Dance of the Years

by Margery Allingham

  The new world, whose birth pangs old Galantry had so recklessly assumed to be death convulsions, was growing into a mighty youth.

  The Industrial Revolution had so far produced wealth for many who had not had it before, and slavery for a great many more who had not had that either, and a bitter skin game was fast getting under way. At the same time, the Reform Bill had been passed, laying a corner-stone of the new democracy without the majority of folk realizing that once and for all the power of government had been wrested from the aristocracy, and that for the first time there was now no longer any real need to breed, or buy and fake one’s way to power.

  The French Wars were won, but not forgotten, and the loss of one great colony and the threatened loss of another had not passed unnoticed. The nation had had a great fright, and, much of the dead wood, both in ideas and personalities, had been swept away at least for the time being. The new nineteenth century son of the old rake of the eighteenth had buried his father and had set about keeping alive, and growing very strong, in every way possible.

  The national mind plumping for safety and growth appears to have aimed with simple commonsense for wealth and progeny, relying on each to protect the other. The day of the damping-down and banking-up was at hand, and suppression, or rather, compression, with a view to making force was the order of the day.

  Morals had tightened up in a way which would have startled old Galantry, and, because there was a purpose in this urge behind the change, public opinion kept them tight.

  Women’s clothes expressed the subtlety of this change perhaps more clearly than anything else. The natural mode, loose flowing and free, which made no pretences and few mysteries, had suddenly vanished, and in its place had come perhaps the most monstrously inviting and provoking costume of all time. Shoulders and bust appeared almost naked, and were allied to the drawn-in and helpless waist, and the peeping pantalette all promise and prudery; while, most important of all, the full skirt of maternity had returned. Marriage, the ideal state for child-rearing, became a vital institution again. Illegal alliances were abhorred as anti-social, and the virtues were extolled and made important.

  It was a grim, forthright, reviving time, and since human nature does not necessarily keep up with the fashion, there was so much individual cheating that it became a commonplace, and most men were expected to have a few secrets and usually built up a little façade for themselves to hide behind.

  As he sat there opposite Dorothy, his glass in his hand, and a soft, vulnerable expression in his round, dark eyes, the façade James had made for himself became very apparent. The old woman glanced across at him.

  “How is she?” she enquired.

  “Wonderfully well,” he said briefly, and there was a long silence between them while Dorothy shaped her mouth to make words of which she always thought better just in time. Finally she came out with it.

  “I don’t like you mixed up with the wicked,” she said. “Time was when I didn’t believe in hell, but I do now! You’ll be damned, my little old boy, the way you’re going on!”

  James smiled at her awkwardly. He was not surprised, for it was some years now since Dorothy had been “catched,” as she said, by the Dissenters, and he was always having to lead the conversation away from the conversion she had in mind for him.

  “You still go to them places of destruction?” she enquired.

  “I still go to the theatre sometimes.”

  “That poisons your mind, you know.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She closed her eyes, and he suspected she was putting up a prayer for him. Presently she smiled.

  “I’m only a very silly, ignorant old woman,” she said, and seemed to take comfort from the fact, as if there might be a loophole in her entire faith, and James be all right and not doomed to eternal burning after all.

  He grinned at her. She smiled back, and for a moment they were outside the great, grinding social machine and safe together in an inside, eternal world. They talked again about ordinary things, and James watched the sun on the bricks outside the window, and admired the stonecrop sidling its way among them. It was a dear, happy little corner, very warming to the heart.

  After a while Dorothy began again on difficult matters.

  “I’d like to see you with a real lady-wife, and a son or two,” she said, adding with the cruelty of her East Coast blood, “You don’t want to leave that too late, you know. You ain’t too young. Takes strength to get a child.”

  James said nothing, but he frowned as he looked out of the window, and she did not dare to press him further. Instead, she told him that Young Will was a grandfather three times over, that Lucius’s second son was lately married, and that she had had word Jason’s youngest had gone to America.

  James was not interested, or he affected not to be, in the fortunes of his father’s first family. Never since the night on which he left Groats had he had any communication with any one of them, but the gossip led him on to enquire of other matters.

  “All well down the road?” he asked.

  “So I hear. The gentleman lives very much to himself, the boy’s still with him. He do look like his father as he rides by. He don’t know me, of course.”

  They were talking of Edwin Castor, lately a Judge, and a man of considerable position and importance. For many years he had been living at Quinney’s, the estate which dominated Sedgewick. Mrs. Castor had died in childbirth, and ever since then her husband had devoted himself to his son and his work. James had never met him since that one tremendous occasion at Groats, and, indeed, had been most careful not to do so. But in the curious way that a simple nature will fasten on to a hero, he had never lost sight of him. As far as James was concerned, Castor remained an ideal; a symbol of earthly perfection, a sort of ‘king human,’ to be admired and emulated at a distance.

  Had James not led such a strangely lonely inner life, such a childish proceeding would not have been possible, but he was a man with necessarily few intimates. The middle class society whose doors were open to him did not satisfy him, and the upper classes who demanded, if not birth, at least some remarkable social accomplishment, remained out of his reach. He did not admit, of course, that this was why he remained so interested in Castor; emotionally he had become less honest as he grew older, as do most people, and he put it down to chance that he should have found a cottage for Dorothy so near the estate of a man who had influenced him so much. This was arrant nonsense, of course. Not long after he had come to London, when Phœbe got her first chance to act there, he had ridden out to look at the country round about, and not entirely by accident had investigated Sedgeford and observed the Castor estate from a discreet distance.

  The empty cottage nearby had attracted him, and he had bought it. Then, not wishing to live in it himself, he could not yet resist having some part of himself there, and so Dorothy had been uprooted from the East Country. Thus James kept an eye on Castor, but never met him, and as he grew older and more sophisticated he became less and less inclined to do so lest he should be disappointed. It was an odd, human little story, only possible in a world in which the social compartments were very nearly watertight.

  Dorothy went rambling on about young Castor. She said he was “wonderfully nice to look at and clever and sort of holy-looking.” James let her chatter and remembered the two parents as he had seen them. They had been a glorious couple, he thought, a pair of Bloods, if ever there was one.

  “She went,” said Dorothy suddenly. “We never see her no more.”

  “Who?” said James.

  “Your Ma,” said Dorothy.

  James blushed. It was a depressing fact that with the years Shulie had become more rather than less of a sore point with him, and on several occasions various young ladies, intending to be complimentary, had mortally offended him with an “Oh! Mr. Galantry. You look quite a gypsy, I declare!” or some equally innocent but unfortunate reference to his dark skin.

  To modern ears this attitude of Jame
s’s may easily sound insane, but in actual fact she had done him great injury. He was a good-looking dog without a collar, and there were moments in nearly every day when some little circumstance arose to remind him of the fact in this new, tight-laced world. Even with Dorothy it was not a subject he cared to discuss, and he changed the conversation immediately and enquired about the Timsons.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Dorothy found little difference between gossip in Essex and gossip in Middlesex. In either county she could hold her own with anybody alive, and she had a great deal to say about the Timsons, who, as wealthy newcomers, were naturally the talk of the place.

  James was interested because he had reason to be. He had met Alfred Timson in London at a gathering of The Oratorical Friends which was one of the semi-jocular, but jealously select debating clubs then so popular.

  James was chairman of this particular group of convivial talkers, and had condescended to notice and befriend the gentle little new boy, Timson, who was so shy and so apologetic about having made a fortune out of the paint factory he owned.

  One evening after listening to a flowery, if rather pointless argument on the motion “Social Questions are more Important than Political” during which James had distinguished himself by quoting the recent trial of the Glasgow cotton-spinners with great effect, Mr. Timson had been carried away entirely. After congratulating James warmly, he confessed to a little country place in Sedgewick and begged him to do him the honour of visiting him there.

  James was attracted by the familiar place name, and said he would go, but he was sufficiently a man of his time to decide upon making a call first. At that time in his life he never took social chances. All through the period in which he lived, there sounded the savage note of class war. It was not the lazy murmur of other days, but the vigorous spiteful crack of the efforts of a great middle-class forcing itself on and up into supremacy with the busy ruthlessness of a forest fire.

  Dorothy went on talking about the Timsons, and her view of them was the view of the countryside, trained in observations, and gifted with the often brutal clear-sightedness of people who go by the senses, by the heart rather than the head.

  Dorothy said that Mr. Timson was thought to be a good, kind-hearted, not-much-strength-to-him sort of a man, but that she was quite a “different bag of meal.” According to Dorothy, she came of better family than her husband and was “remarkable sour,” because she could not bring him and the children into “her yard” instead of “her staying in his as God intended.”

  She also reported that they had not been called upon by the Castors and that in her opinion this had been a “wonderful blow to the lady.” She finished by saying that there was money there, and a great pew full of children on a Sunday, but that that was not of much account in these days, was it?

  James allowed it to flicker through his mind that it really was astounding that he and Dorothy, who had lived together in such a simple world long ago, should now be talking of such complicated social distinctions with so much practice and interest, but the thought did not stay and he slipped back into the new world once again and took her remarks as seriously as the fashion demanded.

  Dorothy continued to talk of Mrs. Timson.

  “She’s a he-she,” she said, using the old local word. “Wonderful strong-minded. She’ll have her way if she gets more help from Satan than the Lord. I ’ouldn’t cross her, I ’ouldn’t!”

  James kept this information in his mind, when about three in the afternoon he rode sedately down the road to pay his respects to Mr. Alfred Timson. He found a new, white brick house built with the fashionable semi-basement, although there was land and to spare, standing in a very decent little park newly planted with oak and beech.

  A manservant conducted him into a hall whose chequered marble floor faded into the distance, and from which a staircase which had not quite the elegance of the great days which had inspired it rose up into mystery far above him. It was very elegant, and in spite of its size, slightly stuffy. An incredible number of pictures and mounted heads lined the walls, and the brilliant Turkey rug was quite three inches thick.

  James thought it very charming and in most restrained taste. He also admired the drawing-room with the green silk damask curtains, which were stiff enough to stand alone; the ormulu; the clocks with the garden faces; the cast iron; the concert grand; the harp; the embroidery frames; the great baskets of flowers; the carpet with the multi-coloured pomegranates on it; the vast pictures and the tiny pictures; the marble and the gold. It all looked pretty good to James. He put it down as comfortable, wealthy, quiet, and oddly enough in one brought up at Groats, not at all overdone.

  It transpired that his friend was out but that Ma’am was in, and would be graciously pleased to receive him. She kept him waiting only a little time and made her entrance through a little door at the far end of the room, pausing for an instant on the threshold in a way which told him she had either seen, or heard, a very detailed account of Miss O’Neill in comedy. She was not at all what he had expected, having prepared himself for one of the battleship matrons of the period. Instead he found an unusual-looking woman in the late thirties, very tall and thin, with a straight back and a square, wide face like a cat. She had wide mouth, too, and widely set cold, moonlight eyes edged with startlingly thick dark, black lashes, not very long.

  She received him with quiet ease and revealed a much deeper voice than he had heard in a woman. James had charm for the opposite sex, and therefore knew a great deal about it. Mrs. Timson interested him enormously, but he did not like her; there was something reckless about her which made him uneasy at first.

  At that time the rules for conversation at a first, formal call were laid down almost to the letter, so that the business of getting acquainted was made as simple as possible. James answered discreet enquiries, and put others. The whole point of the proceeding, which was intensely practical, as were all the social antics of the time, was for each party to find out without giving offence to the other, if there was any real reason why they should not associate. At the time it was an important matter, for admission to some houses could easily deny access to others. The little conference was quite as gruelling as any modern commercial encounter, and it went well enough. The wary phase passed, and Mrs. Timson relaxed a little.

  She was evidently very disappointed that he did not live in the district, and was sufficiently unguarded to admit that they were newcomers and knew very few people round about as yet. Then, since James was sitting in front of her, very handsome and solid looking, with his round black eyes twinkling gallantly, she smoothed down the folds of her green silk dress and said: “Of course; that will come.”

  It was the queer way she said it that startled him, and he remembered what Dorothy had said about her being a “he-she.” There was tremendous strength of purpose there.

  “Of course,” he said smoothly, and asked her if she found the country dull. She glanced round the crowded room, so elegant and so unworn.

  “Sometimes a little,” she said very cautiously. “Of course, I have my children.”

  James gathered that there were five of them. Willie, the eldest, was already in London with his dear Papa; Elizabeth, the next, was just back from a finishing school; she was a dear child, but of course a great responsibility just now. A beautiful innocent child of sixteen was a responsibility, was she not?

  James thought she might be, but he also thought it a very odd thing to say to a stranger. He asked what Miss Elizabeth found to do with herself alone in the country. Mrs. Timson lifted her square, cat’s face to his and said that there was something so beautiful in the sweet purity of budding womanhood that one was sorely tempted to keep it unsullied as long as one possibly could. Soon dear Lizzie must have a ball, and come out, like other young ladies of her age. But just for a little while it was too tempting to keep her helping in the nursery with the younger children, practising her music and sewing with her beloved Mama.

  James had heard th
is sort of talk before. It was growing more and more fashionable. Ruskin was about nineteen at the time and the ideas which he was to crystallize a few years later had already many devotees. James did not altogether like it, he had very much the countryman’s view of life and the reproduction of it, and he did not believe in leaving the training of any young animal too late. Once or twice lately he had heard of young women, and boys too, brought up with such a rarefied outlook that some of the common animal functions were considered shocking by them. James, who had been brought up by Larch and Jason, regarded such a fashion with deep misgiving, although he could not deny that from his own purely masculine point of view there was something physically exciting in the idea of a virgin so virginal that even her mind was unopened.

  He was acute in this sort of matter though, and he saw the underlying motive of the mode, one he was sure which was never admitted or even guessed by the ladies who embraced it. It did not altogether shock him; like most people interested in the breeding of animals, he was inured to such shifts and had no belief in the polite fiction of the inexhaustible virility of any male, but he did not like it, hoped it was not necessary, and thought, too, that if the older ladies were not very careful there might easily be a lot of trouble arising out of it.

  He was human enough to want to see the young paragon, and he said so, half laughing, adding that he supposed such innocence was kept safely under lock and key.

  Mrs. Timson’s reply startled him. She professed herself horrified at this suggestion, which she affected to take literally, and assured him that she had such complete faith in the inviolable qualities of little Lizzie’s sweetness that she never imposed any of the foolish restraints upon her to which she saw other mothers subject their unfortunate offspring. In her opinion, she said, any such move might give the child ideas which could be almost indelicate.

  James listened to her and wondered why she was so vehement. He sincerely hoped she was lying. The topic was a trifle heavy for a first call and he steered the conversation into easier channels.