Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (29 page)

 
          
One
day during the Easter holidays I went to dine with the Delanes, and finding my
host alone with old Gracy I concluded that Leila had again gone off with the
children. She had: she had been gone a week, and had just sent a letter to her
husband saying that she was sailing from
Montreal
with the little girl. The boys would be
sent back to
Groton
with a trusted servant. She would add nothing more, as she did not wish
to reflect unkindly on what
his own
family agreed with
her in thinking an act of ill-advised generosity. He knew that she was worn out
by the strain he had imposed on her, and would understand her wishing to get
away for a while…

 
          
She
had left him.

 
          
Such
events were not, in those days, the matters of course they have since become;
and I doubt if, on a man like Delane, the blow would ever have fallen lightly.
Certainly that evening was the grimmest I ever passed in his company. I had the
same impression as on the day of Bolton Bryne’s chastisement: the sense that
Delane did not care a fig for public opinion. His knowing that it sided with
his wife did not, I believe, affect him in the least; nor did her own view of
his conduct—and for that I was unprepared. What really ailed him, I discovered,
was his loneliness. He missed her, he wanted her back—her trivial irritating
presence was the thing in the world he could least dispense with. But when he
told me what she had done he simply added: “I see no help for it; we’ve both of
us got a right to our own opinion.”

 
          
Again
I looked at him with astonishment. Another voice seemed to be speaking through
his lips, and I had it on mine to say: “Was that what your old friend in
Washington
would have told you?” But at the door of
the dining-room where we had lingered, Mr. Gracy’s flushed countenance and
unreverend auburn locks appeared between us.

 
          
“Look
here, Hayley; what about our little game? If I’m to be packed off to bed at ten
like a naughty boy you might at least give me my hand of poker first.” He
winked faintly at me as we passed into the library, and added, in a hoarse
aside: “If he thinks he’s going to boss me like Leila he’s mistaken. Flesh and
blood’s one thing; now she’s gone I’ll be damned if I take any bullying.”

 
          
That
threat was the last flare of Mr. Gracy’s indomitable spirit. The act of
defiance which confirmed it brought on a severe attack of pleurisy. Delane
nursed the old man with dogged patience, and he emerged from the illness
diminished, wizened, the last trace of auburn gone from his scant curls, and
nothing left of his old self but a harmless dribble of talk.

 
          
Delane
taught him to play patience, and he used to sit for hours by the library fire,
puzzling over the cards, or talking to the children’s parrot, which he fed and
tended with a touching regularity. He also devoted a good deal of time to
collecting stamps for his youngest grandson, and his increasing gentleness and
playful humour so endeared him to the servants that a trusted housemaid had to
be dismissed for smuggling cocktails into his room. On fine days Delane, coming
home earlier from the bank, would take him for a short stroll; and one day,
happening to walk up Fifth Avenue behind them, I noticed that the younger man’s
broad shoulders were beginning to stoop like the other’s, and that there was
less lightness in his gait than in Bill Gracy’s jaunty shamble. They looked
like two old men doing their daily mile on the sunny side of the street. Bill
Gracy was no longer a danger to the community, and Leila might have come home.
But I understood from Delane that she was still abroad with her daughter.

 
          
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?