Dance of the Years

by Margery Allingham

  James did not care a tinker’s dam for him or his habits. From old Galantry he had inherited the eighteenth-century belief that a gentleman only tolerated his attorney in the most difficult of moments, and that in all others he was bound to be but an unpleasant reminder of mortality or debt.

  He was also worried about other things. There had been a nurse at Penton Place when he left, and also a highly secretive and self-important old woman with an ominous bag, and all through the drive his thoughts kept veering round to Jinny and the coming child.

  As they turned down a lane, which was scarce more than a cart track between two high hedges, Mr. Dewsey gave up trying to talk, and James was very glad of it. He was not at all sure what he was in for, and was not looking forward to the coming interview. Their driver, who was a man from the town, was not easy either, since it was a lonely place and his fares looked well worth robbing.

  At this moment they swung round a bend in the lane and came suddenly upon the hollow. The sight of it astonished James, and for the first time he was faintly apprehensive for their physical safety. In the back of his mind he had been carrying a picture of the wood behind Jason’s house, and the half-dozen caravans there, the few poor horses hobbled nearby, the single fire, and the tinker’s donkey hovering warily in the middle distance.

  This was something quite different. There were nearly fifty caravans set in small groups on the poor turf; the horses were in droves, and everywhere there were fires with numbers of lean figures standing round each. It looked like a fair ground in the very early morning. There was squalor there, and colour, and much show. Everybody was in his best clothes. The caravan doors were thrown wide as they always were at Appleby, with everything at all valuable which each owner possessed pushed well into the foreground. Shawls and coverlets, embroidered waistcoats and skirts, household china, lamps, and bowls, and trays; everything, all put out to be seen.

  As the trap slowed down and finally stopped, the whole gathering turned and stood silent, looking at them. It was a dramatic moment. The driver began to mutter that it would be wise to go back, and only then did it dawn upon Mr. Dewsey that if there should be some trickery hiding in the commission which had been entrusted to him, then he and his client might be in a very disadvantageous position at the moment. Two alone, and miles away from anywhere.

  “God bless my soul! Who are they all?” he demanded nervously. “I had no expectation of anything like this. Who are they all?”

  James rose without answering and began to climb carefully to the ground. He knew quite well who they were. All of them, every sharp-eyed man, every ragged child, must be a Smith and his relation. The best part of the whole tribe must be present.

  He went forward stolidly. His shoulders looked enormous under his long coat and his tall hat sat squarely on his big head. In his dark face his strong white teeth showed in a faint irrepressible smile, for in spite of his embarrassment which was acute, the old Galantry in him was tremendously amused.

  Blackberry Smith came out of the silent crowd to meet him. James knew him at once, he could hardly help it; they were very alike. They were not doubles, of course, there were many points of difference. The pure gypsy was a smaller man, and his skin unexpectedly was not so dark, while his eyes were those of his race, small and bright and wide open, without, of course, the Galantry hoods. But nevertheless, there was a very definite likeness.

  Mr. Dewsey used to tell the story afterwards and always spoilt his tale by insisting that he could not tell the difference between them, which was absurd.

  The thing which almost unbalanced James, and for which he never forgave Shulie, was Blackberry’s costume. Everybody in the gathering was unconventionally clad, for best clothes in that company were nearly always remarkably old, not to say ancestral clothes, and James was surrounded by an array of archaic finery. But Blackberry was in a costume which he recognized. It dragged him back through the years to Groats in candlelight. It was old Galantry’s evening suit. James had never heard that Shulie had taken it with her, yet here it was, crumpled and still reeking of the wormwood in which it had been stored against the moth. The plum-coloured silk of the breeches clung to Blackberry’s fine muscles, and the laced cuffs riding up his shirtless forearm, disclosed his dirty wrists. James had not set eyes on the suit for over thirty years, but he knew it at once and he took off his hat, not so much to Blackberry, as to his clothes.

  The young gypsy held out his hand and said with ingratiating gentleness: “Welcome, brother.”

  On seeing the situation was in hand, Mr. Dewsey had come bustling up by this time, and he used to relate this incident with great effect.

  James accepted the greeting as a formal one, and said “Thank you.” Meanwhile talk had broken out everywhere, and there was a great deal of sibilant comment in a language Mr. Dewsey did not understand and found disturbing. Gradually, however, he gathered it was approving, and received the impression that it was James’s physique which was being discussed. Only then did it occur to him that all his legal proofs of identity would go for very little in this community, and that James would stand or fall by his appearance. To his relief there seemed to be no question about this, nor, when he looked round from one dark face to another could he think there would be.

  The whole scene impressed Mr. Dewsey. The rising land in the background was chocolate from the plough, and the trimmings of the brown and black hedgerows became more distinct as they crept nearer to the bowl of the hollow. Then came the bright caravans gaudy and defiant, and among them moved the ragged people splendid in their dirty finery, while lastly, in the centre, stood the square Victorian gentleman holding his shining and sophisticated hat.

  Blackberry had a natural dignity himself, but at the moment it was handicapped. He was helplessly eager to show off before his kinsfolk, and anxious to ingratiate himself with his splendid half-brother. He was trying also to remember all the tricks his mother had taught him. Old Galantry had lived on in Shulie, or at least some of him had, and in her mixture he had undergone some odd changes.

  To James, Blackberry was a nightmare. Clad in this dreadful corpse of a suit, he had a painfully familiar way of bowing, bending his back stiffly as if he were an old man, and a trick of waiting until after a sentence and then laughing a little. These were not natural mannerisms, but schooled ones, and James thought it typical of Shulie to pick on old Galantry’s personal idiosyncrasies, and advance them in her ignorance as evidences of a superior civilization. He was shocked to the soul. He saw what had happened at once, and realized that Shulie must have loved his father to have treasured and re-taught so many little memories of him. But to find scraps of him here, travestied and simplified, was indescribably repugnant.

  The circumstance gave him a key to the people with whom he was to deal. It was a betrayal of the very simple mind behind all this show; they were children, wandering infants in the green world; naughty, dirty, cunning children; younger and sillier than other races.

  He recognized their enormous interest in him for what it was, and knew they were delighted that he should look important and prosperous, and that if he had been shabby they might have turned on him. His humiliation increased at every moment, and he hated them because there was something very like them deep in himself which made him secretly proud of their admiration.

  Blackberry Smith led the way to the caravan where their mother lay, and James mounted the steps to look down into a yellow face which he did not recognize. Shulie had aged very early, as gypsy women do, and she was now very close to dying. James saw a tooth-less face, creased with many wrinkles, and expressionless as an apple. She was still breathing, but already there was a sightless glaze over her black eyes, and she showed no sign of recognition as he bent over her. The air in the waggon was nauseating, and the coloured shawl over the couch only too obviously hid filth and rags, while the little claw hand on the silk was dirty.

  It was certainly not poverty stricken, nor were there any evidences of neglect; rather there was
a suggestion of a primitive fussiness. It reminded James of the death-bed of some greatly loved animal. He could not bring himself to speak. This younger man, so like himself and yet so different, was in charge here. The woman was his mother, not James’s.

  Blackberry Smith slid his hand under the pillows and drew out a bundle of ragged documents and a greasy leather bag. He would have placed them in James’s hands had the older man not recoiled from them.

  “No,” said James. “No.”

  “No, brother?”

  “No.”

  “I would like you to take them.” Blackberry spoke very softly but with dignity. “I do not want what is not mine, brother. That would not be lucky.”

  So it was not only on the surface; Shulie’s teaching went deeper and was there in the same way travestied and made infantile.

  James was being hard tried, and he was learning in the process, yet he did not move.

  Mr. Dewsey had followed James, and now stood nervously on the top step half in and half out of the door. He was regarding the scene within with mounting apprehension, and hoped to God Mr. Galantry would do nothing to offend.

  The caravan was surrounded by a wolfish mob. At the moment it was friendly; he hoped sincerely that it would remain so.

  “If I might advise,” he began unhappily, and hesitated.

  James saw him out of the corner of his eye and was suddenly amused. He smiled at his half-brother and took the proffered bundle. Afterwards he felt under his coat and took out his gold watch and chain, which he handed to Blackberry. He had no idea why he did it, or even that it would be acceptable; it was an odd thing to do on the face of it, and was in James’s case purely impulsive.

  Mr. Dewsey assumed it was a tribal custom, and may of course have been right, but James did not know.

  Blackberry took the gift and seemed overcome, while the atmosphere improved noticeably. It was a strange incident, very simple and primitive, and with Shulie lying there, her breathing hard, it was also terrible.

  James had no idea of what his inheritance might consist, and was unaware that he held it. He remained looking down at the woman, trying to picture her as he had last seen her, and striving to reconcile the picture with this helpless little yellow face, bound with the white headcloth. He found he could not do it. She was gone. The Shulie who had stood in the wind with her arms outstretched was vanished, gone with the leaves, gone with Groats, gone with old Galantry and his own childhood. As far as he was concerned she had died long ago, and to his embarrassment he knew that he was relieved.

  Then Blackberry touched him on the arm and said that they must eat together.

  James left Mr. Dewsey as soon as they reached London. He had been away two days and a night, and was anxious to get back to Penton Place. Mr. Dewsey took charge of the documents, which appeared to be the title deeds of small parcels of property scattered all over the country, and the bag James took with him.

  Its contents had disappointed and even annoyed the lawyer. It had consisted of three gold pieces, two of them early Louis d’or, and one an English guinea, a pair of old paste buttons in a daisy design, a small heart in something which Mr. Dewsey strongly suspected was brass, and a solitary marquisite shoe buckle threaded with a purple ribbon. James had roared with laughter when he first set eyes on them, and had told Mr. Dewsey that his watch had cost him thirty guineas, a fact which seemed to delight him.

  Mr. Dewsey thought he was mad, and was privately annoyed to find gypsies as vulgar and worthless as he had always heard they were.

  James arrived home at dusk, and as he opened the door with his key an unmistakable atmosphere of bustle and excitement rushed down the hall to meet him. He could smell fires and cooking, and the comforting odour of soap. The harness of respectability slipped round him like loving arms. He found he knew what had happened without being told. He could see the good news in the maid’s face as she came hurrying up for his hat and coat, and could hear it in the cheerful clatter from the kitchens down the service stairs.

  Shulie and the hollow under the hillocks, Blackberry and the coloured caravans, faded into a world of fantasy. They became like a tale in a book, far off, beyond the horizon.

  In that moment of joyous return even Groats disappeared, even Jed and “The Golden Boar,” even Phœbe and the theatre and Drury Lane. They ran into each other and faded and drifted away. This was reality.

  He ran upstairs, shaking the floors with his weight, and arrived red-faced and breathless outside Jinny’s door. It was opened to him before he knocked by a nurse who motioned to him to be quiet. He would have brushed past her to get to the bed where his wife lay, pale and satisfied, with big eyes looking hopefully to him for approval, but the woman arrested him and he turned to find himself looking down at the child in her arms.

  “It’s a girl, sir,” she whispered. “A lovely little girl.”

  James looked down at his first living child and saw a little yellow face which was seamed and lined like a withered apple; a fold of white shawl fell over the top of her head like a kerchief, and as he stared she moved her lips exposing tiny toothless gums. A dreadful thrill of recognition ran through James.

  The baby regarded him with eyes from which the shadows had robbed their early blue, leaving them as black and as bright as they would ever be. Shulie. Shulie to the life.

  The nurse put back the shawl. “Lovely curly black hair just like a little gypsy,” she said proudly. “Oh, sir, she is the dead spit image of you.”

  Chapter Twenty-four

  There was no question of reincarnation, at any rate in its popular sense, between Shulie and the new baby. Nothing so elementary, so sweeping, or so easy. One died round about the time that the other one was born, and the similarity between them was phenomenal, but their souls were their own.

  James called his daughter Deborah after a character in one of Lovell’s plays, and she had a great deal of her mother in her as well as Shulie. She went through the world with part of it honestly believing she was half-witted; another suspecting her of being some sort of unrecognized saint, and still another who stood amazed before an iron commonsense which sometimes appeared in her.

  However, all this came later, and the important thing at the moment is what happened to James.

  One James died when he first saw Deborah and Jinny’s son William side by side, and the new James, who slid into his skin then, was a slightly different person. When James saw Deborah growing more and more like Shulie; when he took her to see Dorothy, and the old woman let her eyes grow wet as she watched the child; when James saw William holding the toddler so that his head was close to hers, and the startling difference between them was very apparent; then a number of things, ambitions and prides, ingredients, stuff of himself died beneath that cold ray of realization. The James who went on living without them was no more the same mixture than a recipe containing aqua vita is the same thing when it is left out.

  As a father in that particular period he had tremendous powers in his own home. It would almost seem that the Victorians heard so much about God the Omnipotent Father that each family man thought himself justified in setting up as father the omnipotent God. James had absolute sway over his children in everything save life and death, and thought it an excellent thing.

  He had four more children, who arrived in quick succession. These were a son, Thomas; a daughter who died of smallpox at the age of four; and two more boys, Richard and Henry. All these save the daughter, who resembled her mother, were of the Shulie kind. They were short, dark-skinned folk, all with the same black eyes wihout hoods; there was no sign of old Galantry in the whole pack of them. It was a great disappointment to James.

  The change in him after Deborah’s birth was actual. He gave up aspiring, and in one way this made him a far more definite personality than he had ever been before. At home he was autocratic, more secretive than ever, slightly selfish, and with an extraordinary notion of his own dignity. Away from home, behind the scenes with Toole, the comedian, or
at his Debating Club, or at the music hall, he was a noisy schoolboy delighting in the most laborious of practical jokes, as was then the fashion.

  His money affairs did not give him much trouble, but they did not improve to match the size of his family, and meanwhile the country had just undergone the worst depression in its history, so that Whippy and the Jasons had needed help from the amateur of horseflesh. On the other hand, James’s investments had done very well, and his houses brought him in small, steady sums, but he saw that the old order was gone, and that whether he liked it or not his children must be self-supporting.

  Therefore the new James took a new view of William. Still putting his faith in princes, he argued that if William was the superior being he had always assumed he would be, he would doubtless get on very well in almost any circumstances. So, since he had very little money to spend on education, and no influence in the professions either, he did the best he could for William, and applied to the Timson family for an apprenticeship for him in the paint and ink-making concern.

  He supported William during this seven-year penal servitude, and pointed out to him very frankly that if there was any substantial inheritance coming from anywhere, it must come from the Timsons. To do James justice, he did no more for Tom; but for Deborah he thought of other things.

  Although she reminded him so vividly of Shulie, he loved Deborah. She was so very much his own, and he knew, as one does know such a thing of oneself, that she needed every chance. James saw his way to giving her this. The gypsy inheritance—James and Mr. Dewsey always called it ‘The Smith Estate’—had turned out to be not altogether negligible despite the unpromising contents of the bag. The legal work involved was considerable, but the properties concerned proved to be unexpectedly in order. There were no counter claims, and Shulie and Blackberry had bought with great sagacity. Both James and the lawyer were surprised. It was a curious collection. There was a cluster of hovels in Latchingdon; a slaughter-house in Layer Breton; two little forges, one at Tey and the other at White Colne; a forlorn little inn on the road between Wormingford and Bures; and at least half a dozen little pightles scattered all over the place, one of these in the very centre of a sporting estate brought James a considerable sum. There were one or two houses also, nothing at all large, but all in good repair.