Dance of the Years by Margery Allingham Page A

cocking an eye at his father. “Ever since they got wind of your intention, his mother and her father have been making my life a scourge. I trust you will forgive me for the suggestion, but I don’t suppose, sir, that James’s mother and—er—grandfather have been exercising the same pressure on you.”
    There was a moment of complete silence and James glanced at his father confidently, but suddenly his rock gave way under him. The two men were looking at each other steadily, and the two pairs of hooded, overwise eyes met and wavered. Presently they both began to laugh.
    They gave James a glass of wine and he drank it slowly although he hated it, and was on the verge of choking anyway. Afterwards he went out of the room, crossed the hall, and climbed out of the library window.
    It was growing dark in the plantation to the east of the house, and he edged through it to the verge of the field beyond. He lay in the grass and wept, until he was cold. Finally he sat up and looked up over the waves of green which were fast turning grey in the failing light. His sight was phenomenal, and he watched single fronds of feathery goose-grass, and the little hairs upon them all bending gracefully before the light wind. The air was cool and soft and smelled so sweet that his sense seemed to faint before he could savour it all. He sat there motionless, feeling himself soothed, and comforted as actually as though something were stroking his very heart.
    It was a strange, lovely, physical experience; as if the sweet earth had hugged him, and held him close and made little noises to take his mind off the whole species and their savagery. Under these caresses his self-confidence gradually returned. From the time he had come out of the house he had been feeling simply, but now he began to think once more, and the first thing he thought was that after all it did not matter; and presently he slid into a mood which became typical of him later. It was great, strong, bull-headed obstinacy. Very well then, he thought. In spite of Shulie, in spite of people, in spite of a certain cartyness, in spite of anything the world had in the box for him, he would go on and grow into himself, and whatsoever tried to stop him should go down at last before his determination if it took him for ever to do it. He sat hunched up in the long grass, a small square figure, black against the deepening grey, lonely and solid, and master of the situation once again.

Chapter Seven
    It is quite possible that the life he would have led in a fashionable Public School in the early nineteenth century would have broken James, but the experience was not for him. He went to Mr. Philby’s “Establishment for the Sons of Gentlemen,” not in London, but upon the London road, and Little Will, his nephew, went to Westminster, where he was a fairly unmolested, ineffectual little scrub.
    At Mr. Philby’s school in Kelvedon, much of James’s self-esteem was restored. Whatever he might have been elsewhere, in that little community he was a whale. If the story followed him (it was the ditch which took everybody’s fancy), it was not such a good story to that homely money-conscious stronghold as was Squire Galantry of Groats Hall.
    The building was one of those slabs of Queen Anne housing built on the road verge to save land, which are very impressive in front, but which prove to be very thin through, with a pathetic sort of pretentiousness which can never hope to deceive anybody who can step inside. Mr. Philby had a grand reception room for the parents, but most of his teaching was done in two large brew houses at the back. They were cold in winter and draughty in any weather, but James barely noticed the discomfort. Neither then, or ever, did he bother about ease of body. This was no virtue in him, he was so physically tough that as long as conditions were not actually harmful, he scarcely noticed them.
    In those days the town of Kelvedon was a