“If they're not going by rail who's collecting them? I mean who's paying delivery?”
“Pay delivery?” exclaimed Mr Chilly. “He never mentioned it.”
The foreman did not answer but returned to his small desk against the wall at the end of the factory, “Henry,” said Mr Chilly, holding Henry's arm and walking towards the office, “I am in despair.”
“What was the price?'” said Henry.
“Henry!” said Mr Chilly. “Bring me the book quickly. Suppose I was looking at the wrong list.”
“It's quite clear, Mr Chilly,” said Henry.
“Mr Chilly, Mr Chilly,” said Mr Chilly. “Don't be so impersonal, so hard. Everard-please. Say 'Everard', Henry. No, go on. Say it.'”
“Everard,” said Henry.
“Oh dear, that's better,” said Mr Chilly. “You sometimes freeze me. One would think one wasn't liked. One would have the impression one was thought a fool. You do think I'm a fool, don't vou, Henry? Don't deny it. Don't deny you have often thought Everard is a fool.”
“I never …” began Henry Beluncle.
“Oh, you and your father are so strong, so sensible. Everything is easy to you. You are a born businessman, a shrewd, quick, practical-look at your hands, show them to me. No, I mean it, show them to me….”
They were standing by an empty table where the men's tea cans stood near the entrance to the factory. Henry Beluncle blushed and glanced nervously towards the men. Henry showed his hands and Mr Chilly raised them.
“The hands,” said Mr Chilly, “of a practical, ambitious, successful man. Have you seen the ghastly hands of Miss Vanner? Meat, Henry, chilblained meat. Mine …”
Mr Chilly dropped Henry's hands and held his own up in a despair that gradually changed to interest and then to discreet admiration.
“Mine are different,” said Mr Chilly coolly. “Artistic-some would say. I have no doubt,” said Mr Chilly with satisfaction, “the proletariat is looking at us with vulgar interest. I will go. I leave you, Henry, who know the men,” said Mr Chilly, “to soothe their troubled breasts.”
XX
“I'm sorry I'm late,” Lady Roads was roughly calling up the stairs to the landing outside her office. It was a room looking on to the traffic, over one of the banks in Boystone. Mr Beluncle was standing on the landing with his hat off and his head bowed, forcefully mourning the minutes that were dying around him. Time, he felt, fluttered away from him like pound notes as he waited. He could feel himself ticking like a taxi while this woman, always late, kept him waiting.
Lady Roads was thrown up on the landing on a wave of shouts, breasts first, hitching her skirt at the waist.
“I've been raising the dead,” Lady Roads laughed. She enjoyed Mr Beluncle's startled look.
“He wanted to die,” said Lady Roads, “but I wouldn't let him. They're so sweet,” said Lady Roads with the wistful-ness of the masterly, “when they try to die and they can't.”
Mr Beluncle liked geniality, but only in himself. At one of the doors on the landing the displeased figure of Miss Wix appeared. She was trembling at the chin, trembling with all she knew, all she feared. Lady Roads had the loud shabbi-ness of wealth, Miss Wix the shiny shabbiness of poverty. At home with the parents who disliked her, Miss Wix cooked on a paraffin stove, a small meal which she ate alone. With it she drank a cup of some liquid which tasted like tea and coffee mixed and which was free of caffein and tannin, those deleterious drugs that play on our senses. She was married to a bicycle on which she rode gracefully through Boystone, thinking of practical household repairs, her religion and often of the nephew she had brought up and whom she had held so often to her uninflected chest.
“Kitty,” Lady Roads said loudly, waving an envelope at her. “For you. From Toronto. I found it in my box.”
Miss Wix's trembling head gave a shaking evasive look at Lady Roads's bosom. She was frightened of those bold breasts which had suckled children. She dreaded and even hated the bosom of Lady Roads and often spoke of it curtly to her followers in the church. Lady Roads, she said, was probably a secret Roman Catholic and worked “through sex”.
Suspiciously Miss Wix took the letter from Lady Roads's fat and pretty hand and Lady Roads opened upon her one of her long, sly, sensual smiles.
“Come on, Mr Beluncle,” said Lady Roads, “when I can find my bloody keys.”
Miss Wix had gone back into her own room, and as Lady Roads led the way into hers with the dipping walk of a large woman, she said:
“That was a letter from headquarters. Poor Kitty has been writing to them complaining that I get all the patients. She says I get them by personality and not by prayer. Sit down.”
“It is hard to realise,” Mr Beluncle said, “that woman is a Divine Idea.”
Lady Roads's room had linoleum on the floor and was furnished by a trestle table in deal with the green-bound works of Mrs Parkinson in twelve volumes on it and a large cocoa-coloured photogravure of one of the Parkinsonian temples which resembled a famous block of offices. The Purification was, in essence, an office religion, a way of finding the Almighty in the proper files. There were two deck chairs in Lady Roads's room. Mr Beluncle looked with annoyance at them. Why no Bulux chair here? The Parkin-sonians ought to support one another. If not Uncle's Chair why not Model Three?
Lady Roads sat down and dropped things about her as if she were on a beach. She crossed her strong legs and exposed an unclean garter. She laughed again.
“I know what Kitty has been up to,” said Lady Roads. “She wants to get me thrown off the register. She doesn't get the cases.”
“Terrible,” said Mr Beluncle, who was very shocked, but he felt better after hearing a scandal.
“Oh!”-Lady Roads was melancholy—“our movement stirs up all the hate in human nature. And I'll tell you something between ourselves.” Lady Roads gave him an even slyer look. “I opened that letter by mistake. It was in my box. I stuck it up again. If“—she winked—”it was a. mistake.” She started to heave herself out of her chair. “I must go and tell her. No,” she said, relapsing, “talk to me first. How's your boy? Here”—and she pulled a bag of toffees out of her pocket. “Have a sweet?”
“No, thank you,” said Mr. Beluncle, but Lady Roads put a large toffee in her cheek.
“I'm listening,” she said.
“You are speaking about Henry,” said Mr Beluncle apologetically. “Well, I suppose the answer is that he has the belief in youth.”
“I'm always on the side of youth. The young people always come to me,” said Lady Roads. “The future of our movement is with youth. Bring the youth. Gall the youth. They long for a leader.”
“I was not aware,” said Mr Beluncle politely, “that the Divine Mind had any age.”
“I'm fifty-two,” said Lady Roads.
“I'm surprised to hear you give voice to that,” said Mr Beluncle, with a little indulgence.
“No,” he said genially. “Henry is at the age when he knows everything. A father …”
“Has he got any girls?” said Lady Roads. “He ought to see a lot of girls.”
“He has no time for girls. A man who works for me has his mind fully occupied,” said Mr Beluncle firmly.
“It's sweet to see them in love,” said Lady Roads tenderly and looking voluptuously at Mr Beluncle.
“He may have spoken to a girl. I don't know,” said Mr Beluncle, on guard.
“Oh, who?” said Lady Roads.
“Oh, no one,” said Mr Beluncle. “I imagine he always thinks he's in love.”
“That's the wonderful thing about our movement,” said Lady Roads. “It takes sex out of love.”
Mr Beluncle blushed on behalf of Lady Roads.
“We have got to make youth take sex out of love,” she said with bitterness.
Mr Beluncle allowed her to go on. There was confusion in the teaching of Mrs Parkinson about love between the sexes. Miss Wix was of the party that believed it to be forbidden. She was surrounded by a group of
celibate girls and women who had left their husbands. Lady Roads believed that marriage was permissible if sexual intercourse could be eliminated. Mr Beluncle had not joined the movement in order to argue; he did not care for the subject to be talked about: it suggested enquiry into other peoples' lives and Mr Beluncle was against that. It took attention from his life. He noticed that sex was discussed everywhere but he preferred to manoeuvre out of the way; the sexual instinct interfered with the acquisitive.
“I don't want sex,” he thought of saying to Lady Roads. “I want more of God, more and more. Manna is what I want-every day.” He had occasional doubts about Lady Roads: like himself she had a strong mind in a strong body. She was very spiritual, of course; her spirituality was strengthened by the fact that her husband had been a railway director worth-well, Mr Beluncle had made a note of the figure somewhere. Mr Beluncle regarded this sum with reverence and with innocence.
But the time had come to interrupt Lady Roads.
“Talking of getting the sex out of love or the love out of sex, what you were saying,” said Mr Beluncle, who got no pleasure out of frankness. “I should like to get the accountants out of my office. They've been in a week.”
“Always a trying time,” said Lady Roads tactfully.
“Well, your office is not your own. They're in and out, wanting to know this and that, things you can't remember. Twopence here, threepence there. It's marvellous really. An accountant,” Mr Beluncle said, with deprecation, “is a man who deals with figures. That's his business, what he has been trained to; he knows five is more than four and two is less than three. He writes down a lot of figures on paper and he looks at them and he believes what he sees. That's the point: he actually believes it. They hypnotise him. I suppose the biggest lies that have ever been told are on balance sheets. You can add it up this way, you can add it up that, and every time you can get a different answer. That's the point. As Shakespeare says, it's all in your own mind.”
Mr Beluncle paused.
“No,” said Mr Beluncle, “if I'd listened to accountants or believed figures, I'd be out on the street. But there it is, it's their profession, they've got to believe it, or they'd be on the streets. I tell Mrs Truslove this every day, but well Still, I didn't come to talk about that. I'm going to be frank with you-and why shouldn't I be frank with you?” said Mr Beluncle, in his intimate voice. “The fact is we can't afford to carry your nephew as things are. I say, as things are. If we are going to go on carrying Everard-we call him Everard-to be plain about it, we feel, Mrs Truslove feels, I feel, that in common justice Everard ought to support us by carrying us more than he does. I feel, we both feel, Mrs Truslove and I feel, that we have done something for Everard. He came to us and-to be quite honest with you, he's a very nice boy …”
“He's thirty-five,” said Lady Roads.
“But we had to teach him everything. I don't say he doesn't know the privilege he has had, I hadn't thought of it as a privilege myself but Mrs Truslove said to me only yesterday, 'He has to realise he is privileged in working for us,' and Mrs Truslove is just, very just. I will say that about her if I go down to my grave, Mrs Truslove is a just woman though she has not yet seemed to want-why do I say 'not want'? We all want them, in fact we have them whether we want them or not, they're here and now-the teachings of Mrs Parkinson.”
“You mean,” said Lady Roads, “it's a question of money?”
“Well,” said Mr Beluncle, smiling abundantly, “you always come to the point. I wouldn't have put it quite that way. We think we want money, I may think I want money to buy a house with, I've seen a house which looks to be the right idea, in fact I'm sure it is, if God wants it for me, but what we want is substance, ideas. Seek ye first. I would have said if there was a need of money in my business it was not for me to outline to God how it would be met, I don't say that Everard has to bring in more money but if God wants him to be the channel, well,” said Mr Beluncle, with rebuking charm, “it is not for me to obstruct him. He would get seven per cent free of tax.”
He stopped and frowned. Lady Roads was rustling her bag of sweets.
“Go on,” she said, “I'm listening. Do have one though. They are the kind Mrs Parkinson used to eat.”
“Really,” said Mr Beluncle, very impressed. “In that case, may I see? What are they called?”
And while he was taking a sweet, a door banged on the landing.
“There goes poor Kitty,” Lady Roads chuckled. “Do go on. You want Everard to put up more capital….”
“Don't mistake me,” said Mr Beluncle, holding up the palms of both hands. “To mortal belief, capital is necessary to business-there it is, why conceal it? I would have put it in different words. I would have said that giving is the lesson of life. It may be, I don't say it is, that Everard's problem is like the world's problem-we can always give more than we do.”
Mr Beluncle saw himself suddenly and shyly in a dramatic light.
“I just want to give the whole time,” said Mr Beluncle, “-to pour out.”
XXI
At his home in the morning, Mr Beluncle said, “I shall be early tonight.”
“Oh, I am glad,” said Mrs Beluncle. “You're not often early. I get the pip shut up with gran. I never go out. I sit here waiting for you, longing for you to come home; but, there it is, I say, it's for us. You're working for us. It's being alone stirs up my imagination. Do come early—just once. Leave it all to this man Chilly and to Mrs Truslove.”
Mr Beluncle and his wife both saw they were drifting as usual to the dangerous subject. They hesitated on the edge of it and then drew back. There was a pleasure in the old quarrel. It was easy going over the old ground again, visiting old jealousies, repeating familiar accusations, remembering slammed doors and fits of hysteria and their hot repertoire of criminal charges which broke up the boredom of their lives. The certainty that they would be doing this for the rest of their lives made them pause. What a long time to go; they must invent some new arguments. Their genius had reached one of its infertile periods.
“I would like to have supper early. I am going to the lecture,” said Mr Beluncle. “Will you come?”
“Oh,” said Mrs Beluncle, “I thought you were coming home to see me. No, I won't come. How can I go when I haven't got any clothes to wear with all those women? I would have thought you had enough of God.”
“That's a surprising thing to say, old girl,” said Mr Beluncle amiably. “Perhaps you don't realise what you've said. Had enough of the infinite! How can you?”
“Oh well,” mumbled Mrs Beluncle, without ill nature. “I'm a heathen. I've seen the posters. Van Hook, who is Van Hook? This lecturer.”
“It's Van der Hoek,” Henry said.
“We had a dog called Van when I was a child. He died. Van, Van, Van, I called out all night when I was little. It broke my heart. Oh, how I loved him. I would have died for him.” Mrs Beluncle was surprised by herself. “Where is everything now?” she asked with fear.
Henry and George Beluncle moved closer to their mother and looked curiously at her and she saw the lost, tender gaze in their eyes that were usually so fiercely, warmly young.
“That's my religion,” said Mrs Beluncle. “Love a thing while it's here. We shall all die.”
Mr Beluncle was bored.
“I want you boys to come to the lecture. Mr Van der Hoek is one of the Big Three in the movement. That man gave up a thousand pounds a year in dentistry for Mrs Parkinson. Sacrificed everything. I don't know what he makes now. Three thousand perhaps,” said Mr Beluncle.
Afterwards Henry told George he was not going to the lecture.
“Other things to do?” said Mrs Beluncle ironically.
“No,” said Henry.
To George he said, “This house is a prison. I am trapped in it. Wherever I go I am stopped. My letters are opened. They are watched and counted….”
“You never have any letters,” said George.
“I have,” said Henry. “I used to have. Mary
used to write letters to me but I had to stop. You know there was a row.”
“Well, what d'you want to write letters for?” said George. “I never write letters.”
“I can't talk to anyone,” said Henry. “Why should one feel gratitude?”
Then Mrs Beluncle wheedled George.
“What has Henry been saying to you?”
“Carrying on. He is the eldest,” said George.
“He was talking about this girl he goes out with,” suggested Mrs Beluncle.
“He wasn't,” said George.
“You can't deceive me,” said Mrs Beluncle. “I am a woman. None of you can deceive me. I read you all like a twopenny book. You and your father. Going to a lecture my backside. Do you think I don't know?”
“You're just out to make trouble,” said George. “We shall be having 'the other woman' next.”
“Clever, aren't you?” said Mrs Beluncle. “Do you think I'd let another woman ruin my life, not likely. Mrs Truslove is my greatest friend. You boys think you know everything, but you don't.”
“We've seen a lot,” said George stubbornly.
“Now then, stop that, I won't have it, what you've seen. You've no business to see,” said Mrs Beluncle sharply.
“Well,” said George, “why don't you make him get me a job?”
“What has happened to you lately,” said Mrs Beluncle suspiciously, “speaking up for yourself. Eh? What have you been doing down at Fred's?”
Leslie, who had been packing his school books, came in and answered for George gaily:
“Aunt Connie, all over again. Look at the way he stands, round-shouldered. It must be some woman.”
Mrs Beluncle moved round the breakfast table picking up the plates as she went and then at the top was arrested by a new thought:
“We're all mad,” she said, looking to them, panic-stricken, for confirmation.
In the evening Henry came home early from Bulux. He had seen Mary in her shop in the town for two or three minutes. He had decided to go to the lecture in order to be where she was, held by the same building, to think about her.
Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 19