“Dear lady, the loss is mine,” Helm was saying.
“Go in, go in! You’ll catch your death of cold,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Have your nice bath. I’ll come another day.”
She gave him a little push and pulled the door to. It slammed. Noel Wells was round on the bedroom side of the house, peering in at the window, his long nose touching the glass.
“ ‘Sister Ann, Sister Ann, do you see anyone coming?’ ” said Mrs. Bradley behind him.
“I’m sure she’s here,” said Wells. “I wish we could warn her.”
Mrs. Bradley did not hear him. She was round at the living-room window, watching Helm. He was an interesting study. He was positively dancing with rage. His hands clawed the air. Three times he kicked the bath with his slippered foot.
“Come, child,” said Mrs. Bradley to Noel Wells, as she came up behind him. Wells shook his head.
“I’m staying here until that woman comes out,” he said, “and then I’m going to tell her who Helm is. He can’t see us. It’s nearly dark out here.”
“You’ll wait too long, dear child,” said Mrs. Bradley gently. “While Helm was opening the door to us I saw her leave the bungalow by way of the bedroom window. She’s half-way to Bognor by now.”
“But she must have been undressed,” protested Wells.
“She wasn’t. She was wearing a knitted suit and a waterproof, and she is fairly young,” said Mrs. Bradley gravely. “Get into the car as quickly as you can, and we’ll follow her. Right away, Tom!”
The woman, whoever she was, had disappeared, however, for they overtook nobody answering to the given description. Mrs. Bradley clicked her tongue. The foolish girl, whoever she was, might at least have been given a friendly warning, if they could have found her.
chapter twelve: sweetheart
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When Susan Cozens was found drowned at the “Swinging Sign” inn, a week after Mrs. Bradley had gone back to her home for Christmas, it was Looney Thomas who voiced the general opinion. He said he was not surprised. It was common belief that the inn was haunted. None of the local people would have dreamed of leasing it. They would not have expected customers, if they had leased it, and to have purchased outright, as these intrepid but foolhardy Londoners had done, seemed little short of lunacy on the one hand, or of trafficking with the powers of evil on the other, to the superstitious people of the village.
Nevertheless, there seemed little of the moon’s madness, and still less of the cloven hoof, about Malachi Spratt and his wife. He was a decent, clean, cheerful man of forty when he bought the “Swinging Sign” on the London Road, not five miles out of Bognor Regis, and his wife Dora was a slow-moving, strong, big, industrious creature, quietly-spoken, self-contained, civil and obliging. The people found her generous, too, and, in their ills and their troubles, sympathetic and comforting beyond the ordinary. She had married beneath her, it was said; but she and her husband were an excellent match—he so lithe and quick—it was rumoured that he had held a wrestling championship somewhere, sometime; but wrestling was not a local sport, so nobody was sufficiently intrigued by the rumour to find out the time, district and kind of wrestling involved—she with her apparent languor behind whose slow grace burned fires of energy.
When they had owned the “Swinging Sign” for about twenty months, a son was born to them, and everyone in the village foretold disaster. Their luck had been too good. For one thing, although the village people feared the lonely inn, motorists on the London Road did not. Spratt’s bar might often be empty, but his saloon lounge, his bar parlour, his six fine bedrooms and his garage were often filled to capacity with foreigners, Londoners and their cars. He had twice entertained a Gretna couple, and once a man absconding with company funds. All who came were welcome, as long as they were quiet and paid their score. Many people came again and again, for the reckoning was moderate, the food and drink reasonably good, and the beds comfortable. By the time young John was rising twenty, his father was sufficiently rich to be thinking about rebuilding the “Swinging Sign” and laying the ghost.
Upon mentioning this to one of his clients, however, he was persuaded by the young fellow to give up the idea. The ghost was advertised in an important and distinguished Sunday paper as an extra inducement to stay a week-end at the “Swinging Sign” and business became more brisk than ever. Unfortunately, the luck did not last, for, almost coincident with young John’s twenty-first anniversary, a new by-pass road was opened which diverted traffic from that part of the London Road which led past the inn, and the “Swinging Sign” was left like an eyot in a looped backwater—not high-and-dry exactly, but subject to the fluctuations of week-end and holiday tides of traffic.
Some motorists preferred the narrow highway to the broad new arterial road, and for these the “Swinging Sign” catered adequately as of old; but the high tide of prosperity had passed, and the villagers revived the old tales of ghosts, ill-luck and sudden death, to the annoyance of young John and the amusement of his father. Neither husband nor son could tell what effect the change in fortune was going to have upon Dora. Slow-moving, gracious, bountiful and aloof as before, she kept the house as she had always kept it, and listened to the troubles of the village as she had always listened to them. She was spacious minded, even when John took up with Susie Cozens.
Susie was small and pretty—the antithesis in every way of Dora. She was three years older than John, and had been a shop assistant in London before she came back to keep the village stores with her widowed mother. Even Malachi, who was tolerant of all his fellow-creatures, could not bring himself to contemplate with any degree of enthusiasm the fact that the shallow, cheaply-scented little platinum blonde would be his daughter-in-law. Susie herself looked down on her future relatives. Privately, she would not have been averse to changing her sweetheart had the offer of a better one presented itself.
John was young. That in itself was a disadvantage. She fancied she would have preferred the cave-man type of lover. John, who was big enough, strong enough, taciturn enough, and sufficiently lacking in any sense of humour to fill the rôle, was inhibited by his upbringing and by the difference in their ages from treating Susie in the rough, contemptuous manner which she fancied she would have enjoyed.
Against the obvious disadvantages of John’s youth and courtesy there were, in Susie’s opinion, several facts which told fairly heavily in his favour. For one thing, he was, with two exceptions, the only male of her own generation (living in or near the hamlet of Lamkin) who was not a farm labourer. The exceptions were the parson’s son, young Eric Greenacre, and the squire’s chauffeur, a man of thirty, named Roy.
Roy was his surname. His baptismal name was Ham. He earned thirty-five shillings a week and lived rent free in the room over the squire’s garage. He breakfasted free of charge, and paid the cook seven shillings and sixpence a week inclusive for the rest of his food. The squire, a bibliophile and a faddist, had curious economic theories, and tried them on his servants. Thus, if Roy were absent from the servants’ breakfast for any reason whatsoever, including illness, a sum of tenpence was added to his weekly wage for every breakfast that he missed. Out of the ten-pences he was charged accordingly for the breakfasts taken to his bedside during the period his illness lasted. So when Roy contracted influenza he was in pocket over the breakfasts, for he never had any, and once when he broke his leg he was considerably out of pocket, because he found the enforced inactivity so dull that, as he explained to Susie, he had to eat a lot to keep himself from being bored to death.
It took Susie a considerable time to weigh the two young men in opposite sides of the scale, and to make the nice adjustments which were to aid her in making up her mind between them. It is certain that she could have had her choice, for Roy and John were equally blind, foolish and insensitive where women were concerned, and neither was capable of seeing what a cheap little humbug Susie was. John, getting twenty shillings a week from his father and all found, would one day inherit the “Swinging Sign.” Against this was Roy’s extra fifteen shillings, less the seven and sixpence for meals and the fact that presumably he would never be his own master. On the other side, though, thought Susie, it would be possible for her to be married thirty years at least before John inherited anything, and if those thirty years were to be spent with her husband’s parents, who obviously disliked and distrusted her, what would be gained?