The Lodger (2 page)

***

  Bunting came back to the fire and looked down at his
wife with mild excitement. Then, seeing her pale, apathetic face,
her look of weary, mournful absorption, a wave of irritation swept
through him. He felt he could have shaken her!

  Ellen had hardly taken the trouble to listen when
he, Bunting, had come back to bed that morning, and told her what
the milkman had said. In fact, she had been quite nasty about it,
intimating that she didn't like hearing about such horrid
things.

  It was a curious fact that though Mrs. Bunting
enjoyed tales of pathos and sentiment, and would listen with frigid
amusement to the details of a breach of promise action, she shrank
from stories of immorality or of physical violence. In the old,
happy days, when they could afford to buy a paper, aye, and more
than one paper daily, Bunting had often had to choke down his
interest in some exciting "case" or "mystery" which was affording
him pleasant mental relaxation, because any allusion to it sharply
angered Ellen.

  But now he was at once too dull and too miserable to
care how she felt.

  Walking away from the window he took a slow,
uncertain step towards the door; when there he turned half round,
and there came over his close-shaven, round face the rather sly,
pleading look with which a child about to do something naughty
glances at its parent.

  But Mrs. Bunting remained quite still; her thin,
narrow shoulders just showed above the back of the chair on which
she was sitting, bolt upright, staring before her as if into
vacancy.

  Bunting turned round, opened the door, and quickly
he went out into the dark hall - they had given up lighting the gas
there some time ago - and opened the front door.

  Walking down the small flagged path outside, he
flung open the iron gate which gave on to the damp pavement. But
there he hesitated. The coppers in his pocket seemed to have shrunk
in number, and he remembered ruefully how far Ellen could make even
four pennies go.

  Then a boy ran up to him with a sheaf of evening
papers, and Bunting, being sorely tempted - fell. "Give me a Sun,"
he said roughly, "Sun or Echo!',

  But the boy, scarcely stopping to take breath, shook
his head. "Only penny papers left," he gasped. "What'll yer 'ave,
sir?"

  With an eagerness which was mingled with shame,
Bunting drew a penny out of his pocket and took a paper - it was
the Evening Standard - from the boy's hand.

  Then, very slowly, he shut the gate and walked back
through the raw, cold air, up the flagged path, shivering yet full
of eager, joyful anticipation.

  Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly
he would pass a happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious,
despondent, miserable self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that
these moments of respite from carking care would not be shared with
his poor wife, with careworn, troubled Ellen.

  A hot wave of unease almost of remorse, swept over
Bunting. Ellen would never have spent that penny on herself - he
knew that well enough - and if it hadn't been so cold, so foggy, so
- so drizzly, he would have gone out again through the gate and
stood under the street lamp to take his pleasure. He dreaded with a
nervous dread the glance of Ellen's cold, reproving light-blue eye.
That glance would tell him that he had had no business to waste a
penny on a paper, and that well he knew it!

  Suddenly the door in front of him opened, and he
beard a familiar voice saying crossly, yet anxiously, "What on
earth are you doing out there, Bunting? Come in - do! You'll catch
your death of cold! I don't want to have you ill on my hands as
well as everything else!" Mrs. Bunting rarely uttered so many words
at once nowadays.

  He walked in through the front door of his cheerless
house. "I went out to get a paper," he said sullenly.

  After all, he was master. He had as much right to
spend the money as she had; for the matter of that the money on
which they were now both living had been lent, nay, pressed on him
- not on Ellen - by that decent young chap, Joe Chandler. And he,
Bunting, had done all he could; he had pawned everything he could
pawn, while Ellen, so he resentfully noticed, still wore her
wedding ring.

  He stepped past her heavily, and though she said
nothing, he knew she grudged him his coming joy. Then, full of rage
with her and contempt for himself, and giving himself the luxury of
a mild, a very mild, oath - Ellen had very early made it clear she
would have no swearing in her presence - he lit the hall gas
full-flare.

  "How can we hope to get lodgers if they can't even
see the card?" he shouted angrily.

  And there was truth in what he said, for now that he
had lit the gas, the oblong card, though not the word "Apartments"
printed on it, could be plainly seen out-lined against the
old-fashioned fanlight above the front door.

  Bunting went into the sitting-room, silently
followed by his wife, and then, sitting down in his nice arm-chair,
he poked the little banked-up fire. It was the first time Bunting
had poked the fire for many a long day, and this exertion of
marital authority made him feel better. A man has to assert himself
sometimes, and he, Bunting, had not asserted himself enough
lately.

  A little colour came into Mrs. Bunting's pale face.
She was not used to be flouted in this way. For Bunting, when not
thoroughly upset, was the mildest of men.

  She began moving about the room, flicking off an
imperceptible touch of dust here, straightening a piece of
furniture there.

  But her hands trembled - they trembled with
excitement, with self-pity, with anger. A penny? It was dreadful -
dreadful to have to worry about a penny! But they had come to the
point when one has to worry about pennies. Strange that her husband
didn't realise that.

  Bunting looked round once or twice; he would have
liked to ask Ellen to leave off fidgeting, but he was fond of
peace, and perhaps, by now, a little bit ashamed of himself, so he
refrained from remark, and she soon gave over what irritated him of
her own accord.

  But Mrs. Bunting did not come and sit down as her
husband would have liked her to do. The sight of him, absorbed in
his paper as he was, irritated her, and made her long to get away
from him. Opening the door which separated the sitting-room from
the bedroom behind, and - shutting out the aggravating vision of
Bunting sitting comfortably by the now brightly burning fire, with
the Evening Standard spread out before him - she sat down in the
cold darkness, and pressed her hands against her temples.

  Never, never had she felt so hopeless, so - so
broken as now. Where was the good of having been an upright,
conscientious, self-respecting woman all her life long, if it only
led to this utter, degrading poverty and wretchedness? She and
Bunting were just past the age which gentlefolk think proper in a
married couple seeking to enter service together, unless, that is,
the wife happens to be a professed cook. A cook and a butler can
always get a nice situation. But Mrs. Bunting was no cook. She
could do all right the simple things any lodger she might get would
require, but that was all.

  Lodgers? How foolish she had been to think of taking
lodgers! For it had been her doing. Bunting bad been like butter in
her hands.

  Yet they had begun well, with a lodging-house in a
seaside place. There they had prospered, not as they had hoped to
do, but still pretty well; and then had come an epidemic of scarlet
fever, and that had meant ruin for them, and for dozens, nay,
hundreds, of other luckless people. Then had followed a business
experiment which had proved even more disastrous, and which had
left them in debt - in debt to an extent they could never hope to
repay, to a good-natured former employer.

  After that, instead of going back to service, as
they might have done, perhaps, either together or separately, they
had made up their minds to make one last effort, and they had taken
over, with the trifle of money that remained to them, the lease of
this house in the Marylebone Road.

  In former days, when they had each been leading the
sheltered, impersonal, and, above all, financially easy existence
which is the compensation life offers to those men and women who
deliberately take upon themselves the yoke of domestic service,
they had both lived in houses overlooking Regent's Park. It had
seemed a wise plan to settle in the same neighbourhood, the more so
that Bunting, who had a good appearance, had retained the kind of
connection which enables a man to get a job now and again as waiter
at private parties.

  But life moves quickly, jaggedly, for people like
the Buntings. Two of his former masters had moved to another part
of London, and a caterer in Baker Street whom he had known went
bankrupt.

  And now? Well, just now Bunting could not have taken
a job had one been offered him, for he had pawned his dress
clothes. He had not asked his wife's permission to do this, as so
good a husband ought to have done. e had just gone out and done it.
And she had not had the heart to say anything; nay, it was with
part of the money that he had handed her silently the evening he
did it that she had bought that last packet of tobacco.

  And then, as Mrs. Bunting sat there thinking these
painful thoughts, there suddenly came to the front door the sound
of a loud, tremulous, uncertain double knock.

  
M
r. Bunting
jumped nervously to her feet. She stood for a moment listening in
the darkness, a darkness made the blacker by the line of light
under the door behind which sat Bunting reading his paper.

  And then it came again, that loud, tremulous,
uncertain double knock; not a knock, so the listener told herself,
that boded any good. Would-be lodgers gave sharp, quick, bold,
confident raps. No; this must be some kind of beggar. The queerest
people came at all hours, and asked - whining or threatening - for
money.

  Mrs. Bunting had had some sinister experiences with
men and women - especially women - drawn from that nameless,
mysterious class made up of the human flotsam and jetsam which
drifts about every great city. But since she had taken to leaving
the gas in the passage unlit at night she had been very little
troubled with that kind of visitors, those human bats which are
attracted by any kind of light but leave alone those who live in
darkness.

  She opened the door of the sitting-room. It was
Bunting's place to go to the front door, but she knew far better
than he did how to deal with difficult or obtrusive callers. Still,
somehow, she would have liked him to go to-night. But Bunting sat
on, absorbed in his newspaper; all he did at the sound of the
bedroom door opening was to look up and say, "Didn't you hear a
knock?"

  Without answering his question she went out into the
hall.

  Slowly she opened the front door.

  On the top of the thee steps which led up to the
door, there stood the long, lanky figure of a man, clad in an
Inverness cape and an old-fashioned top hat. He waited for a few
seconds blinking at her, perhaps dazzled by the light of the gas in
the passage. Mrs. Bunting's trained perception told her at once
that this man, odd as he looked, was a gentleman, belonging by
birth to the class with whom her former employment had brought her
in contact.

  "Is it not a fact that you let lodgings?" he asked,
and there was something shrill, unbalanced, hesitating, in his
voice.

  "Yes, sir," she said uncertainly - it was a long,
long time since anyone had come after their lodgings, anyone, that
is, that they could think of taking into their respectable
house.

  Instinctively she stepped a little to one side, and
the stranger walked past her, and so into the hall.