The Square Peg or The Gun Fella полностью

The cards were yet another fillip to his rage, as he sat to write to the Hunt Secretary. What sort of England had he come into? he wondered. He sat at his study table and wrote to Sir Peter, to say that he was surprised that the hounds had been permitted to enter Spirr after his wish that they should keep out of it. He added that he had meant what he said, that Spirr was to be a Bird Sanctuary, and that he was determined to keep the hounds out in future. In addition to the trespass into the closed covert of Spirr, people had broken open, and then unhinged, a securely fastened gate, so that the trespass of the whole gathering might be easy. If there were any explanation, he said that he would be glad to hear it. He sent this letter down to Coombe by his driver that evening, thinking that an answer would come by hand that night. It did not come. He went to bed fuming with rage, but was a little appeased by the thought that a note would reach him at breakfast-time.

It did not come. In his anger, he telephoned to Coombe House, asking for Sir Peter. He was answered by the angry ham, that Sir Peter had gone, two nights before, to London, and would be there for three nights more. Sir Peter, therefore, was out of the plot; he had not been there with the hounds; and in his absence the plotters, whoever they were, had had an easy time. He was glad that Sir Peter had not been present; nothing of the kind would have happened if he had been. But he reflected that Annual-Tilter had been in command there; he was the man responsible.

“I’ll rub the Tilter’s nose in the mud for this,” he vowed. “If a Master cannot keep his field in order, he’d better be shown up,” he growled.

He turned to his breakfast-table, where his letters waited for him. At the top of the pile was one in an unknown lady’s hand, postmarked Stubbington; he opened this, and read:

(“He’d have been a damn sight sorrier to find me in,” Frampton growled.)

(“Now we come to the main point,” he growled.)

“Willie Method-Methodde,” Frampton repeated, “sweet little Wilhelmina-pina Mrs. Methody Pethody. Something in my wonderful Works for a lad who finds it so difficult to find anything to do, who wants so to show what is in him until the water-carrying industry’s revived. What the devil does she mean by the water-carrying industry? Does she mean bringing the water-carts to the Tatchester slums? Or men going round, as they did in old London, selling buckets of water at the doors?” He remembered then a speech in the House about the restoration of canals. Probably that was what she meant. The wonderful Works were to house the fledgeling till he could get a whole time job as a bargee. He liked her assumption, that the Works would be the place for her son. Not a word of capacity, or interest, or keenness, or knowledge of guns or explosives; just the fact that he had been at the University and found it difficult to get anything. Well, she would find it jolly difficult to get anything out of him, if that was the way she went about it.

The next letter was from the Stubbington Gazette, a little four-page weekly, which he had seen once or twice. He had passed its office in Stubbington several times; usually the window was full of the week’s local photographs, and thereby conspicuous. The letter ran: