XVI
Mr Beluncle walked to London Bridge. He did not dare to take a taxi until he had crossed the river for he felt Mrs Truslove might have some means of watching him anywhere within half a mile of his factory.
“A terrible thing,” he said. “I am fifty-five. Really, I would not mind being dead. All you have to do is to hang yourself.”
He enacted the scene, and just as he was being cut down, he saw not his own body, but Jack Truslove's body in the mortuary at Birmingham.
“Served him right,” said Mr Beluncle. “Oh no, I didn't mean that. Good heavens, why did I say that? What I meant was, in a sense, it served him right. There's no doubt about it-he deceived me. No good ever comes of deceit.”
Mr Beluncle stopped outside a tie shop. “Many a time I have bought a shirt or tie here,” said Mr Beluncle, “in the early days.”
The same shop, with the same narrow, pinch-faced window, and the same shirts and ties for the office people round about who could not afford better.
“Damn” fool I must have been,” said Mr Beluncle, for he had his shirts made expensively in the West End now.
“I used to wear spotted bows,” he said. He shuddered cynically: the shop brought to his mind again Truslove's great, sly deceit. Truslove was a one-tie man; a faded piece of green poplin used to hang parsimoniously from his neck like a suicide's halter; his straying, sandpapering voice had the weakness of one who had started to hang himself the night before and then had not had the will to go on. He was a tall, soldierly shabby man with a sunken chest, who seemed to look over the tops of everyone's head at some distant place, like the blind looking for something they have lost. At first Truslove was a customer of Beluncle's agency, one of those lonely, friendly ones who buy so as to make an excuse for interminable chats. He liked making quotations from poetry in a depressed voice. One of these Mr Beluncle always remembered. “It irks me not if men my garments wear,” Mr Truslove was fond of saying. Afterwards Mr Beluncle used to laugh with Miss Dykes, his secretary, a plump and stolid, homely girl.
“His garments! He'd have a job to give them away.” Mr Truslove was the most shabbily dressed man in the trade. Why? What was the matter with Mr Truslove? What did he want? What was wrong? He was doing quite well on a few patents. What was he after? Mr Beluncle used to ask his secretary, who was too solemn to enjoy rhetorical questions. He used to ask his wife.
“It's a funny world,” he said. “Here am I without a penny, but I've got faith. That man Truslove has got capital and not even the faith to buy himself a decent tie. And confound me,” said Mr Beluncle, “if I don't tell him so.”
Mr Beluncle did tell him. Mr Beluncle told Mr Truslove this with tremendous emotion.
“I'll tell you something, Truslove. You don't know you're born. You know the trade. You've made a chair that would sell all over the world, but you just peddle it about in ones and twos. You haven't even given it a name. You can't sell a thing without a name. And you can't sell it without faith.”
Mr Truslove's wintry eyes moistened.
“I can't make a chair like that, I haven't the capital, but if I had you'd see the Beluncle Chair all over England,” cried Mr Beluncle.
“Uncle's Chair,” murmured Mr Truslove, in his flat and weary voice.
“The Beluncle Chair,” corrected Mr Beluncle.
“Uncle's Chair,” repeated Mr Truslove suicidally.
“Uncle's?” said Mr Beluncle, offended at the play on his name.
“No offence,” said Mr Truslove, in the voice of one pausing before he cut his throat. “I give you the idea.”
“Don't you give me ideas,” said Mr Beluncle warmly and in a scornful temper because he saw Truslove's idea was a good one. “I've got all I can manage. I'm so full of ideas, I'm afraid I'll burst a blood vessel. Give me the capital.”
It was a sudden wooing, but that is what Truslove did.
Truslove & Beluncle: it was like a marriage and Uncle's Chair was the child of it. Even now, all these years afterwards and Truslove long dead, Mr Beluncle felt the nuptial buzz of those early months. Mr Beluncle saved Mr Truslove by his faith; Mr Truslove saved Mr Beluncle by his capital. And it was like a marriage by the offence it caused; there had been nothing but quarrels ever since. Miss Dykes, the solemn, heavy young secretary who had slaved for Mr Beluncle, who had a crippled sister and an invalid mother, and who often went without her pay for two or three weeks when Mr Beluncle's agency was in a bad way, who had once or twice paid Mr Beluncle's train fare to Scotland (where he had business) out of her own pocket, and had only got half of it back, was jealous of Mr Truslove at once. Mrs Beluncle, who had liked Mr Truslove because he looked ill, now turned against him too. Mrs Beluncle suspected the motives of everyone who helped her husband; why did people back a certain bankrupt? They were giving him money in order to ruin him.
“What's he after? That's what I can't make out. You're so blind. You're so full of yourself. You believe everything they tell you,” she said. “You don't listen to your own wife.”
She was quite right, Mr Beluncle often thought; but the poor woman had her mother's temper and spoiled her intuitions by wrapping them up in unending yards of rage.
Mr Beluncle walked on slowly from the tie shop with a short laugh of indignation. Ten weeks after Truslove had become his partner the betrayal had come.
Mr Beluncle went home and stood fizzing like a black old-fashioned bomb in the hall of his house.
“Eth,” he said, “I've had a blow.”
“Phil,” Mrs Beluncle cried, “not the High Street?”
“The High Street?” he said. “Why are you digging that up. What's the High Street got to do with it. Forget the High Street.”
“I thought someone had come about Connie or the High Street,” she said.
“Take this from me,” said Mr Beluncle, hardening his face, which he rarely did, squaring his jaw, and looking as though he would hit the next person who spoke to him. “No one is going to come about Connie or the High Street. I don't know what you mean.”
“But, Phil-it was never paid. We went… I mean …”
“Ethel,” said Mr Beluncle, softening sadly, “you don't understand business. When Medalls opened up in the High Street he took a risk. It was none of Connie's business. The landlord took a risk. The manufacturers took a risk. That's what business is-risk. You never did and yet you were a business girl. Forget the High Street. The High Street does not exist. It's finished.”
Beluncle started to laugh in an uncomfortable way.
“It's Truslove-Jack. He's married Miss Dykes. Don't sit looking at me. I say, he's married Miss Dykes-that's all.”
“But, Phil…”
Mr Beluncle said it had gone on under his nose for months and he had not noticed. That he was rather proud of; he hoped he had more important things to do in life than to notice sex. Yet they ought to have told him. They hadn't even asked. It might have been thoroughly inconvenient for him to have them married. And then, surely, if the girl had wanted to marry she ought, in a platonic way, to have married him, not Truslove. For Truslove was not free to marry; he was, so to say, married to him, Mr Beluncle. And what a disgusting thought it was; that long bony man with ginger hair on his arms-and probably on his legs too-in bed with that poor fat girl; Mr Beluncle wanted to rush into the bedroom and save her, or at any rate to lie between them, in case, in the middle of the night, she started telling Mr Truslove confidential business matters which she must have picked up while she was working with him.
“I don't mean anything Wrong,” said Mr Beluncle to himself, exhausted by his torment, and speaking in that pathetic inner voice which he sometimes used for introspection, “but I thought she was in love with me.”
His wife's reply to all this was typical of her. In a flash, woman-like, she changed from her long dislike of Miss Dykes and Mr Truslove, to infatuation with them.
“I said, you never listen, you never do, I-I-I, all the time, I said, he wanted something when he came t
o you,” she said tenderly. “He was lonely.”
“Lonely?” said Mr Beluncle. He had never heard of such a thing.
“Wanted something, someone-human,” said Mrs Beluncle.
“Pooh,” said Mr Beluncle.
And then: “Poor girl,” she said.
“Poor girl,” burst out Mr Beluncle, in open jealousy. “She trapped him. She feathered her nest. Feathered it!” said Mr Beluncle, flopping into a chair which seemed to him noticeably cold and unfeathered. “Poor girl!” he jeered.
“He's dying,” said Mrs Beluncle, tears coming to her eyes. “Like my sister. I've seen it before. I can hear his chest now, like a lift going up and down.”
“A lift?” said Mr Beluncle with terror-for sometimes his wife's images were too wild for his sensibility. “That's a peculiar thing to say. I mean to say, have some sense, a lift in a man's chest. How can a man's chest sound as if it had a lift? …”
“Going up and coming down. I can hear it. My poor sister,” said Ethel.
Mr Beluncle was relieved. He knew when his wife mentioned her sister she was never describing anything likely to be repeated in human experience.
And there, Mr Beluncle turned out to be wrong again. There were more betrayals. Six months after the marriage of Miss Dykes and Mr Truslove the girl's mother died. Two years after that the partnership came to an end: Mr Truslove dropped dead in the corridor of a train going to Birmingham, where he was to introduce a new idea of his-the Long Uncle Chair for (as he said dismally, glancing at his own legs) long uncles.
XVII
Mr Beluncle went to Birmingham for the body of his partner. The death shocked him. He had loved Truslove. The flat voice, the small eyes, the lankiness, the uncouthness, the calmness of Truslove, had had a powerful effect on him; they had excited his heart and his senses. “David and Jonathan we were,” he said.
And yet, Beluncle thought, when he saw his friend's body in the mortuary (and but for the strong arm of the young widow he would have fainted at the sight of it), Truslove had his faults. The parable of the talents, perhaps applied to him; perhaps the story of the centurion; one must give up everything. Truslove was mean, exact, prudent, curbing. Men with a little capital always were. And when he and the widow walked out in the industrial rain and he put his umbrella up and took her surprisingly thin, hard arm which was not soft like Ethel's, he felt wild with hunger, wanted to take a larger room at the hotel, have a bottle of champagne, eat ham and hire cars. He wanted to show this girl who had worked for him three years ago, and whom he didn't forgive for so secretly marrying his partner and who would come into his money, how these things were done.
She would not let him. Her face was set and dirty with grief, not red like his own; she did not weep. She stopped him at the undertaker's, where she insisted on coming, when he was about to spread himself on the funeral. She had complained about the expense of the hotel. She obliged him to go to a poor teashop where they had eaten scrambled eggs and there was a thumb mark on his plate.
One triumph Beluncle had, after the funeral-when he had been obscured by two or three relatives-Mrs Truslove and himself travelled first-class back to London and he reserved the compartment. This was an important victory, for Truslove had introduced the cautious notion of third-class travel in the firm. When the train came out of the foul station tunnel into the smoky sunlight and the smell of coal and sulphur staled the carriage, Mrs Truslove was weeping. They were her first tears. Mr Beluncle sat opposite to her for three hours, saying little to her and watching.
“There has been a death,” he said, in a low, discreet voice, to the ticket inspector, handing him two third-class tickets and a half-crown tip. The inspector murmured and went. She was too dazed to notice or to stop him hiring a car when they got to London.
At Mrs Truslove's house when the car got there, no blinds were drawn. The house had been visited by Beluncle once or, perhaps, twice before and had made an impression of hardness and damp on him. Beluncle did not object to the house. What disturbed him was that inside and out it had a dingy austerity which recalled to him the house of his parents and, also, that the Dykes had lived there for seventeen years. The extraordinary thing was that Truslove had not taken his wife away from it, but had moved in with her. Economy again. Truslove had been one of nature's lodgers. His bicycle was in the hall.
The front room of the house was a bed-sitting-room, occupied by the crippled sister of Mrs Truslove; a room at the back was the sitting-room, beyond that was a kitchen. When they got to the house, Mrs Truslove rushed straight upstairs and left Mr Beluncle in the sitting-room. The furniture of the older Dykes (the father had been a postman) was in this room, and every object, the old-fashioned vases on the over-mantle, the horsehair sofa, the hard chairs, the fantastic sideboard with its little mirrors, indicated people who never spent money on new things if the old or the second-hand would do. Beluncle's estimating eye reckoned how much they would get for the lot in a sale.
But soon the door was opened and gently struck the cloth-covered table which stood against the wall; the canary, which Beluncle had not noticed, began to sing and in, very softly on the oiled wheels of her chair, came Mrs Truslove's sister.
The bearings made a soft tick as it moved, a kind of winding sound. Judy Dykes had the air of a peculiar human clock, some doll-like, wooden Swiss invention. She was a very pretty woman in those days. Her voice had a childish sing-song and this evening it was electric and eager and happy.
“I have to wait till my sister comes down,” she said. “Tell me about it. Now do stop!” she called to the excited canary.
Beluncle said afterwards that this mechanical woman seemed to be preparing some-trick on him, as the figure in a jack-in-the-box might. He sat down uncomfortably and told her about the funeral. He looked at the sideboard, hoping to be given a drink, but the room, indeed the house, was odourless as though no one ate or cooked or drank there.
“I can't believe it,” Beluncle said. “I knew he had a bad chest, but the heart to go like that. I can't credit it. It's no good saying I can, I just can't.”
In his black clothes (bought for the funeral), his black tie and with the heavy black blob of his close-shaven beard like a loose dark bib on his cheeks, his jaw and his large personal chin, Beluncle looked like the king of all mourners in full black blossom. The cripple studied his clothes with a smile of appreciation as he talked, and so fixed her eyes on his white teeth that he was embarrassed and brought out a black-bordered handkerchief and blew his nose, which brought tears to his eyes.
“It hasn't happened,” said the cripple pleasantly.
“That's how it seems,” said Beluncle.
“It's like a dream,” he said.
“It is a dream,” said the cripple.
Mr Beluncle was giving a second touch to his nose with the handkerchief when she said this and stopped to look over the black border at her face. It was gay, smiling; the childish voice had vehemence and zest and that oddity and authority which is fixed, like a device, in voices that are speaking in private quotation.
“He is not dead,” the cripple quoted. “He has discovered that he has not died. He has opened his eyes and has discovered that it has not happened. He is here, wishing we could realise it. He has exposed the biggest lie of all.”
Miss Dykes smiled like à hard-headed, story-telling child. Mr Beluncle put his handkerchief away.
“He has moved,” said the cripple, “on to another plane.”
“Well,” said Beluncle afterwards to his wife, “I felt a damn” fool. You could have knocked me over with a feather.”
But what he meant was that he had felt like knocking Miss Dykes over.
He looked at her shrewdly. She was an echo. These were not her views; she was, he recalled, a follower of Mrs Parkinson's. An appetite was awakened.
But the cripple like a reciting child had finished her piece and did not say any more.
“We shall have to sell the house,” the cripple said. “With the
money we can go away to the sea. That is what I have always wanted to do. I was always on to Mr Truslove about it, but Mr Truslove was obstinate. Now she is free.”
It was plain to anybody, Beluncle said, when he told his wife about this conversation, that there had been no love lost between Mr Truslove and the cripple. “Not Jack,” he said, “but Mr Truslove, Mr Truslove. Very strange.”
“Why did she take him to live with a sister? A sister is a woman,” said Mrs Beluncle.
Mr Beluncle took off his black clothes that night and Ethel took each garment from him.
“A coathanger, old girl. Is that a mark on the trousers? Let me fold them,” he said.
“These must have cost you a penny,” she said.
“You never know when you won't be going to a funeral,” Beluncle said. “Where are those trousers I wore at our wedding?”
There were ten other suits in the wardrobe which they shared, her two or three frocks being shouldered into a corner by these masculine clothes. When he was in his shirt and pants, he realised the drama was over and the reality was that money might be withdrawn from the firm.
Mrs Truslove made a visit to the Beluncles on a Sunday afternoon in February. She was wearing a navy-blue coat of good lasting material, well cut, new gloves and a hat which Mrs Beluncle said would have suited the right person. Mr and Mrs Beluncle were astonished by the woman who sat on the edge of the seat of their small sofa. Mrs Beluncle felt she had been deceived. She recognised her only by her height and her voice. The plump secretary had gone. The widow was thin.
“I did not think,” Mrs Truslove said in a melancholy voice, “when I went to work with Mr. Beluncle, that I would be left with a business.”
“How d'you mean?” said Mrs Beluncle.
“My husband's share was the greater,” said Mrs Truslove.
“I never know about business,” said Mrs Beluncle, who knew very well, but her husband had never told her he had a smaller share; he always spoke of it as if the firm was his and that out of affection for Jack Truslove he had given him a little corner in it.
Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 17