The Sinful Stones Read Online Free Page B

ones, but had worked out their fantasies of power or vengeance on their fellow-citizens.
    The rough timber of the gate was badly hung and scraped open in jerks. He stared into the wind-possessed dark and wondered about his own mind: what complex of oppression and ill-luck would split that cunning bauble into two halves? Would he crack easy? The bauble might be cunning, but he had a curious conviction that it was not strong, that there was a strain of broodiness in his blood. Mother (religion apart) had been as sane as home-baked bread until senility took over. But Father? A schizoid streak might explain the mysterious fracas at the Cavendish, and also the deliberate wasting of his talents in the Clapham booking-office. There had to be a reason for that, and also for Mother’s acceptance of it.
    The salt and icy air hissed through the coarse cloth of Pibble’s habit as though the cloth wasn’t there; he blessed Mary for her stolid belief in woollen underwear, but didn’t dare mooch along the path. To keep what warmth he had he strode as briskly as he dared over the curious surface—except where an underlying rock projected it had been scraped or rolled quite smooth. Even so he held the lantern forward and walked in a hurried crouch, peering for obstructions that might batter his feet still further.
    So who had stolen the manuscript, and why? And had they stolen it at all?
    Ach, the hell with that—why had Sir Francis sent for him in the first place? Not for the book, apparently. Nor to find the thief, since the old man hadn’t known of the theft until Pibble had told him. But there’d been that curious easing of aggressiveness when Pibble had said that Father never spoke about the Cavendish …
    And the hell with that, too. His mind, too rebellious to think in an orderly fashion when it ought by rights to have been hull down in the seas of dream, kept sidling off from its proper problems back to a single obsessive figure, back to the quiet-voiced railway clerk who used to walk hand in hand with small Jamie Pibble along the streets of Clapham on Sunday afternoons, explaining things. Always explaining: the principles of the electric motor as a tram banged past; Lloyd George’s betrayal of his soul and his party where a shredded election poster hung from black brick; natural selection when they came to the serried tulips in Councillor Blacker’s front garden. . .Pibble, transfixed by the pang of memory, stood still and looked upward; the Atlantic wind was herding streamers of cloud so fast that the stars behind them seemed to be racing to the west—Father would have found that a fine occasion for an explanation of the phenomenon of parallax.
    But what had he been like? How could anyone tell, who only knew him out of context—when his illness, and the war, and his row with Francis Francis had combined to cut him off from his proper sphere and leave him with no other concern than to keep his wife and son fed and warm in the cramped house on the steep street?
    The only person who could answer that question had been dead forty-three years. (Odd that Sir Francis had bothered to count them.) He’d have known, too, whether he had schizoid tendencies. Pibble remembered the sleepless summer night when he’d crept down and settled on the canvas drugget which protected the precious stair-carpet, and then listened in a chilly half-dream to Father’s voice as it explained the neighbours in terms of the cheap copy of The Plain Man’s Guide to Freud which he’d spent his tobacco money on that week: why Betty Fasting made such a fuss about her dustbins; why Ted Fasting, in consequence, insisted on growing his prize onions in the front garden for all the street to see; why the Barton sisters held those hissing quarrels over the proper treatment of their aspidistra; why Joe Pritchett would cross the street to touch a lamp-post; and (just as mysterious to the shivering listener