Read Dance of the Years Online
Authors: Margery Allingham
Dance of the Years
MARGERY ALLINGHAM
THIS BOOK
IS FOR
MRS. EMILY JANE HUGHES
Chapter One
When Mr. Galantry (the one who was called “Will” or “Squire”) first saw the gypsy, she was wooding in the spinney behind the Home Farm where Jason lived. She was bent after the sticks, and there was an attractive ellipse of olive back between her bodice and her short skirt.
She was at the sapling stage then, as fine-drawn as she ever was in her life, only just formed, very strong and yet soft and warm-looking, and the hollows under one of her knees were exposed as she grovelled among the wiry grass.
Old Galantry, who was a widower, and completely alone now that his children were grown and gone, had very few illusions left about himself at that time. He knew that in twenty years he would be dead, or better dead, for he had no desire to go on living after the four-score.
The era to which he belonged was very nearly dead already. Its final pains had been upon it for the best part of his life, and to him the very smell of the world was cold and acrid with foreboding of the winter to come. He had reached the age when a man has glimpsed the end of the twisting and surprising path of his life, and has faced and recognized, if only for a minute or two in the night, either the darkness and the cold, or the sharp agony which precedes the rebirth.
Old Will Galantry saw the dark and felt the cold, and whilst it did not frighten him particularly, it made him melancholy.
He kissed the girl casually, as he had every right, just as he had a right to caress or chastise any other creature on the estate. She did not scuttle away, but stayed close to him for a moment, which both surprised and rather pleased him. He walked on for a bit, and was amused at himself for remembering that he had an old coat on. Gypsies were abominably dirty.
The dapling yellow light spilt through the leaves on to them, making a romantic picture, which made him wish again that he had built one of those little sham-classical ruins he had always promised himself since his return from the grand tour nearly thirty-five years before.
A great many people had them now, indeed they were positively common, but the idea was a charming conceit he thought, and could,
if combined with the right kind of rock and fern garden, be very elegant and fitting. This kind of encounter would be dignified and romanticized by one anyhow.
The girl was walking easily and with perfect balance, a peculiarity of the wild animal and the well-bred one, he reflected, not to be found in the middle. Some of the country girls could hardly keep on their feet, they were so clumsy.
This was a very wild little thing. He could feel the life in her pouring into him almost painfully, and although it was a phenomenon with which he was not unacquainted since he had been a countryman dealing with living things nearly all his time, he noted it with particular interest because it was so strong.
She left him when they reached the end of the woodland and he felt an old man again as he went on alone. The whole thing was the most trivial of incidents; no more extraordinary than an encounter with a tame doe or an unexpectedly kind foal, of which last, to be honest, she vaguely reminded him. But he harked back to it several times as he walked back to the Hall, and at night when he sat by the fire with his bottle and his Virgil, he thought of it again.
Two or three years later (which was the time when most of them heard about it) Galantry's amused friends and infuriated relations could only suppose that the old man went a little mad that evening, but that was not true.
Galantry had no particularly remarkable brain, but what he had served him very well, and his behaviour, if inconsiderate from an outside point of view, was not illogical. Strictly from his own standpoint, it had in it a certain amount of cold, self-preservative sense. The thing so few people remembered afterwards was the recklessness of that peculiar hour.
Among the landed gentry, the conviction that the country was on the decline had been growing for some time. Galantry was not a wealthy member of the caste, but he certainly belonged to it. He had an estate worth three to four thousand a year, if no very distinguished connections save through his wife; but she was dead and her relatives not congenial to him. He was essentially a countryman, at heart a bookman, and as he sat there alone in the small library in which he had dined, he feared that the Island's glory was dying, and not very slowly.
Politically, the situation was horrific. The turn of the century had found the country at war and alone, the sole European Power still upon its feet in the path of a military genius who ranked with Alexander. While on its throne sat a German king of pronounced and unexpectedly successful despotic tendencies, who was so convincingly, so unquestionably and publicly insane, that every now and again his subjects, albeit respectfully, put him under restraint.
Meanwhile, Pitt was seriously ill, and the French Emperor's grand army encamped on the cliffs of Boulogne was looking across the Channel consideringly.
Like many Englishmen before and since, old Galantry sat placidly in his own house, by his own fire, quite alone and quite calm, and wondered with a sort of proud exasperation, why on earth everybody else in the country was not panic-stricken and rioting. The prospect was hopeless from Galantry's point of view, enemies at the gate and God knew what inside it.
He had never considered the gradual rise of industry, which had been going on all his life-time, as a revolution, but he could not very well miss that something tremendous was happening there; the changes which had been creeping over the land secretly for years had now received such an impetus from the never-ending French wars, that their progress was visible to the most determinedly blind, which he was not. The world was changing under his nose, between green shoot and stubble. The old order was going and the new one was rolling into place, gasping so painfully, retching and suffering so wretchedly in its agonizing birth-pangs, that he might well be excused for mistaking them for death convulsions.
Galantry could do little about it. He knew that as certainly as that he was getting old. He was a cold, shy man. He was prudent; his children thought him mean. He was lazy. His servants thought him easy-going. He was a romantic, and, long ago, something of a poet. He loved books better than men now, and as a reward sat in his library alone with only the dark shelves and softly flaming candles to keep him company.
In spite of the difficult times, there was no starvation on the Groats Hall estate; he could see to that, and did so in a well-meaning if somewhat haphazard fashion. And there was life there too, of a sort.
Jason's breeding boxes were full of the new light horses, which were replacing the heavy pack animals now that the roads were no longer mere cart-tracks needing the plough every spring. But horses do not need the amount of men which the arable land demands, and the vast open tracts of grazing at Groats asked little care.
Old Will Galantry was not a great sporting man, nor was he any great power in the district, being inclined to forget his magisterial duties. The fact was, he was finishing; he was coming quietly and he hoped decently to an end. When he died Groats would be sold. Young Will did not want it; that young man had his work cut out being a son to his wife's father far away in the West Country where three thousand acres were maturing under his prudent eye. Jack and Ben were at sea, neither of them could hope to buy the other out; while Lucius the youngest, with his practice at the Bar, was elbowing his way against the cleverer sons of poorer men, and was not likely to aspire to a country seat.
The estate was not so valuable now, either. Five daughters had taken five portions. The Yarrow Farms and the two hundred acres on the Frating side had gone over to a new farmer who was working them as though he meant to get the very life out of the earth. It had to be faced, there was no future for Groats as far as the Galantrys were concerned. The end would come quietly in ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years hence, providing always, of course, that the country squeezed and shuffled through its present difficulties.
Twenty years did not seem a long time to Galantry. Twenty miracles of the aconites bursting yellow and wet through the barren earth; twenty apple harvests; twenty short, sweet, hot summers; twenty Christmases; twenty, only twenty; and each solid pleasure in life growing fainter as his own powers failed, and then, nothing.
This was the general background to his mind at that time, but the peculiar and particular virtue of that actual moment, the essence of its sudden youth and headstrong impulsiveness, lay in something else.
Just now, and for a little while, the country was in physical danger, and was reacting to the phenomenon in its own oddly exalted way. This was the hour of freedom. This was the psychological moment when the very stones cried out; that magical, dangerous, instinctive time when land and people, dead earth and quick earth, seemed to fuse and stand solid, age, possessions, degrees and prudence, all forgotten in one glorious, unanimous bellow of exuberant defiance.
Galantry felt this deep national exultation. He approved it and thanked God for it with that kind of wondering satisfaction with which cold people warm their hands at an unexpected fire on their own heart's hearth. But he felt the heat through an insulating glove; having had unlimited time for thought all his life, he had done a little thinking and he saw now that the flame was emotional and probably ephemeral. All the same the phenomenon had an effect upon him. The effect which the âdays of power' had on Galantry was to make him feel released from something. His responsibilities at first felt less heavy, and then began most dangerously to look downright silly.
So, stripped of what was after all the fairly light harness of the conventional worries and repressions of a comfortable and still eighteenth-century life, he saw himself briefly for what he was insideâa cold, rightly deserted old man, with a strong vein of sensuousness, and a thin vein of poetry in him. And twenty declining years with which to do whatever he liked in a crumbling world.
He had taken a length of dead branch out of the wood box during these considerings. It was still damp, he noticed, and the lichen on the bark was still green. As he thrust it among the red castles and valleys in the fire, he thought seriously about the gypsy and her rare, revitalizing warmth. The trouble was, of course, she would run away.â¦
It is probable that in normal conditions the staggering notion of marrying her would never have occurred to him, but just then, just in those few weeks of power, when everybody in the land was thinking in terms of what could, rather than what ought to be done, it did not seem any more absurd than many of the other practical but unconventional shifts which were being put into practice all over the place.