The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel

by Lionel Trilling

  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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  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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  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

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  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.

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  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,

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  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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  this large creation. It was, for example, a growing excitement to him to

  observe how Buxton, as the recipient of all this various correspondence,