Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (26 page)

 
          
“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 Russcott 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.