The Lodger | Page 4

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