The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel
Page 24
affair and making it what it is now. If you want the measure of what he’s
done, just remember that he’s made me admire a school.”
She let them look at her, the ordinarily implacable enemy of elemen-
tary and secondary education, now making that one significant exemp-
tion from her hostility.
“Is that what you call the good-will of a concern?” she said and she
looked at Hollowell with such aggressive shrewdness that one could almost
see the big cigar of the ______ [blank in original; haggler?] in her mouth.
“How much do you think that’s worth, Arthur?” And she added, “Huh?”
Hollowell smiled in patient recognition of Garda’s well-known and
delightful extravagance. He said with mild forbearance, with the air of
being in the conversation only in the interests of clear thought, “Garda,
you talk as if Linda were trying to put something over on Philip. For one
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thing, price is no object, as Philip knows. And Philip isn’t, you know, be-
ing forced to sell.”
Before this mature reasonableness, Garda’s bright childish bubble of
indignation collapsed. But she recovered. She skillfully borrowed from
Hollowell his own reasonable manner. “No, really,” she said with gravity.
“It makes me a little angry with you and Linda. The school was made
by Philip. It’s not his property, it’s—it’s his work. He doesn’t own it, he
lives it. And now just because Linda wants a school, she wants Philip’s
because it’s near her home. No, really. I think it’s wrong Linda, I think
it’s wrong.”
Linda had been let out of the dispute by her husband’s impersonal
entrance into it, but now she had to come back. She said, “Really, Gar-
da”—it seemed that really was the word that marked dispute on the high
level of this company—“really it is not right of you to make it sound
like some mere whim of mine. You make it sound like something frivo-
lous—and insufficiently motivated. And you make it sound as if we were
trying to make Philip do something against his will. We’re just asking
him. He’s not forced to sell to us.”
“Oh!” Garda cried with great impatience. She made a gesture with
her hands to brush away certain cobwebs that had been allowed to stay
too long. “Forced! Forced! You know perfectly well that he may well be
forced. You know very well that he’s still putting money into the school
and isn’t making any.”
At this there was a silence in which the Hollowells seemed more
deeply plunged than anyone else. Philip Dyas sat with his forefinger
along his cheek, intelligent and imperturbable. Harold Outram seemed
full of unuttered laughter, Marion Cathcart had seemed very remote from
the whole conversation but now Vincent saw that she was very intensely
aware of something. Dr. Buxton was looking at Garda with gentle and
friendly curiosity.
Garda’s gaze went wildly about the table to estimate the havoc she
had wrought and to find help. She had, as even a stranger could see,
carried the matter beyond a joke by suggesting that the Hollowells were
capable of using money not merely as a means of exchange, a lubrica-
tion of the gears of life, but as a force. Like any guilty person, she cov-
ered one desperate act by committing another. “Well, I don’t know what
Harold’s damned Foundation is for if not to help just such things as
Philip’s school.”
And she turned to Outram with a flash of blue fire from her eyes that
had the intention of illuminating the problem of his duty.
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Outram smiled to her in a mocking, friendly way, unharmed by her
anger, but May Outram opened her mouth and eyes in shocked surprise.
It was a great tension that these friends had worked up among them-
selves, actually a quarrel. Yet in a way it was not like any quarrel that
Vincent had ever known. He remembered that in a book by a famous
revolutionist he had read that it was foolish to suppose that when the
State eventually withers away in the ultimate society, there will be none
of the conflict which now makes life interesting but bad. The badness
would go, but the interest would stay. In the ultimate society there would
be the most passionate differences of opinion—people would glowingly
debate such matters as a new aqueduct or bridge or work of art or philo-
sophical idea, and even parties would be formed on the ground of these
differences. These interests would be all the more intense because ev-
eryone concerned would be disinterested, with nothing personal to gain.
There would be none of the desire for personal gain that now makes life
hideous. All the purer desires would be that much freer.
There seemed to be present now at the dinner table some vague in-
complete intimation of that future. It may have been that Vincent simply
did not know the full meaning and force of all that was said. His own
exploration of the tone of things was that the quarrel was taking place in
Buxton’s presence. Buxton had not yet said a word, but in the purview
of his glance the “quarrel” was taking place without the tone of quarrels.
Whatever the quarrel might have been in another atmosphere, in the
climate of Buxton’s presence it had almost a nobility.
Still, the table had fallen silent. Vincent would have liked to come
to Garda’s help, but he did not presume to. Whatever the Cathcart girl
felt, she too obviously had to remain silent. Dyas could say nothing. Sud-
denly Garda turned to Buxton and cried in a passionate wail, “Jorris, am
I wrong?”
The old man had his wineglass in his hand. It was surely with a
sense of his drama that he sipped the wine and wiped his mustache be-
fore he answered. He said, “I don’t know, Garda, whether you’re right,
but you’re by no means wrong.”
It could not be taken as an equivocal answer. Buxton’s eyes, as he
delivered it, swept the table, took in the Hollowells, first Linda, then
Arthur, took in Philip Dyas sitting with his finger along his chin, took
in Harold Outram and settled on Garda. His voice was very immediate
and personal, as if he saw every implication of what had been said. And
when he had given his judgment, the matter ended and the joke, or the
quarrel, did not go on. Garda, who might have been expected to triumph
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brightly over her beaten opponents—it would not have been beyond her
to have called out a crowing “See?”—sat quiet and almost humble. As
for the others, they gave no sign of having been rebuked. They all sat
together in a gentle silence. It was as if they had agreed to have out this
disagreement under certain ideal conditions. It had been had out and
now it seemed done with. It might almost have been started, Vincent
thought, in order to draw from the old man this moment of judgment,
for surely they must feel what he felt, a sense of deliverance so sudden
and so sensual as to make him feel foolish. He had always thought it a
failure i
n Greek tragedy when the god appeared high up on the tower to
settle the disputes and resolve the action, thought it a failure in drama,
but now he knew what dramatic possibilities there lay in the sudden
voice that stilled the bickering of drama with irrefutable judgment. Back
and forth went the dialogue and dialectic of passion and then came the
voice, still and sure, and all eyes went up to where it came from and all
voices were quiet. At that moment Vincent remembered his father in his
little optometrical shop. For the first time in his life he felt that he was
some man’s son.
Dinner came to an end with the end of the dispute. The party went
out to sit on the lawn with disagreement quite over.
The light of the long August day was at last failing. There was a large
band of darkness in the eastern sky. Had the air been as usual this would
have seemed no more than the massed approach of night. But there was
a vibrancy in the air, a strangeness in the light, a succession of delicate
little puffs of wind that turned back the undersides of the leaves and
these things gave to the weighty formation of clouds its bright character
of the portent of a storm.
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chapter 18
As each man of the party came out of the house, he looked up and around
and sniffed. There was a high thin purity of fragrance in the air. Buxton
made the gesture that all the other men made, the quick, calculating sniff
and the look around the horizon. It touched Vincent oddly to see it, this
primitive responsiveness to weather, this taking it into account.
Hollowell, about to light his pipe, paused with the match cupped in his
hand over the bowl. This seemed to give him a nautical authority of weath-
er wisdom when he surveyed the heavens and said, “Storm coming.”
It was a long way off. But it was certainly coming and already it drew
everyone together in exhilaration. The little sudden puffs of wind were
almost chilly. At the very height of summer there was the hint of autumn
and even of winter. This reminder of time to come was a sensation shared
among them all. It was almost an adventure shared. Consequently no one
had to be very witty or acute to win response from the others. In the light-
ly tossing leaves over their heads there was an urgency, a kind of wildness.
In the east they could now hear the rumble of thunder. It was far off but
it was unusually decisive in tone. They could see the infrequent flicker of
the unfinished novel
distant lightning. As the glow in the west diminished, they became more
aware of the lights within the house behind them.
Garda Thorne, more than the others, was responsive to the charge
in the air. She strolled with Hollowell over the lawn, back and forth. She
had taken his arm and was actually doing what Vincent had read about
but never seen, she was “leaning” on it. She looked up at the sky and
called to the others, “It’s going to be a regular tempest.” Then, as if by an
obvious transition, she said, “You can’t imagine how lovely you look, all
of you together.”
Vincent could well imagine that they did. Certainly he had never
known before how existence could shine with the quality of a moment
forever caught on canvas. What Garda was seeing was something that
might forever exist under the name of After Dinner At The Outrams and
in the catalogue there would be the explanatory note, “The bearded fig-
ure is the American scientist Buxton. The young man at his left …” Per-
haps they all had some sense of the notable moment they were sharing.
But of them all surely only Garda, with her bitter consciousness of time
on the move, and he himself, recently escaped from dullness, could truly
know how beautiful the moment was. He himself could feel that it was
worth having lived a life of dullness, almost of sordidness, to be now able
to taste so fully what life could really be. Could really be, not in imagina-
tion or in thought, but in reality.
It was no doubt inevitable that at this moment he should think of
his past life, seeing his mother in their dining-room, almost smelling the
odor of past meals which, in certain homes, is the palpable atmosphere of
past quarrels. Yet as his mind moved toward his mother in a tenderness
of guilt, he knew that it was not right of him to feel any guilt toward her.
For this moment was the unconscious goal of all her plans for him. It was
for this that she had bred and reared him—that he should have achieved a
place amid comfort and elegance and among the powerful and easy people
of the earth. No, it was not to her that any sacrifice of guilt was due. Yet he
found some guilt necessary in this moment of felicity and it was to Kramer
that he paid it. The memory of that friend and teacher with his pervasive
suspicion of elegance, with his preoccupation with things of the mind, his
perpetual sense of resistance to “temptation,” came to Vincent now, and at
his own bidding. And with it came the thought of “integrity” and his un-
happy speculations of the morning. At the very height of his pleasure, he
destroyed it, thinking miserably of the reason for his being here.
The storm was coming nearer and it brought Brooks Barrett. In his
solicitude for Buxton he had arrived early. He was not early enough to
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get Buxton safely home. The wind had heightened and then there were a
few warning drops of rain that sent the party into the house. They were
barely inside when the rain came with a huger downpour than most of
them had ever seen. The thunder, however, was still in the distance, as if
a greater violence were being kept in reserve, but it was already very loud
and almost perfectly continuous.
“At this rate it can’t last long,” said Hollowell in a competent voice.
He said it chiefly to Barrett, who was in great anxiety, but anyone in the
room was free to derive comfort from his assurance.
But the storm was not to be so easily exorcised. May Outram said
with surprising quaintness, “Its fury is increasing.” The old phrase was
appropriate. There was really a kind of animus expending itself, a kind of
will at work in the downward rush of water. It pounded on the roof and
made the hollow house roar.
The children woke and cried out and Marion Cathcart leaped from
her chair and sped upstairs to them. In a little while she returned with
the children, who came down the stairs before her, wrapped in their
bathrobes, beaming smugly at the coziness they saw awaiting and to the
cries of welcome they received. But May Outram said, “Oh Marry do you
think you should have?”
“Why, yes,” Marion answered, and although she said it lightly and as
if under correction, it seemed to settle the matter for May Outram.
The children, who looked, with their long robes and their bright em-
barrassed faces, like illustrations in the books they read, went up to Bux-
ton and stood at his knee. The grizzled maid brought a tray of glasses
and bottles and everyone sat about in a sociable way with a drink in hand.
/> But the event whose anticipation had recently been drawing them to-
gether and that had, as it were, reached its climax with the arrival of the
children, now seemed to have lost its charm. It even seemed to isolate
them from each other. No one, of course, anticipated danger. But there
seemed nothing to say.
At first Garda seemed to enjoy the tempest. It was she who called
it by that name. “Why, it’s a perfect tempest!” she said. And for a while
she prowled about the beautiful cozy room with her light step and her
glass in her hand. But as the storm lasted, she became subdued. She
put down her glass and carried a footstool to where Buxton sat in a great
wing chair. She sat at his feet and her face was troubled. Buxton laid his
hand for a moment on her shoulder and to Vincent it seemed that the
old man’s hand moved heavily and he was startled to see that there was
trouble in the aged face.
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When the thunder broke, it was with a truly terrifying intensity. So
complex were its sounds, so strange and various were its modulations
that they made the effect of an articulate and meaningful utterance. The
grizzled maid came in and spoke to May Outram in a low voice. “Of
course!” May said in a flutter of good-natured solicitude. “Of course—tell
them to come right in here.” But the two young housemaids on whose
behalf the permission had been sought would not come “right in here.”
All they wanted was as much security as they asked for and they sat in
the lighted dining-room, as close as they could get to the doorway. They
looked foolish and declassed and secretly pleased with themselves and
very intimate among themselves.
What made conversation hard was waiting for the storm to abate.
Everyone’s meteorological knowledge agreed with Hollowell’s—a storm’s
brevity was in proportion to its intensity. But this rule of thumb did not hold
for this occasion. There were no signs of the storm’s end. And impatience
began to develop and the indignity of being imposed on and trapped.
This was most apparent in Brooks Barrett. His responsibility for
Buxton gave him license to fidget openly. He paced the floor. From time
to time he looked at a large pocket watch. He stared accusingly out of the
window to examine the wild night. It was no longer a time for smiles