If Winter Comes | Page 3

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