The Square Peg or The Gun Fella полностью

“He should have been the first,” Frampton said. “He should in all things have been the first. As it is, he is the last, as always.” He was thinking more of the Mansell Gun than of Spirr Wood at the moment. “However,” Frampton said, “the matter’s out of my hands now. It is too late for him to apologise. The Stubbington police will, by this time, have summoned him. That may teach him that I’m in earnest about Spirr.”

Sir Peter came away soon after this, wondering whether his wife were not altogether right about the tenant of Mullples. He did not tell her all that Frampton had said, but told her that he was angry, as she would have been, if a trespass of the sort had been made at Coombe. She said, that at Coombe people were not spoil-sports and knew how to take jokes. Sir Peter thought that perhaps they knew only how to take the jokes of their kind, and that often what seemed a joke to one class might be taken as a deadly insult and avenged as such, perhaps years afterwards, by another. He knew that Frampton had had a shattering loss not many months before; and he knew, too, how cruelly and easily a vanity may be injured, and how it will brood and brood and anon flame out appallingly.

The news that the Hunt had been summoned to the Magistrates’ court spread through the land and filled the countryside with fury. Here was this gun fella summonsing the Master; the fella must be mad, first of all tries to spoil sport, then can’t take a joke. Of course, those young fools are young fools, but hang it all, to summons the Hunt. Chap ought to be put in Coventry; ought to be horse-whipped; ought to be shot.

The case was heard a few days later at the Stubbington Magistrates’ Meeting. It was well advertised in the nation’s Press. Dick Harold gave Frampton a hint that a fairly tough set of sportsmen were going to duck him at the bridge there. Frampton said, let them try it. He didn’t much believe in listening to threats, but set out to the Court with a knuckleduster in each pocket, just in case. He would mark one or two before they got him into any river. Just before he started, his lawyer warned him, by telephone, that there was a good deal of feeling, and that the London Press were taking it up.

“Let them take it up,” he said. “The trespass and damage are undoubted. The more the folly of the idle is made apparent the better.”

The Magistrates met on Market Days at Stubbington; the little town was very full. He left his car at a garage, some distance from the Court, and walked the rest of the way. For the greater part of his journey he was not recognised. The crowds were country folk come in for the market. When he began to draw near the Court, he saw that the Press was there in strength. Cinema and camera men were on all the doorsteps opposite the Court-house; unmistakable interviewers were at the Court-house door. In the street leading to the Court was a crowd of the friends of the defendants. There they all were: Hard-Riding Dick, old Bill Ridden, the Kowzer, with his Morny-Cannon tile with a woodcock feather in its band, several chaps with slit mouths and the eyes of grooms, and several nondescript lads, in baggy plus-fours with tassels at the knee. The women were all of one sort; though one or two wore jodhpores instead of skirts, they all wore the same sorts of tweed, shoes and hats; all were made up in the same ways, with the same clip and the same ripple in their hair, the same vermilion streak instead of a mouth, and the same thin lines instead of eyebrows. They smoked the same kind of cigarette, each with the same air of not liking it but being unable to do without it, and all those who wore no gloves had the same red finger-nails, as though they had been scratching rivals.

“But what rivals can these creatures have?” he asked. “What man could put in for one of these?”

He passed through this brazen company towards the policemen at the door; and as he passed, he heard their comment, which was meant for him to hear. The Press sprang into action as he approached; the ostler-looking men called to them, not to let the mucker break their cameras; the interviewers surged round, asking questions, which he would not answer; the cinema-men worked their little wheels till he was inside the door. He went into the Court and took a seat. Presently, the Magistrates came in, and the first case was called, of Sampson Stockfish, a fruiterer’s assistant, for trespassing in pursuit of game. The case was slowly presented by a policeman, who spoke so that each word might be recorded by a slow scribe; but the evidence when heard and weighed did not suffice; Sampson was dismissed.