Sabre regarded the broken cup much as Sir Isaac Newton
presumably regarded the fallen apple. He “worked
back” from the cup through the events of the
day, and through the events of the day returned to
the cup. It interested him to find that the fragments
on the floor were as logical a result of the movements
of the day as they would have been of getting the
small hand axe out of the woodshed, aiming a blow at
the cup, and hitting the cup.
He thought, “I started to break that cup when
I rustled the newspaper at breakfast. I went
on when I suddenly came back and got into that niggling
business over why I had come back. Went on when
I walked off to my room after that letter business.
Practically took up the axe when I couldn’t
say, ‘Well, how’s the Garden Home going
on?’ at dinner. And smashed it when I chaffed
about Bagshaw an hour ago. Rum business!
Rotten business.”
That was the day’s epitaph. But for the
murder of the cup he found—gone to bed
and lying awake—a culprit other than himself.
He thought, “It was meeting Nona made me come
home like that. But if that had been the first
time I’d ever met Nona I shouldn’t have
returned. So it goes back further than that.
Nine—ten years. The day she married
Tybar. If she hadn’t married Tybar she’d
have married me. The cup wouldn’t have been
broken. Nona broke that cup.”
These events were on a Monday. On the following
Thursday Nona came to see him at his office.
She was announced through the speaking-tube on his
desk:
“Lady Tybar to see you, sir.”
Nona! But he was not really surprised. He
had taken no notice of her letter. He had wanted
to go up to Northrepps to see her, but he had not
been. When two days passed and still he prevented
himself from going, he began to have the feeling—somehow—that
she would come to see him. It was the third day
and she was here, downstairs.
“Ask her to come up,” he said.
She came in. She wore (as Sabre saw it) “a
pale-blue sort of thing” and “a sort of
black hat.” He had considered it as an odd
thing, in his thoughts of her since their meeting,
that, though he could always have some kind of notion
what other women were wearing, he never could remember
any detail of Nona’s dress.
But it was her face he always looked at.
She stood still immediately she was across the threshold
and the door closed behind her. She was smiling
as though she felt herself to be up to some lark.
“Hullo, Marko. Don’t you hate me for
coming in here like this?”
“It’s jolly surprising.”
“That’s another way of saying it.
Now if you’d said it was surprisingly jolly!
Well, shake hands, Marko, and pretend you’re
glad.”
He laughed and put out his hand. But she delayed
response; she first slipped off the gauntlets she
was wearing and then gave him her hand. “There!”
she said.
