him as drained as if he had spoken in rage.
He said, “Father, I came to say good-bye. I’m leaving today.”
“I know,” said Mr. Hammell. Then he said, “Son, we don’t get on the
way we used to.”
By the tone of his voice it seemed that the past he meant was but a
year or two before, but actually, as Vincent knew, he meant a time when
Vincent was a boy of five and there had existed a great community be-
tween father and son.
“You used to understand your father. You don’t understand him
any more. Some day, son, he must have a talk with you.” Mr. Hammell
seemed to get a gratification from talking about himself as if he were
someone else. “There are things you don’t understand about him, things
he could tell you that would open your eyes.”
“I know, father,” Vincent said.
He knew what his father meant—the rights of the long quarrel with
his wife, the humiliations inflicted by her family, the deep hidden justice
of all his actions. But more than any of these he meant at this moment
the sacrifice of his talents which he believed he had made for Vincent,
the curtailment of his possibilities, the surrender of his powers to the
family’s safety. For like many another young American, Vincent was the
son not only of hope but of despair.
“You don’t know, my son, you don’ t know,” Mr. Hammell said. He was
standing behind his counter and his voice rang with the desperation—no
less terrible because he was consciously trying to express it—of a man who
has no wife, no son, no work, no memories and no hope save that which
made him cling, more than most men, to life and the regard of others.
And the word which he seemed most to rely on, the word “son,” had
no other effect upon the person it signified and to whom it was addressed
than to make him wince internally as at some lapse of taste, as indeed it
was. Vincent thought of the Pullman car he would soon inhabit. He thought
that distance translates itself into time and that when he had arrived in the
East, his father would be many years behind him. And he thought of the
object of his journey, of Jorris Buxton, in his great old house, living with
his knowledge of the universe, mighty with years, wisdom and power.
“Father, let it go for now,” he said. “Please, father,” he said. “I’ve
come to say good-bye. Please let’s not quarrel. After all, I’m going away.”
Mr. Hammell smiled secretly, sadly and distantly. “Yes. I suppose
you’re doing what you think is right. But it’s a terrible blow to me. It’s a
betrayal, son, I need you here.”
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A kind of panic came over Vincent, so completely was his father
oblivious of him. In his father’s mind there stood some abstract notion
of the son he had planned to have, but the actual son who stood before
him had no reality save as he denied the function of that other son of his
father’s mind. “But father, this is my work, my—” he was about to say
“life” but he heard the panic in his own voice and with a great effort he
said nothing more. He could not bring himself to make claims for his
life in that voice. He said in the manner of routine, “Soon, father, I’ll
probably be able to help you.”
“I’m sure you will, my son,” his father said piously. “I know you have
every intention of so doing. You are bound to succeed. Tell me, are these
people you can trust?”
“Which people?” Vincent asked. Mr. Hammell never knew direct-
ly about Vincent’s affairs and was always in an exasperating confusion
about them.
“These people who have engaged you to take care of the old man—
are they trustworthy?”
Vincent stared. “Father, you haven’t understood. I’m not going to
take care of an old man. How could you think that? I’m going to write
a biography of a famous person. Jorris Buxton is a great man.” Then
because neither for his father’s sake nor his own could he bear to let his
father’s appalling misconception remain, he said, “It’s as if I were going
to write the biography of Spinoza while he was still alive.”
“He’s an old man. I know how it is. You’ll have to look after him.”
Mr. Hammell’s blind insistence made Vincent’s heart contract. He
suddenly saw his father as an old man—illegitimately old before his time,
for Mr. Hammell was but in his sixties, but old and saying so, and asking
for help beyond anything financial. A sudden deep jealousy had made
him quarrelsome and wrongheaded. He had become a child to whose
family another child had been born. He had chosen to be an old man and
now his son was preferring another old man to him.
There was nothing to say or do but what was false and formal. Vincent
said, “I’ll be home on a visit soon. I’ll write often. Take care of yourself.”
And he held out his hand.
Mr. Hammell did not take his son’s hand. He came out from be-
hind his counter and laid his arms around Vincent and put his head
softly on his son’s shoulder. A kind of shudder went through Vincent,
but he put his arms about his father’s slight back and patted him sev-
eral times, awkwardly and reluctantly yet still with the intention of giv-
ing comfort.
chapter 12
When the taxi stopped at the Outram house Vincent said with more em-
phasis than he intended, “Is this it?” The driver, thinking that his own
good sense was being questioned, replied, “Well, sure it is.” But what
Vincent meant was that the simplicity of the house quite startled him.
With the reality before him, he could not now recall the house his imagi-
nation had shaped, but certainly it was not this low, long ramble of a
place, so fresh, so weather-beaten, so honest.
And when he had been installed in the drawing-room while a griz-
zled housemaid went in search of Harold Outram, his surprise grew.
And with his surprise, his disappointment grew. Was it for no more than
this that Harold Outram had exchanged his great young talent? For as
Vincent Hammell looked about the room, everything was precisely as he
himself would have wanted it.
He had naturally never put to himself the question of what a per-
fect drawing-room should look like. But now that he saw this room, he
felt that it perfectly expressed his own taste. Everything in it pointed
to ease and simplicity, nothing to richness. There was, indeed, even a
kind of shabbiness to be observed in the room. He looked for the ex-
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pected luxury and could not find it, not knowing that he was in its very
midst. He was naïve enough to think that luxury must appear as vulgar-
ity. He could not know what made the effect which called forth his ad-
miration—how much of chintz and how much of dull, glowing wood,
how much spruceness and how much casualness, how much thought
and how much calculated dependence on accident. He believed that
money was only for the striking and the chic, for what was intended to
overpower the beholder. He did not know how expensive was the mod-
> esty of some simple fabric or the intellect that inhered in a cherrywood
lowboy. He did not know that mind could give to mere objects the valid-
ity of great uttered ideas and that people could so train themselves that
they could endure to have only these right ideas about them, to sit in
or eat from or to be the content of their casual regard. Now he only saw
that everything here was to his own stern young taste. Indeed, the note
of exculpating shabbiness was so perfectly struck that the room seemed
almost within his own financial reach, or at least not forever outside
his own financial possibility. It was therefore below the right status of
Harold Outram.
But within a few minutes he understood the room and the whole
Outram establishment rather better. The maid came back to say that Mr.
Outram was not to be found but that Mrs. Outram was at the pool with
the children. She opened the door that led from the drawing-room to the
little flagged terrace and pointed down the lawn.
The woman who stood at the edge of the pool was sturdy and well
shaped. Her thighs were full but her legs were delicate, and she had a
ripe bosom and pretty rounded arms. Her damp hair hung to her shoul-
ders. She was talking to the bobbing heads of two children in the swim-
ming pool and to make her point more forcibly—she wanted them to get
out of the water—she crouched down in the beautiful classic attitude, the
knuckles of one hand touching the ground beside her lower knee, her
other arm resting lightly upon the upper knee. The children, laughing
and protesting, climbed out of the pool on either side of her. To Vincent
Hammell on the terrace, the picture they made was a very charming one,
the mother so richly formed, the children so slight and coltish, all three
of them with their tanned skins gleaming with wet. He felt that now he
had a true sense of Harold Outram’s life. Not that the breadth of the lawn
seemed magnificent to him, or the swimming pool a luxury more unat-
tainable than the drawing-room, but that mother and children here in
this setting seemed costly quite beyond his reach. He felt a pang of youth
and inadequacy at the scene. If anyone at that moment had asked him,
1
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“Is this what you want?” he would have said no. Yet he felt debarred from
something, he felt suddenly poor, young and untried.
Mrs. Outram slipped on a short light robe and advanced to meet the
guest. The children, a boy of ten and a girl of six, walked by her side.
“You’re Mr. Hammell,” she said. “Harold is around somewhere.”
She held out a damp hand. Vincent took it but he felt a little at a loss.
She added no word of welcome or of greeting to which he could reply,
and he had nothing to say once he had agreed to his identity. Yet he was
not uncomfortable.
Theodore Kramer had represented Harold Outram’s wife as a small-
minded woman who lived for pleasure and prestige. But Vincent’s first
glimpse of her made that estimate impossible. She too much resembled
a Maillol bronze, she was a warm and almost majestic mother. Yet now,
as he stood close to her, he had an impression which confirmed neither
Kramer’s opinion nor his own delighted first judgment. At near view she
seemed puzzled and embarrassed and rather deprecating, more at a loss
than he himself was. What chiefly came to him was her shy awkward-
ness which relieved him.
“I suppose you’d like a swim,” she said in an oddly discouraged voice
that seemed to suggest that his taking a swim could only be a weari-
ness to him and a nuisance to everyone. “Or maybe you’d like a drink.
Kiddy,”—she addressed the little boy—“run and tell Emma to bring
something to drink.”
“Highballs?” the child asked.
“Highballs, anything. Yes: highballs,” his mother answered. As if
in bewilderment at the strange ways of childish precocity, she turned to
Vincent, lifted her eyebrows high and shrugged. The gesture struck Vin-
cent as commonplace and provincial.
There were chairs and there was a table with a large gay sunshade
over it and May Outram invited her guest to sit down. She seated herself
with a little comic groan.
“The girl who takes care of the children is away and I’m all in,” she
said.
There was very little of the lovely Demeter-impression left, yet Vin-
cent found himself being pleased by his hostess. He found it hard to
understand what part she played in the life of her husband.
“So you’re the new biographer,” Mrs. Outram said. And then she
added brightly and with pleasure, “The new Boswell.”
“The new one?—have there been others?” Vincent saw a long line of
biographical employees who had not given satisfaction.
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“Oh no, you’re the first. I just meant that you’re the biographer and
you’re new.” She made a gesture as if to throw away the conversation that
had become so troublesome.
She was remarkably pretty and her face glowed with a tumbled hoy-
denish friendliness. She vigorously fluffed out her damp hair, piled it up
on her head and carelessly pinned it there, making a charming coiffure
that accentuated the bucolic quality of her face. Vincent was conscious of
the innocence of the nape of her neck and also of the smoothness of her
thighs and the rise of her breasts, for, as she lifted her arms to adjust her
hair, her little robe fell open. Her movements were not quite graceful,
they were even a little awkward in a reassuring way.
It was clear that Mrs. Outram was not the rapacious woman of
Theodore Kramer’s strict imagination. Neither was she, Vincent had to
conclude with regret, the grave Greek personage of his first glance. He
decided that she was not very clever but that she had treasures of warm
sensuality to give. Vincent had read of such women. He admired Harold
Outram for the wisdom of his choice of a wife and he himself felt the
wiser for giving this admiration. This new world was still all unshaped in
his mind, it made him feel a little lost and light-headed, and he was glad
that, from the shifting uncertainties that attend the arrival at a strange
place, one clear conclusion had so quickly emerged.
He said, “Do you see much of Mr. Buxton?” for it was necessary to
say something.
“Oh yes, we do,” Mrs. Outram said, “as much as anyone does.”
“What is he like? Will I find him difficult?”
“Difficult? No, he’s sweet. Well—difficult. Yes, I suppose he can be
difficult. He can be tough. He knows what he likes, and what he likes,
he likes.”
It was not exactly illuminating.
“You mean he’s crotchety?”
“Crotchety?” She considered the idea solemnly and then repelled it
with energy. “No. Wherever did you get such a notion? You mean be-
cause he’s old? Oh, get any such idea out of your head. He’s not old that
way. My God, no! There’s none of that kind of thing about him. My God!
The one thing about Mr. Buxton is that he’s a man.”<
br />
In the midst of this speech something caught her attention and al-
though she went on in her petulantly passionate way, she became more
and more abstracted from Vincent and from what she was saying. It was
her husband and someone else, a woman, coming out of the clumps
of woods beyond the lawn, and she rose and waved to them. Her rising
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and lifting her arm coincided with her statement about Buxton’s being
“a man,” so that when she made this affirmation she was standing at full
stretch, as if marking her utterance. The posture was beautiful, but she
had quite lost interest in what she was saying.
Harold Outram, seeing Vincent, took his companion’s arm to hurry
her along. She was slight and compact and she walked with a bright
nervousness that kept her light skirt in more than usual motion. Even at
the distance there was something engaging about her, as there should
have been, for when Outram had warmly shaken Vincent’s hand, he
said, “I know you’ll forgive me for not being here when you came if I
tell you that I went to bring Miss Thorne to see you.” He said, “Garda,
this is Vincent Hammell,” and at her name so casually spoken, Vincent
perceived the charming face of Garda Thorne materializing out of the
vague resemblance to her picture. He began to understand—it came
over him like a vertigo—what kind of world he had entered. And it was
a world so much fuller of little prizes than he had ever imagined, for
just as he was about to try some speech that could only have sounded
foolish, Garda Thorne had her hand in his and was saying, “I’ve been
wanting so long to meet you, Mr. Hammell, ever since Harold told me
about you. He says you are so clever and such a good critic. I don’t know,
myself. I avoid such things.”
Her very voice suggested the reason for the avoidance—it breathed
intuition and a respectful distaste for the critical intellect. She might
have been speaking of bear-hunting, so surely was the critical intellect
consigned to masculinity. The voice was a true voice, not the acquired
passport of a class. Miss Thorne was dainty, the liberal gray of her dark
hair was but a humorous comment on her years, and she looked at the
young man with blue eyes that made him the very center of her notice,
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 19