Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics)

by V. S. Pritchett

  Vogg was divided in mind about the cripple. Her religion was wicked, the false god worshipped. It was, after the Roman Catholic Church, the most wicked of religions. But she was a cripple. The sins of her fathers had crippled her. Was she downtrodden enough to be saved?

  “What is the matter, dear. Is your old stomach paining you?” his mother said.

  He told her about the lecture and how he had shouted out. Mrs Vogg listened proudly. She had only the slightest knowledge of his religion, but she was lazily proud to think her son had made trouble. All the housework, he does, she said, gets me up in the morning, dresses me, cooks the breakfast, cooks all the meals, a good son. What's making trouble matter? Let him make it. The world owes it to him.

  And she had a fantasy that one day when he was making trouble somewhere, a man's voice would suddenly cry out:

  “Stop that or I'll belt you.”

  Her son's father, whoever or wherever he was, suddenly appearing. “David'll kick up a row until his father comes,” she affectionately thought.

  Still, when she heard his story she wanted to soothe him.

  “Don't let it get on your mind, dear,” she said. “Don't worry about it. Everyone will have forgotten about it tomorrow.”

  Forgotten! Mrs Vogg saw she had said the wrong thing. That was what drove him out of the house again when the pain weakened; the fear that the silly public would have forgotten all about him.

  He stood at Boystone East station to sell his paper. He counted twenty known followers of Mrs Parkinson going to the trains. He was showing himself. He was aware of every pair of eyes and there was a slight smile on his face. He was determined to be watched. He felt that standing or waiting he cut a mark in the air. The pain inside him made him think this.

  MR. BELUNCLE

  XXXIII

  Vogg put his suitcase down at the end of the road where the Beluncles lived, for the weight pulled his ribs out of his stomach. He thought he was going to split and his stomach rolled over. He started on again looking at the sky in agony, and when he got to Boystone market he felt too weak to go on. He bought two buns, got into the Hetley bus and made for home. Buns always stopped the pain and at Hetley when he got off it was small and dull.

  To be without pain, after three days and nights of it, enlarged the mind of Vogg. He looked about him as he walked and the excited energy he had known immediately after the meeting came back to him. And more, for there was the energy or the power which came from the contemplation of the pain he had suffered. He had passed through one crisis; he was ready for another.

  The pigeons were tipping in circles over the street as he walked past the large houses towards his shop. He watched them and fell into a day-dream about old Vogg's pigeons. Pigeons took him back to his childhood. Watching in the yard with Vogg, he had had his earliest introduction to injustice. Pigeon racing, the old man said, wasn't straight. There were men who fixed their clocks. The big fellows won the prizes. They could build big lofts and employ a couple of loftmen to feed them. Some of the first to go to hell-fire would be the men with big lofts; after that the bloody railway porters who, racing men themselves, would put the crate of birds in the wrong train at the junction. There were men like Dykes, the postman, who wouldn't tell you anything, close as oysters, dirty, wily, cunning men. “I'd spit out half the teeth in my head to have a look inside Dykes's brain for five minutes, he's deep,” old Vogg used to say when Vogg was a boy.

  Vogg was eating his second bun as he walked, watching the sky, and the dough stuck dryly in his throat. A pair of birds came down on a chimney and he watched them bobbing there like a pair of clockwork toys up to their tricks. He stopped. And then one flew off and Vogg, looking from the chimney to the house, was taken aback. He was brought abruptly and fast back from his childhood when he saw, as if he had never seen it before, that the house was the Dykeses'.

  An extraordinary sense, like a revelation of his true state during the last three days since the meeting, came to him. He had been lonely. When he had stood up in the Royal Cinema, he had seen not a single known face. Except Miss Dykes's. She had been Wheeled in at the back of the hall, and she had even smiled at him. It was her smile, excited and proud, which had given him the will to get up; she at any rate would know who he was. He was shouting, in a sense, at the lecturer, just to show her. He knew now that to show himself to her would have a definite effect. She knew. She had heard. The town saw him and probably had no recollection or knowledge of his act. Vogg's vanity was roused, his feeling of loneliness went, He crossed the road to the Dykeses5 house and, stirred by the familiar whine of its iron gate, knocked at the door.

  “It is that Vogg,” said Mrs Johnson to the cripple. She was not sitting in her chair but on the long couch which was put by the window in her room, with her feet in the sunlight, reading and drowsing.

  “Oh, Mrs Johnson!” said the cripple. Her heart raced with fear. “But are you sure he asked for me? He didn't ask for my sister? Is it about the papers?”

  “Love Vogg. Love Vogg,” Miss Dykes hurriedly prayed.

  “No, dear,” said Mrs Johnson. “It was you he asked for. I've got him on the step.”

  “Child of God. Child of God,” Miss Dykes murmured in a panic.

  “Oh, ask him in, ask him in, don't keep him on the step.”

  “It's all right, dear,” said Mrs Johnson. “I put the chain on. You leave the door open, next thing they step in and they steal your umbrellas. It happened when I was a girl at my Uncle Tom's.”

  “Fetch him in,” Miss Dykes said, proud in her sudden calm. “I will see him.”

  It might be, she thought, an answer to her prayer. For days she had loved. She could nearly see and feel the love pouring from her eyes and her mouth and her heart like a pure stream of light across the road to the shop. She was numb and serene with the steady stream of the sentences of her prayers, dulled by the monotonous brilliance of the light which was broken only by short crimson flashes (like those one sees when staring into the face of the sun). It was the swooning crisis when the nerves collapse and the self dissolves and ripples away into weakness, nothingness, the liquid of a kind of death. Those moments went and then the long struggle of desire began again, the will revived it, the bones of her forehead began to ache with her striving until the light of her vision began once more to pound upon her.

  “Mrs Johnson dear,” she said. “Put the rug over me. Is my hair straight? I have prayed for him to come.”

  “You pray for funny things, miss,” said Mrs Johnson formally, to show detachment from a prayer which, being directed to one of her own class, was a folly to her. Mrs Johnson had a profound conviction that prayer should not extend beyond the people of one's own station. “Don't you give anything to Vogg, miss. His father was lame with the doors that slammed on his foot. They're hawkers.”

  Mrs Johnson arranged Miss Dykes's cushions while she was saying this and then this wide-bummed woman went to the door.

  “She says to come in/5 said Mrs Johnson scornfully. She watched for him to wipe his feet on the mat; and when he did not, watched for his hand to go to his head and take off his hat; but instead his hand went to his pocket, he slipped a tract into her surprised hand. “I'm daft,” she said. Vogg never wore a hat.

  Annoyed with herself, she closed the door after him. When he went into the room she looked at the dusty prints of his shoes on her shining brown linoleum. Mr Vogg's profound voice seemed to tumble like coals into a cellar. It was, to Mrs Johnson's mind, an offence and she went back to her kitchen and shut it out.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Vogg,” Miss Dykes said, putting out a hand, in her playful and magical manner. “Sit down.”

  Vogg did not answer, but he sat down. Three days of pain had put pale blue circles under his eyes and drawn his mouth tight and his lips down. He was wearing his sharp-shouldered navy-blue suit. He sat very upright with his knees together and she was startled by the fingers of his hands. She had not remembered seeing such separate fingers; such a ti
ny and disparate crew. The green tops of his tracts were showing in his jacket pocket. Mr Vogg looked melancholy, energetic and ill. He ignored the room and, in a sense, was not in it; but was like some incongruous figure cut out of shiny paper, and pasted awkwardly upon a drawing.

  “I bring a message to you,” said Mr Vogg.

  Miss Dykes's heart sank with disappointment. She had expected—she did not know what she had expected. Perhaps that Mr Vogg would fall on his knees with contrition; perhaps that he would beg her pardon. She had imagined him listening, beaten, but longing for the Truth.

  Now, he said, he had come simply with some message! Her sister had put ail advertisement in his window for a lawn mower. Perhaps it was about that? Or the distributors had forgotten to send one of her pattern magazines. Her lips drooped. She had dropped from her burning flights towards the sun, into the familiar desert of unanswered prayers.

  “What is it? Who from?” she said, putting as good a face on it as she could.

  Mr Vogg took his hands from his knees and let his arms hang loosely and straight as if his joints had gone. The fingers nearly touched the floor. The effect was to thrust his chest forward. There was a kind of prolonged mechanical flash from his false teeth, a rapid, lifeless heliograph signal. He said:

  “I bring you a message from our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”

  Miss Dykes's heart was jerked with fear and while she searched for a word to say, the voice of Mr Vogg broke, as if some gear had been let in and a loud machine began to grind:

  “The Day of Judgment is at hand. The Lord cometh in the hour no man knoweth,” he said. “I charge you: Gome out from them and be ye separate. Three nights ago in the Royal Cinema, the voice of God was heard crying, 'Lies, lies', to the wickedness that dwells in high places. I bore witness to the Truth. I exposed to all the world the wickedness of the prostitute you worship, this Mrs Parkinson, daughter of the whores of Babylon.”

  Miss Dykes was shaking with terror, but her will and anger broke it down. Weeks of loving went from her heart.

  “How dare you speak like that of Mrs Parkinson and our movement,” she said. “Mrs Parkinson is the purest soul on earth, the messenger of Love and God to this age, cleansing the lepers, healing the sick and redeeming man from his slavery to the senses.”

  Mr Vogg did not interrupt. A flow of recited words always pleased him and he listened, but as automatically as he spoke. Miss Dykes was emboldened:

  “And if this is the message you have come to give, I can tell you it is not from Christ Jesus, the highest expression of Love that ever trod this earth, but from animal magnetism and evil. And that it is powerless to hurt the child of God. And, what is more, Mr Vogg, you are the image and likeness of God and you cannot be brought into subjection by this wicked thing.”

  Mechanically Mr Vogg nodded, the heliograph flashed. The message came back, monotonously, without expression.

  “I have read your literature. I know your arguments. They are from your father the Devil and the lusts of your father ye will do. The world is four thousand two hundred and fifty-two years old and the Word of God has gone out, gathering his people together before the judgment; the day is decided. Search the scriptures and you will find it. There will be wars and rumours of wars, millions will be slaughtered and the cities fall, like it says, and the house of the harlot will burn. This is the witness I bear.”

  Miss Dykes smiled.

  “You have no power over me,” said Miss Dykes, in a trembling voice. “No power at all. Truth is all power. God is power. Not evil. I am the image of God. The image that means reflection. There is no power, no power. …;”

  Miss Dykes was losing her way.

  “You are the child of darkness, not the child of light,” Mr Vogg eftbrtlesssly continued. “You are a harlot in the house of harlots. You were born in wickedness and lust and fornication.”

  Mr Vogg's manner changed a little. An edge came upon his voice, some local inflection from that part of London.

  “You and your sister, your father who was a liar and a robber and your mother a harlot before you. You are liars and daughters of liars and worshippers of Belial. …;”

  “How dare, how—how dare you, Mr Vogg, speak of my sister and” The rug fell off Miss Dykes's body, agitated by her movements. She made a move to pick it up, but it was beyond the reach of her hands and she could not, though she strained to do so, stretch to get it. She wriggled her body. “My feet,” she was crying to herself. “I must cover my feet,” for Mr Vogg was looking obscenely at them. It was the first movement his head had made.

  “You say it's the Truth,” he said. “Why doesn't it heal you? Why can't you walk?” he said.

  And now his impersonality had gone. He stood up and the face was cut into the lines of its illness and his deep voice was quieter with personal rancour.

  “I know the reason. Everyone in this street knows the reason. God crippled you for the sins of your father. The cheating postman who stole the letters, the dirty racer, a gambler. And your mother drinking every night in The Butcher's Arms and paying for it out of what she earned on her back.”

  “Stop it! Get out! Mrs Johnson!” called Miss Dykes. “Pick up that rug, give it to me.”

  She wriggled vainly to ease herself down the couch.

  Above all to cover her feet, to hide them from him.

  “Your sister three times a week with a City man, in this house, in this very room,” said Mr Vogg.

  “You're mad. If I could get at you!” cried Miss Dykes. The sweat was heavily seeded in her scarlet face, the shoes had fallen off her feet and she was helpless to reach her skirt which had worked over her knees and on one side, the side he stood, her thigh and its suspender were uncovered. It was the last shame.

  “Mrs Johnson!” she screamed out. “Let me get at you. I will kill you.”

  Mr Vogg did not move. He stood there, looking at her, without a smile on his face. He grimaced, as if he were cut out of wood. There was a thump. Miss Dykes, in her last effort, had lost her balance and rolled off the couch. It had been mounted on high wooden blocks so that she could watch the street when she lay there. She fell heavily on her back and rolled over, dragging the rug with one hand.

  “How dare you talk about my sister,” she called out from the floor, in spite of the shock of her fall from the bed. “My sister has never … You hateful…;”

  The sound of steps came from the kitchen and Mrs Johnson came into the room. She could not see the figure of Miss Dykes but could hear her grovelling and her voice and she could see Mr Vogg looking down. And she saw Mr Vogg step back and say, “No! Get away. Get away,” and hold his hands up.

  Mrs Johnson took three steps across the room to him and then she cried out, “What have you done? She's having a fit. She's having a fit.”

  Miss Dykes, who had turned over on her stomach, suddenly raised her buttocks and fell, then raised them again; the right leg moved in a half-sprawling move, sideways. She fell on to one knee and they both saw her raise herself on it. “I'll kill you. I'll kill you,” she was muttering.

  “She's moving. She's crawling,” Mr Vogg said, backing away to the fireplace. “Keep her away. Keep her away from me. Keep her away.”

  “Dear,” cried Mrs Johnson, going down on her knees to hold the cripple, and as she did so, the cripple rose to her knees and her left leg now sprawled and she half raised herself to Mrs Johnson's arms. The sweat poured from her face and her chest and had soaked her blouse.

  “Kill him. Let me get to him,” Miss Dykes was shouting, and she struggled against Mrs Johnson's body, tearing at her apron and her blouse, striking Mrs Johnson with her fists.

  “Quiet, quiet,” gasped Mrs Johnson. “Help me.”

  But Vogg had got to the corner of the room; he was grimacing with fear.

  “Keep her away. Keep her away.”

  In the enormous strength of her rage, Miss Dykes pushed Mrs Johnson. Her blouse was torn down to her waist. Miss Dykes pushed against the corner of th
e table and Mrs Johnson tottered and loosened a hand to save herself. She let go of the cripple and Miss Dykes fell again.

  She fell, not under the table, but sideways and half across the corner of it. And there she half hung, gripping the table by the edge.

  “She can walk. Look. She can walk,” sneered Vogg, in his corner. And indeed the right leg bent and then straightened and for a few seconds Miss Dykes stood like a drunken woman, before she slithered down again to where she had been half lying before.

  “It's a sham,” he called. “She can walk all the time.” “Don't stand there like a man,” called Mrs Johnson.

  “Help me with her.”

  “Kill him,” groaned Miss Dykes, pulling herself up by the table leg once more. “Don't let him go.”

  XXXIV

  “She has walked three steps,” the doctor said. He was a thin, elderly man with tobacco-stained fingers, gentle manners and a nose that had once been broken.

  “It's a miracle,” said Mr Beluncle. “I don't understand you medical men. You attack us but we do the job all the same.”

  “It's interesting,” said the doctor gently. “Did you see it?”

  “They phoned me at the office and I brought Mrs Truslove down at once,” said Mr Beluncle, beginning a long personal narrative.