He could not tell, but jealousy implied the estimate of value, of store set
upon something. And as he walked to his luncheon appointment with
Outram, it seemed to him that what Kramer had expressed was not an
evaluation of Vincent’s youthful advantages or of Outram’s power. No
one could be more precise in his use of language than Kramer, and he
would have said envy if he had meant it. Jealousy meant that Kramer had
in mind the connection that might develop between his two friends. It
was love that Kramer had been thinking of rather than power, and to ex-
ist with Outram in Kramer’s emotion gave Vincent a kind of parity with
the man he had not yet seen. He felt an excitement which he thought of
as confidence.
It stood him in good stead, this confidence, for Outram had ap-
pointed the Athletic Club as their place of meeting. He was staying at the
Club, which of course quite became his position, and the Athletic Club
at lunch hour was quite different from the Tennis Club of the morning.
The Tennis Club was, at best, gentility—that is, status without power—
and even its gentility was lately being somewhat eroded. But the Athletic
Club was the power that made status. It proclaimed its nature in the
largeness of all its furnishings, in the solidity of the walnut that panelled
its walls and the permanence of the leather that covered its armchairs,
in the very darkness of the great lobby, in the smell of the bar that was
just off the lobby. Vincent felt sure that no club in New York or even
London could better give the feeling of massed masculine force. One
of Kramer’s stories about Harold Outram had for its occasion a drink
at the Harvard Club, and Kramer had been annoyed at Vincent’s quick
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foolish cry, “What does it look like—the Harvard Club?” Yet, as of course
Kramer sensibly saw, a young man with Vincent’s work to do would nat-
urally have a sociological interest in any number of things, in settings or
ways of life or manners that he would not necessarily approve of. Vincent
and his friends liked to think. Or these were the scientists of the great
plants with their rather dry but not unfriendly looks [ sic]. Had anyone at
any other time said to Vincent Hammell that reality was made here, he
would have loftily resisted the idea. But now he felt it to be true, and he
braced himself against the fact, feeling impalpable.
He really did not know how to think about power. His mind turned
to the appearance of the men about him. Here, if one saw tweeds, they
were not the heavy stiff harsh tweeds that members of the university
wore. And actually what one saw most were dark, softly-hanging cloths,
distinguished from each other only by differences of pattern of the sub-
tlest kind. Vincent had reason to be glad that instinct had taught him
that if one must dress cheaply one did best with suits of grey flannel,
with shirts of white oxford, with ties of the simplest stripe—they were far
harder to find than might be supposed—and with sturdy, but not extrava-
gantly sturdy, shoes. He despised himself for being aware of his propri-
ety, but he could not help it. He comforted himself with the thought that
such matters had not seemed trivial to Balzac and Stendhal, from whom
he had learned the name of Straub, the great tailor of the Restoration, al-
though be could not have named the tailor that made these men around
him so beautifully unnoticeable.
It was a small and frivolous mind that could be aware of appearance
when so much reality was all about him: he was sure of that. These men
made the things and decisions that affected the lives at least of thou-
sands, perhaps of millions. That was power, that was the creation of real-
ity. But he could not conceive the joy of that. All that he wanted was the
license to move freely and without embarrassment in the world, to be
swift and simple and a little touched with glory.
chapter 6
“This room,” Mr. Rykstrom said to Harold Outram, “is my last large
work. A little painting I still do, mornings, before the real day begins,
because if you come from my country early rising is in the blood. Yes, in
the blood. But it is only a little painting on little pictures. Nothing large
any more. Some day I return to my old scale. Meanwhile from my re-
sponsibilities there are many pleasures. And you too must find—”
Mr. Rykstrom left it to Harold Outram to know what he would find.
He meant that Mr. Outram like Mr. Rykstrom had left the life of art for
the life of administration, a sad choice but having its heroic compensa-
tions.
Harold Outram said, “A job, Mr. Rykstrom, is in any language a dirty
job.”
This young man was making things hard for Mr. Rykstrom. It was
not Mr. Rykstrom’s intention to ask very much of the Peck Foundation.
He chiefly wanted to involve the Foundation in the principle of aiding
Meadowfield. His eye was to the future. But something was not going as
it should. Outram was the kind of American Mr. Rykstrom admired—
handsome, rapid, efficient and clothed with power. With such Americans
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Mr. Rykstrom got on very well. But they did not usually show such irri-
table, almost petulant, sensitivities as Harold Outram showed, quite as if
he had a bad digestion. There had been the occasion when, in the office,
going over the list of the faculty, Mr. Rykstrom had come to the name of
Solocheff. “That Solocheff,” he had said, shaking, his head, “that Solo-
cheff. A man not without talent, you understand, but not our best type.
A Jew as we discovered, not a Czech at all. And like all Jews, a radical in
secret. You know—a little bit radical, the way they are. He does not really
fit.” That was all Mr. Rykstrom had said, yet when he looked up from the
list he saw Outram openly scowling at him.
This had been the more disconcerting because, although Mr. Ryk-
strom was opposed to Jews on principle, the principle being their exces-
sive tendency to abstract intellectuality, he had no feeling against Solo-
cheff himself, who was actually not very clever. He had merely wanted to
suggest to the secretary of the Peck Foundation how sound Meadowfield
was. The late Mr. Peck had been known to dislike Jews.
And now there was the moment when they were standing in the
great reception hall known as the Saga Room, its walls covered with Mr.
Rykstrom’s murals representing incidents from Scandinavian story, and
Mr. Rykstrom was moved to say, “So you, an artist, deal with the mil-
lions of Frank Ewart Peck, and I, an artist, deal with the fortune of Gilbey
Walter, and we deal with each other. It is funny, isn’t it?” In his boyhood,
Mr. Rykstrom had read in novels of people making statements through
clenched teeth but he had never actually seen that phenomenon until
Harold Outram answered his question by saying, “Very funny.”
Mr. Rykstrom could not understand on what principle his guest was
showing resistance. This handsome young man, this American type, was
clearly making a reference to something within himself that was hostile.
Mr. Rykstrom was used to an American division of feeling, the reference
to a principle which was not the one by which the man daily acted. In
most cases this had been useful to Mr. Rykstrom. It frequently took the
form of a kind of generous guilt and he had come to think of it as a char-
acteristically American emotion. It was what he counted on to swell the
endowment of Meadowfield and no doubt it had even been responsible
for Meadowfield’s creation. A situation in which the arts were involved
seemed especially to bring it into play. But Meadowfield was not having
the anticipated effect upon Harold Outram.
It occurred to Mr. Rykstrom that his guest had perhaps been talk-
ing to the people at the university. But this did not seem likely and in
any case Mr. Rykstrom could not take the university’s rivalry with any
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seriousness. The City University had never recovered from the decisive
defeat which Meadowfield represented. It was still not able to explain
what terrible error it had made that had decided Gilbey Walter to divert
to the creation of Meadowfield the huge sums once clearly destined for
the university. As any member of the department of philosophy or of
English literature could have explained, men can endure catastrophe if
they can only give a meaning to it—and so, after ten years, it was still a
lively question what was the act of president or trustees, or some dean or
professor, or even some student, that had brought about Gilbey Walter’s
terrible change of heart. But nothing had ever been discovered to make
the event understandable. One day the university believed that it had
in store a great future of libraries, laboratories, gymnasiums and high
salaries. The next day it knew that these things were dreams and that a
strange institution to be called Meadowfield was to be a reality. Not all
the wisdom of the university could make the explanation. It could only
counsel a tragic acceptance. The hopes were now in the past and there
was nothing to do but to remain proud, earnest and second-rate.
The university was alone in its grief. No doubt, if it had been made
richer and handsomer by Gilbey Walter, the interest and affection of the
city would have gone out to it. As things were, the city took its pride and
pleasure in Meadowfield and probably understood it better than it would
have understood even an expanded and renovated university.
On three square miles of good ground, not far from the limits of the
city, Gilbey Walter had constructed his center for the artistic life of the
region. Within two years he had built and staffed a school of painting,
another of sculpture, another of architecture. There shortly followed a
school of instrumental and vocal music, a school of musical composi-
tion. The arts of dramatic production, including opera, had a building
to themselves, with four theatres, three small and one large, and many
workshops. Textile design and manufacture had been provided for, as
well as ceramics and glassware.
In addition to its training of professional artists and craftsmen, Mead-
owfield reached out to touch the city’s life at many points. With great suc-
cess it introduced the pleasures of community singing. It taught adults
the arts of finger-painting and clay-modelling and instructed housewives
in interior decoration. And although its original program had not includ-
ed specifically intellectual pursuits, it had come to devote some part of
its efforts to study-groups and with so much success that more and more
of the city’s organizations put their cultural problems into the efficient
care of Meadowfield. But the chief intention of Gilbey Walter had been
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to establish here in the Middle West an institution which would be a
home for every art. He had had it in mind to check the emigration of the
young artists to the East and to Europe and to attract here the great fig-
ures from Europe and the East. The latter intention was an afterthought.
If it seemed to contradict the regional premise of Walter’s great enter-
prise, actually it was a true expression of that premise. For one thing, it
was a kind of revenge, a raiding of the metropolitan centers. And then
the scheme required that the great cities should confirm its defiance of
them. And the men of the old centers of culture had been drawn to this
mid-western American outpost. The French, it is true, were not well rep-
resented among the foreign artists who came to Meadowfield. To Gilbey
Walter while he was alive and to his representatives after he was dead,
this was not entirely a matter of regret. The French practice of the arts
took an insufficient view of the part which national feeling plays in the
creations which most truly speak to the human spirit. It was rather from
the nations which had a just and exacerbated sense of national suffering
and national destiny that the Meadowfield faculty was drawn. Certain
Finns, Poles, Letts [ sic], Croats, Czechs and Germans fitted admirably
into the plan. They had a quick response to the young musicians who
wished to write compositions entitled Prairie Suite and to the ideals of
young painters who, tired of theories, wished to record the lives of what
they called their own people.
Harold Outram disliked Meadowfield. He tried to keep this feel-
ing in check. He held before his mind the genuine beauty of the
buildings—Meadowfield had been in existence for no more than ten
years, but its brick and stone had been so well chosen for color that
its buildings seemed ageless, an effect the founder had insisted on; all
the Meadowfield buildings had been designed to conform to the con-
tours of the ground, and where the ground had been flat, contours had
been wonderfully contrived, so that one felt that all these buildings,
organized around the lovely little lake, were the natural and beautiful
consequences of geological forces; with their long low modest lines,
they seemed reluctant to rise above the earth from which they sprang.
Surely these buildings, Harold Outram thought, must represent some-
thing good in the institution. It was necessary for him these days to be
extremely careful. He had in his hands some part of the future of the
nation—it was as simple and as important as that. He must not feel
the irritation he did feel. He admired the fabric that he was shown, the
glassware, the pottery. But he found that he was soon bored by them,
then annoyed. He reminded himself how important it was in the life
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of a people that it should produce beautiful objects. Yet he could not
overcome his feeling that he was being involved in something frivo-
lous. It was surely a deficiency in himself that he was unmoved by the
paintings he saw. They expressed the national life—each painting had
its due amount of vigor or of serenity and sometimes its due amount
of violence. There was something very cleanly about these paintings,
they were hard and firm.
He had made too many mistakes, he had led
himself into too much suffering to be able to judge them truly. He was
indifferent to the paintings but he did not dare explore his mind to jus-
tify his indifference.
“If I dislike them,” he said to himself in the explicit, formulated
way he had taken to using, “they must be good. Or good enough to be
endowed.”
For he knew that although he had made up his mind to do noth-
ing for Meadowfield, the decision was mere childish play. There were no
two ways about it—Meadowfield was a going concern, its endowment
large and safe, its purposes sound and not only sound but democratic, its
management able to handle whatever plans for expansion it proposed.
After he had caused Mr. Rykstrom sufficient uneasiness, he would rec-
ommend the grant, a large one. But as they entered the Saga Room to-
gether to look at Mr. Rykstrom’s murals, he gave himself the pleasure of
disengaging his arm from Mr. Rykstrom’s guiding hand.
When they were back in Mr. Rykstrom’s beautiful blond office, Mr.
Rykstrom said gently, “And now you have seen all. It is very beautiful, is
it not? Very well conceived?”
And Mr. Rykstrom said, “I have given up my own art to it—I am no
longer a painter, I am an administrator. But I do not regret the loss. You
can understand that?”
This time Harold Outran was touched. He smiled generously to Mr.
Rykstrom and said, “Yes, I can understand it.” But as soon as he had said
it, he knew that he did not understand it as Mr. Rykstrom wished it to be
understood. If conceivably Meadowfield was being administered by an art-
ist, the murals in the Saga Room had been painted by an administrator.
He picked up the handsome Meadowfield catalogue in its earth-
brown cover. He sifted through its pages. “Now explain to me again what
you mean by your ‘Organizational’ courses.”
“Gladly,” said Mr. Rykstrom with executive briskness. “You under-
stand of course the assumptive principles on which Meadowfield was
founded. The hand,” and Mr. Rykstrorn held up both his strong hands,
“the eye,” and with one finger Mr. Rykstrom struck his temple, close to
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the corner of his eye, “the thorax and diaphragm,” and. Mr. Rykstrom
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 13