and manners but for wrinkled brows and set lips. So serious was the
situation that he ventured to regard the company with a manner of com-
plaint. He seemed to be indicting not only the elements but also these
false friends who conspired to keep his master—surely that was the right
word—from his proper bed at his proper hour.
At last Barrett could stand it no longer. He entered into consultation
with the Outrams and it was arranged that Buxton was to stay the night.
It was Vincent’s room that he was to have and Vincent was to sleep on the
living room sofa. At this solicitude Buxton showed neither pleasure nor
annoyance. When the room was ready for him, he said goodnight with a
beautiful smile. Then he thought of something and trudged to where the
housemaids were sitting in the doorway. They looked surprised and they
blushed, and then, as he spoke to them, they giggled and rose uncer-
tainly and, as he turned away, they sat down again, looking suddenly very
charming in the flustered animation that had struck their faces.
Vincent was standing as Buxton passed them. He said, “Good night,
sir,” and Buxton said, “Good night, Hammell. We’ll begin our grim business
in the morning,” and he sturdily climbed the stairs, Barrett at his heels.
For a while Buxton’s being benighted here in the house relaxed the
awkwardness of the group. The two children felt that it was an adventur-
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the unfinished novel
ous happening with an assured and attractive future—“Will he be here
in the morning when I wake up?” Paul asked. For a little while there was
the feeling that had prevailed when the storm had been approaching.
But when the thunder lost a little of its force, the rain lost none, and
now there was a high wind rising in power every moment. The imagina-
tion of the maids seemed limited to fear of the thunder. When that had
diminished, they rose with the air of having accomplished a task or a
social duty and shyly vanished. But to the fancies of the educated people,
the wind was suggestive beyond the thunder and the rain. The thunder
might be anger but the rain was spite. Thunder suggested a ceiling of
heaven from which the bolts might be discharged, but the wind came
from the illimitable unimaginable distances. They were really so affected
by it that when Brooks Barrett appeared at the head of the stairs and sur-
veyed the room and then silently descended, they all looked at him with
frightened eyes. His ghastliness, although they were all familiar with it,
now seemed strange, as if he had just been stricken white.
Barrett descended halfway down the stairs and there he stood, he-
raldic, with an arm outstretched to Vincent and a finger beckoning. Vin-
cent looked quickly around behind him to see to whom the signal had
really been made. But there was no one behind him. It was he who was
being called.
He went wondering up the stairs to Barrett, and when he had come
level, he felt a strong grip on his upper arm as Barrett put his head close
and said in a loud whisper, “He wants you.” Conscious of the watching
puzzled eyes below, he was gently impelled up the stairs in Barrett’s grip.
He felt that this strange servant had been so grandly deputized that he
did not resent this needless intimacy of touch.
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chapter 19
It was not until they had reached the door of the bedroom that Vincent
was able to ask a question.
“What is it?” he said.
Barrett’s hand was on the knob. He kept it there as he looked into
Vincent’s face. “He’s afraid,” he said. “He’s frightened in the storm.”
This made nonsense. But Barrett’s saying it frightened Vincent. Or,
rather, it left a great vacancy into which fear might rush at will. If there
was any reason for fear it was this Barrett himself who stood there with
his look of a man upon whom jail has done its expected work. Yet Vin-
cent knew that Barrett was telling the simple truth. He made a gesture
to Barrett to open the door. He made it from a desperate impulse to face
whatever it was that he shrank from. Yet in its curtness, it had the appear-
ance of authority and Barrett’s response to it was a kind of obedience.
Vincent had spent but a single night in the bedroom. Yet it was al-
ready somewhat his own, with his typewriter and his few books, and his
hairbrushes on the dresser. It seemed strange that Buxton should be in-
habiting it. Every light in the room was on, the overhead cluster, the bed-
lamp, the writing table. Buxton lay in the bed. He was clad in fresh blue
the unfinished novel
pajamas. The neat overlap of the sheet was pulled almost to his beard.
His eyes were closed, and when Vincent saw that his hands were clasped
he knew that they were not clasped in prayer, but to keep the current of
life flowing continuously as possible.
The emotion that Vincent felt upon seeing him was like the most in-
tense social embarrassment. He would have liked to go away, but could not.
He would have liked to advance. But he could not do that either—not until
the old man opened his eyes and, turning his head slightly, looked at him
with a glance that seemed to express, though faintly, wearily, a welcome
and a hope. This gave Vincent the power to seat himself on the edge of the
bed and do what he knew he must do—touch one of the clasped hands and
urge it to relax its grip on the other hand. It was the fierce grip of Buxton’s
hand on his own that informed Vincent of the fear, the panic fear.
Here in this upper room the wind seemed worse than in the rooms
below. One could hear up here what one could not distinguish below, the
noise of the resistance of the great trees. The curtains were drawn and
one could not see their movement, but one could hear it, the wild person-
al noise of organic matter. Buxton’s white beard twitched with the effort
of a smile. “Just stay,” he breathed, “Just stay. Just stay,” he said, and con-
tinued to whisper it like an incantation. And as the wind rose, the terror
came into his eyes and Vincent felt the convulsive clutch of his hand.
Vincent thought, “He is going to die. This is death.” But he did not
believe that. It was a thought that expressed a deficiency of imagination.
He was willing that deficiency. It was not hard to think of the extrem-
ity of death. But it was very difficult, it was terrifying, to think of other
extremes. Death was well-known and it was not incompatible with the
wonderful peace of the contemplating mind. Even the death-terror might
be thought of as the tragic end of all mind. But Vincent knew that Buxton
was not really dying. The unaccountable terror was not an end, but a
contradiction. It contradicted, among other things, that wonderful peace
of the “contemplating mind” that Vincent had so gratefully and proudly
discovered that afternoon. It was not dying that Buxton was in terror of.
He was simply in terror and he was in nothing else.
Barrett stood against the wall at the far end of the room. He held his
hands behind him, between him and the
wall. A faithful messenger, he
had brought the one he had been sent for. Now as he watched the old
man and the young man, he had the air of being outside and properly
outside whatever was happening.
Vincent saw that it was the wind that started the waves of terror that
overwhelmed Buxton. It was a child’s fear. Vincent was quick to mock to
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the unfinished novel
himself, as any modern young man would be, the awe that he had been
betrayed into feeling, a few hours before, at the power of the contem-
plating mind. But as he sat uncomfortably on the bed, his hand growing
cramped in the old man’s fierce grip, the impulse to save himself by
self-mockery quite left him. He found that he [saw] it as a point of pride
that he had been selected by Buxton as the comforter of his agony. “He
wants you,” Barrett had said. The comforter of his agony and, so far as
biology would permit, its partaker. For the waves of the old man’s terror
lapped at the edges of his own mind. Later he was to learn, objectively,
as we say, to learn it as a scientific fact, that with certain physiological
conditions of the very old there is the experience of night terrors of the
most extreme kind. But he himself, in the flush of his youth, could, if
he wished, see an enormous vision of empty life. The analogy of Manilla
Boulevard on a wet night, of vacant bright February days, of the gentil-
ity, worn and weary, of his parents’ dining-room, or [the] prison of his
own room on a Sunday night when life seemed to have sunk back into
a half-lit nothingness from which it would never recover—these were
the things by which he knew the enormous vision of emptiness, of the
illimitable terror of vacuity.
Yet at twenty-three biology stands strong. And it was remarkable
how the point of pride came to reinforce it. And the point of pride gave
rise to the point of honor. For Vincent, grimly proud of his having been
the one chosen to try to stand between Buxton and his terror, knew that
it must be a point of honor with him not to relate to anyone what he was
now witnessing.
He could not explain this decision of secrecy. He did not know if he
made it for Buxton’s sake. He did not know if he made it for the sake
of the company in the drawing-room below. He only knew that when
he went downstairs he would not answer truthfully the questions they
would ask about what had transpired above.
By the time Barrett came from his self-consigned place against the
wall and tapped him on the shoulder, he was extraordinarily calm. He
followed Barrett’s glance and saw that Buxton had fallen asleep and was
now breathing with relative quietness.
Barrett nodded and Vincent nodded in reply. As gently and gradually
as possible, he withdrew his hand from the relaxed grip and stood up.
Buxton did not move in his sleep.
On tiptoes, Barrett went to the door and held it open for Vincent. He
indicated by signs that he would spend the night here in the armchair.
The wind was still wild, although it was now beginning to abate.
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the unfinished novel
As Vincent reached the door by slow stealthy steps, Barrett scrutinized
his face intently. Vincent submitted to the strange examination. He was
very tired. He had never felt such a fatigue before. Barrett poked a finger
violently downward, indicating the company below. He laid the finger over
his lips and shook his head backward and forward in negation. He was en-
joining silence, the very silence that Vincent had resolved to keep. Vincent
closed his eyes wearily to indicate both comprehension and assent. And as
he made that sparse gesture, which he had never made before, it seemed
to him the gesture of a man much older than he actually was.
As he went down the stairs, he had to face the lifted heads and ques-
tioning eyes of all the waiting company. He was the bearer of tidings
which they all wanted to hear. And they had a right to hear while he had
no right to withhold what he knew. As he saw the expectant faces he had
for a tumultuous moment the happy busy feeling of someone who is
about to impart what everyone wishes to learn.
He was a young man who thought much of fame, power and success
in life. To him this was a brilliant company, wonderfully worth impress-
ing. The demand of its expectation was very compelling. He felt not only
a great impulse but a great opportunity, to take on the tragic standing
that would make him their peer. And not only their peer, but even their
superior, telling them what they did not know, forcing their minds to a
new conception of their admired man.
How he ever descended those stairs in silence, with his sad knowl-
edge hot and bursting within him, he never knew. Harold Outram came
forward and said, “Was anything the matter?” And Vincent shook his
head indifferently and answered, “No, nothing’s the matter.”
He was able to say it so casually that Outram’s question seemed fussy
and foolish. It seemed to be at once established that nothing could be
more natural than that Buxton, sleepless for some reason, should want
to chat with the man who was to be his biographer.
It was not until he had told his lie that Vincent saw that he had re-
taliated upon Harold Outram for having that morning refused to tell him
about Claudine Post. He had let fade his intention of considering the jus-
tice of his anger at Outram. He had let go by the whole question of why
he, so immature and inexperienced, had been chosen as Buxton’s biog-
rapher. And when the question presented itself to him again, it did not
arouse in him that dissolving sense of the morning, of having been used
and betrayed. It was remarkable how much stiffening his lie and his se-
cret knowledge had put into him. There was no need to be angry, no need
to be “hurt.” There was suddenly no need to consider himself at all.
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chapter 20
The really old Essex, the Essex that the tourist will go out of his route
to see, consists chiefly of Wentworth Street. This is a short broad thor-
oughfare overarched by wine-glass elms of large growth. On Wentworth
Street are situated the eleven houses that give Essex a kind of fame.
It is of course true that the very oldest of these houses, the Went-
worth House, is almost entirely a restoration. But no secret is made of
this. The studied character of the grim, solid, almost fortified structure is
quite simply admitted by its being used as a museum. The other houses
date from a later time, from after the violence of the Indian Wars which
had destroyed the original Wentworth House and other houses like it.
And there is even enough of the original Wentworth House still left to
justify the 1670 marker, for its stone chimney is still standing and, al-
though the original door is now kept inside the house as an item in the
collection of historical objects, it bears not only an explanatory placard
but also the scars and holes of the arrows and bullets which had been
directed against it when it was actually used as a door.
worth House experiences the morality that inheres in pewter and wood,
the unfinished novel
in iron and copper and dark flawed glass. He sees the many utensils that
pertain to fire, the flint-pistol and the bellows, the kettle and the trivet,
the spit-jack, tongs, warming-pan and grog poker, and he remembers the
cold hardships of a vanished, handmade world. The collection of weap-
ons, the Indians’ and the colonists’, puts him in mind of the old life of
daily mortal danger. Here, as in any such New England museum, hard-
ship seems to go hand in hand with innocence. He reads the framed le-
gal instruments on the walls and concludes from the quaintness of their
language that the intention of their makers in regard to the transactions
described was of an almost childlike intention.
And if the tourist is of a certain age, he is sure to be stirred by memo-
ries not only of national but of personal youth. For here, all about him, is
the matter of his earliest picture-books and classrooms, suggesting the
turkeys and blunderbusses and tall hats which he had cut out of paper
with blunt-nosed scissors and colored with crayons of black and orange.
And this is the paraphernalia of his boyish play, of his own knowledge of
snow and then of snug warmth, of simple weapons, spears and bows and
the gun that is lethal upon a loud shout of Bang, of forts and fires, chase
and ambush and hand-to-hand fighting.
The other treasures of the street cannot speak to the visitor quite
so intimately. Yet they will surely reach him in their own way, for the
quiet thoughtful shapes of the old Essex houses are very eloquent.
These fine doorways could have allowed the entrance and exit only of
gravely happy people, or of people saddened only by meaningful sor-
row. Thus the American will dream for an hour his modern dream of
a past life that moved with the order, economy and significance of a
narrative. Thus he makes his American Mont St. Michel, his white and
wooden Chartres.
Wentworth Street begins with the restored Wentworth House, which,
in its fortified seventeenth-century strength, is so very different from the
houses of the later time, and it ends with the old church and what is left
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 25