Dance of the Years Page 4

  There was nothing sentimental in the gesture. On the contrary, he he made the arrangement with broken-hearted embarrassment, for he would have done the same thing to entice home a sulky or wounded dog. He was tired, and as he leaned back in his chair he felt old and a fool. The consequences of his folly were bouncing all over him, like apples from an overturned barrel. The other side of his distress, the fear, the aching misery, which was not his by right, but appeared to belong to a younger Galantry cheated out of it by circumstance so long before, still startled him.

  He sat there waiting until the dawn.

  Jason found Shulie at three in the morning. It was still dark and very sharp weather. He and old Larch were walking back to the farm kitchen after a night of successful labour in the barn, and their minds were full of the difficulties of birth. Jason was still young at that time, but he had already begun to get the shiny, corded appearance, which stamped ‘horse’ all over him when he got older. Larch was old already; a placid, gentle old man. Nothing worried or surprised him, and his voice was as soothing as his enormous seamy hands.

  Jason, who had little respect for anything on two legs and something like veneration for anything on four, loved him on occasions like this, and was always nervous in case the old man died or got seized up with the rheumatics. He was thinking of heating the old chap with something that would warm the blood of a jack fish, when they heard a sound almost at their feet.

  Jason was carrying the lantern, and he raised it. He saw the situation immediately.

  Back in the summer the top of a badly-stacked waggon load of hay had floundered off into an old dry ditch just outside the farm gate. At the time it had been protected casually with a faggot or two from a nearby pile, and Jason had been meaning to have the whole thing cleared, but had never got round to sparing the labour. Now a dark hole marked the mouth of a little cave in it, and out of the hole hung a corner of green satin petticoat.

  Both men had heard the story, of course.

  Richard’s visit to the Home Farm, although discreet, had not really deceived anybody. Besides the whole countryside was waiting for the gypsy to run away, and had been so waiting for a twelvemonth.

  Jason whistled through his teeth. “We’d better go up to the Hall,” he said softly. But before Larch nodded the sound which had first arrrested them came again, and the old man took the lantern.

  “Reckon there’s summat to do,” he observed briefly. “Let me get down, master, will ’ee? Let me get down in ’ere.”

  So Larch delivered the last son old Galantry ever had, and his household felt it was disgraced and humiliated.

  As he stood on the far side of the cart track in the darkness, Jason smelled the sweet hay and the clean morning air, which no red curtains had polluted, and he heard the old horseman talking as he had heard him a hundred times before, soothing, caressing, and so quiet that his voice might have been a stream mumbling. It was meaningless sound most of the time, sometimes sharp and almost brutally commanding, and then soft again, gentle and persuasive.

  “Now, now. Now, now. Har! There, there. Now, now. Yes, yes. Yes. A good little old gel. A good little old gel. Soon, soon. Now, now.”

  The sky was lightening, the birds had started to whistle, and Jason was chilled to the bone. The yellow lantern glow shining through the dry grasses, and the spiky silhouette of the faggots, now obscuring, now revealing outlines and colours within, reminded him of something which he felt uncomfortably was Popery.

  There was no need to ask if the woman was alive, for he could hear her heavy breathing. She was a good ’un in one respect, anyway, he thought, for there was not a sound out of her now that she knew that she was not alone.

  Now the crisis was rising again. He could hear the quiet voice of Larch, the rustling, the single sound from the woman, the agonized, heroic breathing.…

  The shocking impropriety of the whole affair burst on Jason suddenly; colour flooded his face, and the country boy still in him swept aside the purely veterinary considerations which until now had preoccupied him.

  “I’ll goo down to the house and get my missus,” he said aloud over his shoulder, and set off at a trot. But before he had got a couple of yards, a new sound altogether cut through the morning.

  It was the great, first cry; always familiar, yet always terrible. It rang out challengingly over the busy growing world. Loud and triumphant and furious. An angry bellow from the ever-returning conqueror of the earth come back again to battle for his inheritance. Another reinforcement from the inexhaustible reserve.

  Jason waited, and Larch’s voice, delighted as it always was at such times, answered the question that had been in his mind.

  “A little old boy!” he was shouting amid the roaring, “a little old boy! Come up my dearie, come up my lady, come up my smart, pretty girl. A great, shouting little old boy; fine and fierce as a little old bull. Holler, my little old ’un; holler, will ’ee. Do ’ee good, and won’t hurt I!”

  At noon when Galantry was asleep in his chair with his jaw dropped like a dead man’s, and Shulie and the baby were sleeping too, with the hated curtains torn down round the naked bed, the sun was up and the doors were open and the regular, sensible ritual of an ordered, civilized day was in full swing once more.

  Pale after the night’s insufferable affront, Dorothy met Richard in the hall.

  “Not a sign of fever. Not a scratch on the boy, and not a sneeze in either of them,” she said, continuing aloud the indignant harangue which had been going on in her mind for the best part of six hours. “But God knows what sort of a man he’ll be after a start like that.”

  “That’s his look-out,” said Richard, adding with the finality and brutality of his kind, age and country: “He can’t never be a gentleman. That’s one thing certain sure.”

  Chapter Four

  They christened him James; partly because it seemed a good manly name, but also because as far as Galantry knew, no one in the family had ever borne it, and so no one could possibly be offended.

  James never altered it, even when he altered his surname, and he never allowed anyone to call him Jimmy. But nevertheless, for the whole of his life he privately considered it a low, inferior sort of name, just as the name William was always surrounded in his mind with a quite unreasonable halo of importance and superiority.

  It was typical of him that he never did get away from this idiotic piece of mental rubbish, and it never occurred to him to do anything about it save to accept it as a natural evil. That was the Shulie in him. It used to make him laugh though sometimes, and that was old Will Galantry in him. On the whole these two settled down very peaceably in the boy, though that belongs to later in the story.

  Until he was seven years and nine months old, the young James firmly believed he had inherited the earth. There was little to prevent him getting this idea. There were few visitors to the house in those years, and when one did come, Dorothy always bundled James out of the way; first because he was so dark, and secondly because she loved him so.

  This passion of hers developed in his babyhood, much to her own embarrassment, and to all the country folks’ good-humoured amusement for she was considered to be “wonderfully proud,” and the kind of woman who would not have had children of her own, anyway. Very soon she gave up pretending, and they gave up laughing, and James first belonged to her and afterwards when he could talk and walk, she to him.

  It was Shulie’s fault. Shulie was as good a mother as is any other nice, healthy animal. Once her baby was weaned, it became to her just another member of the family, not specially her own. Since she had no sentimentalities or conventions in the matter, she behaved naturally and returned her undivided affection to Galantry, although by him she had no more children.

  When Galantry married her, he knew only that she would not dare to leave him because if she did her own people would not take her back. He never did realize that to her, the marriage tie went far deeper than that.

  Sometimes in the early years, wh
en he saw her from his window standing in the air, her arms outstretched, enjoying the rough, sensuous caress of the wind, he would be overtaken by a sudden terror, and feared that he might become hag-ridden by his conscience urging him to let her go free. This was a fantastic idea as he knew perfectly well, for she was his wife and the mother of his child, but he was a man who played with his thoughts and got much of his entertainment from them. Yet whenever in that nagging self torture, which is the vice of the introspective, he used to edge up to the subject, he was always first gladdened, and then humbled, and to be honest, made to be rather puzzled to find her clinging to his dry, chilly body in a dumb agony of youth and warmth.

  Old Galantry never did quite understand this, and he used to wonder if she was obstinately making the best of her destiny. The notion that she loved him because he was her husband, and that a cunning, if primitive mixture of training and breeding had made that fact well-nigh magical to her, never came into his mind. He saw that she was grateful for his tenderness, and he thought that very sweet in her, but he never knew how passionately grateful she was, or dreamed that she would still have loved and waited on him had he treated her like a dog. In the end he gave up fidgeting about it, and took what the gods had given him, but to his dying day he kept her away from younger men.

  So James grew up on his own, with Dorothy as his protector, keeper and slave. He was an odd-looking child from the beginning. He was wedge-shaped and not very tall, and he had the barrel chest of some ancestor of Shulie’s; some past smith, swinging his hammer in the greenwood, had laid the foundations of that torso. It sat oddly on the fine, aristocratic legs Galantry had had from his mother, and of which she had been so proud. These did not please James so well. All his life he had a complex about legs, insisting that they should be stout and not too long; and this in general, and not only for himself, which would have been reasonable. His hands were Galantry’s too; so like, that they were almost replicas. They were small, artistic, and extraordinarily sensitive at the finger tips. His head resembled neither parent’s particularly; it was square, and set very firmly on the short, thick neck of a Smith. He was dark, too, darker even than his mother, and he had her hair, which curled snakily to his poll; while the down on his body, over his cheek bones, and on his forearms, and even between his shoulder blades, was blue dark, even in infancy. The top part of his face was like his father’s, and they had the same heavy-lidded eyes, which should have been mournful, but which were always amused. Galantry had noticed those eyes in all his children, and his own father had had them, as had one of his grandparents also. They interested him, but what the joke had been which had brought that amusement into eyes which generations of experience had made sad, he could not imagine.

  James had a coarse, characterful mouth, not unlike Shulie’s, but without quite her innocence. In later life it became hard, but when he was a child it was loose and, as the country people said, lustful. A rum-looking little boy, strong as a lion.

  He governed Dorothy from an early age. Had he been her own son she would never have put up with it, but she was a great one for knowing her place, and she taught him to know it too. His parents were kind to him, but they were remote, always absorbed in themselves, and their indifference kept him if not humble, at least reasonable, so that he grew up to be self-reliant, convinced of his third place in the order of superiority, but schooled by the tidy, strictly common-sense discipline of Dorothy’s background.

  Dorothy made him physically clean and mentally honest, and taught him that God would get at him and persecute him if he was not. Since he had Shulie’s simplicity and credulousness, he believed her literally and was very careful. One thing she taught him by mistake, though, and it was unfortunate because it was not true. Dorothy convinced James that there was a lower order of mortals who adored him, and who existed to serve him because he was somehow special. Not a soul breathed a word, even hinting at the scandal (and it was still a real scandal and all over the county) in his hearing. Dorothy saw to that herself, and not only for the child’s sake. Her particular world depended on old Galantry’s credit as an important, trustworthy gentleman being kept good. However, nothing Dorothy could do could disguise Shulie; even at the age of six James began to notice that there was something very unusual about her. Dorothy taught him one set of rigid rules on which, so he came to understand, both his safety and his interesting quality of specialness depended; Shulie broke all these flagrantly, and yet he saw she remained unchastened by God, and was still apparently the second most important person in the house. For a long time James could get no sense out of Dorothy on this subject, and while it did not bother him particularly, it went down in his mind as a mystery.

  One day, however, she said something which gave him an idea that she might not always tell him all she knew. He found that terrifying, and it offended him also, for he thought it impudent in her. No one ever realized where James got his pride, for it was not a peculiarity of the Galantry’s; yet goodness knows the answer was there plain enough. James got his pride from Dorothy. She fed it to him with his pap, and her love for him, which like any other love, was a creative force, etched it on his character indelibly. So it was not really extraordinary after all; few diseases are necessarily hereditary.

  The first clue Dorothy gave him about Shulie was the interesting thing she said about spitting in the house.

  “No,” she thundered, “no, no, no! You mayn’t never do it, even if your Ma do. Do your Papa spit? Do I spit?”

  Her final phrase put James on to the truth, since it removed the possibility that spitting might be one of those things permissible in privileged women alone. Dorothy would not amplify her statement, and he caught the idea then for the first time that there was something radically wrong with Shulie.

  There were several peculiar circumstances attending this otherwise trivial incident. In the first place, on receiving the idea, the young James was seized with a premonition. It was one of the first of a long line of them, stretching not only throughout his own lifetime, but persisting to the third and fourth generation.

  These impressions of the future, and all the other sensitivenesses which were kin with them, were the cause of so much pride, so much superstition, muddle and fuss generally, on so many different occasions, that perhaps it would be better to spend a little time on the one manifest on this occasion which was a perfect and simple example.

  James merely felt that he suddenly knew something with his head which all the rest of him had known for a very long time. That thing was that there was something dangerous to his comfort and unlucky and inescapable for him in Shulie. It was no vague impression. It clamped down upon him; a sensation of disaster so strange and inexplicable that he began to cry out at the top of his voice that he was frightened. He bellowed with fear, growing crimson in the face as if he were choking. Dorothy caught him in her arms. She hated any suggestion that James was “different,” especially in a psychic or magical fashion. That stressed the gypsy element far too much. Already there were a great many tales about Shulie in this respect; these had been bound to arise for the whole countryside was steeped in superstition concerning the gypsies. The truth, at any rate as far as Shulie was concerned, lay in two facts.

  The first was that the actual physical life in her was so powerful that she could pass on a little of it when emotion freed it. No one called it animal magnetism at that time.

  The second was simply that certain of her senses were animal sharp, and she was apt to feel a message from any of these so acutely that she was absorbed by it, and had no time to analyse the sensation.

  There were times, therefore, when she appeared prophetic, inasmuch as she behaved like the animal who pulls up and refuses to move just before the bridge breaks, or the tree crashes across the path. It was magic of a kind all right, but no more of the devil than many other secrets of the earth. However, at the time there were several mysteries.

  When old Squire Green, Galantry’s neighbour, who had been away at Wells
recuperating from his excesses, came over to see his old friend’s new folly, Galantry thought he looked very much better, but Shulie saw grey under his tan, and smelt a very faint and terrifying odour; and she was so overwhelmed by the recollection which it conjured up, of the ritual of a burning pyre of a caravan far back in her childhood, that she flew into a panic, grew pale herself, and began to cry. She would say nothing to Galantry afterwards except that she “smelled death.” This was the literal truth, but as a remark it exasperated him, and when old Philip took ill some days after, and died in a week or so in circumstances Doctor Wild did not altogether understand, since cancer of the upper bowel was not in his experience, there was quite a lot of talk about “Galantry’s witch,” and the old man himself looked at her curiously.

  There were other incidents, too. She could often smell out things which had been mislaid, and could tell if a stranger had recently been in the house. She could never give any satisfactory explanation of her powers, and on the occasion on which she suddenly took an aversion to the parlour hearth, and insisted on Galantry leaving it, the great fall of burning soot which smothered half the room some hours later, surprised her as much as it did anybody else. But whereas after it had happened, she merely felt happy and relieved, they were upset and mystified, and knew not whether to blame her for making it happen, or for not warning them that it was about to do so.

  All this sort of thing made for a great deal of mystery and uncertainty, and Dorothy disliked it because she felt it was “gypsy,” and she watched James most anxiously for any sign of the streak. She did her best with him; she cut his hair as short as she dared to try to get the curl out, washed him nightly in lemon water in a pathetic attempt to whiten his skin, raved at him unreasonably for the least untidiness, and even taught him to feel that his pleasure in the open air was not quite what was expected of him.