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.
Sabre liked this room. Three latticed windows,
in the same wall, 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.
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.”
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
