“I’ll be the death of you, Roly-Poly,” he said, “if you don’t drive these chaps while the weather’s open.”
The weather that winter was open; the work could be pushed. Except for a part at the western end, the house was “not too bad, considering,” Roly-Poly said.
Frampton was at his best in a scene of this sort. He loved work and the direction of any kind of energy. He was at Mullples at all hours, bearing a hand with any job which took his fancy, and trying his own way at it, hoping to make it simpler. He had a fondness for all tradition of work, judging it to be a memory, however defective, of the methods of genius. He tried to lay bricks, and to do tiling. He dug with the best of them, and planed against the carpenters, to see who could cut the longest shaving. Always, when he could, he talked with the men, and tried to find out from them who had taught them their ways of working. Somewhere in the far past there had been wonderful fellows in all the crafts; odd ghosts of their methods still flitted. He heard only of men long since gone, Old Joe This, and poor Mr. Tom That, who had learned from men who had worked under Hawkesmoor, who had learned from men who worked under Wren, who had learned from old tother who had done some of the plastering at Nonesuch, who had learned from someone shadowy indeed, who had learned from the great unknown. But somewhere, genius had been bright in all the crafts, and the glimmer still showed.
It was necessary now and then to try to get work done at Stubbington and in Tatchester, When this happened, it was his fortune to fall foul of the country method, which was, perhaps, just the leisured method of genius, which he longed to recover. In his impatience he declared publicly, and the words were repeated “with advantages,” that the country workers were the sediment left, when all the guts had gone to the Colonies and all the brains to the towns. In the pubs at Stubbington, the labouring men summed him up as a slave-driver, who had a lot of chaps putting painted plaster on the walls, and spending pots of money on it, but that with it all, he’d no great cause to talk to them like that: his own father was only a baker’s boy, and his grandfather had been in Tatchester prison. He’d no cause to sing proud with that in his record. Let a man with a grandfather in prison not talk too loud about his place in the world, however much money he might have.
He had now set the lower and the lower middle-class against him; very soon, he was to shoot at higher game and rouse a prouder hatred.
But, in the meantime, the work engrossed and delighted him. One of the pleasantest parts of the work was exploring the nooks and crannies of Mullples with Roly-Poly. They went up to the attics and got at the roofs; they groped in the cellars, tapped at old walls, broke off old plaster, laid bare fireplaces and powdering chambers, rafters with splendid chamfers cut on them, done by some sure hand with an adze, in the one stroke, and hinges forged by the smith during the Wars of the Roses. But like Roly-Poly, he was less in love with these things, than with the later work. The theatre gave him the intensest thrill. There, under the stage, in a big store-room, so admirably built that it was dry as dust, were things which delighted him. There, behind the shards, the straw, the worn tools, harness and other rubbish of a country house, was a stack of stuff laid edgewise. It looked, at first sight, like hurdling, but it proved to be scenery, much the worse for wear. It represented a classical park or woodland, of the time of Louis Seize; the sets were all of trees, or parts of temples. Pinned to some of the sets were papers which told what play they once had decorated. It was the play of Zimoire the Terrible, a play in verse, translated from the French of M. le Vicomte de Bellencourt, Ministre du Roi. On one of the slats was a programme, which gave the names of the players, but not the date, only the days of the week, “on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, at 3 p.m. precisely.” On the floor were some written bits of parts, half a page of a Female Slave’s part, and the song, in manuscript, to be sung by Master Nashe, “Alas, O tender Rapture.”
Nothing more remained of the theatrical ambitions of that ancient lord of Mullples; local memory had forgotten him; the guide-books ignored him. Frampton searched for more in the British Museum and the public records. Surely, a man who cared for poetry and the other arts to this point must have left a mark on his time. What was the soul who produced Zimoire the Terrible in such a place?
Meanwhile, there was much to do at Spirr. He found, in Weston Mullples, an oldish man who was said to be very good indeed at fencing. Frampton wanted the outer fence of Spirr to be thoroughly repaired, cut, laid and ditched. He employed this old man among others to do this work.
Going out one day, in February, to see how the work was getting on, he found this man, on the western hedge, and stopped to talk with him. The work was excellent, for the man, Zine, was perhaps the greatest living master of fencing, then alive.
“That’s beautiful fencing,” Frampton said.
The old man knew that it was.
“There’s not many can do it now, the old way, the way it ought to be done,” he said.
“Who taught you to do it?” Frampton asked.
“Why, my father, sir,” he said, “my father, who used to work at Sir Peter’s, him and old Will, who was at the Rectory: good fencers both, at the trimming and laying. They didn’t give prizes for ’un, then; no, it was a well-done job, then; no need to give prizes.”
“How old are you?” Frampton asked, expecting to get some clue to the date when fencing was well done.
“I’m seventy-two, sir,” the old man said. He worked on, for a time, then he said: “You see, there, sir, away yonder, the hill in like the blue? That’s Wicked Hill, as they call it.”
“Indeed.”
“Yes, sir: Wicked Hill. They was hunting out that way, yesterday, from the Fox Inn, a matter of twelve mile. Are you a hunting man, sir?”
“No,” Mansell said, “not in the least.”
“Well, that’s where they went yesterday,” the old man said, “out Wicked Hill way; and two of their horses laid down and died.”
“Did they kill their fox?” Frampton asked.
“No, sir,” the old man said. “He got away on ’em, being artful. Very artful things are foxes, sir, as all the world knows. And a fox is better than a man at it, for he can be tired and artful, and a man can’t, not when he’s tired. That’s why polices catch thieves and foxes get away.”
“That’s a very good point,” Frampton said. “I’ve never heard it put before. And what killed the horses? Did they fall?”
“No, sir; I reckon they was just ridden till their hearts burst. It’s a good galloping country, over ’twixt the Fox and the Hill.”
He bent to his task, plainly cheered by the image of something excessive; then, seeing that Frampton wished to talk, he grounded his slasher, and straightened up, glad of an opportunity to pass on his experience.
“They don’t see the hunts they used to see in the old days,” he said; “there’s a lot of reasons for that, the one being the ground, that is now got cleared of the water it used to hold. There is a deal less boggy land now, than in my father’s time. That makes it hard for the foxes. The hounds can go now, fast, over what would ’a held ’em long ago. Then to my way, the foxes aren’t the same kind; all the good ’uns got killed off in the mange years, as they call ’em, when all the foxes got mange; you’d see some of ’em with no more hair than on a baby. They got in a lot of new foxes, presently, on the sly, from Germany, somebody was saying, but they aren’t like the old English sort, nor won’t be, yet awhile; for you can’t hurry Nature, that’s sure; she’s one that won’t be hurried, not for anything that you can do.”