Chaos followed. Indoors and out of doors they raged without check.
Even Beale gave the thing up. He knocked Charlie into a flower bed and
then disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.
It was growing dusk. From inside the house came faint sounds of mirth,
as the sacking party emptied the rooms of their contents. In the fowl
run a hen was crooning sleepily in its coop. It was a very soft,
liquid, soothing sound.
Presently out came the invaders with their loot--one with a picture,
another with a vase, another bearing the gramophone upside down.
Then I heard somebody--Charlie again, it seemed to me--propose a raid
on the fowl run.
The fowls had had their moments of unrest since they had been our
property, but what they had gone through with us was peace compared
with what befell them then. Not even on that second evening of our
visit, when we had run unmeasured miles in pursuit of them, had there
been such confusion. Roused abruptly from their beauty sleep, they
fled in all directions. The summer evening was made hideous with the
noise of them.
"Disgraceful, sir. Is it not disgraceful!" said a voice at my ear.
The young man from Whiteley's stood beside me. He did not look happy.
His forehead was damp. Somebody seemed to have stepped on his hat and
his coat was smeared with mold.
I was turning to answer him, when from the dusk in the direction of
the house came a sudden roar. A passionate appeal to the world in
general to tell the speaker what all this meant.
There was only one man of my acquaintance with a voice like that. I
walked without hurry toward him.
"Good evening, Ukridge," I said.