“With Mr Cummings?” said the cripple, avid for news.
“No, no,” said Mrs Truslove, with weary annoyance. “With Everard.”
“Oh,” said the cripple knowingly.
“It is not 'oh5 at all,” said Mrs Truslove. “I am going with Mr Gummings tomorrow, if you want to know all my business.”
“Don't get cross,” said the cripple.
“I'm tired,” said Mrs Truslove.
“You are tired of me,” said the cripple.
“No. But can't I come in without having to say everything?” said Mrs Truslove.
The cripple looked injured.
“No,” her face clearly said. “You are mine, the whole of you, every minute of you.”
“If Cummings offers you that job,” said the cripple, “take it. Get out of Beluncles. I have seen that very clearly lately. It's an infatuation with you.”
“It is my money,” said Mrs Truslove, with bitterness, “that is infatuated.”
After she had said this, the pain of her situation was renewed. She wished now her passion for Beluncle was over, that she could speak of it. She had been on the point of speaking to Everard Chilly about it; under his folly, she guessed he would at least understand ruin. But she had not spoken; she knew she would confess in a tone that would sound like a reprimand to his youthfulness. It was distasteful to be so unattractive.
But the cripple spoke, from habit. Her real subject was waiting on her lips.
“An awful thing happened,” said the cripple.
“What?”
“Vogg was at the lecture. Vogg from opposite. Mr Van der Hoek had been speaking for about twenty minutes when someone got up at the back of the hall and started shouting.”
“Shouting? Shouting what?”
“I didn't hear. Shouting terribly. Words. I don't know.”
The cripple covered her ears with her hands.
“Everyone was there,” she said excitedly. “Mr Edwards was there, Mr Phibbs rushed up from the front—and Mr Langton …”
“But what for?”
“Vogg and a man. They were shouting out.”
“Yes, but what?”
“I didn't hear,” repeated the cripple, covering her ears. “But Mr Van der Hoek was wonderful. He went straight on, the power of Truth is in that man. Mr Phibbs just leaned over and tapped the man on the shoulder and it was Vogg. Vogg!
“I … no, no. I mustn't hate him. It was wonderful after that. The calm. The uplift. Not a cough the whole evening. Why do we have to get our papers from Vogg?” the cripple said.
“We don't have to,” said Mrs Truslove. “You've had too much excitement. You ought to be in bed.”
Miss Dykes chattered on. She had spoken to Mr Van der Hoek. He had moved down from the crowd that stood around him afterwards to speak to her. He was like a big brother. “Well,” he said. The broad, lazy goodness of that “Well”. She had told him how badly she felt about the man crying out in the middle of the meeting. It made her ashamed for the town.
“And that is true,” she said. “I felt awful. As if I had cried out myself. I blushed at the time, and Mrs Angel who was in front, her neck went quite red. But Mr Van der Hoek said, 'Well,' he said, so plainly, so wise, so human, oh I don't know, so like a man, dear, 'Well, I guess I had to know pretty sharp that there's only one Voice.' ”
“And that,” enquired Mrs Truslove, “was his?”
“It was wonderful,” said Miss Dykes, staring at the carpet. Suddenly Miss Dykes gave a cry: “My foot, my right foot. It moved. Did you see it? It moved. Look.
“It moved. I'm sure it moved.”
“You saw the shadow of my arm. I just moved it from the back of your chair,” Mrs Truslove said.
“No, it wasn't a shadow. I saw it move. Wait. Watch.”
They sat silently, looking at Miss Dykes's feet in their black suede shoes with the high heels. They sat without speaking and Mrs Truslove could hear her sister's intense breathing. She seemed to be dragging her breath through her teeth.
Mrs Truslove held her tongue and pity relaxed and filled out her face. She looked ten years older as she leaned sadly to one side, concealing a yawn. This cry—that her sister had seen her foot move—had so often been heard. In excitement, after a meeting perhaps or simply on some boring evening when she was getting no attention, the cry would come.
“My foot has moved. I swear.”
It had curiously the effect of a deliberate cruelty inflicted xipon those around her, not upon herself.
Mrs Truslove hardened herself and let the minutes slip by. She had no pain, she thought, that she could put upon anybody.
“Why didn't you wear your brown pair this evening, the ones with the diamante; those are my favourites?” Mrs Truslove tactfully said.
“With black!” said the cripple, waking up. “Linda! Really! No, my dark green I might have worn, or the black lizard, but no, I'm funny. I felt like these.”
The spell was broken. The cripple could always be distracted by talk of clothes. The sisters returned to talk of the lecture.
On the following afternoon Lady Roads came to the cripple's house. She visited her every week. Mr Van der Hoek had been staying with Lady Roads, and after she had had a lecturer to stay, Lady Roads's batteries were recharged, by all the scandal of the movement which she adroitly got out of visiting speakers. Lady Roads felt she was missing something in her tedious work in Boystone. One got interested in people in Boystone, but the important people of the movement had no time for that. They were decisive.
Lady Roads was brusque and melancholy with the cripple.
“As far as I'm concerned,” she said harshly, “you're healed. You're walking. I see it and I'm not going to say any more about it. The work's done.”
Miss Dykes's heart hardened with fear and resentment when she heard this. Healed. Walking. She did not want to be healed. She cringed with terror.
“Love more!” barked Lady Roads, like a man.
Miss Dykes winced. She moved her hands in an impulse to cling to one of the cardigans of this hard-corseted motherly woman and to beg her not to desert her. She was distracted by Lady Roads's clothes. Today she was dressed in a low-necked, pink silk jumper and her large breasts rested on top of a corset which must have been pulled on anyhow. The colour of her skirt was ginger and she was wearing—Miss Dykes was quick to see—odd stockings.
“I want to be married,” Miss Dykes had once said to Lady Roads. Lady Roads was a sentimental woman and a warm matchmaker, but of the kind who like to drive people to the altar and then violently pull them back from it at the last moment. She knew that those she had driven into marriage always turned upon her afterwards. She pretended riot to understand why.
“No woman would want to marry if she knew what marriage means,” Lady Roads said. “For men, marriage means sex and nothing else.”
“I suppose it does,” said the cripple demurely. Then boldly, “I want that so much.”
Lady Roads regarded her patient with a pity which was really disgust and dislike.
“That is a great obstruction to your healing,” she said.
After long struggles with herself Miss Dykes had conquered her day-dreams. She waited twice a week to see the large, sad, broken eyes of her healer, the clumsy assuring bosom in the wrong blouse, the woman victim abused once by a husband whom Miss Dykes now had come to hate with jealous desire—though she had never seen him—to hear the warm, harsh voice that made her mind wake up. She innocently adored Lady Roads's title, which seemed to come into the room like a shadow with her. If she could only walk, Miss Dykes thought, she would see her more, she would not be left behind but would go off with her in her motor-car, to her house, wherever she went, never leaving her side, willing to be bullied, in an ecstasy of gratitude, in a desire to replace the man who had wounded her body. The wound—Miss Dykes was to be its guardian.
Now she heard that Lady Roads was not going to pray for her any more. Miss Dykes listened and gazed, and by a larg
e effort of her love made an attempt to agree.
“Stop thinking about yourself,” said Lady Roads. “Love more. Heal other people. That is what you must do. When I leave this room, begin healing other people with Love and Truth.”
Yes, yes, yes, Miss Dykes's thoughts went on like panicking fingers on the keys of a piano.
“I will help her,” Miss Dykes thought. “Buy her clothes. Poor darling, she gives so much of her life to others, she never has time to think of them. The pink with that ginger is terrible. No, I am wrong. I must not seem to be criticising her, for if God wanted pink and ginger together like that, it would be right—but God probably wouldn't want that pink.”
Lady Roads left. The room became insipid. Agitatedly Miss Dykes filled her heart with love. Quickly moving to those near at hand, she started to love her sister and Mr Beluncle and her housekeeper. But these people were too close to her. She moved her chair to the window, and drawing back the dark blue curtain, she sat preparing to love the world. A brewer's van drawn by a horse had stopped at one of the shops across the street.
The horse is an idea of strength and fidelity (she saw), the van is a useful thing. What was beer? The Parkinsonians were teetotallers and non-smokers. What could be the spiritual significance of a notorious evil?
“It is refreshment,” she thought doubtfully. “Where streams of living water flow … No.”
And to her memory came the difficult figure of her sister's new friends, Mr Cummings and Mr Chilly.
Love Mr Cummings? In two hours she had become as jealous of Mr Cummings as she had been of Mr Beluncle. When Mr Beluncle came to the house she always went off to bed or to the next room. To listen, lying stiffly and still for one change in the monotone of the voices, for a run of new notes, for whispers, for a sound of love.
“I must love him, not hate him,” she insisted.
She closed her eyes to pray. When she opened them again, at the sound of a car, she half believed that Mr Cummings and Mr Chilly had been whipped out of their office chairs and had come flying to her door, drawn by her irresistible prayer.
The street was empty now. A road like a glum and vacant face, flat under the maudlin London haze. Their father's ugly presentation clock twanged. Miss Dykes's heart closed and love went out of her head. For solid years at a time she had seen endless, narrow folds of dirty woollen cloud such as now slanted over the dark blue slates and the red chimneys, a dirty raftering as heavy as time itself. “This that I am having now and seeing now is my life. I have been thinking that life is something that is going to happen.”
And that was how, she thought, the old people in the row of decaying shops must feel. That decay was their life. And so she came to look at Vogg's, the nearest one. The weak daylight made the upper windows impenetrable, but there, slowly it occurred to the cripple, Mrs Vogg might be. Her eye was moving from the edge of Vogg's shop to the empty hairdresser's next door, was indeed on the last bricks of the Vogg shop, on the frontier between the two sets of lives and about to forget them.
And then, with the inner roar of a vision in the mind, like shop shutters going up in the morning, the revelation came to her. Mrs Vogg was the woman she must love. Mrs Vogg was the woman like herself, a woman at a window unable to move. And she must love Vogg, the man who had cried out—one hand went to her ear—those words.
The heart of Miss Dykes opened again. Love Vogg. Love Vogg. Love Mrs Vogg.
XXVII
“I had dinner with Everard last night,” said Mrs Truslove across the desk to Mr Beluncle, who was working out figures. He had calculated the imaginary cost of Marietta. This had led to an imaginary estimate of his debts and his income; that was horrifying. Mr Beluncle then went into an imaginary inquest on the prospects of next year's money.
The first principle clearly was, Ye must be born again. So he gave birth to the firm again in a different form. He put the letters P.B. for Philip Beluncle at the top of the page, constructed a genealogical tree of directors and shareholders beneath it, branched into several lines of production.
Suppose Mrs Parkinson's Group increased its churches at the rate of five, no, say ten, a year; say each held two hundred, no five, well, put seven hundred people. That is seven thousand chairs. Seven thousand at cost was… But now he was into the question of cost and profit: the fairy tale of figures began to enchant. That was Mrs Parkinson alone. The actual population of England was—what was it? (Mrs Truslove saw him get Whitakefs from the shelf)—forty-five millions. That meant, how many chairs? Well, how many chairs in a house? How many houses? Yes, Mr Beluncle thought, and we're only talking of chairs. What about three-piece suites? This is modern business, Mr Beluncle hummed to himself, statistics, planning, analysis. It was what Mr Van der Hoek had said in his lecture! God was the great planner.
Mr Beluncle woke up. “What did you say?” he said.
“I dined with Chilly,” she said.
“What on earth did you do that for?” he said.
His memory whizzed back like a film to Mr Truslove. Another betrayal. Surely, at her age, she was not going to start again.
“I thought you were dining with Cummings,” he said.
“That is tonight,” she said.
Two blows. He felt—but no one seemed to know what he felt. Quite frankly he did not like people to dine with each other. Not his sons. Not his wife. No one. They were all like vultures pulling his flesh off him. They tore themselves out of him, leaving large raw wounds. Beluncle froze.
“Chilly,” he said, “doesn't realise what a privilege he has in working for us.”
“I am not usually taken with Everard,” she said. “He behaves well in difficult situations. He was surprisingly sympathetic and tolerant. It was not easy for him.
“Nor for me,” said Mrs Truslove.
“What are you talking about?” Mr Beluncle asked.
“Your sister was here last night, after you left,” she said.
“Constance!” said Beluncle, putting his pencil in his ear.
“Drunk,” said Mrs Truslove, “on the floor.”
Beluncle listened to the story and his fingers tapped on his desk.
“Why wasn't the door locked? The outside door is supposed to be locked at half-past five,” he said.
“It is no use losing your hair,” she said.
“What did she say?” said Beluncle. “Was Chilly there? Did she talk to Chilly?”
“Of course,” said Mrs Truslove. “She's in a bad way. The gas was turned off at her flat. We tried to make her some coffee.”
“Her flat! You took her home!” gasped Mr Beluncle.
“What did she want?” said Mr Beluncle.
Mrs Truslove hesitated. She could not resist it.
“What all the Beluncles want—” she said, “cash.”
“Don't be funny, Linda. That girl has been helping herself to other people's money all her life,” Mr Beluncle shouted out suddenly. “She's been rich. Do you think she'd give me a penny when I was down? Not a penny. Shut the door in my face, my own sister. Now she comes here.”
“You told me,” she said, repenting. But again, she could not resist saying:
“Poor Philip. They're all after him.”
“Poor,” said Beluncle, pulling himself together. “She was here a fortnight ago, after you had gone. I didn't mention it. I knew she was about. That was why I had the gate locked at home the other Sunday. …;”
“You told me it was Lady Roads. Oh, Philip.”
“Well, Lady Roads. Perhaps it was. I don't know,” he said.
“But,” his anger started again but now coldly, “let us have this clear. I won't have her here. I won't have her talk to Chilly. I'll go and see her. I don't want my business trotted round all over the place.
“Tou seem to think it's all right,” he said.
“It's not a nice thing for me,” he said. “I've led a decent life. She killed my father. She won't write to her own mother.”
“But it's her mother she wants to see,
” said Mrs Truslove. “She says you have written to her telling her not to come. I don't know what is going on but she seems to think you are stopping her seeing her mother.”
Mr Beluncle stood up. When his face took a greenish bruised colour, his grey close curls looked like a wig and he seemed to have been compressed for an explosion of frightening violence. The violence of Mr Beluncle frightened Mrs Truslove and went to her entrails, woke up not her old love but a total powerlessness in his hands. She could not disguise from herself her longing to be attacked by him and the irony she used in self-defence was simple provocation. She had, she believed, come to the end of her love for him; but she had not come to the end of that ambiguous compulsion which comes from the hatred in love.
“Constance can come down to see us tomorrow,” he said quietly. “What is to prevent her? There are trains. She can come. 'You come, I said to her. 'But remember,' I said, 'mother is an old woman, Her mind wanders. A shock might kill. You don't want to kill your mother,' I said. 'If you can take that responsibility, well and good,' I said. 'It's up to you. I can't take it.' And why does Constance want to come? Is it love? Does she think of her mother's love for her? Does she care about her in her old age? Has she made a single sacrifice? You would have thought she would have been a daughter as I have been a son. No, she wants money, as you said just now, you're quite right, to pour down her throat. And then, how do we know that it would be convenient for her mother to give her money? It might be very inconvenient. How can I say? I don't know how it seems to you,” he said more calmly, “how life seems to you, but to me it seems you work, you sow and others reap. But God sees into the heart. What would my father say if he were alive to see the money he saved for years thrown away on drink in a fortnight? Constance thinks she wants money, but we none of us want money. You don't, I don't, Connie doesn't. What we want is to purify our hearts—that's what Purification means. My father would say, I can hear him saying it,” said Mr Beluncle, very moved and shyly wiping an eye with the back of a finger, “I have lived my life for nothing.”
Mr Beluncle looked at her hard as he spoke and she looked as steadily at him, her eyes softening when he spoke of his father, for she thought of hers, and then hardening again. He got up in order to face her eyes and began again:
Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 22