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 Ruscott 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.
Colonel Ruscott specialized in chivalry. For him the war was “the blue and the grey,” the rescue of lovely Southern girls, anecdotes about Old Glory, and the carrying of vital despatches through the enemy lines. Enchantments seemed to have abounded in his path during the four years which had been so drab and desolate to many; and the punch (to the amusement of us youngsters, who were not above drawing him) always evoked from his memory countless situations in which by prompt, respectful yet insinuating action, he had stamped his image indelibly on some proud Southern heart, while at the same time discovering where Jackson’s guerillas lay, or at what point the river was fordable.
And there sat Hayley Delane, so much younger than the others, yet seeming at such times so much their elder that I thought to myself: “But if he stopped growing up at nineteen, they’re still in long-clothes!” But it was only morally that he had gone on growing. Intellectually they were all on a par. When the last new play at Wallack’s was discussed, or my mother tentatively alluded to the last new novel by the author of Robert Elsmere (it was her theory that, as long as the hostess was present at a man’s dinner, she should keep the talk at the highest level), Delane’s remarks were no more penetrating than his neighbours’—and he was almost sure not to have read the novel.
It was when any social question was raised: any of the problems concerning club administration, charity, or the relation between “gentlemen” and the community, that he suddenly stood out from them, not so much opposed as aloof.
He would sit listening, stroking my sister’s long skye-terrier (who, defying all rules, had jumped up to his knees at dessert), with a grave half-absent look on his heavy face; and just as my mother (I knew) was thinking how bored he was, that big smile of his would reach out and light up his dimple, and he would say, with enough diffidence to mark his respect for his elders, yet a complete independence of their views: “After all, what does it matter who makes the first move? The thing is to get the business done.”
That was always the gist of it. To everyone else, my father included, what mattered in everything, from Diocesan Meetings to Patriarchs Balls, was just what Delane seemed so heedless of: the standing of the people who made up the committee or headed the movement. To Delane, only the movement itself counted; if the thing was worth doing, he pronounced in his slow lazy way, get it done somehow, even if its backers were Methodists or Congregationalists, or people who dined in the middle of the day.
“If they were convicts from Sing Sing I shouldn’t care,” he affirmed, his hand lazily flattering the dog’s neck as I had seen it caress Byrne’s terrified poney.