Dance of the Years

by Margery Allingham

  This particular autumn was a time of high lights. Dombey & Son was coming out in parts; Tennyson was roaring his sonorous sweetness to enraptured thousands; and Jenny Lind was taking the Town.

  Meanwhile, on a solid base of common sense, social fancy work was raising a fussy and ridiculous head. The codes were growing tighter and less flexible, Paris had thought up the crinoline, and Victorian gothic was flourishing, not only in architecture, for manners, too, were fast acquiring the same rigid and meaningless curls and decorations.

  James was an inheritor, one of the stalwarts of the rank and file, and he walked down the neat road looking very tidy and in keeping. He wore a good, skirted black coat, sand-coloured trousers strapped under his boots, and a splendid waistcoat embroidered in carefully blended colours of sand, black and occasional touches of green. It was perhaps a little sporting for his middle years, but how pleasant. His hat was a glistening stove-pipe, and an atmosphere of comfort and respectability surrounded him like a nimbus.

  He walked quickly because he was curious, but he was resolutely determined not to be excited by the letter from the unknown solicitor which had reached him that morning. It had invited him to call on a matter which would be of benefit to him, but had said no more. No one could have received it quite unmoved, but James had remained obstinately placid lest he should be disappointed. To take his mind off the subject he was considering his present condition and the last few years of his life.

  Jinny, he still avoided the Lizzie, had proved unexpected. His recollections of the first few weeks of his marriage were coloured by the dogs which Whippy Fletcher had brought him as a wedding present. It had been typical of Whippy to pick on a couple of Newfoundlands who had been trained to rise up on their hind legs and remove the hat from off the head of any visitor who should be so ill-mannered as to enter the house without uncovering. They had appealed to James, as Whippy had known they would, but they were a tavern joke and had struck a wrong note from the outset, especially with some of Mrs. Timson’s relations. It had been very unfortunate, James thought.

  Scraps of the stuff of his period had stuck to James as he grew through it. By this time some of them were incorporated in him, and old Galantry’s sense of humour was sometimes in danger of being overlaid by the Victoriana.

  The discovery that in many ways Jinny was a silly little thing had been a great astonishment to James. The two women he had known best before his marriage were Dorothy and Phœbe, and both of these were capable and far more shrewd than he. Between them they had given him a slightly exalted view of the sex as a whole. Jinny was certainly not capable, nor was she shrewd, and there were times when her helplessness appalled him.

  On the first night of his marriage he had dispensed with servants in the house; it was a delicacy (in the present case, meaningless) which reached depths of indelicacy difficult to stomach by people of almost any other age. Certainly old Will Galantry would have raised his eyebrows at it, as would any twentieth century sophist. Anyway, James did it because Mrs. Timson told him to, and in the morning after a night of decorous slumber, he asked his wife to make him a cup of tea. To this day he remembered her despair, her fear. She could not. She went downstairs obediently, but remained in the cold kitchen shivering and in tears, and when at last he found her there she dared not tell him. It was a mountain out of the most trivial of molehills. She did not know how. James, who looked quite ridiculous in a flapping nightshirt and shawl, had taken the situation in hand, and had given her her first lesson. By the time he had finished with her she could make tea.

  From this unpropitious beginning he went on to find out that he had to teach her a number of things, and there were times when he thought Mrs. Timson had presented him with a practically unwritten book. Jinny was a child; she was most willing, most obedient, most long suffering. Her powers of endurance were so great that he never comprehended them. He assumed she did not feel as much as other people did. He assumed Frank went out of her mind like words from a wiped slate. He assumed she accepted the difference in her life as the birds accept the change in the weather. They sing less, perhaps, but appear just as happy.

  In those days he put her down as a little simple, perhaps not even quite normal, but certainly very sweet and docile. Some of her faults were curable, he found with relief.

  At Tarn’s, the good bonnet shop near the Elephant and Castle, for instance, she was apt at first to be quite insanely extravagant, and he had had to put his foot down. Yet she had not resented his interference at all, but had accepted the ruling, and now asked his permission before she made any purchase. But he never cured her of her friendliness, and in this he thought she was absurd. She was never familiar, never free, of course, but so friendly to absolutely anybody. The beggars of the district congregated round her like birds at a crumb table, while her servants looked after her as if she were their little sister. And that was a time when good servants did not behave like that.

  No one spoke ill of her, everybody loved her absentmindedly. James did himself when it came to that. But money meant nothing to her, nor could she be trusted to keep anything unless expressly told not to give it away. She loved clothes, and kept herself very neat and lovely, and yet did not live for them. Ugliness, dirt, evil, passed over her like filth over a glazed sink. She emerged from anything of the sort unsoiled. She was a fool, of course, but an odd sort of fool. There was strength in her somewhere.

  Her religion made James slightly nervous. As far as he could make out it was genuine, and he was glad of that, of course. All nice women and decent men were highly religious at that time of day, but Jinny took her religion with a difference. She was not churchy, but she often read her Bible in odd moments and apparently for fun. She took it with enjoyment and comprehension. James did not mind her enjoying it, he thought that very charming in her, but he was bothered if he approved of her understanding it for even the official interpreters appeared to him to differ greatly in their readings. Yet she was always sitting with her head in it, and appeared to regard it, if he could be forgiven for such a blasphemous thought, as a sort of spiritual Mrs. Beeton. He could make little of her there, and once or twice she had puzzled him in the same sort of way.

  In that first year her silence about the baby had struck him as being remarkable, and there were times when he wondered what on earth she imagined he believed about it. It was not mentioned between them, she bore her pains and discomforts stoically, and when at last he did refer to its eventual arrival, she seemed glad he expected it, as well she might be. But that was all; she never spoke of it.

  All this, of course, was in the early days now mercifully left behind. Since then there had been changes. At this ten-year distance his earliest recollection of Jinny’s first baby was not immediately after it was born, but later when it could just toddle. Even now when he remembered the incident he was discomforted. Jinny had been in the garden, wearing a white dress with dark blue upon it; her full skirt had swept the daisies and her tight bodice had called attention to the corseted, artificial lines of her back and waist. As James had looked down from his window at her, she had called aloud to someone, and her tone had been intelligent as if she expected to be understood. Until that moment James had thought of the child solely as an object and a possession, but now he realized there was in his house some new person with a life and a soul of his own. For an instant the discovery struck a chill in him.

  “William,” Jinny had called, “come here, my darling, come here!”

  He had appeared then staggering out from behind the syringa, and had stood for an instant, his knees bent and his arms swinging, as if he were preparing to leap up at her. His blazing blue eyes were dancing and his yellow hair burned in the sun. He had looked so strangely tall and golden, so enchantingly different, that James had felt again all the old admiration which had so enthralled him long ago.

  On the heels of that memory had come another. He had remembered old Larch speaking. “A good dam will always throw to the sire, come what may.
” And then suddenly, born of these two recollections, had come hatred, utterly unexpected, inexcusable hatred of the child.

  James had caught the emotion in himself by its very tail, and had dragged it out like a demon and pitched it away from him. He had been startled and angry, disgusted at himself; he made a mental note to buy the child a present at once.

  Later when he had put the whole incident as far back in his mind as possible, another idea occurred to him. The time had come when he must get him a son of his own.

  James’s first child, a daughter, died at birth, and its coming very nearly killed Jinny. The doctor who attended her had taken it upon himself to point out that she was still very young. To-day as James walked down the road from his house he gathered up the intervening years and bundled them back into the bureau of his memory without looking at them. They had not been unhappy for him, he had worked out a life for himself in which his home was a base; nor, as far as he knew, had they dragged wearily for Jinny. She had played with her baby, practised her music, and done anything James told her. Also she had accompanied James when he sang, and had been very nice to him when he had tried to play the violin, and had made, as he said himself, ‘the very devil of a noise.’

  Theirs was an entirely amicable relationship. They met in everything but outlook, and James who knew that his own brightly-coloured landscape with its background of country deals and speculations, and its vistas of convivial club evenings, music hall nights, and backstage adventures, was completely unknown to her, had no idea at all what picture her window showed. They were like an old child and a young child pausing before a booth at a fair, holding hands, but looking into different peep-shows.

  Now at last she was going to have another baby, and all promised well. James was excited and very fond of Jinny in an entirely new way. The terrible inferiority complex which had made it possible for him to desire to father another man’s child, was appeased, and he was as near that mood of long ago when he had felt god-like as ever in his life since. He longed to see the new baby and know it himself translated. He wanted to show it to Dorothy.

  He had never taken Jinny or little William to see her when he went himself, and he knew she resented that. However, he dared not. He would not meet that odd look which he knew must come into her eyes when she should glance up at him from Frank Castor’s child. She would see it all and would know why it had happened too.

  James was thinking about that why now. It had been a good idea, he was certain of it. In spite of all the obvious disadvantages, in spite of unexpected emotional reactions in himself, it had been a good idea. The possession of Jinny and the house and the servants and the garden with the syringa tree, had given him the background he needed. The possession of that fair, intelligent boy had given him something else, something he was not going into even now, alone with himself. Sufficient was it, he felt, that he had conquered something; come out on top of a disability. Now he was the man he had always wanted to be. Next week perhaps he would have a child to continue him.

  He was in an excellent mood by the time he reached the solicitor’s office. The interesting words ‘of benefit’ lingered in his mind. All the same he knew no one who could leave him money so he kept his hope in rein.

  It was a very fair-sized firm, he discovered, evidently an old-established City business tucked into a narrow house in St. Mary Axe. The clerks in the downstairs room treated his broadcloth with deference, and upstairs the senior partner, a pleasant, roundish person called Dewsey, stared at him blankly when he first walked into the office.

  It was a curious interview, for Mr. Dewsey was so uncharacteristically ill at ease. He made a great business of establishing James’s identity, although this was necessarily something of a formality since much of the ground had been covered in tracing him at all. The more convinced he became the more uncomfortable he grew, until James was slightly irritated. Finally the lawyer sat back in his chair.

  “Mr. Galantry,” he said, taking the plunge, “have you ever heard of a person called Blackberry Smith?”

  James said he had not, but spoke cautiously now, suspecting one of his many horse deals.

  “Well, it would appear,” said Mr. Dewsey, keeping his tone deferential, “it would appear, my dear sir, that he is your half-brother. A most honourable, a most exact young man.”

  After a moment of bewilderment, during which his mind had gone to Lucius and Young Will and all the rest of old Galantry’s sons, James suddenly comprehended. The colour came into his face, and he got up.

  Mr. Dewsey, who was not unprepared for some reaction of the sort, rose also and stepped between his visitor and the door.

  “Wait! Mr. Galantry! Wait, I implore you. It will not be an inconsiderable estate by any means.”

  It was more the tone than the words which halted James, for it conveyed that he was expected to behave in an undignified manner, and was doing so. He turned back at once and sat down again with his legs wide apart and his hands, which held his hat and gloves, resting on the silver knob of his stick, so that his big dramatic head with the curls appeared to Mr. Dewsey just above them.

  The lawyer dealt with him very cautiously, and his story when it came out at last after a deal of tissue wrappings was not entirely extraordinary, although it was so unexpected. Reduced to unlegal English it amounted to a couple of facts. Shulie was dying, and wished to leave James part of her possessions.

  She had married again on rejoining her people, and by her second husband had surviving one son—Blackberry Smith. This young man had obeyed his mother’s wishes to the letter and had instructed Mr. Dewsey to find his half-brother, so that James might receive his portion in the approved manner from his parent’s hand.

  James received the information in silence. He had never dreamed of such a thing happening, but he knew at once that it was not remarkable. He also knew something which Mr. Dewsey did not, which was that his half-brother must have been born in September and had not been much of an infant to look at so that his name had been given to him in explanation, as one might say a ‘blackberry kitten’ or a ‘blackberry foal’; one not having much chance of survival since it had the winter to go through before it was weaned.

  Mr. Dewsey, mistaking his visitor’s silence, became suddenly defensive.

  “You may be a little surprised to find a firm of this standing having a gypsy client,” he said.

  “No, sir,” said James. “No, sir, I am not.” All the same he was surprised; surprised in the true sense of the word. Here in the very midst of London, hemmed in by the black buildings, shut down by the fog pall overhead, held fast by the comfortable respectability of Penton Place, he was yet surprised by the green glade, by the red caravans, by the wood smoke curling up through the leaves.

  Unfortunately Mr. Dewsey still felt bound to give an explanation. James was the sort of person to whom people did give explanations because he looked so informed.

  “I inherited my father’s practice in Norwich,” said Mr. Dewsey, “and among his clients there were several of these—these—ah—wanderers. One of them preferred to follow me to London than to trust anyone else, so it was quite natural for his son to come to me when in any difficulty. My father’s client was Jacoby Smith, the second husband of Shulamite Galantry. He’s dead, of course.”

  James nodded absently. “Where are they now?” he enquired.

  Mr. Dewsey was embarrassed to confess that he did not exactly know, but any letter he sent Blackberry Smith care of the landlord of “The White Lion” in Wych Street seemed to reach him in an unusually short space of time. Indeed, he said, there had been occasions when he had received an answer (written by some obliging parson and signed with Blackberry’s mark) in as little as a week.

  “If she is dying, they will not move if they can help it,” said James. “I think we should go down there wherever it is.”

  Mr. Dewsey agreed that would be the wisest plan. He was puzzled by James, who had made no enquiries as to the probable size of his inheritance. H
is appearance had been unexpected, but his attitude was more so.

  “I understand you have not seen your mother since you were sixteen years old,” he ventured.

  “That is so,” said James.

  It was going through his mind that he could wash his hands of the whole thing, could take nothing, and could, at the price of insulting his own blood, stay safely away from the thing he had been trying to escape all his life. Even before he considered it, however, he knew it would not do. James was too firmly planted upon the earth to believe in flight as a means of relief. There was in such matters, he considered, no escaping save in growing.

  “Yes!” he said, suddenly getting up, “yes! We’ll go down.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  More than once on the drive out from Halstead in Essex to the hollow of open ground under the hillocks above Sible Heddingham, James wondered why on earth he had brought Mr. Dewsey with him, although in all reason he could not very well have come without him.

  It was a lowering day, and the plump lawyer was inclined to be apprehensive. He was a man who made a great virtue of being interested in everything and everybody, but he had not the true courage of real curiosity, and while he was entertained to think his calling carried him into many odd corners and situations, he yet wanted to make it quite clear to James that gypsies (their notorious dishonesty and lack of any social pretensions whatever being understood) were not a commonplace with him.