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In her suspenseful novel, "The Lodger," Marie Belloc Lowndes intricately weaves a chilling narrative steeped in the atmosphere of London in the early 20th century. This work, often regarded as a precursor to the modern detective story, explores themes of paranoia and the duality of human nature through the lens of a young couple haunted by the mysterious figure of their tenant. Lowndes's sharp prose combines elements of psychological thriller and social commentary, reflecting the uncertainties of an era marked by rapid industrialization and societal change, ultimately questioning the thin veneer of respectability in urban life. Marie Belloc Lowndes, a prolific writer born into a prominent literary family, drew on her own experiences and surroundings to craft engaging narratives. Her deep interest in crime and early psychological studies allowed her to infuse her characters with depth and complexity, making them memorable. The inspiration behind "The Lodger" was partly derived from the infamous Jack the Ripper murders, which captured public imagination and influenced her depiction of fear and moral ambiguity. I wholeheartedly recommend "The Lodger" to readers who relish masterfully constructed suspense and historical nuance. This novel not only offers an engrossing mystery but also serves as a profound reflection on the darkness that can dwell within the human psyche, making it a seminal work in the genre of psychological thrillers. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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The Lodger
Table of Contents
Introduction
In The Lodger, Marie Belloc Lowndes turns the seemingly safe threshold of a rented room into a moral pressure chamber, asking how far ordinary, well-meaning people will compromise vigilance, truth, and conscience when the price of survival is silence, when the comfort of routine is shadowed by headlines of anonymous violence, and when hospitality, pride, and need collide in the narrow corridor between public terror and private dread, so that the most intimate domestic gestures—serving a meal, closing a door, counting coins—become charged with the terrible possibility that safety requires seeing less, knowing less, and believing more than is prudent.
First published in 1913, The Lodger is a psychological crime novel set in London during a wave of killings that echo the public’s memory of the Whitechapel murders of 1888, whose notoriety helped shape the book’s atmosphere of fear. Lowndes situates her story in boarding-house rooms, lodging corridors, police stations, and city streets where gaslight and fog mingle with rumor. The narrative emphasizes suspense over detection, investing the domestic sphere with the intensity of a thriller while keeping the larger city just offstage as a murmur of newspapers, crowds, and clockwork routines, all of it pressing inward on a private household.
The premise is disarmingly simple: a respectable but financially strained couple open their home to a quiet, impeccably mannered lodger just as a series of brutal murders grips the city, and everyday peculiarities—late-night walks, locked boxes, sudden disappearances—acquire sinister meanings under the glare of public panic. The narrative often cleaves closely to the landlady’s anxious perceptions, a choice that produces a taut, claustrophobic effect as small observations swell into moral crises. Lowndes’s prose is restrained yet insistent, favoring incremental revelations and accumulating dread over sensational spectacle, so that the reader advances by unease rather than by tidy clues or bravura twists.
At the heart of the book lies an examination of precarious respectability: how tight budgets, social pride, and the desire to appear proper can distort judgment. Lowndes probes the ethics of suspicion, showing how fear can masquerade as prudence and how decency can shade into self-protective denial. The domestic economy—rent due, coal rationed, a meal stretched—becomes inseparable from moral economy, as the hosts weigh trust, duty, and self-preservation. The novel also considers gendered labor and emotional burden, tracing what it costs to maintain a household’s surface calm while violence stalks the streets, and how privacy itself can serve as refuge and veil.
Lowndes crafts tension through disciplined point of view and careful rhythm, alternating the monotony of household tasks with sudden irruptions of news, knocks, and questions. The city exists as a pressure system—fog, footfalls, headlines—that seeps into parlors and basements, while the lodger’s odd rituals create a counterrhythm of secrecy. Dialogue is spare and weighted; the most charged exchanges are silences and glances. Rather than puzzle-solving, the book offers ethical suspense: the reader is asked to inhabit uncertainty, to feel the cost of every conjecture. This design makes the novel both gripping and eerily intimate, its stakes rooted in daily life.
The Lodger endures because it anatomizes fear at the intersection of money, media, and morality, a nexus that remains urgent. Its portrait of press-driven anxiety, neighborhood rumor, and the ethics of following a sensational case anticipates today’s true-crime culture and the churn of social feeds. Its depiction of precarious housing, service work, and the optics of respectability speaks to contemporary class pressures. Adapted many times for stage and screen, the story’s core appeal persists not through shocks but through recognition: the uneasy knowledge that harm can move through ordinary rooms, and that the hardest decisions arrive disguised as kindness.
For new readers, expect a measured pace that rewards attention to gesture, weather, and the cadence of domestic work, because the novel’s power lies in how meaning accrues around small acts. Notice how money and time are counted, how doors open and close, when conversation turns to newspapers, and when silence swallows a room. Read it as a case study in ethical weather: pressure rising and falling, choices forming like fog. The Lodger remains compelling not simply as a historical curiosity, but as a mirror held to everyday compromise, asking what hospitality, trust, and self-preservation cost when fear shares the key.
Synopsis
Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger (1913) opens in a London house worn thin by want, where Mr. and Mrs. Bunting, former servants now living on dwindling savings, face the shame of an empty lodging. In the fog and cold, a solitary gentleman knocks and quietly takes the upstairs rooms. Calling himself Mr. Sleuth, he pays in advance, asks for strict privacy, and brings few possessions alongside a well-thumbed Bible. He keeps irregular hours, dislikes noise, and requests that certain pictures be covered. Relief at solvency settles uneasily over the household as his presence reshapes their routines and awakens a wary, grateful vigilance.
Across the city, a sequence of brutal murders attributed to a killer known as the Avenger grips the press and public. Headlines, handbills, and street-corner rumors thicken the air, and the Buntings cannot help following each detail. Joe Chandler, a young policeman friendly with the family, stops by with guarded tidings from the Yard, feeding Mr. Bunting’s morbid curiosity. The lodger’s late-night excursions, his nervous, devout manner, and his insistence on secrecy begin to intersect, in Mrs. Bunting’s mind, with the dates and districts of the crimes. Gratitude for his rent wars with a creeping fear of what it might be paying for.
Lowndes roots the suspense in domestic minutiae and Mrs. Bunting’s vigilant consciousness. The lodger eats simple meals, keeps to his rooms, and reads Scripture with unsettling fervor. Odd odors drift down, and small requests—hot water at unconventional hours, errands that must be done discreetly—strain the landlady’s nerves. She notices how his outings coincide with the thickest fogs and darkest nights, and how carefully he avoids casual acquaintances. Yet she says nothing to her husband, guarding both their income and their fragile respectability. Silence, in this cramped house, becomes both a shield and an accusation, tightening the hold of anxiety over everyday chores.
When Daisy, Mrs. Bunting’s cheerful daughter, arrives for a visit, the stakes sharpen. Joe Chandler’s shy courtship brings him more often to the house, and with him come stories of cordons, searches, and frightening clues. The lodger grows more exacting about privacy, wary of strangers in the passage or voices on the stair. Mrs. Bunting’s duty to protect her child clashes with her dependence on the rent and her dread of scandal. Mr. Bunting’s fascination with the murders and his easy camaraderie with Joe complicate her secrecy. The domestic space tightens into a trap made of politeness, fear, and need.
Pressure mounts as the city closes ranks against the Avenger. Police spread nets across districts, questioning lodging-house keepers and scrutinizing night travelers. Within the Buntings’ home, chance incidents—a misplaced item, an unexpected return, a door opened at the wrong moment—threaten to pierce the fragile arrangement. Mrs. Bunting swings between rationalizations and dread: the lodger’s courtesy and temperance argue one way; his secrecy, unusual paraphernalia, and odd hours suggest another. Each new headline makes complicity feel heavier. The question is no longer abstract guilt but whether the peril, if it exists, can be kept outside the threshold—or whether it already resides within.
As attention narrows, official suspicion seems to brush dangerously near the household, and chance convergences turn uneasy coincidences into urgent decisions. Mrs. Bunting weighs what to say, to whom, and at what cost. The novel’s moral core lies here: a landlady and wife trapped between gratitude, survival, and the claims of justice. To betray a lodger is to risk ruin and humiliation; to stay silent may risk worse. Lowndes tracks the calculations of class, respectability, and hunger that govern what can be admitted. The city’s fog becomes an ethical atmosphere, blurring lines between witness and accomplice, prudence and cowardice.
Without relying on sensational revelations, Lowndes crafts a study of fear that turns a lodging-house into a crucible. The Lodger helped shape the psychological thriller by shifting attention from detection to the inward pressures of conscience, secrecy, and social precarity. It examines how news media inflame panic, how poverty constricts choice, and how ordinary people bargain with danger to maintain appearances. The novel’s endurance lies in its intimate scale and steady pulse, where the question of what one can bear to know becomes as gripping as any chase. Its restrained ambiguity keeps the tension alive long after the pages close.
Historical Context
Marie Belloc Lowndes’s The Lodger is rooted in late Victorian London, whose East End became infamous during the 1888 Whitechapel murders attributed to “Jack the Ripper.” Between August and November that year, at least five women were killed in or near Whitechapel and Spitalfields, crimes that were never officially solved. The area, crowded with casual laborers and migrant communities, stood in stark contrast to affluent West End districts, highlighting sharp urban inequalities. Gas-lit streets, dense courts, and frequent fogs shaped both daily life and public anxieties. Lowndes situates her domestic drama against this milieu of fear, notoriety, and fascination with violent, anonymous crime.
Policing during the Whitechapel crisis illuminates the novel’s atmosphere. The Metropolitan Police, founded in 1829, had reorganized its detective arm into the Criminal Investigation Department in 1878. In 1888 investigators lacked fingerprinting and modern forensic techniques, relying on witness testimony, patrol routines, and rudimentary clues. Senior officials faced criticism when high-profile murders went unsolved, and bloodhounds were even tested to little effect. The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, chaired by George Lusk, patrolled streets and pressed authorities for action, reflecting public impatience and civic activism. This contested landscape of official authority and lay participation informs Lowndes’s portrayal of suspicion, surveillance, and the limits of detection.
The mass press shaped how Londoners understood the murders and urban life. Cheap papers competed for circulation with sensational headlines and speculative commentary. Editors publicized letters purporting to be from the killer, notably the “Dear Boss” letters and the “From Hell” packet sent to George Lusk with a portion of human kidney, episodes that remain debated but undeniably fueled panic. Sensational coverage also amplified xenophobic rumors, including the “Leather Apron” scare that wrongly targeted John Pizer, a local Jewish bootmaker. Lowndes’s narrative reflects this media ecology, where rumor travels quickly, reputations teeter, and fear becomes a commodity.
Economic and social conditions in the East End underpin the novel’s domestic focus. Overcrowded tenements, precarious piecework in the “sweating” trades, and casual dock labor left many families one missed wage from destitution. Lodging and boarding houses were widespread, allowing property owners to monetize rooms while tenants gained short-term shelter. The Poor Law system and local workhouses loomed as last resorts. Religious and philanthropic bodies, including the Salvation Army (founded 1865), mounted missions and shelters amid persistent hardship. Lowndes’s attention to household budgets, rent, and respectability arises from this environment, where survival often depended on taking in paying strangers under uncertain conditions.
Debates about gender and public safety also inform the storyworld. Victorian and Edwardian Britain idealized domesticity while offering limited paid work to women—chiefly domestic service, laundry, sewing, and shop work. Street economies exposed many to harassment and violence, and public talk of “fallen women” framed responses to sexual danger. The Contagious Diseases Acts, suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886, had already stirred controversy over policing women’s bodies. In 1888, several murder victims were described in official records as engaging in casual prostitution or sleeping rough. Lowndes channels these realities into a narrative preoccupied with vulnerability, propriety, and the dangers of dependence.
Literary currents frame how the book approaches crime. The sensation novels of the 1860s (by writers such as Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon) fused domestic settings with transgressive secrets, while Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories popularized deductive detection from 1887 onward. Urban Gothic motifs—fog, anonymity, crowds—permeated popular fiction and journalism. Around 1900, psychological character studies gained prominence, creating appetites for interior stress rather than merely external adventure. Published as a short story in 1911 and as a novel in 1913, The Lodger draws on these strands, emphasizing unease inside ordinary homes against a backdrop of public manhunts.
Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947) was an Anglo-French novelist and journalist, the sister of author Hilaire Belloc. She contributed to periodicals and wrote novels exploring crime and society. Living in London and writing in the years before the First World War, she drew on a well-known, unresolved episode of 1888 that still preoccupied readers. Her tale first appeared in McClure’s Magazine in 1911 and was expanded into a book in 1913. The work’s careful attention to manners, class markers, and domestic economies reflects Lowndes’s interest in how ordinary respectability can fray when confronted by sensational violence and public scrutiny.
The Lodger ultimately mirrors and critiques its era’s anxieties about strangers, class insecurity, and the reach of institutions. It observes how charity, police work, and journalism intersect with household survival, showing respectability as both shield and liability. By staging dread within a rented home, the novel refracts the 1888 panic through everyday economics and manners rather than official casefiles. Its enduring resonance is evident in adaptations, notably Alfred Hitchcock’s 1927 film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. Lowndes’s portrait of fear, rumor, and constrained choices distills a historical moment when modern city life felt newly crowded, surveilled, and unpredictable.
The Lodger
CHAPTER I
Robert Bunting and Ellen his wife sat before their dully burning, carefully-banked-up fire[1q].
The room, especially when it be known that it was part of a house standing in a grimy, if not exactly sordid, London thoroughfare, was exceptionally clean and well-cared-for. A casual stranger, more particularly one of a Superior class to their own, on suddenly opening the door of that sitting-room; would have thought that Mr. and Mrs. Bunting presented a very pleasant cosy picture of comfortable married life. Bunting, who was leaning back in a deep leather arm-chair, was clean-shaven and dapper, still in appearance what he had been for many years of his life—a self-respecting man-servant.
On his wife, now sitting up in an uncomfortable straight-backed chair, the marks of past servitude were less apparent; but they were there all the same—in her neat black stuff dress, and in her scrupulously clean, plain collar and cuffs. Mrs. Bunting, as a single woman, had been what is known as a useful maid.
But peculiarly true of average English life is the time-worn English proverb as to appearances being deceitful. Mr. and Mrs. Bunting were sitting in a very nice room and in their time—how long ago it now seemed!—both husband and wife had been proud of their carefully chosen belongings. Everything in the room was strong and substantial, and each article of furniture had been bought at a well-conducted auction held in a private house.
Thus the red damask curtains which now shut out the fog-laden, drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road[1], had cost a mere song, and yet they might have been warranted to last another thirty years. A great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet[2] which covered the floor; as, again, the arm-chair in which Bunting now sat forward, staring into the dull, small fire. In fact, that arm-chair had been an extravagance of Mrs. Bunting. She had wanted her husband to be comfortable after the day's work was done, and she had paid thirty-seven shillings for the chair. Only yesterday Bunting had tried to find a purchaser for it, but the man who had come to look at it, guessing their cruel necessities, had only offered them twelve shillings and sixpence for it; so for the present they were keeping their arm-chair.
But man and woman want something more than mere material comfort, much as that is valued by the Buntings of this world. So, on the walls of the sitting-room, hung neatly framed if now rather faded photographs—photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting's various former employers, and of the pretty country houses in which they had separately lived during the long years they had spent in a not unhappy servitude.
But appearances were not only deceitful, they were more than usually deceitful with regard to these unfortunate people[2q]. In spite of their good furniture—that substantial outward sign of respectability which is the last thing which wise folk who fall into trouble try to dispose of—they were almost at the end of their tether. Already they had learnt to go hungry, and they were beginning to learn to go cold. Tobacco, the last thing the sober man foregoes among his comforts, had been given up some time ago by Bunting. And even Mrs. Bunting—prim, prudent, careful woman as she was in her way—had realised what this must mean to him. So well, indeed, had she understood that some days back she had crept out and bought him a packet of Virginia.
Bunting had been touched—touched as he had not been for years by any woman's thought and love for him[3q]. Painful tears had forced themselves into his eyes, and husband and wife had both felt in their odd, unemotional way, moved to the heart.
Fortunately he never guessed—how could he have guessed, with his slow, normal, rather dull mind?—that his poor Ellen had since more than once bitterly regretted that fourpence-ha'penny[3], for they were now very near the soundless depths which divide those who dwell on the safe tableland of security—those, that is, who are sure of making a respectable, if not a happy, living—and the submerged multitude who, through some lack in themselves, or owing to the conditions under which our strange civilisation has become organised, struggle rudderless till they die in workhouse[4], hospital, or prison.
Had the Buntings been in a class lower than their own, had they belonged to the great company of human beings technically known to so many of us as the poor, there would have been friendly neighbours ready to help them, and the same would have been the case had they belonged to the class of smug, well-meaning, if unimaginative, folk whom they had spent so much of their lives in serving.
There was only one person in the world who might possibly be brought to help them. That was an aunt of Bunting's first wife. With this woman, the widow of a man who had been well-to-do, lived Daisy, Bunting's only child by his first wife, and during the last long two days he had been trying to make up his mind to write to the old lady, and that though he suspected that she would almost certainly retort with a cruel, sharp rebuff.
As to their few acquaintances, former fellow-servants, and so on, they had gradually fallen out of touch with them. There was but one friend who often came to see them in their deep trouble. This was a young fellow named Chandler, under whose grandfather Bunting had been footman years and years ago. Joe Chandler had never gone into service; he was attached to the police; in fact not to put too fine a point upon it, young Chandler was a detective.
When they had first taken the house which had brought them, so they both thought, such bad luck, Bunting had encouraged the young chap to come often, for his tales were well worth listening to—quite exciting at times. But now poor Bunting didn't want to hear that sort of stories—stories of people being cleverly "nabbed," or stupidly allowed to escape the fate they always, from Chandler's point of view, richly deserved.
But Joe still came very faithfully once or twice a week, so timing his calls that neither host nor hostess need press food upon him —nay, more, he had done that which showed him to have a good and feeling heart. He had offered his father's old acquaintance a loan, and Bunting, at last, had taken 30s. Very little of that money now remained: Bunting still could jingle a few coppers in his pocket; and Mrs. Bunting had 2s. 9d.; that and the rent they would have to pay in five weeks, was all they had left. Everything of the light, portable sort that would fetch money had been sold. Mrs. Bunting had a fierce horror of the pawnshop. She had never put her feet in such a place, and she declared she never would—she would rather starve first.
But she had said nothing when there had occurred the gradual disappearance of various little possessions she knew that Bunting valued, notably of the old-fashioned gold watch-chain which had been given to him after the death of his first master, a master he had nursed faithfully and kindly through a long and terrible illness. There had also vanished a twisted gold tie-pin, and a large mourning ring, both gifts of former employers.
When people are living near that deep pit which divides the secure from the insecure—when they see themselves creeping closer and closer to its dread edge—they are apt, however loquacious by nature, to fall into long silences. Bunting had always been a talker, but now he talked no more. Neither did Mrs. Bunting, but then she had always been a silent woman, and that was perhaps one reason why Bunting had felt drawn to her from the very first moment he had seen her.
It had fallen out in this way. A lady had just engaged him as butler, and he had been shown, by the man whose place he was to take, into the dining-room. There, to use his own expression, he had discovered Ellen Green, carefully pouring out the glass of port wine which her then mistress always drank at 11.30 every morning. And as he, the new butler, had seen her engaged in this task, as he had watched her carefully stopper the decanter and put it back into the old wine-cooler, he had said to himself, "That is the woman for me!"
But now her stillness, her—her dumbness, had got on the unfortunate man's nerves. He no longer felt like going into the various little shops, close by, patronised by him in more prosperous days, and Mrs. Bunting also went afield to make the slender purchases which still had to be made every day or two, if they were to be saved from actually starving to death.
Suddenly, across the stillness of the dark November evening there came the muffled sounds of hurrying feet and of loud, shrill shouting outside—boys crying the late afternoon editions of the evening papers.
Bunting turned uneasily in his chair. The giving up of a daily paper had been, after his tobacco, his bitterest deprivation. And the paper was an older habit than the tobacco, for servants are great readers of newspapers.
As the shouts came through the closed windows and the thick damask curtains, Bunting felt a sudden sense of mind hunger fall upon him.
It was a shame—a damned shame—that he shouldn't know what was happening in the world outside! Only criminals are kept from hearing news of what is going on beyond their prison walls. And those shouts, those hoarse, sharp cries must portend that something really exciting had happened, something warranted to make a man forget for the moment his own intimate, gnawing troubles.
He got up, and going towards the nearest window strained his ears to listen. There fell on them, emerging now and again from the confused babel of hoarse shouts, the one clear word "Murder!"
Slowly Bunting's brain pieced the loud, indistinct cries into some sort of connected order. Yes, that was it—"Horrible Murder! Murder at St. Pancras!" Bunting remembered vaguely another murder which had been committed near St. Pancras—that of an old lady by her servant-maid. It had happened a great many years ago, but was still vividly remembered, as of special and natural interest, among the class to which he had belonged.
The newsboys—for there were more than one of them, a rather unusual thing in the Marylebone Road—were coming nearer and nearer; now they had adopted another cry, but he could not quite catch what they were crying. They were still shouting hoarsely, excitedly, but he could only hear a word or two now and then. Suddenly "The Avenger! The Avenger at his work again!" broke on his ear.
During the last fortnight four very curious and brutal murders had been committed in London and within a comparatively small area.
The first had aroused no special interest—even the second had only been awarded, in the paper Bunting was still then taking in, quite a small paragraph.
Then had come the third—and with that a wave of keen excitement, for pinned to the dress of the victim—a drunken woman—had been found a three-cornered piece of paper, on which was written, in red ink, and in printed characters, the words,
"THE AVENGER"
It was then realised, not only by those whose business it is to investigate such terrible happenings, but also by the vast world of men and women who take an intelligent interest in such sinister mysteries, that the same miscreant had committed all three crimes; and before that extraordinary fact had had time to soak well into the public mind there took place yet another murder, and again the murderer had been to special pains to make it clear that some obscure and terrible lust for vengeance possessed him.
Now everyone was talking of The Avenger and his crimes! Even the man who left their ha'porth of milk at the door each morning had spoken to Bunting about them that very day.
******
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 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 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 three 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.
And then, for the first time, Mrs. Bunting noticed that he held a narrow bag in his left hand. It was quite a new bag, made of strong brown leather.
"I am looking for some quiet rooms," he said; then he repeated the words, "quiet rooms," in a dreamy, absent way, and as he uttered them he looked nervously round him.
Then his sallow face brightened, for the hall had been carefully furnished, and was very clean.
