Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics)

by V. S. Pritchett

  “That was yesterday,” said the doctor. “There has been shock.”

  “You call it shock,” said Mr Beluncle. “I call it God. I call it a miracle.”

  “I call it Nature really,” said the doctor modestly.

  “Just like that, suddenly, she saw the Truth,” said Lady Roads, who came into the room now. “I've been treating her for years.”

  “I know,” said the doctor. “I believe whatever I see. It has often happened. I expect in your religion you get a lot of cases.”

  “Often,” said Mr Beluncle scornfully. “Not in medical science. And may I make a correction there if you will pardon me. If she had died you would call it Nature too! I would like to say this is a purely normal happening. We are normal people.” Mr Beluncle put his head in the air and walked up and down.

  “Nothing could be more normal than Mr Beluncle,” Lady Roads said slyly to the doctor.

  “Normal! I am normality,” said Mr Beluncle, with aggressive good humour. “Or to use a word I prefer, the word of that American President—what was his name?—never mind—normalcy.”

  “I wonder what his blood pressure is,” the doctor said to himself.

  Tears had been running down Mrs Johnson's cheeks again, they saw when she brought the tea in.

  “My baby,” she said. “He tried to kill her.”

  “Now, Mrs Johnson,” said Lady Roads. “We ought to be filled with joy.”

  Mrs Johnson looked oddly across to the couch. There was a long tear at the side of the cover.

  “Who tried to kill her?” asked the doctor.

  “That beast, that dirty beast,” Mrs Johnson cried out. “If I could get hold of him. Hanging is too good for a man like that.”

  She went to the door and the doctor got up and followed her.

  “We must protect ourselves against evil,” said Lady Roads, closing her eyes. “I must speak to the doctor. He isn't hostile. But Mrs Johnson is upset. It's very important for the movement not to speak of this yet. I think it would be a good thing to get your sister away from here, dear,” she said to Mrs Truslove. “I will have her to stay with me. You can both come. I have seen it before. If God does something wonderful people can't stand it. They hate it. They tear you to pieces rather than admit the Truth; the devil gets into them.”

  Mrs Truslove did not answer but her heart cried:

  “This is the beginning. They are taking her away. She belongs to me no more. I must not be selfish but what have I got now?” And she looked at Mr Beluncle with one of those incredulous regards of farewell which had come to her eyes unwished for on now numberless days. “Nothing.”

  And she could not restrain the cynical and ferocious thought: “If this had happened years before, if I had been alone in my house, I would have had him. She gives me my freedom now I am virtuous and do not want it.”

  “This,” said Mr Beluncle, “is going to make a lot of difference to our lives. No one knows what Mrs Truslove has had to bear all these years; she has felt the strain. I have seen it. It isn't always easy.”

  “What has happened to me,” Mrs Truslove asked herself, startled by his remark, “that I cannot be grateful for that? He has always been careful to read only half my thoughts.”

  He stayed there the evening, after the doctor had gone, and outstayed Lady Roads. Miss Dykes was at last asleep. Mrs Truslove came out of the room quietly and blinked at their radiant faces.

  There was, she said, going to be trouble with Mrs Johnson. Mr Beluncle listened to her account of her sister's behaviour. They had had to let her try to walk a step or two and then listen to her accuse them of trying to stop her.

  Mr Beluncle took her into the small narrow back garden and heard the evening radios bawling away, one overpowering machine drowning the others. There were instances of applause and laughter, like the roaring of packed-in animals.

  “This,” said Mr Beluncle, “has given me certainty. I know what to do. Now cheer up. It's wiped the floor with the doctor, you could see that.”

  Mrs Truslove's hand was on his arm. She was not drawn closer to him, she had never felt so far away, but she needed his support.

  “I am worried about that poor wretch Vogg,” she said. “I wonder if I ought to go and see him. If it's true what Mrs Johnson keeps saying, that he broke into the house and tried to get at Judy—what was he trying to do? To rape her, do you think?—we ought to see the police.”

  “Now calm yourself,” said Mr Beluncle, shocked by the word “rape”. “We've heard what happened from Judy. It is a very wonderful thing. She sent for him, called him over, it was very brave of her, to speak to him about the meeting. It's a lesson to us all; expose the lie, as Lady Roads said, and the healing comes. Personally I feel humble, very humble,” said Mr Beluncle, stopping in the middle of the grass plot and addressing the neighbouring gardens.

  “Women like Mrs Johnson—they're like my wife, their imagination runs away with them.”

  “Why does Mrs Johnson say he broke in? I think Judy is going to die,” said Mrs Truslove.

  “Die!” exclaimed Mr Beluncle. “This is the beginning of life. Personally, I feel I am beginning life all over again. She's not going to die.”

  Mr Beluncle spoke with anger: “When we have seen with our own eyes a wonderful manifestation of Divine Love,” he said loudly.

  “But we didn't see anything with our own eyes,” said Mrs Truslove.

  “We have seen her walk,” said Mr Beluncle, “that is what I am grateful for. I can tell you the world is not the same place for me, after this. I feel I have been changed. A wonderful thing has happened. In a way it is frightening. I could easily be frightened now. But I am not.”

  Mrs Truslove did not answer.

  “I feel,” said Mr Beluncle, modestly looking away, “I can see the future all around me.”

  “For me—well, you can see, it might destroy my life,” she said.

  “Destroy?” he said. “It can't. Destroy? I don't understand.”

  She had not meant to be threatening, but she could see that he took her words in that way. It was not a complete shock that he thought of what had happened only as something that would affect himself.

  XXXV

  There was one simple change Mr Beluncle had not reckoned with. There was confusion, happiness, apprehension at Hetley and he was out of it. Mrs Truslove stayed with her sister. Mr Beluncle drove there on the third morning on his way to the office. What he expected to see was a woman radiant and walking. What he saw was Miss Dykes sitting in an armchair with a stick beside her. She got up for half a minute, swayed on her legs, reached for her sister's arm, took a very small step and then sat down. Her eyes terrified Beluncle. They were larger than they had been, more brilliant, ecstatic and sunken. She looked gaunt and ten years older. When no one was watching she got up again and walked two steps to the mantelpiece and held it. There was a small annoyance: she was a little deaf. And Beluncle heard that she had been deaf when she was a young child.

  Mr Beluncle drove on to his office. “Make way, make way,” his car horn spoke out in the clogging traffic on the London road. “A miracle has occurred. It may be my turn next. It will be.”

  In the following days, when Mrs Truslove rang him up at his office, she sounded tangled in happiness and fear, in a private entanglement so close that when he spoke of business affairs her voice seemed to go off the line. To get her to listen to one or two practical things was like chasing a fly down that impersonal wire.

  “I shan't come in this week. I don't know about next,” she said. “I may go to the Roadses'.”

  Mr Beluncle could not hide his shock of displeasure. If anyone ought to be going for a rest, if anyone ought to be going to Lady Roads's house, it was himself. Yes, that is what he felt like—a thorough rest.

  He missed Mrs Truslove. Despondently, resentfully, with misgiving, he sat alone at his desk, looked at her empty chair—and what did he feel? It was very odd, but he felt hungry.

  It was as if he had b
een nibbling off her for years, and his first independent act in her absence was to have coffee and biscuits brought in earlier.

  “I see you have brought only three biscuits,55 he said to the girl.

  “I thought you being alone, sir,” she said.

  “Now, Mildred,55 he said, with a forgiving smile, “pull yourself together. Did I change the order?'5

  “I'm sorry, sir,” said Mildred. She brought in three more biscuits.

  Mr Beluncle felt better after eating his partner's biscuits.

  It was unnerving to pass a morning in which he answered all the telephone calls, read the letters and the newspapers and had no one to bicker with. He had always felt that if there was any truth in her accusation that he was lazy and incompetent, it was because she prevented him from following his plans. He had only to go out of the room intending to speak to one of the clerks, for her to say, “If you are going to the warehouse you had better speak to So-and-So,” or if he had planned a morning in the West End showroom, she would be certain to say something that would prevent him from going, as if she knew how to read his mind and automatically thwart it. Now she was away—and he realised with a shock that she had not been away more than two days in fifteen years—he was lost. He spent hours trying to think of what he ought to do, how she would contradict it and how he must do what he supposed she would want if she were there. He was screwed up to an extraordinary pitch of loyalty and duplicity.

  But he came back to the important new fact: the miracle. Mr Beluncle was a believing man. He believed everything. He believed both versions of the miracle. He believed that Miss Dykes had heroically sent for Mr Vogg and had calmly been transfigured and healed by her courageous affirmations. He also believed that Vogg had attacked her and she had floored him by miraculously rising to her feet. He also believed that it did not matter what had happened: the interpretation was everything. This led him to the conclusion that if he was expecting miracles in his own life— and he was expecting them, rather peremptorily too—a good deal of boldness and severity was necessary.

  Mr Beluncle began his week by rebuking the people in his office and his factory. By the end of the week, Mr Cook was flustered to the point of being almost unable to hold his pen, Miss Vanner was talking of giving her notice, Mr Andrews was tensely whistling to himself, one of the workmen was sacked, the others were watchful and resentful, Mr Chilly had been spoken to about not pulling his weight and Henry found himself working hard for the first time in his life. Mr Beluncle had turned down a Canadian order because it was not large enough and had had several rude telephone calls.

  Certain crucial letters were put on Mrs Truslove's side of the desk. They were all financial; one or two were urgent. They represented future disputes with his partner. Mr Beluncle evaded them. A successful evasion made him feel as efficient as an unavoidable facing of facts did. He had been able to evade the awkward fact of his sister's visit and when he thought he ought to see her, or feared that she would call again, he said, to his imaginary interlocutor:

  “There has been a miracle. You understand we must postpone our talk.”

  He was on good terms with his wife this week. He had been able to say that, without wishing to be unkind, it was a relief to be on one's own again; and Mrs Beluncle was pleased about that. “She has interfered with you. She has held you back,” she said. She was also able to sympathise with him in the amount of work he had to do. And even when she changed her mind and perversely took the opposite view: that Mrs Truslove had “a steadying hand”, that she hoped she would “come back before something went wrong”, this was a good point too. To hear his wife saying a good word for Mrs Truslove was a relief, a pleasure.

  It was always a question what to tell his wife. In the end he always told her everything; occasionally that succeeded; at other times, he regretted it. He had begun by telling her that the cripple had had some attack, some crisis, and he had been on the point of telling her about the miracle itself, but he remembered Lady Roads's warning; and his wife, strangely determined to be pleasant about everything this week, made the warning unnecessary. Mrs Beluncle loved a good illness. The illness of the cripple, the fact of having to look after a crippled sister, had been Mrs Belimcle's one never broken bond of liking for the hated woman. It gave her a kind of respectability, almost a certificate of chastity in widowhood, admitted her to that hushed court of calamity in which Mrs Beluncle was a genteel lady-in-waiting. What calmed Mrs Beluncle was the notion that the cripple was getting worse and she could see that this must be a test of her husband's faith. She had no doubt in her mind that the Purification would be unable to do anything for the cripple; but her love for her husband, the strongest feeling in her life, made her hope that his faith would survive the test for his sake. Perhaps, if things went well, “that woman” Mrs Truslove would join the Purification: it would be happier if she did. Mrs Beluncle did not quite admire Mrs Truslove for sharing her own (Mrs Beluncle's) total rejection of her husband's religion. She would have preferred Mrs Truslove to be different from herself.

  As the week went by, Mr Beluncle's efficiency had created a kind of hollow. He had decided so fast, rebuked so sternly, evaded so promptly, that he found time on his hands. From Hetley he picked up the latest news: Miss Dykes had continued to walk. Mrs Truslove, telling him not to come down, telephoned this news to him; her voice was worried, and became high-pitched with anxiety. She was having difficulties with Mrs Johnson. She had gone to see Mr Vogg and Vogg was out. There was a rumour that he had gone away. An ambulance had come for Mrs Vogg.

  Mrs Truslove was keeping him off. He put down the receiver, injured and puzzled. The thought struck him that perhaps she would never come back.

  Mr Beluncle felt suddenly cold and sick, but he quickly mastered that feeling. He repeated his phrase: “There has been a miracle.” It occurred to him that he kept on saying this, but that he was not acting on it. How to act in the knowledge of the miraculous?

  Quite clearly, as if a voice had spoken to him, Mr Beluncle heard the words:

  “See the agents about Marbella. Make an offer.”

  XXXVI

  When he left his office, and stepped into the street, a shower of gold seemed to him to fall upon his shoulders, his sleeves, his trousers. He took a taxi, on the south side of London Bridge—he took it on the north side when Mrs Truslove was at the office—and sat in the long expensive drive to the West End. He disliked driving his own car in the London traffic and one of Mrs Truslove's meannesses was that she would never let him have a chauffeur. He paid off the taxi at the top of Bond Street.

  There began then one of Mr Beluncle's bouts of imaginary shopping and general expenditure. First of all he started valuing property, worked out the return of corner sites. In each shop window he calculated turnover. He bought and sold dozens of passing cars. He equipped himself with all kinds of luxurious stationery, trunks, suitcases, picnic baskets, pictures, shirts, ties. In the middle of this, he quite unexpectedly bought a lobster. This was a real purchase. He had the idea of taking the lobster back to his office and eating it there and, forgetting Marbella for a moment, he looked for a taxi to take him back.

  There was no taxi, but he found that he was outside a silversmith's. Mr Beluncle had a special feeling for silver. He loved it, but not entirely for itself. When he gazed at a window filled with silver, his desire rose, but it was not for the silver itself; he had heard of families, in certain straits, “selling their silver”, and of large sums being “got” for it. Just when they were bankrupt, penniless, finished, they suddenly “sold some of the silver”, took a little out of the hoard and adroitly lived on the proceeds. In the past crises of his life, it would have made all the difference if Mrs Beluncle had had silver to sell. One may or may not be short of money, but Bond Street cried to heaven of the indispensable affirmations of property. He had once sold his wife's rings in his young days. Suppose she had not had rings! “Buy silver”—it was an imperative.

  Mr Beluncle went into t
he shop and after the first shock of hearing the prices, they began to bemuse him.

  Ten pounds was his price; but in a short time fifty, seventy, a hundred and fifty, three hundred and twenty-five murmured the poetry of numbers into his glowing ears. In a pause he saw himself in one of the shop mirrors: it was like seeing someone bidding against him in an auction. He returned to his dabbling on the counter with new zest. He heard himself estimating, as he walked out of the shop, with a small silver tray, as he looked back at a much larger and presumptuously tarnished one in a case by the window, that he must have saved two hundred pounds.

  And now, with his tray Mr Beluncle was floating. He had drunk the champagne of expense. To see him walking down the street now, was to see a nabob, exalted, sublimely contemptuous in the face. What some men find in a woman's winding arms he had in this glorious expense. He got into a taxi, went to Victoria, took a first-class ticket and in an hour had hired a car from the country station to the house. There was a small shock for him in the train. He had got his tray but where was the lobster? It was gone. He had lost it, left it somewhere.

  There stood Marbella, the florid, the dissolute villa, the clubman, the company director. The sky was heavy and grey at Sissing and the house, overcrowded by its trees and creepers, was sunk in a postprandial nap which brought out the obduracy of its character; its plain view that it was uninterested in anyone who had not got the money.

  “The last man who lived in you,” Mr Beluncle argued back, “thought he was on top of the world. A year after he moved in his wife died. And she found he had embezzled twenty thousand pounds. She is out of her mind.”

  The house grunted.

  “That's nothing to do with me. Have you got the cash?”

  Mr. Beluncle said sharply:

  “Surtees had it before. The biggest man in eggs. I knew Surtees when he was nothing. I sold him his first desk and I had a job getting the money. Two wives divorced him. Do you call that happiness? And his son killed in a motor accident. His favourite son.”