The Square Peg or The Gun Fella полностью

“You oughtn’t to expect too much, Fram,” the old man said. “This countryside has been drained, triply drained, of all its best, three times in a hundred years. The chances of commerce drained it once, the prospects of the colonies a second time; then the War took the rest. You’ve got the average, dead-level here.”

“Well, I want to make it a living level, if it has to be a level.”

“It’s living, all right, with a good deal of courage and kindness. It’s a bit stupid sometimes, I daresay, but then you must make allowances. The world does not need guns and explosives, like you, all the time; it wants to jog along and dig its potato patch, and knock off while the hounds go by. This village that you’re building will be based on what? Fear of war, and the hope of killing the other fellow first. Those can’t be abiding things in life. These people here used to have fear of God and the hope of salvation. It became fear of squire and the hope of being able to muddle through somehow. It’ll change; it is changing.”

“Yes. I know it’s changing,” his son said, “and which way’s it changing? To a greater humanity or to a more degraded mechanism? I’ve grown up in ease to see certain things as important and to have them. I’d be a skunk if I didn’t strain a point to let the other chap have his share.”

“His share of what he wants, Fram, not of what you want.”

“The cheap Press and the Government have killed all personal wants in ’em,” Frampton answered. “They soon won’t even marry unless they draw a bonus.”

The pushing on of the work at St. Margarets was his chief interest that autumn; he had some hundred and fifty men working there. During the summer, when earth was green and the land dry, this work was not an eyesore; but when the autumn storms came in with wet and the thinning of the leaf, those who had known the empty Waste and woodland cursed Frampton for making such a mess. His lorries had churned the roads. Annual-Tilter’s car stuck there; the angry ham’s car stuck there; the Member wrote to complain.

“You wait, my swine,” Frampton thought. “When once we get going, your old happy seat in the places of obstruction will be damn near bust.”

It fell, that at the middle of that October, he had invited an artist and his wife to Mullples for the week-end. He had planned to have a fresco in the maids’ sitting-room, with portraits of all the maids in it, and wished to discuss it with the painter. The maids had looked forward to this, and he had had some expectations, for he believed that the young man might do a remarkable work. However, early in the Saturday morning the artist telegraphed that his wife was ill and that he could not come.

Frampton was vexed at this, for he was now at Mullples for the week-end without any companion. He had some thought of telephoning to ask his father if he might go there for the week-end, but remembered that his father had to be in London that week-end. It was a raw, cold morning, with the barometer falling and a dull south-east wind coming from a greasy sky. Dirty weather was coming; and as such weather always did, it brought to Frampton a sense of unsettledness and coming danger. He went up and down and in and out, all the morning, unable to settle to anything. He could neither write letters, nor draw designs; he could not think about guns, nor read a book. He loathed Mullples. It was the house that he “had built to be so gay with,” and this was the gaiety vouchsafed to him: Margaret dead, and himself loathed and loathing. He hated being alone there. He had some thoughts of bolting back to London, but the unsettledness in his mind due to the storm kept him there. He thought of various men whom he might ask to come along for the week-end, but the same unsettledness kept him from telephoning; as he planned, the opposite of the plan formed itself and checked the plan. Either there was something against the fellow, or it would never do to ask him at such short notice.

He debated and havered thus until lunch-time, unable to ask anybody. By lunch-time he was hating himself and Mullples, life and its messes, country and town. After lunch, when it was too late to ask anybody, he regretted that he had been so squeamish. They would have been glad to come, anyway, since sitting by the fire at Mullples, over some very good port, would have been better than sitting over a fire in a studio in London.