If Winter Comes | Page 8

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,