XLII
“You must be quiet,” Mrs Truslove said to her sister. “You must rest.”
“I have been resting all my life,” said Miss Dykes. “I must walk. I must go out. Soon I shall run. That is what I'm longing to do. I want to open the door and run all the way to the grocer's. People will see me running. Are you afraid of people seeing me? I believe you are. You wish I was still a cripple.”
“No,” said Mrs Truslove. “I don't. Don't be childish. How could I wish that?”
“It is you who are ill. You ought to rest,” said Miss Dykes, with a counter-attack of new authority.
When Mr Beluncle came she said to him harshly:
“I shall dance. I shall dance with you.”
Mr Beluncle shuddered. Miss Dykes shuddered too.
Lady Roads came and tenderly sat with her arm on Miss Dykes's shoulder.
“When can I testify?” Miss Dykes said. “When can I go to church and give thanks? My heart is longing to pour out the gratitude I feel. When can I go? This week?”
“I should wait,” said Lady Roads.
“I'm impatient,” said Miss Dykes. “I know I am.”
“We will let you go soon,” said Lady Roads.
She looked sadly at Miss Dykes. They were all, in their hearts, afraid of her.
She will turn on me, Lady Roads was thinking. It was always happening: the people she helped always turned on her and denounced her. The more the goodness of God was manifest the greater evil seemed to grow. Lady Roads sighed: the miracle would be one more trial of her faith.
“It is fatal,” a voice inside her said, “to succeed.” And again:
“I have given birth to a monster. I have done evil.”
Lady Roads had never doubted her religion, but now, half the day, she found herself denying it.
“I have cast out the devil from this woman and it has entered into my soul.” This was one feeling and she clung to it; for there was another far more horrifying:
“I have put a devil, the devil of life, into this woman.”
She had not “played straight” about the miracle; for having begged everyone to keep silence about it as much as possible, in Miss Dyke's interest, Lady Roads had gone off and talked about it herself recklessly. Now, she reflected, she was punished: though words of love eloquently came out of her, instinctively she felt a physical disgust before the woman. It was a disgust that had come to life in the early days of her marriage, a horror that the flesh—the flesh of all things— should be made whole.
XLIII
Miss Dykes could stand and she could walk a little way slowly with help from her sister's or Mrs Johnson's arm. Her thin back was curved and her head leaned forward and her eyes peered at a place two yards ahead of her, as she stepped. She made a continuous small progress. The act of walking made her tremble and she exhausted herself by talking about it all the time; as she heard very poorly in one ear and did not catch quickly what people said, her walks seemed to others like a precarious stepping over words. The archness of Miss Dykes's voice had given place to hoarseness and stridency; her mouth seemed to have lengthened or she drew back her lips with more strain than she used to show when she was ill. Absorbed in her chrysalis change like some ingenious moth, she had forgotten her interest in her clothes and she had been obliged to put aside her elegant shoes for a pair of boots that would hold her weak ankles.
In her crippled state Miss Dykes had had the firm and settled look of the invalid, had sat in her chair as if it were a little throne or a small royal carriage, boldly announcing that the misfortune did not affect her, impatient of sympathy, sensitive to those who were repelled. She had always been able to detect these people and would get Mrs Johnson to wheel her to them at once. Then, her conversation had been aggressive and she had used her war language. She had felt herself to be at an advantage and had prided herself on observing people more closely than they observed her. In general, she had had respect and, among young people, sympathy and fear. A girl like Mary Phibbs loved her. Miss Dykes's strongest feelings were for women.
Towards men Miss Dykes had been false and hostile. Her eyes mocked, her voice hardened; she sought the male vanity, to injure it. She tried to punish them for being unable to see in her a sexual object. She had been quick to notice the attraction of men to other women.
But, above all, in her chair, Miss Dykes had been secure. Now her security had gone and some of its health too. Her yellowish skin had reddened at the cheekbones and brought out a number of small feverish marks or irregularities in the skin. She now looked ill; or, at any rate, thinner and haunted, consumed by the spiritual power which had visited her. She seemed to be inhabited.
At last, Lady Roads gave in. She told Miss Dykes she could go to church.
“You are to take a taxi,” she said to Miss Dykes. “It will be tomorrow.”
When the day came Miss Dykes was breathless with her arrangements. She was going to sit at the back of the hall with Lady Roads, who would not be reading the lesson on that evening, and on the other side of her were to be her sister and Mrs Johnson.
Mrs Truslove listened many times to this arrangement. Two hours before the meeting, Mrs Truslove said:
“Judy, you are not to mind, but I do not think I shall come.”
“Oh, Linda, please,” begged the cripple.
“It is against my conscience,” said Mrs Truslove.
A sharp quarrel broke out between the sisters. Miss Dykes pleaded, but Mrs Truslove did not change her mind.
“You are hard,” said Miss Dykes.
“I have always respected your beliefs,” said Mrs Truslove. “You must respect mine.”
“But it is the Truth,” said Miss Dykes.
“There is no answer to that, is there?” said Mrs Truslove. “I am being kind really. It would spoil it for you if I were there. You can spqak more freely. I'm going out with Mr Cummings and his wife tonight. I did not arrange it, but it's just happened.”
“Oh,” said Miss Dykes quickly, with her old malice. “It was Mr and Mrs Beluncle, now it is Mr and Mrs Cummings.”
“Yes,” said Mrs Truslove. “But I am older. I am worth a great deal more than I used to be. You are going to be well and I shall really be free!”
“You are going to leave me,” said Miss Dykes.
“You,” smiled Mrs Truslove, “are going to be leaving me. Isn't that it?”
XLIV
Miss Dykes spoke at the meeting of the Boystone Branch of Mrs Parkinson's Group. It was a long time before she could get away from the people who gathered round her afterwards. Many kissed her when she left. Only Miss Wix and Mr Phibbs remained out of the crowd after they had spoken to her. The humble Miss More had not been able to shake her hand. It was she who went outside to stand by the taxi to open the door for her. The last cinema queue was moving into the Royal when at last Miss Dykes came out slowly, shining with her happiness, on Mrs Johnson's arm.
“Oh,” cried Miss Dykes, at the sight of the crowd oozing into the Royal. “If I could take them in my arms!” Gazing at the crowd she did not notice Miss More in the darkness. Miss More had opened the door, but in her obscurity was too slow to close it when Miss Dykes got into the taxi; the driver pushed her away and closed the door himself.
The taxi drove through the avenues of Boystone and Miss Dykes sat forward on the seat smiling at the dark empty streets.
“The silence!” she said. “The beautiful darkness. I shall wander about all night. I never thought of the nights before.”
Mrs Johnson did not answer.
“When I go courting,” said Miss Dykes, teasing Mrs Johnson.
“Oh yes, I'm going courting. Don't think I'm not.”
Mrs Johnson dabbed her eyes with the back of her hand and then tapped on the window of the cab.
“Opposite the pillar-box,” she said to the driver.
The taxi stopped outside their house and Mrs Johnson leaned forward, putting her arm across Miss Dykes to open the door. As she did th
is, she suddenly put her hand to her neck and gave a cry. There was a rushing sound like hail falling as a shower of small gravel fell on the windscreen and bonnet of the cab.
“It hit me. A stone,” said Mrs Johnson.
They got out of the cab and the driver got down too. He looked at the cab and then went a few yards down the road into the dark.
“That wasn't boys,” he said. “It came from the corner.”
“Get into the house,” said Mrs Johnson, and she forgot to watch Miss Dykes go painfully in. Mrs Johnson stood with the taxi driver. She was holding her neck and trying to pay him at the same time. She was trembling.
“Quick,” she said.
She was glad to see a spear of light from the open door marking the path down to the gate and she hurried towards the house. At the first step her foot touched something soft and earthy on the path: it was an uprooted plant. She looked beyond it. There was another and another. All the plants in the small garden had been torn up. They were thrown on the path.
Anger came into Mrs Johnson's heart. She walked all over the small lawn to see what else had been done to the little garden she loved. “Oh, another! Another! Oh, they've been into the garden. Oh, my poor garden,” she cried. She was in tears. She got to the thick hedge separating the garden from the house next door. Suddenly she stepped back. She gave a cry and could not move. The body of a man could be seen in the fan of light cast by the door, lying face downwards, close under the hedge. In the light he looked like a soft length of old sacking. She had nearly trodden on him.
“Here,” she called out, not knowing whether to make her voice soft or loud.
With a scramble and a thump, the man got heavily to his feet and faced Mrs Johnson. His teeth were showing like a rabbit's in fright and he had one arm raised; his eyes seemed to dig into her face like a pair of light chisels. He was panting and Mrs Johnson felt his breath. Down came the arm clumsily, a clod of earth flew out of it. There was the sound of glass breaking as the clod went into Mrs Truslove's front window, and the man muddled through a gap into the next garden gasping as he went, before Mrs Johnson moved.
“A man! Help!” Mrs Johnson choked.
The sound of his breath, grunting, like some animal's, made her sick.
There were lights in many of the houses of the street, but no window or door opened. There was no sound from the house next door.
“Help!” shouted Mrs Johnson. She saw the stumbling blur of the man go through two gardens and into the street until he was lost.
There was no sound even from her own house.
Four minutes went by before an upper window was opened in a house many doors down the street and a lazy voice called out:
“What is it?”
Then other doors and windows opened.
Slowly a group of neighbours got together and some took advantage of the opportunity of seeing into Mrs Truslove's house. They came foolishly to consider the broken window. Miss Dykes had been upstairs at the back and heard nothing. Mrs Johnson was a quiet, simple woman, but now she was talking violently. It was a long time before she calmed down. Miss Dykes, exhausted by her evening, was nevertheless hard and collected. She was not disturbed. She sternly treated this as an occasion to show herself to the astonished neighbours.
Mrs Johnson swept up the glass and got Miss Dykes to go to bed. Then Mrs Johnson moved out of the kitchen and sat in the sitting-room, guarding the hole in the window and waiting for Mrs Truslove to come home.
Mrs Johnson was too upset to read, to sew or to do anything. She sat listening to every sound, feeling the insinuating cold air from the broken window on her shoulder. She had seen the man's face and his grey hair. He was old, stupid and frightened. It recalled to her the face of Granger, Vogg's old man.
It was Vogg's old man. He got into the mews and waddled through the next street.
“I done it. I bore the Witness,” he was breathing the words out hard, like steam. He was quietly screaming it to a ship at Southampton where Vogg was.
Mrs Johnson, with her brown dress, her earthy skin, her round brown eyes, and still short of breath, sat sizzling without thought a teapot on the hob. She knew what had happened; knew it obscurely in a way impossible for her to express.
The attack had begun. You couldn't do what you liked (Mrs Johnson knew), in Hetley. And Hetley was not this new suburban place, barely forty years old; Hetley was the old Hetley, the conquered region of small urban cottages, old shops, like Vogg's, pubs buried down side streets. It was Last's the greengrocer's, where the dwarf worked, it was Vogg's Gospel Hall in Princes Road, the back-gardens filled with colonies of sheds and, in themselves, like small villages behind the houses. The old Hetley was conquered, built over, grubbed up by the new commercial life, but like inextinguishable weed it still came through.
Mrs Johnson herself was old Hetley: she knew without having to articulate the matter to herself, what old Hetley thought. There was no private life among the inhabitants; there were no secrets among them. Everything Was known, everything was said aloud with a slow dispassionate rancour. The thieving families were known, the immoral families, the fighters, the drunks, the hypocrites, the heroes. A woman could kill a newborn child, a man could beat his wife twice a week, there could be adultery, fornication; all these things were known. And knowing them. Hetley was satisfied and wished to do nothing more about it. On Saturdays and Sundays, this old population put on its carefully kept and stiffish clothes as villagers do, and sat in the public-houses or the gospel halls in their groups, no one alone. They sat in the twos and threes in which they lived, as if they were groups of human beings cut inseparably from the same piece of wood or riveted together, publicly, fondly exposing the frailties, the fantasies, the wounds of their families.
The old Hetley (Mrs Johnson knew) plundered the new Hetley. What the old Hetley hated in the new Hetley was its suburban attempt at perfection and privacy. People who went in for privacy were trying to rise in the world, to cut themselves off. The Dykeses were an example of this. Postman's daughters and already, shutting themselves off, seeking other society, taking up with a new religion from London, the Dykeses had broken their ties and were claiming to be better than their neighbours. This had been the cause of Vogg's envious dislike of them. His religion, growing fast in the old Hetley, drew upon this population, fed upon its belief—when it saw the new life growing around it—in calamity impending for all except themselves.
Mrs Johnson had seen the old man's face. She had seen the stones fly, she had seen the plants pulled up and she knew these were the classical moves of aggression in old Hetley. The war had started. Ruled though she was by her love of the Dykeses, she could not conceal from herself her share in the commori mind of her people, Old Hetley had always hated the sick to get better. They came back in dribs and drabs from Boystone hospital on visiting days, loudly stopping in the streets to announce the outrages they had heard of there. The dead left all night in the wards, the wrong girl operated on and dying of it, the nurses who mixed the prescriptions, the operations in public view without anaesthetics: old Hetley spread the muttered slander of its folklore in the corners of pubs, in the buses and the trams.
The old Hetley that would not stand for doctors would, Mrs Johnson knew, never stand for miracles. It would fight, in the end, by its own peculiar methods, for its cardinal belief in calamity.
Mrs Johnson had been at the doctor's. She had been telling him for the twentieth time of the wickedness of Vogg.
“But,” said the doctor, vainly trying to find out exactly what had happened when she had found Vogg and Miss Dykes together: he had been told, though at different times, of robbery, attack, even—well, not quite rape, but something called “insulting her”, which he took to be sexual exposure.
“But,” said the doctor, “you must be glad Miss Dykes can walk.”
Mrs Johnson pulled her bag on to her lap and her soft simple face hardened and became an unpleasant liver-like colour.
“Well, no, to be
fair and square, doctor, no, I am not. That's the truth. It's no good telling you a lie. I'd sooner her crippled for life than that wickedness, it's upset me.”
“But it may have been the work of prayer and God,” said the doctor gently. “You ought to be glad whatever the reason. I've seen four or five cases in my life and I'm always glad.”
Mrs Johnson looked suspiciously at him.
“No,” she said, with the hardness of a sentimental heart. “I shan't ever be that. She was contented as she was, as happy as a child; if she had something to complain of, I can understand it, but no, she never said. Waited on hand and foot. I did my best. It was always Mrs Johnson this and Mrs Johnson that. I don't want thanks for what I did, I did it willingly, I was a mother to her, the poor thing,” Mrs Johnson cried. “I pushed her about like a baby.” And Mrs Johnson showed him her two large, now unused, hands helplessly. “I hardly know how to walk without that chair. And now to be turned on. It's 'I'm all right now, Mrs Johnson, I can manage myself. I'm not a cripple.' Doctor, it hurts, it cuts me to the heart.”
It was the chair Mrs Johnson loved. To see it empty, emptied her body.
“If I'd known when I pushed her to that church twice a week and sat there with her, that this is what would happen, I'd never have gone/5 she said. “After all I did for them.”
Mrs Johnson saw years of work wasted. She had loved sitting in the meeting-hall of the Purification. She had loved listening to the accounts of illness at their mid-week meeting. She had enjoyed above all these the peace of a “good sit down”, resting her big working legs and her heavy arms. There, during the reading of the lesson, she had daydreamed of the things she liked most to dream about: polishing the floor of the hall, for example, dusting the chairs, giving it all a “good old spring clean”. Not cramped any more by a small place, she would let herself go there on a large scale, and by the end of the service she would feel the exhilaration of one who has done a notable piece of work. There had grown in her mind the pleasurable feeling that Mrs Parkinson's Group owed her an ever-growing debt of gratitude. Now she would be required no longer.
Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Page 29
