If Winter Comes | Page 6

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