“Yes, I’m the chap,” he muttered. “Take a good look, my hard-eyed duds.”
Among them he noticed a tall young man whose eyes and hat were somehow tilted at different angles; he was with a very fair, tall girl, who was smoking a cigarette in a holder. They looked a fairly tough couple, he thought; he judged that they either were, or were dressed to resemble, a bad film star and her lizard. They were Pob and his girl friend, known as Brass-Eyed Sarah. He was close to them. Brass-Eyed Sarah, in a very brazen voice, said:
“That’s the bounder who’s going to close Spirr.”
She was one of the brightest of the Bright Young Things. The train came in at that moment. While waiting to pilot his old father through the doors of the station, he heard himself pointed out and commented on by several others. Some of the remarks by the women were meant for him to hear; he heard them. He hardened his heart exceedingly.
In the next week or two, it became clear to him that he was not to find many friends in that countryside. He was away for the greater part of each week, devising his new gun. In his absence, between Monday and Friday night, a few men, knowing that he would be away, left cards upon him. He returned these calls, but found that by some coincidence the people were never at home when he returned the calls; the acquaintance was not made. He did not much wish to make the acquaintance, but marvelled a little at the people troubling to leave cards, if they meant the acquaintance not to be made.
“But,” he thought, “it is a thing they do, and feel bound to do. They will say: ‘Of course, I left cards on the bounder, when he came to these parts; one has to do that, of course; but I took good care not to be in when he came here; a fearful feller like that.’”
After two weeks, he was surprised to find that his chance remarks about the villas at Coombe House had been taken seriously. There were two letters in the Tatshire Times under the heading “Beauty Spot Threatened.” One letter, written in the office, so Frampton judged, said that they had heard with alarm that a new-comer to the district had plans of building red brick villas on the matchless slope of Mullples Hill; the second, by some female hand, presumably Lady Bynd, who had no doubt had Ponk to lunch, called on all loyal lovers of Britain to defend their birthright.
“Her birthright,” Frampton muttered. “The view from her Strawberry Hill Gothic windows. She’s related to the chap who owns this screed. I heard someone say. Well, I’ll lead her a dance over it.”
There was in Tatchester, an opposition paper to the Tatshire Times. The Tatshire Times was a good old weekly Church and State Tory paper, supporting the landed interest and all those commercial interests by which the landed interests keep going. It believed in “the strong hand” in India, Ireland and native questions generally; it felt and said that strikers in industrial disputes did not know which side their bread was buttered, even when it was plainly not buttered on either side. It had a good many subscribers, and was used by local tradesmen who advertised in it constantly. In the last two years, an opposition weekly paper known as “a rag,” or “a red rag,” by the supporters of the Tatshire Times, had been established in Tatchester. This was the Tatshire Change. It was run very ably in the Labour interest, and was making its way. It had already taken nearly a third of the subscribers and a fifth of the advertisements from the Tatshire Times, and many tradesmen, who had at first feared to advertise in it, lest they should lose custom, were beginning to pluck up heart and consider whether they should not make a change.
Frampton had no “Labour leanings,” as his neighbours supposed; he hated revolutionaries as much as he hated tories; his business was to make guns and sell them, in doing which Labour papers were as troublesome to him as Tory Colonels in high places. He disliked inefficiencies, found them in all ranks and was intolerant of them everywhere. The wandering Devil, who was never far from his elbow when there was a chance of gratifying one of his angers, now prompted him to rouse the troubled waters a little more.
“Since she believes in these red brick villas,” he thought, “we’ll see if we can’t make her squirm.”
Just at that moment the telephone rang; it was the Tatshire Change speaking, to ask if he had anything to say about his proposed scheme of building on the Mullples Hill.
He had a moment of much happiness. He asked, if anything had yet been written in the Tatshire Change. The editor replied:
“No, we have no information, beyond the letters in the Toast & Tea” (The local nickname for their rival.)
“Very well, then,” he answered. “I don’t want to talk over the telephone, for over a telephone a man’s words may be all misreported. I’m going to my Works now. If you care to come with me and see the Works, I’ll be glad to talk about it.”
This was too good a chance for the editor to miss. He came with Frampton to London, saw the Works, and heard his views. In a few days, just as the Tatshire Times was culling the flowers from the crop of correspondence about “the spoliation of Mullples beauty spot,” as they meant to call it, the Tatshire Change came out with a long article, and placarded it all over the city.
There was a run on the Tatshire Change; it sold three editions before midnight. The buyers read the following:
“With reference to the letters which have appeared in a local contemporary, and fittingly on the back page, which is being behind the times, even for Tatshire, about some proposed building on Mullples or Abbey Hill, in this county, a member of our staff sends the following account of an interview with Mr. Mansell, the owner of the property in question:
“‘I saw Mr. Mansell to-day by appointment at his works in East London, where he is busily engaged in perfecting the details of his much-improved light machine-gun, which is said to be likely to revolutionise warfare. He received me in his office, which was hung with the trophies of his handicraft.
“‘You have come to ask about the suggested building on Mullples Hill?’ he said. ‘Well, ask away. But first, let me ask you, do you know Mullples Hill?’
“‘We said, yes, we saw it daily, if the weather were at all clear.
“‘Very well,’ he said; ‘do you often go there?’
“‘We said, no, we have never been there.
“‘Very well,’ he said; ‘do you know anybody who does go there?’
“‘No, we said, we knew nobody who went or even had been there, but probably many local people had been there at one time or another.
“‘Very well, then,’ he said. ‘If many go there, they would leave traces, is not that so?’
“‘We said, yes, they would leave traces.
“‘Very well, then,’ he replied. ‘Let me tell you that there are no traces, or practically none. The nearest road to the hill passes at its foot, quite half a mile from the top. There is no lane, no track, no path leading up it. It is a lonely, deserted, barren hill, very steep in places, and covered on all its western slopes with a thicket of white and black thorn, elder, bramble and stunted oak; it is a jungle of weed and diseased wood growing on the poorest soil of the Waste. It is a part of Stubbington Great Wood, in fact, where all the trees are stunted. Primitive man neglected it, because it is overlooked from Stubbington Hills behind it. Picnic parties and view admirers neglect it for the same reason. I have examined the whole of Mullples Hill for signs of human use and interest. At the top, in a shallow depression, were the remains of two picnic fires, one ancient, the other possibly of last August. In one part of the wood, in a shelter under a bank, there is the trace of a tramp’s camp; a man was there with his doxy during the summer, and left ashes, a can, a bottle, a boot and the ruins of a corset. There are at the moment marks of horses’ hoofs on the turf of the hill; the local Hunt has been what they call cubbing, which I trust they will omit in future. That is how man uses the hill at present; two tramps, two picnic-parties and the cubbers, in the finest recorded summer.