Dance of the Years (2 page)

Old Galantry knew a little about the gypsies and their mysterious ways. At one time he had considered them a romantic tribe, but that was a delusion from which he had recovered on making their acquaintance. He knew that if the girl was one of the Smith tribe, as he thought she was, she would find no refuge among her own people if she deserted a lawfully wedded husband, especially if he were a man of authority. Moreover, the law of the land still gave a man pretty nearly absolute powers over his wife. Once he married her there would be no humiliating running away.

That, as near as can be set down on paper, is the truth of what happened to Galantry, and how he came to do what he did, and why the child was so dark. It made a tremendous amount of trouble from the beginning.

The gypsies were not only considered by the entire countryside to be unfit for civilized society, but some of them were; and when Jason remarked that “the old fellow might as well have married a pig,” he spoke with that awful reasonableness and complete disregard for anybody or anything but his own honest opinion, which the East Country folk have always possessed.

Shulie (everybody knew what that was short for and it did not help, although it made old Galantry laugh) never took kindly to the house, and was sullen and dirty in it, but she was given to sudden fits of exalted happiness when in the open air, and would sometimes stand in the wind with her arms thrown out, her full breasts bursting at her bodice, and her dark hair, which was oily and curling, blowing out behind her. She was very young and some people were half sorry for her at those times, but their pity did not last because, although docile, she really was abominably uncouth. Also, of course, the ‘days of power' passed.

At the time, Galantry told nobody outside his own household, and managed the thing very quietly. He had no near neighbours that winter, while the country folk were so deeply and completely shocked that they kept the story comparatively dark, fearing it might somehow reflect disgrace on the very district. In self-defence they altered the
facts a little, too, and spoke primly of ‘a young country person.' Thus, quite unconsciously, giving the impression that Galantry had gone soft in old age, and had married one of his own maidservants. This was a jolly story, but better than the truth, which struck nobody as funny.

Shulie was thrust into a decent stuff dress, which came down to the slippers she would keep discarding. In the end they kept her out of sight as much as possible, but by the time the first family had even heard of the marriage, and came rushing down in panic to find it legal and unalterable, she was seven months with child; while old Galantry, although in undisputable possession of his senses, was delighted and tremendously amused and proud of himself.

It was six years now since the first Mrs. Galantry had been carried down the hill to the churchyard, and ever since that day Dorothy Holding, who was a maid at five pounds a year and all found, had been the actual mistress of Groats. In a sense, she had held the office before then, but nobody ever suggested that she did not know her place.

The fact was that the first Mrs. Galantry had been a charming little woman with about as much sense at fifty as she had possessed at fourteen. She had had china-blue eyes, a lovely shape, no energy whatever, great obstinacy, and a totally erroneous theory that was she a natural blue-stocking. Her main affectation, this pretention to a rare, God-given appreciation of letters, persisted all her life. She confused it with an accomplishment and treated it as if it had been a neat way with a song, or a knack of doing her hair.

In fact, she flourished it prettily. She brought it out in the evening before guests, taught her children to imagine it was far more mysterious and important than it could ever have been if genuine, and generally played the goat with it in a way which amused her husband in his youth, embarrassed him in his middle age, and later on filled him with fury.

However, quite apart from her intellectual pretensions, the good lady was no housekeeper, and did not even pretend to be one, which was at least original in her, for at that time the attribute was not only
fashionable, but essential, if a woman was to be mistress in her own house.

In the wilds surrounding Groats, every winter was a time of siege. The parishes round about had not done their duty by the roads, and as yet the very new macadaming had come nowhere near them. When the first heavy rains turned the clay to a quagmire, Groats was practically cut off from wheeled traffic. Somebody had to keep the machinery of civilized living going, and gradually Dorothy Holding, who had begun work in the dairy when she was seven, and had risen slowly to be housekeeper, took more and more responsibility for the general comfort. When the first Mrs. Galantry died, she took it all.

Dorothy was born for it. She was one of those women who remain unaltered by any change in the social life of the century. In Saxon hall, Caroline still-room, or the manager's room in the latest block of service flats, wherever or whenever a large household has had to be fed, cleaned, bedded and controlled, one of the Dorothy Holdings of the world has bustled there, secret, single-minded, and quite extraordinarily powerful.

In the end, whatever the theories of civilized living, the answer lies in them. Fly to the secret parts of the earth and they are there, looking out casually and with preoccupied eyes from the doorways of the largest huts; come back to the newest communal feeding centre and they are there again, selfless, untiring, thinking of something else. They are the ultimate bosses whenever man pauses for a moment in his hag-ridden experimenting to enjoy the earth.

Old Galantry was always saying this sort of thing to Dorothy, making fun of her cautiously, as intellectual men do of practical women of whom they are more than half terrified. His favourite remark was that when the world ended, and all the dead arose prodigiously hungry no doubt, since their humanity was to be restored to them, some helpful person would be certain to set about directing a fair and orderly distribution of the loaves and fishes, and that that person, as sure as God made little apples, would be Dorothy Holding.

She never responded to this in any way, and her silence used to disconcert him. He would try to re-establish his superiority by marvelling to himself at her stupidity, but he was never quite sure how much of a fool she was.

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.

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.