Dance of the Years by Margery Allingham Read Free Book Online Page A

were always amused. Galantry had noticed those eyes in all his children, and his own father had had them, as had one of his grandparents also. They interested him, but what the joke had been which had brought that amusement into eyes which generations of experience had made sad, he could not imagine.
    James had a coarse, characterful mouth, not unlike Shulie’s, but without quite her innocence. In later life it became hard, but when he was a child it was loose and, as the country people said, lustful. A rum-looking little boy, strong as a lion.
    He governed Dorothy from an early age. Had he been her own son she would never have put up with it, but she was a great one for knowing her place, and she taught him to know it too. His parents were kind to him, but they were remote, always absorbed in themselves, and their indifference kept him if not humble, at least reasonable, so that he grew up to be self-reliant, convinced of his third place in the order of superiority, but schooled by the tidy, strictly common-sense discipline of Dorothy’s background.
    Dorothy made him physically clean and mentally honest, and taught him that God would get at him and persecute him if he was not. Since he had Shulie’s simplicity and credulousness, he believed herliterally and was very careful. One thing she taught him by mistake, though, and it was unfortunate because it was not true. Dorothy convinced James that there was a lower order of mortals who adored him, and who existed to serve him because he was somehow special. Not a soul breathed a word, even hinting at the scandal (and it was still a real scandal and all over the county) in his hearing. Dorothy saw to that herself, and not only for the child’s sake. Her particular world depended on old Galantry’s credit as an important, trustworthy gentleman being kept good. However, nothing Dorothy could do could disguise Shulie; even at the age of six James began to notice that there was something very unusual about her. Dorothy taught him one set of rigid rules on which, so he came to understand, both his safety and his interesting quality of specialness depended; Shulie broke all these flagrantly, and yet he saw she remained unchastened by God, and was still apparently the second most important person in the house. For a long time James could get no sense out of Dorothy on this subject, and while it did not bother him particularly, it went down in his mind as a mystery.
    One day, however, she said something which gave him an idea that she might not always tell him all she knew. He found that terrifying, and it offended him also, for he thought it impudent in her. No one ever realized where James got his pride, for it was not a peculiarity of the Galantry’s; yet goodness knows the answer was there plain enough. James got his pride from Dorothy. She fed it to him with his pap, and her love for him, which like any other love, was a creative force, etched it on his character indelibly. So it was not really extraordinary after all; few diseases are necessarily hereditary.
    The first clue Dorothy gave him about Shulie was the interesting thing she said about spitting in the house.
    â€œNo,” she thundered, “no, no, no! You mayn’t never do it, even if your Ma do. Do your Papa spit? Do I spit?”
    Her final phrase put James on to the truth, since it removed the possibility that spitting might be one of those things permissible in privileged women alone. Dorothy would not amplify her statement, and he caught the idea then for the first time that there was something radically wrong with Shulie.
    There were several peculiar circumstances attending this otherwise trivial incident. In the first place, on receiving the idea, the young James was seized with a premonition. It was one of the first of a long line of them, stretching not only throughout his own lifetime, but persisting to the third and fourth generation.
    These impressions of the future, and all the