Dance of the Years

by Margery Allingham

  Boxer came running at its summons, but she was busy and flustered, and she listened to his request with half her mind still on the kitchen stove. He wanted the black leather writing case in which all his papers had been brought from London. He had not been well enough to go down to his desk himself, and had instructed Debby to put all the loose papers into the case without looking at them. He had no doubt that she had done exactly as she had been told.

  As soon as the girl returned with the case he unlocked it with the key on his watch-chain and began to turn over the papers inside. Immediately, as if it had been thrust deliberately under his nose, he saw something which startled him. Incredulously he drew it out and sat looking at it. It was his own letter to Lucius, unfranked, and still sealed. As soon as he recovered from his first astonishment he became furious. So this was the explanation of Lucius’s silence; the letter had never been sent, and it was James and not his half-brother who had done the mannerless, unforgivable thing and never replied. James was not ordinarily angry. As Boxer came flying at the sound of his violent ringing she thought he looked like a wicked old bull, sitting up in his chair snorting and stamping. His shoulders were hunched, his neck had disappeared, and the veins stood out down his forehead.

  His voice was terrible, she said afterwards. Boxer was frightened of James, and not entirely because she saw that he was going to give himself a seizure. In her alarm she told the absolute truth.

  Yes, that was right, she said, she had not posted the letter when James gave it to her because, just before Mr. William left Penton Place after his last visit he told her to look out for it and to keep it back. Mr. William had given her the name and address for which she was to look out, together with a shilling, and had told her that the master was going a little queer in his last illness and might write something to a relative which could make trouble. Mr. William was so clever and so good and religious that Boxer had not hesitated to believe him, and so had done as he asked. She had not known what to do with the letter, and not imagining Mr. Galantry would be down again, she had slipped it into the bureau in his parlour with some other papers for when Mr. William should come again. Miss Deb. must have gathered it up without looking at it. Boxer was sorry if she had done wrong, and could she give Mr. Galantry the shilling?

  James, who had been staring at her blankly, shook his head. “Go away,” he said, “go away.”

  Boxer hesitated because, as she told the doctor afterwards, he sounded so “mumbly,” but it was clear that he wanted her to go, and so rather than annoy him she went. James watched her disappear into the house; it was a relief to keep his mind on that for a moment, but when she had gone he had to go back and face the information again. He did not doubt her story; he had inspired that sort of fear in that sort of girl before, and he recognized that sort of truth when he heard it.

  For a little while he did not know what was the matter with him; his anger had evaporated as he had listened to the girl and a new emotion had taken its place. As it grew upon him, chilling him, he knew it suddenly. He was afraid.

  William was his prop, his centre, the mainstay of his tent. If William had done this, what else had he done? If William would do this, what else would he do? The inference was clear. William was arranging to have a perfectly free hand without any intelligent interference. His was the only brain in the entire family, and he preferred it to remain so. Why?

  James, who like the war horse had mocked at fear, was frightened now. A dozen considerations struggled into his mind, and the greatest of them stood out before the others.

  William did not love Debby or the rest; William did not love anybody. James had often noticed this about him with interest, and had thought little of it. It had never occurred to him that it might matter, but in view of this discovery he saw its purpose. If William was a traitor, if William was not good, if he was not honourable, was not just, was not even honest, then the fact was of terrifying account. In James’s desperation, and it had become desperation now for his heart was popping dangerously and the garden was swimming into a rainbow, he strove to comprehend William and to find reassurance. He was hopelessly confused. William and Edwin Castor became one in his mind. He could see the face quite distinctly; it was cold, noble, golden-haired and alien. As he stared at it the truth was forced upon him with the brutality of revelation, and he saw that he himself had never known or loved William.

  He had admired him, and had been ridiculously proud to possess him. He had exalted William and had put his trust in him. Because William had possessed attributes which James himself could not achieve, he had endowed him also with all his own virtues, but he had never loved him because he was not lovable.

  Now James had come the other way to knowledge, and had discovered the truth about William by trial and error, and it had taken too much time. Now James was helpless. He was afraid for the part of himself he was leaving behind; he was afraid for Debby and for Tom and the boys at school, and even for old Pecker in the field; all left in the hands of the alien.

  James’s heart was hurting him, his eyes were clouding, and the world was slipping away.

  “If only I could have got even with him,” he said aloud, and to his surprise an old country voice, Larch’s or Jed’s, answered him out of the darkness of his under-mind.

  “You’ve made a god on him, ain’t you, boy?” it said. “Put your faith in him, ain’t you? Reckon you’ll hev to, you know. Yes. Yes.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  James began to dream.

  They say some men when dying glimpse at heaven, but James was such a primitive, so much a part of the black earth and the green, that he took his glance at the earth.

  His dream began in a formalised, diagrammatic fashion. He thought he left his chair and walked across the grass plot to meet Edwin Castor, who was advancing towards him hand outstretched. Castor had another man with him, who was a stranger to James, and of whom he did not much like the look. This man was small and flashy, and as he came up he said in the obliging, unlikely way of dreams:

  “I’m Walter Raven, you know.”

  James was repelled by him, but he had no time to consider this, for at that moment he saw Jinny there beside them, and the first thing he noticed about her was that she was far smaller than she had been in life. The vision had all the dream’s absurdity, and James was not astonished by anything that happened, only worried.

  The four of them took hands and stood in a circle, and it was only then that James realized that they were in the midst of a crowd. He caught sight of many faces he knew in the company, although many were strangers. He saw Old Will Galantry there, and Frank Castor, and Alfred Timson and his wife, and Debby and Shulie. Far away, on the extreme edge, he saw a gaunt shadow which might have been Dorothy, but there was no sign of Phœbe, although he looked for her. He was only aware of a need of her, a sense of her absence.

  Soon they all began to move. It happened very quickly and smoothly, and with an irrevocableness which convinced James that he was observing something that had happened before, rather than a present reality. He also received the impression that the same thing was happening, and had happened to him elsewhere, but with slightly different partners, and this idea did not astonish him either.

  It was very sunny and ordinary in the garden, and the four of them who stood still in the centre were very close together now. Nearer and nearer they came until they began to touch. Jinny and Raven were very small by this time, but Castor was of normal size, while James was largest of all.

  They moved closer and closer, pressed on by the crowd behind them until, in the same slow but by this time agonizing way, they began to merge. The pain in James’s chest was more terrible than he had ever felt pain before; it tore and suffocated him.

  On and on the steady movement continued, the crowd ever pressing inward, until presently—there was only one man there.

  In his dream James became aware of someone new taking over the responsibility. It was the responsibility not only of tha
t mass of impulses, powers and weaknesses which was all there was left of James himself to continue on the earth, but also of all those other impulses and powers which constituted much of the surviving portion of Castor, Jinny and Walter Raven, not to mention any amount of other people.

  James was far too occupied with essential things just then to take much account of a phoney, quick-silver business like time.

  It would seem that the only really obvious thing about time is that every living thing has its own time, its own measure between conception and maturity, maturity and decay, so that it must be only for the convenience of the whole that the matter has become a fixed affair at all.

  James, then, since he was only an individual, had his own time, and the fact that his dream took him about as far forward in calendar time as his memory of, say, Mandrake took him back, was of no consequence whatever to him. Each picture could lie next to the other in his mind.

  James caught his glimpse of the survival, not of his soul, not of the minute part of him which was the responsibility, his bit of God; that went into the Great Pocket to be looked at and considered. James took his peep at the larger, imperfect part of him which continued on the earth. In his dream he saw this part of himself very clearly, and at a most significant moment in its history. James dreamed of himself at the instant when the man who housed him along with so many others, and whose responsibility he had become, was split and torn; at a moment when every single, separate part of the fellow was fighting passionately for life.

  In his dream James saw himself when he was the greater part of a man called James Edwin Galantry, one morning in May in the year nineteen hundred and forty-one.

  At that time the said James Edwin Galantry was facing not so much an overwhelming urge to take his life as a desperate desire not to—somehow.

  James saw with James Edwin’s eyes, as he walked up and down the lawn at Farthing Hall three-quarters of a century later, and saw for the first time in either of their lives the bright clear light of the country of despair.

  It took James some little while to make out who exactly James Edwin was. When the information did come to him it came in flashes, as if he were remembering it rather than having it told to him. There was little strange in this, since at the time he actually was a part of James Edwin, but at first it seemed queer to James, for it came patchily as memories do.

  James ‘remembered’ therefore on that morning in nineteen forty-one that James Edwin was the son of Jeffrey, who had been the only son of William, and that Jeffrey’s wife, the mother of James Edwin, was no less a person than Belle Raven, the Edwardian variety star, daughter of Debby and poor Walter Raven, whom nobody mentioned after his death because he had killed himself when he could delude no one any longer that he was more grand than other men.

  James ‘remembered’ that there had been an almighty row in the family when Jeffrey married Belle, for after suddenly throwing up his preparations for the Church and taking to painting saleable, if uninspired, illustrations to children’s religious books, he had avowed himself as Socialist (a highly unfashionable faith at the time), and then, still abruptly and unexpectedly, had married his music-hall cousin, who until her success had been one of his poorest and most despised relations.

  This revelation was all very swift and startling to James, but it gave him a very vivid picture of Jeffrey as he had been when grown, and also it explained the first part of his dream and showed him how it was that he came to be in such unexpected company. Best of all, it explained what the old country voice within him had meant when it said that somehow or other he must get even with Edwin Castor.

  Now here he was in the same body with him, and must at last become one with him. Together they needs must absorb and digest and help and conquer each other. There was no possible escape for either of them. It frightened the dreaming James when he understood that, and saw the unrelenting truth that a man gravitates towards the thing he worships.

  When he had recovered a little he went on with his exploratory ‘remembering,’ trying to find out what had happened to James Edwin to bring him thus to the final edge of his resource. The fellow had had a strange team to drive; James and Castor, Jinny and the little dark defeatist, who yet had such a strong measure of the power to create.

  James began to ‘remember’ all sorts of things. He began to see something of the dusty harvest of imitation aristocracy which the great middle classes had so triumphantly brought home, only to find it mouldy in store and so exorbitant in cost of production that when they had raised their heads from it to look about, they had shuddered away from their own handiwork. That story had been as though the topmost branches of a thrusting tree had suddenly shied away from the sun to which they had been growing, James thought in his dream.

  James Edwin had been born after that harvest. The man James supposed was actually a great grandson, but to him he was more, much more than a son. In his dream James realized that he loved James Edwin as himself; he had to. The man was himself, at least in major part.

  James ‘remembered’ Jeffrey as James Edwin had known him, which is to say, as a father. He had been a man in an inescapable muddle; a man thrust on by every impulse towards a goal which with his living eyes he saw was a dead end. Jeffrey had been a man who sent his sons to exclusive schools and then raved at them for believing the social teachings they learned there. He had been a man who was for ever trying to make friends with working folk, only to have them touch their hats to him and turn away uncomfortably; a man who married a woman because she was gloriously vulgar and alive, only to have her leave him for men who were more vulgar and lively than himself.

  He had been a man who had seen his eldest son, the clever one who had looked like old Will Galantry and had written so very much better verse, sent out to die in France within a day or so of his leaving school. He had been a man who, having been brought up to believe in a gentlemanly business genius of a God who had been happy to possess Jeffrey’s own father William as a sort of spiritual office boy, came slowly to realize that there was something very wrong with this picture. Jeffrey had come to realize that his wife, Belle Raven, told no more than the truth when she said his father William had gone into business with the brilliant and apparently wealthy Walter Raven, had married Debby to him to consolidate the position, and immediately afterwards, on discovering that a smash was imminent, had left her to her fate. He had got out himself by selling his share in the concern to yet another sanctimonious old hypocrite called Great piece, who had dealt with the situation in a manner which had expedited Raven’s suicide.

  Jeffrey himself had seen William’s charity to Debby afterwards, and it had been the kind which gave charity its false name.

  In his dream James saw Jeffrey as a man whose idols had crashed round him all the time, a man who had been bred and trained to be a gentleman, and who had come to believe gentlemen were ungentle; a man who had been taught to believe in God, and who had come to believe God was hypocritical. James found he could be very sorry for Jeffrey.

  However, the story which James was ‘remembering’ so fast was not all dark. James saw Debby as James Edwin had known her, as an old woman. He saw her as a funny old Debby, exasperating and absurd as ever, but incorruptible and therefore unscathed. Through James Edwin’s eyes James saw a Debby, who had borne and tended children, who had starved for them and worked for them, and kept heart by taking no thought for the morrow, and who, after Belle left Jeffrey, had come to Farthing Hall to take care of their sons.

  James saw a Debby who had brought up this second generation in the same way that she herself had been brought up, and he saw her after they were grown trotting over to William’s great house to nurse first Julia, and then the old man himself, with a devotion their daughters could not imitate. He saw her later still after their deaths, retiring to a cottage to live as Dorothy had lived; and he saw her in a flash as she was now, untidy as ever, happy as ever, sitting darning in the sun, a ragged Bible at her side, a romantic novelette tucked i
nto her chair, and the lively hopefulness of eternal youth in her little black eyes.

  In his dream, James saw a Debby who by some magic he did not understand, by some formula handed on by her mother, some rigmarole about hoping and enduring, had yet for all her thundering stupidity, for all her handicaps, for all the mindful cruelty of men miraculously conquered life.

  The sense of urgency in the dream was tremendous, and James left Debby and went on with his enquiries into James Edwin, whose fate was his own fate, whose chance was his own chance, and whose potential failure was his also. James Edwin was not a young man; he was in the late thirties; he was not a fool, Castor was seeing to that. He was not a coward, either, that was James’s province and he was doing his best. Yet the man was at the end of his resources and James, with his earthly mind (for he was not dead yet, but dreaming), was striving to comprehend.

  James began to ‘remember’ James Edwin’s history, and it took him into the false peace period between the two wars; the breathing space while another world generation was growing up to finish a fight which had been too bitter for the blood of one to sweeten it. Much of this world was incomprehensible to James, and since a man does not see what he does not comprehend, James followed James Edwin from the emotional angle which alone never changes.

  James ‘remembered’ James Edwin’s reactions when Jeffrey convinced of folly by the horrors of two years of the first World War, had decided to break free from his hampering traditions and to back his own belief. As a first step, he had taken James Edwin from a Public School just before his School Certificate Examination, and had told him, somewhat theatrically, to work with his hands. James Edwin had not resented the move greatly and in after life he had come to think of it as a very good thing, but it had had a tremendous effect upon him at the time. For one thing it had changed most of his friends and that had touched him nearly, for with Jinny in him James Edwin had been a man who loved his friends. The James in James Edwin had been stimulated by the change, and now in his dream James ‘remembered’ James Edwin’s grim satisfaction when, after a campaign of wire-pulling and waiting, he had at last got himself taken on as an apprentice at the great Parkinson Motor Works. In the evenings he had attended a night school and had matriculated.