The Buccaneers (52 page)

Miss Testvalley watched it vanish in the outer reaches of the yards to click across the Thames and gain momentum as it made for the Channel. Then she turned and slowly walked back down the long platform. Giving up her platform ticket at the barrier, she crossed the great hall with its acrid smell of coal-smoke and its echoes of farewell sobs and mournful locomotive-whistles. At the exit to the Strand, she drew herself erect, put her hand up to push back the hair that was escaping beneath her hat brim but fluffed it out instead, and aimed her furled umbrella upward.

With a weary flick of his whip, a cabman set his horse clomping toward her in recognition of a signal. Another observer might have seen a female warrior raising a sword to lead the remnants of an army to battle.

Afterword

Edith Wharton had written some 89,000 words of
The Buccaneers
when she died in 1937. Her literary executor, Gaillard Lapsley, had the incomplete manuscript published in New York in 1938.

The published manuscript is a draft which Wharton wrote with spontaneity and brio. She had drawn up a “Synopsis” setting forth the main lines of the novel (though not scenes or episodes), but she departed from it in significant respects almost as soon as she began work. (For instance, in the “Synopsis,” Guy Thwarte is “a poor officer in the Guards,” posted to South Africa. By the time he appears in the story, he is a civil engineer with experience in South America.)

Lapsley made “certain verbal emendations required by sense or consistency,” and a few other such changes have been made here when it seemed that Wharton would have revised to avoid repetitiousness, and when she referred to race in terms repellent to modern readers.

Through Chapter XXIX the text is the original except for a number of interpolations. One original section (now Chapter IX) has been moved forward to reflect the chronology. From Chapter XXX on the text is new except for the scene of the Robinsons at breakfast, now part of Chapter XXXIII. The interpolated passages serve to reconcile discrepancies in the narrative or prepare for later developments.

The new material constitutes thirty percent of the present text.

 
 
The 1938 text, long out of print is now available in
Fast and Loose and The Buccaneers,
edited with an introduction by Viola Hopkins Winner (University Press of Virginia, 1993).

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