Busman’s Honeymoon

Chapter IV. Household Gods

Lady Peter Wimsey propped herself cautiously on one elbow and contemplated her sleeping lord. With the mocking eyes hidden and the confident mouth relaxed, his big bony nose and tumbled hair gave him a gawky, fledgling look, like a schoolboy. And the hair itself was almost as light as tow-it was ridiculous that anything male should be as fair as that. No doubt when it was damped and sleeked down for the day his head would go back to its normal barley-corn colour. Last night, after Bunter’s ruthless pumping, it had affected her much as the murdered Lorenzo’s glove affected Isabella, and she had had to rub it dry with a towel before cradling it where, in the country phrase, it ‘belonged to be’.

Bunter? She spared him a stray thought from a mind drugged with sleep and the pleasure that comes with sleep. Bunter was up and about; she could faintly hear doors opening and shutting and furniture being moved down below. What an amazing muddle it had all been! But he would miraculously put everything right-wonderful Bunter-and leave one free to live and not bother one’s head. One vaguely hoped Bunter had not spent the whole night chasing black beetles, but for the moment what was left of one’s mind was concentrated on Peter-being anxious not to wake him, rather hoping he would soon wake up of his own accord, and wondering what he would say when he did. If his first words were French one would at least feel certain that he retained an agreeable impression of the night’s proceedings; on the whole, however, English would be preferable, as showing that he remembered quite distinctly who one was.

As though this disturbing thought had broken his sleep, he stirred at that moment, and, without opening his eyes, felt for her with his hand and pulled her down against him. And his first word was neither French nor English, but a long interrogative ‘M’mmm?’

‘M’m!’ said Harriet, abandoning herself. ‘Mais quel tact, mon dieu! Sais-tu enfin qui je suis?’

‘Yes, my Shulamite, I do, so you needn’t lay traps for my tongue. In the course of a mis-spent life I have learnt that it is a gentleman’s first duty to remember in the morning who it was he took to bed with him. You are Harriet, and you are black but comely. Incidentally, you are my wife, and if you have forgotten it you will have to learn it all over again.’

‘Ah!’ said the baker. ‘I thought there was visitors here. You don’t catch old Noakes or Martha Ruddle putting “please” into an order for bread. How many loaves would you be wanting? I calls every day. Righty-ho! a cottage and a sandwich. And a small brown? Okay, chief. Here they are.’

‘If,’ said Bunter, retreating into the passage, ‘you would kindly step in and set them on the kitchen table, I should be obliged, my hands being covered with paraffin.’

‘Okay,’ said the baker, obliging him. ‘Trouble with the stove?’

‘A trifle,’ admitted Bunter. ‘I have been compelled to dismantle and reassemble the burners, but I am in hopes that it will now function adequately. We should, however, be more comfortable if we could induce the fires to draw. We have sent a message by the milkman to a person called Puffett who, as I understand, is willing to oblige in the chimney-sweeping way.’

‘That’s okay,’ agreed the baker. ‘He’s a builder by rights, is Tom Puffett, but he ain’t above obliging with a chimbley. You stopping here long? A month? Then maybe you’d like me to book the bread. Where’s old Noakes?’

‘Over at Broxford, as I understand,’ said Mr Bunter, ‘and we should like to know what he means by it. No preparations made for us and the chimneys out of order, after distinct instructions in writing and promises of compliance which have not been adhered to.’

‘Ah!’ said the baker. ‘It’s easy to promise, ain’t it?’ He winked. ‘Promises cost nothing, but chimbleys is eighteenpence apiece and the soot thrown in. Well, I must scram. Anything I can do for you in a neighbourly way in the village?’

‘Since you are so good,’ replied Mr Bunter, ‘the dispatch of the grocer’s assistant with streaky rashers and eggs would enable us to augment the deficiencies of the breakfast menu.’

‘Say, boy,’ said the baker, ‘that’s okay by me. I’ll tell Willis to send his Jimmy along.’

‘Which,’ observed Mrs Ruddle, suddenly appearing from the sittingroom in a blue-checked apron and with her sleeves rolled up, ‘there’s no call to let George Willis think ’e’s to ’ave all me lord’s custom, seem’ the ’Ome & Colonial is a ’apenny cheaper per pound not to say better and leaner and I can ketch ’im w’en ’e goes by as easy as easy.’

‘You’ll ’ave to do with Willis today,’ retorted the baker, ‘unless you wants your breakfast at dinner-time, seein’ the ’Ome & Colonial don’t get here till past eleven or nearer twelve more like. Nothing more today? Okay. ‘Mornin’, Martha. So long, chief.’

The baker hastened down the path, calling to his horse, and leaving Bunter to deduce that somewhere at no great distance the neighbourhood boasted a picture-palace.

‘Peter!’

‘Heart’s desire?’

‘Somebody’s frying bacon.’

‘Nonsense. People don’t fry bacon at dawn.’

‘That was eight by the church clock and the sun’s simply blazing in.’

‘Busy old fool, unruly sun-but you’re right about the bacon. The smell’s coming up quite distinctly. Through the window, I think. This calls for investigation… I say, it’s a gorgeous morning… Are you hungry?’

‘Ravenous.’

‘Unromantic but reassuring. As a matter of fact, I could do with a large breakfast myself. After all, I work hard for my living. I’ll give Bunter a hail.’

‘For God’s sake put some clothes on-if Mrs Ruddle sees you hanging out of the window like that she’ll have a thousand fits.’

‘It’ll be a treat for her. Nothing so desirable as novelty. I expect old man Ruddle went to bed in his boots. Bunter! Bun-ter!… Damn it, here is the Ruddle woman. Stop laughing and chuck me my dressing-gown… Er-good-morning, Mrs Ruddle. Tell Bunter we’re ready for breakfast, would you?’

‘Right you are, me lord,’ replied Mrs Ruddle (for after all, he was a lord). But she expressed herself later in the day to her friend Mrs Hodges.

‘Mother-naked, Mrs ’Odges, if you’ll believe me. I declare I was that ashamed I didden know w’ere to look. And no more ’air on ’is chest that wot I ’as meself.’

‘That’s gentry,’ said Mrs Hodges, referring to the first part of the indictment. ‘You’ve only to look at the pictures of them there sun-bathers as they call them on the Lydoh. Now, my Susan’s first were a wunnerful ’airy man, jest like a kerridge-rug if you take my meaning. But,’ she added cryptically, ‘it don’t foller, for they never ’ad no family, not till ’e died and she married young Tyler over at Pigott’s.’

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.’

Returning thus processionally through the sittingroom he was relieved to see only Mr Puffett’s ample base emerging from under the chimney-breast and to hear him utter loud groans and cries of self-encouragement which boomed hollow in the funnel of the brickwork. It is always pleasant to see a fellow-creature toiling still harder than one’s self.

In nothing has the whirligig of time so redressed the balance between the sexes as in this business of getting up in the morning. Woman, when not an adept of the Higher Beauty Culture, has now little to do beyond washing, stepping into a garment or so, and walking downstairs. Man, still slave to the button and the razor, clings to the ancient ceremonial potter and gets himself up by installments. Harriet was knotting her tie before the sound of splashing was heard in the next room. She accordingly classed her new possession as a confirmed potterer and made her way down by what Peter with more exactness than delicacy, had already named the Privy Stair. This led into a narrow passage, containing the modern convenience before-mentioned, a boot-hole and a cupboard with brooms in it, and debouched at length into the scullery and so to the back door.

The garden, at any rate, had been well looked after. Then were cabbages at the back, and celery trenches, also an asparagus bed well strawed up and a number of scientifically pruned apple-trees. There was also a small cold-house sheltering a hardy vine with half a dozen bunches of black grapes on it and a number of half-hardy plants in pots. In front of the house, a good show of dahlias and chrysanthemums and a bed of scarlet salvias lent colour to the sunshine Mr Noakes apparently had some little taste for gardening or at any rate a good gardener; and this was the pleasantest thing yet known of Mr Noakes, thought Harriet. She explored the potting-shed, where the tools were in good order, and found a pair of scissors, armed with which she made an assault upon the long trail of vine-leaves and the rigid bronze sheaves of the chrysanthemums. She grinned a little to find herself thus supplying the statutory ‘feminine touch’ to the household and, looking up, was rewarded with the sight of her husband. He was curled on the sill of the open window, in a dressing-gown, with The Times on his knee and a cigarette between his lips, and was trimming his nails in a thoughtful leisurely way, as though he had world and time enough at his disposal. At the other side of the casement, come from goodness knew where, was a large ginger cat, engaged in thoroughly licking one fore-paw before applying it to the back of its ear. The two sleek animals, delicately self-absorbed, sat on in a mandarin-like calm till the human one, with the restlessness of inferiority, lifted his eyes from his task, caught sight of Harriet and said ‘Hey!’-whereupon the cat rose up, affronted, and leapt out of sight.

‘That,’ said Peter, who had sometimes an uncanny way of echoing one’s own thoughts, ‘is a very dainty, ladylike occupation.’

‘Isn’t it?’ said Harriet. She stood on one leg to inspect the pound or two of garden mould adhering to her stout brogue shoe. ‘A garden is a lovesome thing. God wot.’

‘Her feet beneath her pettitcoat like little mice stole in and out,’ agreed his lordship gravely. ‘Can you tell me, rosy-fingered Aurora, whether the unfortunate person in the room below me is being slowly murdered or only having a fit?’

‘I was beginning to wonder myself,’ said Harriet; for strange, strangled cries were proceeding from the sittingroom. ‘Perhaps I had better go and find out.’

‘Must you go? You improve the scenery so much. I like a landscape with figures… Dear me! what a shocking sound-like Nell Cook under the paving-stone! It seemed to come right up into the room beside me. I am becoming a nervous wreck.’

‘You don’t look it. You look abominably placid and pleased with life.’

‘Well, so I am. But one should not be selfish in one’s happiness. I feel convinced that somewhere about the house there is a fellow-creature in trouble.’

At this point Bunter emerged from the front door, walking backwards across the strip of turf, with eyes cast upward as though seeking a heavenly revelation, and solemnly shook his head, like Lord Burleigh in The Critic.

‘Ain’t we there yet?’ cried the voice of Mrs Ruddle from the window.

‘No,’ said Bunter, returning, ‘we appear to be making no progress at all.’

‘It seems,’ said Peter, ‘that we are expecting a happy event. Parturiunt montes. At any rate, the creation seems to be groaning and travailing together a good deal.’

Harriet got off the flower-bed and scraped the earth her shoes with a garden label. ‘I shall cease to decorate the landscape and go and part of a domestic interior.’

Peter uncoiled himself from the window-sill, took off his dressing-gown and pulled away his blazer from under ginger cat.

‘All that’s the matter with this chimney, Mr Bunter,’ announced Mr Puffett, ‘is, sut.’ Having thus, as it were, come out by the same road as he had gone in, he began to draw his brush from the chimney, unscrewing it with extreme deliberation, rod by rod.

‘So,’ said Mr Bunter, with an inflection of sarcasm lost on Mr Puffett, ‘so we had inferred.’

‘That’s it,’ pursued Mr Puffett, ‘corroded sut. No chimney can’t draw when the pot’s full of corroded sut like this chimney-pot is. You can’t ask it. It ain’t reasonable.’

‘I don’t ask it,’ retorted Mr Bunter. ‘I ask you to get it clear, that’s all.’

‘Well now, Mr Bunter,’ said Mr Puffett, with an air of injury, ‘I put it to you to just take a look at this ’ere sut.’ He extended a grimy hand filled with what looked like clinkers. ‘’Ard as a crock, that sut is, corroded ’ard. That’s wot your chimney-pot’s full of, and you can’t get a brush through it, not with all the power you puts be’ind it. Near forty feet of rod I’ve got up that chimney, Mr Bunter, trying to get through the pot, and it ain’t fair on a man nor his rods.’ He pulled down another section of his apparatus and straightened it out with loving care.

‘Some means will have to be devised to penetrate the obstruction,’ said Mr Bunter, his eyes on the window, ‘and without delay. Her ladyship is coming in from the garden. You can take out the breakfast tray, Mrs Ruddle.’

‘Ah!’ said Mrs Ruddle, peeping under the dish-covers before lifting the tray from the radio cabinet where Bunter had set it down, ‘they’re taking their vittles well-that’s a good sign in a young couple. I remember when me and Ruddle was wed-’

‘And the lamps all need new wicks,’ added Bunter austerely, ‘and the burners cleaned before you fill them.’

‘Mr Noakes ain’t used no lamps this long time,’ said Mrs Ruddle, with a sniff. ‘Says ’e can see well enough by candlelight. Comes cheaper, I suppose.’ She flounced out with the tray and, encountering Harriet in the doorway, dropped a curtsy that sent the dish-covers sliding.

‘Oh, you’ve got the sweep, Bunter-that’s splendid! We thought we heard something going on.’

‘Yes, my lady. Mr Puffett has been good enough to oblige. But I understand that he has encountered some impenetrable obstacle in the upper portion of the chimney.’

‘How kind of you to come. Mr Puffett. We had a dreadful time last night.’

Judging from the sweep’s eye that propitiation was advisable, Harriet extended her hand. Mr Puffett looked at it, looked at his own, pulled up his sweaters to get at his trousers pocket, extracted a newly laundered red-cotton handkerchief, shook it slowly from its folds, draped it across his palm and so grasped Harriet’s fingers, rather in the manner of a royal proxy bedding his master’s bride with the sheet between them. ‘Well, me lady.’ said Mr Puffett, ‘I’m allus willin’ to oblige. Not but what you’ll allow as a chimney wot’s choked like this chimney is ain’t fair to a man nor yet to ’is rods. But I will make bold to say that if any man can get the corroded sut out of this ’ere chimney-pot, I’m the man to do it. It’s experience, you see, that’s wot it is, and the power I puts be’ind it.’

‘I’m sure it is,’ said Harriet

‘As I understand the matter, my lady,’ put in Bunter, ‘it is the actual pot that’s choked-no structural defect in the stack.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr Puffett, mollified by finding him self appreciated, ‘the pot’s where your trouble is.’ He stripped off another sweater to reveal himself in emerald green. ‘I’m a-goin’ to try it with the rods alone, without the brush. Maybe, with my power be’ind it, we’ll be able to get the rod through the sut. If not, then we’ll ’ave to get the ladders.’

‘Ladders?’

‘Access by the roof, my lady,’ explained Bunter.

‘What fun!’ said Harriet. ‘I’m sure Mr Puffett will manage it somehow. Can you find me a vase or something for these flowers, Bunter?’

‘Very good, my lady.’ (Nothing, thought Mr Bunter, not even an Oxford education, would prevent a woman’s mind from straying away after inessentials; but he was pleased to note that the temper was, so far, admirably controlled. A vase of water was a small price to pay for harmony.)

‘Peter!’ cried Harriet up the staircase. (Bunter, had he remained to witness it, might after all have conceded her an instinct for essentials.) ‘Peter darling! the sweep’s here!’

‘Oh, frabjous day! I am coming, my own, my sweep.’ He pattered down briskly. ‘What a genius you have for saying the right thing! All my life I have waited to hear those exquisite words, Peter darling, the sweep’s come. We are married by god! we are married. I thought so once, but now I know it.’

‘Some people take a lot of convincing.’

‘One is afraid to believe in good fortune. The sweep! I crushed down my rising hopes. I said. No-it is a thunderstorm, a small earthquake, or at most a destitute cow dying by inches in the chimney. I dared not court disappointment. It is so long since I was taken into anybody’s confidence about a sweep. As a rule, Bunter smuggles him in when I am out of the house, for fear my lordship should be inconvenienced. Only a wife would treat me with the disrespect I deserve and summon me to look upon the-good lord!’

He turned, as he spoke, to look upon Mr Puffett, only the soles of whose boots were visible. At this moment a bellow so loud and prolonged issued from the fireplace that Peter turned quite pale. ‘He hasn’t got stuck, has he?’

‘No-it’s the power he’s putting behind it. There’s corroded soot in the pot or something, which makes it very hard work… Peter, I do wish you could have seen the place before Noakes filled it up with bronze horsemen and bamboo what-nots and aspidistras.’

‘Hush! Never blaspheme the aspidistra. It’s very unlucky. Something frightful will come down that chimney and get you-boo!… Oh, my god! look at that bristling horror over the wireless set!’

‘Some people would pay pounds for a fine cactus like that.’

‘They must have very little imagination. It’s not a plant it’s a morbid growth-something lingering happening to your kidneys. Besides, it makes me wonder whether I’ve shaved. Have I?’

‘M’m-yes-like satin-no, that’ll do! I suppose, if we shot the beastly thing out, it’d die to spite us. They’re delicate, though you mightn’t think it, and Mr Noakes would demand its weight in gold. How long did we hire this grisly furniture for?’

‘A month, but we might get rid of it sooner. It’s a damn shame spoiling this noble old place with that muck.’

‘Do you like the house, Peter?’

‘It’s beautiful. It’s like a lovely body inhabited by an evil spirit. And I don’t mean only the furniture. I’ve taken a dislike to our landlord, or tenant, or whatever he is. I’ve a fancy he’s up to no good and that the house will be glad to be rid of him.’

‘I believe it hates him. I’m sure he’s starved and insulted and ill-treated it. Why, even the chimneys-’

‘Yes, of course, the chimneys. Do you think I could bring myself to the notice of our household god, our little Lar? Er-excuse me one moment, Mr-er-’

‘Puffett is the name.’

‘Mr Puffett-hey, Puffett! Just a second, would you?’

‘Now then!’ expostulated Mr Puffett, swivelling round on his knees. ‘Who’ve you a-poking of in the back with a man’s own rods? It ain’t fair to a man nor his rods.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Peter. ‘I did shout but failed to attract your attention.’

‘No offence,’ said Mr Puffett, evidently conceding something to the honeymoon spirit. ‘You’ll be his lordship, I take it. Hope I sees you well.’

‘Thank you, we are in the pink. But this chimney seems to be a little unwell. Shortness of wind or something.’

‘There ain’t no call to abuse the chimney,’ said Mr Puffett. ‘The fault’s in the pot, like I was saying to your lady. The pot, you see, ain’t reconcilable to the size of the chimney and it’s corroded that ’ard with sut as you couldn’t ’ardly get a bristle through, let alone a brush. It don’t matter ’ow wide you builds the chimney, all the smoke’s got to go through the pot in the end, and that-if you foller my meaning-is where the fault is, see?’

‘I follow you. Even a Tudor chimney winds somewhere safe to pot.’

‘Ah!’ said Mr Puffett, ‘that’s just it. If we ’ad the Tooder pot, now, we’d be all right. A Tooder pot is a pot as a practical chimney-sweep might ’andle with pleasure and do justice to ’isself and ’is rods. But Mr Noakes, now, ’e tuk down some of the Tooder pots and sold ’em to make sundials.’

‘Sold them for sundials?’

‘That’s right, me lady. Catchpenny, I calls it. That’s ’im all over. And these ’ere fiddlin’ modern pots wot ’e’s put on ain’t no good for a chimney the ’ighth and width of this chimney wot you’ve got ’ere. It stands to reason they’ll corrode up with sut in a month. Once that there pot’s clear, the rest is easy. There’s loose sut in the bends, of course but that don’t ’urt-not without it was to ketch fire, which is why it didn’t oughter be there and I’ll ’ave it out in no time once we’re done with the pot-but while the sut’s corroded ’ard in the pot, you won’t get no fire to go in this chimney, me lord, and that’s the long and the short of it.’

‘You make it admirably clear,’ said Peter. ‘I see you are an expert. Please go on demonstrating. Don’t mind me-I’m admiring the tools of your trade. What is this affair like a Brobdingnagian corkscrew? There’s a thing to give a man a thirst-what?’

‘Thank you, me lord,’ replied Mr Puffett, evidently taking this for an invitation. ‘Work first and pleasure afterwards. W’en the job’s done, I won’t say no.’

He beamed kindly at them, peeled off his green uppermost layer and, arrayed now in a Fair-Isle jumper of complicated pattern, addressed himself once more to the chimney.