The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel
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demonstratively clutched his throat and then struck his solar plexus with
the flat of his palm, “the feet and legs” and Mr. Rykstrom tapped his
shoes and his trouser-legs, “it is with these that we think quite as much
as with the mind,” and Mr. Rykstrom struck his forehead with the tips
of four fingers. “Indeed, can we differentiate what we call the mind from
the soma, the body, the whole organism? Yet our civilization has put all
emphasis on the mind that thinks—that thinks in concepts, ideas. Too
much Plato,” said Mr. Rykstrorn with a smile. “We wish to put the em-
phasis the other way. The hand, the eye, the thorax and diaphragm, the
feet and legs—we wish to bring these into play.”
“And the section in between?” said Outram.
“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Rykstrom leaned politely forward.
“I said, the important section between the legs and the diaphragm.”
And Outram looked hard at Rykstrom. He was sorry he had started this.
He did not want to pursue the matter. But he had certain privileges and
he was glad that Rykstrom looked uncomfortable.
“You are Freudian?” Mr. Rykstrom asked in an objective voice.
“No. Go on—I’m sorry I interrupted.”
“So then: not the intellect but the whole being. It was that conception
that made Mr. Walter not give his money to the university. He was,” said
Mr. Rykstrom judicially, “in many ways a very deep thinker. Eccentric but
deep. And so Meadowfield was conceived. But inevitably the civic duty
arises. The Women’s Guild wants this, the Junior League asks if we can
do that. The Round Table Club wants a course. The Fellowship of Recon-
ciliation wants some lectures. In what? In current events, in Russia, in
psychology, in short-story writing. It is not our program, but you can see
how we must serve the community, so we arrange courses. These we call
our Organizational courses.”
“I see,” Outram said. He had found something of interest in the
catalogue and he said, “I see you have a young man giving a course in
short-story writing—Hammell, Vincent Hammell.”
“Hammell?” said Rykstrom, but the name meant nothing and he
reached out to take the catalogue from Outram.
“Oh yes—gives the course for the Junior League. Such people are not
on our faculty—they are hired for the occasion. But wait!” and Rykstrom
was struck by a recollection. “I have a letter!” and he opened a desk file.
“Just yesterday it came. A lady from the Junior League class writes to say
that Mr. Hammell is—what is the expression—‘giving me nothing.’ It is
nothing to his discredit. It is a group of wealthy ladies, not junior, and ev-
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ery year they need a new man to teach them to be literary artists. I assure
you, if they began with finger-paints they would make more progress and
more satisfaction. You are interested in this young man Hammell?”
“I’m going now to have lunch with him.”
“And not lunch here? I am disappointed.”
“I’m sorry.” Outram was disposed suddenly to be quite polite. “I have
so little time and this is important.”
“If you are interested in the young man—” Mr. Rykstrom indicated
possibilities.
“I don’t know, I’ve yet to meet him,” Outram said in a voice intended
to make the director feel venal.
“It is not to his discredit that the ladies are not satisfied. Every year
they find out they are not satisfied.” And Mr. Rykstrom smiled in refer-
ence to the remark Outram had made that had caused Mr. Rykstrom to
ask him if he was Freudian.
“But he will lose the job?”
“The indication is yes.”
The knowledge that the young man, all unknown to himself, was to
be deprived of his job made him appear to Harold Outram in a new and
more attractive light. As he was driven back to the city in Mr. Rykstrom’s
car, having first made the telephone call to warn Vincent of his lateness,
he thought of the young man as being alone in the world and therefore
the readier to give and receive friendship. At that time in his life Harold
Outram thought often of friendship and was conscious of his need for
it.
He identified Vincent Hammell almost at once. The great dark lobby
of the Club had cleared and the young man was easily to be picked out.
Outram took in at once the quality that he saw in Vincent’s face, the
handsomeness that was made not so much by the features as by the in-
telligence that organized them, the quality that Outram thought of as
“breeding,” or so he named the quality of the face that had been put there
by some solicitude, no doubt parental, the appearance of someone set
apart as special. What Harold Outram was not aware of was that young
Hammell’s face attracted him because it matched one of the several, one
of the more forgivable, ideas he had of his own appearance.
At almost the same moment, Vincent became sure that this tall man
entering the lobby was Harold Outram. He was struck with a poignant
dismay. It was a response he often had to men of Outram’s age. Old men
or men who had crystallized into true middle age did not disturb him.
They were of another race. But when youth still lingered, when the jaw
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had still a clean line and the expression still retained boyishness and
good looks, he was often frightened and repelled. Nothing else gave him
the same sense of life in process, the process being one of decay and
disintegration. It was the loss, he felt, of the vital and moral strength. It
seemed to Vincent that upon men in their thirties life had worked only
to their shame. His first emotions upon sight of Harold Outram were of
fear and pity.
chapter 7
The two men sat in the great bright dining-room of the Club. They had
still scarcely spoken, yet it seemed that by merely leading Vincent to the
dining-room, by choosing a table and ordering lunch, Harold Outram
had established a connection, even an intimacy. Vincent looked back to
his first impression with wonder, so vivid, so charming, so beautifully
organized did Harold Outram now seem to him. Decay and disintegra-
tion were words most precisely inappropriate to his presence. By his air,
in every detail of his manner, he confirmed to Vincent the promise of
life that his letter had made. Outram was tall and well set up and held
himself straight, especially when he walked through the dining-room,
as if he were resisting the glances that might be directed his way. His
close-cropped hair was light in color, but not so light as to seem less than
masculine. If there was a hint of the late Greek in the full mouth and
the rounded chin, this was contradicted by the solidity of the skull, the
expanse of the forehead and the restless, repressed energy of the eyes.
Outram had made no apology for his lateness until they were seated
and their cocktails and lunch ordered. His apology, when it came, was
charged with personal meaning for Vincent. “I’m sorry I was late,” he
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is.” To hear so great a power as Outram handle so great a power as Ryk-
strom made Vincent’s current of life flow faster. It suddenly came to him
that the still greater powers of the world, the presidents and the premiers,
the marshalls and the millionaires, talked about each other in just such
a way. The veil of anonymity fell away from government. He saw into its
very heart. He felt like the efficient young agent or secretary of a cabinet
minister, he with his clear vision and heightened pulse.
“What a reactionary bastard he is,” said Outram.
Vincent had now to understand that he was secretary to a political
personage of the liberal persuasion. It was a point necessary to have clear
after those political wanderings of Outram’s.
“Am I right?” Outram asked.
“Yes, you’re right,” Vincent said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“Firings?” Outram’s voice was professional, precisely to the point.
“Well—forced resignations. Petty persecutions, that sort of thing.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Well, yes—close acquaintances.” Vincent had the sense of being
brilliantly succinct.
“What’s their story?”
Vincent told what he knew about Meadowfield and Rykstrom. Yet he
did not speak as he would have expected to. For the first time in his life
he had a relation to a reality of money and tangibilities. To himself and
his friends Meadowfield was a whited sepulchre of culture and Rykstrom
was a byword, a man at once sinister and ridiculous. But as he talked
now he had clearly in mind the solid existence of the Meadowfield build-
ings, the hundreds of students and the scores of teachers who daily used
them, the details of kitchens and furnaces, gardens and repairs, all the
manifestations of existence that an institution makes. The power that
Outram represented made him aware of Meadowfield’s solid, bulking,
corporate life, its existence not merely in the mind but on the earth. It
was the first time that Vincent had ever been in connection with such an
existence. All that he and his friends had ever owned or dealt with existed
only in the mind. He found that the scandalous, sour gossip that he and
his friends exchanged about Meadowfield was no longer so relevant as it
had once seemed. It had to be strained through the sieve of a new sobri-
ety and responsibility.
He thought about this later and with a little dismay. His sudden new
conception of Meadowfield seemed to him a defection from the purity
of his idealism. It was to be for him a measure of Outram’s quality that
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in so brief a time in Outram’s company he had learned so much about
politics. For the second time that day he had occasion to be aware that his
youth was over.
The conversation about Meadowfield drew to an end. Outram had
the sense that they were now at the close of a prelude. Outram smiled
and said, “It was kind of you to write that letter to me.”
And then he added, “But also, of course, it was cruel.”
The second remark, casually flung out, might have been made sim-
ply for the purpose of seeing how the young man would handle it. At any
rate, the young man felt it to be in the nature of an emergency and a test.
He did not handle it badly. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I thought of that, but I
took a chance that you would feel the other more.”
At this a silence fell. They both contributed to it as if it were a conver-
sation. Then Outram said, “Tell me—do you believe in fate? in destiny?”
Vincent that morning had made a wager with his fate on the ten-
nis court, yet to him the question seemed a bizarre one and he looked
embarrassed for his companion. He groped for an answer and, as he
hesitated, Outram looked at him with an impatient glance, as if he were
being excessively dull. “It will interest you,” Outram said. “One evening
a friend of mine, name of Philip Dyas, walked over to my house—I live
in the country—and he brought with him a copy of a magazine, The Prairie Review. He wanted me to read an essay by a young man, name of Hammell. The next morning a letter came to me from the same young
man. It sounds like fate, doesn’t it?”
And then Outram said sharply, “You don’t know Philip Dyas, do
you?”
Outram’s sudden question seemed to suggest that his friend Philip
Dyas had been conspiring with Vincent. It was an odd enough notion to
make Vincent laugh as he said, “Never heard of him.” But it also made
his heart beat faster. What end could Outram have supposed the con-
spiracy to have?
“No, of course you never have,” Outram said. “So you can see why
I asked you if you believed in fate?” But of course Outram had not ex-
plained anything about “fate.” He had only related a coincidence. Fate
surely meant that the coincidence would yield a great and presumably
desirable event. The blood beat in Vincent’s ears like the hooves of ap-
proaching horses. The explanation of “fate” was clearly still to come.
“It’s really remarkable,” Outram said. He was not referring to the
coincidence, for to Vincent’s astonishment he drew from his breast-
pocket the very article itself, cut from The Prairie Review and neatly
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stapled into a little pamphlet. He laid it on the table as if it were a docu-
ment in the case, the papers of some transaction that was in negotia-
tion between them.
The essay was the same that Kramer had spoken of, the one pre-
tentiously entitled “The Sociology of the Written Word.” It began with
the statement that in every age society provides certain means by which
the young man of the lower middle class, sometimes the actually poor
man, can rise to honor and power. Such a means is the law, the church,
the army in time of war. Another means is the arts, of which literature
calls most often to the young man of good gifts and generous ambitions,
for literature seems to need not much more equipment than a firm will
and a good intelligence. But for that very reason, Vincent had gone on to
point out, literature is the most treacherous of all the artistic professions.
The young writer has no such demonstrable seal upon his calling as the
manual skill of the young painter, or the technical dexterity of the musi-
cian. He cannot be disciplined in his craft by elementary teachers, there
are no masters to judge for him the proficiency of his technique at an
early age, no finger exercises by which he can show his first mechanical
skill. His is the art in which technique is least specific, least commu-
nicable, seems to depend largely on a condition of inner life. He dares
trust no one to say where he has gone wrong. He needs a courage which
amounts to arrogance, and, if he lacks this, he can become so panic-
stricken that he cannot work.
Following this, Vincent had sketched the moral dilemma the young
man faces. For the choice of the literary career bestows upon him a
moral status which is of considerable, if
ambiguous, interest to those
around him. He sets himself up, by his choice, in a moral superiority, he
is moved by an impulse of protest and separation. Yet at the same time
that he sets himself apart, he files his application for praise and fame.
Now follows, Vincent had said, a game with almost impossible rules.
Moral superiority consists in being indifferent to society’s demands and
even hostile to them. Yet praise and fame are being sought—what else
can bestow them save this rejected society itself? And if praise and fame
come, is it because the writer has been morally convincing or because he
has surrendered his moral integrity? In short, the rule that the solitary
player establishes for himself is that he must make a goal at both ends of
the field and simultaneously.
Outram leafed through the stapled pages as if refreshing his memo-
ry of them. “How old are you?” he said.
“Twenty-three.”
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“You know a great deal. It’s the kind of situation that they set up to
drive rats crazy in psychological laboratories. And you’re very clever with
your ‘Ways.’”
He was referring to Vincent’s enumeration of the ways the writer
may be tempted to take through the stony land. There was what he called
The Way of Tom Sawyer, in which the writer lives by his joyful presence
at his own funeral—he settles for present intransigence and misunder-
standing with praise and fame to come after death. The Way of the Virgin
was the surrender of the dedicated talents to the wealth which is nowa-
days so lavishly ready for them—a youthful dedication has the effect of
raising a writer’s value and of stimulating the interest of money, pre-
cisely as did a fresh virginity in the old comic plays. The Way of the Pillar
of Salt was the writer’s choice of integrity together with sterility—he be-
comes a writer in name but not in deed, and he makes this choice on an
historical principle which holds that creation has ceased to be possible in
the modern world.
“You’re a very mordant fellow,” Outram said, “yes, quite a mordant
fellow.” There was a harsh and challenging note in his voice.
It was by way of being a kind of compliment, but Vincent’s heart