he had thought of some plan as he came along. "What time's
lunch? Half-past one? What about getting your bike and going for a bit
of a run first?"

She was at a drawer of her table where she kept, with beautiful
neatness, implements for various household duties. A pair of long
scissors came out. "I can't possibly. I've things to do. Besides some
one's coming to lunch."

He began to feel he had been a fool. The feeling nettled him and he
thought, "Why 'some one'? Dash it, I might be a stranger in the house.
Why doesn't she say who?" And then he thought, "Why should she? This is
just _it_. I'd have heard all about it at breakfast if I'd been decently
communicative."

He said, "Good. Who?"

She took a shallow basket from the shelf. He knew this and the long
scissors for her flower-cutting implements. "Mr. Bagshaw."

And before he could stop himself he had groaned, "Oh, lord!"

She "flew up" and he rushed in tumultuously to make amends for his
blunder and prevent her flying up.

"Mark, I do wish--"

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I really am most awfully sorry, Mabel. 'Oh,
lord''s not really profanity. You know it's not. It's just my way--"

"I know that."

But he persevered. "As a matter of fact, it's clear connection of
thought in this case. Bagshaw's a clergyman, and my mind flew instantly
to celestial things."

She did not respond to this. "In any case, I really cannot see why you
should object to Mr. Boom Bagshaw."

"I don't. I don't in the least."

"I've heard you say--often--that he's far and away the best preacher
you've ever heard."

"He is. Absolutely."

"Well, then?"

"It's just his coming to lunch. He's such a terrific talker and you know
I can't stick talkers."

"Yes, that's just why I invite them when you're not here."

He laughed and came across the room towards her impulsively. He was
going to carry this through. "You've got me there. Properly." He took
the basket from her hand. "Come on, we'll cut the flowers. I'll be
absolutely chatty with old Bagshaw."

She smiled and her smile encouraged him tremendously. This was the way
to do it! They went through the glass doors into the garden and he
continued, "Really chatty. I'm going to turn over a new leaf. As a
matter of fact, that's why I came back. I got out of bed the wrong side
this morning, didn't I?"

He felt as he always remembered once feeling as a boy when, after going
to bed, he had come downstairs in his nightshirt and said to his father,
"I say, father, I didn't tell the truth this morning. I had been
smoking." He had never forgotten the enormous relief of that confession,
nor the bliss of his father's, "That's all right, old man. That's fine.
Don't cry, old chap." And he felt precisely that same enormous relief
now.

She said, "Was that the reason? How awfully funny of you!" and she gave
one of her sudden bursts of laughter.

He had a swift feeling that this was not quite the same as the reception
of his confession by his father in that long-ago; but he thought
immediately, "The thing's quite different." Anyway, he had confessed.
She knew why he had come back so suddenly. He felt immensely happy. And
when she said, "I think we'll have some of the roses," he gaily replied,
"Yes, rather. These roses!"

Fine! How easy to be on jolly terms!

And immediately it proved not so easy. He had got over the rocks of
"niggling"; he found himself in the shoals of exasperation.


II

She cut the first rose and held it to her lips, smelling it. "Lovely.
Who was your letter from, Mark?"

He thought, "How on earth did she know?" He had forgotten it himself.
"How ever did you know? From Lady Tybar. They're back."

"I saw you from the window with the postman. Lady Tybar! Whatever was
she writing to you about?"

He somehow did not like this. Why "_whatever_"? And being watched was
rather beastly; he remembered he had fiddled about with the
letter,--half put it in his pocket and then taken it out again. And why
not? What did it matter? But he had a prevision that it was going to
matter. Mabel did not particularly like Nona. He said, "Just to say
they're back. She wants us to go up there."

"An invitation? Whyever didn't she write to me?"

"Whyever" again!--"May I see it?"

He took the letter from his pocket and handed it to her. "It's not
exactly an invitation--not formal."

She did what he called "flicked" the letter out of its envelope. He
watched her reading it and in his mind he could see as perfectly as she
with her eyes, the odd, neat script; in his mind he read it with her,
word by word.

     Dear Marko--We're back. We've been from China to Peru almost. Come
     up one day and be bored about it. How are you?

     Nona.

His thought was, "Damn the letter!"

Mabel handed it back, without returning it to its envelope. She said,
"No, it's not formal."

She snipped three roses with astonishing swiftness,--_snip, snip, snip_!

Sabre sought about in his mind for something to say. There was nothing
in his mind to say. He had an absurd vision of his two hands feeling
about in the polished interior of a skull, as one might fumble for
something in a large jar.

At the end of an enormous cavity of time he found some slight remark
about blight on the rose trees--the absence of it this year--and
ventured it. He had again an absurd vision of dropping it into an
enormous cavern, as a pea into an immense bowl, and it seemed to tinkle
feebly and forlornly, as a pea would. "No blight this year, eh?"

"No; is there?" agreed Mabel,--_snip_!

Nevertheless conversation arose from the forlorn pea and was maintained.
They moved about the garden from flower bed to flower bed. In half an
hour the shallow basket was beautified with fragrant blooms and Mabel
thought she had enough.

"Well, that's that," said Sabre as they reëntered the morning room.


III

Low Jinks, her matchless training at the level of mysteriously performed
duties pat to the moment and without command, appeared with a tray of
vases. Each vase was filled to precisely half its capacity with water.
There were also a folded newspaper, a pair of small gilt scissors and a
saucer. Low Jinks spread the newspaper at one end of the table, arranged
the vases in a semicircle upon it, and placed the gilt scissors
precisely in alignment with the right-hand vase of the semicircle, and
the saucer (for the stalk ends) precisely in alignment with the
left-hand vase. She then withdrew, closing the door with exquisite
softness. Sabre had never seen this rite before. The perfection of its
performance was impressive. He thought, "Mabel is marvellous." He said,
"Shall I take them out of the basket?"

"No, leave them. I take them up just as I want them."

She took up a creamy rose and snipped off a fragment of stalk over the
saucer. "Why does she call you 'Marko'?"

He was utterly taken aback. If the question had come from any one but
Mabel, he would have quite failed to connect it with the letter. But
there had distinctly been an "incident" over the letter, though so far
closed, as he had imagined, that he was completely surprised.

He said "Who? Nona?"

"Yes, Nona, if you like. Lady Tybar."

"Why, she always has. You know that."

Mabel put the rose into a specimen vase with immense care and touched a
speck off its petals with her fingers. "I really didn't."

"Mabel, you know you do. You must have heard her."

"Well, I may have. But long ago. I certainly didn't know she used it in
letters."

He felt he was growing angry.

"What on earth's the difference?"

"It seems to me there's a great deal of difference. I didn't know she
wrote you letters."

He was angry. "Damn it, she doesn't write me letters."

She shrugged her shoulders. "You seem to get them anyway."

Maddening!

And then he thought, "I'm not going to let it be maddening. This is just
what happens." He said, "Well, this is silly. I've known her--we've
known one another--for years, since we were children, pretty well. She's
called me by my Christian name since I can remember. You must have heard
her. We don't see much of her--perhaps you haven't. I thought you had.
Anyway, dash the thing. What does it matter?"

"It doesn't _matter_"--she launched a flower into a vase--"a bit. I only
think it's funny, that's all."

"Well, it's just her way."

Mabel gave a little sniff. He thought it was over. But it wasn't over.
"If you ask me, I call it a funny letter. You say your Christian name,
but it isn't your Christian name--_Marko_! And then saying, 'How are
you?' like that--"

"Like what? She just said it, didn't she?"

"Yes I know. And then 'Nona.' Don't you call that funny?"

"Well, I always used to call her 'Nona.' She'd have thought it funny, as
you call it, to put anything else. I tell you it's just her way."

"Well, I think it's a very funny way and I think anybody else would
think so. I don't like her. I never did like her."

There seemed no more to say.


IV

He walked up to his room. He closed the door behind him and sat on a
straight-backed chair, his legs outthrust. Failure? He had come back
home thus suddenly with immensely good intentions. Failure? On the
whole, no. There was a great deal more he could have said downstairs,
and a great deal more he had felt uncommonly inclined to say. But he had
left the morning room without saying it, and that was good; that
redeemed his sudden return from absolute failure.

Why had he returned? He "worked back" through the morning on the Fargus
principle. Not because of his thoughts after the Twyning business; not
because of the disturbance of the Twyning business. No. He had returned
because he had seen Nona. Thoughts--feelings--had been stirred within
him by meeting her. And it had suddenly been rather hateful to have
those thoughts and to feel that--that Mabel had no place in them.

Well, why had he come up here? What was he doing up here? Well, it
hadn't been altogether successful. Mabel hadn't been particularly
excited to see him. No, but that didn't count. Why should she be? He had
gone off after breakfast, glum as a bear. Well, then there was that
niggling business over why he had returned. Always like that. Never
plump out over a thing he put up. Niggling. And then this infernal
business about the letter. That word "funny." She must have used it a
hundred times. Still.... The niggling had been carried off, they had
gone into the garden together; and this infernal letter business--at
least he had come away without boiling over about it. Much better to
have come away as he did.... Still....


V

A gong boomed enormously through the house. It had been one of her
father's wedding presents to Mabel and it always reminded Sabre of the
Dean's, her father's voice. The Dean's voice boomed, swelling into a
loud boom when he was in mid-speech and reverberating into a distant
boom as his periods terminated. This was the warning gong for lunch. In
ten minutes, in this perfectly ordered house, a different gong, a set of
chimes, would announce that lunch was ready. The reverberations had
scarcely ceased when Low Jinks, although she had caused the
reverberations, appeared in his room with a brass can of hot water.

"Mr. Boom Bagshaw has not arrived yet, sir," said Low Jinks; "but the
mistress thought we wouldn't wait any longer."

She displaced the ewer from the basin and substituted the brass can. She
covered the can with a white towel, uncovered the soap dish, and
disappeared, closing the door as softly as if it and the doorpost were
padded with velvet. Perfect establishment!

Sabre washed his hands and went down. Mabel was in the morning room,
seated at the centre table where the flowers had been and where now was
her embroidery basket. She was embroidering, an art which, in common
with all the domestic arts, she performed to perfection. "Bagshaw's
late?" said Sabre.

Mabel glanced at the clock. Her gesture above her busy needle was
pretty.

"Well, he wasn't absolutely sure about coming. I thought we wouldn't
wait. Ah, there he is."

Sabre thought, "Good. That business is over. Nothing in it. Only Mabel's
way."

Sounds in the hall. "In the morning room," came Low Jinks's voice.
"Lunch ... wash your hands, sir?"

There was only one person in all England who, arriving at Crawshaws,
would not have been gently but firmly enfolded by the machine-like order
of its perfect administration and been led in and introduced with rites
proper to the occasion. But that one person was the Reverend Cyril Boom
Bagshaw, and he now strolled across the threshold and into the room.


VI

He strolled in. He wore a well-made suit of dark grey flannel, brown
brogue shoes and a soft collar with a black tie tied in a sailor's knot.
He disliked clerical dress and he rarely wore it. He was dark. His
good-looking face bore habitually a rather sulky expression as though he
were a little bored or dissatisfied. You would never have thought, to
look at him, that he was a clergyman, or, as he would have said, a
priest, and in not thinking that you would have paid him the compliment
that pleased him most. This was not because Mr. Boom Bagshaw lacked
earnestness in his calling, for he was enormously in earnest, but
because he disliked and despised the conventional habits and manners and
appearance of the clergy and, in any case, intensely disliked being one
of a class. For the same reasons he wore a monocle; not because the
vision of his right eye was defective but because no clergyman wears a
monocle. It is not done by the priesthood and that is why the Reverend
Cyril Boom Bagshaw did it.

He strolled negligently into the morning room, his hands in his trouser
pockets, the skirt of his jacket rumpled on his wrists. He gave the
impression of having been strolling about the house all day and of now
strolling in here for want of a better room to stroll into. He nodded
negligently to Sabre, "Hullo, Sabre." He smiled negligently at Mabel and
seated himself negligently on the edge of the table, still with his
hands in his pockets. He swung one leg negligently and negligently
remarked, "Good morning, Mrs. Sabre. Embroidery?"

Sabre had the immediate and convinced feeling that the negligent and
reverend gentleman was not in his house but that he was permitted to be
in the house of the negligent and reverend gentleman. And this was the
feeling that the negligent and reverend gentleman invariably gave to his
hosts, whoever they might be; likewise to his congregations. Indeed it
was said by a profane person (who fortunately does not enter this
history) that the Deity entered Mr. Boom Bagshaw's church on the same
terms, and accepted them.

As he sat negligently swinging his leg he frequently strained his chin
upwards and outwards, rather as if his collar were tight (but it was
neatly loose), or as if he were performing an exercise for stretching
the muscles of his neck. This was a habit of his.


VII

A silver entrée dish was placed before Mabel, another before Sabre. Low
Jinks removed her mistress's cover and Mr. Boom Bagshaw pushed aside a
flower vase to obtain a view.

"I don't eat salmon," he remarked. The vase was now between himself and
Sabre. He again moved it, "Or cutlets."

Mabel exclaimed, "Oh, dear! Now I got this salmon in specially from
Tidborough."

"I'll have some of that ham," said Mr. Boom Bagshaw; and he arose
sulkily and strolled to the sideboard where he rather sulkily cut from a
ham in thick wedges. The house was clearly his house.

He addressed himself to Mabel. "Now in a very few weeks you'll no longer
have to get things from Tidborough, Mrs. Sabre--salmon or anything else.
The shops in Market Square are going the minute they're complete. I got
a couple of fishmongers only yesterday."

He spoke as if he had shot a brace of fishmongers and slung them over
his shoulder and flung them into Market Square. Market Square was that
portion of the Garden Home designed for the shopping centre.

"Two!" said Mabel.

"Two. I encourage competition. No one is going to sleep in the Garden
Home."

"What will all the bedrooms be used for then?" Sabre inquired.

Mr. Boom Bagshaw, who was eating his ham with a fork only, holding it at
its extremity in the tips of his fingers and occasionally flipping a
piece of ham into his mouth and swallowing it without visible
mastication, flipped in another morsel and with his right hand moved
three more vases which stood between himself and Sabre. He moved each
deliberately and set it down with a slight thump, rather as if it were a
chessman.

He directed the fork at Sabre and after an impressive moment spoke:

"You know, Sabre, I don't think you're quite alive to what it is that is
growing up about you. Flippancy is out of place. I abominate flippancy."
("Well, dash it, it's my house!" Sabre thought.) "This Garden Home is
not a speculation. It's not a fad. It's not a joke. What is it? You're
thinking it's a damned nuisance. You're right. It _is_ a damned
nuisance--"

Sabre began, "Well--"

"Now, listen, Sabre. It _is_ a damned nuisance; and I put it to you
that, when a toad is discovered embedded in a solid mass of coal or
stone, that coal or stone, when it was slowly forming about that toad,
was a damned nuisance to the toad."

Sabre asked, "Well, am I going to be discovered embedded--"

"Now, listen, Sabre. Another man in my place would say he did not intend
to be personal. I do intend to be personal. I always am personal. I say
that this Garden Home is springing up about you and that you are not
realising what is happening. This Garden Home is going to enshrine life
as it should be lived. More. It is going to make life be lived as it
should he lived. Some one said to me the other day--the Duchess of
Wearmouth; I was staying at Wearmouth Castle--that the Garden Home is
going to be a sanctuary. I said 'Bah!' like that--'Bah!' I said, 'Every
town, every city, every village is a sanctuary; and asleep in its
sanctuary; and dead to life in its sanctuary; and dead to Christ in its
sanctuary.' I said, 'The Garden Home is not going to be a sanctuary, nor
yet a sepulchre, nor yet a tomb. It is going to be a symbol, a signal, a
shout.' More ham."

He paused, pushed his plate to one side more as if it had bitten him
than as if he desired more ham to be placed upon it, and looked around
the room before him, sulkily, and exercising his chin.

Sabre had a vision of dense crowds of bishops in lawn sleeves, duchesses
in Gainsborough hats, and herds of intensely fashionable rank and file
applauding vigorously. He could almost hear the applause. But how to
deal with this man he never knew. He always felt he was about fourteen
when Mr. Boom Bagshaw thus addressed him. He therefore said, "Great!"
and Mabel murmured, "How splendid!"


VIII

But Sabre's thought was--and it remained with him throughout the meal,
acutely illustrated by the impressive monologues which Mr. Boom Bagshaw
addressed to Mabel, and by her radiant responses--his thought was, "I
simply can't get on with this chap--or with any of Mabel's crowd. They
all make me feel like a kid. I can't answer them when they talk. They
say things I've got ideas about but I never can explain my ideas to
them. I never can argue my ideas with them. They've all got convictions
and I believe I haven't any convictions. I've only got instincts and
these convictions come down on instincts like a hammer on an egg."

Mr. Boom Bagshaw was saying, "And we shall have no poor in the Garden
Home. No ugly streets. No mean surroundings. Uplift. Everywhere uplift."

There slipped out of Sabre aloud, "There you are. That's the kind of
thing."

Mr. Boom Bagshaw, as if to disclose without fear precisely where he was,
dismantled from between them the hedge of flowers which he had replaced
and looked sulkily across. "What kind of thing?"

Sabre had a vision of himself advancing an egg for Mr. Bagshaw's hammer.
"About having no poor in the Garden Home. Isn't there something about
the poor being always with us?"

"Certainly there is."

"In the Bible?"

"In the Bible. Do you know to whom it was addressed?"

Sabre admitted that he didn't.

"To Judas Iscariot." (Smash went the egg!)

Sabre said feebly--he _could_ not handle his arguments--"Well, anyway,
'always with us'--there you are. If you're going to create a place where
life is going to be lived as it should be lived, I don't see how you're
going to shut the poor out of it. Aren't they a part of life? They've
got as much right to get away from mean streets and ugly surroundings as
we have--and a jolly sight more need. Always with us. It doesn't matter
tuppence whom it was said to."

"It happens," pronounced Mr. Boom Bagshaw, "to matter a great deal more
than tuppence. It happens to knock the bottom clean out of your
argument. It was addressed to the Iscariot because the Iscariot was
trying to do just what you are trying to do. He was trying to make duty
to the poor an excuse for grudging service to Christ. Now, listen,
Sabre. If people thought a little less about their duty towards the poor
and a little more about their duty towards themselves, they would be in
a great deal fitter state to help their fellow creatures, poor or rich.
That is what the Garden Home is to do for those who live in it, and that
is what the Garden Home is _going_ to do."

He stabbed sharply with the butt of a dessert knife on the dessert
plate which had just been placed before him. The plate split neatly into
two exact halves. He gazed at them sulkily, put them aside, drew another
plate before him, and remarked to Mabel:

"You know we are moving into the vicarage to-morrow? We are giving an At
Home to-morrow week. You will come."

The plural pronoun included his mother. He was intensely celibate.


IX

The day ended in a blazing row.

In the afternoon Mr. Boom Bagshaw carried off Mabel to view the progress
of the Garden Home. While they dallied over coffee at the luncheon
table, Sabre was fidgeting for Bagshaw to be gone. Mabel, operating
dexterously behind the blue flame of a spirit lamp, Low Jinks hovering
around in well-trained acolyte performances, said, "Now I rather pride
myself on my Turkish coffee, Mr. Boom Bagshaw."

Mr. Bagshaw, who appeared to pride himself at least as much on his
characteristics, replied by sulkily looking at his watch; and a moment
later by sulkily taking a cup, rather as if he were a schoolboy bidden
to take lemonade when mannishly desirous of shandygaff, and sulkily
remarking, "I must go."

Sabre fidgeted to see the words put into action. He wanted Bagshaw to be
off. He wanted to resume his sudden intention of remedying his normal
relations with Mabel and the afternoon promised better than the
intention had thus far seen. That niggling over the unexpectedness of
his return,--well, of course it was unexpected and upsetting of her
household routine; but the unexpectedness was over and the letter
incident over, and Mabel, thanks to her guest, delightfully mooded.
Good, therefore, for the afternoon. When the dickens was this chap
going?

Then Bagshaw, rising sulkily, "Well, you'd better come up and have a
look round."

And Mabel, animatedly, "I'd like to"; and to Sabre, "You won't care to
come, Mark."

Sabre said, "No, I won't."


X

Throughout dinner--Mabel returned only just in time to get ready for
dinner--Sabre examined with dispassionate interest the exercise of
trying to say certain words and being unable to say them. They conversed
desultorily; in their usual habit. He told himself that he was speaking
several hundred "other" words; but the intractable words that he desired
to utter would not be framed. He counted them on his fingers under the
table. Only seven: "Well, how was the Garden Home looking?" Only seven.
He could not say them. The incident they brought up rankled. He had come
home to take a day off with her. She knew he was there at the luncheon
table to take a day off with her. It had interested her so little, she
had been so entirely indifferent to it, that she had not even expressed
a wish he should so much as attend her on the inspection with Bagshaw.
The more he thought of it the worse it rankled. She knew he was at home
to be with her and she had deliberately walked off and left him....
"Well, how was the Garden Home looking?" No. Not much. He couldn't. He
visualised the impossible seven written on the tablecloth. He saw them
in script; he saw them in print; he imagined them written by a finger on
the wall. Say them--no.

Mabel left him sitting at the table with a cigarette. There came
suddenly to his assistance in the fight with the stubborn seven, abreast
of the thoughts in the office that had brought him home, a realisation
of her situation such as he had had that first night together in the
house, eight years before; there she was in the morning room, alone. She
had given up her father's home for his home--and there she was: a happy
afternoon behind her and no one to discuss it with. Just because he
could not say, "Well, how was the Garden Home looking?"

He thought, "I'm hateful." He got up vigorously and strode into the
morning room: "Well, how was the Garden Home looking?" His voice was
bright and interested.

She was reading a magazine. She did not raise her eyes front the page.
"Eh? Oh, very nice. Delightful."

"Tell us about it."

"What? Oh ... yes." Her mind was in the magazine. She read on a moment.
Then she laid the magazine on her lap and looked up. "The Garden Home?
Yes--oh, yes. It was charming. It's simply springing up. You ought to
have come."

He stretched himself in a big chair opposite her. He laughed. "Well,
dash it, I like that. You didn't exactly implore me to."

She yawned. "Oh, well. I knew you wouldn't care about it." She yawned
again, "Oh dear. I'm tired. We must have walked miles, to and fro." She
put down her hands to take up her magazine again. She clearly was not
interested by his interest. But he thought, "Well, of course she's not.
For her it's like eating something after it's got cold. Dinner was the
time."

He said, "I expect you did--walk miles. Bagshaw all over it, I bet."

She did what he called "tighten herself." "Well, naturally, he's
pleased--enthusiastic. He's done more than any one else to keep the idea
going."

Sabre laughed. "I should say so! Marvellous person! What's he going to
do about not wearing clerical dress when he has to wear gaiters?"

"What do you mean--gaiters?"

Signs of flying up. What on earth for? "Why, when he's a bishop. Don't
you--"

She flew up. "I suppose that's some sneer!"

"Sneer! Rot. I mean it. A chap like Bagshaw's not going to be a parish
priest all his life. He's out to be a bishop and he'll be a bishop. If
he changed his mind and wanted to be a Judge or a Cabinet Minister, he'd
be a Judge or a Cabinet Minister. He's that sort."

"I knew you were sneering."

"Mabel, don't be silly. I'm not sneering. Bagshaw's a clever--"

"You say he's 'that sort.' That's a sneer." She put her hands on the
arms of her chair and raised herself to sit upright. She spoke with
extraordinary intensity. "Nearly everything you say to me or to my
friends is a sneer. There's always something behind what you say. Other
people notice it--"

"Other people."

"Yes. Other people. They say you're sarcastic. That's just a polite
way--"

He said, "Oh, come now, Mabel. Not sarcastic. I swear no one thinks I'm
sarcastic. I promise you Bagshaw doesn't. Bagshaw thinks I'm a fool. A
complete fool. Look at lunch!"

She caught him up. She was really angry. "Yes. Look at lunch. That's
just what I mean. Any one that comes to the house, any of my friends,
anything they say you must always take differently, always argue about.
That's what I call sneering--"

He, flatly, "Well, that isn't sneering. Let's drop it."

She had no intention of dropping it. "It is sneering. They don't know it
is. But I know it is."


XI

He had the feeling that his anger would arise responsive to hers, as one
beast calling defiance to another, if this continued. And he did not
want it to arise. He had sometimes thought of anger as a savage beast
chained within a man. It had helped him to control rising ill-temper. He
thought of it now: of her anger. He had a vision of it prowling, as a
dark beast among caves, challenging into the night. He wished to retain
the vision. His own anger, prowling also, would not respond while he
retained the picture. It was prowling. It was suspicious. It would be
mute while he watched it. While he watched it....

He pulled himself sharply to his feet.

"Well, well,", he said. "It's not meant to be sneering. Let's call it my
unfortunate manner."

He stood before her, half-smiling, his hands in his pockets, looking
down at her.

She said, "Perhaps you're different with your friends. I hope you are.
With your friends."

He caught a glint in her eye as she repeated the words. Its meaning did
not occur to him.

He bantered, "Oh, I'm not as bad as all that. And anyway, the friends
are all the same friends. This place isn't so big."

Then that quick glint of her eye was explained--the flash before the
discharge.

"Perhaps your friends are just coming back," she said. "Lady Tybar."

The vision of his dark anger broke away. Mute while he watched it,
immediately it lifted its head and answered her own. "Look here--" he
began; and stopped. "Look here," he said more quietly, "don't begin that
absurd business again."

"I don't think it is absurd."

"No, you called it 'funny.'"

She drew in her feet as if to arise. "Yes, and I think it's funny. All
of it. I think you've been funny all day to-day. Coming back like that!"

"I told you why I came back. To have a day off with you. Funny day off
it's been! You're right there!"

"Yes, it _has_ been a funny day off."

He thought, "My God, this bickering! Why don't I get out of the room?"

"Come back for a day off with me! It's a funny thing you came back just
in time to get that letter! Before it was delivered! There! Now you
know!"

He was purely amazed. He thought, and his amazement was such that,
characteristically, his anger left him; he thought, "Well, of all
the--!"

But she otherwise interpreted his astonishment. She thought she had made
an advantage and she pressed it. "Perhaps you knew it was coming?"

"How on earth could I have known it was coming?"

She seemed to pause, to be considering. "She might have told you. You
might have seen her."

He said, "As it happens, I did see her. Not three hours before I came
back."

She seemed disappointed. She said, "I know you did. We met Lord Tybar."

And he thought, "Good lord! She was trying to catch me."

She went on, "You never told me you'd met them. Wasn't that funny?"

"If you'd just think a little you'd see there was nothing funny about
it. You found the letter so amazingly funny that, to tell you the truth,
I'd had about enough of the Tybars. And I've had about enough of them."

"I daresay you have--with me. Perhaps you'll tell me this--would you
have told me about the letter if I hadn't seen you get it?"

He thought before he answered and he answered out of his thoughts. He
said slowly, "I--don't--believe--I--would. I wouldn't. I wouldn't
because I'd have known

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