across the table at meal after meal. She looked out at the world with her
still, judging gaze in which, as Vincent knew, he himself did not stand
very favorably. He could not resent this—he himself judged the world
pretty severely and knew that there were reasons why he should be se-
verely judged.
But now, as Vincent watched Marion Cathcart’s almost timid entry
into the pool, he felt not only that she had no right to judge him but
that she was even compromising the youth they shared. Garda Thorne,
who was perhaps twice Marion’s age, swam with the same precision that
marked her tennis. He remembered now he had never before, in his four
days here, seen the girl in the pool, no doubt because she was ashamed
of her swimming and got up before the rest of the household to practice
in this guilty secrecy.
He continued to observe her as she stood on the lawn toweling her-
self. It was only a little past seven of the already beclouded morning. The
sun was not high and it shone weakly, and in that unardent light the girl
had a strange and solitary existence. She stood there alone on the lawn
and bent over to dry her legs and thighs and then she dried her arms and
shoulders and then her neck and back hair, rubbing slowly, meditatively,
inattentively. Her bathing suit was black and close-fitting. Another eye
than Vincent’s might have found that its remarkable scantness was very
happily justified, but Vincent was aware of no particular grace or charm.
Indeed, quite to the contrary. He would formerly have said that Marion
Cathcart was a quick graceful person and tall. But now she seemed rath-
er short than tall. He had the sense that her feet seemed to press almost
heavily into the grass, they bore her weight almost inelegantly. There was
a certain resemblance to May Outram as he had first seen her, except that
the Cathcart girl suggested to him no ideas of fine crouching bronze stat-
ues. She was only irritating in her awkwardness and vulnerability.
Well, he was glad. He had been taken in by Marion Cathcart and
now he saw through the pretence. He looked forward to meeting her,
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the unfinished novel
armed with this new knowledge of her. In his establishment in this new
place, the last barrier had gone down. By now the feverishness which had
marked all his vision and estimate of the first two days had almost en-
tirely passed. Like a foreigner in a new land, he had observed everything,
noted everything, found meaning in everything. Like any foreigner, ob-
servation and understanding were his means of defense against his alien
position. Things had more significance than reality. But now proportion
was asserting itself. May Outram’s silences did not disturb him. He had
learned what to take and what to discount in Harold Outram’s violence.
The children had begun to accept him as one of the household. He was
on easy terms with the dachshund Wolfgang. Between himself and Gar-
da Thorne he felt a special bond. After two sets of tennis with Hollowell,
winning one and losing the other, he was no longer in confusion about
great wealth. He had chatted with Philip Dyas in a way that made him
feel that he was on the road to friendship with that admirable man. After
two visits to Buxton, he was coming to be rather wonderfully at ease with
this great subject of his. And perhaps the last indication that he was see-
ing things in their true normal light was that Brooks Barrett no longer
seemed to have some strange knowledge from beneath the earth but was
quite ordinarily the servant everybody else took him for. Within four days
Vincent Hammell was no longer a strange and lonely young man in a
world full of secrets and legendary dangers. Only Marion Cathcart had
remained, not exactly a danger, but quite clearly a hostile element.
But no longer. She had succeeded, right up to this revealing moment,
in keeping alive in him his sense of being alien. But now he could feel
that if anyone was the stranger, it was this very Marion. She had the pre-
cedence of him here, for this was her second summer with the Outram
children. Yet for all her precedence in time, she had not yet been able to
come as close as himself, with only four days, to this world of clear deci-
siveness. He was impatient to meet her now, armed as he was with this
new advantage over her. He was eager to recoup his position with her
and he shaved and dressed with a sense of combative exhilaration.
But she did not appear at breakfast. And almost as if she were aware
of his new knowledge and was avoiding it, she lunched early with the
children. Vincent found himself frustrated and annoyed. He looked for-
ward to dinner.
He had no expectation of finding her at Philip Dyas’s and when he
entered the study and saw her there, the surprise of her presence took
him aback. She gave him that quick straight glance of hers and he met it,
but he did not know that it was not a glance of judgment but of curiosity.
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It put him on the defensive, where he had not expected to be. He tried
to see her in the light of the morning’s revelation. But somehow the new
knowledge did not operate. It did not, when it came to the test, apply at
all. She stood there with her brow as broad and calm as he had believed it
to be, her eyes just as level and competent as he had at first thought. She
stood trim and taut, really as elegant and weightless on her feet as any
woman could want, or any man could want for her.
For a moment their glances clashed. But there was, after all, no ac-
tual quarrel between them, and no cause for one. After all, they were
housemates, and Philip Dyas was beginning to emanate amusement. So
each of them said “Hello” politely but as sparingly as possible.
Marion was on the point of leaving, but she lingered. It was not out
of any inclination but only because a woman knows that she makes too
much drama by breaking off her visit to a man immediately upon the
appearance of another visitor. But Vincent thought of her as intrusive, as
spoiling his anticipated visit to Dyas.
Dyas could not help seeing that his young visitors were in a difficulty
with each other. He thought that the young woman could take care of her-
self more easily than the young man, for it was to Vincent that he spoke.
“You’ve come from Buxton’s, haven’t you? You’ve begun work already.”
“Yes, I have,” Vincent said, and felt Marry’s intrusion more than ever.
He would have liked to speak of Buxton to Dyas. But he remembered the
greeting between Buxton and Marion Cathcart and he felt constrained in
her presence. Besides, with his quick responsiveness to surroundings,
he was too much absorbed by this new room to answer with concentra-
tion. He believed that to let his eye wander so observantly about would
be a little rude or at least a little raw. But the room was delightful to him,
corresponding much more to something in himself, with its ascetic air,
than had the Outrams’ happy drawing-room. This was really his own
room at ho
me grown to maturity and authority. And suddenly he saw an
object which so pleased him that he had to go up to it to examine it, quite
forgetting any question of manners.
It stood on a low bookcase and it was a thing to be examined close-
ly, a model of a whaleboat, something under a foot in length and made
with amazing precision. “This is wonderful,” Vincent said, looking back
across the room to Dyas. And it really was wonderful. The boat rested in
two curved uprights. It was constructed of pegged planks, and the planks
and the gunwale and the ribs were in the most precise proportion to
those of a real boat. It did not have the dwarfed and shrunken and subtly
tortured look of most miniature things—it was the imitated thing itself
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the unfinished novel
and then something more, it had a reality added rather than subtracted
by its size. Within the boat lay all the instruments for an encounter with
a whale. There were three harpoons, one of them with its line attached
to the rope which lay precisely coiled in its barrel. The line of the boat
was all strength and speed, the boat was ready at any moment to move
forward out of its cradle. Vincent found his fingers itching for it, express-
ing some unidentifiable impulse that came from some unrecognized
depth—he had never before had so disinterested an impulse toward
anything. Beside this perfectly useless simulacrum of an efficient useful
thing, art itself seemed utilitarian, making its comment on life, offering
explanations and solutions. This boat seemed relevant to nothing. It sim-
ply invited his fingers and his love.
“You like it?” said Philip Dyas. He had come up and was standing
beside Vincent.
“I don’t think I’ve ever liked anything so much,” Vincent answered
and his voice expressed very nearly all that he felt, quite matching the
eagerness of Dyas’s question.
Marion Cathcart left at that moment. She was standing near the door
and she simply stepped out through it and the two men looked up at her
step and saw that she was gone.
“I’m glad you like it,” Dyas said. “I saw it one day in the window of
an antique shop in New York. I was in a black mood, one of those finally
desperate moods that one gets into—”
He could not have known the charm that his words had for Vincent,
the literal charm that fortified his spirit at the knowledge that others than
himself could know despair. Dyas sat there so solid, but that solidity had
its possibility of melting no less than his own. Vincent had noted before
this the subtlety of Dyas’s heavy face, but now he saw its possibility of
torture. It was far from being tortured now, however. It was all alive with
interest, friendliness and vitality.
“—and suddenly I saw this—this thing. I must have stood in front of
that window for half an hour, longer than I’ve ever stood before a picture.
It never occurred to me that I could buy it. I started at last to leave but I
had to come back after having gone only a little distance. Then I realized
that I could, after all, buy it. And I did, on the spot. It cost much more
than I should have spent, it was terribly expensive.”
“Yes, I should think so. Do you know when it was made?” Vincent
said.
“It was made by a whaling man, certainly, but I never think of its be-
ing made. It’s odd—I really don’t like to think of that. It must have been
1
the unfinished novel
made over many voyages or maybe when the man had left the sea, but
it’s strange, I never think of his hands at work on it. It looks, does it not,
like the very idea of a boat?”
This expressed very well what Vincent had felt and he said, “Yes, I
know just what you mean.”
“I suppose it’s some kind of fetish for me. I don’t quite know why.
It isn’t as if I had any feeling for whaling, or greatly admired MobyDick,
but there seems …”
He shrugged, giving up any attempt to explain or to know the reason
for his feeling.
“It looks,” Vincent said, “so frail and yet so tough. As if one could be
safe in it.”
“Yes—safe or saved. Perhaps any boat means salvation. But it’s quite
lovely, isn’t it? Pick it up if you like.”
Vincent hesitated. It was, oddly, not a thing to be handled, yet he did
want to hold it. He carefully lifted it out of its cradle. He could feel the
tough resilience of the wood. “What kind of wood is it?” he asked.
“They told me teak—the same kind of wood they made the big boats
of.”
As Vincent held the boat, Dyas lifted out one of the oars and held
it up for Vincent to see. He put it back and took out the barrel with its
coiled rope and the harpoon that was so wonderfully warped by its leader
to the heavier line. When they had examined these and when Dyas had
made Vincent examine the precision with which the planks were fitted,
he put back the boat’s equipment and Vincent laid the boat gently on its
cradle. The two of them stood back to look together at this object again.
1
chapter 23
At about ten o’clock in the morning, Vincent would present himself at
Buxton’s house on Wentworth Street. Barrett answered his ring and
in the dim vestibule the “assistant” glowed with his phosphorescent
pallor and his eyes gleamed with a genteel conspiratorial awareness.
Vincent could not rid himself of the feeling that every morning Barrett
was about to whisper, “Have you brought it?” and that one morning
he would find himself answering, “Hush—yes, here it is.” But Barrett
never asked the question.
On some mornings Barrett bore word that Buxton wished to see Vin-
cent when he came, but most often the order of the day was that Vincent
would go directly to the small room on the second floor that had been set
aside for him. There he would work over the papers which, in cardboard
files, filled two old mahogany bookcases.
It was an enormous accumulation. Buxton had long ago acquired
the habit of preserving papers. He explained to Vincent, in apology for
the vast clutter, that he had acquired the feeling that all documents were
precious from having worked two summers with a professor of his on
certain ancient papyri. “Such rubbish,” he said. “It would amaze you,
the unfinished novel
the triviality of the evidence on which the ancient civilizations are recon-
structed.” The young Buxton had played with the fancy that a dance-card
or a dinner invitation might be preserved by chance for the delight of
scholars a millennium hence. “I used to think about some Alexandri-
an who owed another Alexandrian for a consignment of sheep’s grease
and I thought how wonderful it was, how lucky they were, to have their
names known now, Sosostris and Climenes or Laon and Diacones.” Vin-
cent knew well enough how the rest of the fancy went—how the young
student would exist as a fact and a puzzle in the mind of some scholar
of the inconceivable future. If you had luck, the mind of the s
cholar who
held the dance-card or the dinner invitation would not condescend to
you [who] were dead and blown away but would be unhappy because it
would never know the tunes to which you had danced or the taste of the
food you had eaten. The fancy had formed a fixed habit for Buxton and
he had thrown into a cardboard file every conceivably documentary scrap
he received. When the file had filled, another had succeeded it and after
that another, and as the years passed, the rate of accumulation increased.
Among the ranged files in the bookcase there were eventually some that
were tight with the correspondence of only a single year. But the last fif-
teen years were contained in far fewer than fifteen files. Indeed to hold
the letters of the last six years, a single file sufficed. Once this was under-
stood, a single glance could give the rate of Buxton’s life.
Vincent was to prowl at will through the mass of paper that had thus
accumulated, doing what the biographical scholar calls “spade work.”
And no biographer could have wanted a wider or a richer field to work or
one whose soil the spade cut more easily. Vincent had always despised
the academic men for whom “documents” were the crown of existence.
But now that he himself had a fine chaos of documents to manipulate,
he understood the particular delight such work could give. Out of this
“material,” this primal matter, upon which no more than a rough chron-
ological order was as yet imposed, it was for him to draw the organiza-
tion and meaning that were there, waiting for him. And this was but the
beginning, for to every letter that was contained in the cardboard files
there was presumably an answering letter from Buxton himself. These
letters would have to be found and read. The world concentrated here on
Buxton, addressing itself to Buxton, making him the center of the world.
But Buxton had also addressed himself to the world. From whatever per-
son and place a letter had come, to that person and that place a letter had
also gone. The size of the task he had so lightly undertaken would have
appalled Vincent had he not been so deeply stirred by the adventure of
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the unfinished novel
this large creation. It was, for example, a growing excitement to him to
observe how Buxton, as the recipient of all this various correspondence,
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 27