Dance of the Years (26 page)

James developed some queer habits in the fifteen years after Deborah was born. The drives in the park, for instance, those were unusual. They came about like this. One spring day, James having purchased a new gig with rubber-tyred wheels by Mr. Reading, then practically the first of its kind, decided to take Jinny for a drive through the town to Hyde Park and back. He was always afraid that she might catch cold, for he hated illness, and on this occasion he instructed her to wear her old, thick brown dress, and her short fur jacket and muff, even if they were not particularly fashionable. Jinny did as she was told, of course, and she looked well enough, but not expensive. They had just reached the Park and were enjoying the smooth motion of the wheels when they both became aware of a young man who was walking on the footway. As soon as he caught sight of Jinny he grew
very pale, and with a fumbling gesture which betrayed him, raised his hat. Jinny bowed, but she closed her eyes like a child, and was still icy cold when she returned home.

James looked squarely at young Frank Castor, whom he had never seen before. He recognized him at once because of the likeness to his father. That was all; the gig flashed by, and James appeared to have missed the incident. He spoke to Jinny of other things, and refused to see anything odd in her faint replies. Yet on his way home he called in at Jay's and bought her a complete outfit, choosing the clothes himself, and turning the shop upside down until she appeared to his satisfaction.

The following day he drove her through the Park again, all dressed up in her new clothes, but this time without encountering anyone of interest.

Blackberry might easily have done such a thing. James knew that and did not care. Moreover, he did it again on the corresponding date the following year, but this time he bought Jinny's outfit some days earlier. It was on the fifth of April, and he did it every year so that it became a tradition. Never once did he give any explanation to his wife, and never did they meet Frank Castor again.

If James wondered what Jinny thought about it, he did not think very hard, for he was not by nature a cruel man.

There were other minor evidences of the change in James.

For one thing, he produced a theory that all lawyers were dishonest, simply so that many of his transactions might be done personally in cash. In true gypsy fashion he liked the gold money, and the small drawers in the bureau in his own sitting-room were frequently stuffed with it.

Then, when his own black curls thinned, as they did early, he went with much secrecy to Head, the famous wig-maker, and got himself a toupé. When he died there were thirty of these, gradually fading from black to grey, from grey to white, all set neatly on little stands in his cupboard.

His politics, which were Liberal, became more rigid with the years; his autocratic behaviour at home grew more definite. He collected and used a vast store of aphorisms, and his pride and dignity became enormous.

Yet if James was fading, if the flower of his life was widening to its fullest extent, if the petals were separating one from another and would soon begin to curl, leaving the hard green fruit of the man bare and unlovely, the plant was not dying by any means. Already the shoots around him were hardening and forming into buds. Among them the foreign shaft which was William was growing very tall and distinctive.

James would never have agreed that it was social stability which dominated his life, yet all the struggle and consequent growth in it arose from that. James put his faith in imaginary princes; William put his in visible cash.

There was one good thing about William: he did work. Of all the Galantrys—and, at any rate, he bore that name—he alone had the driving itch for toil without which few men achieve material success. He had other peculiarities also, and even before his quasi-religious phase, and Spurgeon, and that remarkable invention of his,
The Converted World
, he exhibited traits which were foreign and extraordinary to the family.

At seventeen, with four years of his apprenticeship done, William was a handsome, intelligent and serious young man. Mrs. Timson was hardening into a bitterly disappointed woman, keeping regret and disillusion at bay with a blind barrier of sheer silliness in these days, and she used to whisper to her eldest son (the other William, always called Willitimson) that poor Jinny's boy looked like a Somebody. This always annoyed Willitimson, who had taken over the firm on his father's death, and was engaged to marry the young widow of his father's junior partner, and thus was William's absolute boss.

He was an undistinguished little person himself, and he resented his nephew's tall superiority, although he loved his sister, Jinny.

William began with many advantages. The social stability for which James had sacrificed so much was his by right; his father was an independent gentleman, his manners were good, and his speech fashionable, and his mother was the sister of the head of the firm.

The other apprentices were jealous of him to begin with, but his self-assurance made it a pleasure to him to go out of his way to be charming to them, while his brains and energy made him their leader.

To Jinny he was Frank come back. She instructed him early and honestly in the mechanics of sex, and after that she thought him perfect. To her he was not only the real Frank, but Frank made right, the ideal in whom she had hoped and believed. William was very like his father; he had the cold blue Castor eyes which could express utter disbelief with a blankness which was frightening. They
were like a blue sea on a bitterly cold day. In all his life they never changed; they often laughed, but never warmed. For the rest, he had a really wonderful head covered with thick gold hair, which looked as if it was a deeper gold underneath; a strong grave face, and a magnificent carriage. Even in age he never lost that stance, and his grandchildren noticing it assumed for quite a time that he was God. It was typical of him that this mistake never shocked him.

To James he was Edwin Castor come out of the misty clouds where James himself had put him. As he grew to know the boy, he felt he was getting to know the man he had admired from a distance. Naturally William was not, in youth, nearly so clever or experienced as James, and James observing that was delighted, for he felt he was catching up with his main ideal at last. It made him very kind to William. He took him into his life and obtained pleasure from teaching such an apt pupil the gentle art of doing business.

The Victorian English, for all their faults, taught the modern world to do business, and at that time the cult was in full flower in London. James taught William what he had inherited from Shulie's ancestors, what he had learned in Mr. Philby's school, what Jed and Gustus had taught him, and one or two things he had found out for himself. As his share, William brought Castor's brain to bear on the subject, and also his other principal quality, the one Jinny had given him—courage. At an early age he began to show considerable gifts.

James taught William one other thing. It was that discovery of his about the liberation which lies in expression. It was not easy for James to pass this on, for he had never learned how to set himself free, but William grasped the theory. He had not the gift of words, but he saw what they were for and what they could do. He made this piece of information a very useful asset.

One of the more interesting things about William was that he never had any fear of not being able to make a living. Nearly everyone in his teens would seem to experience that terror, but not he. It was not even that he did not quite realize what it quite meant, for his experience at Timson's had shown him early what the struggle in the commercial world was like at that time. William saw what was required of him, and he thought he could do it on his head. He could, too; that was what startled James.

During his apprenticeship William was handicapped by grim rules. For seven years he was bound to work for nominal pay with only the prospect of a very unremunerative job at the end of it. Moreover, his future prospects at Timson's, whatever they sounded like to James and Jinny in Willitimson's drawing-room, were not in reality particularly good. William realized that very early on. Willitimson's new bride already had a son of seven, a strong-looking child, and William
knew that it would not be the clever nephew who would get any place in the sun in the firm. Besides, he saw no point in doing business that way. He felt himself intrinsically better than Willitimson, and any in his employ. He felt he was so far removed from them that the notion of taking anything from them disgusted him. He decided to make his own way.

There was considerable impudence in the decision, for this was the lush summer of English commerce; not the autumn, not the harvest, but the summer, when most of the fruits were visible but not quite ripe. The promise of wealth and comfort and unimagined luxury spread out on all sides, and everyone was tending his own little patch with the jealousy and excitement of the gardener a couple of weeks before the Show. At such a time it was not easy to consider sharing; in harvest, perhaps, but not now, in summer. Not now when the gold was not fully ripe.

The basic scheme of the middle classes, with its two horns—wealth and progeny—was well under way. Everywhere there were vast families growing up to guard and live upon the coming fortunes; enough was going to have to be a lot. It was a greedy, anticipatory time.

Into this came William, clear-headed, self-confident, and cold as an empty hearth. His first move was to notice the need for a new quick-drying paint, and to hunt up a chemist who could get him out a formula for one. While he was still articled to Timson's it was of little use to him, since anything he produced during that time automatically belonged to them, but on the day he was free he applied for a patent and disclosed his secret to Willitimson. The result was an education to him.

The formula was not a fortune creator, but it was a useful thing, and Willitimson thought it might be worth investigating. He also thought William worth keeping, and after a long consultation with James he decided to give William the unique opportunity of serving another long apprenticeship, this time in the new printing firm which Timson's had acquired.

Willitimson promised many concessions in the new agreement; all fees were to be waived, and the nominal pittance increased to as much as half a sovereign a week. James might not have accepted the offer had it not been that he was first and foremost a countryman, and still clung to the belief in the sacred tie between blood and blood. To his mind the important thing was that Willitimson was Jinny's brother, so when the man told his sister that he would look after her son, James believed him. William was coldly angry at the decision, but he made no objection and accepted his lot with a show of virtuous obedience.

William had been brought up by Jinny, and Jinny had tried to give him her own secret, but no one on earth can teach anyone else's heart to be true; and so it was with her teaching as it had been with James's. William saw the sense of the thing without being able to grasp the power himself.

William learnt from Jinny that it paid to be good, and became, so people said, a “prize hypocrite” in a period when the species flourished. In many ways he was successful, but always he was a dancer who never heard the tune, and a great many of the steps he took certainly went against the swing and put other people out.

He went to “Morland and Jones,” the printers, in humility and obedience, and found a new trade to learn and a new part of the City to explore in Curry Street, round at the back of Shoe Lane. Whilst there he had several new ideas. They were small printers with one or two good accounts, the main one of which was a Government contract for the printing of pawn tickets; but they had other interests, including a little periodical called
The Elbow Chair
. This remarkable journal was produced at threepence and came out every fortnight. Its circulation never exceeded twelve thousand copies, but those were actually bought by the public, and it supported a bony young man called Mellish and his old father, who had started the venture.

These two, together with a boy whom William always identified with Smike in
Nicholas Nickleby
, wrote and laid out the entire paper, which was only sixteen quarto-size pages.

For a time William could not understand how such a journal sold at all, until it dawned upon him that it was the double page on chess, with its problems and its news of tournaments, and other gossip about the game, which was its main attraction. The bright paragraphs on the front page, which were written by Mellish, and the serial story inside which was written by Mellish's father, were apparently nothing to do with the case. Every three months an article by a master of the game saved the wavering sale, and a small weekly prize for a problem steadied the boat.

William was most interested. He worked out the cost of the printing, the office and the distribution, and soon became fascinated. He saw the venture in its clearest and most material light. To him it appeared as a method of selling low-grade bulk paper at forty times its value, with the added advantage that the more of it one sold the higher the profit became. He saw, too, that it was the ink on the paper which did the selling, so that the only real problem was which words to print with the ink. Having arrived at this discovery, he put it by for a little and began to look about him, but he took care to make good friends with young Mellish, and went out of his way to be helpful to him.

The idea came later, but already its inspiration was in being.

At the Surrey Music Hall, behind James's house, there had been lately scenes of great excitement over some performances of an unusual kind. A new prophet had taken to teaching in that wilderness, and already there was a flutter about him in many circles. Spurgeon had been born practically next door to Mr. Philby's school. For a time he had been the boy preacher of the Eastern Counties, and now had come to London to draw the Town as if he were, as some of the more outspoken journals said contemptuously, “Grimaldi in a halo.” He was a Dissenter, at that time a Baptist, before he split the Evangelicals over the relative unimportance of Immersion, and he was one of those sturdy East Coast men who see what they do see so vividly that there is no room in their universe for anything else.