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
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 perfectly well that you'd have thought it—funny."

XII

No answer he could have made could have more exasperated her. "I—don't—believe—I—would." Deliberation! Something incomprehensible to her going on in his mind, and as a result of it a statement that no one on earth (she felt) but he would have made. Any one else would have said boldly, blusteringly, "Of course I would have told you about the letter." She would have liked that. She would have disbelieved it and she could have said, and enjoyed saying, she disbelieved it. Or any one else would have said furiously, "No, I'm damned if I'd have shown you the letter." She would have liked that. It would have affirmed her suspicions that there was "something in it"; and she wished her suspicions to be affirmed. It would have been something definite. Something justifiably incentive of anger, of resentment, of jealousy. Something she could understand.

For she did not understand her husband. That was her grievance against him. She never had understood him. That den incident in the very earliest days of their marriage had been an intimation of a way of looking at things that to her was entirely and exasperatingly inexplicable; and since then, increasingly year by year, her understanding had failed to follow him. He had retired farther and farther into himself. He lived in his mind, and she could by no means penetrate into his mind. His ideas about things, his attitude towards things, were wholly and exasperatingly incomprehensible to her.

"It's like," she had once complained to her father, "it's like having a foreigner in the house."

Things, in her expression, "went on" in his mind, and she could not understand what went on in his mind, and it exasperated her to know they were going on and that she could not understand them.

"I—don't—believe—I—would." Characteristic, typical expression of those processes of his mind that she could not understand! And then the reason: "I wouldn't because I'd have known perfectly well that you'd have thought it—funny."

And, exasperation on exasperation's head, he was right. She did think it funny; and by his very reply—for she knew him well enough, so exasperatingly well, to know that this was complete sincerity, complete truth—he proved to her that it was not really funny but merely something she could not understand. Robbery of her fancy, her hope that it was something definite against him, something justifiably incentive of resentment, of jealousy!

It was as if he had said, "You can't understand a letter like this. There's nothing in it to understand. And that's just what you can't understand. Look here, you see my head. I'm in there. You can't come in. You don't know how to. I can't tell you how to. Nobody could tell you. And you wouldn't know what to make of it if you did get in."

Exasperating. Insufferable. Insupportable!

She could not express her feelings in words. She expressed them in action. She arose violently and left the room. The whole of her emotions she put into the slam of the door behind her. The ornaments shivered. A cup sprang off a bracket and dashed itself to pieces on the floor.

XIII

Sabre regarded the broken cup much as Sir Isaac Newton presumably regarded the fallen apple. He "worked back" from the cup through the events of the day, and through the events of the day returned to the cup. It interested him to find that the fragments on the floor were as logical a result of the movements of the day as they would have been of getting the small hand axe out of the woodshed, aiming a blow at the cup, and hitting the cup.

He thought, "I started to break that cup when I rustled the newspaper at breakfast. I went on when I suddenly came back and got into that niggling business over why I had come back. Went on when I walked off to my room after that letter business. Practically took up the axe when I couldn't say, 'Well, how's the Garden Home going on?' at dinner. And smashed it when I chaffed about Bagshaw an hour ago. Rum business! Rotten business."

That was the day's epitaph. But for the murder of the cup he found—gone to bed and lying awake—a culprit other than himself. He thought, "It was meeting Nona made me come home like that. But if that had been the first time I'd ever met Nona I shouldn't have returned. So it goes back further than that. Nine—ten years. The day she married Tybar. If she hadn't married Tybar she'd have married me. The cup wouldn't have been broken. Nona broke that cup."

CHAPTER IV

I

These events were on a Monday. On the following Thursday Nona came to see him at his office.

She was announced through the speaking-tube on his desk:

"Lady Tybar to see you, sir."

Nona! But he was not really surprised. He had taken no notice of her letter. He had wanted to go up to Northrepps to see her, but he had not been. When two days passed and still he prevented himself from going, he began to have the feeling—somehow—that she would come to see him. It was the third day and she was here, downstairs.

"Ask her to come up," he said.

She came in. She wore (as Sabre saw it) "a pale-blue sort of thing" and "a sort of black hat." He had considered it as an odd thing, in his thoughts of her since their meeting, that, though he could always have some kind of notion what other women were wearing, he never could remember any detail of Nona's dress.

But it was her face he always looked at.

She stood still immediately she was across the threshold and the door closed behind her. She was smiling as though she felt herself to be up to some lark. "Hullo, Marko. Don't you hate me for coming in here like this?"

"It's jolly surprising."

"That's another way of saying it. Now if you'd said it was surprisingly jolly! Well, shake hands, Marko, and pretend you're glad."

He laughed and put out his hand. But she delayed response; she first slipped off the gauntlets she was wearing and then gave him her hand. "There!" she said.

"There!" It was as though she had now done something she much wanted to do; as one says "There!" on at last sitting down after much fatigue.

She tossed her gauntlets on to a chair. She walked past him towards the window. "You got my letter?"

"Yes."

Her face was averted. Her voice had not the bantering note with which she had spoken at her entry.

"You never answered it."

"Well, I'd just seen you—just before I got it."

She was looking out of the window. "Why haven't you been up?"

"Oh—I don't know. I was coming."

"Well, I had to come," she said.

He made no reply. He could think of none to make.

II

She turned sharply away from the window and came towards him, radiant again, as at her entry. And in her first bantering tone, "I know you hate it," she smiled, resuming her first suggestion, "me coming here, like this. It makes you feel uncomfortable. You always feel uncomfortable when you see me, Marko. I'd like to know what you thought when they told you I was here—"

He started to speak.

She went on, "No, I wouldn't. I'd like to know just what you were doing before they told you. Tell me that, Marko."

"I believe I wasn't doing anything. Just thinking."

"Well, I like you best when you're thinking. You puzzle, don't you, Marko? You've got a funny old head. I believe you live in your old head, you know. Puzzling things. Clever beast! I wish I could live in mine." And she gave a note of laughter.

"Where do you live, Nona?"

"I don't live. I just go on"—she paused—"flotsam."

Strange word to use, strangely spoken!

It seemed to Sabre to drop with a strange, detached effect into the conversation between them. His habit of visualising inanimate things caused him to see as it were a pool between them at their feet, and from the word dropped into it ripples that came to his feet upon his margin of the pool and to her feet upon hers.

III

He took the word away from its personal application. "I believe that's rather what I was thinking about when you came, Nona. About how we just go on—flotsam. Don't you know on a river where it's tidal, or on the seashore at the turn, the mass of stuff you see there, driftwood and spent foam and stuff, just floating there, uneasily, brought in and left there—from somewhere; and then presently the tide begins to take it and it's drawn off and moves away and goes—somewhere. Arrives and floats and goes. That's mysterious, Nona?"

She said swiftly, as though she were stirred, "Oh, Marko, yes, that's mysterious. Do you know sometimes I've seen drift like that, and I've felt—oh, I don't know. But I've put out a stick and drawn in a piece of wood just as the stuff was moving off, just to save it being carried away into—well, into that, you know."

"Have you, Nona?"

She answered, "Do you think that's what life is, Marko?"

"It's not unlike," he said. And he added, "Except about some one coming along with a stick and drawing a bit into safety. I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for—"

He suddenly realised that he was back precisely at the thoughts his mind had taken up on the morning he had met her. But with a degree more of illumination. Two feelings came into his mind, the second hard upon the other and overriding it, as a fierce horseman might catch and override one pursued. He said, "It's rather jolly to have some one that can see ideas like that." And then the overriding, and he said with astonishing roughness, "But you—you aren't flotsam! How can you be flotsam—the life you've—taken?"

And, lo, if he had struck her, and she been bound, defenceless, and with her eyes entreating not to be struck again, she could not deeper have entreated him than in the glance she fleeted from her eyes, the quiver of her lids that first released, then veiled it.

It stopped his words. It caught his throat.

IV

He got up quickly. "I say, Nona, never mind about thinking. I'll tell you what's been doing. Rotten. Happened just after I met you the other day."

"The dust on these roads!" she said. She touched her eyes with her handkerchief. "What, Marko?"

"Well, old Fortune promised to take me into partnership about an age ago."

"Marko, he ought to have done it an age ago. What's there rotten about that?" Her voice and her air were as gay as when she had entered.

"The rotten thing is that he's turned it down. At least practically has. He—" He told her of the Twyning and Fortune incident. "Pretty rotten of old Fortune, don't you think?"

"Old fiend!" said Nona. "Old trout!"

Sabre laughed. "Good word, trout. The men here all say he's like a whale. They call him Jonah," and he told her why.

She laughed gaily. "Marko! How disgusting you are! But I'm sorry. I am. Poor old Marko.... Of course it doesn't matter a horse-radish what an old trout like that thinks about your work, but it does matter, doesn't it? I know how you feel. They had an author man at a place we were staying at the other day—Maurice Ash—and he told me that although he says it doesn't matter, and knows it doesn't matter, when an absolutely trivial person says something riling about any of his stuff, still it does matter. He said a thing you've produced out of yourself you can't bear to have slighted—not by the butcher. Gladys Occleve made us laugh. Maurice Ash said to her, 'It's like a mother's child. Look here, you're a countess,' he said to her. 'You oughtn't to mind what a butcher thinks of your children; but supposing the butcher said your infant Henry was a stupid little brat; what would you do?' Gladys said she'd dash a best end of the neck straight into his face."

Sabre laughed. "Yes, that's the feeling. But of course, all these books"—he indicated the shelves—"aren't mine, not my children, more like my adopted children."

She declared it was the same thing. "More so, in a way. You've invented them, haven't you, called them out of the vasty deep sort of thing and brought them up in the way they should go. I do think it's rather fine, Marko."

She was at the shelves, scanning the books. Her fond, her almost tender sympathy made him, too, feel that it was rather fine. Her light words in her high, clear tone voiced exactly his feelings towards the books. Talking with her was, in the reception and return of his thoughts, nearer to reading a book that delighted him than to anything else with which he could compare it. There was the same interchange of ideas, not necessarily expressed; the same creation and play of fancy, imagined, not stated.

Her hands were moving about the volumes, pulling out a book here and there; she mused the titles. "'Greek Unseens—Prose'; 'Greek Unseens—Verse'; 'Latin Unseens—Verse.' Marvellous person, Marko! 'The Shell Algebra'; 'The Shell Latin Grammar'; 'The Shell English Literature': 'The Shell Modern Geography.' That's a series 'The Shell,' eh? I do call that a good idea. 'The Six Terms Chemistry'; 'The Six Terms Geology.'"

"Yes, that's another series," he said. He was standing beside her. Delightful this! His pride in his work thrilled anew. "You see the idea of the thing. Gives the boy the feeling of something definite to get through in a definite time."

She was reading one of the prefaces, signed with his initials. "Yes, that's ever so good. I see what you've written here, '...avoiding the formidable and unattractive wilderness that a new textbook commonly presents to the pupil's mind.' I call that jolly good, Marko. I call it all awfully good. Fancy you sitting in here and thinking out all those ideas. Or do you think them out at home? Do you talk them out with Mabel?"

He thought of Mabel's expression. "Those lesson books." He lied. "Oh, yes. Pretty often."

"Show me which was the first one of all—the one you began with."

He showed her. "Fancy!" She handled it. "How fearfully proud of it you must have been, Marko. And Mabel; wasn't she proud? The very first!" She called it "Dear thing" and returned it to its place with a little pat, as of affection.

He turned away. "Oh, well, that's enough," he said.

V

She moved about the room, touching things, looking at things.

"Show me something else. Is that where the old trout basks? Can he hear us? I'm glad I've seen your room, Marko. I shall imagine you puzzling in here."

Touching things, looking at things.... He thought the room would always look different—after this. He felt strangely disturbed. He could with difficulty reply to her. His mind threw back, in its habit, to some dim occasion when he had felt in some degree as he was feeling now. When? Certainly he had felt it before. When?

He remembered. It was a Saturday in the first month of his first term at Tidborough School when his father had come over to see him. The loneliness of newness was still upon him. He had been affected almost to tears by being with some one whose mind was open, as it were, for him to jump into: some one to whom he could open his mind, unseal the home thoughts, unlock the timid tongue. He had talked how he had talked! He had felt bursting to talk; and only talking could ease the feeling; and how it had eased! Yes, this was the same again. He did not want her to go. He wanted to talk—how he wanted to talk!—to tell, unseal, unlock, expose.

He said, "I tell you what, Nona. I'll tell you something. I've an idea sometimes of cutting out from all this place and starting an educational publishing business on my own."

She was enormously interested. "Oh, Marko, if only you would!"

"Well, I think about it. I do. I can see a biggish thing in it. The Tidborough Press, I'd call it. Like the University Press, you know, Oxford and Cambridge. By Jove, it might go any distance, you know!"

"Oh, you must! You must!"

He began to pour out the tremendous and daring scheme.

VI

He talked animatedly,—these long pent up enthusiasms. She attended, rapt and gleaming-eyed, following him with most delicious "Yes—yes" and with little nods; and he suddenly became aware of how poignant to him was the sympathy of her interest,—and stopped. Thus to pour out, thus to be heard, was to experience the exquisite pain that comes with sudden relief of intolerable pain, as when an anodyne steals through the veins of torture. He stopped. He could not bear it.

"Well, that's all," he said.

She declared, "It's splendid. How well you're doing, Marko. I knew you would." She paused. "Not that that matters," she said.

He asked her, "What do you mean—'not that that matters'?"

She made a little face at him. "Marko, you're not to snap me up like that. I've noticed it two or three times. I mean it doesn't matter what a man does. It's what he is that matters."

He laughed. "Well, that lets me down pretty badly if that's the estimate. I'm awful, you know."

She shook her head. "Oh, you're not so bad."

"You don't know me. I've been growing awful these years."

"Tell me how awful you are. Does Mabel think you're awful?"

"You ask her! I'm the most unsatisfactory sort of person it's possible to meet. Really."

"Go on; tell me, Marko. I like this."

"What, like hearing how unsatisfactory I am?"

"I like hearing you talk. You've got rather a nice voice—I used to tell you that, didn't I?—and I like hearing you stumbling about trying to explain your ideas. You've got ideas. You're rather an ideary person. Go on. Why are you unsatisfactory?"

How familiar her voice was on that note,—caressing, drawing him on.

He said, "I'll tell you, Nona. I'm unsatisfactory because I've got the most infernal habit of seeing things from about twenty points of view instead of one. For other people, that's the most irritating thing you can possibly imagine. I've no convictions; that's the trouble. I swing about from side to side. I always can see the other side of a case, and you know, that's absolutely fatal—"

She said gently, "Fatal to what, Marko?"

He was going to say, "To happiness"; but he looked at her and then looked away. "Well, to everything; to success. You can't possibly be successful if you haven't got convictions—what I call bald-headed convictions. That's what success is, Nona, the success of politicians and big men whose names are always in the papers. It's that: seeing a thing from only one point of view and going all out for it from that point of view. Convictions. Not mucking about all round a thing and seeing it from about twenty different sides like I do. You know, you can't possibly pull out this big, booming sort of stuff they call success if you're going to see anybody's point of view but your own. You must have convictions. Yes, and narrower than that, not convictions but conviction. Only one conviction—that you're right and that every one who thinks differently from you is wrong to blazes." He laughed. "And I'm dashed if I ever think I'm right, let alone conviction of it. I can always see the bits of right on the other side of the argument. That's me. Dash me!"

She said, "Go on, Marko. I like this."

"Well, that's all there is to it, Nona. These conviction chaps, these booming politicians and honours-list chaps, these Bagshaw chaps—you know Bagshaw?—they go like a cannon ball. They go like hell and smash through and stick when they get there. My sort's like the footballs you see down at the school punt-about. Wherever there's a punt I feel it and respond to it. My sort's out to be kicked—" He laughed again. "But I couldn't be any other sort."

She said, "I'm glad you couldn't be, Marko. You're just the same as you used to be. I'm glad you're the same."

He did not reply.

VII

She sat briskly forward in the big armchair in which she faced him, making of the motion a movement as though throwing aside a turn the conversation had taken. "Well, go on, Marko. Go on talking. I'm not going to let you stop talking yet. I love that about how people get success nowadays. It's jolly true. I never thought of it before. Yes, you're still a terribly thinky person, Marko. Go on. Think some more. Out loud."

Caressing—drawing him on—just as of old.

He said thoughtfully, "I tell you a thing I often think a lot about, Nona. You being here like this puts it in my mind. Conventions."

She smiled teasingly. "Ah, poor Marko. I knew you'd simply hate it, my coming in like this. Does it seem terribly unconventional, improper, to you, shut up with me in your office?"

He shook his head. "It seems very nice. That's all it seems. But it does bring into my mind that you're the sort of person that doesn't think tuppence about what's usually done or what's not usually done; and that reminded me of things I've thought about conventions. Look here, Nona, this really is rather interesting—"

"Yes," she said. "Yes."

Just so he used to bring ideas to her; just so, with "Yes—yes," she used to receive them.

But he went on. "Why, convention, you know, it's the most mysterious, extraordinary thing. It's a code society has built up to protect itself and to govern itself, and when you go into it it's the most marvellous code that ever was invented. All sorts of things that the law doesn't give, and couldn't give, our conventions shove in on us in the most amazing way. And all probably originated by a lot of Mother Grundy-ish old women, that's what's so extraordinary. You know, if all the greatest legal minds of all the ages had laid themselves out to make a social code they could never have got anywhere near the rules the people have built up for themselves. And that's what I like, Nona—that's what I think so interesting and the best thing in life: the things the people do for themselves without any State interference. That's what I'd encourage all I knew how if I were a politician—"

He broke off. "I say, aren't I the limit, gassing away like this? I hardly ever get off nowadays and when I do!—Why don't you stop me?"

She made a little gesture deprecatory of his suggestion. "Because I like to hear you. I like to watch your funny old face when you're on one of your ideas. It gets red underneath, Marko, and the red slowly comes up. Funny old face! Go on. I want to hear this because I'm going to disagree with you, I think. I think conventions, most of them, are odious, hateful, Marko. I hate them."

VIII

He had been strangely affected by the words of her interruptions: a contraction in the throat,—a twitching about the eyes.... But he was able, and glad that he was able to catch eagerly at her opinion. "Yes, yes, I know, odious, hateful, and much more than that, cruel—conventions can be as cruel, as cruel as hell. I was just coming to that. But they're all absolutely rightly based, Nona. That's the baffling and the maddening part of them. That's what interests me in them. In their application they're often unutterably wrong, cruel, hideously cruel and unjust, but when you examine them, even at their cruellest, you can't help seeing that fundamentally they're absolutely right and reasonable and necessary. Look, take quite a silly example. There's a convention against going to church in any but your best clothes. It's easy to conceive wrongness in the application of it. It's easy to conceive a person wanting to go to church and likely to benefit by going to church, but staying away because of feeling too shabby. But you can't help seeing the rightness at the bottom of it—the idea of presenting yourself decently at worship, as before princes. That makes you laugh—"

"It doesn't, Marko. I can see much worse things just on the same principle."

He said pleasedly, "Of course you can, can't you? Look at all this stuff there's been in the papers lately about what they call the problem of the unmarried mother. Now there's a brute of a case for you: a girl gets into trouble and while she sticks to her baby she's made an outcast; every door is shut to her; her own people will have nothing to do with her; no one will take her in—so long as she's got the baby with her. That's convention and you can imagine cases where it's cruel beyond words. But it's no good cursing society about it. You can't help seeing that the convention is fundamentally right and essential. Where on earth would you be if girls with babies could find homes as easily as girls without babies?" He smiled. "You'd have babies pouring out all over the place. See it?"

She nodded. "I do think that's interesting, Marko. I think that's most awfully interesting. Yes, cruel and hateful and preposterous, many of them, but all fundamentally right. I think that's absorbing. I shall look out for conventions now, and when they annoy me most I'll think out what they're based on. I will!"

"Well, it's not a bad idea," he said. "It helps in all sorts of ways to think things out as they happen to you. You don't realise what a mysterious business life is till you begin to do that; and once you begin to feel the mysteriousness of it there's not much can upset you. You get the feeling that you're part of an enormous, mysterious game, and you just wonder what the last move means. Eh?"

She did not answer.

Presently she said, "Yes, you do still think things, Marko. You haven't changed a bit, you know. You're just the same."

He smiled. "Oh, well, it's only two years, you know—less than two years since you went away."

"I wasn't thinking of two years."

"How many years were you thinking of?"

"Ten."

They just sat there.

IX

The insistent shrieking of a motor siren in the street below began to penetrate their silence. When it came to Sabre's consciousness he had somehow the feeling that it had been going on a very long time. He jumped to his feet. The siren had the obscene and terrific note of a gigantic hen in delirium. "What the devil's that?"

She received his question with the blank look of one whose mind had no idea of the question's reason. The strangled gurgle and shriek from without informed her in paroxysms of hideous sound. With a motion of her body, as of one shaking off dreams, she threw away the be-musement in which she had sat. She screwed up her face in torture. "Oh, wow! Isn't it too awful! That's Tony. In the car. I told him I'd look in here." She glanced at the clock. "Marko; it's one o'clock. I've been here two mortal hours!"

The gigantic hen screamed in delirious death agony.

"Oh, good heavens, that noise!" She stepped to the window and opened the casement. "Tony! That noise! Tony, for goodness' sake!"

An extravagantly long motor car was drawn against the curb. Lord Tybar, in a dust coat and a sleek bowler hat of silver grey, sat in the driver's seat. He was industriously and without cessation winding the handle of the siren. An uncommonly pretty woman sat beside him. She was massed in furs. In her ears she held the index finger of each hand, her elbows sticking out on each side of her head. Thus severally occupied, she and Lord Tybar made an unusual picture, and a not inconsiderable proportion of the youth and citizens of Tidborough stood round the front of the car and enjoyed the unusual picture that they made.

The spectators looked up at Nona's call; Lord Tybar ceased the handle and looked up with his engaging smile; the uncommonly pretty woman removed her fingers from her ears and also turned upwards her uncommonly pretty face.

"Hullo!" called Lord Tybar. "Did you happen to hear my sighs?"

"That appalling noise!" said Nona. "You ought to be prosecuted!"

"If you'd had it next to you!" piped the uncommonly pretty lady in an uncommonly pretty voice. "It's like a whole ship being seasick together."

"It's nothing of the kind," protested Lord Tybar. "It's the plaintive lament of a husband entreating his wife." He directed his eyes further backward. "Good morning, Mr. Fortune. Did you recognize my voice calling my wife? There were tears in it. Perhaps you didn't."

"Good lord," said Sabre, "there's old Fortune at his window. I'll come down with you, Nona."

As they went down he asked her, "Who's that with him in the car?"

"One of his friends. Staying with us."

Something in her voice made it—afterwards—occur to him as odd that she spoke of one of "his", not one of "our" friends, and did not mention her name.

"Well, the whole of Tidborough knows where you've been, Nona," Lord Tybar greeted them. "And a good place too." He addressed the lady by his side. "Puggo, look at those pulpits and things in the window. You never go to church. It'll do you good. That's a pulpit, that tall thing. They preach from that."

The lady remarked, "Thanks. I can remember it. At least I was married in a church, you know."

"And, of course," said Nona, "you always remember you're married, don't you?"

Sabre glanced quickly at her. Her tone cut across the frivolous exchanges with an acid note. So utterly unlike Nona!

And the thing was real, not imagined; and went further. The uncommonly pretty woman addressed as Puggo replied, "Oh, always. And so do you, don't you, dear?" and her uncommonly pretty eyes went in a quick glance from Nona's face to Sabre's, where they hovered the fraction of a moment, and thence to Lord Tybar's where also they hovered, and smiled.

And Lord Tybar, his small, handsome head slightly on one side, looked from one to another with precisely that mock in his glance that Sabre had noticed, and transiently wondered at, on the day he had met them riding.

Funny!

"But, Puggo, you don't know Sabre, do you?" Lord Tybar said. "Sabre, this is Mrs. Winfred. A woman of mystery. One mystery is how she ever won Fred and the other why she is called Puggo. There must be something pretty dark in her past to have got her a name like Puggo."

The woman of mystery shrugged her shoulders. "Of course Tony's simply a fool," she observed. "You know that, don't you, Mr. Sabre?"

"It's not her face," Lord Tybar continued. "You might think it's her figure the way she hides it up under all those furs on a day like this. But a pug's figure—"

Nona broke in. "I suppose we're going to start some time?"

"Will you come and sit here?" Puggo inquired, but without making any movement.

"No, I'll sit behind."

She got in. "Good-by, Marko." Her voice sounded tired. She gave Sabre her hand. "Jolly, the books," she said. "And our talk."

"Now throw yourself in front, any boy who wants to be killed," Lord Tybar called to the idlers. "No corpses to-day?" He let in the clutch. "Good-by, Sabre. Good-by, good-by." He waved his hand airily. The big car slid importantly up the street.

Sabre watched them pass out of sight. As the car turned out of The Precincts into High Street—a nasty corner—Lord Tybar, alone of the three, one hand on the steering wheel, half turned in his seat and twirled the silver-grey bowler in gay farewell.

Or mockery?

X

Through the day Sabre's thoughts, as a man sorting through many documents and coming upon and retaining one, fined down towards a picture of himself alone with Nona—alone with her, watching her beautiful face—and saying to her: "Look here, there were three things you said, three expressions you used. Explain them, Nona."

Fined down towards this picture, sifting the documents.

He thought, "Tybar—Tybar.—They're just alike in their way of saying things, Nona and Tybar. That bantering way they talk when they're together—when they're together. Tybar does, whoever he's with. Not Nona. Not with me. But with Tybar. She plays up to him when they're together. And he plays up to her. Everybody says how amusing they are. They're perfectly suited. They look so dashed handsome, the pair of them. And always that bantering talk. Nona chose deliberately between Tybar and me. I know she did. She loved me, till he came along. It's old. Ten years old. I can look at it. She chose deliberately. I can see her choosing: 'Tybar or Marko?—oh, dash it, Tybar.' And she chose right. She's just his mate. He's just her mate. They're a pair. That bantering, airy way of theirs together. That's just characteristic of the oneness of their characters. I couldn't put up that bantering sort of stuff. I never could. I'm a jolly sight too serious. And Nona knew it. She used to laugh at me about it. She still does. 'You puzzle, don't you, Marko?' she said this very morning."

He thought, "No, that wasn't laughing at me. Not that. No, it wasn't. Not that—nor any of it. What did she mean when she said 'There!' like that when she gave me her hand when she first came in? And took off her glove first. What did she mean when she said she had to come? 'Well, I had to come,' she said.—What did she mean when she said she was flotsam?—Flotsam! Why? Made me angry in my voice when I asked her. I said, 'How can you be flotsam?' And how the devil can she?—Nona, with Tybar, flotsam? But she said it. I said, 'How can you be flotsam, the life you've—taken?' I didn't mean to say 'taken' like that. I meant to have said 'the life you've got, you live.' But I meant taken, chosen. She did take it, deliberately. She chose between us. I might almost have heard her choose 'Marko or Tybar? Oh, dash it—Tybar.' I never reproached her, not by a look. I saw her point of view. My infernal failing, even then. Not by a look I ever reproached her. I thought I'd forgotten it, absolutely. But I haven't. It came out in that moment that I haven't. 'The life you've—taken!' I meant it to sting. Damn me, it did sting. That look she gave! As if I had struck her.—What rot! How could it sting her? How could she mind? Only if she regretted.—Is it likely?"

He thought, "But is she happy? Is it all what it appears between them? That remark she made to that woman and the extraordinary way she said it. 'You never forget you're married, do you?' Amazing thing to say, the way she said it. What did she mean? And that woman. She said something like, 'Nor you, do you?' and looked at me and then at Tybar. And Tybar looked—at Nona, at me, as if he'd got some joke, some mock...."

He thought, "What rot! She chose. She knew he was her sort. She knew I wasn't. She chose deliberately...."

Clearly, as it were yesterday, he remembered the day she had declared to him her choice. In the Cathedral cloisters. Walking together. And suddenly, in the midst of indifferent things, she told him, "I say, Marko, I'm going to marry Lord Tybar."

And his reply, the model of indifference. "Are you, Nona?"

Nothing else said of it between them. There would certainly have been more discussion if she had said she was going to buy a packet of hairpins. And his thought had immediately been, not this nor that nor the other of a hundred thoughts proper to a blow so stunning, but merely and immediately and precisely that he would tell his father Yes to what that very morning he had told him No,—that he would go into the Fortune, East and Sabre business. Extraordinary effect from such a cause! Grotesque. Paradoxical. Going into Fortune, East and Sabre meant "settling down"; marriage conventionally involved settling down; yet, while he had visioned marriage with Nona, settling down had been the last thing in the world to think of,—because he projected marriage with Nona, he had that very morning rejected settling down. He was not to marry her; therefore, yes, he would settle down. Amazing. He had not realised how amazing till now.

And catastrophic. Not till now had he realised to what catastrophe he then had plunged. He thought, "The fact was Nona touched things in me that helped me. Without her I just shut down—I just go about—longing, longing, and all shut up, day after day, year after year—all shut up. And now there's this—she's come back like this—"

He came upon the picture of himself alone with Nona—alone with her watching her beautiful face—and saying to her, "Look here, there were three things you said, three expressions you used. Explain them, Nona. Explain 'There!' with your glove off. Explain 'Flotsam.' Explain 'Well, I had to come.' Explain them, Nona—for God's sake."

CHAPTER V

I

But it was October before he asked her to explain them. The Tybars, as he learnt when next he met her, a week after her visit to the office, were only at Northrepps for a breathing space after their foreign tour. Through the summer they were going the usual social round, ending in Scotland. Back in October for the shooting, and wintering there through the hunting season.

So she told him; and he thought while she was speaking, "All right. I'll accept that. That helps to stop me asking her. If an opportunity occurs before she goes I'll ask her. I must. But if it doesn't occur I'll accept that. I won't make an opportunity."

It did not occur, and he abode by his resolution. He met her once or twice, always in other company. And she was always then particularly gay, particularly airy, particularly bantering. But answering her banter he once caught an expression behind her airiness. He thought, "It is a shield"; and he turned away abruptly from her. He could not bear it.

This was on the occasion of a little dinner party at Northrepps to which he had come with Mabel; Major Hopscotch Millet and one or two others were among the guests. Major Millet, who had been in particularly hopscotch, Ri—te O! form throughout the evening, was walking back, but Mabel invited him to accompany them in the ancient village fly. "Ri—te O!" said Major Millet with enormous enthusiasm.

Nona came with them to the door on their departure. Sabre was last down the steps. "Well, I shan't see you again till October," she said.

"No, till October." He no more than touched her hand and turned away. He had kept his resolution.

She was close behind him. He heard her give the tiniest little catch at her breath. She said, "Shall I write to you, Marko?"

He turned towards her. She was smiling as though it was a chaffing remark she had made. Her shield!

And he answered her from behind his own shield, "Oh, well, I'm bad at letters, you know."

But their eyes met with no shields before them; and she was wounded, for he just caught her voice as he went down the steps, "Oh, Marko, do write to me!"

The Ri—te O voice of the Hopscotch. "Come on, Sabre, my boy! Come on! Come on!"

He got into the cab. Major Millet had taken the seat next Mabel. "Ri—te O, Cabby!" the Hopscotch hailed.

As the horse turned with the staggering motions proper to its burden of years and infirmity, Mabel inquired, "What was Lady Tybar talking to you about all that time?"