Part 1
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
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!”