If Winter Comes | Page 9

looked
on to the garden. In the spaces between them, and in the two spaces
between the end windows and the end walls, he placed his bookshelves,
a set of shelves in each space.
Mabel displayed no interest in the move nor made any reference to it at
teatime. In the evening, hearing her pass the door on her way to dress
for dinner, he called her in.
He was in his shirt sleeves, arranging the books. "There you are! Not
bad?"
She regarded them and the room. "They look all right. All the same, I
must say it seems rather funny using your bedroom for your things
when you've got a room downstairs."
"Oh, well, I never liked that room, you know. I hardly ever go into it."
"I know you don't."
And she went off.
III
But the significance of the removal rested not in the definite
relinquishment of the den, but in her words "using your bedroom": the

definite recognition of separate rooms.
And neither commented upon it.
After all, landmarks, in the course of a journey, are more frequently
observed and noted as landmarks, when looking back along the journey,
than when actually passing them. They belong generically to the past
tense; one rarely says, "This is a landmark"; usually "That was a
landmark."
IV
The bookcases were of Sabre's own design. He was extraordinarily
fond of his books and he had ideas about their arrangement. The lowest
shelf was in each case three feet from the ground; he hated books being
"down where you can't see them." Also the cases were open, without
glass doors; he hated "having to fiddle to get out a book." He liked
them to be just at the right height and straight to his hand. In a way he
could not quite describe (he was a bad talker, framing his ideas with
difficulty) he was attached to his books, not only for what was in them,
but as entities. He had written once in a manuscript book in which he
sometimes wrote things, "I like the feel of them and I know the feel of
them in the same way as one likes and knows the feel of a friend's hand.
And I can look at them and read them without opening them in the
same way as, without his speaking, one looks at and can enjoy the face
of a friend. I feel towards them when I look at them in the
shelves,--well, as if they were feeling towards me just as I am feeling
towards them." And he had added this touch, which is perhaps more
illuminating. "The other day some one had had out one of my books
and returned it upside down. I swear it was as grotesque and painful to
me to see it upside down as if I had come into the room and found my
brother standing on his head against the wall, fastened there. At least I
couldn't have sprung to him to release him quicker than I did to the
book to upright it."
The first book he had ever bought "specially"--that is to say not as one
buys a bun but as one buys a dog--was at the age of seventeen when he
had bought a Byron, the Complete Works in a popular edition of very

great bulk and very small print. He bought it partly because of what he
had heard during his last term at school of Don Juan, partly because he
had picked up the idea that it was rather a fine thing to read poetry; and
he kept it and read it in great secrecy because his mother (to whom he
mentioned his intention) told him that Byron ought not to be read and
that her father, in her girlhood, had picked up Byron with the tongs and
burnt him in the garden. This finally determined him to buy Byron.
He began to read it precisely as he was accustomed to read books,--that
is to say at the beginning and thence steadily onwards. "On the Death
of a Young Lady" (Admiral Parker's daughter, explained a footnote);
"To E----"; "To D----" and so on. There were seven hundred and eight
pages of this kind of thing and Don Juan was at the end, in the five
hundreds.
When he had laboriously read thirty-six pages he decided that it was
not a fine thing to read poetry, and he moved on to Don Juan, page five
hundred and thirty-three. The rhymes surprised him. He had no idea
that poetry--_poetry_--rhymed "annuities" with "true it is" and "Jew it
is." He turned on and numbered the cantos,--sixteen; and then the
number of verses in each canto and the total,--two thousand one
hundred and eighty.... _Who-o-o!..._ It was as endless as the seven