If Winter Comes | Page 5

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