‘NO BREAD AND MILK’ (it said) ‘TILL FURTHER NOTISE’.
‘Hmm!’ said Peter. ‘The occupier, I gather, has already taken his departure. This has been up for several days, by the look of it.’
‘He’s got to be there to let us in,’ said Harriet.
‘He’s probably deputed somebody else. He didn’t write this himself-he can spell “notice” in his letter to us. The “somebody” is a little lacking in thought not to realise that we might want bread and milk. However, we can remedy the matter.’
He reversed the paper, wrote in pencil on the back ‘bread and milk, please’, and restored it to Bunter, who tin-tacked it back and gloomily opened the gate. The car moved slowly past him, up a short and muddy approach on either side of which were flower-beds, carefully tended and filled with chrysanthemums and dahlias, while behind them rose the dark outlines of some sheltering bushes.
‘A load of gravel would have done them no harm,’ observed Bunter to himself, as he picked a disdainful way through the mud. When he reached the door-massive and uncompromising, within an oaken porch having seats on either side-his lordship was already performing a brisk fantasia upon the horn. There was no reply; nothing stirred in the house; no candle darted its beams; no casement was thrown open; no shrill voice demanded to know their business; only, in the near distance, a dog barked irritably.
Mr Bunter, gloomily self-restrained, grasped the heavy knocker and let its summons thunder through the night. The dog barked again. He tried the handle, but the door was fast.
‘Oh, dear!’ said Harriet. This, she felt, was her fault. Her idea in the first place. Her house. Her honeymoon. Her-and this was the incalculable factor in the thing-her husband. (A repressive word that, when you came to think of it, compounded of a grumble and a thump.) The man in possession. The man with rights, including the right not to be made a fool of by his belonging! The dashboard light was switched off, and she could not see his face; but she felt his body turn and his left arm move along the back of the seat as he leaned to call across her: ‘Try the back!’-and something in his assured tone reminded her that he had been brought up in the country and knew well enough that farm-houses were more readily assailable in the rear. ‘If you can’t find anybody there, make for the place where the dog is.’
He tootled on the horn again, the dog responded with a volley of yelps, and the shadowy bulk that was Bunter moved round the side of the building.
‘That,’ continued Peter, with satisfaction, and throwing his hat into the back of he car,’ will keep him busy for quite a bit. We shall now give one another that attention which for the last thirty-six hours, has been squandered on trivialities… Da mihi basia mille, deinde centum… Do you realise, woman, that I’ve done it?… that I’ve got you?… that you can’t get rid of me now, short of death or divorce?… et tot millia millies Quot sunt sidera caelo… Forget Bunter. I don’t care a rap whether he goes for the dog or the dog goes for him.’
‘Poor Bunter!’
‘Yes, poor devil! No wedding bells for Bunter… Not fair, is it? All the kicks for him and all the kisses for me… Stick to it, old son! Wake Duncan with thy knocking. But there’s no hurry for the next few minutes.’
The fusillade of knocks had begun again, and the dog was growing hysterical.
‘Somebody must come some time,’ said Harriet, still with a sense of guilt that no embraces could stifle, ‘because, if not-’
‘If not… Last night you slept in a goose-feather bed. and all that. But the goose-feather bed and the new-wedded lord are inseparable only in ballads. Would you rather wed with the feathers or bed with the goose-I mean the gander? Or would you make shift with the lord in the cold open field?’
‘He wouldn’t be stranded in a cold open field if I hadn’t been so idiotic about St George’s, Hanover Square.’
‘No-and if I hadn’t refused Helen’s ten villas on the Riviera!… Hurray! Somebody’s throttled the hound-that’s a step in the right direction… Cheer up! The night is yet young, and we may even find a goose-feather bed in the village pub-or in the last resort sleep under a haystack. I believe, if I’d had nothing but a haystack to offer you, you’d have married me years ago.’
‘I shouldn’t be surprised.’
‘Damnation! Think what I’ve missed.’
‘Me too. At this moment I could have been tramping at your heels with five babies and a black eye, and saying to a sympathetic bobby, “You leave ’im be-’e’s my man, ain’t I ’e?-’E’ve a right to knock me abaht”.’
‘You seem,’ said her husband, reprovingly, ‘to regret the black eye more than the five babies.’
‘Naturally. You’ll never give me the black eye.’
‘Nothing so easily healed. I’m afraid. Harriet-I wonder what sort of shot I’m going to make at being decent to you.’
‘My dear Peter-’
‘Yes, I know. But I’ve never-now I come to think of it inflicted myself on anyone for very long together. Except Bunter, of course. Have you consulted Bunter? Do you think he would give me a good character?’
‘It sounds to me,’ said Harriet, ‘as though Bunter had picked up a girl friend.’
The footsteps of two people were, in fact, approaching from behind the house. Somebody was expostulating with Bunter in high-pitched tones:
‘I’ll believe it w’en I sees it, and not before. Mr Noakes is at Broxford, I tell you, and has been ever since last Wednesday night as ever is, and he ain’t never said nothing to me nor nobody, not about sellin’ no ’ouse nor about no lords nor ladies neither.’
The speaker, now emerging into the blaze of the headlights, was a hard-faced angular lady of uncertain age, dressed in a mackintosh, a knitted shawl, and a man’s cap secured rakishly to her head with knobbed and shiny hatpins. Neither the size of the car, the polish of its chromium plating nor the brilliance of its lamps appeared to impress her, for advancing with a snort to Harriet’s side she said, belligerently:
‘Now then, ’oo are you and wot d’you want, kicking up all this noise? Let’s ’ave a look at yer!’
‘By all means,’ said Peter. He switched on the dashboard light. His yellow hair and his eye-glass seemed to produce an unfortunate impression.
‘H’mph!’ said the lady. ‘Film-actors, by the look of yer. And’ (with a withering glance at Harriet’s furs) ‘no better than you should be, I’ll be bound.’
‘We are very sorry to have disturbed you,’ began Peter, ‘Mrs-er-’
‘Ruddle is my name,’ said the lady of the cap. ‘Mrs Ruddle, and a respectable married woman with a grown son of her own. He’s a-coming over from the cottage now with his gun, as soon as he’s put his trousis on, which he had just took ’em off to go to bed in good time, ’aving to be up early to ’is work. Now then! Mr Noakes is over at Broxford, same as I was sayin’ to this other chap of yours, and you can’t get nothing out of me, for it ain’t no business of mine, except that I obliges ’im in the cleaning way.’
‘Ruddle?’ said Harriet. ‘Didn’t he work at one time for Mr Vickey at Five Elms?’
‘Yes, ’e did,’ said Mrs Ruddle, quickly, ‘but that’s fifteen year agone. I lost Ruddle last Michaelmas five year, and a good ’usband ’e was, when he was himself, that is. ’Ow do you come to know Ruddle?’
‘I’m Dr Vane’s daughter, that used to live at Great Pagford. Don’t you remember him. I know your name, and I think I remember your face. But you didn’t live here then. The Batesons had the farm, and there was a woman called Sweeting at the cottage who kept pigs and had a niece who wasn’t quite right in the head.’