The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel
Page 9
up a position of responsibility near the van. He stood with his hands be-
hind his back, superintending with quiet vigilance the operations of his
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men. He said nothing but he was sharp-sighted and a slight frown showed
that he was not to be imposed on by his subordinates.
They were both now established in sufficient importance and could
acknowledge each other.
Vincent said, “Hello,” carelessly, take it or leave it.
Toss answered in kind.
“You moving in?” said Vincent.
“Uh-huh. You live here?”
Vincent showed the direction of his home by a backward movement
of his head. He had his mother’s consciousness of the superiority of the
house the new boy was to live in. But he was not disturbed by that. He held
strongly to the belief, which was helped to formulation by certain doctri-
nal discussions in school, that considerations of social position were con-
temptible. Still, he was taking the difference into account, just as, when he
learned about Toss’s New York past, he took that too into account.
They exchanged names. Toss’s name, it came out, was really George
and he said he did not know why he was called Toss, it was what he
had always been called. Much later, when the intimacy had developed,
he admitted that he was called Toss because that was the way he had first
pronounced his own name. They exchanged ages. Toss took it as a matter
of advantage that he was older than Vincent by a year. But Vincent felt
the advantage or being the junior and ultimately he enforced this view
upon Toss.
Within a few weeks the intimacy between the two boys grew until it
reached the point of surfeit. They found that they could not do without
each other. Then suddenly it seemed that they could scarcely endure each
other’s sight, so bored and disgusted did they become. But they survived
this period as they survived others of the kind that were to come—their
intimacy would reach so far that they expected more from each other
than either could supply. They gave each other much, the loyalty, the
almost fanatical chivalry that can be given by boys whose parents have
been able to spare them the imminent prospect of having to make their
way in the world.
It was assumed between them that on the whole Toss was the more
practical of the two, the more hard-headed. But they were more inclined
to stress the similarities rather than the differences of their characters.
For example, they agreed that they were equally idealistic. Toss inaugu-
rated the venture into radio as well as the venture into stamp-collecting.
Vincent was not really interested in either activity, but he was willing to
go along. He had, as boys do have, an almost ritualistic sense of what was
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becoming to boyhood. Toss took these commitments to boyish propriety
rather more seriously than Vincent. Yet he too actually lived the double
life. To the adult world they appeared engagingly enough as “real boys.”
But the adult world would have been astonished by the gravity and scope
of their conversations. Boys then still wore knickerbockers and black
stockings and that costume made the discrepancy between their appear-
ance and their talk even greater. They were indefatigable moralists. They
judged everything and were great partisans of justice in all things, in
their relations with each other, in the discipline of school, in the dealings
of shopkeepers and their parents, and even in politics.
When it was time for one of the pair to leave the other’s house, he
would always make an appeal to be “walked home” and, after some resis-
tance, the appeal was always granted. But then the one who had walked the
other home had to be “walked back,” and so they would go back and forth,
sometimes in the bitter cold, each struggling against being the one to take
the last walk alone, until they settled the matter by separating at a point
which they believed to be precisely median between the two houses.
At some time in their first year of high school, there was an incident
for which Vincent never forgave himself. A Shakespearean company
came to town and there were reduced tickets for the Saturday matinees.
It was Toss who proposed that they see Macbeth. It was Vincent who sud-
denly felt oppressed by the prospect. “Oh—we’re too young for that sort
of thing. Tragedy!” he said. And Toss had replied, calm and lofty and prig-
gish, “It’s part of the education of a gentleman.” Vincent did not know
why he had said what he had. Perhaps it was part of the ritual of boyhood,
carried too far. Toss’s rebuke was humiliating. Vincent felt that in their
relation to literature, it was he himself who had the intimacy, that there
was something merely assumed in Toss’s attitude about tragedy. Later,
Toss remembered that remark of Vincent’s and used it against his friend.
Who could have known how seriously they lived the heroic life?—
how on Saturdays when they had gone off for the day to some wooded
place with their knapsacks and had made and eaten one of the two mess-
es they had learned to make from a work on camp cookery (one being
of dried beef, the other of canned tuna-fish), they were Martin Arrow-
smith and his fierce friend Terry Wickett, toiling together for the pure
sake of science in a cabin in Vermont, fiercely contemptuous of all social
elegance, despising the distractions of convention. Or they were Dick
Heldar and his friend Torpenhow before the light failed, exposed to the
dangers of the desert and the Mahdi’s men—what was the Mahdi?—for
the sake of truth and art. They did not, of course, act out these dreams,
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only used some catchword from the book to indicate their understanding
of what they were up to. Each of them was at the same time both Martin
Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett, but when it came to The Light That Failed,
Toss was rather on the Torpenhow side, while Vincent rather fancied the
tragedy that was to overtake him as Dick Heldar. It was from the Kipling
book, with its strange charm of being far-off in time, yet near in spirit to
their boyhood, that they learned their most persistent fancy, of being for-
eign correspondents who would see and know everything. They dreamed
of “travelling light,” by which they meant that their “kits” would be cut to
a bare minimum of equipment and also that they would have no human
ties except, of course, their partnership with each other.
Lust itself was no less involved in their sense of the heroic and it
was The Man Who Laughs that led them to talk, guardedly, of their sexual
hopes. They never confided to each other how frequently and how se-
riously the scene of Gwynplane in _____’s [blank in original] bedroom
engaged their nocturnal thoughts.
[One line blank in original]
but they drew closer together in their response to that wonderful mo-
ment, relieving the shame of their secrecy by coolly and maturely dis-
cussing the future realization of their hopes.
Yet it was over this novel of V
ictor Hugo’s that a certain rift in their
friendship developed, to grow with the years. Toss extravagantly admired
the opening of the story. “Ursus was a man. Homo was a bear.” “God,”
said Toss, shaking his fist in inexpressible enthusiasm, “that’s writing.”
He had a tendency to admire what he called the “true to life” and the
“natural” in books, by which he meant a certain brusqueness or a famil-
iarity in the author’s prose manner. Vincent did not know why, but he
found something irritating in the excessiveness of Toss’s admiration of
these things, especially of the Hugo passage. It was the first occasion on
which Toss seemed alien, a human object to be looked at and considered,
not a part of himself.
Together the two boys fought their way forward in the intricate politi-
cal life of a great high school. They were great admirers of Babbitt and
Stalky and Co. and they kept in their private lives together a certain area
in which they mocked all the talk of “service” to the school. But it was
their life and they were properly endowed to live it. Neither was heavy
enough to think of real football, but they gallantly offered themselves
for the form teams which played without helmets or shoulder-pads and
they came home bruised and battered from practice. There was the great
hierarchy of “squads,” which began with the Sanitation Squad, went on
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to the Traffic Squad and culminated in the almost awful Control Squad
which was made up of boys and girls of the most frightening sexual ma-
turity. To this last pinnacle Toss eventually arrived, though neither could
ever have dreamed of the possibility of this in the days when both were
“humble freshm[e]n.”
“Humble freshman” was one of the clichés of the school literary
magazine that Vincent fought against when he became its editor-in-chief.
Some feeling that he never wholly formulated kept Vincent from wish-
ing to join the Control Squad, although Toss assured him that he could
“make” it if he wanted to.
Together they began their experience of girls. Guided by shyness and
class feeling, they were attracted only by the nicer girls. Toss was inclined
to like girls of a rather passive prettiness, while Vincent preferred girls
in whom special charms were to be found by him alone, girls in whom a
lack of merely obvious beauty suggested a spiritual or intellectual inter-
est. In their senior year they made the discovery, and pooled their infor-
mation, that even the well dressed girls Toss knew and even the intellec-
tual girls Vincent knew were accessible and curious. It filled their days
with wonder that the hopes begun in the time of The Man Who Laughs
might yet be fulfilled.
Toss’s father was a Yale man and that had decided Toss’s choice of
a college, which in turn decided Vincent’s. Even when the Dodges were
not doing well there had been no question but that Toss would go to Yale,
for a wealthy uncle was to be relied on. But the uncle was not needed, for
Mrs. Dodge came suddenly into the inheritance of a very considerable
estate of an aunt of hers, and Mr. Dodge himself, in the very midst of the
depression that was making it bewilderingly difficult for Mr. Hammell
to approximate his own usually comfortable income, became indisput-
ably a success. The two boys had planned Yale together and they had
dreamed of their rooms in Harkness even when the bleak, staring fact
in the Hammell home was that the family was no longer in comfortable
circumstances. It was for Vincent the first real deprivation of his life that
Toss went off to New Haven without him.
Then began the long ending of their friendship. The first year of
their separation was no more than sad. They wrote long letters and were
glad of the chance to do that. But when Toss came home for Christmas
it was he who had had the experience of college and Vincent who had, in
decency, to listen to all that his friend had learned. At the City University,
which was all that the Hammells could afford for Vincent, there was a
kind of “college life,” there were fraternities and even an inferior kind
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the unfinished novel
of football spirit, there were activities and politics and “big men.” But
Vincent, thinking of Yale and the quadrangles and towers of Harkness,
knew that there was no comfort for him in these imitations. He began to
build his own myth of student days, moulding it closer to a French uni-
versity than to an American or an English one, building it on intellectual
activity. Toss, to be sure, was not without his own intellectual life. He had
developed a Yale love of eighteenth-century literature and had settled on
Smollett as his favorite. He bought a great many books and talked of the
wonders of the Brick Row and the treasures of the Elizabethan Club. He
even had acquired a political liberalism of which he was rather proud
and was a great admirer of Soviet Russia. It was an intellectual life of
which Toss was proud, but it did not match Vincent’s whose circle at that
time was beginning to form as a rather raffish group of Jews, an Arme-
nian who was regarded with awe as a genius in Renaissance scholarship,
an Irish boy whose father had had two conversations with Yeats and one
with Joyce, and a poor boy from the farm country whose passion for so-
ciology made it inevitable that he should be thought of as a new Thor-
stein Veblen. With these friends he played handball and enjoyed it, yet
it was handball he played, and even though he remembered that it was
the game that Stephen Dedalus played with Cranly in A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, still it was painful to remember that at Yale Toss
was playing squash. He never introduced Toss to these friends of his, as
much for Toss’s sake as theirs, for he knew that they would have been
hostile to Toss’s polite antiquarianism and even to his good opinion of
Russia, for they were in all things complex and complaining minds. They
knew that Vincent had wanted to go to Yale and they used to tease him
about the gentility of his desires, for they themselves were, or affected to
be, pleased with the social inadequacies of the city university. That was
the time when the Sterling Library at Yale was being built and Vincent
followed the liberal magazines in making it the object of his contempt,
what with its telephone booths designed to suggest the confessional
booths of a cathedral. He even went so far as to say that Harkness with
its English Gothic was a cultural falsehood, thus rejecting something he
and Toss had loved together. He said that Connecticut Hall, where Na-
than Hale had lived as a student, was the only honest building at Yale.
Toss was angry not only because he was being attacked in his university
but also because he felt snubbed by the false superiority of Vincent’s new
circle of friends, which he had never met. He spoke of his disappoint-
ment that Vincent should be so “weak” as to accept his opinions from a
bunch of screwballs.
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“And greaseballs,” he had added, blinded by his anger.
It made the occasion of their first real quarrel, the fatal one, the quar-
rel that set them apart from each other, that established Toss as a man
who loved fine leather bindings on his books—“why shouldn’t a book
be as beautiful as anything else?”—and who intended by his own efforts
and his father’s help to establish himself in life and in life’s fine things,
a man who respected the life of the intellect and owned two good Hog-
arths and a fine print of Fielding’s big face; it established Vincent as a
reader of Flaubert, Baudelaire and Joyce, a close and careful student of
poetry according to the methods of critics Toss never heard of and was
not interested in knowing about, a man jealous for the integrity of his
own intellect and already planning to make his way by it, a willing wearer
of shabby clothes—though here there was not much difference between
the two, for the orthodox collegian like the intellectual collegian was al-
ready rather shabby in a careful way and Vincent was more elegant in his
shabbiness than his own college friends.
What was happening between them happens every year to a few
thousand young American men who discover that their special friend
has ceased to have all his old value. The lines of communication grow
fewer and more conscious. The thinning out of feeling is a slow one
and it makes for great, if unspoken, bitterness between the young men.
They never lose a kind of interest in each other, the bitterness is even the
last stage of their affection, but they become members of different races.
One becomes a “business man” and the other an “intellectual.” Each one
comes to believe that the facts of ingestion, procreation and death are not
quite the same with this former friend, once so nearly another self, as
with himself.
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chapter 3
Even Vincent, who was the one who was aware that the real end must
come soon, did not want the break between Toss and himself. They were
at their best when they played tennis and did not talk much. This morn-
ing on the little verandah of the club, they felt relaxed and clubby. They
were able to draw on all their old times together, their old happiness and