Dance of the Years (23 page)

He put these aside and made up his accounts very carefully. But afterwards, just before he put everything back, he took up the note on the unfaded paper and looked at the scribbled line again.

James, O James
. That was all. He sat bent over the desk looking at it. Had it not been for that unexpected glimpse of the fair-ground preparations he might have wavered badly even then. But that glimpse was the straw which brought the scales down on the sober side.

The little house which delighted him so, the solidarity, the respectability, were all also a little confining. He felt them like harness round him, smart and shiny harness, but bonds nevertheless. It seemed to James that the glimpse of the Surrey Gardens had reminded him of the advantages of harness.

Yet Phœbe's letter did not leave him unmoved. He was only just becoming used to life alone. At first there had been fearful moments, and even now they recurred occasionally when he felt lost and had known himself to be but half a thing without her.

The fundamental James, who had never altered save to get extra mental belongings since he was first able to think, belonged to Phœbe and she to him. He was so cold without her. Her letter wrung him because it was entirely comprehensible to him; he knew exactly what she had thought, and how she had felt when she set down the words. Had she written him a book she could have told him little more about herself.

It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment—all these spring on a man, inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared. James, who had done with youth, was suddenly stabbed so painfully by it that the tears came into his eyes. He tore up the letter into stamp-sized pieces, and was going to stuff them into the grate when he changed his mind, knowing it was weakness. He put the pieces into the snuff box and packed it back carefully into the secret drawer. Then he went down the stairs and out of the house, locking the front door behind him.

He felt much as he had done on first leaving Groats; a great, warm part of his life was done. This was a new man walking down the street. This was James Galantry Esquire, a gentleman of property and small but secure position. A gentleman who would have interesting children.

“Hurry,” say the Years, “hurry, hurry, hurry!”

All the time the Dance goes on, sometimes so fast that the pattern of it becomes obscure as the performers whirl by, bemazed and giddy, sometimes so slowly that an individual can look about him and see the convolutions, the turns and the half-turns, the bowing to partners, the linkings-up, and the swings away. But there is never any pause, never any rest or breathing space, always the line waves on.

Ten autumns after the one in which James had first taken possession of his house in Penton Place found him walking down the street again, little changed save at heart, and there not drastically. There had been shocks for him in the past ten years, some triumphs and some tragedies. Experience had not made him old exactly, but in common with many other men of his period, he was remarkably adult.

He found himself a member of a peculiarly successful generation, which with all its faults had done something and done it very quickly. In a quiet way the times were tremendous; the Island and its middle-classes, which were still only one generation away from working-classes, were in bud and flower. All kinds of new shoots were springing up; the great schism in the Church had occurred, and High, Low and Broad were now living divisions which had risen phœnix fashion out of what had once been a comparatively moribund whole. The Chartists had tried and failed, but they had prized up the crust of ignorance and indifference so that the well-to-do were beginning to wonder whether material success really was the only answer after all; development, mistakes and triumph were taking place in every possible direction and at great speed.

This particular autumn was a time of high lights.
Dombey & Son
was coming out in parts; Tennyson was roaring his sonorous sweetness to enraptured thousands; and Jenny Lind was taking the Town.

Meanwhile, on a solid base of common sense, social fancy work was raising a fussy and ridiculous head. The codes were growing tighter and less flexible, Paris had thought up the crinoline, and Victorian gothic was flourishing, not only in architecture, for manners, too, were fast acquiring the same rigid and meaningless curls and decorations.

James was an inheritor, one of the stalwarts of the rank and file, and he walked down the neat road looking very tidy and in keeping. He wore a good, skirted black coat, sand-coloured trousers strapped under his boots, and a splendid waistcoat embroidered in carefully blended colours of sand, black and occasional touches of green. It was perhaps a little sporting for his middle years, but how pleasant. His hat was a glistening stove-pipe, and an atmosphere of comfort and respectability surrounded him like a nimbus.

He walked quickly because he was curious, but he was resolutely determined not to be excited by the letter from the unknown solicitor which had reached him that morning. It had invited him to call on a matter which would be of benefit to him, but had said no more. No one could have received it quite unmoved, but James had remained obstinately placid lest he should be disappointed. To take his mind off the subject he was considering his present condition and the last few years of his life.

Jinny, he still avoided the Lizzie, had proved unexpected. His recollections of the first few weeks of his marriage were coloured by the dogs which Whippy Fletcher had brought him as a wedding present. It had been typical of Whippy to pick on a couple of Newfoundlands who had been trained to rise up on their hind legs and remove the hat from off the head of any visitor who should be so
ill-mannered as to enter the house without uncovering. They had appealed to James, as Whippy had known they would, but they were a tavern joke and had struck a wrong note from the outset, especially with some of Mrs. Timson's relations. It had been very unfortunate, James thought.

Scraps of the stuff of his period had stuck to James as he grew through it. By this time some of them were incorporated in him, and old Galantry's sense of humour was sometimes in danger of being overlaid by the Victoriana.

The discovery that in many ways Jinny was a silly little thing had been a great astonishment to James. The two women he had known best before his marriage were Dorothy and Phœbe, and both of these were capable and far more shrewd than he. Between them they had given him a slightly exalted view of the sex as a whole. Jinny was certainly not capable, nor was she shrewd, and there were times when her helplessness appalled him.

On the first night of his marriage he had dispensed with servants in the house; it was a delicacy (in the present case, meaningless) which reached depths of indelicacy difficult to stomach by people of almost any other age. Certainly old Will Galantry would have raised his eyebrows at it, as would any twentieth century sophist. Anyway, James did it because Mrs. Timson told him to, and in the morning after a night of decorous slumber, he asked his wife to make him a cup of tea. To this day he remembered her despair, her fear. She could not. She went downstairs obediently, but remained in the cold kitchen shivering and in tears, and when at last he found her there she dared not tell him. It was a mountain out of the most trivial of molehills. She did not know how. James, who looked quite ridiculous in a flapping nightshirt and shawl, had taken the situation in hand, and had given her her first lesson. By the time he had finished with her she could make tea.

From this unpropitious beginning he went on to find out that he had to teach her a number of things, and there were times when he thought Mrs. Timson had presented him with a practically unwritten book. Jinny was a child; she was most willing, most obedient, most long suffering. Her powers of endurance were so great that he never comprehended them. He assumed she did not feel as much as other people did. He assumed Frank went out of her mind like words from a wiped slate. He assumed she accepted the difference in her life as the birds accept the change in the weather. They sing less, perhaps, but appear just as happy.

In those days he put her down as a little simple, perhaps not even quite normal, but certainly very sweet and docile. Some of her faults were curable, he found with relief.

At Tarn's, the good bonnet shop near the Elephant and Castle, for instance, she was apt at first to be quite insanely extravagant, and he had had to put his foot down. Yet she had not resented his interference at all, but had accepted the ruling, and now asked his permission before she made any purchase. But he never cured her of her friendliness, and in this he thought she was absurd. She was never familiar, never free, of course, but so friendly to absolutely anybody. The beggars of the district congregated round her like birds at a crumb table, while her servants looked after her as if she were their little sister. And that was a time when good servants did not behave like that.

No one spoke ill of her, everybody loved her absentmindedly. James did himself when it came to that. But money meant nothing to her, nor could she be trusted to keep anything unless expressly told not to give it away. She loved clothes, and kept herself very neat and lovely, and yet did not live for them. Ugliness, dirt, evil, passed over her like filth over a glazed sink. She emerged from anything of the sort unsoiled. She was a fool, of course, but an odd sort of fool. There was strength in her somewhere.

Her religion made James slightly nervous. As far as he could make out it was genuine, and he was glad of that, of course. All nice women and decent men were highly religious at that time of day, but Jinny took her religion with a difference. She was not churchy, but she often read her Bible in odd moments and apparently for fun. She took it with enjoyment and comprehension. James did not mind her enjoying it, he thought that very charming in her, but he was bothered if he approved of her understanding it for even the official interpreters appeared to him to differ greatly in their readings. Yet she was always sitting with her head in it, and appeared to regard it, if he could be forgiven for such a blasphemous thought, as a sort of spiritual Mrs. Beeton. He could make little of her there, and once or twice she had puzzled him in the same sort of way.

In that first year her silence about the baby had struck him as being remarkable, and there were times when he wondered what on earth she imagined he believed about it. It was not mentioned between them, she bore her pains and discomforts stoically, and when at last he did refer to its eventual arrival, she seemed glad he expected it, as well she might be. But that was all; she never spoke of it.

All this, of course, was in the early days now mercifully left behind. Since then there had been changes. At this ten-year distance his earliest recollection of Jinny's first baby was not immediately after it was born, but later when it could just toddle. Even now when he remembered the incident he was discomforted. Jinny had been in the garden, wearing a white dress with dark blue upon it; her full
skirt had swept the daisies and her tight bodice had called attention to the corseted, artificial lines of her back and waist. As James had looked down from his window at her, she had called aloud to someone, and her tone had been intelligent as if she expected to be understood. Until that moment James had thought of the child solely as an object and a possession, but now he realized there was in his house some new person with a life and a soul of his own. For an instant the discovery struck a chill in him.

“William,” Jinny had called, “come here, my darling, come here!”

He had appeared then staggering out from behind the syringa, and had stood for an instant, his knees bent and his arms swinging, as if he were preparing to leap up at her. His blazing blue eyes were dancing and his yellow hair burned in the sun. He had looked so strangely tall and golden, so enchantingly different, that James had felt again all the old admiration which had so enthralled him long ago.

On the heels of that memory had come another. He had remembered old Larch speaking. “A good dam will always throw to the sire, come what may.” And then suddenly, born of these two recollections, had come hatred, utterly unexpected, inexcusable hatred of the child.

James had caught the emotion in himself by its very tail, and had dragged it out like a demon and pitched it away from him. He had been startled and angry, disgusted at himself; he made a mental note to buy the child a present at once.

Later when he had put the whole incident as far back in his mind as possible, another idea occurred to him. The time had come when he must get him a son of his own.

James's first child, a daughter, died at birth, and its coming very nearly killed Jinny. The doctor who attended her had taken it upon himself to point out that she was still very young. To-day as James walked down the road from his house he gathered up the intervening years and bundled them back into the bureau of his memory without looking at them. They had not been unhappy for him, he had worked out a life for himself in which his home was a base; nor, as far as he knew, had they dragged wearily for Jinny. She had played with her baby, practised her music, and done anything James told her. Also she had accompanied James when he sang, and had been very nice to him when he had tried to play the violin, and had made, as he said himself, ‘the very devil of a noise.'

Theirs was an entirely amicable relationship. They met in everything but outlook, and James who knew that his own brightly-coloured landscape with its background of country deals and speculations, and its vistas of convivial club evenings, music hall nights, and backstage
adventures, was completely unknown to her, had no idea at all what picture her window showed. They were like an old child and a young child pausing before a booth at a fair, holding hands, but looking into different peep-shows.