The Square Peg or The Gun Fella полностью

It came instantly into Frampton’s mind that he had seen this fellow, or half seen him, with the barmaid at the Stag’s Death in Tuncester only two nights before. It came like a flash, with the certainty of inspiration.

“When you’ve bought it,” the Kowzer concluded, “please hang it on your rump and let us kick it for you.”

Frampton made no effort to take the money.

“Half a crown,” he said; “you ought to keep that. It’ll be the first instalment on your barmaid’s bastard at Tunster presently.”

This took the wind out of the Kowzer’s sails; it was a surprise; it knocked him flat. Frampton walked on through the hostile company. He would take good care, he promised himself, that no other hunt should run a drag through Spirr, nor come on to any ground of his. He took his car and drove home.

Though he meant to spend most of his time at Multiples until Christmas, it was not a home to him; it was a place of unrest, bitterness and disappointment. Margaret, who had become the symbol of all that he was lacking, was gone from it.

“Nature has put a curse on this Waste,” he growled, “and everybody says that monkish land has cursed everybody who has held it since the monks were flung out. Now the curse hangs on me, the double curse. Once I used to be happy in my work. I enjoyed making guns and things. Why should I go on making them? I’ve no one to make for now, no son to hope for and no soul to try to please. I don’t even want to make a gun so deadly that man will be able to destroy himself off the planet. I’ve come to an end.”

For some weeks after Margaret’s death, he had dreaded and loathed motor-driving. Those feelings faded, while he was in the Far West. Now that he was at Mullples, he found that driving late at night, or in the early mornings, was soothing to him. He had to watch his road and think of what he was doing, and had, as he put it, the damn world to himself. While going through the swift, dark night, with his lights on the sickle of the road in front, and his eyes on the swerve of the road, he could forget his frustrations and the bitterness of his home-coming.

“I was to have shared life with Margaret in a beautiful place; and instead of that I’m in hell, fighting the local skunks alone.”

That was the thought always present to him, in the Works, and at Mullples, and in all those places about Newbury which brought memories of her. He did not think it so often when driving alone at night. Besides, if he took a car and went away at a venture, soon after dinner, he dodged the long evening alone. He could reach the sea at a lonely point of the coast, in a little more than an hour. That was a favourite run of his. Or he could enter a distant city, and seek out the queer places of amusement in its lower ways, thinking that “what amuses the foundation of the race may amuse me, who am shaken to my foundation.” It did not amuse him in the least his old friends, well, he shrank from them; he was a hurt beast shunning the herd, and they, knowing his queerness and prickliness shrank from him, fearing to hurt him and rouse an explosion. So he began to drive out from Mullples late in the evenings and return in the early mornings after runs of a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles. Then he took to driving afield before dinner, to dine far off among strangers, in odd places, where no-one and no thing could remind him of his past, where he would be the unknown among the unknown, in a relationship too brief to be unhappy.

Then he took to searching in shops of second-hand goods for books and prints of interest to himself. He had always had a flair for things; he beat through the grimy nooks of many a foul old shop, and found much that was of value, but unfashionable at the moment. But what good was it? He didn’t want the things. Margaret was dead, who might have liked them.

Soon after the Magistrates’ Court, it chanced that he was driving home late in a dark, moist and somewhat misty night, bad for driving, upon roads not well known to him. He was saying to himself: “Somewhere near here there’s a beast of a bend,” when he knew suddenly that the bend was there, just ahead. He slackened and changed gear, and proceeded round with caution. As he came round, he saw something on the road in front of him; he switched all his lights upon it. A big car, with its bows in the ditch to the left, was slued half across the road. As it was on the bend of the road, Frampton crawled past it, put his car in safety, and came back with a strong pocket torch to examine.

“There’ll be a corpse or two under that,” he told himself. “Blessed are they who find a motor-smash, for they will be charged with manslaughter.”

He flashed the light of his torch upon the wreck. A figure of a man in evening dress rose unsteadily from the ditch, screening his eyes from the light. Frampton recognized him at once; this was Pob Ted, who found it so difficult to get anything to do; Pob Ted, the leader of the drag.