Dance of the Years Read online

  “I can see it, but I can’t get it out,” he said.

  The old man did not reply immediately, and when he did his voice was far more soothing than usual. “That’s a bush, is it?” he enquired. “I didn’t think of that. He ain’t been out to pick up anything.”

  “It’s a sliver,” said James after another inspection. “Very likely it’s off the wall.”

  He went round the box looking carefully at the tarred boards which lined it, and did not notice anything unusual in the lack of comment from the doorway. He had to move the bay’s tail to get by at one point. It was lashing, and he protested bitterly to the animal as he brushed it out of his face. He never found the new, white scar on the tar, for as he passed the half-door, a steely hand came over it and drew him out into the sunlight. Jason set him on his feet, and James saw in amazement that he had become sallow, and his thin face looked discoloured and faded round the eyes. The epithets which burst from him were new to the child, but the insult in them was unmistakable. He was astounded and offended, and Larch intervened hastily.

  “You don’t want to go up to a beast you don’t know till you know more,” he said mildly. “That’s an ugly tempered little old brute. He uses his front feet like a man fighting. We’d look wonderfully funny if he’d killed of ye, shu’nt we?”

  James glanced behind him, his nose on a level with the top of the half-door. The horse was watching him with an eye which was like a big, blue alley marble. There was no animosity there, rather a sort of silly, affable dependency. James could not raise any fear of him.

  “Well, he’s got a sliver in his knee,” he said, with dignity. “I’ll get it out if you’re frightened.” He was quite conscious of his condescension, and aware, too, that he was asserting the authority which had been given him by his private understanding with the animal. He glanced from one to the other, and was comforted to see the impression he was making.

  It was true that Larch refused his help, but he did so with sincere respect. He said he would poultice the sliver out later, and would tie up the joint in a cabbage leaf afterwards to cool it. But he made the explanation as if to a colleague. So when they went on towards the mare, James walked abreast of the others. It was only his extreme niceness which prevented him from walking in front of them. Things were going to be all right after all. His momentary lapse had been forgiven, if not perhaps so much by man, at least by fate. His new friend, the horse, had put them in their place for laughing.

  Meanwhile, Larch and Jason were eyeing each other over his head. “That’s a wonderful, strange thing, so it is,” remarked Jason. “Never seen ’em, never handled ’em, but come to it by Nature.”

  “Come to it by Nature,” echoed Larch. “By the blood in his little old mother’s body. Reckon I’ll have to take you down to the forge, boy, and see if you can shoe.”

  The thought appeared to tickle him, and he thumped James familiarly between the shoulder blades. “You got some strength there,” he added, with interest. “Extraordinary strength for a little old boy. Feel of him, master.” Jason felt James’s back as if he had been a little animal.

  “Eh,” he said approvingly, “wonderful strong. He’s a Smith all right. We’ll have to run and take the washing off the line when you come by, young ’un.”

  This subtle joke bewildered James, but it delighted Larch, who wheezed nearly as much as he had done over the mole. James showed the whites of his eyes, as the crackle of laughter shuttled over his head. Dismay crept over him. Something had gone wrong. He had triumphed over the incident of the coach horse, but not in the right way. He had an uncomfortable impression that there was some fate which was being confirmed about him by whatever he did, and it was not altogether something to be proud of. Like most children he was very much aware of fate.

  The mare they went to see was sulking in a shed leading off a barn yard which gave on to the green meadow James had seen through the archway. She was an ugly little thing, and was still smarting and ill-tempered from the hobble and its indignities. Jason said she was a cross-bred cart mare; part Suffolk, and part a Russian “pound-a-legger,” but her virtues were that she was sturdy and soundly healthy, with a lot of work in her.

  The two men looked at her briefly, and shut the door again.

  James listened to their short sentences, and by guessing during the blanks, came to understand that some sort of experiment was afoot. He made cautious enquiries, and was half flattered, and half affronted to find they were prepared to answer him freely, having assumed, no doubt, that since he had shown an affinity with the beasts he would automatically know a great deal about them, and the peculiar mechanism of reproduction generally. He never forgot how offended he was by this; he was not shocked in the ordinary sense, having had a fairly accurate notion of the principal facts for some time, but he was shaken to the roots of his pride by something strange in their manner. There was a sort of “he’s funny, he doesn’t matter” note in their talk, and he found it very hard to bear, especially as he felt that they might possibly be right.

  Suddenly the whole explanation came out baldly; put with all the brutal truthfulness of the East Anglian. Old Larch had no intention of hurting the child; he was simply trying to explain something else, which to his way of thinking was remarkably interesting.

  “The foal will be a half-breed. He won’t be a Blood, but he’ll have Blood in him,” he said earnestly. “Nothing’ll alter that whatever happens. See? Look now, it’s like yourself. You’re old Squire Galantry’s son all right, anyone can see that, but you’ve got your mother in you. You’re a Smith too; a gyppo; borned in a ditch. Nothing’ll alter that, will it? Whatever you do, you can’t never prevent the gyppo showing, and maybe a hundred years to-day you’ll have a grandchild who’s pure gyppo, like as not. Borned with ear-rings, very likely. Nature’s a wonderful little old girl; once she’s got a hold of a thing, she don’t never let that goo.”

  “Har! You don’t want to talk like that together,” said Jason, driving the nail right home in his clumsiness.

  The square little boy in his good clothes stood in the grass with his feet apart, and his weight balanced evenly. He stared at the two unwinking. Slowly the information settled into him; it got down into his mind; it answered questions; cleared up mysteries; filled in gaps. It fitted so neatly, went in so smoothly, that he knew it for the truth at once. Curiously, its immediate effect was calming. The sensation of approaching catastrophe and revelation which had hung over him for a long time now, and which had worked up to a crisis all the day, ceased abruptly. Here it was. Shulie was a gyppo.

  He himself was not the third most important person in the world by thousands. He was half a gyppo. James knew a great deal about gypsies, and he shared the common country view of them. He had seen them, too, and had heard their mendicant whimperings. To him they were the lowest known human race, and he felt Larch and Jason entirely justified in despising them.

  His great strength, which was not only physical, asserted itself. He felt rather cold, but very quiet and self-contained, and very much aware that he must defend himself. He was so fresh and new in heart and mind that he was exquisitely sensitive to all that happened to him, and he knew that it was as though a half-perceived, shadowy creature, who had been walking beside him for a long time, had suddenly got into his skin with him. He looked at Jason coldly.

  “Will the foal be as strong as his father?” he enquired.

  “Very likely stronger,” said Jason; “hope so!”

  “Will he look like him?”

  “Might do.”

  “He’ll have his father in him,” put in Larch, who was still anxious to make it all quite clear. “But he won’t be quite like him; not with that little old mare for a dam. Come what may, he’ll be a bit carty about the head and neck.” And for the life of him he could not help his wet, red-rimmed eyes from shooting a glance over James’s shoulders.

  “More’n likely he’ll be defferent from both of ’em,” said Jason, hurrying the whole subje
ct out of the way. “That’s a toss up every time.”

  Larch laughed. “That’s so. He’ll rise to the highest or sink to the lowest. That’s what an old woman told me at Lavenham Fair. Old gyppo woman, she was. That’s about the size of it. He’ll be a mystery packet.”

  “I see,” said James, with Galantry dignity. “But he won’t ever be a real Blood.”

  “No, no, boy. He won’t never be a Blood.”

  “Not if he wants to?”

  “Not if he tears the heart out on him. Course not. He’ll be a half-bred born, won’t he?”

  “Perhaps he’ll be better,” said James in revolt.

  “I hope he will for the job I want him to do,” said Jason. “That’s why I’m a-breeding of him.”

  James went home by the long way round. He was older than before, he felt, and far more independent. He took a mind to walk round to the hollow behind Lower Wood, where he was not supposed to go. The gypsies were gone from the place, although they had been there recently. The grass was still worn from their wheels, and scarred from their fires. James went carefully round the place and then stalked home through the fields.

  He had no desire to stamp and cavort now, but walked rather sedately, imitating Galantry’s small steps.

  When he got to the house, he ran up the stairs and went into Shulie’s room. It smelled unaired in the hot sunshine, which poured through the closed casement, and was in its customary pickle. James eyed it with new knowledge, and was rather frightened of it. He picked his way to the long mirror and stood looking at himself with a conscious courage which gave him a secret, slightly vicious satisfaction. At first he hoped that the obvious thickness of his neck and chest were something to do with his coat, and when Dorothy found him he was stripped to the waist, his thick bones showing clearly through his soft skin.

  He silenced her scandalized outburst at this evidence of vanity by his first remark.

  “I see I’m a bit carty about the head and neck,” he said. “Oh, and Dorothy, you should have told me I was born in a ditch.”

  Chapter Six

  Some people cannot be bothered with regret. Dorothy was one of these. She had no time for it, she said, and meant that it was too bitter to be borne.

  As soon as she realized that James knew the things which she had been keeping as a secret, she accepted the fact, and went on from there, counting only the advantages of his discovery. Chief among these was the realization that she had no longer any need to watch what she was saying, and at once she raised the startled little boy to the status of an ally, and made him a party to all her hopes and fears for him.

  As they worked together in the herb garden, or as he followed her about upstairs, among the linen presses, or as she sat on his bed at night, she now had so much to tell him about the whole affair that if there had ever been any hope that the brutality of Larch’s revelation would not take too much effect on the child, it was dashed for ever. James heard the whole story over and over again, and a great deal more besides.

  The oddness, the roughness, the general moral unreliability of gypsies, as well as their pariah qualities, were discussed by the two of them at tremendous length; and he heard much that was true and much that was fantasy and country superstition.

  Had he not had so much of Shulie in him, he might have been seriously affected; but he was too healthy for that. For a time it is true, he saw himself as the child with the hump or the club foot must see himself; but fortunately for him, Dorothy was very sensible. Her only wild ideas came from her ignorance of certain facts. Psychologically she was sound as a bell. She stood for no fancy nonsense, and she loved James and her one idea was to do him good. In her programme for him there was no escape by sublimation, no silly turning a disadvantage into an asset, nor yet magnifying it into a life tragedy. She just made him understand he had a special danger. By the time she had a quarter done talking to him, he was still able to consider himself an important addition to the human race, but one who had perhaps, a somewhat uncertain hold on that position. It made him a very good, very serious, very watchful little boy. All this was Dorothy’s doing, and in that she lived on in James until he died.

  The destructive part of her work on James lay, of course, in the things she told him which were not true. It was only because they were lies that her wild ideas about Shulie’s people did such bad work. They were false; they put him out.

  James grew to hate and fear Shulie, so that he lost much of her, and disliked that which he was forced to keep. Had she ever been a mother to him, so that he loved her, the complications might have been serious; but as it was, he was spared that ordeal by confusion. The older James grew the less he liked Shulie. She embarrassed him a hundred times a day. Coarsenesses which tickled old Galantry, who had no trace of them in himself, frightened James, who saw in them reminders of his own impulses. He avoided her as much as possible, and in secret imitated his father and the Vicar, who gave him his first lessons.

  It was over this question of education that James met his first fence. Old Galantry had been to Westminster School, then the first in the land, and had sent all his sons there. But when James’s turn arrived, a hitch occurred. Dorothy had been waiting for something like it. She found out all the details, passed them through the mill of her indignation, and let James have the result. The trouble was that about the time when James should have gone to the school, Galantry’s first grandchild, eldest son of Young Will and his wife, was due to go there also; and Young Will’s father-in-law sent him down to see Galantry with urgent representations that the uncle and nephew should not be allowed to be educated together. It was a narrow, unkindly move, infuriating to old Galantry and not pleasant for either of his sons, but it marked a change, a new era. The casual days of the eighteenth century had gone.

  Young Will arrived unexpectedly one hot Saturday afternoon about four o’clock, when James was sitting hidden in the shrubbery, a place of which he was very fond. He saw his half brother get out of the little box carriage, and noticed that both master and servant were in furious tempers. The man went round to the yard and the visitor strode into the house. James only saw his face for a moment, but he saw that he was ashamed-angry. These fine distinctions in emotion were very clear to James, and he never understood that he saw them more easily than do most people. On this occasion he was alarmed, for ashamed-anger he well knew was the most unreasonable, erratic anger of all. He kept out of the way all day, and the next thing he remembered about the incident was himself eating kidneys toasted on a fork for his supper in the breakfast-room, while Richard stood waiting to take him in to see his father and the newcomer, who were dining by themselves.

  He remembered afterwards the feeling of obstinate pleasure in the food slowly wearing down his apprehension about the coming interview. As they went through the hall, he looked up and saw Shulie peering over the banisters; curiosity and excitement and nervousness in her face. It was so exactly what he was feeling himself that he was suddenly angry with her as if she had taken something from him instead of him taking it from her. He scowled at her, and she drew back at once, eyeing him sulkily like another child. Even Richard was inquisitive. It was evident that something very unusual was happening, for old Galantry belonged to a period when no gentleman saw anybody, or anything for that matter, just after dinner at night.

  James always liked the dining-room because it was cool and opulent, with shining wood and red and gold walls. It had a decent, solid grandeur about it, which always made him feel secure. To-night it looked more luxuriant than ever, for it was partially in shadow, and the sunset light came in yellow and caressing through the open west windows. Dorothy had set out the best silver, and the air was heavy with flowers and the intimate perfume of Burgundy.

  The two men sat facing one another, and the first thing that struck James when he saw them was that they were terrifyingly alike. They were dressed very differently, for Young Will had gone over to the very high breeches and very short waistcoat that Mr. Topham had made so
fashionable. But in spite of that, James saw them as almost identical; a man both old and young. The sight was very nearly too much for him; he nearly panicked with rage and jealousy.

  Young Will was looking at him with the same speculation which he had sometimes seen in his father’s face, and they were still staring at one another when old Galantry barked at James telling him to pay his duty to his half-brother. James had never merited this tone from anyone before, and it occurred to him that he must be on show in some way, since Jason used the same voice to an animal he was selling. So he went forward at once and bowed to the younger man in the way the Vicar had taught him, and enquired most solicitously how he did.

  Because the obeisance was old fashioned it pleased Galantry, and struck Young Will as false; but it was gracefully done, and there was nothing in it to complain about. Young Will rubbed his ear uneasily; a gesture of his father’s, which sent another stab of jealousy through James.

  “Oh, I know, I know,” Young Will said uncomfortably. “He’s a good fellow. How d’ye do, James? You’ve got a mighty pair of shoulders on you, brother. But that’s not the point, is it, sir?” he added, turning to his father. “It’s the damned silly tale. Be reasonable.”

  “I resent it,” said old Galantry warningly. “I resent it very much, you know.”

  “Not nearly so much as you’d resent an intimation from the school.” The words were only muttered, and Young Will stared moodily into the horn of his wine-glass. He knew his mission was vulgar, and he disliked it intensely.

  Old Galantry grew brick coloured. He clapped his hand to the place where his sword would have been had he not long since given up wearing one.

  “I hope that’s not a threat, sir,” he said.

  “No, sir. It’s not.” Young Will looked and sounded wretched, and the phrases of the time when polite talking was as much an art as fencing could not hide his embarrassment.

  “I only feel that if you persist in your intention, you’ll get snubbed, sir, and the boy’s life will be a burden to him, and to any other child closely connected with him. I wonder you care to subject my young half-brother here to the ridicule he’d be bound to encounter. You are out of touch, sir. The whole fashionable universe is changing. The mode to-day is to be most nice, most particular. The story has been out once and will be revived. Forgive me, sir, but you know as well as I do that although by no means disgraceful, thirty years ago it would have got the whole family into one duel after another. To-day I assure you it will involve laughter, insults, and a deal of unhappiness for two children in a very fierce school.”