Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation. I had noticed that Delane never explained; his chief strength lay in that negative quality. He was probably hardly aware that people were beginning to say: “Poor old Gracy—after all, he’s making a decent end. It was the proper thing for Hayley to do—but his wife ought to come back and share the burden with him.” In important matters he was so careless of public opinion that he was not likely to notice its veering. He wanted Leila to come home; he missed her and the little girl more and more; but for him there was no “ought” about the matter.
And one day she came. Absence had rejuvenated her, she had some dazzling new clothes, she had made the acquaintance of a charming Italian nobleman who was coming to New York on the next steamer… she was ready to forgive her husband, to be tolerant, resigned and even fond. Delane, with his amazing simplicity, took all this for granted; the effect of her return was to make him feel he had somehow been in the wrong, and he was ready to bask in her forgiveness. Luckily for her own popularity she arrived in time to soothe her parent’s declining moments. Mr. Gracy was now a mere mild old pensioner and Leila used to drive out with him regularly and refuse dull invitations “because she had to be with Papa.” After all, people said, she had a heart. Her husband thought so too, and triumphed in the conviction. At that time life under the Delane roof, though melancholy, was idyllic; it was a pity that old Gracy could not have been kept alive longer, so miraculously did his presence unite the household it had once divided. But he was beyond being aware of this, and from a cheerful senility sank into coma and death. The funeral was attended by the whole of New York, and Leila’s crape veil was of exactly the right length—a matter of great importance in those days.
Life has a way of overgrowing its achievements as well as its ruins. In less time than seemed possible in so slow-moving a society, the Delane’s family crisis had been smothered and forgotten. Nothing seemed changed in the mutual attitude of husband and wife, or in that of their little group toward the couple. If anything, Leila had gained in popular esteem by her assiduity at her father’s bedside; though as a truthful chronicler I am bound to add that she partly forfeited this advantage by plunging into a flirtation with the Italian nobleman before her crape trimmings had been replaced by ‘passemeterie’. On such fundamental observances old New York still took its stand.
As for Hayley Delane, he emerged older, heavier, more stooping, but 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 p
arted 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 unintelliglble 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.”
New Year’s Day.
The ’Seventies.
I.
She was bad…always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,” said my mother, as if the scene of the offence added to the guilt of the couple whose past she was revealing. Her spectacles slanted on her knitting, she dropped the words in a hiss that might have singed the snowy baby-blanket which engaged her indefatigable fingers. (It was typical of my mother to be always employed in benevolent actions while she uttered uncharitable words.)
“They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue hotel”; how the precision of the phrase characterized my old New York! A generation later, people would have said, in reporting an affair such as Lizzie Hazeldean’s with Henry Prest: “They met in hotels”—and today who but a few superannuated spinsters, still feeding on the venom secreted in their youth, would take any interest in the tracing of such topographies?
Life has become too telegraphic for curiosity to linger on any given point in a sentimental relation; as old Sillerton Jackson, in response to my mother, grumbled through his perfect “china set”: “Fifth Avenue Hotel? They might meet in the middle of Fifth Avenue nowadays, for all that anybody cares.”
But what a flood of light my mother’s tart phrase had suddenly focussed on an unremarked incident of my boyhood!
The Fifth Avenue Hotel…Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest…the conjunction of these names had arrested her darting talk on a single point of my memory, as a search-light, suddenly checked in its gyrations, is held motionless while one notes each of the unnaturally sharp and lustrous images it picks out.
At the time I was a boy of twelve, at home from school for the holidays. My mother’s mother, Grandmamma Parrett, still lived in the house in West Twenty-third Street which Grandpapa had built in his pioneering youth, in days when people shuddered at the perils of living north of Union Square—days that Grandmamma and my parents looked back to with a joking incredulity as the years passed and the new houses advanced steadily Park-ward, outstripping the Thirtieth Streets, taking the Reservoir at a bound, and leaving us in what, in my school-days, was already a dullish back-water between Aristocracy to the south and Money to the north.
Even then fashion moved quickly in New York, and my infantile memory barely reached back to the time when Grandmamma, in lace lappets and creaking ‘moire,’ used to receive on New Year’s day, supported by her handsome married daughters. As for old Sillerton Jackson, who, once a social custom had dropped into disuse, always affected never to have observed it, he stoutly maintained that the New Year’s day ceremonial had never been taken seriously except among families of Dutch descent, and that that was why Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had clung to it, in a reluctant half-apologetic way, long after her friends had closed their doors on the first of January, and the date had been chosen for those out-of-town parties which are so often used as a pretext for absence when the unfashionable are celebrating their rites.
Grandmamma, of course, no longer received. But it would have seemed to her an exceedingly odd thing to go out of town in winter, especially now that the New York houses were luxuriously warmed by the new hot-air furnaces, and searchingly illuminated by gas chandeliers. No, thank you—no country winters for the chilblained generation of prunella sandals and low-necked sarcenet, the generation brought up in unwarmed and unlit houses, and shipped off to die in Italy when they proved unequal to the struggle of living in New York! Therefore Grandmamma, like most of her contemporaries, remained in town on the first of January, and marked the day by a family reunion, a kind of supplementary Christmas—though to us juniors the absence of presents and plum-pudding made it but a pale and moonlike reflection of the Feast.
Still, the day was welcome as a lawful pretext for over-eating, dawdling, and looking out of the window: a Dutch habit still extensively practised in the best New York circles. On the day in question, however, we had not yet placed ourselves behind the plate-glass whence it would presently be so amusing to observe the funny gentlemen who trotted about, their evening ties hardly concealed behind their overcoat collars, darting in and out of chocolate-coloured house-fronts on their sacramental round of calls. We were still engaged in placidly digesting around the ravaged luncheon table when a servant dashed in to say that the Fifth Avenue Hotel was on fire.
Oh, then the fun began—and what fun it was! For Grandmamma’s house was just opposite the noble edifice of white marble which I associated with such deep-piled carpets, and such a rich sultry smell of anthracite and coffee, whenever I was bidden to “step across” for a messenger-boy, or to buy the evening paper for my elders.
The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable. No one, in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented by “politicians” and “Westerners,” two classes of citizens whom my mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking them with illiterates and criminals.
But for that very reason there was all the more fun to be expected from the calamity in question; for had we not, with infinite amusement, watched the arrival, that morning, of monumental “floral pieces” and towering frosted cakes for the New Year’s day reception across the way? The event was a communal one. All the ladies who were the hotel’s “guests” were to receive together in the densely lace-curtained and heavily chandeliered public parlours, and gentlemen with long hair, imperials and white gloves had been hastening since two o’clock to the scene of revelry. And no
w, thanks to the opportune conflagration, we were going to have the excitement not only of seeing the Fire Brigade in action (supreme joy of the New York youngster), but of witnessing the flight of the ladies and their visitors, staggering out through the smoke in gala array. The idea that the fire might be dangerous did not mar these pleasing expectations. The house was solidly built; New York’s invincible Brigade was already at the door, in a glare of polished brass, coruscating helmets and horses shining like table-silver; and my tall cousin Hubert Wesson, dashing across at the first alarm, had promptly returned to say that all risk was over, though the two lower floors were so full of smoke and water that the lodgers, in some confusion, were being transported to other hotels. How then could a small boy see in the event anything but an unlimited lark?
Our elders, once reassured, were of the same mind. As they stood behind us in the windows, looking over our heads, we heard chuckles of amusement mingled with ironic comment.
“Oh, my dear, look—here they all come! The New Year ladies! Low neck and short sleeves in broad daylight, every one of them! Oh, and the fat one with the paper roses in her hair…they are paper, my dear…off the frosted cake, probably! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Edith Wharton - Novel 15 Page 18
