Dance of the Years Page 2

  At the time he married the gypsy, Dorothy was forty-two and at her zenith. She had not much affection for Galantry, rather a sort of tolerant acceptance. He sat on the top of her world indolently, like a nodding carter on a waggon-load of sacks. The marriage astounded and shocked her, but it did not demoralize her. Immediately she made it her business to see it did no such thing to the rest of the household either.

  The news was not broken to her gently. Galantry sent for her on the night it happened, when the parson and the girl’s father were still in the house. Since he was bothered if he could think of one, he offered no explanation or excuse, but related the fact and watched her face for any change of expression. To his relief it remained as wooden as one of the carved apples over the mantel. Her eyes flickered once, but with that obstinate wistfulness, which is now called wishful thinking, he put it down to the candles in the draught.

  When he had finished speaking, he pulled Shulie out from behind his chair, and handed her over to be cared for. There was only a moment’s mutual appraisement between the two women. Dorothy was not good-looking then or ever; she was over tall, very flat, and hard fleshed as a man. The pretty, bunchy fashion designed to look well on the matron, whatever her condition, did not suit her. Her clothes hung round her bones disconsolately, and her face was hard and brown and tight-looking under its frill of calico.

  To Shulie she looked terrible in the true Old Testament sense.

  Meanwhile, Dorothy, on the other hand, saw a full-blooded, barefoot gypsy, and had she seen a negress she must have received very much the same shock.

  Sir Walter Scott had shed no mantle of romance over the Romanys at that time, and the Sheriff would have had his work cut out to convince Miss Holding at any period. Dorothy had been on close, but not neighbourly terms with the gypsies all her life, and what she knew of them led her to suppose that they were predestined by God to be dirty, to lie and to steal, and therefore as night follows day, by man to be hanged, hunted or deported. However, like most country people, her instinct was to seize rather than to explode, so she stepped to one side and gave Galantry a brief bob.

  “This way,” she said to Shulie, and her voice betrayed nothing whatever.

  The girl did not move, so Galantry got up and led her to the door. She went with him quite docilely, without glancing behind her. On the threshold of the dark hall there was a momentary hitch, but Miss Holding suddenly flounced out her skirts, and all but swept the gypsy from the room by sheer force of the draught.

  Groats was not a large household at the time. With the departure of Galantry’s elder children much of the bustle had gone from the place, but there was a sizable kitchen-full of inside servants.

  As Dorothy drove Shulie up the broad, shallow stair to the parlour, where she proposed to install her while she collected herself, she held all the household personalities in her mind. There was Donald the coachman, and Richard, the Master’s own man, his wife Estah, who was the cook, Peg her scullion, and Sarah the young chamber-maid. Richard had been silent and hang-dog for days, so he had already been told in confidence no doubt. Estah would be ruled by him in this as in all else. Donald, Dorothy could manage—he was a good soul, stolid and slow thinking. Peg mattered less than nothing, being scarce better than a gyppo herself, but Sarah might make trouble.

  Sarah was young, sly and quick-witted, quite capable of taking advantage of a situation breathing disruption. It was quite possible that she would get hold of this creature, coax her, pet her, sponge on her, and range herself on the destroying side. Very likely Sarah would have to go.

  It was typical of Dorothy that she should have reacted in this intensely practical way, even when in a condition of shock. Her concern was the preservation of the house and all it contained or stood for. She had noticed some of the unrest of the hour with deep animal misgiving. She did not think much about outside things, but she felt them, and when they threatened her castle, she was the first to smell the smoke.

  Unrest was abroad, danger, excitement; all bad things for a home.

  She knew well enough what was going on—Change. Change deep and irrevocable. Change as inescapable, as relentless and as painful as the change from youth to middle age. She hated it and feared it and dreaded it, and knew it would come.

  In the parlour the candles guttered as the door swung gustily, and the two women went in. It was a pretty room and not without elegance. Red silk damask flowed round the windows, and picked up the strawberries on the chintz and the blush in the heathen signs on the carpet. To Shulie it looked like a great half-full trunk of treasures with the lid shut down.

  Dorothy stepped forward to take a spill from the mantelshelf with which to light the rest of the candles, which were prudently kept dark whenever the room was not in actual use, and while she was so occupied she had to take her eyes off the girl. She still barred the way to the door though, and in the moment the gypsy passed her she caught a glimpse of the frightened face and wild outdoor eyes.

  Shulie made no noise at all, she went like a shadow. Not out of the house, but down the stairs, across the hall, and into the library to Galantry again. Once there she stood very close to him. She was shaking violently, and the pulses at the hinges of her jaws showed clearly and piteously.

  Old Galantry, who was a cold man for all his passions, felt once again the life in her, and a flood of unusual tenderness brought colour to his thin face. As he put his arm round her, it occurred to him that he was holding her up so that she could not hide under his chair. The notion amused him, but it also touched some nearly atrophied flame of generosity very deep in him, and shook for once into glorious youthful uncertainty, the merciless boredom of his self-knowledge. His gratitude to Shulie was sudden, overwhelming and pathetic.

  He dismissed Dorothy when she came running down in a flutter. She saw he was a little shamefaced at the weakness, but she went off obediently, still without any sign whatever on her tight-skinned face.

  Galantry was highly relieved. He put her down as even more the stolid, faithful fool than he had thought, and was grateful. He reflected that she probably thought he had gone a little mad, and for her own sake was being indulgently reticent about it. Meanwhile he had Shulie within his arm.

  All the same he had under-estimated Dorothy, who had not thought for a moment that he had lost his mind. Later that evening she told Richard what she did think, and they stood gloomily together considering it, one on either side of a barrel in the stillroom. They were two gaunt country people, and they had all the wisdom and perception of eight hundred years’ experience of simple, civilized living behind their hard, expressionless eyes.

  “Because of the war he’s thought he could do what he likes,” said Dorothy, and Richard nodded in grave agreement.

  As a remark, it did not sound particularly fresh or profound, but they were neither of them people of much talk, and all the upheaval, all the dangerous unleashings and disintegrations of war passed as a fear through them when Dorothy spoke the word. When she said “what he likes,” in spite of her quick, flat tone, the phrase to Richard summed up all the lust, all the recklessness, all the impropriety and all the selfishness of generations of lonely old men.

  Chapter Three

  All that was in the autumn of one year. By spring eighteen months later the reckless hour had passed completely. More and more evidences of the general trend which the social life of the land was taking so fast had filtered down as far as Groats. If the world was going to come to an end, it was going to do it in an odour of propriety apparently. Old Galantry damned it for its censoriousness, its narrow-mindedness, and its growing tendency to poke its nose into a gentleman’s private affairs.

  He was standing at the end of the drive at the time, under the oaks which were budding yellow and hopeful. Far down the cart track road a coach was lumbering away from him. In it sat Libby, his youngest daughter, and she was in tears, he knew. She was the last of his children to come and see if it really were true, and it was, so there they all
were.

  When he was not infuriated by it, his children’s reactions to his second marriage amused Galantry, and made him feel young and mischievous. Certainly he had upset them all. The coming child had finished it. That had got under their skins, and their irritation was not all to do with their loss of money by any means.

  Poor Libby; he liked her the best of all his daughters, in spite of her mute reproach. Of all her mother’s children she had more of his mind. She did know a little about the Arts of which she talked so freely, and that, thank God, was a change.

  He was very glad he had had her so well educated. Her husband was an M.P. He was dull and considerably her senior, but he looked after her well and appeared to appreciate her. Libby was all right. What had she to cry about when she saw her father happy?

  To old Galantry the amazing thing was that he was happy; extraordinarily happy. He had even written a little again too. At first he had been inclined to suspect this particular aspect of his rejuvenation since it smacked a little of a pathetic second adolescence. And that embarrassed him even while it made him laugh. All the same, he remembered, he had never been without talent. His collected poems, published in his early middle-age, had been very successful. His youthful “Why should I so soon despair …” had been very much admired, and seemed likely to pass into the lighter verse of the language. Certainly this brief glory had been offset somewhat by the annoyance he had caused with the controversial essay he wrote for the Quarterly, espounding very dully the old theory that the works of Homer were by several different hands. This had involved him in some vigorous correspondence; some of it downright abusive.

  However, of recent years, he had done very little; his pen had grown heavy, his paper uninviting. Yet now, when the only way to escape Shulie’s invigorating presence was to shut himself up in the library, energy had returned and the blood had crept once again into the fernery of the secret places of his skull. Still, literary aspirations aside, the important thing was that for the first time in his whole life he felt completed. Shulie was his complement.

  It was not her intellectual attainments which so added to him, God knew. At one time, he had toyed with the idea of teaching her to read Latin, since the notion of a young woman who could read nothing but that language amused him. But having begun by trying to teach her the alphabet, he had come up against something quite new in his experience. Anyone who has ever tried to teach a very intelligent and and willing dog to talk must have had something of the same enlightenment.

  Shulie could make rings round him in many ways, but the alphabet was not in her range. She had her own methods of communication. Yet his gain from her was not only physical. She widened and stretched his mind, sharpened his perception, and opened a hitherto undiscovered corner of the world to him. No, he thought, it was no good anyone arguing with him, strange though it was, absurd and inconvenient though it might be; he, Will Galantry, was with Shulie by his side a complete and finished human entity; a man capable of living in, and enjoying that small corner of the world in which he had been destined to take his own particular part in the Round Dance of God.

  Inconvenient it certainly was at times. Shulie was no figure of fantasy, no poet’s dream. Shulie was what she was, Heaven help her. Sometimes old Galantry realized with dismay that he must have been constructed very far one way from the normal to need a complement so distant in the other.

  He turned back from the gate and glanced down the drive expectantly. The young laurels were growing well and the corner of the rose-brick house showed warm, if formal, in the clean, clear morning. Its legal mistress was not visible, but Galantry guessed she was near, and presently he called her.

  After a while, she came out from behind the whitethorn hedge which flanked the laurels, and he realized she had been waiting there until Libby had safely gone. The two women had just met, but that was all. After the first almost silent inspection, Shulie had disappeared from Libby’s sight, and had kept out of it. It was odd behaviour in her, but sensible and not without dignity.

  At the moment he saw at a glance she was in one of her delighted moods. These were completely natural, and followed any period of restraint. She was very near her time, and looked ridiculously burdened in her full dress, like a child with a bundle of washing.

  She had tied a bit of coloured stuff round her neck again. Galantry saw it with despair. He was not at all sure it was not a piece of one of his first wife’s evening gowns; it looked familiar. Also, she was dirty again. Her hands and face were smudged, and the wet grasses had draggled her skirt to the knees.

  “Good God, woman, you’ll take a fever!” In spite of his alarm, Galantry did not put the rebuke he intended into his voice. It was nearly half his own fault she did not obey him, he reflected irritably. If he could only school himself, he might train her a little. His expression betrayed him. She followed his thought and laughed, and lifting her skirts came over the tussocks towards him. Then he was furious. She was bare-foot again, and the grass was drenching. It was a cold spring.

  “The child, Shulie,” he protested in helpless terror, lest he should lose her. “Think of the child.”

  She stopped and stood looking at him with all the knowingness and all the contempt of the outdoor creature on its own safe ground showing in her broad, brown face. She was the master in this situation.

  In spite of, or perhaps because of her pregnancy, she was radiant. There was in her none of the heavy-eyed weariness of the domestic animal in the same physical state.

  “Shulie!” commanded Galantry in sudden rage.

  She turned away from him then and disappeared among the shrubbery. Presently he saw her out on the path again. She was going away from him and was stumping along with exaggerated awkwardness in shoes which she was pretending were too tight.

  She had taken them off behind the hedge while she was waiting for Libby to go, and must have hidden them there.

  It occurred to Galantry once more as he watched her, how inspired he had been to marry her, and thus purchase her loyalty. In any lesser position she would have led him an abominable dance.

  Having had some experience by this time, he ignored her, and turning back, wandered down the path again towards the gate. In a little while he felt her cheek rubbing against his shoulder. She was carrying her shoes in her hand.

  He took no notice of her, and after they had continued some way in silence, she began to wheedle him. This was an extraordinary performance of hers, and Galantry was never tired of hearing it. As far as he could gather, the words meant nothing whatever, or at any rate they were the least part of the charm. Taken as a communication, the things she actually said were ridiculous.

  “Don’t be angry, my dear, my gorgeous. Don’t be angry, my lovely one, my sweet, my master, my King of Egypt, my little one, my darling, my young pig, my great one. Don’t be angry. Don’t be angry. Don’t be angry. Think of something else. Think of the day. Think of the air. Think of the smells. Don’t be angry. Don’t be angry. Think of Shulie. Think of warm Shulie. Don’t be angry. Don’t be angry....”

  She had a naturally soft voice, without as yet, the Romany whine in it, and Galantry had improved her English. Her chant was monotonous and curiously soporific.

  The harangue could go on for eight minutes, as he had found out once with his stop-watch; a private experiment which had tickled him immensely. But the flow, with its endless repetitions and occasional innocent indencies, was but the vehicle. The potency of the performance lay in something purely physical. The urgency of her pleading was a force quite as strong and very nearly as actual as a warm wind, and quite as innocently sensuous as the purring of a leg-rubbing cat.

  If one was not vastly, mentally superior to it, and old enough to be more or less insulated against it, it would have been an alarming thing, Galantry thought. As it was, he found it charming and oddly pathetic.

  “Oh, Shulie,” he said, laughing, “if I were a younger man.…”

  She wriggled free of him, and lifted a face
which shone with life and unschooled intelligence.

  “Then you would hit me,” she said.

  Old Galantry stiffened. It was quite true. She was literally right. Hot blood, young blood, God save him, ordinary blood, would rebel at this elemental coquetry. There was no error in Shulie, no disease, no wrong, nothing even strange. It was he who was removed from Nature. All his superiority over her so vast from one point of view was suddenly made negative when seen from this other angle. In fact, there was, there must be another enormous half of life of which he still knew very little.

  Galantry did not altogether like this idea, and he thrust the thought out of his head, while Shulie, quick to realize she had not pleased, but without knowing in the least why, took the only course known to her and began her outrageous begging again. After a while, they wandered on happily together through the yellow, green and white of that brilliant spring.

  That was the real beginning of the incident which set the whole countryside by the ears, and which was to be reported everywhere where horse and carter should pause, for years afterwards.

  It happened, as that sort of thing so often does, almost as if it were prearranged. Everybody behaving quite normally, and only the combination of their separate natural reactions making the unfortunate whole.

  An hour traipsing round the wet grounds in Shulie’s wake made Galantry himself considerably dishevelled, while she succeeded in getting into the kind of mess which a spaniel achieves in the same pursuit. They were neither of them fashionably dressed, and that was unfortunate, since the older modes were most susceptible to disarray. Beau Brummel was as yet a young man, and his chastening influence had scarcely touched the fashionable world, much less reached Groats.

  Galantry’s mulberry-coloured coat and breeches and gay striped waistcoat showed the wet. His stockings became rouled, and the ribbon which tied his queue had pulled astray, so that it hung in a rat-tail.