A
Last Look Back
JOHN HERRMANN
THE street running out toward the fish and lobster
docks, in the small Massachusetts town, looked bare
and deserted. The late January day was cold. No
snow lay on the ground.
An (inexpensive Qoupe with New York license
plates, driving out this street, stopped about fifty
feet from a weatherbeaten, unpainted building, on
the side of which hung a newly-painted sign, "John-
son's, Lobsters." Except for the newly-painted sign,
the building looked exactly as it had nine years
before.
A very tall and slender man stepped out of the
car and stood with his right hand resting on the
door-handle. He looked at the building, and then at
the rickety wharf behind it. With the tide at ebb the
.
'
plIes of the wharf stretched far down, at crazy
angles, into the black water of the narrow inlet.
The man's gaze roamed from the wharf to the
thick trees across the inlet, where he could see a
huge, shiny, white house, boarded up for the winter.
Further to the left, he saw other houses, but no
people. His eyes followed the curve of the inlet to-
ward the town itself, then back to the stretch of
bare, weed-covered ground directly opposite.
Lying on this patch of ground were a few small
piles of old lumber, a heap of lobster pots, a pile
of ashes and refuse; and on the far side, near the
high water mark, lying on its side, the two masts
touching the ground, he saw a small sailing boat.
He had driven over two hundred miles for a look
at the bleached, unpainted ruin of what had once
been his proud little ketch. Standing, ,still holding
the door-handle of his car, this man gazed steadily
at the boat for three or four minutes. Except for the
occasional flap of the brim of his soft velour hat and
the movement of the skirt of his overcoat in the
wind, there was no sign of motion about him. His
eyes stared fixedly at the sad, rotted, weatherbeaten
boat, and not a muscle in his face moved.
Into memory, moving swiftly, rhythmically, came
scenes and events out of the past nine years of his
life. His memories were not only of important
things, but in flashes he rememberd trivial, incon-
sequential happenings. And out of these remem-
brances, the thing which impressed him most strong-
ly was their lack of continuity, of meaning. They,
following the pattern of nine years, led nowhere.
After his daydream, which had started when he
first saw the small boat lying helplessly on her beam
ends, he dropped his hand from the door-handle of
the car. He was shocked and slightly ashamed when
he realized that, after nine years, he was back to
PARTISAN
REVIEW
his boat again. Back where, just now, his memories
had begun.
If he accepted the orthodox view of what makes
success or failure in this country, this man would be
forced to acknowledge that he was a failure. In the
years following college and his entrance into the
practice of law, up until the summer he first sailed
the boat, however, he could say that he had once
enjoyed the beginnings of success.
Before
1927,
he was a junior partner in a highly
respected law firm in New York. He was married
to a young woman with good social connections and
a splendid education. He had steadily added to his
bank account, had purchased a few securities, as
investments, not for speculative purposes. Above
all, he worked very hard and conscientiously. Mere-
ly an average student, unnoticed at the Harvard law
school, he had grown to be perhaps the most promis-
ing of the eight junior partners in his law firm.
He had worked very hard, and for long hours.
In the spring of
1927,
his doctor told him he had a
nervous breakdown. Absolute rest and no business
worries, he was advised, would cure him, given time.
He and his wife moved to Maine, and rented a small
cottage from an old sea captain on the river below
\Viscasset.
Then the boat came into his life, and there began
the gradual transformation which first stripped him
of the ambition to become a great corporation
lawyer, and finally made him begin to doubt that
the courts, the law, and the very institutions of his
country, really operated for the greatest good of
the greatest number.
Even the desire for a home and family, which
Edward Peyton had tried earnestly to realize with
his wife, Helen, was now of the distant past.
He looked at the gray, bleached hull of the boat.
He knew, even at the distance from which he watch-
ed, that rune years had finished ,her. The sadness
Edward Peyton felt as he walked toward the boat
was reminiscent of the sad hollowness, rising from
the pit of his stomach and working out through his
whole body, which had infected him when he lost his
wife.
Peyton seemed impelled, almost against his will,
toward the lifeless ruin of the boat, which had once
seemed an animate creature, capable of occasional
caprice, yet dependable, graceful, beautiful, and
willing. He walked slowly, his body stiff, his long
legs moving steadily, surely, taking him down the
incline of the lost toward the water's edge. His eyes,
unmoving under prominent eyelashes, half blond,
half gray, stared straight ahead.
Half-way down the gentle incline, Edward Pey-
ton stopped suddenly and turned his head northwest-
ward in the direction he assumed Boston to lie.
Years ago, the night before his little boat had put
in to her last harbor, he and his wife were becalmed
far out in Boston Bay. They were cruising along the
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