Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

He wondered if the notion that a Shakespeare play could be called bad would shock her, and he had used the example chiefly to find out. But she seemed unconcerned. Or perhaps she had read Shaw. Or more likely still, her mind was anchored to the main issue, for she went on: “So you didn’t like Moon of the Galtees? Ach, nor did anybody. They’re taking it off… And I don’t suppose you liked me in it either.”

“It wasn’t much of a part for you, was it?”

She grimaced. “As good as I generally get. I try to believe it’s because they think I’m too young.”

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen. Nearly eighteen.”

“I’d have guessed you nearer twenty.”

“I FEEL like twenty. And I dress to look older, but none of it seems to work. There’s a fourteen-year-old part in a new play they’re considering —I’ll bet they offer it to me.”

“Juliet was fourteen.”

“Ah, now, if only I could have a chance like that!”

“Would you take it?”

“Who wouldn’t? Or is it absurd of me to be so ambitious? Maybe I should stick to leprechauns?”

“Leprechauns or Juliet—it’s all acting.”

“I know. And you haven’t yet told me how—if—you LIKED my acting.”

“You really want me to?”

“Sure. I can bear it.”

He said judicially after a pause: “I don’t think you know HOW to act, but I think you have SOMETHING—I don’t quite know what—but it’s something you’d be lucky to have as well, even if you did know how to act.”

“All I have to do, then, is to learn?”

“Yes. And UN-learn.”

“Ah, I see.”

The inflection he caught in her voice made him continue quickly: “Remember, that’s only my opinion.” The words didn’t sound like his, and he wondered how far the impulse to speak them could be identified as humility, truculence, or a simple desire to spare her feelings.

“It’s what I asked for. Thank you.”

“Yes, but—but—”

“But what?”

“Well, what I mean is, don’t let ANYBODY’S opinion worry you. Because worrying wouldn’t help. And unless the person who criticizes has something constructive to say—” He checked himself, aware of immense pitfalls.

She said musingly after a pause: “I expect you’re right—that I’ve everything to learn and unlearn.”

“I didn’t say EVERYTHING. You weren’t at a dramatic school?”

“No. Is that what I need?”

“On the contrary, I rather thought you HAD been to some school.” He laughed. “They teach a lot of the wrong things.”

“Ah, now, Mr. Saffron, am I as bad as that?”

“My name’s Paul, by the way. I wish you’d call me Paul.”

“All right. PAUL. And I don’t know how to act, according to you. Maybe you think you could teach me?”

“Heavens, no. I’m not a teacher. I can’t act myself—I haven’t the vaguest idea how it’s done.” Again he knew that this was an attitude-cliché, with just enough truth in it for guile. “All I do —all I hope to do—is to… if I had to put it into a sentence… to… to communicate a sort of excitement.” Well, that was true —fairly true, anyhow. “If you challenge me to say I could do that with you, then I’ll say it—I’d try to, anyhow… I mean, if I were directing a play you were in.”

“Excitement?”

“Of course there’s much more to it than just that—there’s style and technique and a hundred other things. But the essential thing is the kindling of emotion in the actor—in his mind, in his voice, in his movements.”

“Emotional excitement?”

“Call it anything you like. Perhaps it’s what Oscar Wilde meant when he said he felt in a mood to pick his teeth with the spire of a cathedral.”

“HE said that?”

He nodded, amused at what he guessed—that to her Catholic mind the name was necessarily a symbol of wickedness. “Are you surprised?”

“Oh, no. But I’d never heard it before. It’s a wonderful phrase.”

“Wilde was one of the wittiest men who ever lived.”

“I know. I’ve read his plays. Under the bedclothes with a flashlight.” She caught his look and added: “That was at school. They were strict about the books we got, but we used to smuggle them in. I also read De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol.”

“You were interested in Wilde at that age?”

“Oh yes—and my great-uncle often talked about him—still does. He knew him. They were at T.C.D. together.” Again she intercepted the look. “That’s Trinity College, Dublin.”

He gaped, a little enchanted by this strange Irish world in which there could be so much intimacy and innocence combined; for of all the reasons for being concerned about Wilde, surely the fact that one’s great-uncle had been at college with him was unmatchable.

She broke into his reverie by saying: “Did YOU ever have that feeling —that you could pick your teeth with the spire of a cathedral?”

The answer that came to his mind (that he was enjoying such a sensation there and then) was too simple and astonishing to confess, so he said: “Well, on a first night when you know the play’s a hit you feel pretty good.” (He had never had this experience.)

She nodded, more with encouragement than assent, and he went on feverishly: “And sometimes also it happens at quieter moments—when you’re alone or with just one other person… the heart suddenly beating a little faster, putting its private exclamation mark at the end of every thought.”

“That’s not a bad phrase either.” (It was his own, but he had used it before in some article.) “You could be Irish, the way the words come.”

He laughed. “A real playboy of the western world, with an American accent.”

“Yes, and you ought to visit the West, by the way—OUR West— Kerry, Clare, Connemara…”

“Perhaps I will when I’ve straightened out a few ideas about Ireland in general.”

“Not too straight or they’ll surely not be right. Remember we’re a twisted people.”

“And I’m a twisted man.”

She said quietly: “What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing, nothing. A joke. Can’t I joke too? But I AM getting a feeling of this country and I think I DO know what you mean when you call it twisted.”

It was true that he was already aware of Ireland as an atmosphere— something at once garrulous and secretive, warm-hearted yet slightly mocking, as if after a thousand years of insolubility a problem could become itself a kind of dark inscrutable answer. So far he had been in Dublin a week and had written not a line; all he had done was to sightsee, read newspapers, talk to everyone he met, hear a few shots in the distance, and go to the theatre. Yet deeper than such surface contacts was something that came to him by the same channel that it could pass from him to others—a communication of excitement, as he had called it, so that, had Dublin been a play, he would have been aching to put it on the stage. There was a symmetry in the emotion that the city gave him, and his meeting with Carey seemed part of it.

She on her side was equally aware that she had never met anyone who interested her so much as Paul. As he went on talking she was sure he must realize how comparatively ignorant she was, yet at the same time she knew how little it mattered; she had wits to match his in the profound escapade which, at first, is every human relationship of consequence. Nor had she been really hurt by his telling her that she didn’t know how to act, because she felt he would have been more polite if he had been less interested in her (though in that she was wrong); and, as the hours progressed till it was time to return to the streets, she passionately wanted to retain his interest, not only for its own sake, but for the strength she already felt she could draw from such a new thing in her life. For she alone knew how events during recent months had strained her nerve, had set up tensions that had kept her sleepless often till dawn, weakening even ambition, so that from the original ‘I want to be a great actress’ that had kept her emotionally alive as a schoolgirl, she had caught herself lately in half-wistful clingings, as if the dream were becoming a prop instead of an urge. But suddenly, talking to Paul, she had felt the urge again.