Dance of the Years Page 15

  By this time she had grown into a very distinctive-looking woman, at times breathtakingly beautiful, at times positively ugly, but always, in any situation, and at any given moment, a personality. The years had put more drawing into her face and every muscle could obey her and shape itself anew to tell something she might care to say. She was a comedy actress, polished and acute, and worth every halfpenny of the munificent eight pounds a week which Mr. Macready had somewhat grudgingly agreed to pay her.

  She was a little darker now than she had been as a child; her hair was a deeper straw, and was now brushed sleek like a satin hood, while her gold silk dress which matched it sat jauntily on her tall figure, and flounced out from the drawn-in waist in a cascade of nonsensical frills. Even now, even when he knew her so well that she was a part of him, James always felt young and clumsy when he was with Phœbe. It was one of the chief reasons why he loved her, and the reason that he never quite admitted to himself.

  The fact that he did love her was confronting him now like an abyss opening at his feet, filling him with fear, actual physical fear; a dropping of the heart and a wave of blood passing over his face.

  She was standing in one of her typical attitudes, a pose straight out of a Knowles comedy; one hand was on her hip and one slipper rested on a footstool, while she smiled down at him seated before her. She was looking at him under her lashes, but he knew her eyes, which were like blue stars, were not really laughing.

  “I think I shall, James,” she said softly. “I think I shall, you know.” She was goading him into enquiry and he hung back as long as he could. Finally he gave way.

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “Because I want to be married.”

  It was absurd to pretend surprise, heaven knew it was old ground. They had gone over it again and again, and he had known always that the crisis must come in time. Here it was.

  He sat staring moodily in front of him. His great shoulders were hunched under his very dark green coat; his fancy waistcoat with the staggering embroidery was rumpled and his square head with the mat of black curls on it, lolled forward on his chest. He looked merely sulky, but it was not so. Inwardly he was despairing, a man cringing before the tyranny of his own obstinacy.

  Phœbe let her eyes rest upon him, but there was no telling from her expression what she was thinking. Presently she moved closer to him, and he took her hand as she had known he would, drawing her down on to his knee so that she lay with her forehead tucked under his chin. He said nothing, but there was an aggressive possessiveness in the way he held her, and his arms closed round her with the irritable forcefulness of a man taking his own and be damned to everybody.

  She put her hand round his neck and felt the line where the short hair grew.

  “James,” she said, “I could have children.”

  She felt the exasperated breath imprisoned for a moment in the barrel of the chest beneath her, and presently she tried again, whispering into his neck.

  “James, is it that? Don’t you want my children? Well then, why have any? After all, considering…?”

  He put his hand over her mouth and held it there, but she wriggled free of him and got up and went across the room, looking her enchanting best. Her flounces rustled as she walked, and she moved with that typical swagger which was one of her greatest charms on the stage.

  “You’re right, my love. You’re right. If we yearn for respectability we must conceive it apart. Together it seems somehow to escape us, doesn’t it?”

  He looked up at the note in her voice and saw her posing in the doorway, her arms extended and her eyes raised upwards. It was a very slight burlesque of one of the plaster nymphs in the new theatre. Last time he had seen her do it for himself alone, she had been correctly clad for the part with a silk scarf attached to her skin at salient points with spirit gum.

  He laughed in spite of himself, and afterwards frowned at her angrily for it.

  She went out then, and, he thought, she does not care. She never did. She is not capable of caring. And yet all the time he was only trying to convince himself of something which he did not want to be true.

  James knew quite well, and always had known, that he would not marry Phœbe; would not, could not, should not, would not. Definitely, obstinately; against fate, inclination, desire itself; would not, never.

  At that period the theory that love and marriage had very much to do with one another was not wholly in vogue. When it did come again it began as a polite fiction, another stone in the edifice of productive marriage which the middle-classes were building up to make themselves strong. Very few young people of the middle-classes at that time married for love, and very few realized they had not done so because they were expected to pretend that they had. James belonged to this period and was at a loss in it for, of course, he had no class of his own by rights, and there were times when he longed for the solid advantages of a definite background with a family and friends of the family to make a garden for him to walk about in. Had he been a man who by temperament rejected these things, he would have had no problem; but with the years he had grown very much a man of his time. He had become a true early Victorian, a great believer in solid living, in breeding, in property, in respectability, in keeping up appearances, and in assuming virtue if one had it not.

  Although among the stage folk, the wits, the country people, the the horse-dealing fraternity, and the hearty brethren of The Oratorical Friends he was at home and popular, they did not satisfy him. Always he was aware of the others, the great mass of the wealthier middle-classes, the people to whom old Galantry’s first family belonged, and who were now fast coming into power.

  James could not bear to be left behind.

  He looked at the door through which Phœbe had vanished and thought, as he had thought long ago, that he was not strong enough in himself to marry her. Had he been sure of himself he would have done it and risked it, and bred and hoped for the best; but as it was, no. He knew quite well what kind of life they would lead together, and it would be delightful, slightly irresponsible, and certainly happy. He wanted it so much that his eyes smarted and an unbearable tightness grew in his chest, but he could not take it. It was simply that he could not. He was of his time and of his kind, and if he was to be himself he had no choice but to take the path which lay before him.

  Shulie was strong in him, but not strong enough. It was as if she stood alone on one side of the fence, and on the other stood old Galantry, Galantry’s elder sons, Dorothy, Edwin Castor, Mr. Philby, Jed, Jason, Larch, and one or two more who had given James little or much.

  Samuel was there too; not the young Samuel who might have been at Shulie’s side, but the latter day Samuel, married to a rich woman twice his age who kept him like an ageing puppy on a little, silk lead. He was on the greater side as well.

  Between them all sat James himself; of them, composed of them, fashioned from them, and with only his little half-worked soul his own.

  Phœbe had put her finger on the vital point. It was the children; the survivors in whom all this gang, of which James was the temporary part custodian, was interested. By far the greater half of them clamoured against Phœbe. “If it were not for her, James,” they said, pointing at Shulie, “then you might. But she’ll always be there, and she’s enough. If you give her an ally, James, she’ll swamp us.”

  This conversation was not clear to him, of course. There was nothing fanciful about him in these days. He was not a man to encourage inward voices at all, but they were there in him and their little shoutings made a single note of warning.

  He sat where he was in the familiar chair which by this time was his own chair by right of custom, and faced the real tragedy of his life without recognizing it.

  Phœbe was going out of his world and he knew he was not going to lift a finger to stop her. He was going to let love go, that was all. Now in middle age it seemed a little thing. But it was rather more than that for Phœbe was not his opposite, she was his complement, and a
lways she had restored his balance. If he was careful she was prodigal; if he was cautious she was impulsive; if he was too solemn she was too gay. With her he was a completed man, but not, unfortunately, an early Victorian middle-class gentleman.

  He got up and looked down into the Lane. No, it would not do.

  The outstanding thing about real tragedy is that it is wrong; there is no life in it; it is loss. James found no green shoot in his anywhere.

  It occurred to him to go after Phœbe into the bedroom, at least to kiss her good-bye. Shulie advised it earnestly, but all the rest of the many ingredients which made up James urged him to go quickly, to leave at once, on impulse; to take his hat and stick and be gone. If it was to be ended, and the end had been coming for a long time, it was better that it should come like this, almost casually.

  He went out very quietly and did not hesitate outside her door or on the stair. He was very ashamed.

  Leaning back against the bedroom wall, her shoulder against the panelling and one cheek pressed against it also, Phœbe heard him walking steadily away.

  She did not move, but lay there crying until she had to laugh a little at herself. Then she sat down before the mirror and bathed her face, and put her throat against the air and prepared herself to go on in her own way with all the independence and the sophistication which was in her. But in her heart she knew, just as James knew, that it was a wrong thing, for James had a kindness, a solidarity and a common-sense on which her gaiety could do its little dance.

  She married Sir Robin as she had said she would, and the old man carried her off to Bedfordshire to startle and mystify the natives. There he dried up the pure fount of gaiety with which he had been so fascinated.

  James lived riotously and in an unusual fashion for him for three weeks after she left London. Then he settled down into dignified gloom.

  It was in this mood that Mr. Timson found him when the horrified and unhappy man came to James as a possible saviour in his desperation. He brought an astonishing proposition.

  To Mr. Timson’s amazement and relief, James accepted the proposal after he had heard the full story, and agreed to marry little Miss Lizzie without delay.

  Those who knew anything about the tale at all, and they were surprisingly few all things considered, attributed many disreputable motives to James’s unexpected behaviour. Some thought he must have done it for money, and some were certain he could only have done it for pique. But the real reason was far more extraordinary, and only comprehensible to those who knew James and knew his background, and knew just exactly what it had meant to him when his father’s first family made it so clear that he did not belong to them.

  James married Miss Lizzie to get possessive hands on Edwin Castor’s grandchild, and he would not have done it for any other reason on earth.

  Just before he married, he told Whippy that he felt like having a Blood in his stable, and Whippy thought it a peculiar remark, for at that time he had no thoroughbred nor did there seem, just then, any prospect of getting one. He said as much to James, and James laughed rather bitterly.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Never go back, they say, particularly never in telling a story. Yet since it is important to explain what James was really getting and not what he thought he was, it is necessary to record something of the two things which happened just before Mr. Timson made his desperate proposal. One of these is what Edwin Castor said to Mr. Timson, and the other is what he said to his son.

  Until now the real Edwin Castor has not appeared in this story. Hitherto he has been represented by the effigy of himself to which James set up his altar, and has appeared only as one of the princes in whom James put his trust.

  However, he did exist; a sad, cold man, who suffered secretly with a dyspepsia which his dignity would not permit him to own. He was ambitious, and he was genuinely superior in mind to most of the people about him. He was intolerant of fools and unreasonably irritated by the minor weaknesses of less perfect men. This irritation was born of a genuine mistake, a genuine ignorance of a part of life of whose existence he had no inkling. He was a cold man by nature, and had no conception of the force of the emotions possessed by warmer temperaments. He could reason his own heart out of any inclination it had ever achieved, and sincerely thought that it was laziness or naughtiness which prevented anyone else on earth from doing the same thing.

  Moreover, nor did he ever dream that in priding himself on this strength of mind he might be admitting to a weakness elsewhere. It did not occur to him that it is all very well to take pride in a chain which can restrain a dog, but that the size of the dog should be taken into account. Never in Edwin Castor’s life had his unwilling footsteps dragged him into a situation which he knew to be unwise.

  The mindless power of desire was not in him, and he had no clear notion of the reality of its existence. Unfortunately he thought he knew practically everything. He had a fine legal brain and his experience at the Bar had taught him many facts about human frailty.

  In all physical matters he was unusually fastidious and was faintly proud of himself for being slightly offended by the normal functions of the body. Vice amazed him, and it was vulgarity which made him most ashamed of the world. The older he had grown the more ashamed of it he became, and he kept himself and his own aloof with the care of a woman in an evening gown walking across a farmyard. This was nothing to do with snobbery, and not, as James assumed, a practical interest in breeding.

  Castor was not interested in breeding, the mysteries of heredity had no fascination for him. It was not his subject. It was merely that he felt himself intellectually aloof. Necessarily he was a lonely man. It was true he had certain friends, men of his own age and eminence, but when he met them the clash of temperaments was apt to confuse the gentle interchange of brain and brain, and so most of his association with them was conducted by letter, and the Edwin Castor Correspondence, in three volumes, is a literary curiosity to-day.

  His married life had been short and slightly unreal. His wife had always seemed to him to be a potentially disturbing person who was staying on a visit, and although he was startled by her early death, in his secret heart he knew it for a relief. Constant meeting, talking, sleeping with her had forced her too far into his life. She had come within an ace of blundering into his very self, and that was an intrusion to which he could not have submitted.

  Frank was his only child, and in Frank he saw his own survival which was as near as he came to loving. Even so, he did not identify himself with the boy truly; he saw him rather as the “next person in charge,” and for that did his best to prepare him.

  Edwin Castor was nearly fifty and was set and old in everything but mind long before his time when Mr. Timson called upon him one evening late in the year. Mr. Timson was in a considerable state, he was fresh in his misery and was spurred on by his wife, who had a hysterical eagerness in her manner which he did not understand at all.

  Edwin Castor received him with that devastating politeness which sets the recipient instantly at a disadvantage, He put everything but himself at his visitor’s disposal, and then waited, not without mild curiosity, to see what he should do next.

  Alfred Timson was a simple, unaffected man, far too capable of being hurt. His passage to success had contained so much agony that when he arrived at it, it simply comforted and did not overwhelm him. At this moment he was utterly vulnerable and was a wretched, ashamed and smarting soul nakedly in tears. To Castor who had not anything like the same capacity for feeling, and was subconsciously aware of his lack, he was repellent before he even spoke.

  Mr. Timson produced the sad little story without art. He was sorry for Castor, sorry for Youth, sorry for Folly, sorry for his girl, sorry for Castor’s boy, and fully aware of much of the desperation and hunger which had led to the sin. He saw it as a sin and a disaster, as sins are. He did not see the ignorance, for of all things that are difficult to understand, ignorance is the most elusive. It is not easy to imagine nothing. However, he
possessed the insight of pity, and before he realized what he was doing he was interceding for the boy, who had broken into his garden and stolen and despoiled his daughter.

  He was that sort of man in that sort of trouble. His tale was passionate, incoherent and utterly convincing; even Castor did not doubt for a moment that the story was true, and that, even although he only heard the facts and brushed aside the evidences of the other man’s misery as some sort of weakness.

  The intimation came as a tremendous shock to him, but it did not overbalance him as it had Timson. Ugly stories were a commonplace in his work, and in his time he had heard worse. Emotionally he was shaken, naturally, but that side of him was not a very highly developed or adult affair. Therefore so far as the actual interview was concerned he was at a considerable advantage.

  They were in a big room which was cool only in colour and which smelled pleasantly of paper and the leather bindings of books. Castor was standing on the hearth-rug, and was framed in a mass of carved wood overmantel, and by the fine painting of a soldier in red and white behind his head. He made an impressive and judicial figure, while Timson, fidgeting before him, made no figure at all.

  Castor made no attempt to impress, he merely brought out his mind and put it on the matter as if he were setting up a microscope. To Mr. Timson he appeared disconcertingly calm and remote.

  When Castor was ready he began to take the other man through the story very carefully, exactly as if he were a client of his barrister days.

  “Tell me, Mr. Timson, what makes you so certain that my son is the culprit in this abominable and degrading affair?”

  Mr. Timson was only too anxious to explain, and to get the tragedy into the head of this other father who, beneath his calm, must be suffering even as he was. He went off at a great rate, stammering over his story and repeating himself.

  “Well, you see, it was the gardener, my dear sir, the gardener. A good, honest fellow, wonderfully astute. And discreet, too, I think, thank God! He noticed, or thought he noticed, that the garden was being entered from the fields at night, and that the temple—that’s a summer-house, you know: stucco, ornamental, silly little place, romantic looking. Well, he thought, I mean he guessed, he saw in fact, certain things which made him think it was being used, and so he lay in wait and watched. You know how these country fellows do. I mean, they begin to feel the place is their own property—and so it is in a way almost—and he thought he was doing his duty I suppose, and then—then he saw the two children.… They’re only children, my dear sir, only two silly children.… Oh my God …!”