Dance of the Years (37 page)

James ‘remembered' therefore on that morning in nineteen forty-one that James Edwin was the son of Jeffrey, who had been the only son of William, and that Jeffrey's wife, the mother of James Edwin, was no less a person than Belle Raven, the Edwardian variety star, daughter of Debby and poor Walter Raven, whom nobody mentioned after his death because he had killed himself when he could delude no one any longer that he was more grand than other men.

James ‘remembered' that there had been an almighty row in the family when Jeffrey married Belle, for after suddenly throwing up his preparations for the Church and taking to painting saleable, if uninspired, illustrations to children's religious books, he had avowed himself as Socialist (a highly unfashionable faith at the time), and then, still abruptly and unexpectedly, had married his music-hall cousin, who until her success had been one of his poorest and most despised relations.

This revelation was all very swift and startling to James, but it gave him a very vivid picture of Jeffrey as he had been when grown, and also it explained the first part of his dream and showed him how it was that he came to be in such unexpected company. Best of all, it explained what the old country voice within him had meant when it said that somehow or other he must get even with Edwin Castor.

Now here he was in the same body with him, and must at last become one with him. Together they needs must absorb and digest and help and conquer each other. There was no possible escape for either of them. It frightened the dreaming James when he understood that, and saw the unrelenting truth that a man gravitates towards the thing he worships.

When he had recovered a little he went on with his exploratory ‘remembering,' trying to find out what had happened to James Edwin to bring him thus to the final edge of his resource. The fellow had had a strange team to drive; James and Castor, Jinny and the little dark defeatist, who yet had such a strong measure of the power to create.

James began to ‘remember' all sorts of things. He began to see something of the dusty harvest of imitation aristocracy which the great middle classes had so triumphantly brought home, only to find it mouldy in store and so exorbitant in cost of production that when they had raised their heads from it to look about, they had shuddered away from their own handiwork. That story had been as though the topmost branches of a thrusting tree had suddenly shied away from the sun to which they had been growing, James thought in his dream.

James Edwin had been born after that harvest. The man James supposed was actually a great grandson, but to him he was more, much more than a son. In his dream James realized that he loved James Edwin as himself; he had to. The man was himself, at least in major part.

James ‘remembered' Jeffrey as James Edwin had known him, which is to say, as a father. He had been a man in an inescapable muddle; a man thrust on by every impulse towards a goal which with his living eyes he saw was a dead end. Jeffrey had been a man who sent his sons to exclusive schools and then raved at them for believing the social teachings they learned there. He had been a man who was for ever trying to make friends with working folk, only to have them touch their hats to him and turn away uncomfortably; a man who married a woman because she was gloriously vulgar and alive, only to have her leave him for men who were more vulgar and lively than himself.

He had been a man who had seen his eldest son, the clever one who had looked like old Will Galantry and had written so very much better verse, sent out to die in France within a day or so of his leaving school. He had been a man who, having been brought up to believe in a gentlemanly business genius of a God who had been happy to possess Jeffrey's own father William as a sort of spiritual office boy, came slowly to realize that there was something very wrong with this picture. Jeffrey had come to realize that his wife, Belle Raven, told no more than the truth when she said his father William had gone into business with the brilliant and apparently wealthy Walter Raven, had married Debby to him to consolidate the position, and immediately afterwards, on discovering that a smash was imminent, had left her to her fate. He had got out himself by selling his share in the concern to yet another sanctimonious old hypocrite called Great
piece, who had dealt with the situation in a manner which had expedited Raven's suicide.

Jeffrey himself had seen William's charity to Debby afterwards, and it had been the kind which gave charity its false name.

In his dream James saw Jeffrey as a man whose idols had crashed round him all the time, a man who had been bred and trained to be a gentleman, and who had come to believe gentlemen were ungentle; a man who had been taught to believe in God, and who had come to believe God was hypocritical. James found he could be very sorry for Jeffrey.

However, the story which James was ‘remembering' so fast was not all dark. James saw Debby as James Edwin had known her, as an old woman. He saw her as a funny old Debby, exasperating and absurd as ever, but incorruptible and therefore unscathed. Through James Edwin's eyes James saw a Debby, who had borne and tended children, who had starved for them and worked for them, and kept heart by taking no thought for the morrow, and who, after Belle left Jeffrey, had come to Farthing Hall to take care of their sons.

James saw a Debby who had brought up this second generation in the same way that she herself had been brought up, and he saw her after they were grown trotting over to William's great house to nurse first Julia, and then the old man himself, with a devotion their daughters could not imitate. He saw her later still after their deaths, retiring to a cottage to live as Dorothy had lived; and he saw her in a flash as she was now, untidy as ever, happy as ever, sitting darning in the sun, a ragged Bible at her side, a romantic novelette tucked into her chair, and the lively hopefulness of eternal youth in her little black eyes.

In his dream, James saw a Debby who by some magic he did not understand, by some formula handed on by her mother, some rigmarole about hoping and enduring, had yet for all her thundering stupidity, for all her handicaps, for all the mindful cruelty of men miraculously conquered life.

The sense of urgency in the dream was tremendous, and James left Debby and went on with his enquiries into James Edwin, whose fate was his own fate, whose chance was his own chance, and whose potential failure was his also. James Edwin was not a young man; he was in the late thirties; he was not a fool, Castor was seeing to that. He was not a coward, either, that was James's province and he was doing his best. Yet the man was at the end of his resources and James, with his earthly mind (for he was not dead yet, but dreaming), was striving to comprehend.

James began to ‘remember' James Edwin's history, and it took
him into the false peace period between the two wars; the breathing space while another world generation was growing up to finish a fight which had been too bitter for the blood of one to sweeten it. Much of this world was incomprehensible to James, and since a man does not see what he does not comprehend, James followed James Edwin from the emotional angle which alone never changes.

James ‘remembered' James Edwin's reactions when Jeffrey convinced of folly by the horrors of two years of the first World War, had decided to break free from his hampering traditions and to back his own belief. As a first step, he had taken James Edwin from a Public School just before his School Certificate Examination, and had told him, somewhat theatrically, to work with his hands. James Edwin had not resented the move greatly and in after life he had come to think of it as a very good thing, but it had had a tremendous effect upon him at the time. For one thing it had changed most of his friends and that had touched him nearly, for with Jinny in him James Edwin had been a man who loved his friends. The James in James Edwin had been stimulated by the change, and now in his dream James ‘remembered' James Edwin's grim satisfaction when, after a campaign of wire-pulling and waiting, he had at last got himself taken on as an apprentice at the great Parkinson Motor Works. In the evenings he had attended a night school and had matriculated.

The first year had been the worst, James ‘remembered,' for he had lived on the eighteen shillings a week Parkinson had paid him; the Castor in him had been a great help to him at this time, James noted, but then so had the James. Where would he have been without James's physique? James's pride which was Dorothy's pride in the elements of civilization or James's own great bull-headed courage to combat the combined effects of semi-starvation and the new and hostile people?

James's weaknesses had been there too though, James noticed with regret; James's naïvety, James's secret sense of importance, James's passionateness.

All the same, he had got by, and in the end had been supremely happy. The early pre-war years had been hard but pleasant going. At the end of his apprenticeship James Edwin had entered the drawing office at Parkinson's, but he had not languished there; expansion in the trade had given him his chance and he had got on. In ten years he had become the bright boy assistant to Parkinson's chief engineer. He had shown more than a gift for the work and gradually the inventive Raven in him had begun to adapt itself to the new requirements.

James ‘remembered' several triumphs of James Edwin's at this
period, and he saw again the freedom which the young man had discovered in the new expression of himself in steel. James could comprehend the satisfaction in it, he could understand what it was that James Edwin had found so inspiring in his machine, for the delight which James had taken in Mandrake lay in his strength and symmetry, and these were here translated into a later form.

In his dream James ‘remembered' that he had shared greatly in James Edwin's triumph when old man McBride had picked him out and taken him off to join his unusual outfit in South London. McBride, James ‘remembered,' was a tolerated eccentric in the motor world, his small firm was distinguished, and men who found they could not buy him were sufficiently impressed by his genius to buy from him and let him live. McBride was his own chief designing engineer and he collected James Edwin, so somebody said, in case he died in the middle of a job. With McBride, James Edwin had begun to reveal the powers that were in him and during his first two years with the old man, he produced the celebrated “Mole” haul with the first four-wheel drive, which could drag a lifeboat over a beach with a surface like a quarry.

These had been great days for James Edwin, and in his dream James was warmed by the memory of them. These had been like his own horse days, packed with excitement and rivalry and triumph.

As James went on dreaming he began to see the people who had dominated James Edwin's life. With these he was more at home; these his own nineteenth-century mind could understand, and it was evident to him that he must understand somehow if he was to do the best for this future part of himself now at the moment of trial.

The figure whom James ‘remembered' most vividly in James Edwin's life was Phœbe. James Edwin called her by some other name, but James ‘remembered' that he had known from the beginning that it was she. It had been Phœbe slightly different, perhaps, but still so very much herself. Phœbe composed of her own ingredients, Phœbe with black hair, but still Phœbe. In his dream, James ‘remembered' how he, the James part of James Edwin, had leapt up to welcome her with hungry thankfulness, and how the Castor in James Edwin had been terrified by James's certainty and recognition. It had been a difficult passage for James Edwin grappling with the two of them.

James ‘remembered' that there had been many outside influences which had combined against James Edwin's marriage to Phœbe; some of them had been economic considerations, but there were others more difficult for James to understand. There had been urgent advice of older people who still had the disasters of many war marriages fresh in their minds. They had warned against marriage,
and the James in James Edwin had been bewildered. For a time it had appeared as if marriage itself had gone out of fashion, a situation which had struck him as unnatural whatever the condition mankind had made for itself, as ridiculous as if a world of half-made pairs of scissors had decided assembly was uneconomic. The James in James Edwin had put his foot down, James ‘remembered,' and had bullied the Castor part of him into a daring frame of mind by no means natural to it, and James had won.

It had been about this time, James ‘remembered,' that he had begun to get the upper hand of the Castor in James Edwin and to educate him, modify him. In his sleep James grunted with pleasure.

It was still warm and sunny in the nineteenth century day and the old man breathed deeply in it, his eyes tightly closed and his hands twitching in his lap.

In his dream James ‘remembered' the early years of James Edwin's marriage to Phœbe, particularly he ‘remembered' the restoring and familiar feel of her as she slid into his heart and into his arms in bed. James Edwin, who had none of old Will Galantry's verse in him, had told her that she felt like an old coat he was putting on; Phœbe had understood him perfectly, and James had been absolutely certain of her and had known that with her he was completed once again.

Their early life together had been very familiar to the James in James Edwin, almost too familiar. They made all the same old mistakes, and the James in James Edwin had been exasperated by this, but had still belonged too closely to his own modern world to do much about it. It had been so very much the same as long before when James himself had had the responsibility for living; now as then, there was something vaguely meaningless in the happiness of his association with her, something without content in its very completeness and comfort. It had been a sensation of ending when there was no end. James Edwin and Phœbe complemented each other and made one living thing, and so what? What was the purpose of that living thing? Where did they go from there? Both Phœbe and James Edwin had a pretty shrewd idea of the answer, but for various reasons connected with the civilization in which they lived, they did not go into the matter.