“We shall not be able to speak,” he thought, “but we shall be with each other.”
He would sit behind her so that he could see her neck which he loved more than any other part of her; and perhaps her tooth when she smiled and her small puzzled pretending blue eyes. Under the words of Mr Van der Hoek, he would (as it were) creep and their souls would depart from the meeting. Their souls would shed their clothes and somewhere, rising in the summer air until they were almost out of sight, they would be clasped virginally together, talking about abstract subjects of a literary turn.
Leslie saw Henry in the garden and came out to smile with a schoolboy's tempting smile.
“You've changed your mind about the lecture?” Leslie said. “Have you lost your faith? O'Malley takes us for English and he often asks after you. 'Does your brother still believe in that nonsense?' he asked me one day last term.”
“What d'you say?”
“I get him into an argument,” said Leslie. “You never got him on to the infallibility of the Pope, did you? You funked it I expect. And Lourdes. When we've got him going, I get up and say, “You know, sir, you are not supposed to introduce religious propaganda.”
Leslie studied Henry's morbid face. Leslie was the one who watched for them all to provide drama for him, like some curious, dispassionate elderly man. The last-comer to the family, he found in them material for moralising and argument. He had appointed himself the elder. But he demanded events: for him something new must continually be happening.
“Are you going?” said Henry.
“I can't,” said Leslie. “Mesmerism with its crée-ping fingers makes its seen-is—ter passes over the so-called hu-man mind.” Mr Van der Hoek had been criticised for rolling his eyes, making slow, mesmeric movements with his hands during his last lecture. Lady Roads had admired this. “You realise,” she barked excitedly around the meeting hall afterwards to her friends and supporters, “who he was referring to? The Roman Catholic Church.” Miss Wix's face sickened. Anything, she pointed out, that suggested the laying on of hands, for good or for evil, had been forbidden precisely on page 274 of Mrs Parkinson's book. Mr Phibbs said that the lecturer looked as though he was going to lay his hands on something sooner or later if he could.
“Why can't you come?” said Henry.
“Grandma,” said Leslie. “You never know. Suppose she kicked the bucket.”
“You're always talking about that,” Henry rebuked.
“I only say what you all think,” said Leslie. “As a matter of fact, I'm the only one who really cares for her. She's interesting. She had four petticoats on yesterday.”
“You sound as though you don't want to miss anything.”
“Not exactly,” said Leslie. “It would be bad if mother was alone when it happens. It's funny you should mention it though. I want to see what happens. If you'd take my advice,” said the patronising boy, “you'd try and get interested in the family. It's terrible, we all know that, but it's the only family you'll have. Of course you want to be free. I've never been interested in freedom. I'm the youngest and I'm spoiled. You used to be jolly nice to me.”
“Let's walk up and down while we talk,” said Henry.
“Like the old man. Do you ever notice that. He says let's walk up and down. You say the same, rather lordly-like him. No, go on, don't stop because I said that. You know I often think about the family. It's rotten. Sinking ship. The rats are getting ready to leave. You'll leave it, George will leave it, Mrs Truslove will leave it.”
“She's not in the family. She's in the business.”
“The business is the family. I shan't leave. You carit leave this family.”
“You're wrong, man,” said Henry. “You can leave it tomorrow. I mean, I can.”
“I'll tell you about myself,” said Leslie. “I've got my maths but I'll soon knock that off. Before I go in-have you got any friends to talk to? No, I bet. It's the same with me. I don't talk to anyone at school much. You've got to realise we're a peculiar case. I've been checking up at school; other chaps are happy but they're boring. This is more interesting. Look,” he said eagerly, “go to the lecture, you'll see your girl, there'll be a row … go on….”
“That's my business,” said Henry.
“All right. I'll go back to grandma,” said Leslie. “You talk to George about it but you ought to talk to me. I'm more reliable. I could give you advice. If you take my advice. …”
Henry cuffed at his brother's head, but Leslie dodged.
“All right,” said Leslie. “I'm not offended. You'll learn by experience, that's one thing life has taught me.” He had begun his mimicry again. He went away grinning. “I'm going to grandma, she's failing, she's failing. …”
“Shut up,” called Henry.
Leslie came back and said seriously:
“I am the one who loves her. That's what none of you realise.”
But another question was troubling Henry and he followed Leslie this time to the kitchen door, saying:
“Just a minute, Leslie. You said just now Mrs Truslove was part of the family. What d'you mean? Do you know anything?”
Leslie went inside and sat down at the kitchen table and took his school books from their case.
“What do you know?” said Henry, following.
“I keep my ears and eyes open,”, Leslie said.
He opened a geometry book and showed Henry the red ticks made by the master, turning the pages to show that not once had he been wrong. The word written on one page: Excellent.
“See,” said Leslie. “Excellent. Every page. The same with everything.” He pulled out his exercise books and showed his brother the other pages. “Everything's right.
“You know what my tragedy is,” said Leslie, in the manner of Mr Beluncle. “And I don't want you to think I am one of those men who blame their failures on women, saying that women have ruined their lives….”
Mrs Beluncle and George came into the room and she listened in her worried way while Henry and George stood smiling.
“My tragedy is that I've got no ambition,” said Leslie.
“Thank goodness,” said Mrs Beluncle. “We've seen a lot.”
“There you are,” said Leslie to them all. “You've had it all and look what it's done to you. Not one of you with a pound in the Post Office. I've got forty-seven pounds fifteen shillings, and I'm not putting it into Bulux either.”
They laughed, but they looked nervously at the book. How often he had said he had watched them all and had learned his lesson. If she had any sense-and, more important, if she had any left, Leslie said-his grandmother would leave all her money to him.
“And,” he added, with a disquieting look at them, “she probably will.”
XXII
“She's done her front,” Mrs Vogg said. And she sighed as she saw the blue-and-white tiles of the path shine before the door of one of the opposite houses. A woman there with a handkerchief round her head went inside and shut the door.
David Vogg grunted and went on reading the newspaper. He had not shaved and he wore no collar. Now and again his body pressed back into the chair as if he were more closely entrenching himself against the news he found in the world. He read every word, in every column, slowly, going from the news items into the advertisements. Occasionally he read aloud the testimonial written on behalf of a patent medicine. His mother liked these testimonials. They had been an interest of the older Vogg. Mrs Vogg and he had always been drawn close together by the magic of patent medicine.
“It didn't do dad any good,” David Vogg said, after one of these readings.
”No,” sighed Mrs Vogg.
The mother and the son reposed with a little conceit and satisfaction upon the impregnable nature of the father's illnesses. David Vogg reflected, with pride, that sin had been the cause of these maladies: the sins of his father's father. Generations of sin, Vogg mused with arrogance, had been inflicted like a whipping upon himself.
Mrs Vogg glanced at her son. He h
ad not been out of the house for three days. He was sinking into one of his moods. She feared he was thinking of going back to sea. She turned again to look out of the window. Pigeons she liked. As their bold slate bodies flew over the roofs like slowly flung stones she had another pleasurable memory of the elder Vogg. He would sit in the yard at the back waiting for his pigeons to return in the afternoons and it was during one afternoon, when a late bird had come back from Northampton, that he went into the kitchen and first put his arms round her while she was standing at the sink. After that, every place in the house had its secret for her, for Mr Vogg never made love in a bed. This was his distinction. And the pigeons, so destructive of time, by their inconstant arrivals, always seemed to make a suggestion to him. By some accident of genius, Vogg had satisfied her strongest passion: the love of secrets.
A gate whined.
“Miss Dykes is going out. Mrs Johnson does walk fast for a big woman. They're going up to Hoppners, to the shop. They're talking to Sydney Childs, he's sweeping. 'Good morning, good morning,' “ Mrs Vogg's lips politely formed the words that she imagined Miss Dykes to be saying.
David Vogg got up and looked out of the window. He was not drawn by the sight of Miss Dykes or Mrs Johnson, but by a mechanical interest in her chair. It was fairly new and its metal caught the sunlight-the Voggs believed that Mr Beluncle had bought it-and Vogg hissed with unguarded pleasure through his teeth at the sight of it. He, he reflected, had a car.
“Why don't you go out on a lovely day like this?” said Mrs Vogg, holding him by the cuff.
David Vogg shook his head and went back to his paper. Mrs Vogg watched him as the morning passed and he knew she was watching him. He became irritable; when she fell asleep in the afternoon he sulked and went out to seek importance.
Vogg's suitcase which contained his books was heavy and pulled his wrist out of his sleeve, showing the inky tattoo mark on his arm. He walked into the poorer side of Hetley near the gasworks, his mouth twisted by the pain of his load, and then he began his calls. Knock at the door, or ring, case on the ground beside him, the orange-coloured book on Palestine with the pictures ready in his hand.
“Good afternoon. Can I interest you in a book?”
The doors slamming in his face, the rude refusals did not dismay him, nor did the prevaricating smiles deceive. He stood back. People in these streets were frightened of one thing and another, the rent collector, the school inspector, or simply of men who put their foot in the door. They always looked first at his feet. Vogg stood back scornfully. Going away to the next door, he thought these mean, pink, untidy streets would cry out, like the avenues of the rich, when Babylon burned. He smiled not entirely in self-righteousness; when Babylon burned, perhaps before that, when he saw the disaster coming, he would be back at sea, and such grey sheets of water slapped in his ears sometimes, that he was dazed as he walked.
Occasionally he would find householders who were willing to stand at their door and listen to him. He spoke to them in a low, deep, insinuating voice and one or two women, who did not listen to the words, put their hands to their hair or took a deep breath quietly, raising their breasts and half smiling, and would lean over to look at the coloured pictures. Then his voice changed and a deep half-chanted note would take its place, a small sweat would glister on his forehead. He said suddenly:
“Cast off your sins and kneel to the Lord. Fall on your knees before the Judgment Seat.”
As he passed from house to house, people laughed behind his back and some were indignant, some argued, but Vogg was indifferent to this.
As the hard sun went lower in the London fume, Vogg's walk came to an end. He despised those who worked; they were slaves on the treadmill of Mammon, as old Vogg, his adoptive father, had been. Vogg always broke his journeys at the recreation gardens between Boystone and Hetley. If anyone sat near him he gave them one of his pamphlets. When his feet were rested he went on to Boystone to see his friend.
There are two church spires in Boystone High Street. Vogg hated these spires. It astonished him that these monuments to pride and hypocrisy could still stand. When he spoke of the wickedness of the flesh, it was not really of flesh but of stone he thought: of those grey smoky granite buildings. He often pictured these churches on fire.
He had taken a bus from Hetley recreation ground. He showed his books to the conductor. At Boystone market the women were in cotton dresses and the Jews were at their stalls. Vogg hated the Jews. They often came up if he was showing someone a book in the market and were itching to see him sell one and to watch his methods. Once or twice they had whistled up friends, anxious to see that ecstatic thing to them-a sale. And six months before this time the thing had succeeded. A Jewish greengrocer had sold a book for him and always grinned at him now when he passed.
“Sailor man,” the Jew called him. Vogg heard the whine of the sea in his ears when this happened, and now Boystone market was the confusing, undermining sea to him and he avoided the Jew for unsettling him.
Vogg got out of the market and walked down to Boystone East. The two churches burned. The Public Library, filled with the dreadful fruits of the Tree of Knowledge, caved in. He came to the largest cinema: the Royal. It was an old-fashioned house approached by a long, wide, ascending passage with posters on the walls, a kind of tunnel, like a gullet or a mouth, that breathed out warm air. It was an entrance to hell, filled with tobacco smoke and women.
What made the Royal seem wicked to Vogg? It was a place of pleasure; but the crowning wickedness was a notice saying, Seats'2 J., is. 6d., gd. It was the pay for pleasure that convinced Vogg of its wickedness. All over the world, in ports, he could think of pleasures that stripped seamen of their money. He knew that the Royal filled up with the ordinary people of Boystone; yet when he thought of them there, his imagination became licentious. The moment they were in there, in the darkness, their clothes came off them. The Royal was packed with the naked.
As he passed, a new word struck him at the entrance. It was printed on a poster. It was the word “Free”.
Vogg went on past the Royal to the station. The clock outside the wine company's shop, beckoning to drunkenness, said twenty minutes past five with its black sad hands.
Granger was standing on the kerb at the station entrance. With an experienced flick of his wet thumb, Granger was handing out tracts to people as they came off the London trains. A litter of these discarded tracts blew about the station yard.
Vogg went to him quietly.
“Whatcha,” said the old man meekly. In his earthy face the eyes glittered modestly like toiling ants.
“Good evening,” said Vogg, with contempt, which the old man caught.
“I've been casting the bread,” the old man whispered timidly.
Vogg did not answer.
“Oh, the manifold mercies,” he whined to ingratiate himself.
Vogg nodded and stood beside him.
“Pack it up,” said Vogg.
The old man was shocked.
“Not stop?” he said incredulously.
“You're only making a mess,” said Vogg, nodding to the tracts blowing about the yard.
“It's the word,” pleaded the old man.
“Come up to the Royal,” said Vogg. “I want to show you something.”
“All that way,” pleaded the old man. “My poor feet are caning me. We were going to the cricket, you said, in the van.”
“There's a call at the Royal. I heard a call,” said Vogg. The old man turned in awe. He smiled with wonder and connivance at Vogg.
“All right,” he said. “Was it”—he lowered his speech and came close to Vogg—“the Voice?”
“You don't have to hear a Voice,” said Vogg.
A tragic expression came upon the old man's solid face, as if he had heard a farewell.
“It's written up,” said Vogg sternly. “You've got to use your eyes.”
The old man sighed but held back; but Vogg walked away and he was forced to hurry after him.
After falling into their curious walk, as if together they had become a shambling, four-legged animal, they went up to the Royal Cinema, stared at a poster. The poster said: A Free Lecture on the Science of Purification. Speaker: Elias Van der Hoek. Is Death Real?
“Many false prophets shall arise,” chanted the older man.
“Free,” said Vogg. “Tonight. Eight o'clock,” said Vogg, shutting him up.
“What's that?” said the old man stupidly.
“We've got to bear witness,” said Vogg. “It's free.
“In there,” he nodded to the cinema.
“Did the Voice say?” asked the old man, drawing back.
“I said,” said Vogg. “What's up with you?
“Lies,” Vogg shouted suddenly, very loudly, to the street.
An errand boy turned round and stopped. The proprietor of the cinema was strolling up the long passage to take the last of the sun.
“Not go to the cricket?” pleaded the older man.
“Lies,” shouted Vogg, ignoring him.
The proprietor heard the word, but by the time he had got to the entrance, Vogg and the old man had moved slowly away.
“If I was vouchsafed a new pair,” the older man said, pointing to his boots, “I could get along quicker. These are murder.”
“I've got a pair of my father's back home,” said Vogg impatiently. “We'll pick them up.”
And then Vogg explained to the older man: there was a call to go to the lecture of Mr Van der Hoek and shout. They were to sit at the back near the exit and first Vogg was to get up and shout; after that the older man; and then both together.
” Shout what?” said the older man anxiously.
“You shout 'Blasphemy against our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ',” said Vogg. “I'll shout 'Lies'. Then you shout out 'Lies', and I'll do 'Blasphemy'.”
“No, you do 'Blasphemy' and what was it? I forget so easy. I'll do 'Lies'. I've got more voice for a short word.”
“And they all of one accord began to make excuses,” said Vogg.
“Ah!” sighed the older man. “The dear Bosom. That's where by rights I ought to lay my head.”
Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 20