John Brown's Body by A. L. Barker Read Free Book Online

scrambled the voices in his head – he had a dutiful head, bent on giving others their say.
    “The Colonel left Thorne to me, but he wished Bertha to share it.” The Colonel had not known Ralph. The late Colonel was fond of Bertha. And the Colonel’s lady was no fool. Thorne took some keeping up and although she had plenty of money Emmeline was not averse to saving it. Expenses shared were expenses halved, last year it had cost Ralph two hundred pounds towards a new roof.
    Two hundred, the sum exactly. “These things happen”, he might say to Bertha, “like the roof – you can’t budget for them’. But there could not be another roof.
    He went to the bar with his glass. “Make it a double.”
    “Aren’t you devoted to this stuff,” said the barmaid unquestioningly.
    “It’s an old Navy habit.”
    Had she really been interested she would have asked was he in the Royal or Merchant. She looked beyond him, called along the bar, “I’ve only got one pair of hands.”
    There was a group which Ralph saw stationed always at the same end. The group fluctuated in size but the composition was stable: the members of it were steak-eaters who knew their way about, had beaten out their ways whenever the line of least resistance was not also the most profitable. They could be thought of as a crux, the Pilot’s tone – perhapsit amounted only to timbre – came not from the brewers or the publican or the neighbourhood, but from these men at the bar. Ralph had watched them putting up topics and shooting them down, putting each other up and blowing each other to blazes. They were privileged people, for them wheels turned and switches were thrown.
    When one of them finished a joke they roared all together and fell ritually apart with laughter. The place brimmed with noise, it was a change from the voices in Ralph’s head.
    From the far side of the room someone appeared to be contemplating him. A stranger with his overcoat hung open, his hat pushed back and bending the fleshy rims of his ears, raised his thumb in greeting. Or had Ralph imagined it?
    “You’re sitting on my gloves,” said a girl.
    Ralph stood up, there was nothing on his chair.
    “You don’t mind me asking? I was keeping that seat for a friend.”
    “I beg your pardon –”
    “Sit down till he comes, if he comes. I don’t feel comfortable with an empty place beside me.”
    Ralph sat down reluctantly. The girl wore dark glasses which he found intimidating.
    “You have to be careful who you speak to. I wouldn’t have come if I’d known I’d be sitting here alone. I’m hypersensitive and it’s an ordeal. ‘Half-past eight in the Pilot, I’m dying to see you,’ he said. I think he’s died and been buried.” She covered Ralph with her shiny round knees like a couple of guns. “It cost me something to go and ask for this little gin for myself. People make it very clear what they think of a woman on her own in a bar. As soon as you step over the threshold of a licensed premises they let their thoughts go. I feel like asking is the licence to slander as well as to drink.”
    Ralph was surprised. Didn’t the modern girl like to be thought liberal?
    “This place is a jungle. Do you see that tiger over there? He’s been eating me up with his eyes ever since I came in.”
    Of course the man with bent ears was looking at her, Ralph could see that now. The gesture with the thumb had been invitation, not greeting.
    “He thinks I’m with you, he’d try to make a kill if he knew I wasn’t.”
    I’m not being watched, thought Ralph, I just get in the way every time anyone looks at anyone else. That’s Krassner’s doing.
    “Have you a cigarette?”
    Ralph hadn’t. He preferred to smoke a pipe when at leisure.
    “Isn’t it silly? Even that barmaid scares me. I see what she’s thinking, honestly, it flays me when people think like that.”
    “I haven’t any cigarettes –”
    “God, how that man stares! Hasn’t he seen a woman before?” She