“You go too far,” said Mr Beluncle. “It's time you were in bed.”
“Yes, it is,55 said Mrs Beluncle.
“While it's still there, yes, I will,” said Leslie, getting up. “Good night, dad. Good night, mum. Good night,” he said to the grandmother.
When he had gone Ethel Beluncle said gravely:
“It is wicked how we carry on. God will punish us.”
XXXIX
When her magazine fell to the floor, the grandmother woke up and Ethel took her up to her bed. Very quickly the old lady walked and up the stairs scampered with the precise energy of old age.
Before Mrs Beluncle left, she made signals with her eyes to her husband. She indicated Henry.
“George,” she said, “it is time for you too.”
The boys noticed her unconvincing voice and glanced at each other for help. They both got up for common protection and went to the door.
“Just one moment, Henry,” said Mr Beluncle.
The two youths looked with amused, anxious and different love into each other's eyes. George dawdled at the door, longing for the privilege that was to be his brother's: the privilege of being alone in the room with his father and hear his father rage. To George it seemed a misfortune that his brother, who would wilfully and bitterly misunderstand what was going to be said to him shortly, should have a “blowing up” wasted on him; how deeply George envied Henry the trouble he was shortly going to experience.
“Treachery,” George murmured sympathetically to Henry at the door, using a word Henry often used, and speaking it only for this reason; for George wished to experience treachery too. Reluctantly, he shut the door on the scene and went upstairs to his bedroom.
Mr Beluncle stood humbly in the wonder of his own life.
He leaned to smell the roses in the bowl on the table.
“I want to talk to you,” said Mr Beluncle, resting his arms on the table.
Henry sat down at the other end of the table. He quickly decided upon what objects in the room to look, while his father talked. The hands of the clock showed the curls of his father's grey hair, a coloured drawing of two comic red-nosed Scotsmen with whisky bottles was to the right of his shoulders. To the left was a small beaten-bronze letter-rack which had been put to one side of the mantelpiece because, as Mr Beluncle said in a kind of terror, “That space is empty.” If he could concentrate on these, looking at every inch of them, Henry thought he might be able to save himself from the so easily overwhelming gravity of his father's voice that would go to his bowels and unman him.
Mr Beluncle joined his white hands and said:
“I wish to talk to you and I don't want you to get the idea that what I am going to say is unkind, because it isn't meant unkindly. …;”
“No,” said Henry's small hard voice. He was staring at the clock hands.
“I only think of your good because you're my son and it's natural for a father to think of the good of his children; it's no good saying he doesn't know better, he does. You may think you know a lot, but you haven't the experience, that's the point. An ounce of experience is worth a pound of theory. A man came to me today and wanted my opinion. I told him, 'You can have it, but I don't give my experience away and it will cost you ten pounds,' so you see I'm not talking through my hat, I'm giving you what many people would have to pay for. …;”
Mr Beluncle had not intended to digress on to this last point, but once his tongue got going he couldn't resist an anecdote and had in fact travelled back to some time in his own youth when in the Commercial Room of the North-Eastern, Leeds, he heard some old traveller say it; and in re-telling it, Mr Beluncle was not so much making a shrewd hard point as showing his life to his son.
“Did he pay it?” said Henry, hoping to deflect the discussion, for he was still safe. His eyes had followed every detail of the carving on the top of the clock and had now moved to the letter-rack.
“I was just illustrating my point,” said Mr Beluncle. “And don't try to take me up.55
“No, father,” said Henry steadily, for he had gained a point. It was far easier for him to withstand the sarcasm or angers of his father than his affection.
“I've noticed that about you. You try and take me up,” said Mr Beluncle. “You try to be clever, but let me tell you this, I wish I'd taken my father's advice. Not a day of my life passes, but I wish to heaven I'd followed what he said, not that we depend on others, you've got to live your own life, if you make a mess of it that's your affair, it's no good coming to me and saying, 'Father, I wish I had done as you said.' It will be too late.”
Mr Beluncle won back his lost point there. It was by the use of the word “father” and putting the words into his son's mouth.
The red-nosed Scotsmen in their comic picture, and the Scottie in his tartan ribbon beside it, gleamed. What (they seemed to ask) have you got against us? And they reproached Henry as a creature alien to the normal currents of sale-ability: something out of nature, an unnatural son, a jealous brother, a coward in love. They could see he was weakening. Henry's uneasy eyes looked at his father's face.
This was Henry's last defence: to study his father's face. To see the slightly sunburned forehead and the rind-like cheeks, as some kind of cratered moon; to think of all the train journeys it had done, the cigars it had smoked, the telephone calls it had taken, the goods it had sold, the rows it had had with customers, the laughs it had given in hired cars, the amount of industrial smoke the nostrils had breathed, the commercial anecdotes the ears had heard, the food the mouth had eaten, the hymns it had sung. The face became larger, the face of a city, smelling of trains, theatres, chapels and smoke rooms, warehouses and urinals; and it was as if, flying in an aeroplane over London or Birmingham, or some huge city, he looked down and the city was his father's face.
“You are still seeing that girl, aren't you?” said Mr Beluncle, in that sudden manner which startled and confused his customers. Henry's fantasy was unavailing and it vanished. But he had been prepared.
“What girl?” he said, but not defiantly. He simply wished his father to say the name of Mary Phibbs, for if he spoke the name then surely the love he felt would come unawares to his father's lips.
“Mary Phibbs,” said his father, sharply. “You know what girl I mean.” And to Henry's horror, when his father spoke the name, the opposite thing had happened; she was half destroyed, reduced to nothing or to the ordinary run of female creatures.
“You are seeing her?” repeated his father, following his advantage.
“Yes,” said Henry, from his store of coolness.
“After I asked you not to. After you promised.”
“I didn't promise. You said, I …” Henry's voice trembled. He was in danger. He had been about to have the folly of saying, “One is obliged to agree with you. A promise forced is not a promise freely given.” But then he would have to admit his physical fear. Mr Beluncle swept on, bringing his hand to the table, preparing to hit the table if he were provoked enough, and as it lay there the hand, easily, softly clenched.
“You deceived me. That is to say, you think you deceive me. But you don't. I know what people are doing. You think I go round the factory and don't know what people are doing?”
“No,” murmured Henry. And he could hear the voice of Mary Phibbs fading as it said,. “This is where you must stand up to him. If you love me as you say.” Mr Beluncle saw the weakness of his son's position and the strength of his own and spoke lightly, but on this subject he could not conceal a personal disgust.
“You think you are in love,” Mr Beluncle said.
“You have been in love?” said Henry.
“Of course I have. Dozens of times,” laughed Mr Beluncle, but he remembered to check his laugh, “before I met your mother.
“It doesn't matter what I've been,” said Mr Beluncle. “I don't want you to see that girl any more. It's against my wish and you will see one day that I am right.”
“Why?” said Henry, but his voice wa
s giving. He had lost the power to say more than one word.
“Why?” asked Mr Beluncle, greatly astonished at being questioned.
But, good God, my boy, don't you know there has been a miracle, he wanted to say. We were never like other people, but now we are quite extraordinary. Anything may happen. All the things we want, we can now have. This is your chance: to want only the most advantageous things.
“Yes,” said Henry, falsely encouraged. “What harm …?” But, suddenly, as always happened, he was lost. His trembling voice crumbled on the words. The tears, long held back, now sprang from his eyes, and before he could raise his hand, they were rolling in huge drops down his ashamed and angry cheeks, running into his mouth, while sobs, like creatures that had suddenly rushed into him and taken possession of his body, broke out and shook him with their grotesque antics. His struggles only finished the wreck of his stand. He was helpless, ugly, gulping, choking, trembling, incapable of speech and he saw Mary far away, left, lost, forgotten, betrayed.
Mr Beluncle took his arms from the table and, sitting back, let his hands lie in his lap. He had glanced at his watch as he moved them. He had won. He was satisfied. He regarded the face of his son with pity. He had had enough to do, in his time, with his wife's tears, with Mrs Truslove's tears. “Here I am trying to save him from marriage,” he said to himself. “I try to save him and he cries.”
“I want you to get on. I want you to have an important position. I want you to get a better position than me,” said Mr Beluncle, suddenly pitying himself. “And one day you'll find the right girl, not this girl, some other, the right one. We may move into a bigger house, a better one, larger perhaps, perhaps Marbella, or in the country. I saw one advertised today. It had kennels, and if we do that one day, if we can get a place further out—for I do want to be further out, you can't breathe in this place—I hope you'll find a girl, Some nice girl, who'd be friends with me too, whose arm I could take, and who would talk with me, who'd appreciate me and I could say, 'Jolly nice. Jolly good. This is Henry's wife. Jolly good.' That's the sort of girl I want—I want you to have, I don't say with money, don't misunderstand me, money isn't everything. In fact, money is nothing, nothing at all. We want ideas not money; I don't mean,” Mr Beluncle dreamed, “if there was money I would say No—I wouldn't; it's a bond. You don't love a person less because they have money, you can say it adds to the love. You might be glad to have a wife who could put money into my business.”
And at this Mr Beluncle raised his right hand and tapped fast with its spread fingers on the table.
Henry tried several times to speak. His sobs had stopped and now he was cold, angry and hard in defeat. His mouth was dry and burning, rage drying him up, and his head had a band of pain across his forehead.
Mr Beluncle went on:
“You are young. You are my son, my child,” he said. “And that is how I wish you to be. I do not want you to think you are growing up. I do not want,” he said with sudden emphasis, going, indeed, pale in the skin when he said this, “you to think of yourself as a man; there are youths you see everywhere at the street corners who think they are grown up and are very knowing, perhaps they do know things which you don't know, I don't want you to know them. In a sense it makes me feel old and I am not old, and I don't feel old.”
Struck by his contradiction Mr Beluncle said:
“I don't feel old. I feel young,” and he looked accusingly at his son. “But when I'm old, though you know as well as I do,” he said with anger, “that there is no such thing as old age—what is time? Has anyone seen it? Can you see time? Of course you can't. When that comes, I may want you to carry on the business.”
Without reflecting, without fearing or considering, Henry said:
“I don't want to stay in the business.”
But after he said it, his heart began to beat heavily and fast.
“What?” said Mr Beluncle, waking up from his dream.
“I don't want to stay in the business. I want to go abroad. I want to learn foreign languages. I …”
It was Mr Beluncle's turn to be shaken by emotion. He became as pale as his son had been when their talk began and, for a reason he could not understand, he could feel tears rising in his breast, for that is how they seemed to come; from his whole body. But Mr Beluncle easily mastered his emotion; and, just as his son's voice had become cold and hard, so his own became hard too.
“Pardon me,” said Mr Beluncle coldly. “Pardon me. I think there has been a misunderstanding. It was my impression that you invited yourself into the firm and not that the firm invited you. You don't imagine that we wanted you there: I know many that would go down on their bended knees to work with me. Mr Chilly cried. He cried in my office.”
“Oh, I'm not the only one,” Henry laughed wryly.
“I do not mean,” said Mr Beluncle, “when I say he cried, that he actually cried. A considerable sum was involved. That's the point. And remember this: we don't want you, the business doesn't want you. You are not so important that it can't go on without you. Conceit is your trouble, but beware. God doesn't want us, we want Him. Go, go—and don't mind me. But I can't imagine what Mrs Truslove will say. It is hardly polite to her.”
Ethel Beluncle's voice was heard calling from the top of the stairs.
“Come on, you two,” she said, in an artificial and playful voice. “What are you talking about?”
Mr Beluncle stopped. He was glad to escape from his son. He wished to be in the room alone with him no longer. He saw to his astonishment that the boy had grown up; the love affair was nothing, but this new claim to go away, to be different, to have some entirely different interest in life, was serious. Mr Beluncle for the first time saw in his son a will. He gaped with total incomprehension at the frail, tired-eyed, pasty and pretty-lipped boy who rejected him and who —for it amounted to that—told him that his life work had no interest for him whatever.
XL
Mrs Beluncle was standing on the landing waiting for them, with her shoes off and her skirt undone and her hair down. She gave her son a sharp but airy look as he came up and coldly kissed her.
“Whatever is the matter with you?” she said ironically.
“Nothing,95 he said, and went to his room.
In his own room, Mr Beluncle stood in his shirt sleeves while his wife undressed. She stepped out of her clothes and left them in circles all oyer the floor. She enjoyed, he suspected, making his room untidy and she liked to sit naked and pleased with her smallness in it, in order to annoy him. This bedroom of his own, like his office, was a way of getting away from her. He stood defeated in his shirt sleeves.
“I thought,” he said, “—it was a dream—my son would be glad to work with me. Proud even. But no!”
And raising his chin to the mirror, he took a brush and angrily brushed his wounded head. And then he put on various lotions with which he treated his thick hair, for undressing was as long a process with Mr Beluncle as dressing was, a careful criticism of the clothes he had favoured on that day. A button, a collar, a sock, might have been unworthy.
“Why did you go on at him the way you did about that girl?” said Mrs Beluncle. “You were young once. You were always after girls, that girl in the cash at Beedles now… ”
“I wasn't,” said Mr Beluncle truthfully. “I had other things to think of.”
“You were unnatural,” said Mrs Beluncle. For it had been her despair in her young days with him she had had no one to be jealous of except his mother, and jealousy was everything to her. “It would have been better if you had. Why didn't you let him alone? What did you want to talk to him like that for?”
“But,” said Mr Beluncle, with surprise, “it was you who told me to, this evening. You said, 'He's still seeing that girl, you ought to speak to him.' …;”
“A woman,” said Mrs Beluncle, with spirit, “doesn't like to see a girl after her son.”
“I wish you wouldn't drop hairpins all over the carpet, old girl,” said Mr Bel
uncle. “They might get into my feet. And do put a little something on,” he said. “It's not nice, you'll catch cold… ”
“You are a hard man, you were brought up unnaturally— look at the way you've treated Mrs Truslove,” she said, for seeing her husband defeated she could not resist taking the side of the conqueror.
“But you said” protested Mr Beluncle, who was baffled by the changes in his wife's mind, “you said …;”
“Oh, I say,” said Mrs Beluncle. “And I think too. But I don't go about breaking people's hearts.”
She began crawling on her bare knees picking up the hairpins.
“You only go for him because you've got something on your conscience,” she said. “The way you accuse others, it's as plain as a pikestaff what you've been up to.”
But as she said this Mrs Beluncle narrowed her eyes and fiercely resolved to speak severely to her son for attacking &nd upsetting his father as he had done. His father was not like other men (she was going to tell Henry) and that was just as well. He thought he was God; look at the men who don't think they are God, what a lot they are—who would touch them? They are nothing. They have got only themselves.
XLI
Henry lay awake most of the night. Anger and grief came down upon him out of the darkness of the room as, a hundred times, he went over the scene with his father. He seemed to have been brought to a precipice in the night; in the morning he would be over the edge of it. For he could see Mary no more. He loathed his own cowardice, his failure to speak, the betrayal of his nature and his will. And yet as the impossibility of seeing Mary any more became clearer, so there grew a determination to see her, to descend into deeper places of secrecy. He yielded, yet he would never really yield. He lay in the first destroying rage of his life. The next day, pale, unspeaking, sick, burned up and ill, he went giddily to his father's factory. His head throbbed, the muscles of his face were stiff with hatred of the world, which seemed to go on around him, distantly and mechanically, as if he were deaf and a wall of glass stood between him and every other person. The traffic in the street, the machines in the factory, seemed soundless. As for his father and himself— they passed each other without speaking much. He read scorn in Mr Beluncle's insulting expression. But that common look of Mr Beluncle covered the intensity of his concern for the miracle and a sternly hushed determination not to mention it. After a couple of hours at his factory Mr Beluncle went down to Hetley to see Mrs Truslove again.
Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 28