characteristic burst of sudden laughter. It was not, as with some persons, that matters calling for sympathy made her impatient—as very robust people are often intensely impatient with sickness and infirmity. She never would say, "I have no patience with such and such or so and so." She had plenty of patience. It was simply that she had no imagination whatsoever. Whatever she saw or heard or read, she saw or heard or read exactly as the thing presented itself. If she saw a door she saw merely a piece of wood with a handle and a keyhole. It may be argued that a door is merely a piece of wood with a handle and a keyhole, and that is what Mabel would have argued. But a door is in fact the most intriguing mystery in the world because of what may be the other side of it and of what goes on behind it. To Mabel nothing was on the other side of anything she saw and nothing went on behind it.
A person or a creature in pain was to Mabel a person or a creature "laid up." Laid up—out of action—not working properly: like a pencil without a point. A picture was a decoration in paint and was either a pretty decoration in paint or a not pretty decoration in paint. Music was a tune, and was either a tune or merely music. A book was a story, and if it was not a story it was simply a book. A flower was a decoration. Poetry, such as
"While the still morn went out with sandals grey,"
was simply writing which, obviously, had no real meaning whatsoever, and obviously—well, read the thing—was not intended to have any meaning. A fine deed was fine precisely in proportion to the social position of the person who performed it. Scott's death at the South Pole, when that was announced in 1913, was fine because he was a gentleman. The disaster of the colliers entombed in the Welsh Senghenydd mine which happened in the same year was sad. "How sad!" She read the account, on the first day, with the paper held up wide open and said "How sad!" and turned on to something for which the paper might be folded back at the place and read comfortably. Scott's death she read with the paper folded back at the account. She liked seeing the pictures of Lady Scott and of Scott's little boy. She read the caption under one of the pictures of the wives and families of the four hundred and twenty-nine colliers killed in the Senghenydd mine, but not under any of the others. The point she noted was that all the women "of that class" wore "those awful cloth caps"—the colliers' women just the same as the women in the mean streets of Tidborough Old Town.
She was never particularly grateful for anything given to her or done for her; not because she was not pleased and glad but because she could invest a gift with no imagination of the feelings of the giver. The thing was a present just as a pound of bacon was a pound of bacon. You said thank you for the present just as you ate the bacon. What more was to be said?
She revelled in gossip, that is to say in discussion with her own class of the manners and doings of other people. She thought charity meant giving jelly and red flannel to the poor; she thought generosity meant giving money to some one; she thought selfishness meant not giving money to some one. She had no idea that the only real charity is charity of mind, and the only real generosity generosity of mind, and the only real selfishness selfishness of mind. And she simply would not have understood it if it had been explained to her. As people are judged, she was entirely nice, entirely worthy, entirely estimable. And with that, for it does not enter into such estimates, she had neither feelings of the mind nor of the heart but only of the senses. All that her senses set before her she either overvalued or undervalued: she was the complete and perfect snob in the most refined and purest meaning of the word.
She was much liked, and she liked many.
CHAPTER V
I
The Penny Green Garden House Development Scheme was begun in 1910. In 1908, the year of the measles and the separated bedrooms, no shadow of it had yet been thrown. It never occurred to any one that a railway would one day link Penny Green with Tidborough and all the rest of the surrounding world, or that a railway to Tidborough was desirable. Sabre bicycled in daily to Fortune, East and Sabre's, and the daily ride to and fro had become a curious pleasure to him.
There had once occurred to him as he rode, and thereafter had persisted and accumulated, the feeling that, on the daily, solitary passage between Tidborough and Penny Green, he was mysteriously detached from, mysteriously suspended between, the two centres that were his two worlds—his business world and his home world.
With its daily recurrence the thought developed: it enlarged to the whimsical notion that here, on his bicycle on the road, he was magically escaped out of his two worlds, not belonging to or responsible to either of his two worlds, which amounted to delicious detachment from all the universe. A mysteriously aloof, free, irresponsible attitude of mind was thus obtained: it was a condition in which—as one looking down from a high tower on scurrying, antlike human beings—their oddness, their futility, the apparent aimlessness of their excited scurrying became apparent; hence frequent thought, on these rides, on the rather odd thing that life was.
He was not in the least aware that so simple, so practical and so obviously essential a thing as his daily ride—as simple, practical and obviously essential as getting out of bed in the morning and returning to bed at night—was moulding a mind always prone to develop meditative grooves. But it did develop his mind in the extraordinary way in which minds are moulded by the most simple habits. In this mere matter of conveyance a philosopher might trace back a singularly brutal and callous murder to the moulding into callous and brutal regard of other people's sufferings rendered into a perfectly gentle mind by the habit of daily travelling to business in London on the top of a motor omnibus. It would only need to be shown that the gentle mind secured his seat with dignity and comfort at the bus's starting point and daily for years watched with amusement, and then with callousness and so with brutality the struggles of the unhappy fellow creatures who fought to assail it at its stopping places on the way to the City.
Mark Sabre was not in the least aware of any steadily permeating influence from his sense of detachment on this daily habit of years. But he was influenced. On entering his Penny Green world on the return home, or on entering his Tidborough office world, on the way out, he had sometimes a curious feeling of descending into this odd affair of life to which he did not really belong. And for the few moments while the feeling persisted he sometimes, more or less unconsciously, took towards affairs a rather whimsical attitude, as though they did not really matter: an irritating attitude, unpractical, it was sometimes hinted by his partners; an irritating attitude—"You really are very difficult to understand sometimes"—it was often told him by Mabel.
II
This very matter of the bicycle ride, indeed, apart altogether from its effect upon his mood, supplied an instance of the kind of thing Mabel found it so difficult to understand in her husband.
He made what she called a childish game of it. Every day on the ride home, Sabre ceased pedalling at precisely the same point on the slope down into Penny Green and coasted until the machine came to a standstill within a few yards of his own gate. This point of cessation was never twice in a week at the same spot; and Sabre found great interest in seeing every day exactly where it would be, and by intense wriggling of his front wheel and prodigious feats of balancing, squeezing out of the machine's momentum the last possible fraction of an inch. There was a magnificent distance record when, on one single occasion only, he had been deposited plumb in line with his own gate; and there was a divertingly lamentable shortage record, touched on more than one occasion, when he had come to ground plumb in line with the gate of Mr. Fargus, his neighbour on that side.
Each of these records, though marked by the gates, was also and more exactly marked by a peg hammered into the edge of the Green.
This
