imposed a unity upon the multiplicity. Different as each writer was, the
act of writing to Buxton, the idea of Buxton in each writer’s mind, gave
each letter something in common with all the other letters, so that one
could learn almost as much, Vincent began to think, from the letters
Buxton had received as from those he had sent.
To master the chaos of paper, Vincent found that he had to be ex-
traordinarily systematic. He disliked notes and indexes, but they were
indispensable. He divided Buxton’s life into five periods—there was
Childhood and there was Youth; there were what he called the Human-
istic Years; there were the Years of Science; and there were the Essex
Years. He found that he had unconsciously made a distinction between
the years of science and the Essex years. He did not know what Buxton
did with his mornings, but he rather thought that it was not scientific
work that occupied those hours.
With the “periods” laid out, Vincent began to go through the corre-
spondence year by year, making notes on it on stiff white cards. “Series of
letters from a high school friend, dealing chiefly with B’s religious doubts,”
a card would read, and then would follow a notation of the date of each of
the group of letters. On a separate card each letter was abstracted and its
significant sentences copied out. From these cards Vincent would make
a summary, trying to complete a single subject each day. Lunch would be
brought to him on a tray by Barrett and after lunch he would continue a
little longer with his work, and then spend the late afternoon with Buxton.
He would bring his abstract to Buxton, who sat in his big wicker chair
on the lawn or in the cool parlor, listening while his life was recalled to
him. Of many incidents and people Buxton had no active memory. Had
he been writing his own life, he would perhaps never have thought to in-
clude certain important matters at all. But he had only to be reminded of
these events to shine with the intensity of his recollection.
“There was,” Vincent might say, “a friend of yours in high school,
named Leslie Miller—” And Buxton’s eyes would begin to sparkle as
wickedly and merrily as if he could still tease Leslie Miller. “Damn!” he
said. “I haven’t thought of Leslie for forty years. And we were as close as
two male creatures could be. We used to hunt squirrels back of the town,
and God how we talked! There was nothing we didn’t talk about. We
broke off some time in college—didn’t we?”
“No, it was later than that. It was the year after your graduation.” The
ironic affection of Buxton’s voice made Leslie Miller as alive and near to
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Vincent as if he were Toss Dodge. Leslie was presumably long in his be-
liever’s grave, but for the moment he strode through the room—Vincent
saw him as taller and rangier than Buxton—with his small-bore rifle over
his shoulder and his earnest face, literal in belief, imaginative in desire.
And with him there came the tinge and scent of the autumn hunting.
“Is there something about Darwin in the letters?” Buxton asked. He
was always eagerly curious about the past, but he never wanted to read
the documents themselves or hold them in his hands. Once, when Vin-
cent volunteered to get some early letters to show him, he forbade it al-
most angrily.
“Yes, there’s a good deal about Darwin. You seem to have had a con-
siderable difference over religion. There’s one letter—do you recall?—in
which he breaks off communication with you. He says he can no longer
know you except as his adversary.”
“But that isn’t really the last letter, is it? I’ll bet there are more let-
ters after that. Isn’t that so?—aren’t there more after that?” And Buxton
chuckled.
“Yes, there are.”
“I was sure,” Buxton said with satisfaction. “He was a dear fellow,
Leslie was, but he really had a turnip for a head. He liked to be stub-
born and I liked to make him do what I wanted. If he said he would
never communicate with me again, I would have undertaken to make
him communicate with me again. He became an Episcopalian minister.
In Ohio, I think. You know, it wasn’t really a difference of opinion that
broke us up. I wasn’t really interested in religion then, not one way or the
other. But something developed between us that made me feel that if he
was for religion then I was against it. I used to think it was a kind of teas-
ing, but it was rather more than that.” And he looked at his biographer
with a kind of pained candor. “I think I was rather cruel to him.” And a
moment later he said, “I like Dyas, but it’s the way I am with him when
he talks religion.”
“Does Mr. Dyas talk religion?” It was surprising.
“Oh well, you know—not religion,” Buxton said, “but he rather wants
me to say there’s nothing rationally inconsistent about the idea of God.
Eddington’s kind of thing. He’s read Eddington—knew him, I think, at
Cambridge. And at the same time that Hollowell girl, Linda Hollowell,
she keeps after me to assure her that there is ground for a perfect, abso-
lute determinism. I can’t imagine why she should want it.”
Vincent found it incongruous, even a little disappointing, that he
should pick up from Buxton this kind of information about his new
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environment. But the old man had a great impulse toward the present
and Vincent had to accustom himself to the idea that this was no mere
monument of the past. It was on his response to the present that Bux-
ton’s memory of the past moved. He was greatly aware of the little circle
that had formed around him. He took no account of the place he held in
its center, but he took great account of its existence and quality. Vincent
had to correct the striking revealing first impression he had of the man,
so old and wise that the details of human quality did not exist for him. In
whatever way Buxton judged what he saw, he certainly saw a great deal.
There were many other respects in which Vincent had to modify his
first mythical notion of Buxton. There was, for example, the necessity of
adjusting himself to the sexual note that now and then appeared in the
conversation. Quite early in his work Vincent came across a letter from
what must surely have been a young girl. He noted, with an archaeolo-
gist’s interest, how early had been the origin of the square, back-slop-
ing, affected handwriting of the contemporary college girl. The words of
the letter were so cryptic as to be clearly erotic. They breathed reference
to some great moment that had been shared, though it was impossible
to tell of what kind the moment had been. The letter was undated, but
it had been deposited with other letters of Buxton’s twenty-eighth year.
This letter Vincent read aloud to Buxton, in a dry voice, feeling shy at the
first intrusion of privacy. At the name of the writer, Buxton’s eyes lighted
up and stayed alight through the reading of the lette
r. And his biogra-
pher’s first impression was that this was the light of reminiscent lust.
It was an appalling thought. And yet the young man had to see at once
that his conclusion had been hasty, conventional and wrong. The light in
Buxton’s eyes was rather that of fine intelligence, as if Buxton had seen a
wonderful relation between ideas. Buxton said, referring to the writer of
the cryptic letter, “She was a fine bunch.”
“I beg your pardon?” Vincent said, all his sensibilities retreating once
more as his perception of intelligence seemed denied.
“Bunch—a fine bunch of a girl.” And Buxton made a gesture, incon-
clusive but plastic, as of gathering, or as of holding, a nosegay of flow-
ers. Vincent’s shy, priggish retreat from the sexual awareness of an old
man was wholly checked. There was in Buxton’s manner so responsive
a sense of the fragrance and fragility of the bunch. All of a sudden the
word, which may have been the slang of Buxton’s youth, seemed lovely.
The little incident of the “bunch” was the occasion for Vincent to
begin his private notebook on Buxton. The notebook was a large one,
bound in cardboard covers, mottled black and white, like the notebook in
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which Vincent tried to put down his observations on things in general,
but larger. It was to be, this new notebook, the repository for all the com-
ments and incidents relating to Buxton that Vincent wished to record
for himself. Some of these entries might eventually find their way into
the biography, but the chief purpose of the notebook was to record what
might have no place in a public work. It might, for example, be possible
and even necessary to mention in the biography that Buxton at twenty-
eight had had a brief love affair with a young woman identifiable only by
a rather sweet and foolish nickname, but it might be quite another thing,
worth hesitating over, to say in print that some fifty years later her lover
had referred to her as a “fine bunch.”
One day Buxton used the same word about Marion Cathcart. “That
Marry,” he said abruptly, “she’s a fine bunch of a girl for the right man.”
Vincent heard himself replying crisply, “No doubt.” At last the beau-
tiful innocence had broken down into the senile lubricity he had feared
for it. But there was Buxton looking at him very firmly and with a kind of
disapproving curiosity. There was no fantasy in the old man’s expression,
and Vincent, hearing the words reverberating in his mind, understood
that there had been no fantasy in the voice, just a simple statement of
reality. Marry was a fine bunch of a girl exactly as little Paul Outram was
a remarkably intelligent boy or as Arthur Hollowell was a very rich man.
“You don’t think so?” said Buxton with an almost haughty surprise.
“Oh yes, she’s very attractive.” And Buxton grunted with the satisfac-
tion of a logical man who has driven back underground a piece of non-
sense that had dared to raise its head.
It was Buxton’s relation with his father that, in the first few weeks,
taught Vincent most about the old man. There were letters from the elder
Buxton, written while his son was away at college, and in this instance,
there were Buxton’s replies to most of the letters, preserved from among
his father’s papers. Quarrels had taken place in these letters, especially
one notable disagreement at the time Buxton had chosen his scholarly
career. But the quarrels, including this one, were always compounded
and they even seemed to Vincent to be the incandescence of the strange
charge that flowed between the father and the son.
The elder Buxton—incredible to think he had been born a round
century ago!—had apparently been a man of only moderate education.
But he wrote with the literacy and feeling for style that had been a nation-
al trait in his youth, and now and then his letters yielded a remarkable
sentence. On one occasion he wrote to his son, “Your mother believes
that your Aunt Thyrza’s loss and pain are having a purifying effect. It
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the unfinished novel
comforts her to think so, and so I say nothing, but I have never known
loss and pain to work anything but harm. I fear those persons who have
suffered and it is my belief that strength of character is given to us to
prevent our being corrupted by pain.” He could say this kind of thing,
but usually the letters were commonplace. What made them remarkable
to Vincent was a quality that seemed to have nothing to do with intellect.
There had been no intimacy between the two Buxtons. There had been
no expression of affection. But as Vincent went through the correspon-
dence, he began to be aware of a certain willingness on the part of the fa-
ther, a willingness for the son to have the quality he did have. There was
no eagerness for the son to have any particular quality at all. And there
was no reluctance. There was just this simple willingness. The letters of
the elder Buxton communicated to Vincent the sense of a man who was
content with himself, who had enough of himself and was willing that
his son should have enough of him self. It was as if he had presented his
son not only with life, but with a specific life, the life of a man, with the
right to enjoy and the right to be mistaken. It was part of the nature of
the gift that, having made it, he should be unaware of it—what he had
given, he had given, and it was as little for him to try to nourish it as to
try to check it. But he was not unresponsive to it—Vincent was sure of
that from the gravity and directness of his letters to his son.
In his own way, the father had been impressive. He looked im-
pressive enough from his photographs, a dark man, mustached, thick-
haired, heavy-browed. Looking at the old photographs, Vincent had the
sense of a deep change in culture since the time they had been taken.
In all these pictures the men bulked solid and plastic. They were so
very much there before the camera, so clear in the many shades of
black. They confronted the camera, aware of it, almost defying it. There
was no catching them unaware or unconscious. They were, indeed, not
“caught” by the camera at all. They did not pretend that the camera had
intruded, stealthily and without permission, on their privacy, on their
delicate reluctance to be portrayed, coming upon them in a moment of
rest and meditation. One saw them precisely in the moment of having
their picture taken, of putting themselves on record, and they posed
and projected their images to the lens and the plate, standing up to the
occasion and to the searching eye. They were not by any means pas-
sive to the camera. And the slow lens and the slow plate required stiff-
ness, a genuine being there, not for a split second but for a continuous
time. There were none of the soft grays of modern portrait photographs
which had surely been evolved, as Vincent came to think, for the sake
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of women. Certainly in the old photographs the women were not at a
s
much advantage as the men.
To this general rule Buxton’s mother was an exception. There was no
photograph of her taken after her thirty-second year, and she had died a
few years later. Vincent was a little disconcerted by the visual image of
the mother of the aged Buxton as a perpetually young woman, like some
nymph or goddess of Greek story, who, while the lines deepen in her
son’s face, and his hair greys and his muscles slacken, remains as fresh
and rosy as when she had conceived him. Mrs. Buxton held a mystery for
Vincent. She was bound to have, for he was trying to find the source of
Buxton’s quality and it was inevitable that he should seek it in the par-
ents. What Mrs. Buxton had, Vincent found difficult to understand. For
in her appearance there was the gentleness, even the submissiveness,
which the poets of an earlier day had loved to remark on in women. Yet
it was strange, the gentleness and submissiveness did not suggest weak-
ness. On the contrary, Vincent found, as he looked at the representations
of that face, that there was an expectation here, even a demand, a kind
of force that he had never before imagined. He was curiously excited by
these pictures and he took them out again and again to look at them. He
did not understand their attraction for him until he remembered that he
had gone back in just this way to certain pictures in his boyhood because
they had contained some sexual information or some sexual charm. In
these photographs there was, he saw, a sexual fact of a high, complex
kind. A convention about the last century kept him from understanding
the fact, but he saw it at last and believed that in these photographs he
was seeing an intensity of womanhood such as he had never seen and
never imagined, grave, silent and profound.
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chapter 24
Vincent had nearly forgotten the existence of the woman about whom
Outram and May and Garda had shown such violent feelings, the woman
about whom, as Harold Outram had put it, he was to find out for himself.
He was seated one day with Buxton and the interview was just drawing to
its close when Brooks Barrett entered the room and said to Buxton, “You
have visitors, sir.” He said it with an air of firmly-expressed disapproval.
It was a disapproval that seemed to have its history—he seemed to know
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 28
