The Square Peg or The Gun Fella полностью

It was a happy summer for him; all his energies were in full play, making either beauty or ingenuity; all his life was focused and aimed. The end of July was to see the crowning of his life, when he would marry, and presently bring Margaret home to the beautiful place his love was making for her. As the summer drew on, with her beauty, and the hawthorn gave way to the dog-rose, and the corn-crake called, and the cry and the flight of the swallows made the evenings marvellous, he felt, that he had made Mullples worthy of the beauty in which it stood. It was become again one of the beautiful houses of the land; “and when I say England,” he added proudly, “I mean the world.”

Presently, July came in with fair weather, intense heat and pressure to get the workmen out of Mullples. The pools in front of the house were now full of water. The garden was full of flowers; the house rang with songs and whistling as the last of the decorators and painters worked. By the 12th, the house was ready for him; the electricians had done; the engine was installed and running; the floors had all been scrubbed, and the screens removed from the frescoes. On the afternoon of the 15th, he walked with the artists about the empty rooms, looking at the work. The rooms looked a little raw in their bareness. The paintings looked a little startling in their newness; but he was pleased with them. As the light deepened into glow upon some of them, he felt the power of their design and knew that his four men had wrought four masterpieces for his new home in the wilds.

He was to be married in one week from that day. He had come to full maturity of manhood without wishing to be married; he had never met any woman before Margaret who drew him in the least. Margaret attracted him; he wanted her; he felt that his life would be completed by her. In his savage way, he wanted children and felt that she would be the mother for them. He could not say why he wanted children. He was not fond of them, when he met them, nor did they take to him. He tried to answer the question, why he wanted children, and found it hard to answer. He was fortunate in life, and knew that his children would have the advantage which fortune gives. He had not much faith in the future of England and none whatever in the future of civilisation.

“So why,” he asked himself, “should I, or anyone, want to bring helpless beings into the world where they may have the very devil of a beastly time? Just as I’m perfecting my Death Rose to blast to death half the sons of men, I’m going to take a wife and try to beget a few. If I succeed, I shall bring some unfortunates out of the unknown night of nothing to a world where they may curse me heartily for my reckless act. ‘Honour thy father and thy mother,’ the parents always say; but by Jove, the children say a different thing; unwanted virgins, poor devils in cells and mad-houses, down and outs on the benches, misfits, geniuses, and ninety-seven per cent of the normal as well, would a damn sight rather have been left blank. Not much wish among them to honour the senseless two who fetched them out of nothing to suffer and be sick.”

Yet, even in his savagery, he felt, that children were living and that these thoughts of his were destructive of life.

“It may be,” he thought, “that without children people become inhuman. Without children this place will be a pretty empty shell. I’d like my children to have what I planned and put good work into.”

He was looking out over the valley in the sunset as he thought these thoughts. He turned to see the geese in Bill Caunter’s great design behind him. He would like his son to have that evidence of his father’s sense of decoration. And as he thought this, there floated into his brain the idea for a new gun, almost too bad to be true, which would make the Death Rose, lethal as it was, almost a health cure in comparison.

For a moment, the simplicity of it took his breath away. “There must be some snag,” he thought. He sat down on the window seat and made some jottings on a pocket pad. No, the inspiration had spoken truth from a well of all truth; the gun might be and could be. Whether it would be was another matter, for he knew what getting a gun adopted meant. He had been up against the pigs of lead of retardation and obstruction. No soldier would look at a gun of this sort.