The Lodger | Page 5

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 had 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. He 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.
CHAPTER II
Mr. 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