OLD NEW YORK
THE SPARK
(_The ’Sixties_)
By EDITH WHARTON
OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN
THE OLD MAID
THE SPARK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
SUMMER
THE REEF
THE MARNE
FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING
OLD NEW YORK
THE SPARK
(_The ’Sixties_)
BY
EDITH WHARTON
AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC.
DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL
[Illustration: colophon]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Copyright, 1924, by The Curtis Publishing Company_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE SPARK
(_The ’Sixties_)
THE SPARK
(_The ’Sixties_)
I
“You idiot!” said his wife, and threw down her cards.
I turned my head away quickly, to avoid seeing Hayley Delane’s face;
though why I wished to avoid it I could not have told you, much less why
I should have imagined (if I did) that a man of his age and importance
would notice what was happening to the wholly negligible features of a
youth like myself.
I turned away so that he should not see how it hurt me to hear him
called an idiot, even in joke--well, at least half in joke; yet I often
thought him an idiot myself, and bad as my own poker was, I knew enough
of the game to judge that his--when he wasn’t attending--fully justified
such an outburst from his wife. Why her sally disturbed me I couldn’t
have said; nor why, when it was greeted by a shrill guffaw from her
“latest,” young Bolton Byrne, I itched to cuff the little bounder; nor
why, when Hayley Delane, on whom banter always dawned slowly but
certainly, at length gave forth his low rich gurgle of appreciation--why
then, most of all, I wanted to blot the whole scene from my memory. Why?
There they sat, as I had so often seen them, in Jack Alstrop’s luxurious
bookless library (I’m sure the rich rows behind the glass doors were
hollow), while beyond the windows the pale twilight thickened to blue
over Long Island lawns and woods and a moonlit streak of sea. No one
ever looked out at _that_, except to conjecture what sort of weather
there would be the next day for polo, or hunting, or racing, or whatever
use the season required the face of nature to be put to; no one was
aware of the twilight, the moon or the blue shadows--and Hayley Delane
least of all. Day after day, night after night, he sat anchored at
somebody’s poker-table, and fumbled absently with his cards....
Yes; that was the man. He didn’t even (as it was once said of a great
authority on heraldry) know his own silly business; which was to hang
about in his wife’s train, play poker with her friends, and giggle at
her nonsense and theirs. No wonder Mrs. Delane was sometimes
exasperated. As she said, _she_ hadn’t asked him to marry her! Rather
not: all their contemporaries could remember what a thunderbolt it had
been on his side. The first time he had seen her--at the theater, I
think: “Who’s that? Over there--with the heaps of hair?”--“Oh, Leila
Gracy? Why, she’s not _really_ pretty....” “Well, I’m going to marry
her--” “Marry her? But her father’s that old scoundrel Bill Gracy ...
the one....” “I’m going to marry her....” “The one who’s had to resign
from all his clubs....” “I’m going to marry her....” And he did; and it
was she, if you please, who kept him dangling, and who would and who
wouldn’t, until some whipper-snapper of a youth, who was meanwhile
making up his mind about _her_, had finally decided in the negative.
Such had been Hayley Delane’s marriage; and such, I imagined, his way of
conducting most of the transactions of his futile clumsy life.... Big
bursts of impulse--storms he couldn’t control--then long periods of
drowsing calm, during which, something made me feel, old regrets and
remorses woke and stirred under the indolent surface of his nature. And
yet, wasn’t I simply romanticizing a commonplace case? I turned back
from the window to look at the group. The bringing of candles to the
card-tables had scattered pools of illumination throughout the shadowy
room; in their radiance Delane’s harsh head stood out like a cliff from
a flowery plain. Perhaps it was only his bigness, his heaviness and
swarthiness--perhaps his greater age, for he must have been at least
fifteen years older than his wife and most of her friends; at any rate,
I could never look at him without feeling that he belonged elsewhere,
not so much in another society as in another age. For there was no doubt
that the society he lived in suited him well enough. He shared
cheerfully in all the amusements of his little set--rode, played polo,
hunted and drove his four-in-hand with the best of them (you will see,
by the last allusion, that we were still in the archaic ’nineties). Nor
could I guess what other occupations he would have preferred, had he
been given his choice. In spite of my admiration for him I could not
bring myself to think it was Leila Gracy who had subdued him to what she
worked in. What would he have chosen to do if he had not met her that
night at the play? Why, I rather thought, to meet and marry somebody
else just like her. No; the difference in him was not in his tastes--it
was in something ever so much deeper. Yet what is deeper in a man than
his tastes?
In another age, then, he would probably have been doing the equivalent
of what he was doing now: idling, taking much violent exercise, eating
more than was good for him, laughing at the same kind of nonsense, and
worshipping, with the same kind of dull routine-worship, the same kind
of woman, whether dressed in a crinoline, a farthingale, a peplum or the
skins of beasts--it didn’t much matter under what sumptuary dispensation
one placed her. Only in that other age there might have been outlets for
other faculties, now dormant, perhaps even atrophied, but which
must--yes, really must--have had something to do with the building of
that big friendly forehead, the monumental nose, and the rich dimple
which now and then furrowed his cheek with light. Did the dimple even
mean no more than Leila Gracy?
Well, perhaps it was _I_ who was the idiot, if she’d only known it; an
idiot to believe in her husband, be obsessed by him, oppressed by him,
when, for thirty years now, he’d been only the Hayley Delane whom
everybody took for granted, and was glad to see, and immediately forgot.
Turning from my contemplation of that great structural head, I looked at
his wife. Her head was still like something in the making, something
just flowering, a girl’s head ringed with haze. Even the kindly candles
betrayed the lines in her face, the paint on her lips, the peroxide on
her hair; but they could not lessen her fluidity of outline, or the
girlishness that lurked in her eyes, floating up from their depths like
a startled Naïad. There was an irreducible innocence about her, as there
so often is about women who have spent their time in amassing
sentimental experiences. As I looked at the husband and wife, thus
confronted above the cards, I marvelled more and more that it was she
who ruled and he who bent the neck. You will see by this how young I
still was.
So young, indeed, that Hayley Delane had dawned on me in my school-days
as an accomplished fact, a finished monument: like Trinity Church, the
Reservoir or the Knickerbocker Club. A New Yorker of my generation could
no more imagine him altered or away than any of those venerable
institutions. And so I had continued to take him for granted till, my
Harvard days over, I had come back after an interval of world-wandering
to settle down in New York, and he had broken on me afresh as something
still not wholly accounted for, and more interesting than I had
suspected.
I don’t say the matter kept me awake. I had my own business (in a
down-town office), and the pleasures of my age; I was hard at work
discovering New York. But now and then the Hayley Delane riddle would
thrust itself between me and my other interests, as it had done tonight
just because his wife had sneered at him, and he had laughed and thought
her funny. And at such times I found myself moved and excited out of all
proportion to anything I knew about him, or had observed in him, to
justify such emotions.
The game was over, the dressing-bell had rung. It rang again presently,
with a discreet insistence: Alstrop, easy in all else, preferred that
his guests should not be more than half an hour late for dinner.
“I say--_Leila!_” he finally remonstrated.
The golden coils drooped above her chips. “Yes--yes. Just a minute.
Hayley, you’ll have to pay for me.--There, I’m going!” She laughed and
pushed back her chair.
Delane, laughing also, got up lazily. Byrne flew to open the door for
Mrs. Delane; the other women trooped out with her. Delane, having
settled her debts, picked up her gold-mesh bag and cigarette-case, and
followed.
I turned toward a window opening on the lawn. There was just time to
stretch my legs while curling-tongs and powder were being plied above
stairs. Alstrop joined me, and we stood staring up at a soft dishevelled
sky in which the first stars came and went.
“Curse it--looks rotten for our match tomorrow!”
“Yes--but what a good smell the coming rain does give to things!”
He laughed. “You’re an optimist--like old Hayley.”
We strolled across the lawn toward the woodland.
“Why like old Hayley?”
“Oh, he’s a regular philosopher. I’ve never seen him put out, have you?”
“No. That must be what makes him look so sad,” I exclaimed.
“Sad? Hayley? Why, I was just saying--”
“Yes, I know. But the only people who are never put out are the people
who don’t care; and not caring is about the saddest occupation there is.
I’d like to see him in a rage just once.”
My host gave a faint whistle, and remarked: “By Jove, I believe the
wind’s hauling round to the north. If it does--” He moistened his finger
and held it up.
I knew there was no use in theorizing with Alstrop; but I tried another
tack. “What on earth has Delane done with himself all these years?” I
asked. Alstrop was forty, or thereabouts, and by a good many years
better able than I to cast a backward glance over the problem.
But the effort seemed beyond him. “Why--what years?”
“Well--ever since he left college.”
“Lord! How do I know? I wasn’t there. Hayley must be well past fifty.”
It sounded formidable to my youth; almost like a geological era. And
that suited him, in a way--I could imagine him drifting, or silting, or
something measurable by aeons, at the rate of about a millimetre a
century.
“How long has he been married?” I asked.
“I don’t know that either; nearly twenty years, I should say. The kids
are growing up. The boys are both at Groton. Leila doesn’t look it, I
must say--not in some lights.”
“Well, then, what’s he been doing since he married?”
“Why, what should he have done? He’s always had money enough to do what
he likes. He’s got his partnership in the bank, of course. They say that
rascally old father-in-law, whom he refuses to see, gets a good deal of
money out of him. You know he’s awfully soft-hearted. But he can swing
it all, I fancy. Then he sits on lots of boards--Blind Asylum,
Children’s Aid, S.P.C.A., and all the rest. And there isn’t a better
sport going.”
“But that’s not what I mean,” I persisted.
Alstrop looked at me through the darkness. “You don’t mean women? I
never heard--but then one wouldn’t, very likely. He’s a shut-up
fellow.”
We turned back to dress for dinner. Yes, that was the word I wanted; he
was a shut-up fellow. Even the rudimentary Alstrop felt it. But shut-up
consciously, deliberately--or only instinctively, congenitally? There
the mystery lay.
II
The big polo match came off the next day. It was the first of the
season, and, taking respectful note of the fact, the barometer, after a
night of showers, jumped back to Fair.
All Fifth Avenue had poured down to see New York versus Hempstead. The
beautifully rolled lawns and freshly painted club stand were sprinkled
with spring dresses and abloom with sunshades, and coaches and other
vehicles without number enclosed the farther side of the field.
Hayley Delane still played polo, though he had grown so heavy that the
cost of providing himself with mounts must have been considerable. He
was, of course, no longer regarded as in the first rank; indeed, in
these later days, when the game has become an exact science, I hardly
know to what use such a weighty body as his could be put. But in that
far-off dawn of the sport his sureness and swiftness of stroke caused
him to be still regarded as a useful back, besides being esteemed for
the part he had taken in introducing and establishing the game.
I remember little of the beginning of the game, which resembled many
others I had seen. I never played myself, and I had no money on: for me
the principal interest of the scene lay in the May weather, the ripple
of spring dresses over the turf, the sense of youth, fun, gaiety, of
young manhood and womanhood weaving their eternal pattern under the
conniving sky. Now and then they were interrupted for a moment by a
quick “Oh” which turned all those tangled glances the same way, as two
glittering streaks of men and horses dashed across the green, locked,
swayed, rayed outward into starry figures, and rolled back. But it was
for a moment only--then eyes wandered again, chatter began, and youth
and sex had it their own way till the next charge shook them from their
trance.
I was of the number of these divided watchers. Polo as a spectacle did
not amuse me for long, and I saw about as little of it as the pretty
girls perched beside their swains on coach-tops and club stand. But by
chance my vague wanderings brought me to the white palings enclosing the
field, and there, in a cluster of spectators, I caught sight of Leila
Delane.
As I approached I was surprised to notice a familiar figure shouldering
away from her. One still saw old Bill Gracy often enough in the outer
purlieus of the big race-courses; but I wondered how he had got into the
enclosure of a fashionable Polo Club. There he was, though,
unmistakably; who could forget that swelling chest under the
shabby-smart racing-coat, the gray top-hat always pushed back from his
thin auburn curls, and the mixture of furtiveness and swagger which made
his liquid glance so pitiful? Among the figures that rose here and there
like warning ruins from the dead-level of old New York’s respectability,
none was more typical than Bill Gracy’s; my gaze followed him curiously
as he shuffled away from his daughter. “Trying to get more money out of
her,” I concluded; and remembered what Alstrop had said of Delane’s
generosity.
“Well, if I were Delane,” I thought, “I’d pay a good deal to keep that
old ruffian out of sight.”
Mrs. Delane, turning to watch her father’s retreat, saw me and nodded.
At the same moment Delane, on a tall deep-chested poney, ambled across
the field, stick on shoulder. As he rode thus, heavily yet mightily, in
his red-and-black shirt and white breeches, his head standing out like a
bronze against the turf, I whimsically recalled the figure of
Guidoriccio da Foligno, the famous mercenary, riding at a slow powerful
pace across the fortressed fresco of the Town Hall of Siena. Why a New
York banker of excessive weight and more than middle age, jogging on a
poney across a Long Island polo field, should have reminded me of a
martial figure on an armoured war-horse, I find it hard to explain. As
far as I knew there were no turreted fortresses in Delane’s background;
and his too juvenile polo cap and gaudy shirt were a poor substitute for
Guidoriccio’s coat of mail. But it was the kind of trick the man was
always playing; reminding me, in his lazy torpid way, of times and
scenes and people greater than he could know. That was why he kept on
interesting me.
It was this interest which caused me to pause by Mrs. Delane, whom I
generally avoided. After a vague smile she had already turned her gaze
on the field.
“You’re admiring your husband?” I suggested, as Delane’s trot carried
him across our line of vision.
She glanced at me dubiously. “You think he’s too fat to play, I
suppose?” she retorted, a little snappishly.
“I think he’s the finest figure in sight. He looks like a great general,
a great soldier of fortune--in an old fresco, I mean.”
She stared, perhaps suspecting irony, as she always did beneath the
unintelligible.
“Ah, _he_ can pay anything he likes for his mounts!” she murmured; and
added, with a wandering laugh: “Do you mean it as a compliment? Shall I
tell him what you say?”
“I wish you would.”
But her eyes were off again, this time to the opposite end of the field.
Of course--Bolton Byrne was playing on the other side! The fool of a
woman was always like that--absorbed in her latest adventure. Yet there
had been so many, and she must by this time have been so radiantly sure
there would be more! But at every one the girl was born anew in her:
she blushed, palpitated, “sat out” dances, plotted for tête-à-têtes,
pressed flowers (I’ll wager) in her copy of “Omar Khayyám,” and was all
white muslin and wild roses while it lasted. And the Byrne fever was
then at its height.
It did not seem polite to leave her immediately, and I continued to
watch the field at her side. “It’s their last chance to score,” she
flung at me, leaving me to apply the ambiguous pronoun; and after that
we remained silent.
The game had been a close one; the two sides were five each, and the
crowd about the rails hung breathless on the last minutes. The struggle
was short and swift, and dramatic enough to hold even the philanderers
on the coach-tops. Once I stole a glance at Mrs. Delane, and saw the
colour rush to her cheek. Byrne was hurling himself across the field,
crouched on the neck of his somewhat weedy mount, his stick swung like a
lance--a pretty enough sight, for he was young and supple, and light in
the saddle.
“They’re going to win!” she gasped with a happy cry.
But just then Byrne’s poney, unequal to the pace, stumbled, faltered,
and came down. His rider dropped from the saddle, hauled the animal to
his feet, and stood for a minute half-dazed before he scrambled up
again. That minute made the difference. It gave the other side their
chance. The knot of men and horses tightened, wavered, grew loose, broke
up in arrowing flights; and suddenly a ball--Delane’s--sped through the
enemy’s goal, victorious. A roar of delight went up; “Good for old
Hayley!” voices shouted. Mrs. Delane gave a little sour laugh.
“That--that beastly poney; I warned him it was no good--and the ground
still so slippery,” she broke out.
“The poney? Why, he’s a ripper. It’s not every mount that will carry
Delane’s weight,” I said. She stared at me unseeingly and turned away
with twitching lips. I saw her speeding off toward the enclosure.
I followed hastily, wanting to see Delane in the moment of his triumph.
I knew he took all these little sporting successes with an absurd
seriousness, as if, mysteriously, they were the shadow of more
substantial achievements, dreamed of, or accomplished, in some previous
life. And perhaps the elderly man’s vanity in holding his own with the
youngsters was also an element of his satisfaction; how could one tell,
in a mind of such monumental simplicity?
When I reached the saddling enclosure I did not at once discover him; an
unpleasant sight met my eyes instead. Bolton Byrne, livid and
withered--his face like an old woman’s, I thought--rode across the empty
field, angrily lashing his poney’s flanks. He slipped to the ground, and
as he did so, struck the shivering animal a last blow clean across the
head. An unpleasant sight--
But retribution fell. It came like a black-and-red thunderbolt
descending on the wretch out of the heaven. Delane had him by the
collar, had struck him with his whip across the shoulders, and then
flung him off like a thing too mean for human handling. It was over in
the taking of a breath--then, while the crowd hummed and closed in,
leaving Byrne to slink away as if he had become invisible, I saw my big
Delane, grown calm and apathetic, turn to the poney and lay a soothing
hand on its neck.
I was pushing forward, moved by the impulse to press that hand, when his
wife went up to him. Though I was not far off I could not hear what she
said; people did not speak loud in those days, or “make scenes,” and the
two or three words which issued from Mrs. Delane’s lips must have been
inaudible to everyone but her husband. On his dark face they raised a
sudden redness; he made a motion of his free arm (the other hand still
on the poney’s neck), as if to wave aside an importunate child; then he
felt in his pocket, drew out a cigarette, and lit it. Mrs. Delane, white
as a ghost, was hurrying back to Alstrop’s coach.
I was turning away too when I saw her husband hailed again. This time it
was Bill Gracy, shoving and yet effacing himself, as his manner was,
who came up, a facile tear on his lashes, his smile half tremulous, half
defiant, a yellow-gloved hand held out.
“God bless you for it, Hayley--God bless you, my dear boy!”
Delane’s hand reluctantly left the poney’s neck. It wavered for an
instant, just touched the other’s palm, and was instantly engulfed in
it. Then Delane, without speaking, turned toward the shed where his
mounts were being rubbed down, while his father-in-law swaggered from
the scene.
* * * * *
I had promised, on the way home, to stop for tea at a friend’s house
half-way between the Polo Club and Alstrop’s. Another friend, who was
also going there, offered me a lift, and carried me on to Alstrop’s
afterward.
During our drive, and about the tea-table, the talk of course dwelt
mainly on the awkward incident of Bolton Byrne’s thrashing. The women
were horrified or admiring, as their humour moved them; but the men all
agreed that it was natural enough. In such a case any pretext was
permissible, they said; though it was stupid of Hayley to air his
grievance on a public occasion. But then he _was_ stupid--that was the
consensus of opinion. If there was a blundering way of doing a thing
that needed to be done, trust him to hit on it! For the rest, everyone
spoke of him affectionately, and agreed that Leila was a fool ... and
nobody particularly liked Byrne, an “outsider” who had pushed himself
into society by means of cheek and showy horsemanship. But Leila, it was
agreed, had always had a weakness for “outsiders,” perhaps because
their admiration flattered her extreme desire to be thought “in.”
“Wonder how many of the party you’ll find left--this affair must have
caused a good deal of a shake-up,” my friend said, as I got down at
Alstrop’s door; and the same thought was in my own mind. Byrne would be
gone, of course; and no doubt, in another direction, Delane and Leila. I
wished I had a chance to shake that blundering hand of Hayley’s....
Hall and drawing-room were empty; the dressing-bell must have sounded
its discreet appeal more than once, and I was relieved to find it had
been heeded. I didn’t want to stumble on any of my fellow-guests till I
had seen our host. As I was dashing upstairs I heard him call me from
the library, and turned back.
“No hurry--dinner put off till nine,” he said cheerfully; and added, on
a note of inexpressible relief: “We’ve had a tough job of it--_ouf_!”
The room looked as if they had: the card tables stood untouched, and the
deep armchairs, gathered into confidential groups, seemed still
deliberating on the knotty problem. I noticed that a good deal of
whiskey and soda had gone toward its solution.
“What happened? Has Byrne left?”
“Byrne? No--thank goodness!” Alstrop looked at me almost reproachfully.
“Why should he? That was just what we wanted to avoid.”
“I don’t understand. You don’t mean that _he’s_ stayed and the Delanes
have gone?”
“Lord forbid! Why should they, either? Hayley’s apologized!”
My jaw fell, and I returned my host’s stare.
“Apologized? To that hound? For what?”
Alstrop gave an impatient shrug. “Oh, for God’s sake don’t reopen the
cursèd question,” it seemed to say. Aloud he echoed: “For what? Why,
after all, a man’s got a right to thrash his own poney, hasn’t he? It
was beastly unsportsmanlike, of course--but it’s nobody’s business if
Byrne chooses to be that kind of a cad. That’s what Hayley saw--when he
cooled down.”
“Then I’m sorry he cooled down.”
Alstrop looked distinctly annoyed. “I don’t follow you. We had a hard
enough job. You said you wanted to see him in a rage just once; but you
don’t want him to go on making an ass of himself, do you?”
“I don’t call it making an ass of himself to thrash Byrne.”
“And to advertise his conjugal difficulties all over Long Island, with
twenty newspaper reporters at his heels?”
I stood silent, baffled but incredulous. “I don’t believe he ever gave
that a thought. I wonder who put it to him first in that way?”
Alstrop twisted his unlit cigarette about in his fingers. “We all
did--as delicately as we could. But it was Leila who finally convinced
him. I must say Leila was very game.”
I still pondered: the scene in the paddock rose again before me, the
quivering agonized animal, and the way Delane’s big hand had been laid
reassuringly on its neck.
“Nonsense! I don’t believe a word of it!” I declared.
“A word of what I’ve been telling you?”
“Well, of the official version of the case.”
To my surprise, Alstrop met my glance with an eye neither puzzled nor
resentful. A shadow seemed to be lifted from his honest face.
“What _do_ you believe?” he asked.
“Why, that Delane thrashed that cur for ill-treating the poney, and not
in the least for being too attentive to Mrs. Delane. I was there, I tell
you--I saw him.”
Alstrop’s brow cleared completely. “There’s something to be said for
that theory,” he agreed, smiling over the match he was holding to his
cigarette.
“Well, then--what was there to apologize for?”
“Why, for _that_--butting in between Byrne and his horse. Don’t you see,
you young idiot? If Hayley hadn’t apologized, the mud was bound to
stick to his wife. Everybody would have said the row was on her account.
It’s as plain as the knob on the door--there wasn’t anything else for
him to do. He saw it well enough after she’d said a dozen words to
him--”
“I wonder what those words were,” I muttered.
“Don’t know. He and she came downstairs together. He looked a hundred
years old, poor old chap. ‘It’s the cruelty, it’s the cruelty,’ he kept
saying; ‘I hate cruelty.’ I rather think he knows we’re all on his side.
Anyhow, it’s all patched up and well patched up; and I’ve ordered my
last ’eighty-four Georges Goulet brought up for dinner. Meant to keep it
for my own wedding-breakfast; but since this afternoon I’ve rather lost
interest in that festivity,” Alstrop concluded with a celibate grin.
“Well,” I repeated, as though it were a relief to say, “I could swear he
did it for the poney.”
“Oh, so could I,” my host acquiesced as we went upstairs together.
On my threshold, he took me by the arm and followed me in. I saw there
was still something on his mind.
“Look here, old chap--you say you were in there when it happened?”
“Yes. Close by--”
“Well,” he interrupted, “for the Lord’s sake don’t allude to the subject
tonight, will you?”
“Of course not.”
“Thanks a lot. Truth is, it was a narrow squeak, and I couldn’t help
admiring the way Leila played up. She was in a fury with Hayley; but she
got herself in hand in no time, and behaved very decently. She told me
privately he was often like that--flaring out all of a sudden like a
madman. You wouldn’t imagine it, would you, with that quiet way of his?
She says she thinks it’s his old wound.”
“What old wound?”
“Didn’t you know he was wounded--where was it? Bull Run, I believe. In
the head--”
No, I hadn’t known; hadn’t even heard, or remembered, that Delane had
been in the Civil War. I stood and stared in my astonishment.
“Hayley Delane? In the war?”
“Why, of course. All through it.”
“But Bull Run--Bull Run was at the very beginning.” I broke off to go
through a rapid mental calculation. “Look here, Jack, it can’t be; he’s
not over fifty-five. You told me so yourself. If he was in it from the
beginning he must have gone into it as a schoolboy.”
“Well, that’s just what he did: ran away from school to volunteer. His
family didn’t know what had become of him till he was wounded. I
remember hearing my people talk about it. Great old sport, Hayley. I’d
have given a lot not to have this thing happen; not at my place anyhow;
but it _has_, and there’s no help for it. Look here, you swear you won’t
make a sign, will you? I’ve got all the others into line, and if you’ll
back us up we’ll have a regular Happy Family Evening. Jump into your
clothes--it’s nearly nine.”
III
This is not a story-teller’s story; it is not even the kind of episode
capable of being shaped into one. Had it been, I should have reached my
climax, or at any rate its first stage, in the incident at the Polo
Club, and what I have left to tell would be the effect of that incident
on the lives of the three persons concerned.
It is not a story, or anything in the semblance of a story, but merely
an attempt to depict for you--and in so doing, perhaps make clearer to
myself--the aspect and character of a man whom I loved, perplexedly but
faithfully, for many years. I make no apology, therefore, for the fact
that Bolton Byrne, whose evil shadow ought to fall across all my
remaining pages, never again appears in them; and that the last I saw of
him (for my purpose) was when, after our exaggeratedly cheerful and even
noisy dinner that evening at Jack Alstrop’s, I observed him shaking
hands with Hayley Delane, and declaring, with pinched lips and a tone of
falsetto cordiality: “Bear malice? Well, rather not--why, what rot!
All’s fair in--in polo, ain’t it? I should say so! Yes--off first thing
tomorrow. S’pose of course you’re staying on with Jack over Sunday? I
wish I hadn’t promised the Gildermeres--.” And therewith he vanishes,
having served his purpose as a passing lantern-flash across the twilight
of Hayley Delane’s character.
All the while, I continued to feel that it was not Bolton Byrne who
mattered. While clubs and drawing-rooms twittered with the episode, and
friends grew portentous in trying to look unconscious, and said “I don’t
know what you mean,” with eyes beseeching you to speak if you knew more
than they did, I had already discarded the whole affair, as I was sure
Delane had. “It _was_ the poney, and nothing but the poney,” I chuckled
to myself, as pleased as if I had owed Mrs. Delane a grudge, and were
exulting in her abasement; and still there ran through my mind the
phrase which Alstrop said Delane had kept repeating: “It was the
cruelty--it was the cruelty. I hate cruelty.”
How it fitted in, now, with the other fact my host had let drop--the
fact that Delane had fought all through the civil war! It seemed
incredible that it should have come to me as a surprise; that I should
have forgotten, or perhaps never even known, this phase of his history.
Yet in young men like myself, just out of college in the ’nineties, such
ignorance was more excusable than now seems possible.
That was the dark time of our national indifference, before the
country’s awakening; no doubt the war seemed much farther from us, much
less a part of us, than it does to the young men of today. Such was the
case, at any rate, in old New York, and more particularly, perhaps, in
the little clan of well-to-do and indolent old New Yorkers among whom I
had grown up. Some of these, indeed, had fought bravely through the four
years: New York had borne her part, a memorable part, in the long
struggle. But I remember with what perplexity I first wakened to the
fact--it was in my school-days--that if certain of my father’s kinsmen
and contemporaries had been in the war, others--how many!--had stood
aside. I recall especially the shock with which, at school, I had heard
a boy explain his father’s lameness: “He’s never got over that shot in
the leg he got at Chancellorsville.”
I stared; for my friend’s father was just my own father’s age. At the
moment (it was at a school foot-ball match) the two men were standing
side by side, in full sight of us--_his_ father stooping, halt and old,
mine, even to filial eyes, straight and youthful. Only an hour before I
had been bragging to my friend about the wonderful shot my father was
(he had taken me down to his North Carolina shooting at Christmas); but
now I stood abashed.
The next time I went home for the holidays I said to my mother, one day
when we were alone: “Mother, why didn’t father fight in the war?” My
heart was beating so hard that I thought she must have seen my
excitement and been shocked. But she raised an untroubled face from her
embroidery.
“Your father, dear? Why, because he was a married man.” She had a
reminiscent smile. “Molly was born already--she was six months old when
Fort Sumter fell. I remember I was nursing her when Papa came in with
the news. We couldn’t believe it.” She paused to match a silk placidly.
“Married men weren’t called upon to fight,” she explained.
“But they _did_, though, Mother! Payson Gray’s father fought. He was so
badly wounded at Chancellorsville that he’s had to walk with a stick
ever since.”
“Well, my dear, I don’t suppose you would want your Papa to be like
that, would you?” She paused again, and finding I made no answer,
probably thought it pained me to be thus convicted of heartlessness, for
she added, as if softening the rebuke: “Two of your father’s cousins
_did_ fight: his cousins Harold and James. They were young men, with no
family obligations. And poor Jamie was killed, you remember.”
I listened in silence, and never again spoke to my mother of the war.
Nor indeed to anyone--even myself. I buried the whole business out of
sight, out of hearing, as I thought. After all, the war had all happened
long ago; it had been over ten years when I was born. And nobody ever
talked about it nowadays. Still, one did, of course, as one grew up,
meet older men of whom it was said: “Yes, so-and-so was in the war.”
Many of them even continued to be known by the military titles with
which they had left the service: Colonel Ruscott, Major Detrancy, old
General Scole. People smiled a little, but admitted that, if it pleased
them to keep their army rank, it was a right they had earned. Hayley
Delane, it appeared, thought differently. He had never allowed himself
to be called “Major” or “Colonel” (I think he had left the service a
Colonel). And besides he was years younger than these veterans. To find
that he had fought at their side was like discovering that the
grandmother one could remember playing with had been lifted up by her
nurse to see General Washington. I always thought of Hayley Delane as
belonging to my own generation rather than to my father’s; though I knew
him to be so much older than myself, and occasionally called him “sir,”
I felt on an equality with him, the equality produced by sharing the
same amusements and talking of them in the same slang. And indeed he
must have been ten or fifteen years younger than the few men I knew who
had been in the war, none of whom, I was sure, had had to run away from
school to volunteer; so that my forgetfulness (or perhaps even
ignorance) of his past was not inexcusable.
Broad and Delane had been, for two or three generations, one of the safe
and conservative private banks of New York. My friend Hayley had been
made a partner early in his career; the post was almost hereditary in
his family. It happened that, not long after the scene at Alstrop’s, I
was offered a position in the house. The offer came, not through Delane,
but through Mr. Frederick Broad, the senior member, who was an old
friend of my father’s. The chance was too advantageous to be rejected,
and I transferred to a desk at Broad and Delane’s my middling
capacities and my earnest desire to do my best. It was owing to this
accidental change that there gradually grew up between Hayley Delane and
myself a sentiment almost filial on my part, elder-brotherly on his--for
paternal one could hardly call him, even with his children.
My job need not have thrown me in his way, for his business duties sat
lightly on him, and his hours at the bank were neither long nor regular.
But he appeared to take a liking to me, and soon began to call on me for
the many small services which, in the world of affairs, a young man can
render his elders. His great perplexity was the writing of business
letters. He knew what he wanted to say; his sense of the proper use of
words was clear and prompt; I never knew anyone more impatient of the
hazy verbiage with which American primary culture was already
corrupting our speech. He would put his finger at once on these
laborious inaccuracies, growling: “For God’s sake, translate it into
English--” but when he had to write, or worse still dictate, a letter
his friendly forehead and big hands grew damp, and he would mutter, half
to himself and half to me: “How the devil shall I say: ‘Your letter of
the blankth came yesterday, and after thinking over what you propose I
don’t like the looks of it’?”--“Why, say just that,” I would answer; but
he would shake his head and object: “My dear fellow, you’re as bad as I
am. You don’t know how _to write good English_.” In his mind there was a
gulf fixed between speaking and writing the language. I could never get
his imagination to bridge this gulf, or to see that the phrases which
fell from his lips were “better English” than the written version,
produced after much toil and pen-biting, which consisted in translating
the same statement into some such language as: “I am in receipt of your
communication of the 30th ultimo, and regret to be compelled to inform
you in reply that, after mature consideration of the proposals therein
contained, I find myself unable to pronounce a favourable judgment upon
the same”--usually sending a furious dash through “the same” as
“counterjumper’s lingo,” and then groaning over his inability to find a
more Johnsonian substitute.
“The trouble with me,” he used to say, “is that both my parents were
martinets on grammar, and never let any of us children use a vulgar
expression without correcting us.” (By “vulgar” he meant either familiar
or inexact.) “We were brought up on the best books--Scott and
Washington Irving, old what’s-his-name who wrote the _Spectator_, and
Gibbon and so forth; and though I’m not a literary man, and never set up
to be, I can’t forget my early training, and when I see the children
reading a newspaper-fellow like Kipling I want to tear the rubbish out
of their hands. Cheap journalism--that’s what most modern books are. And
you’ll excuse my saying, dear boy, that even you are too young to know
how English ought to be _written_.”
It was quite true--though I had at first found it difficult to
believe--that Delane must once have been a reader. He surprised me, one
night, as we were walking home from a dinner where we had met, by
apostrophizing the moon, as she rose, astonished, behind the steeple of
the “Heavenly Rest,” with “She walks in beauty like the night”; and he
was fond of describing a victorious charge in a polo match by saying:
“Tell you what, we came down on ’em like the Assyrian.” Nor had Byron
been his only fare. There had evidently been a time when he had known
the whole of “Gray’s Elegy” by heart, and I once heard him murmuring to
himself, as we stood together one autumn evening on the terrace of his
country-house:
_Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,_
_And all the air a solemn stillness holds...._
Little sympathy as I felt for Mrs. Delane, I could not believe it was
his marriage which had checked Delane’s interest in books. To judge from
his very limited stock of allusions and quotations, his reading seemed
to have ceased a good deal earlier than his first meeting with Leila
Gracy. Exploring him like a geologist, I found, for several layers under
the Leila stratum, no trace of any interest in letters; and I concluded
that, like other men I knew, his mind had been receptive up to a certain
age, and had then snapped shut on what it possessed, like a replete
crustacean never reached by another high tide. People, I had by this
time found, all stopped living at one time or another, however many
years longer they continued to be alive; and I suspected that Delane had
stopped at about nineteen. That date would roughly coincide with the end
of the civil war, and with his return to the common-place existence from
which he had never since deviated. Those four years had apparently
filled to the brim every crevice of his being. For I could not hold that
he had gone through them unawares, as some famous figures, puppets of
fate, have been tossed from heights to depths of human experience
without once knowing what was happening to them--forfeiting a crown by
the insistence on some prescribed ceremonial, or by carrying on their
flight a certain monumental dressing-case.
No, Hayley Delane had felt the war, had been made different by it; how
different I saw only when I compared him to the other “veterans” who,
from being regarded by me as the dullest of my father’s dinner-guests,
were now become figures of absorbing interest. Time was when, at my
mother’s announcement that General Scole or Major Detrancy was coming to
dine, I had invariably found a pretext for absenting myself; now, when I
knew they were expected, my chief object was to persuade her to invite
Delane.
“But he’s so much younger--he cares only for the sporting set. He won’t
be flattered at being asked with old gentlemen.” And my mother, with a
slight smile, would add: “If Hayley has a weakness, it’s the wish to be
thought younger than he is--on his wife’s account, I suppose.”
Once, however, she did invite him, and he accepted; and we got over
having to ask Mrs. Delane (who undoubtedly _would_ have been bored) by
leaving out Mrs. Scole and Mrs. Ruscott, and making it a “man’s dinner”
of the old-fashioned sort, with canvas-backs, a bowl of punch, and my
mother the only lady present--the kind of evening my father still liked
best.
I remember, at that dinner, how attentively I studied the contrasts, and
tried to detect the points of resemblance, between General Scole, old
Detrancy and Delane. Allusions to the war--anecdotes of Bull Run and
Andersonville, of Lincoln, Seward and MacClellan, were often on Major
Detrancy’s lips, especially after the punch had gone round. “When a
fellow’s been through the war,” he used to say as a preface to almost
everything, from expressing his opinion of last Sunday’s sermon to
praising the roasting of a canvas-back. Not so General Scole. No one
knew exactly why he had been raised to the rank he bore, but he tacitly
proclaimed his right to it by never alluding to the subject. He was a
tall and silent old gentleman with a handsome shock of white hair,
half-shut blue eyes glinting between veined lids, and an impressively
upright carriage. His manners were perfect--so perfect that they stood
him in lieu of language, and people would say afterward how agreeable
he had been when he had only bowed and smiled, and got up and sat down
again, with an absolute mastery of those difficult arts. He was said to
be a judge of horses and Madeira, but he never rode, and was reported to
give very indifferent wines to the rare guests he received in his grim
old house in Irving Place.
He and Major Detrancy had one trait in common--the extreme caution of
the old New Yorker. They viewed with instinctive distrust anything
likely to derange their habits, diminish their comfort, or lay on them
any unwonted responsibilities, civic or social; and slow as their other
mental processes were, they showed a supernatural quickness in divining
when a seemingly harmless conversation might draw them into “signing a
paper,” backing up even the mildest attempt at municipal reform, or
pledging them to support, on however small a scale, any new and
unfamiliar cause.
According to their creed, gentlemen subscribed as handsomely as their
means allowed to the Charity Organization Society, the Patriarchs Balls,
the Children’s Aid, and their own parochial charities. Everything beyond
savoured of “politics,” revivalist meetings, or the attempts of vulgar
persons to buy their way into the circle of the elect; even the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, being of more recent creation,
seemed open to doubt, and they thought it rash of certain members of the
clergy to lend it their names. “But then,” as Major Detrancy said, “in
this noisy age some people will do anything to attract notice.” And they
breathed a joint sigh over the vanished “Old New York” of their youth,
the exclusive and impenetrable New York to which Rubini and Jenny Lind
had sung and Mr. Thackeray lectured, the New York which had declined to
receive Charles Dickens, and which, out of revenge, he had so
scandalously ridiculed.
Yet Major Detrancy and General Scole had fought all through the war, had
participated in horrors and agonies untold, endured all manner of
hardships and privations, suffered the extremes of heat and cold,
hunger, sickness and wounds; and it had all faded like an indigestion
comfortably slept off, leaving them perfectly commonplace and happy.
The same was true, with a difference, of Colonel Ruscott, who, though
not by birth of the same group, had long since been received into it,
partly because he was a companion in arms, partly because of having
married a Hayley connection. I can see Colonel Ruscott still: a dapper
handsome little fellow, rather too much of both, with a lustrous wave to
his hair (or was it a wig?), and a dash too much of Cologne on too-fine
cambric. He had been in the New York militia in his youth, had “gone
out” with the great Seventh; and the Seventh, ever since, had been the
source and centre of his being, as still, to some octogenarians, their
University dinner is.
Colonel Ruscott specialized in chivalry. For him the war was “the blue
and the grey,” the rescue of lovely Southern girls, anecdotes about Old
Glory, and the carrying of vital despatches through the enemy lines.
Enchantments seemed to have abounded in his path during the four years
which had been so drab and desolate to many; and the punch (to the
amusement of us youngsters, who were not above drawing him) always
evoked from his memory countless situations in which by prompt,
respectful yet insinuating action, he had stamped his image indelibly on
some proud Southern heart, while at the same time discovering where
Jackson’s guerillas lay, or at what point the river was fordable.
And there sat Hayley Delane, so much younger than the others, yet
seeming at such times so much their elder that I thought to myself: “But
if _he_ stopped growing up at nineteen, they’re still in long-clothes!”
But it was only morally that he had gone on growing. Intellectually they
were all on a par. When the last new play at Wallack’s was discussed, or
my mother tentatively alluded to the last new novel by the author of
_Robert Elsmere_ (it was her theory that, as long as the hostess was
present at a man’s dinner, she should keep the talk at the highest
level), Delane’s remarks were no more penetrating than his
neighbours’--and he was almost sure not to have read the novel.
It was when any social question was raised: any of the problems
concerning club administration, charity, or the relation between
“gentlemen” and the community, that he suddenly stood out from them, not
so much opposed as aloof.
He would sit listening, stroking my sister’s long skye-terrier (who,
defying all rules, had jumped up to his knees at dessert), with a grave
half-absent look on his heavy face; and just as my mother (I knew) was
thinking how bored he was, that big smile of his would reach out and
light up his dimple, and he would say, with enough diffidence to mark
his respect for his elders, yet a complete independence of their views:
“After all, what does it matter who makes the first move? The thing is
to get the business done.”
That was always the gist of it. To everyone else, my father included,
what mattered in everything, from Diocesan Meetings to Patriarchs Balls,
was just what Delane seemed so heedless of: the standing of the people
who made up the committee or headed the movement. To Delane, only the
movement itself counted; if the thing was worth doing, he pronounced in
his slow lazy way, get it done somehow, even if its backers _were_
Methodists or Congregationalists, or people who dined in the middle of
the day.
“If they were convicts from Sing Sing I shouldn’t care,” he affirmed,
his hand lazily flattering the dog’s neck as I had seen it caress
Byrne’s terrified poney.