Dance of the Years

by Margery Allingham

  Shulie’s green and yellow lute-string was wringing from hem to thighs, and was torn and draggled. The string of frayed rag round her neck had slipped round her ear, and she exposed as much plump, brown bosom as would be decent at a ball, but nowhere else. There were twigs and dead leaves in her wind-matted hair, and her shoes still hung from her hand.

  They approached the house from the side, and came in noisily through the garden door into the central hall.

  Galantry was laughing and his haggard face was unusually flushed as his wife dragged him along. Shulie was in an impossible mood. She was screaming, wildly excited as usual by the comparatively rare freedom of the open air. Together they made one of those pictures which no painter has been able to romanticize. Jan van Steen might have done something kindly with it, and would no doubt have stuck his own great cheerful, beery face in some dark corner to make all friendly. But as it turned out on this occasion, it became a Hogarth, child truthful, and not very pleasant, for there were two more figures to go into it.

  As the pair reached the hall, Richard was just admitting Sir Lionel Bretton of Mundham and his mother; two visitors, come on a formal morning call.

  The Brettons were from the other side of the river, and were old acquaintances of the Galantrys. The two families had been on chatting terms for a couple of generations at least, but had never had anything, save the district, in common; although before her marriage the now widowed Lady Bretton had numbered Galantry among her beaux. However, his had only been a half-hearted entry, and they had never been friends.

  Young Bretton Galantry always had disliked, because he reminded him vividly of his father. He had come over to Groats on some flimsy pretext once before since Galantry’s second marriage, and then, as now, his full-blooded face had glowed with the anxious curiosity of the under-entertained. On that occasion he had missed Shulie. But Galantry had guessed his inquisitive purpose, which after all did not take much detecting.

  The greetings were formal, and inclined to be constrained. Shulie alone was unprotected, and she became very quiet.

  Galantry had no idea that he was dishevelled, and he acquitted himself well until he rose from bowing over Jane Bretton’s hand to come face to face with himself in the hall mirror behind her. The apparition disconcerted him, as well it might, and he stiffened.

  Lady Bretton noticed it, and responded in her own way.

  It was five years since she had seen Galantry, and in that time her hair had greyed, and to her intense mortification one of her side-front teeth had fallen out. These things were uppermost in her mind, naturally, and when she missed the gallant response which she had hitherto always awakened in Galantry it hurt her considerably.

  She slid into her second rôle, as older women do, and became the sturdy matron of dignity and experience, and it was only then that she saw what a state he was in. After that, her eyes strayed curiously to Shulie.

  By this time the second Mrs. Galantry was something to look at. Her sullenness had chased all the charm out of her, and she remained unrelievedly dirty, ragged, wet, and of course, very pregnant. There were the marks of her bare feet on the flags behind her, and after a full moment of startled scrutiny (during which she took in some half dozen different facts, each of them well-nigh incredible), Lady Bretton changed her mood again.

  She blushed deeply, and turning to her son she commanded him briefly to go out to the horses. When he had gone, she strode to Shulie’s side and led her firmly on to the hearth-rug. Only then did she turn on Galantry.

  “How you dare,” she said. “You with eight children already. Good God, man, what are you thinking about? Do you want to lose them both? Where’s Dorothy Holding?”

  Before this great natural blast, away went all the frippery.

  Lady Bretton’s curiosity and neighbourly malice fled before the wind, and with it went Galantry’s resentment. He became terrified and inclined to dither, while she remained furious, slightly frightened, and determined to fuss.

  Shulie stood, as she always did when thoroughly alarmed, quite still, with utter stupidity in every line of her.

  Dorothy was sent for, and arrived very nearly as sullen as Shulie. Her contempt for Galantry for putting himself and the household in such a light before a neighbour was hidden, but it was very strong and it sat in her, making itself felt by sheer force of its personality. She, too, was frightened. Her knowledge of the things that could go wrong with the human body was enormous, and one look at Shulie convinced her that the girl was asking for an internal chill, fever, complications in her delivery, and therefore, at that day and location, pretty well certain death.

  All the same, she could have strangled Galantry, for the bed chamber had not been inspected by her for some days, and heaven alone knew into what condition Betty, Sarah’s stupid successor, had let it degenerate.

  Lady Bretton might be a woman of title, but in Dorothy’s opinion she was unlikely to be above domestic gossip, and it would be a fine thing if the whole county heard a description of ragged bed curtains, soiled valances, and unpolished floors. She did her best in a wooden, obstinate way, to prevent the visitor mounting the stairs, but she might as well have attempted to control the spirit of righteous indignation itself.

  Shulie was got to bed by Lady Bretton in person, and the bedroom justified Dorothy’s worst misgivings. Not only was Shulie about as tidy as a bear, but she had no sense at all of the fitness of things. If she was cold, she covered herself with the nearest thing, blanket, hearth-rug or towel, but she was also full of little ingenuities. If she needed more light, it would probably not occur to her to draw the window curtains. The chances were she would twist a corner into a string, and loop the whole drapery to a nail in a beam. Moreover, if she did not like a thing, she would push it away from her, if possible out of sight.

  There was a small portrait of Galantry’s mother, which she particularly detested, and as Dorothy entered, the first thing she noticed across the general rag fair was the canvas hanging lop-sided, and face to the wall over the chimney.

  It was the bed which most startled Lady Bretton. This was a very ornate affair, brought over from France during the disturbances. It was gilt and baroque, and the crimson silk hangings were ancient and luxurious. Shulie liked red, but not curtains round her head, so she had bundled them all up on top, leaving the structure looking somehow like a tragedy queen who had screwed up her hair for the bath. The posts were not altogether naked, for the arms of the two gilt amoretti in the centre of the two at the foot had been utilized as hangers for a remarkable collection of garments of every period, Shulie having discovered the family old clothes chest.

  Still, there was more to do than gape. Dorothy stirred up the entire household. Amid a fine ringing of bells, stumblings, clatterings, splashings, whisperings, and the rattle of heels, Shulie was warmed before a blazing fire of green ash. She was plied with hot bags, given a mustard foot bath, and forced to drink a steaming posset, which tasted sharp and aromatic, and had twigs of rosemary floating in it. She was stripped, too, and stuffed into a clean flannel night-gown. It took some time to find this, and Jane Bretton’s sharp order for them to bring ‘the one she wore last night’ brought a flush to Dorothy’s cheeks, but not of course to Shulie’s.

  The cause of the commotion sat with her head bent, and only her shiny black eyes alive and anxious.

  Finding the second Mrs. Galantry was apparently unable to speak, save in monosyllables, Jane Bretton assumed, quite unjustifiably, that she was also unable to think, and promptly began to talk of her as though she was not there.

  She took Dorothy through the arrangements which had been made for the coming event, and made forthright, if well-meaning comment on the sullen recital. The more she heard, the more dissatisfied she was, and the more sensational loomed, in Dorothy’s accurate imagination, the story she must spread as soon as she got back to her own circle.

  As the interview proceeded, Jane Bretton grew less and less conscious of Shulie as a person. After th
e girl’s shaken head had convinced her that not even the approximate date when the birth might be expected had been worked out, or even considered, she came to the shocking conclusion that Galantry’s second wife really was a half-wit, and her sense of outrage grew. So also did her senses of charity and responsibility, and, unfortunately, drama.

  The village midwife came under her survey. Who was the woman? What was known of her? It was all very well Dorothy talking glibly, but was she known to be clean, capable, no drinker, not too old? Was she honest, healthy, experienced? What had Doctor Wild to say? Doctor Wild had not been consulted? Good heavens, what kind of a household was this? Were they all mad? Whatever the child might be destined to be, whatever they might think or feel, had they the right to indulge in downright neglect? Fortunately there was always God. It was a blessed miracle that she, Jane Bretton, had been directed, positively directed, to ride twenty miles through the mire of the spring in the very nick of time.

  Someone must ride down and bring up the midwife immediately, for in conscience she would not be able to leave the house herself until she was satisfied that the woman was at least more blessed with intelligence than the miserable wretches with which she so plainly saw Groats was entirely inhabited. She would call on the Doctor herself, as she rode home. And now, as to linen.…

  It would not be true to suggest that poor Jane Bretton did not enjoy much of her own performance, but she did not put it on entirely for self-entertainment. She was a nice woman, capable in her own limited way, and she herself had suffered a great deal in child-bed.

  Dorothy misjudged her utterly when she put down her behaviour solely to a desire to get even with Galantry for not renewing his suit of thirty-five years before.

  The person who suffered most was Galantry himself. Embarrassment, irritation, and above all, a fear of losing Shulie, which astonished him because it was so much more violent than anything of the sort he had felt in his youth, made a very old man of him. He dithered and trembled, talked rubbish to young Bretton, left the young man abruptly to stride halfway upstairs, changed his mind and came down to the hall, went up again, knocked, and was sent away; waited on the staircase, pulled himself together and went out hatless into the air; came back again, and snapped the stem of his wineglass as he raised it to his guest.

  The midwife was brought at last, and Jane Bretton interviewed her in front of Shulie. This was a thing which could never have happened had Shulie betrayed any intelligence. But she sat, looking worse than stupid, and they forgot her as anything but an object to be discussed.

  The midwife was a neat, sharp-faced woman, with a scrubbed skin and a bleached apron, and she was anxious to convince Her Ladyship that she knew her job. She was of the better sort, as the village put it, and she was anxious to convey that, too. Jane Bretton, on the other hand, was determined to keep her in her place, and the effect of the lack of response on the one hand, together with the effort on the other, resulted in the good lady producing a vivid account of all the more difficult cases in which she had been involved over a period of twenty years. Obstetrical surgery was in a monstrous infancy at that time, and when at last the recital ceased, and Shulie was bundled into the great bed, and the red curtains were pulled down with a shower of dust and were shrouded into a dark, crimson tent round her, she lay very still.

  She was unnaturally quiet all day, and even Dorothy felt a vague pity for her when she carried up her food. But there was too much to forgive altogether. Dorothy stayed long enough to take down the sheaves of petticoats which hung from the putti’s outstretched arms, and to thrust them into the press in the corner. But she did not speak. She knew the midwife would return at nightfall, and that the Doctor would ride over in the morning. These were the people whose job it was to look after the girl. Dorothy decided to leave it to them.

  Old Galantry, fresh from his harrowing morning with the visitors, came in and looked at his wife. He was exhausted. He had caught cold himself, and had been confronted flatly with one of the disadvantages of his marriage, which he had been ignoring with determined obstinacy for some time. Also, he was averse to suffering, even in his best moments. The pain of his love and need for Shulie had been brought home to him, and had affronted as well as hurt him. He did not like to see her lying so quiet, and in a condition which was, although properly enough, yet his fault. So he kissed her, rubbed her head with his hand, missed the wave of living energy from her, which appeared to have been switched off like a light, and went away again.

  Shulie waited until the sunset faded and the big, solid chunks of furniture misted in the far corners of the room. She had not taken in much of the horror of the midwife’s recital, but now she was uneasy; things were about to happen to her, and they were deep, important things, of which she knew far more than anyone dreamed. Her loneliness gave her great strength, and an enormous fund of courage and secret excitement. It also sharpened her wits, which were never dull.

  She hated the red curtains. They had hung round many scenes of illness in their time, and had never been washed for fear of disturbing the dye. They were hung out in the air once a year certainly, but not in the sun. The old Frenchman for whom they had been made had died of his sins amid them. Many children had been born within their comfortable, fuggy folds, and the first Mrs. Galantry had had her last fever under them.

  Shulie knew nothing of this, and would have thought little of it if she had. But she did not like the curtains. Had she analysed her mistrust, she would have said she thought they were unlucky.

  She had very keen hearing, and thought nothing of that either. Lying in the big room, up two flights of stairs, she yet knew quite well where everybody was in the house, because she could hear them quite distinctly. She heard Galantry kick the log on his study fire, and knew by the faintness of the sound that the door was shut. She heard Dorothy talking in the kitchen on the far side of the building. The voice came in at the window, so all the service doors were closed. There was nothing else to listen to, nothing but the clocks and the rustling of the fire.

  Shulie got out of bed and put a clean cotton gown over her nightdress, and a petticoat over that. There was another petticoat among the things which Dorothy had folded away; it was very old, partly quilted, and had been designed to be worn with a haunch hoop, so that it was very wide. Shulie had taken a great fancy to it. It was of pale green satin, washed nearly white, and was lined at the back with a coloured cotton stripe, not quite suitable, but well enough for underneath in seventeen-fifty, when it was new.

  Shulie found it. She made not even a superficial attempt to tidy after her, but stepped over the riot of garments with it over her arm and went out like a sigh through the house.

  She was in some uneasy pain now, and hurried.

  Nobody saw her go, and no one was very anxious to spread the news of her departure when at last it was noticed nearly an hour and a half later.

  Jane Bretton was safely back at Mundham by then, but the midwife proved nearly as much of a trial to Dorothy, who was still obsessed with the amour propre of the house.

  At Groats there was at first a moment of complete panic. Just for a little while, even the secret solaces had not yet popped up in country minds to lighten the blow. Just for a while, the awful natural delight in any diversion, however alarming, and the fleeting hope so wicked and so ashamed, that this source of disgrace might die and vanish for ever, had not crept into their thoughts. For a moment everybody paused blankly.

  Old Galantry surprised and comforted everybody by keeping his head, and in that he was alone. From somewhere he fished up a power of quiet leadership no one had ever suspected in him before, and he was remarkably composed and matter of fact. It was he who whipped them all into action, and they were not an easy team. Dorothy was mulish; the midwife alternately happily hysterical and ghoulishly prophetic; the other women, made self-important by the nature of the crisis, were knowing and smug; while of the two men servants, Richard was dour and liable to be almost openly angry, and Donald, a
simpler soul, was eager to get his dog, which was a wonderfully good pointer, into the chase, but was yet vaguely aware that somehow or other that would not do.

  It was a fine, cold night with a full moon rising, and after some three hours of the hunt, Richard came up to his master, who was standing on the lawn in his riding cloak.

  Old Galantry was looking much younger in the moonlight; he was very grave, and the light wind was ruffling his hair. Richard hesitated. At last he said very quietly:

  “She’ll be about. Must be. Hiding up somewhere.”

  Galantry turned his head. “Did you go to the Home Farm?”

  “Yes, sir. There’s not a building within three miles I haven’t looked into. She ain’t there. She’s about somewhere here. Won’t come out.”

  Galantry assented without speaking. There was a curious sympathy between them, not so much the bond between man and man as between expert and expert in the ways of the wild.

  All round them the garden was packed with small movements and Lilliputian sound as the gods must hear cities. The unclothed tree tops, curled into new symmetry by the springing buds, swayed against a clear lake of sky in which remote stars looked their distance. The black shrubs crouched and rustled, ferreting in the earth. It was a night of happenings, growings, urgency, fights for life.

  Under the ground the bulbs were forcing their way up against the matted turf. The grass smelled sharp and new, and everywhere there was irrepressible, unconquerable life, struggling and straining to be free. The earth was cold and wet and dangerous, but agonizingly lovely and tremendously at work.

  Behind the two men the house was alight with candles. Richard shifted uncomfortably.

  “If you was to talk to her, sir,” he began, “like enough she’d come out. I’ll take t’others into the house.”

  It was suggested with great natural delicacy, and when the doors were shut old Galantry walked up and down and round about the garden, talking and pleading with his wife, who was hidden somewhere in the dark. He scolded her, coaxed her, and even begged her, but there was no reply, no heavier movement, and after a long time he went into the library, stoked up the fire until it blazed, and sat in there with the curtains pulled back, the warm inviting glow shining out over the short grass.