To believe yourself at any moment to be touched as by a finger and asked "Ready?" "Aye, Ready!"
Mysterious and awful intimacy with God!
IV
And then there were the Perches—"Young Perch and that everlasting old mother of his", as Mabel called them.
Sabre always spoke of them as "Young Rod, Pole or Perch" and "Old Mrs. Rod, Pole or Perth." This was out of what Mabel called his childish and incomprehensible habit of giving nicknames—High Jinks and Low Jinks the outstanding and never-forgiven example of it. "Whatever's the joke of it?" she demanded, when one day she found Sabre speaking of Major Millet, another neighbour and a great friend of hers, as "Old Hopscotch Millet."
"Whatever's the joke of it? He doesn't play hopscotch."
"No, but he bounds about," Sabre explained. "You know the way he bounds about, Mabel. He's about ninety—"
"I'm sure he isn't, nor fifty."
"Well, anyway, he's past his first youth, but he's always bounding about to show how agile he is. He's always calling out 'Ri—te O!' and jumping to do a thing when there's no need to jump. Hopscotch. What can you call him but Hopscotch?"
"But why call him anything?" Mabel said. "His name's Millet."
Her annoyance caused her voice to squeak. "Why call him anything?"
Sabre laughed. "Well, you know how a ridiculous thing like that comes into your head and you can't get rid of it. You know the way."
Mabel declared she was sure she did not know the way. "They don't come into my head. Look at the Perches—not that I care what name you call them. Rod, Pole or Perch! What's the sense of it? What does it mean?"
Sabre said it didn't mean anything. "You just get some one called Perch and then you can't help thinking of that absurd thing rod, pole or perch. It just comes."
"I call it childish and rude," Mabel said.
V
Mrs. Perch was a fragile little body whose life should have been and could have been divided between her bed and a bath chair. She was, however, as she said, "always on her legs." And she was always on her legs and always doing what she had not the strength to do, because, as she said, she "had always done it." She conducted her existence in the narrow space between the adamant wall of the things she had always done, always eaten, and always worn, and the adamant wall of the things she had never done, never eaten, and never worn. There was not much room between the two.
She was intensely weak-sighted, but she never could find her glasses; and she kept locked everything that would lock, but she never could find her keys. She held off all acquaintances by the rigid handle of "that" before their names, but she was very fond of "that Mr. Sabre", and Sabre returned a great affection for her. With his trick of seeing things with his mental vision he always saw old Mrs. Perch toddling with moving lips and fumbling fingers between the iron walls of her prejudices, and this was a pathetic picture to him, for ease or pleasure were not discernible between the walls. Nevertheless Mrs. Perch found pleasures therein, and the way in which her face then lit up added, to Sabre, an indescribable poignancy to the pathos of the picture. She never could pass a baby without stopping to adore it, and an astounding tide of rejuvenation would then flood up from mysterious mains, welling upon her silvered cheeks and through her dim eyes, stilling the movement of her lips and the fumbling motions of her fingers.
Also amazing tides of glory when she was watching for her son, and saw him.
Young Perch was a tall and slight young man with a happy laugh and an air which suggested to Sabre, after puzzlement, that his spirit was only alighted in his body as a bird alights and swings upon a twig, not engrossed in his body. He did not look very strong. His mother said he had a weak heart. He said he had a particularly strong heart and used to protest, "Oh, Mother, I do wish you wouldn't talk that bosh about me." To which Mrs. Perch would say, "It's no good saying you haven't got a weak heart because you have got a weak heart and you've always had a weak heart. Surely I ought to know."
Young Perch would reply, "You ought to know, but you don't know. You get an idea in your head and nothing will ever get it out. Some day you'll probably get the idea that I've got two hearts and if Sir Frederick Treves swore before the Lord Chief Justice that I only had one heart you'd just say, 'The man's a perfect fool.' You're awful, you know, Mother."
He used to reprove his mother like that.
Mrs. Perch would give a grim little laugh, relishing her strength, and then Young Perch would give an involuntary little laugh, accepting his weakness.
That was how they lived.
Young Perch always carried about in one pocket a private pair of spectacles for his mother and in another a private set of keys for her most used receptacles. When the search for her spectacles had exhausted even her own energy, Young Perch would say, "Well, you'd better use these, Mother." It was of no use to offer them till she was weakening in the search, and she would take them grudgingly with, "They don't suit me." Similarly with the keys, accepted only after prolonged and maddening search. "Well, you'd better try these, Mother."—"They injure the lock."
Sabre often witnessed and took part in these devastating searches. Young Perch would always say, "Now just sit down, Mother, instead of rushing about, and try to think quite calmly when you last used them."
Mrs. Perch, intensely fatigued, intensely worried:
"How very silly you are, Freddie! I don't know when I last used them. If I knew when I used them, I should know where they are now."
"Well, you'd better use these now, Mother."
"They don't suit me. They ruin my eyes."
Yet Mrs. Rod, Pole or Perch, who confided much in Sabre, and who had no confidences of any kind apart from her son, would often say to Sabre: "Freddie always finds my keys for me, you know. He finds everything for me, Mr. Sabre."
And the tide of glory would flood amazingly upon her face, transfiguring it, and Sabre would feel an immensely poignant clutch at the heart.
VI
The Perchs' house was called Puncher's—Puncher's Farm, a few hundred yards along the lane leading to the great highroad—and it was the largest and by far the most untidy house in Penny Green. Successive Punchers of old time, when it had been the most considerable farm in all the country between Chovensbury and Tidborough, had added to it in stubborn defiance of all laws of comfort and principles of domestic architecture, and now, shorn alike of its Punchers and of its pastures, the homestead that might easily have housed twenty, was mysteriously filled to overflowing by two. Mrs. Perch was fond of saying she had lived in nineteen houses "in her time", and Sabre had the belief that the previous eighteen had all been separately furnished and the entire accumulation, together with every newspaper taken in during their occupation, brought to Puncher's. Half the rooms of Puncher's were so filled with furniture that no more furniture, and scarcely a living person, could be got in; and half the rooms were so filled with boxes, packages, bundles, trunks, crates, and stacks of newspapers that no furniture at all could be got in. Every room was known to Mrs. Perch and to Young Perch by the name of some article it contained and Mrs. Perch was forever "going to sort the
