The Square Peg or The Gun Fella
To
MY WIFE
Robert Frampton Mansell, the inventor and manufacturer of the Mansell Gun, stopped his car, and leaned from his driving-seat, to call to the ditcher at the roadside. “Is this the way to Mullples?”
“Yes,” the man called. “You keep on, like you be going to Hicks’s. That’s a farm, Hicks’s. Then you turn at the gate. It’s all wrote up, on the gate.”
“Is it far?”
“No, not to say far. ’Tis a step.”
“Thanks.”
“Very welcome, surely,” the man said.
He set the car moving, and looked at the car mirror, to see the two people behind him; his fiancée, Margaret Holtspur, a woman of over thirty, with a face both grave and merry, and his old father, Bob Mansell, a frail and sweet old man.
“We’re on the track,” he said. “The chap knew it.”
“We’re enjoying ourselves,” Margaret said.
It was a drive to enjoy. They were in a new, fine country, in bright October weather, all the brighter for a little rain the night before. The hips were scarlet in the hedges; the roots intensely green against the plough.
“It’s all wrote up, on the gate,” he called; “so look out for a gate.”
He was driving in a poor country road, which had never been tarred; as he drove, little flights of finches kept wavering out of the hedges in front of him. An old, red-brick farm was on the left. It must once have been a most trim little manor house.
“That’ll be Hicks’s,” he said. “It’s been a good place, once.”
He drove on along the lifeless road; he had seldom been in a more deserted part of England.
“It’s this pale clay,” he explained. “There are seven square miles of it, just here, and nothing will really do on it.”
“How did you know that?” Margaret asked.
“I looked it up on my geological map last night,” he explained, “and then I looked up the technical terms in my Compendium of Soils. This piece is called the ‘Tatshire Waste, a well-known geological curiosity, long the despair of the farmer’.”
“Look out,” Margaret cried. “You said, ‘Look out for a gate.’”
“This is the place,” he said; “and there it is, wrote up.”
There, on their left, were the remains of old brick walls, which had once supported folding iron gates. The gates had long since gone. The entrance was blocked by stakes and old barbed wire, with part of a farm-gate, unhinged and unhasped. On this gate a board bore the word “MULLPLES” in irregular letters of white paint.
Frampton Mansell hopped out of the car to heave and prop this gate open. Margaret watched him, with admiration. He was in some ways a fine figure of a man. He was of about forty-two years of age, active, vigorous, compact and with an air of force. He stood about five feet six inches. All his bearing indicated decision, keeping to the point, and getting his own way. His dress was good and costly, but somewhat loud in cut and colour; he wore a tweed hat, shooting jacket and knickerbockers. When he turned, to look at Margaret, he showed a bright, humorous eye and a high colour. In his youth, he had discovered that he resembled one of the portraits of Sir Francis Drake; this had influenced his life profoundly, as Margaret had recently accidentally discovered. He wore the pointed torpedo beard of Drake, and the full, curving moustachioes; he had also made his eyebrows to arch. He walked with a swagger and stood with an air. Guns and explosives had been his interest since infancy; there was something destructive and explosive about him. He gave the impression that his main occupation was making somebody anxious to be back among his orange trees in St. Mary Port.
It took him some little time to get the gate open, as it was backed up by a bit of an old iron bedstead on the far side.
“There you are, my Peggy,” he called; “now I’ll just drive through and block the gate behind me; there may be stock in the field.”
When he had closed it, he stopped at the side of the car. “Now, my Peggy,” he said, “what are your first impressions of Mullples? It’s not a very prosperous approach.”
“We’ll go on and see,” she said. “It’s a most romantic dip in front there; anything may be there. We shall come in sight of the valley, don’t you think?”
“We’ll soon know,” he said. “This is the ninth house we’ve looked at. Nine’s a lucky number, they say.”
Two hundred yards farther on, they passed a ruin, which looked like a fallen pigsty. A stone spout beside it was spouting clear water which had gouged itself a channel beside the driving track. Almost at once, after passing this, the banks of the lane fell away, so that a delightful valley lay open to them.
“Here you are, my Peggy,” he said, “here’s Mullples Valley, and there’s the house, what is left of it.”
He stopped the car, and got out to look. After half a minute, he came to the car and opened the door for Margaret.
“I don’t think we shall look at a tenth,” he said. “This seems good enough.”
His old father was peering into a map. “I’ll get out here, if you don’t mind, Fram,” he said, “while you and Maggie go down to see the house. I want to have a look at that ruin we’ve just passed, where the water was gushing. It’s marked as St. Martin’s Well, in this map of mine, and I’m interested in St. Martin.”
He climbed out, with the help of Margaret and his son. He was only a few years short of eighty, and had not been very well of late.
“I’ll poke about in the ruins,” he said, “and then, when you’ve looked at the house, you can pick me up there.”
“Won’t you come down to the house?” they asked.
“No, thankee, I’ve seen enough of these houses to let. But it oughtn’t to be called the Priory. My map says the site of the priory was lower down.”
He had with him, as always, a strong gardening-stick, fitted with a spud at the end; with this, he walked up towards the ruin. Margaret and Frampton drove slowly on towards the house, which stretched away from them on the other side of a brook.
“Tudor brick,” Frampton said. “See the twisted chimneys?”
“It has been a lovely place,” she said.
It had been noble, but it was plain to anyone that fire, water, poverty, brutality, avarice and helplessness, had all wreaked harms upon it.
“There’s a dovecote,” Frampton said, “in the orchard beyond. And one blue pigeon.”
“What is the other building, beyond?” Margaret asked.
“Stables, I should think,” he said. He stopped the car, looked and said: “Well, Peggy, what d’ye think about it? It’s there or thereabout, wouldn’t you say?”
She quoted from Hart Leap Welclass="underline"
“I don’t believe much in curst,” he said. “It’s been let get into a mess. It looks to me more like poverty. Father is right about the priory. Look down the brook to the left, there; those mounds and tumps are the priory. This would have been the guest-house, perhaps.”
“Don’t you think there would have been a gate-house, before a guest-house?”
“I should imagine,” he said, “that the chap who got the grant of the priory buildings, pulled down the gate-house, which would have stood about here, and used the stuff to enlarge the house itself. I think I’m wrong about that far building. It can’t be stables. What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know what to make of that,” she said, “I don’t know what it can be.”