Part 8 (2/2)

Sabre was extraordinarily attracted by the devotion between the pair.

Their interests, their habits, their thoughts were as widely sundered as their years, yet each was wholly and completely bound up in the other.

When Sabre sat and talked with Young Perch of an evening, old Mrs. Perch would sit with them, next her son, in an armchair asleep. At intervals she would start awake and say querulously, ”Now I suppose I must be driven off to bed.”

Young Perch, not pausing in what he might be saying, would stretch a hand and lay it on his mother's. Mrs. Perch, as though Freddie's hand touched away enormous weariness and care, would sigh restfully and sleep again. It gave Sabre extraordinary sensations.

If he had been asked to name his particular friends these were the friends he would have named. He saw them constantly. Infrequently he saw another. Quite suddenly she came back into his life.

Nona returned into his life.

PART TWO

NONA

CHAPTER I

I

Sabre, ambling his bicycle along the pleasant lanes towards Tidborough one fine morning in the early summer of 1912, was met in his thoughts by observation, as he topped a rise, of the galloping progress of the light railway that was to link up the Penny Green Garden Home with Tidborough and Chovensbury. In the two years since Lord Tybar had, as he had said, beneficially exercised his ancestors in their graves by selling the land on which the Garden Home Development was to develop, Penny Green Garden Home had sprung into being at an astonis.h.i.+ng pace.

The great thing now was the railway.

And the railway's unsightly indications strewn across the countryside--ballast heaps, excavations, noisy stationary engines, hand-propelled barrows b.u.mping along toy lines, gangs of men at labour with pick and shovel--met Sabre's thoughts on this June morning because he was thinking of the Penny Green Garden Home and of Mabel, and of Mabel and of himself in connection with the Penny Green Garden Home.

Puzzling thoughts.

Here was a subject, this ambitiously projected and astonis.h.i.+ngly popular Garden Home springing up at their very doors, that interested him and that intensely interested Mabel, and yet it could never be mentioned between them without.... Only that very morning at breakfast.... And June--he always remembered it--was the anniversary month of their wedding.... Eight years ago.... Eight years....

II

What interested Sabre in the Garden Home was not the settlement itself--he rather hated the idea of Penny Green being neighboured and overrun by crowds of all sorts of people--but the causes that gave rise to the modern movement of which it was a s.h.i.+ning example. The causes had their place in one of the sections he had planned for ”England” and it encouraged his ideas for that section to see the results here at his doors. Overcrowding in the towns; the desire of men to get away from their place of business; the increasing pressure of business and the increasing recreational variety of life that, deepening and widening through the years, actuated the desire; the extension of traffic facilities that permitted the desire; all the modern tendencies that made work less of a pleasure and more of a toil,--and out of that the whole absorbing question of the decay of joy in craftsmans.h.i.+p, and why.--Jolly interesting!

These were the pictures and the stories that Sabre saw in the roads and avenues and residences and public buildings leaping from mud and chaos into order and activity in the Garden Home; these were the reasons the thing interested him and why he rather enjoyed seeing it springing up about him. But these, he thought as he rode along, were not the reasons the thing interested Mabel. And when he mentioned them to her.... And when she, for her part, spoke of it to him--and she was always speaking of it--the reasons for her enthusiasm retired him at once into a sh.e.l.l.

Funny state of affairs!

Mabel was convinced he loathed and detested the Penny Green Garden Home Development; and actually he rather liked the Penny Green Garden Home Development; and yet he couldn't tell her so; and she did not understand in the least when he tried to tell her so. Funny--eight years ago this month....

His thoughts went on. And, come to think of it, the relations between them were precisely similar in regard to nearly everything they ever discussed. And yet they would be called, and were, a perfectly happy couple. Perfectly? Was every happy married couple just what they were?

Was married happiness, then, merely the negation of violent unhappiness?

Merely not beating your wife, and your wife not drinking or running up debts? He thought: ”No, no, there's something more in it than that.” And then his forehead wrinkled up in his characteristic habit and he thought: ”Of course, it's my fault. It isn't only this dashed Garden Home. It's everything. It isn't only once. It's always. It can't possibly be her fault always. It's mine. I can see that.

”Take this morning at breakfast. Perfectly good temper both of us. Then she said, 'Those houses in King's Close are going to be eighty pounds a year; and, what do you think, Mrs. Toller is going to take one!'

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