Dance of the Years (36 page)

The smile had offended James. It was the second time William had offended him lately; the other occasion had been when the young man had found Debby reading the Bible to him, and had said: “That's right,” with such a generous and proprietary air that it almost sounded as if he thought he had something to do with the writing of it. On that occasion James had said to Debby that the fellow imagined “he had God in his pocket.” Poor Debby had turned quite white, and said, “Oh! Papa.” So he had apologized and told her to be quiet and get
The Times Newspaper
.

It was all very childish, James thought tolerantly; William was a good, clever fellow.

Presently as he sat in the sunshine and smelled the sweet strong air of his home, which felt always as if it were washing and feeding him and striving to make him live, he considered his will again.

He had done his best to make it as sound as old Galantry's had been. Debby had the Smith Estate money, and the rest was divided between the five. Farthing Hall went to William, the house in Town to Debby until she married, when it was to be sold and the profit divided between them all equally.

Had he not been able to trust William, he reflected, there might have been an incentive there for him to get the girl married quickly, but he thought he could trust him. Besides, William had plenty of money. As well as
The Converted World
, which was still doing well, William had a half share in a most valuable photographic mount making business. Yes, William was all right.

But it was a pity he had all girls, save for young Jeffrey. James let his mind wander to Jeffrey; the child was about somewhere, probably down the village with Debby. He was a clever boy but unexpectedly delicate, always home from school recuperating from something.

Well, there it was, the servants had a hundred pounds each and a good character, which was the best he could do for them. He hoped Boxer would stay with Debby; God knew she needed someone to see she dressed herself properly. James grunted. He hoped they would all be all right without him. He did not see what else he could do for them, his part was ending while theirs was but half-way through. It was all a little unsatisfying, he thought, a tale which sounded as if it ought to mean something, and yet apparently did not.

James wondered if he would know more about it when he was dead. He was inclined to doubt this on the whole, and he wondered how much of him would die. His body, what was left of it when he had finished with it, would be translated into grass in some overgrown churchyard. His soul would live, they said, but gave no definition. James was too tired to attempt to work one out for himself, and the old Will Galantry in him laughed and pointed out that memory died only too obviously, since James's own had been failing for years; and without a body and without a memory James might find himself a dull fellow.

He returned his attention to the flower-beds. They were very neat and pretty and the tulips looked as stiff and clean as Dorothy in her morning prints long ago at Groats. James wondered if he would see Dorothy after he was dead; it seemed a very unlikely idea. He was pleased with the garden, and it occurred to him he made no arrangements to reward the young man who worked in it three days a week. He was reasonably paid, but he was not thanked. It came into James's mind to leave him ten pounds, it would be a large sum to him, the lad might even get married on it. He wished he dared make it a bit more. Finally, he fixed on fifteen and decided he would attend to it while he thought of it. He felt round his chair for the big dinner bell which he always kept by him when he was in the garden.

Boxer came running at its summons, but she was busy and flustered, and she listened to his request with half her mind still on the kitchen
stove. He wanted the black leather writing case in which all his papers had been brought from London. He had not been well enough to go down to his desk himself, and had instructed Debby to put all the loose papers into the case without looking at them. He had no doubt that she had done exactly as she had been told.

As soon as the girl returned with the case he unlocked it with the key on his watch-chain and began to turn over the papers inside. Immediately, as if it had been thrust deliberately under his nose, he saw something which startled him. Incredulously he drew it out and sat looking at it. It was his own letter to Lucius, unfranked, and still sealed. As soon as he recovered from his first astonishment he became furious. So this was the explanation of Lucius's silence; the letter had never been sent, and it was James and not his half-brother who had done the mannerless, unforgivable thing and never replied. James was not ordinarily angry. As Boxer came flying at the sound of his violent ringing she thought he looked like a wicked old bull, sitting up in his chair snorting and stamping. His shoulders were hunched, his neck had disappeared, and the veins stood out down his forehead.

His voice was terrible, she said afterwards. Boxer was frightened of James, and not entirely because she saw that he was going to give himself a seizure. In her alarm she told the absolute truth.

Yes, that was right, she said, she had not posted the letter when James gave it to her because, just before Mr. William left Penton Place after his last visit he told her to look out for it and to keep it back. Mr. William had given her the name and address for which she was to look out, together with a shilling, and had told her that the master was going a little queer in his last illness and might write something to a relative which could make trouble. Mr. William was so clever and so good and religious that Boxer had not hesitated to believe him, and so had done as he asked. She had not known what to do with the letter, and not imagining Mr. Galantry would be down again, she had slipped it into the bureau in his parlour with some other papers for when Mr. William should come again. Miss Deb. must have gathered it up without looking at it. Boxer was sorry if she had done wrong, and could she give Mr. Galantry the shilling?

James, who had been staring at her blankly, shook his head. “Go away,” he said, “go away.”

Boxer hesitated because, as she told the doctor afterwards, he sounded so “mumbly,” but it was clear that he wanted her to go, and so rather than annoy him she went. James watched her disappear
into the house; it was a relief to keep his mind on that for a moment, but when she had gone he had to go back and face the information again. He did not doubt her story; he had inspired that sort of fear in that sort of girl before, and he recognized that sort of truth when he heard it.

For a little while he did not know what was the matter with him; his anger had evaporated as he had listened to the girl and a new emotion had taken its place. As it grew upon him, chilling him, he knew it suddenly. He was afraid.

William was his prop, his centre, the mainstay of his tent. If William had done this, what else had he done? If William would do this, what else would he do? The inference was clear. William was arranging to have a perfectly free hand without any intelligent interference. His was the only brain in the entire family, and he preferred it to remain so. Why?

James, who like the war horse had mocked at fear, was frightened now. A dozen considerations struggled into his mind, and the greatest of them stood out before the others.

William did not love Debby or the rest; William did not love anybody. James had often noticed this about him with interest, and had thought little of it. It had never occurred to him that it might matter, but in view of this discovery he saw its purpose. If William was a traitor, if William was not good, if he was not honourable, was not just, was not even honest, then the fact was of terrifying account. In James's desperation, and it had become desperation now for his heart was popping dangerously and the garden was swimming into a rainbow, he strove to comprehend William and to find reassurance. He was hopelessly confused. William and Edwin Castor became one in his mind. He could see the face quite distinctly; it was cold, noble, golden-haired and alien. As he stared at it the truth was forced upon him with the brutality of revelation, and he saw that he himself had never known or loved William.

He had admired him, and had been ridiculously proud to possess him. He had exalted William and had put his trust in him. Because William had possessed attributes which James himself could not achieve, he had endowed him also with all his own virtues, but he had never loved him because he was not lovable.

Now James had come the other way to knowledge, and had discovered the truth about William by trial and error, and it had taken too much time. Now James was helpless. He was afraid for the part of himself he was leaving behind; he was afraid for Debby and for Tom and the boys at school, and even for old Pecker in the field; all left in the hands of the alien.

James's heart was hurting him, his eyes were clouding, and the world was slipping away.

“If only I could have got even with him,” he said aloud, and to his surprise an old country voice, Larch's or Jed's, answered him out of the darkness of his under-mind.

“You've made a god on him, ain't you, boy?” it said. “Put your faith in him, ain't you? Reckon you'll
hev
to, you know. Yes. Yes.”

James began to dream
.

They say some men when dying glimpse at heaven, but James was such a primitive, so much a part of the black earth and the green, that he took his glance at the earth.

His dream began in a formalised, diagrammatic fashion. He thought he left his chair and walked across the grass plot to meet Edwin Castor, who was advancing towards him hand outstretched. Castor had another man with him, who was a stranger to James, and of whom he did not much like the look. This man was small and flashy, and as he came up he said in the obliging, unlikely way of dreams:

“I'm Walter Raven, you know.”

James was repelled by him, but he had no time to consider this, for at that moment he saw Jinny there beside them, and the first thing he noticed about her was that she was far smaller than she had been in life. The vision had all the dream's absurdity, and James was not astonished by anything that happened, only worried.

The four of them took hands and stood in a circle, and it was only then that James realized that they were in the midst of a crowd. He caught sight of many faces he knew in the company, although many were strangers. He saw Old Will Galantry there, and Frank Castor, and Alfred Timson and his wife, and Debby and Shulie. Far away, on the extreme edge, he saw a gaunt shadow which might have been Dorothy, but there was no sign of Phœbe, although he looked for her. He was only aware of a need of her, a sense of her absence.

Soon they all began to move. It happened very quickly and smoothly, and with an irrevocableness which convinced James that he was observing something that had happened before, rather than a present reality. He also received the impression that the same
thing was happening, and had happened to him elsewhere, but with slightly different partners, and this idea did not astonish him either.

It was very sunny and ordinary in the garden, and the four of them who stood still in the centre were very close together now. Nearer and nearer they came until they began to touch. Jinny and Raven were very small by this time, but Castor was of normal size, while James was largest of all.

They moved closer and closer, pressed on by the crowd behind them until, in the same slow but by this time agonizing way, they began to merge. The pain in James's chest was more terrible than he had ever felt pain before; it tore and suffocated him.

On and on the steady movement continued, the crowd ever pressing inward, until presently—there was only one man there.

In his dream James became aware of someone new taking over the responsibility. It was the responsibility not only of that mass of impulses, powers and weaknesses which was all there was left of James himself to continue on the earth, but also of all those other impulses and powers which constituted much of the surviving portion of Castor, Jinny and Walter Raven, not to mention any amount of other people.

James was far too occupied with essential things just then to take much account of a phoney, quick-silver business like time.

It would seem that the only really obvious thing about time is that every living thing has its own time, its own measure between conception and maturity, maturity and decay, so that it must be only for the convenience of the whole that the matter has become a fixed affair at all.

James, then, since he was only an individual, had his own time, and the fact that his dream took him about as far forward in calendar time as his memory of, say, Mandrake took him back, was of no consequence whatever to him. Each picture could lie next to the other in his mind.

James caught his glimpse of the survival, not of his soul, not of the minute part of him which was the responsibility, his bit of God; that went into the Great Pocket to be looked at and considered. James took his peep at the larger, imperfect part of him which continued on the earth. In his dream he saw this part of himself very clearly, and at a most significant moment in its history. James dreamed of himself at the instant when the man who housed him along with so many others, and whose responsibility he had become, was split and torn; at a moment when every single, separate part of the fellow was fighting passionately for life.

In his dream James saw himself when he was the greater part of a man called James Edwin Galantry, one morning in May in the year nineteen hundred and forty-one.

At that time the said James Edwin Galantry was facing not so much an overwhelming urge to take his life as a desperate desire not to—somehow.

James saw with James Edwin's eyes, as he walked up and down the lawn at Farthing Hall three-quarters of a century later, and saw for the first time in either of their lives the bright clear light of the country of despair.

It took James some little while to make out who exactly James Edwin was. When the information did come to him it came in flashes, as if he were remembering it rather than having it told to him. There was little strange in this, since at the time he actually was a part of James Edwin, but at first it seemed queer to James, for it came patchily as memories do.