If Winter Comes | Page 7

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