Dance of the Years Read Free

Dorothy Holding, who had begun work in the dairy when she was seven, and had risen slowly to be housekeeper, took more and more responsibility for the general comfort. When the first Mrs. Galantry died, she took it all.
    Dorothy was born for it. She was one of those women who remain unaltered by any change in the social life of the century. In Saxon hall, Caroline still-room, or the manager’s room in the latest block of service flats, wherever or whenever a large household has had to be fed, cleaned, bedded and controlled, one of the Dorothy Holdings of the world has bustled there, secret, single-minded, and quite extraordinarily powerful.
    In the end, whatever the theories of civilized living, the answer lies in them. Fly to the secret parts of the earth and they are there, looking out casually and with preoccupied eyes from the doorways of the largest huts; come back to the newest communal feeding centre and they are there again, selfless, untiring, thinking of something else. They are the ultimate bosses whenever man pauses for a moment in his hag-ridden experimenting to enjoy the earth.
    Old Galantry was always saying this sort of thing to Dorothy, making fun of her cautiously, as intellectual men do of practical women of whom they are more than half terrified. His favourite remark was that when the world ended, and all the dead arose prodigiously hungry no doubt, since their humanity was to be restored to them, some helpful person would be certain to set about directing a fair and orderly distribution of the loaves and fishes, and that that person, as sure as God made little apples, would be Dorothy Holding.
    She never responded to this in any way, and her silence used to disconcert him. He would try to re-establish his superiority by marvelling to himself at her stupidity, but he was never quite sure how much of a fool she was.
    At the time he married the gypsy, Dorothy was forty-two and at her zenith. She had not much affection for Galantry, rather a sort of tolerant acceptance. He sat on the top of her world indolently, like a nodding carter on a waggon-load of sacks. The marriage astounded and shocked her, but it did not demoralize her. Immediately she made it her business to see it did no such thing to the rest of the household either.
    The news was not broken to her gently. Galantry sent for her on the night it happened, when the parson and the girl’s father were still in the house. Since he was bothered if he could think of one, he offered no explanation or excuse, but related the fact and watched her face for any change of expression. To his relief it remained as wooden as one of the carved apples over the mantel. Her eyes flickered once, but with that obstinate wistfulness, which is now called wishful thinking, he put it down to the candles in the draught.
    When he had finished speaking, he pulled Shulie out from behind his chair, and handed her over to be cared for. There was only a moment’s mutual appraisement between the two women. Dorothy was not good-looking then or ever; she was over tall, very flat, and hard fleshed as a man. The pretty, bunchy fashion designed to look well on the matron, whatever her condition, did not suit her. Her clothes hung round her bones disconsolately, and her face was hard and brown and tight-looking under its frill of calico.
    To Shulie she looked terrible in the true Old Testament sense.
    Meanwhile, Dorothy, on the other hand, saw a full-blooded, barefoot gypsy, and had she seen a negress she must have received very much the same shock.
    Sir Walter Scott had shed no mantle of romance over the Romanys at that time, and the Sheriff would have had his work cut out to convince Miss Holding at any period. Dorothy had been on close, but not neighbourly terms with the gypsies all her life, and what she knew of them led her to suppose that they were predestined by God to be dirty, to lie and to steal, and therefore as night follows day, by man to be hanged, hunted or