As he had not examined that end of his property with any care, he went on over it. It was a good big stretch of very poor soil. To the left of the water, the ground rose into a biggish, barren hill, wooded on the Mullples side with stunted and sickly trees, all jungled with bramble and blackthorn. A lot of this hill was of the starved, sickly colour of the Waste; it grew only a kind of grass so poor that it would hardly keep a goat. The wood upon it looked as though nothing entered it, ever. It went straggling down the slopes to more barren pasture, then there came the road, and beyond the road was Spirr. It was clear that the road was the dividing line. To the west of it, things grew fairly well, to the east of it was the Waste.
“It’s a case of denudation, I’ll bet,” he said. “The rains have washed out the life-giving things in the soil on this side and brought them all away down the hill. Well, in time, I may be able to help matters.”
He was shocked at the tumbledown, bankrupt look of everything.
“The first thing to do,” he said to Margaret later, “is to show that we don’t despair of this Waste. It has been told for five generations or so that it is only fit for fox-hunting. The poor soil has come to believe it. Wait a while. We’ll get the hunting off it, and life of a sort on to it. Lupins are said to be the things, but I’ll find out that. Then we’ll clear the jungle and let in the light, and do a bit of surgery or so. The drains must be cleared, too; half the hill is poisoned by retained rains. What this place has lacked has been work and the benefit of a mind upon it.”
Now that the property was his, he gave it work and the benefit of his mind upon it. He set to, like a new broom. He was busy at the time with ideas for a new machine, which he called “The Death Spray,” or “Mullples Multiple Murderer.” But this absorbed him only during working hours; all the rest of his time, except that doled out to Margaret, was given to Mullples and the driving of the artists, craftsmen and workmen employed upon it. But before this began, he did something which had its effect upon his future there. Before the old owners left, he had arranged with them that a firm at Stubbington should be allowed to send men over to clear the jungle and ruin from the premises, so that his own architect’s men might find a cleared field when they arrived. He saw the firm at Stubbington, and though he did not like their looks, still thought that they would be likely to do this work well, in the hope of future favours. It was suggested that they should send their men over to Mullples every day in a lorry and clear the place. He said that the work was to be pressed: the ground had to be clear by the week before Christmas. The manager assured him that the work should be pressed relentlessly.
“Believe me, sir, we’ll have everything off the ground in the time allowed.”
He did not believe him; he summed him up as one of those country contractors who flourish from the absence of rivals.
“I’ll see how you get along,” he said, “at a preliminary bit, before you get the contract for the rest. If you want the contract, you’ll have to work for it.”
He set the preliminary bit. The Manager, thinking that he would make him pay later for his insolence, accepted. He would soon show this London gent that in the Stubbington area you had to employ the one firm or go without. He meant to make Mansell sing small, before he had done with him.
In the afternoon of the day after which work was to be begun there, Frampton came down unexpectedly, and found nothing even begun, except that the workmen had started to build a small camp for themselves. He found the foreman smoking a cigarette and fishing in the lake. Frampton said that he hoped he was enjoying himself, and asked, what he thought he was doing and what his firm had done the day before. The Manager came up at this moment, rather hot from a run. The Manager said that they had to bring their men and stuff a long way, and until it was there, they could do nothing.
“That’s about the thing you’re best at,” Frampton said. “This is what you call ‘pressing things on relentlessly.’”
“I didn’t know you was in such a hurry,” the Manager said, “or I’d have hurried them on.”
“You’re quite incapable of hurrying things on,” Frampton said. “You knew my views, and this is how you put them in practice. You’re a set of slackers.”
“I’m sorry you should speak like that, Mr. Mansell,” the man replied, “but perhaps local workmen aren’t good enough for you.”
“If you’re a specimen of the local workman,” Frampton said, “let me tell you that you aren’t good enough, nor anything like it. Selling matches on the kerb is your job. Pack your traps and your firm’s traps, and be out of it.”
The firm did as they were bid. The foreman did so; some of the men had heard the dispute; they looked with anger at this new-comer from London, who made guns and wanted to drive them like slaves. In Stubbington they started a legend, which was soon to grow, that this Mr. Mansell was in such a hurry, that Stubbington men weren’t good enough for him. The Manager added his own comment, that he had his pride to consider, and would rather lose any work; he had been used to working for gentlemen. Mansell got them all out of it, and covenanted with the London firm, who had done the Works for him. A force of these men came down, with one of those portable camps of Mansell’s own devising, which had been such a boon during the War. They camped on the spot and got busy. The outraged local Manager wrote to a friend in London, who wrote to the Press.
The letter said that the desecration of ancient buildings now going on all over the country was not sparing even such well-known examples of Tudor domestic architecture as Mullples Priory in Tatshire. Lover of Old England asked whether the Anti-Vandal Society could not do something to preserve its beauties from the ruthless “Restoration” about to be put in hand there.
“Already London workmen are encamped, who may, of course, be presumed to be sympathetic to the work of the countryside, and the present owner has been heard to say that if there be one thing he loathes about a place it is ‘Ye Olde’.”
Rolly, the architect, saw the letter and showed it to Frampton, who replied to it. He said that until Christmas, the house would not be his, and that all that was being done to the Mullples estate at present was a clearing up. Some sycamores and elders were being cut, a tangle of thorns and jungle cleared, the choked ponds dredged, and the streams re-banked and their channels refaced. That after a half-century of neglect, the house would be overhauled thoroughly, and that Lover of Old England might have done better to write about it when the theatre was a fowl-house and the brook was running into the cellar. In fact, Lover of Old England and the Anti-Vandal Society ought to buy a little nest in Hogarth’s Gin Alley and stay there.
The outraged manager took the letter to heart and treasured it. He was a man of some little importance in local affairs. Through him, as one of the first in the district to meet Mansell, the Mansell idea began to form in the local mind.
“Mr. Mansell, the famous gun-man, who is going to do up Mullples, is quite impossibly rude to people. He says that no one in Stubbington is fit to touch the house he intends to live in.”
Presently, it took the form:
“He may be rich and he may be clever, but if he goes on as he’s begun, nobody will touch him with a barge-pole.”
On the day after Boxing Day, Frampton’s men took charge of Mullples and Roly-Poly began the work on the house. It was the biggest and most delightful task he had ever had; he put his heart into it. Frampton spent every moment which he could spare from his Death-Spray and Margaret, at Mullples, urging on the work.