otherwise unchanged, from the ordeal. I am not sure that anyone except
myself was aware that there had been an ordeal. But my conviction
remained. His wife’s return had changed him back into a card-playing,
ball-going, race-frequenting elderly gentleman; but I had seen the
waters part, and a granite rock thrust up from them. Twice the upheaval
had taken place; and each time in obedience to motives unintelligible
to the people he lived among. Almost any man can take a stand on a
principle his fellow-citizens are already occupying; but Hayley Delane
held out for things his friends could not comprehend, and did it for
reasons he could not explain. The central puzzle subsisted.
Does it subsist for me to this day? Sometimes, walking up town from the
bank where in my turn I have become an institution, I glance through the
rails of Trinity churchyard and wonder. He has lain there ten years or
more now; his wife has married the President of a rising Western
University, and grown intellectual and censorious; his children are
scattered and established. Does the old Delane vault hold his secret, or
did I surprise it one day; did he and I surprise it together?
It was one Sunday afternoon, I remember, not long after Bill Gracy’s
edifying end. I had not gone out of town that week-end, and after a long
walk in the frosty blue twilight of Central Park I let myself into my
little flat. To my surprise I saw Hayley Delane’s big overcoat and tall
hat in the hall. He used to drop in on me now and then, but mostly on
the way home from a dinner where we happened to have met; and I was
rather startled at his appearance at that hour and on a Sunday. But he
lifted an untroubled face from the morning paper.
“You didn’t expect a call on a Sunday? Fact is, I’m out of a job. I
wanted to go down to the country, as usual, but there’s some grand
concert or other that Leila was booked for this afternoon; and a dinner
tonight at Alstrop’s. So I dropped in to pass the time of day. What
_is_ there to do on a Sunday afternoon, anyhow?”
There he was, the same old usual Hayley, as much put to it as the merest
fribble of his set to employ an hour unfilled by poker! I was glad he
viewed me as a possible alternative, and laughingly told him so. He
laughed too--we were on terms of brotherly equality--and told me to go
ahead and read two or three notes which had arrived in my absence.
“Gad--how they shower down on a fellow at your age!” he chuckled.
I broke the seals and was glancing through the letters when I heard an
exclamation at my back.
“By Jove--there he is!” Hayley Delane shouted. I turned to see what he
meant.
He had taken up a book--an unusual gesture, but it lay at his elbow, and
I suppose he had squeezed the newspapers dry. He held the volume out to
me without speaking, his forefinger resting on the open page; his
swarthy face was in a glow, his hand shook a little. The page to which
his finger pointed bore the steel engraving of a man’s portrait.
“It’s him to the life--I’d know those old clothes of his again
anywhere,” Delane exulted, jumping up from his seat.
I took the book and stared first at the portrait and then at my friend.
“Your pal in Washington?”
He nodded excitedly. “That chap I’ve often told you about--yes!” I shall
never forget the way his smile flew out and reached the dimple. There
seemed a network of them spangling his happy face. His eyes had grown
absent, as if gazing down invisible vistas. At length they travelled
back to me.
“How on earth did the old boy get his portrait in a book? Has somebody
been writing something about him?” His sluggish curiosity awakened, he
stretched his hand for the volume. But I held it back.
“Lots of people have written about him; but this book is his own.”
“You mean he wrote it?” He smiled incredulously. “Why, the poor chap
hadn’t any education!”
“Perhaps he had more than you think. Let me keep the book a moment
longer, and read you something from it.”
He signed an assent, though I could see the apprehension of the printed
page already clouding his interest.
“What sort of things did he write?”
“Things for _you_. Now listen.”
He settled back into his armchair, composing a painfully attentive
countenance, and I sat down and began:
_A sight in camp in the day-break grey and dim._
_As from my tent I emerge so early, sleepless,_
_As slow I walk in the cool fresh air, the path near by
the hospital tent,_
_Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there,
untended lying,_
_Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woollen blanket,_
_Grey and heavy blanket, folding, covering all._
_Curious, I halt, and silent stand:_
_Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest,
the first, just lift the blanket:_
_Who are you, elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-grey’d
hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes?_
_Who are you, my dear comrade?_
_Then to the second I step--And who are you, my child and darling?_
_Who are you, sweet boy, with cheeks yet blooming?_
_Then to the third--a face nor child, nor old, very calm,
as of beautiful yellow-white ivory;_
_Young man, I think I know you--I think this face of yours
is the face of the Christ himself;_
_Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies._
I laid the open book on my knee, and stole a glance at Delane. His face
was a blank, still composed in the heavy folds of enforced attention. No
spark had been struck from him. Evidently the distance was too great
between the far-off point at which he and English poetry had parted
company, and this new strange form it had put on. I must find something
which would bring the matter closely enough home to surmount the
unfamiliar medium.
_Vigil strange I kept on the field one night,_
_When you, my son and my comrade, dropt at my side...._
The starlit murmur of the verse flowed on, muffled, insistent; my throat
filled with it, my eyes grew dim. I said to myself, as my voice sank on
the last line: “He’s reliving it all now, seeing it again--knowing for
the first time that someone else saw it as he did.”
Delane stirred uneasily in his seat, and shifted his crossed legs one
over the other. One hand absently stroked the fold of his carefully
ironed trousers. His face was still a blank. The distance had not yet
been bridged between “Gray’s Elegy” and this unintelligible harmony. But
I was not discouraged. I ought not to have expected any of it to reach
him--not just at first--except by way of the closest personal appeal. I
turned from the “Lovely and Soothing Death,” at which I had re-opened
the book, and looked for another page. My listener leaned back
resignedly.
_Bearing the bandages, water and sponge,_
_Straight and swift to my wounded I go...._
I read on to the end. Then I shut the book and looked up again. Delane
sat silent, his great hands clasping the arms of his chair, his head
slightly sunk on his breast. His lids were dropped, as I imagined
reverentially. My own heart was beating with a religious emotion; I had
never felt the oft-read lines as I felt them then.
A little timidly, he spoke at length. “Did _he_ write that?”
“Yes; just about the time you were seeing him, probably.”
Delane still brooded; his expression grew more and more timid. “What do
you ... er ... call it ... exactly?” he ventured.
I was puzzled for a moment; then: “Why, poetry ... rather a free form,
of course.... You see, he was an originator of new verse-forms....”
“New verse-forms?” Delane echoed forlornly. He stood up in his heavy
way, but did not offer to take the book from me again. I saw in his face
the symptoms of approaching departure.
“Well, I’m glad to have seen his picture after all these years,” he
said; and on the threshold he paused to ask: “What was his name, by the
way?”
When I told him he repeated it with a smile of slow relish. “Yes; that’s
it. Old Walt--that was what all the fellows used to call him. He was a
great chap: I’ll never forget him.--I rather wish, though,” he added, in
his mildest tone of reproach, “you hadn’t told me that he wrote all that
rubbish.”
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Spark, by Edith Wharton and E. C. Caswell