Dance of the Years (3 page)

He was standing at the end of the drive at the time, under the oaks which were budding yellow and hopeful. Far down the cart track road a coach was lumbering away from him. In it sat Libby, his youngest daughter, and she was in tears, he knew. She was the last of his children to come and see if it really were true, and it was, so there they all were.

When he was not infuriated by it, his children's reactions to his second marriage amused Galantry, and made him feel young and mischievous. Certainly he had upset them all. The coming child had finished it. That had got under their skins, and their irritation was not all to do with their loss of money by any means.

Poor Libby; he liked her the best of all his daughters, in spite of her mute reproach. Of all her mother's children she had more of his mind. She did know a little about the Arts of which she talked so freely, and that, thank God, was a change.

He was very glad he had had her so well educated. Her husband was an M.P. He was dull and considerably her senior, but he looked after her well and appeared to appreciate her. Libby was all right. What had she to cry about when she saw her father happy?

To old Galantry the amazing thing was that he was happy; extraordinarily happy. He had even written a little again too. At first he had been inclined to suspect this particular aspect of his rejuvenation since it smacked a little of a pathetic second adolescence. And that embarrassed him even while it made him laugh. All the same, he remembered, he had never been without talent. His collected poems, published in his early middle-age, had been very successful. His youthful “
Why should I so soon despair
…” had been very much admired, and seemed likely to pass into the lighter verse of the language. Certainly this brief glory had been offset somewhat by the annoyance he had caused with the controversial essay he wrote for the
Quarterly
, espounding very dully the old theory that the works of Homer were by several different hands. This had involved him in some vigorous correspondence; some of it downright abusive.

However, of recent years, he had done very little; his pen had grown heavy, his paper uninviting. Yet now, when the only way to escape Shulie's invigorating presence was to shut himself up in the library, energy had returned and the blood had crept once again into the fernery of the secret places of his skull. Still, literary aspirations aside, the important thing was that for the first time in his whole life he felt completed. Shulie was his complement.

It was not her intellectual attainments which so added to him, God knew. At one time, he had toyed with the idea of teaching her to read Latin, since the notion of a young woman who could read nothing but that language amused him. But having begun by trying to teach
her the alphabet, he had come up against something quite new in his experience. Anyone who has ever tried to teach a very intelligent and and willing dog to talk must have had something of the same enlightenment.

Shulie could make rings round him in many ways, but the alphabet was not in her range. She had her own methods of communication. Yet his gain from her was not only physical. She widened and stretched his mind, sharpened his perception, and opened a hitherto undiscovered corner of the world to him. No, he thought, it was no good anyone arguing with him, strange though it was, absurd and inconvenient though it might be; he, Will Galantry, was with Shulie by his side a complete and finished human entity; a man capable of living in, and enjoying that small corner of the world in which he had been destined to take his own particular part in the Round Dance of God.

Inconvenient it certainly was at times. Shulie was no figure of fantasy, no poet's dream. Shulie was what she was, Heaven help her. Sometimes old Galantry realized with dismay that he must have been constructed very far one way from the normal to need a complement so distant in the other.

He turned back from the gate and glanced down the drive expectantly. The young laurels were growing well and the corner of the rose-brick house showed warm, if formal, in the clean, clear morning. Its legal mistress was not visible, but Galantry guessed she was near, and presently he called her.

After a while, she came out from behind the whitethorn hedge which flanked the laurels, and he realized she had been waiting there until Libby had safely gone. The two women had just met, but that was all. After the first almost silent inspection, Shulie had disappeared from Libby's sight, and had kept out of it. It was odd behaviour in her, but sensible and not without dignity.

At the moment he saw at a glance she was in one of her delighted moods. These were completely natural, and followed any period of restraint. She was very near her time, and looked ridiculously burdened in her full dress, like a child with a bundle of washing.

She had tied a bit of coloured stuff round her neck again. Galantry saw it with despair. He was not at all sure it was not a piece of one of his first wife's evening gowns; it looked familiar. Also, she was dirty again. Her hands and face were smudged, and the wet grasses had draggled her skirt to the knees.

“Good God, woman, you'll take a fever!” In spite of his alarm, Galantry did not put the rebuke he intended into his voice. It was nearly half his own fault she did not obey him, he reflected irritably. If he could only school himself, he might train her a little. His
expression betrayed him. She followed his thought and laughed, and lifting her skirts came over the tussocks towards him. Then he was furious. She was bare-foot again, and the grass was drenching. It was a cold spring.

“The child, Shulie,” he protested in helpless terror, lest he should lose her. “Think of the child.”

She stopped and stood looking at him with all the knowingness and all the contempt of the outdoor creature on its own safe ground showing in her broad, brown face. She was the master in this situation.

In spite of, or perhaps because of her pregnancy, she was radiant. There was in her none of the heavy-eyed weariness of the domestic animal in the same physical state.

“Shulie!” commanded Galantry in sudden rage.

She turned away from him then and disappeared among the shrubbery. Presently he saw her out on the path again. She was going away from him and was stumping along with exaggerated awkwardness in shoes which she was pretending were too tight.

She had taken them off behind the hedge while she was waiting for Libby to go, and must have hidden them there.

It occurred to Galantry once more as he watched her, how inspired he had been to marry her, and thus purchase her loyalty. In any lesser position she would have led him an abominable dance.

Having had some experience by this time, he ignored her, and turning back, wandered down the path again towards the gate. In a little while he felt her cheek rubbing against his shoulder. She was carrying her shoes in her hand.

He took no notice of her, and after they had continued some way in silence, she began to wheedle him. This was an extraordinary performance of hers, and Galantry was never tired of hearing it. As far as he could gather, the words meant nothing whatever, or at any rate they were the least part of the charm. Taken as a communication, the things she actually said were ridiculous.

“Don't be angry, my dear, my gorgeous. Don't be angry, my lovely one, my sweet, my master, my King of Egypt, my little one, my darling, my young pig, my great one. Don't be angry. Don't be angry. Don't be angry. Think of something else. Think of the day. Think of the air. Think of the smells. Don't be angry. Don't be angry. Think of Shulie. Think of warm Shulie. Don't be angry. Don't be angry....”

She had a naturally soft voice, without as yet, the Romany whine in it, and Galantry had improved her English. Her chant was monotonous and curiously soporific.

The harangue could go on for eight minutes, as he had found out
once with his stop-watch; a private experiment which had tickled him immensely. But the flow, with its endless repetitions and occasional innocent indencies, was but the vehicle. The potency of the performance lay in something purely physical. The urgency of her pleading was a force quite as strong and very nearly as actual as a warm wind, and quite as innocently sensuous as the purring of a leg-rubbing cat.

If one was not vastly, mentally superior to it, and old enough to be more or less insulated against it, it would have been an alarming thing, Galantry thought. As it was, he found it charming and oddly pathetic.

“Oh, Shulie,” he said, laughing, “if I were a younger man.…”

She wriggled free of him, and lifted a face which shone with life and unschooled intelligence.

“Then you would hit me,” she said.

Old Galantry stiffened. It was quite true. She was literally right. Hot blood, young blood, God save him, ordinary blood, would rebel at this elemental coquetry. There was no error in Shulie, no disease, no wrong, nothing even strange. It was he who was removed from Nature. All his superiority over her so vast from one point of view was suddenly made negative when seen from this other angle. In fact, there was, there must be another enormous half of life of which he still knew very little.

Galantry did not altogether like this idea, and he thrust the thought out of his head, while Shulie, quick to realize she had not pleased, but without knowing in the least why, took the only course known to her and began her outrageous begging again. After a while, they wandered on happily together through the yellow, green and white of that brilliant spring.

That was the real beginning of the incident which set the whole countryside by the ears, and which was to be reported everywhere where horse and carter should pause, for years afterwards.

It happened, as that sort of thing so often does, almost as if it were prearranged. Everybody behaving quite normally, and only the combination of their separate natural reactions making the unfortunate whole.

An hour traipsing round the wet grounds in Shulie's wake made Galantry himself considerably dishevelled, while she succeeded in getting into the kind of mess which a spaniel achieves in the same pursuit. They were neither of them fashionably dressed, and that was unfortunate, since the older modes were most susceptible to disarray. Beau Brummel was as yet a young man, and his chastening influence had scarcely touched the fashionable world, much less reached Groats.

Galantry's mulberry-coloured coat and breeches and gay striped waistcoat showed the wet. His stockings became rouled, and the ribbon which tied his queue had pulled astray, so that it hung in a rat-tail.

Shulie's green and yellow lute-string was wringing from hem to thighs, and was torn and draggled. The string of frayed rag round her neck had slipped round her ear, and she exposed as much plump, brown bosom as would be decent at a ball, but nowhere else. There were twigs and dead leaves in her wind-matted hair, and her shoes still hung from her hand.

They approached the house from the side, and came in noisily through the garden door into the central hall.

Galantry was laughing and his haggard face was unusually flushed as his wife dragged him along. Shulie was in an impossible mood. She was screaming, wildly excited as usual by the comparatively rare freedom of the open air. Together they made one of those pictures which no painter has been able to romanticize. Jan van Steen might have done something kindly with it, and would no doubt have stuck his own great cheerful, beery face in some dark corner to make all friendly. But as it turned out on this occasion, it became a Hogarth, child truthful, and not very pleasant, for there were two more figures to go into it.

As the pair reached the hall, Richard was just admitting Sir Lionel Bretton of Mundham and his mother; two visitors, come on a formal morning call.

The Brettons were from the other side of the river, and were old acquaintances of the Galantrys. The two families had been on chatting terms for a couple of generations at least, but had never had anything, save the district, in common; although before her marriage the now widowed Lady Bretton had numbered Galantry among her beaux. However, his had only been a half-hearted entry, and they had never been friends.

Young Bretton Galantry always had disliked, because he reminded him vividly of his father. He had come over to Groats on some flimsy pretext once before since Galantry's second marriage, and then, as now, his full-blooded face had glowed with the anxious curiosity of the under-entertained. On that occasion he had missed Shulie. But Galantry had guessed his inquisitive purpose, which after all did not take much detecting.

The greetings were formal, and inclined to be constrained. Shulie alone was unprotected, and she became very quiet.

Galantry had no idea that he was dishevelled, and he acquitted himself well until he rose from bowing over Jane Bretton's hand to come face to face with himself in the hall mirror behind her. The
apparition disconcerted him, as well it might, and he stiffened.

Lady Bretton noticed it, and responded in her own way.

It was five years since she had seen Galantry, and in that time her hair had greyed, and to her intense mortification one of her side-front teeth had fallen out. These things were uppermost in her mind, naturally, and when she missed the gallant response which she had hitherto always awakened in Galantry it hurt her considerably.

She slid into her second rôle, as older women do, and became the sturdy matron of dignity and experience, and it was only then that she saw what a state he was in. After that, her eyes strayed curiously to Shulie.

By this time the second Mrs. Galantry was something to look at. Her sullenness had chased all the charm out of her, and she remained unrelievedly dirty, ragged, wet, and of course, very pregnant. There were the marks of her bare feet on the flags behind her, and after a full moment of startled scrutiny (during which she took in some half dozen different facts, each of them well-nigh incredible), Lady Bretton changed her mood again.

She blushed deeply, and turning to her son she commanded him briefly to go out to the horses. When he had gone, she strode to Shulie's side and led her firmly on to the hearth-rug. Only then did she turn on Galantry.