The house said: “You're trying to beat me down.”
“Look at your filthy condition. It is deplorable.”
Mr Beluncle was at the back poking at some creeper in the kitchen gutter.
“Leave me alone,” said the house.
A yard of rusted gutter suddenly fell off and struck Mr Beluncle on the arm. He jumped back with the pain.
“Confound,” said Mr Beluncle. “A suit just back from the cleaners.”
His arm went hard with the pain which he had small capacity to endure. He brushed his coat and pulling back his sleeve he saw a blue ridge on his skin where he had been struck.
Mr Beluncle looked round to see whom he could rage at. There was no one. His conversation could not go on after this insult. He walked to the estate agents' and burst out, “That place is falling to pieces. It is a positive danger. I nearly lost my life. Another inch and someone would have had an action for damages. It's your business, as the agents of the vendor…;”
Yet, that perhaps was the crisis? The miracle was on its way.
At five o'clock he took a slow train back to Hetley to see Mrs Truslove. He did not say a word to her about the house or his journey. But it struck him, when he saw Mrs Truslove holding her sister on the edge of the lawn and in conversation with neighbours on the other side of the fence, that there was something very stupid about them all. If he were to take his clothes off, they would see printed in huge letters all over his body the words he had said to the estate agents an hour before.
“I will put the offer in writing tonight.”
His mystery made him feel modest.
XXXVII
The day was ending. Desire gratified had brought with it a mood of austere and absent lassitude, a benign serenity of mind. Mr Beluncle had been in too many trains and he was tired. He got out of the train at Boystone, wondering what on earth had made him leave his car in London, thinking with self-pity of the uphill walk home under the evening birdsong of the avenues, past houses filled with armchairs where less-disturbed men than he was had long been sitting with their pleasant wives. His behaviour about his car had been as impulsive as his marriage.
“What a man goes home to, he never knows, my father used to say.”
“D'evening, Beluncle.”
Mr Beluncle felt something like a large, rank, dusty friendly dog pushing against him on the platform, changing step to walk with him. He looked up. The stationmaster, the really superfluous man of Mr Beluncle's life: Mr Phibbs. A gingery, low-class man, like an Airedale.
Mr Phibbs grinned ironically.
“Wonderful news,” said Mr Phibbs in his “mere” voice, looking at the last coach of the train go out in a blue electric flash over Boystone bridge.
“I don't get you,” said Mr Beluncle, plainly indicating that it was a matter of principle for him not to “get” Mr Phibbs.
“The world is a wonderful place,” he added.
“Gherss,” said Mr Phibbs. “And people don't realise it.”
Mr Phibbs did not drop Mr Beluncle at the ticket barrier. He walked through the gate with him into the echoing subway up which tired people were climbing.
“I'm referring,” said Mr Phibbs, in his indiscreet voice, “to Miss Dykes.” And Mr Phibbs, it seemed to Mr Beluncle, was announcing this through a megaphone.
That, at any rate, was his effect. Bumping Mr Beluncle's shoulder in a brotherly way, as he stuck his long legs forward, Mr Phibbs pointed out that it was just what the Church needed, and that in his job he had remarkable opportunities of putting in a word for the Truth to some of the passengers. He'd told quite a few.
How the devil had Phibbs heard?
Mr Beluncle was deeply annoyed. Mr Phibbs began to explain the miracle, pointing out that it was natural when Mr Beluncle said it was wonderful; and when Mr Beluncle agreed it was natural, stopping him on the station slope and asking him:
“Cherss, but what do we mean by Nature?”
Mr Beluncle hurried on, but the long figure of Mr Phibbs moved closer to him. He would walk part of the way. He was going off duty.
“It's unwise to talk about it,” said Mr Beluncle. “Lady Roads was very clear about that. We must not let our good be evil spoken of.”
Mr Phibbs was delighted to hear this. Always, in his idleness, searching for new chances of heresy, Mr Phibbs said in the presence of one of his porters as they went outside:
“Cherss. Miss Wix was saying we must remember all healings are not of God. How do we know God healed Miss Dykes? Eh?” And he picked an ear.
Mr Beluncle stopped. He gave his umbrella a gentle tap as he looked from Mr Phibbs's stained navy-blue waistcoat to his face.
“I shouldn't,” he smiled with condescension, “pay much attention to the thought of Miss Wix. It is not usually helpful.”
“A reasonable man like you, Beluncle,” said Mr Phibbs, with a genial familiarity that enraged Mr Beluncle. “No reasonable man can help seeing through Lady Roads.”
“I am not aware/5 said Mr Beluncle, “that anything sees, except the Divine Mind.”
And he shook Mr Phibbs off with these words.
The fool! The second-rate imbecile! Mr Beluncle roared up the streets to his house. Why do they have such a man in the Church? What a man! What a family! Followers of Miss Wix. My God, Mr Beluncle reflected, wherever Truth is how subtle the perversion. We cannot be too severe, too strict, too careful if we wish to enter the Kingdom. A boy, like my son, Henry, carried away by people like the Phibbses! No wonder, thought Mr Beluncle in violent alarm, we don't get miracles in our home. My God, it was Henry who told that Phibbs girl. Henry must have heard me talking on the phone.
It was worse than that: he had been on the edge of the miracle; no, he had been floating in the vision of it all day; and Phibbs had put him in a temper and had taken it from him at the last moment. It had gone.
He was a little calmer when the garden of his house came distantly in sight. The miracle reappeared for a moment, like a mirage. Perhaps … But Mr Beluncle checked himself with horror at the peculiar thoughts that could come into the minds of right-thinking men and he hastily said:
“I hope nothing has happened to mother, today.”
XXXVIII
The two boys, George and Henry, put their bicycles away in the shed and walked under the trees towards the back door of the house. George was saying that up at Pop's there was an abominable laddie called Penrose with a motor-bicycle who slept with the tart called Valery; Pop had been in prison and Fred had pointed out a car thief and the boys of the North Road gang. As he spoke George could smell the sour smell of old tea leaves and melting margarine that hung about Pop's cafe, and he glowed with importance and pleasure in the low company. All these men seemed great men to George; not as great as his father, but when his father ignored his love he turned to them. “I am in the middle of the family,” he thought, “I am going to be the bad son; perhaps that will attract their attention.”
Valery had come and sat on his knee to annoy one of the lorry drivers. George was delighted by this experience.
“You're lucky,” said Leslie to his brothers in the kitchen. “He is not home yet. You just scraped in in time.”
Leslie laughed at their relief.
A small compressed dark storm cloud travelled fast up the main road towards the house. An hour later than his usual time Mr Beluncle was coming home.
“Here he comes,” said George, standing behind a laurel bush at the corner of the garden. Mr Beluncle's face was serious, pale and his eyes were lowered most of the time as he came along. The boy ran back to warn his mother, who looked slyly at her family and put on a sullen expression.
“There is going tp be a row,” said Henry.
Mrs Beluncle went to meet her husband.
“Oh, I've been so worried. I thought there had been an accident,” she said.
“Your father is calling to you,” said Mrs Beluncle, going to her sons. They read in her face that they were wrong. She was not going
to quarrel this evening.
The three boys waited and then George was pushed forward because he had most of the love.
“My shoes, old boy,” said Mr Beluncle in a kind, tired absent voice from his chair in the front room. Mr Beluncle raised one leg and George knelt smiling with pleasure to undo his father's shoes.
The grandmother stood beside her son's chair, thickly smiling.
“Half past eight,” she said. “What a time to get back. I never 'eard of such an hour. It's only ten minutes ago they've come in with those bicycles, both of them. Running round with all the street urchins and the bad company in the public-houses.”
The grandmother smiled with delight.
“When you was a young man,” she said to Mr Beluncle, “you came in at seven and your poor father had to get the whip to you. Eh, poor man, it hurt me to see him so put out. No supper you had. Sent you to bed with a good whipping from his belt,” said the grandmother sentimentally, looking with love at her son. “It's what made a man of you. Your poor father's arm ached.”
“Yes,” said Mr Beluncle. “I remember I was Henry's age. It is what people used to do in those days. It was very wrong.”
“Aye,” said old Mrs Beluncle, “it's what made a man of you. At your age a great boy like you was ought to have known better. The whippings he gave Constance too and she never writes. I'd never bring up children the way Ethel does, she knows no better, it is how she was brought up. On the streets, I've no doubt, like miners' little children.”
Old Mrs Beluncle closed her eyes. She could see the long street of her village with the geese on the green; and she could hear her mother saying, “Close the gate, close the doors, the miners are coming to drink and fight and starve their children. Keep decent people indoors.”
“Loosen, loosen the laces properly, I've often told you,” said Mr Beluncle to George, while his mother went on.
“Pull it right through. Not like that.
“Don't be stupid,” pleaded Mr Beluncle.
“Aye,” said the grandmother. “That George was always the backward one, I ne'er took to him, I ne'er took to him when he was a baby. Lazy, sinful hands he's got and I ne'er liked a sulky face.”
“Pull,” said Mr Beluncle sadly. “I didn't say pull my foot off. By the heel. If I've told you once I've told you a thousand times.”
Ethel came into the room with a plate for the table.
“Ease the sock for me, old girl,” pleaded Mr Beluncle.
“Aye,” wailed the grandmother agreeably, “I lay many a pair of stockings he's pulled off elsewhere. Aye, elsewhere,” she said.
“Where's Henry?” pleaded Mr Beluncle, out of his deep sadness.
“In,” said Ethel.
“How long?” said Mr Beluncle.
“You speak to him. I don't know. I don't watch my children. I don't whip them. I don't spy. I don't ask questions,” said Ethel.
She coloured with that obstinacy of hers which told him what was true or what was untrue this evening would depend, for her, on moods not yet formed.
“I've had,” she said, nodding to the grandmother, “a bad day with her.”
The grandmother did not hear this but knew she was being talked about.
“Homework in the kitchen. Dad!” said George. “A man called Penrose offered me a job.”
“You've what?”
“Fred sort of took me to a man. I've got to see him nine o'clock tomorrow.”
“What man? What job?”
“Penrose,” said George eagerly. “I don't know what it is.”
“You're offered a job; you don't know what it is. Who asked Fred to do this? I didn't ask Fred to get you a job. What were you doing over at Hetley?”
“Seeing Fred,” said George. “I asked him.”
“Tou did,” exclaimed Mr Beluncle, with jealousy. “Oh! Your own father isn't good enough for you, you have to go to Fred. What do you think Fred will think of me? Fred will say, 'Why doesn't his father get a job for him. There must be something wrong with this boy.' Some boys would be glad to ask their father first. I would have thought that I knew more about the business world than Fred.”
“You haven't done anything,” said George.
“Ten months this boy has been hanging round the house waiting for you,” said Ethel, laying the table.
“As if I had nothing else to do but what this boy ought to do for himself. I did at his age. I didn't hang crying round my father,” he said.
“He whipped you out of the place—if that story is true,” said Ethel.
“I often wish I'd listened to my father,” said Mr Beluncle. “You go to this Mr Penrose, my boy. Go and see him, do. You think he's superior to your father, you think he can do better for you than your father, you think he loves you more, thinks more of you and your future—you go. Do.”
Mr Beluncle closed his eyes and lay back in his chair. He had seen a miracle, an actual miracle, the work of God; and he came back to things like this.
He took a long, deep breath. An extraordinary passion rose and fell and wrestled in him. He had the sensation that George was a part of his body, a part that was being ripped away, leaving a terrible red and unjust wound; he felt that his heart was being torn out; he saw, with terror, the bad things that could happen to his son. But above all, he felt that he was stretched out on a rock in the middle of middle age, and that his mother, his wife, his children and the other woman, Mrs Truslove, and her sister, were taking pieces of flesh off him, picking him to the bone. And it was that cripple, of all people, and not himself, who had experienced the miracle. He opened his eyes and considered the room where the table was now laid and Leslie, the youngest, came in. He went over to the armchair, opposite to Mr Beluncle, sat down and put up his foot.
“Eth,” Leslie said. “George! I'm tired. I've had a heavy day. Take my boots off. Loosen the laces. No, don't pull like that, you'll have my foot off… ”
Mr Beluncle gazed and listened with amazement.
“Here have I been doing my homework and you sit there. Grandma's dying of hunger. She's only eaten a cow today.”
Mr Beluncle's body suddenly heaved with laughter. He got up with a roar of laughter and hysterical tears came to his cheeks. He saw the boy nimbly slip out of the chair to the far end of the table, which he accidentally kicked.
“Another pound off when we sell,” Leslie said.
A wonderful optimism and good nature suddenly rose in the Beluncles.
“Tell us the love story in The Windsor” said Leslie, sitting next to his grandmother at the table. “They put me next to you to keep you quiet. Does,” he now shouted in the old lady's ear, “does she wait for Sir John to come back from the Crimean War or does she marry the gamekeeper?”
The old lady sighed.
“Eh, she was true to him,” she sighed. And was about to go on, but Leslie stopped her.
“Not like some, no doubt?” enquired Leslie, looking at each member of the family.
“She didn't have a baby?” said Leslie.
“A beautiful bracelet he gave her,” said the old lady, mishearing.
“See?” said Leslie to his family. “Traps the man by getting in the family way and he steals his mother's jewellery.”
George and Henry lowered their eyes. Mr Beluncle took his table napkin out of his collar, and went scarlet, then violet in the attempt to choke back his laughter, which however spread from chin to chin and then to his swelling neck. Only Mrs Beluncle did not laugh.
“Not in front of me., Leslie,” she said prudishly, “with that talk.”
“No,” said Mr Beluncle, collecting himself, “not in front of your mother.”
Leslie lowered his eyes.
“Somebody ought to tell grandma how life began. She'll only pick it up from me,” Leslie murmured.
“Enough of that,” said Mr Beluncle, suddenly at last quietening his family. Mr Beluncle sat forward in his chair with his legs apart, put four pieces of sugar in his coffee and stirred it. His shrewd and
restless eyes inspected the ceiling of this room.
“This place, Ethel,” he said, nodding at the ceiling and the walls and lifting the cup to his heavy lips as he did so, “this place will fetch its price. I should say”—he screwed up one eye—”it will fetch two thousand pounds.”
“Oh,” groaned Mrs Beluncle.
“Two thousand—even two thousand two hundred,' said Mr Beluncle kindly.
“Five,” said Leslie.
“Seven-fifty,” said Henry.
“Why don't we sell, then?” said Mrs Beluncle.
“Don't be silly,” said Mr Beluncle, putting his cup down with annoyance. “The house doesn't belong to us. I was thinking of what the landlord would get for it.”
“Oh, what does that matter?” said Mrs Beluncle gaily. “Sell all the same. We could sell this sideboard; sell this carpet, I'm sick of it. The fire-irons.”
Excited, she stood up:
“Sell my dress,” she cried. “Look at these shoes.” She kicked them off. “Fifteen shillings. They pinch. I'll be glad to get rid of them.”
Mrs Beluncle sat down again and rocked with laughter and spread her fingers over her face.
“All those suits,” she cried.
“And the piano,” she said.
“Sell me,” muttered Henry morbidly.
“Pay me back the ten shillings you borrowed from me that Christmas when I was twelve. You said you would,” said George dreamily, for this was an incident in his life to which he often returned. His father and he would travel back on the road of his love to that meeting-place where they would be united and a wrong put right.
“Sell grandma,” said Leslie.
“Leslie!” warned Mr Beluncle.
“Not that you would get much,” Leslie said. “She's mortgaged.”
They turned nervously to look at the grandmother. On a sofa which had belonged to her house she sat with her magazine in her lap, stretched like a little girl, asleep.
The laughter that had started suddenly stopped. They all studied Leslie with the incredulity of those who hear the truth spoken.
Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 27