Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (30 page)

 
          
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 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.”

 
          
  

 
          
The ’Seventies.

 
          
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 now, 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
!”

 
          
Aunt
Sabina Wesson was obliged to stuff her lace handkerchief between her lips,
while her firm poplin-cased figure rocked with delight.

 
          
“Well,
my dear,” Grandmamma gently reminded her, “in my youth we wore low-necked
dresses all day long and all the year round.”

 
          
No
one listened. My cousin Kate, who always imitated Aunt Sabina, was pinching my
arm in an agony of mirth. “Look at them scuttling! The parlours must be full of
smoke. Oh, but this one is still funnier; the one with the tall feather in her
hair! Granny, did you wear feathers in your hair in the daytime? Oh, don’t ask
me to believe it! And the one with the diamond necklace! And all the gentlemen
in white ties! Did Grandpapa wear a white tie at two o’clock in the afternoon?”
Nothing was sacred to Kate, and she feigned not to notice Grandmamma’s mild
frown of reproval.

 
          
“Well,
they do in Paris, to this day, at weddings—wear evening clothes and white
ties,” said Sillerton Jackson with authority. “When Minnie Transome of
Charleston was married at the Madeleine to the Duc de…”

 
          
But
no one listened even to Sillerton Jackson. One of the
party
had abruptly exclaimed: “Oh, there’s a lady running out of the hotel who’s not
in evening dress!”

 
          
The
exclamation caused all our eyes to turn toward the person indicated, who had
just reached the threshold; and someone added, in an odd voice: “Why, her
figure looks like Lizzie Hazeldean’s—”

 
          
A
dead silence followed. The lady who was not in evening dress paused. Standing
on the door-step with lifted veil, she faced our window. Her dress was dark and
plain—almost conspicuously plain—and in less time than it takes to tell she had
put her hand to her closely-patterned veil and pulled it down over her face.
But my young eyes were keen and far-sighted; and in that hardly perceptible
interval I had seen a vision. Was she beautiful—or was she only someone apart?
I felt the shock of a small pale oval, dark eyebrows curved with one sure
stroke, lips made for warmth, and now drawn up in a grimace of terror; and it
seemed as if the mysterious something, rich, secret and insistent, that broods
and murmurs behind a boy’s conscious thoughts, had suddenly peered out at me…As
the dart reached me her veil dropped.

 
          
“But
it
is
Lizzie Hazeldean!” Aunt Sabina
gasped. She had stopped laughing, and her crumpled handkerchief fell to the
carpet.

 
          
“Lizzie—
Lizzie
?”
The name was echoed over my head with varying intonations of reprobation,
dismay and half-veiled malice.

 
          
Lizzie
Hazeldean? Running out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel on New
Year’s
day
with all those dressed-up women? But what on earth could she have
been doing there? No; nonsense! It was impossible…

 
          
“There’s
Henry Prest with her,” continued Aunt Sabina in a precipitate whisper.

 
          
“With
her?” someone gasped; and “
oh
—” my
mother cried with a shudder.

 
          
The
men of the family said nothing, but I saw Hubert Wesson’s face crimson with
surprise. Henry Prest! Hubert was forever boring us youngsters with his Henry
Prest! That was the kind of chap Hubert meant to be at thirty: in his eyes
Henry Prest embodied all the manly graces. Married? No, thank you! That kind of
man wasn’t made for the domestic yoke. Too fond of ladies’ society, Hubert
hinted with his undergraduate smirk; and handsome, rich, independent—an
all-round sportsman, good horseman, good shot, crack yachtsman (had his pilot’s
certificate, and always sailed his own sloop, whose cabin was full of racing
trophies); gave the most delightful little dinners, never more than six, with
cigars that beat old Beaufort’s; was awfully decent to the younger men, chaps
of Hubert’s age included—and combined, in short, all the qualities, mental and
physical, which make up, in such eyes as Hubert’s that oracular and
irresistible figure, the man of the world. “Just the fellow,” Hubert always
solemnly concluded that I should go straight to if ever I got into any kind of
row that I didn’t want the family to know about”; and our blood ran pleasantly
cold at the idea of our old Hubert’s ever being in such an unthinkable
predicament.

 
          
I
felt sorry to have missed a glimpse of this legendary figure; but my gaze had
been enthralled by the lady, and now the couple had vanished in the crowd.

 
          
The
group in our window continued to keep an
embarrassed
silence. They looked almost frightened; but what struck me even more deeply was
that not one of them looked surprised. Even to my boyish sense it was clear
that what they had just seen was only the confirmation of something they had
long been prepared for. At length one of my uncles emitted a whistle, was
checked by a severe glance from his wife, and muttered: “I’ll be damned”;
another uncle began an unheeded narrative of a fire at which he had been
present in his youth, and my mother said to me severely: “You ought to be at
home preparing your lessons—a big boy like you!”—a remark so obviously unfair
that it served only to give the measure of her agitation.