When Mr Bunter tapped discreetly at the door and entered with a wooden bucket full of kindling, her ladyship had vanished and his lordship was sitting on the window-ledge smoking a cigarette.
‘Good-morning, Banter. Fine morning.’
‘Beautiful autumn weather. I trust your lordship found everything satisfactory.’
‘H’m. Bunter, do you know the meaning of arriere-pensée?’
‘No, my lord.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. Have you remembered to pump up the cistern?’
‘Yes, my lord. I have put the oil-stove in order and summoned the sweep. Breakfast will be ready…in a few minutes, my lord, if you will kindly excuse tea for this morning, the local grocer not being acquainted with coffee except in bottles. While you are breakfasting, I will endeavour to kindle a fire in the dressing-room, which I would not attempt last night, on account of the time being short and there being a board in the chimney-no doubt to exclude draughts and pigeons. I fancy, however, it is readily removable.’
‘All right. Is there any hot water?’
‘Yes, my lord-though I would point out there is a slight leak in the copper which creates difficulty as tending to extinguish the fire. I would suggest bringing up the baths in about forty minutes’ time, my lord.’
‘Baths? Thank God! Yes-that’ll do splendidly. No word from Mr Noakes, I suppose?’
‘No, my lord.’
‘We’ll see to him presently. I see you’ve found the fire-dogs.’
‘In the coal-house, my lord. Will you wear the Lovats or the grey suit?’
‘Neither-find me an open shirt and a pair of flannel bags and-did you put in my old blazer?’
‘ Certainly, my lord.’
‘Then buzz off and get breakfast before I get like the Duke of Wellington, nearly reduced to a skellington…I say, Bunter.’
‘My lord?’
‘I’m damned sorry you’re having all this trouble.’
‘Don’t mention it, my lord. So long as your lordship is satisfied-’
Yes. All right, Bunter. Thanks.’
He dropped his hand lightly on the servant’s shoulder in what might have been a gesture of affection or dismissal as you chose to take it, and stood looking thoughtfully into the fireplace till his wife rejoined him.
‘I’ve been exploring-I’d never been in that part of the house. After you go down five steps to the modern bit you turn a corner and go up six steps and bump your head and there’s another passage and a little ramification and two more bedrooms and a triangular cubby-hole and a ladder that goes up to the attics. And the cistern lives in a cupboard to itself-you open the door and fall down two steps and bump your head, and bring up with your chin on the ballcock.’
‘My god! You haven’t put the ballcock out of order? Do you realise, woman, that country life is entirely conditioned by the ballcock in the cistern and the kitchen boiler?’
‘I do-but I didn’t think you would.’
‘Don’t I? If you’d spent your childhood in a house with a hundred and fifty bedrooms and perpetual house-parties, where every drop had to be pumped up by hand and the hot water carried because there were only two bathrooms and all the rest hip-baths, and had the boiler burst when you were entertaining the Prince of Wales, what you didn’t know about insanitary plumbing wouldn’t be worth knowing.’
‘Peter, I believe you’re a fraud. You may play at being a great detective and a scholar and a cosmopolitan man-about-town, but at bottom you’re nothing but an English country j gentleman, with his soul in the stables and his mind on the parish pump.’
‘God help all married men! You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. No-but my father was one of the old school and thought that all these new-fangled luxuries made you soft and merely spoilt the servants… Come in!… Ah! I have never regretted Paradise Lost since I discovered that it contained no eggs-and-bacon.’
‘The trouble with these here chimneys, observed Mr Puffett, oracularly, ’is that they wants sweeping.’
He was an exceedingly stout man, rendered still stouter by his costume. This had reached what, in recent medical jargon, is known as ‘a high degree of onionisation’, consisting as it did of a greenish-black coat and trousers and a series of variegated pullovers one on top of the other, which peeped out at the throat in a graduated scale of decolleté.
‘There ain’t no sweeter chimneys in the county,’ pursued Mr Puffett, removing his coat and displaying the outermost sweater in a glory of red and yellow horizontal stripes, ‘if they was given half a chance, as who should know better than me what’s been up them time and again as a young lad, me ole Dad being’ in the chimney-sweeping line.’
‘Indeed?’ said Mr Bunter.
‘The law wouldn’t let me do it now,’ said Mr Puffett, shaking his head, which was crowned with a bowler hat. ‘Not as me figure would allow of it at my time of life. But I knows these here chimneys from ‘earth to pot as I may say, and a sweeter-drawing pair of chimneys you couldn’t wish for. Not when properly swep’. But no chimney can be sweet if not swep’, no more than a room can, as I’m sure you’ll agree with me, Mr Bunter.’
‘Quite so,’ said Mr Bunter. ‘Would you be good enough to proceed to sweep them?’
‘To oblige you, Mr Bunter, and to oblige the lady and gentleman, I shall be ’appy to sweep them. I’m a builder called upon. I ’ave, as you might say, a soft spot for chimneys, ’avin’ been brought up in ’em, like, and though I says it, Mr Bunter, there ain’t no one ’andles a chimney kinder nor wot I does. It’s knowing ’em, you see, wot does it knowing w’ere they wants easin’ and ’umourin’ and w’ere they wants the power be’ind the rods.’
So saying, Mr Puffett turned up his various sleeves, flexed his biceps once or twice, picked up his rods and brushes, which he had laid down in the passage, and asked where he should begin.
‘The sittingroom will be required first,’ said Mr Bunter. ‘In the kitchen I can, for the immediate moment, manage with the oil-stove. This way, Mr Puffett, if you please.’
Mrs Ruddle, who, as far as the Wimseys were concerned, was a new broom, had made a clean and determined sweep of the sittingroom, draping all the uglier pieces of furniture with particular care in dust-sheets, covering the noisy rugs with newspaper, decorating with handsome dunce’s caps two exceptionally rampageous bronze cavaliers which flanked the fireplace on pedestals and were too heavy to move, and tying up in a duster the withered pampas-grass in the painted drain-pipe near the door, for, as she observed, ‘them things do ’old the dust so.’
‘Ah!’ said Mr Puffett. He removed his top sweater to display a blue one, spread out his apparatus on the space between the shrouded settles and plunged beneath the sacking that enveloped the chimney-breast. He emerged again, beaming with satisfaction. ‘What did I tell you? Full ’o sut this chimney is. Ain’t bin swep’ for a mort o’ years, I reckon.’
‘We reckon so too,’ said Mr Bunter. ‘We should like to have a word with Mr Noakes on the subject of these chimneys.’
‘Ah!’ said Mr Puffett. He thrust his brush up the chimney and screwed a rod to its hinder end. ‘If I was to give you a pound note, Mr Bunter’-the rod jerked upwards and he added another joint-’a pound note for every penny’-he added another joint-’every penny Mr Noakes has paid me’-he added another joint-’or any other practical sweep for that matter’-he added another joint-’in the last ten years or may be more’-he added another joint-’for sweeping of these here chimneys’-he added another joint-’I give you my word, Mr Bunter’-he added another joint and swivelled round on his haunches to deliver his peroration with more emphasis-’you wouldn’t be one ’apenny better off than you are now.’
‘I believe you,’ said Mr Bunter. ‘And the sooner that chimney is clear, the better we shall be pleased.’ He retired into the scullery, where Mrs Ruddle, armed with a hand-bowl, was scooping boiling water from the copper into a large bath-can. ‘You had better leave it to me, Mrs Ruddle, to negotiate the baths round the turn of the stairs. You may follow me with the cans, if you please.’