A Gun for Sale (21 page)

‘Friends, Romans and Countrymen,’ he said and they
roared
with laughter: Good old Buddy. Buddy always had the right word. He could make any party go. You never knew what Buddy would say next. ‘Lend me your –’ They shrieked with laughter. He was a dirty dog, old Buddy. Good old Buddy.

Like a great beast which is in need of exercise, which has fed on too much hay, Buddy Fergusson was aware of his body. He felt his biceps; he strained for action. Too many exams, too many lectures, Buddy Fergusson wanted action. While they surged round him he imagined himself a leader of men. No Red Cross work for him when war broke: Buddy Fergusson, company commander, Buddy Fergusson, the daredevil of the trenches. The only exam he had ever successfully passed was Certificate A in the school O.T.C.

‘Some of our friends seem to be missing,’ Buddy Fergusson said. ‘Simmons, Aitkin, Mallowes, Watt. They are bloody conchies, every one, grubbing up anatomy while we are serving our country. We’ll pick ’em up in town. The flying squad will go to their lodgings.’

‘What about the women, Buddy?’ someone screamed, and everyone laughed and began to hit at each other, wrestle and mill. For Buddy had a reputation with the women. He spoke airily to his friends of even the super-barmaid at the Metropole, calling her Juicy Juliet and suggesting to the minds of his hearers amazing scenes of abandonment over high tea at his digs.

Buddy Fergusson straddled across the ambulance step. ‘Deliver ’em to me. In war-time we need more mothers.’ He felt strong, coarse, vital, a town bull; he hardly remembered himself that he was a virgin, guilty only of a shame-faced unsuccessful attempt on the old Nottwich tart; he was sustained by his reputation, it bore him magically in imagination into every bed. He knew women, he was a realist.

‘Treat ’em rough,’ they shrieked at him, and ‘You’re telling me,’ he said magnificently, keeping well at bay any thought of the future: the small provincial G.P.’s job, the panel patients in dingy consulting rooms, innumerable midwife cases, a lifetime of hard underpaid fidelity to one dull wife. ‘Got your
gas
-masks ready?’ he called to them, the undisputed leader, daredevil Buddy. What the hell did examinations matter when you were a leader of men? He could see several of the younger nurses watching him through the panes. He could see the little brunette called Milly. She was coming to tea with him on Saturday. He felt his muscles taut with pride. What scenes, he told himself,
this
time there would be of disreputable revelry, forgetting the inevitable truth known only to himself and each girl in turn: the long silence over the muffins, the tentative references to League results, the peck at empty air on the doorstep.

The siren at the glue factory started its long mounting whistle rather like a lap dog with hysteria and everyone stood still for a moment with a vague reminiscence of Armistice Day silences. Then they broke into three milling mobs, climbing on to the ambulance roofs, fixing their gas-masks, and drove out into the cold empty Nottwich streets. The ambulances shed a lot of them at each corner, and small groups formed and wandered down the streets with a predatory disappointed air. The streets were almost empty. Only a few errand boys passed on bicycles, looking in their gas-masks like bears doing a trick cycle act in a circus. They all shrieked at each other because they didn’t know how their voices sounded outside. It was as if each of them were enclosed in a separate sound-proof telephone cabinet. They stared hungrily through their big mica eye-pieces into the doorways of shops, wanting a victim. A little group collected round Buddy Fergusson and proposed that they should seize a policeman who, being on point duty, was without a mask. But Buddy vetoed the proposal. He said this wasn’t an ordinary rag. What they wanted were people who thought so little about their country that they wouldn’t even take the trouble to put on a gas-mask. ‘They are the people,’ he said, ‘who avoid boat-drill. We had great fun with a fellow once in the Mediterranean who didn’t turn up to boat-drill.’

That reminded them of all the fellows who weren’t helping, who were probably getting ahead with their anatomy at that moment. ‘Watt lives near here,’ Buddy Fergusson said,
‘let’s
get Watt and debag him.’ A feeling of physical well-being came over him just as if he had drunk a couple of pints of bitter. ‘Down the Tanneries,’ Buddy said. ‘First left. First right. Second left, Number twelve. First floor.’ He knew the way, he said, because he’d been to tea several times with Watt their first term before he’d learned what a hound Watt was. The knowledge of his early mistake made him unusually anxious to do something to Watt physically, to mark the severance of their relationship more completely than with sneers.

They ran down the empty Tanneries, half a dozen masked monstrosities in white coats smutted with soot; it was impossible to tell one from another. Through the great glass door of Midland Steel they saw three men standing by the lift talking to the porter. There were a lot of uniformed police about, and in the square ahead they saw a rival group of fellow-students, who had been luckier than they, carrying a little man (he kicked and squealed) towards an ambulance. The police watched and laughed, and a troop of planes zoomed overhead, diving low over the centre of the town to lend the practice verisimilitude. First left. First right. The centre of Nottwich to a stranger was full of sudden contrasts. Only on the edge of the town to the north, out by the park, were you certain of encountering street after street of well-to-do middle-class houses. Near the market you changed at a corner from modern chromium offices to little cats’-meat shops, from the luxury of the Metropole to seedy lodgings and the smell of cooking greens. There was no excuse in Nottwich for one half of the world being ignorant of how the other half lived.

Second left. The houses on one side gave way to bare rock and the street dived steeply down below the Castle. It wasn’t really a castle any longer; it was a yellow brick municipal museum full of flint arrowheads and pieces of broken brown pottery and a few stags’ heads in the zoological section suffering from moths and one mummy brought back from Egypt by the Earl of Nottwich in 1843. The moths left that alone, but the custodian thought he had heard mice inside. Mike, with a nasal douche in his breast pocket, wanted to climb up the
rock
. He shouted to Buddy Fergusson that the custodian was outside, without a mask, signalling to enemy aircraft. But Buddy and the others ran down the hill to number twelve.

The landlady opened the door to them. She smiled winningly and said Mr Watt was in; she thought he was working; she buttonholed Buddy Fergusson and said she was sure it would be good for Mr Watt to be taken away from his books for half an hour. Buddy said, ‘We’ll take him away.’

‘Why, that’s Mr Fergusson,’ the landlady said. ‘I’d know your voice anywhere, but I’d never ’ave known you without you spoke to me, not in them respiratorories. I was just going out when Mr Watt minded me as ’ow it was the gas practice.’

‘Oh, he remembers, does he?’ Buddy said. He was blushing inside the mask at having been recognized by the landlady. It made him want to assert himself more than ever.

‘He said I’d be taken to the ’ospital.’

‘Come on, men,’ Buddy said and led them up the stairs. But their number was an embarrassment. They couldn’t all charge through Watt’s door and seize him in a moment from the chair in which he was sitting. They had to go through one at a time after Buddy and then bunch themselves in a shy silence beside the table. This was the moment when an experienced man could have dealt with them, but Watt was aware of his unpopularity. He was afraid of losing dignity. He was a man who worked hard because he liked the work; he hadn’t the excuse of poverty. He played no games because he didn’t like games, without the excuse of physical weakness. He had a mental arrogance which would ensure his success. If he suffered agony from his unpopularity now as a student it was the price he paid for the baronetcy, the Harley Street consulting room, the fashionable practice of the future. There was no reason to pity him; it was the others who were pitiable, living in their vivid vulgar way for five years before the long provincial interment of a lifetime.

Watt said, ‘Close the door, please. There’s a draught,’ and his scared sarcasm gave them the chance they needed, to resent him.

Buddy said, ‘We’ve come to ask why you weren’t at the hospital this morning?’

‘That’s Fergusson, isn’t it?’ Watt said. ‘I don’t know why you want to know.’

‘Are you a conchie?’

‘How old-world your slang is,’ Watt said. ‘No. I’m not a conchie. Now I’m just looking through some old medical books, and as I don’t suppose they’d interest you, I’ll ask you to show yourselves out.’

‘Working? That’s how fellows like you get ahead, working while others are doing a proper job.’

‘It’s just a different idea of fun, that’s all,’ Watt said. ‘It’s my pleasure to look at these folios, it’s yours to go screaming about the streets in that odd costume.’

That let them loose on him. He was as good as insulting the King’s uniform. ‘We’re going to debag you,’ Buddy said.

‘That’s fine. It’ll save time,’ Watt said, ‘if I take them off myself,’ and he began to undress. He said, ‘This action has an interesting psychological significance. A form of castration. My own theory is that sexual jealousy in some form is at the bottom of it.’

‘You dirty tyke,’ Buddy said. He took the inkpot and splashed it on the wallpaper. He didn’t like the word ‘sex’. He believed in barmaids and nurses and tarts, and he believed in love, something rather maternal with deep breasts. The word sex suggested that there was something in common between the two : it outraged him. ‘Wreck the room!’ he bawled and they were all immediately happy and at ease, exerting themselves physically like young bulls. Because they were happy again they didn’t do any real damage, just pulled the books out of the shelves and threw them on the floor; they broke the glass of a picture frame in puritanical zeal because it contained the reproduction of a nude girl. Watt watched them; he was scared, and the more scared he was the more sarcastic he became. Buddy suddenly saw him as he was, standing there in his pants marked from birth for distinction, for success, and hated him. He felt impotent; he hadn’t ‘class’ like Watt, he hadn’t the brains, in a very few years nothing he could do or
say
would affect the fortunes or the happiness of the Harley Street specialist, the woman’s physician, the baronet. What was the good of talking about free will? Only war and death could save Buddy from the confinements, the provincial practice, the one dull wife and the bridge parties. It seemed to him that he could be happy if he had the strength to impress himself on Watt’s memory. He took the inkpot and poured it over the open title-page of the old folio on the table.

‘Come on, men,’ he said. ‘This room stinks,’ and led his party out and down the stairs. He felt an immense exhilaration; it was as if he had proved his manhood.

Almost immediately they picked up an old woman. She didn’t in the least know what it was all about. She thought it was a street collection and offered them a penny. They told her she had to come along to the hospital; they were very courteous and one offered to carry her basket; they reacted from violence to a more than usual gentility. She laughed at them. She said, ‘Well I never, what you boys will think up next!’ and when one took her arm and began to lead her gently up the street, she said, ‘Which of you’s Father Christmas?’ Buddy didn’t like that: it hurt his dignity: he had suddenly been feeling rather noble: ‘women and children first’: ‘although bombs were falling all round he brought the woman safely …’ He stood still and let the others go on up the street with the old woman; she was having the time of her life; she cackled and dug them in the ribs: her voice carried a long distance in the cold air. She kept on telling them to ‘take off them things and play fair’, and just before they turned a corner out of sight she was calling them Mormons. She meant Mohammedans, because she had an idea that Mohammedans went about with their faces covered up and had a lot of wives. An aeroplane zoomed overhead and Buddy was alone in the street with the dead and dying until Mike appeared. Mike said he had a good idea. Why not pinch the mummy in the Castle and take it to the hospital for not wearing a gas-mask? The fellows with the death’s-head ambulance had already got Tiger Tim and were driving round the town crying out for old Piker.

‘No,’ Buddy said, ‘this isn’t an ordinary rag. This is serious,’ and suddenly at the entrance to a side street he saw a man without a mask double back at the sight of him. ‘Quick. Hunt him down,’ Buddy cried, ‘Tallyho,’ and they pelted up the street in pursuit. Mike was the faster runner: Buddy was already a little inclined to fatness, and Mike was soon leading by ten yards. The man had a start, he was round one corner and out of sight. ‘Go on,’ Buddy shouted, ‘hold him till I come.’ Mike was out of sight too when a voice from a doorway spoke as he passed. ‘Hi,’ it said, ‘you. What’s the hurry?’

Buddy stopped. The man stood there with his back pressed to a house door. He had simply stepped back and Mike in his hurry had gone by. There was something serious and planned and venomous about his behaviour. The street of little Gothic villas was quite empty.

‘You were looking for me, weren’t you?’ the man said.

Buddy demanded sharply, ‘Where’s your gas-mask?’

‘Is this a game?’ the man asked angrily.

‘Of course it’s not a game,’ Buddy said. ‘You’re a casualty. You’ll have to come along to the hospital with me.’

‘I will, will I?’ the man said, pressed back against the door, thin and undersized and out-at-elbows.

‘You’d better,’ Buddy said. He inflated his chest and made his biceps swell. Discipline, he thought, discipline. The little brute didn’t recognize an officer when he saw one. He felt the satisfaction of superior physical strength. He’d punch his nose for him if he didn’t come quietly.

‘All right,’ the man said, ‘I’ll come.’ He emerged from the dark doorway, mean vicious face, hare-lip, a crude check suit, ominous and aggressive in his submission. ‘Not that way,’ Buddy said, ‘to the left.’