Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

Paul finished his sentence and stopped. He felt himself flushing to the roots of his hair, and the aboriginal in him responded with a mental and almost muttered: Why, the son of a bitch… He knew he had been snubbed, and though it was not the first time, the identity of the snubber made it perhaps the most devastating in his experience.

One of the group around him, an actor later to become world-famous, laughed and said: “Don’t mind him, boy. He’s just not used to being contradicted.”

“But I wasn’t contradicting him! I was merely explaining—”

They all laughed then as if the whole incident had been a supreme joke climaxed by his own declaration of innocence. A tall, thin, youngish playwright whose white hair made effective contrast with his bead-black eyes, remarked: “I imagine you must have found Moscow very interesting, Mr. Saffron.”

“Moscow? I’ve never been to Moscow.”

“Indeed? I thought you must be a disciple of Stanislavski.”

“Who?”

The playwright looked as if the question could be damnation either way: the revelation of Paul as an ignoramus, or cover for his appropriation of another person’s ideas.

Actually Paul had not caught the name, but the wine he had drunk increased the dismay he felt at having been snubbed by a man he admired and laughed at for a joke he couldn’t share. He exclaimed hotly: “So I never heard of somebody?… So what? You guys never heard of me till today, did you?”

Later it occurred to him that the name had been Stanislavski, and that he had behaved as if it were unknown to him. The gaucherie completed his mortification.

The party dispersed soon after that, and Paul, still troubled, found himself a couple of hours later in the library, staring at the Cézannes with his mind half elsewhere on a road that wandered disconcertingly between Moscow and Glendalough. The butler brought in a tray of tea-things, and Rowden entered soon afterwards. Paul noticed idly that he wore different clothes; must have an enormous wardrobe, changed for every meal, a fad maybe… and he recollected something that Roberts had told him with evident pride during one of their drives: “Mr. Rowden, sir, is very particular. Clean sheets and pillow-slips every time he goes to bed— even when he takes his little nap in the afternoon. Very particular, he is.” So he’s probably been taking his little nap, Paul reflected.

Rowden attended to the tea-making, a ritual he always performed himself, because it involved bringing the water exactly to a boil over the spirit kettle, mixing the leaves from separate caddies, heating the silver pot with a swill of boiling water and then rinsing it into a bowl; the result, no doubt, was an excellent brew, but Paul didn’t like tea anyway and only drank it from politeness.

Rowden said, handing Paul a cup: “What on earth did you do to our latter-day Coleridge? He went off in a considerable huff and somebody told me you’d insulted him.”

“_I_ insulted HIM? All I did was to beg to differ from a few things he said. He’d been laying the law down—it was time someone else put in a word.”

“I’m afraid you upset him.”

“I’m sorry if I did—I didn’t mean to. But he was talking about the function of the stage director and I’m just as entitled to an opinion about that as he is about books.”

“He directs plays too.”

“Then I don’t think he can be very good at it.”

Rowden laughed. “Confidentially, I rather agree.”

“Why confidentially?”

“Because if you criticize him in this town it means you’re agin the government, and as I’m not agin any government, provided it governs, I keep my mouth shut. I’m afraid you’re too politically naďve to understand our local situation.”

“Probably. That’s why I was sent here to write about it.”

“It might interest you, though, to note what happens to a writer when some accident of history makes him a cultural pontiff over a nationalist literature. The first result is that he ceases to produce any literature himself. The next thing is a tremendous inflation of his ego.”

“I can see you don’t like him much.”

“Did you?”

Paul hadn’t liked him at all, yet he stirred uneasily at any sign of agreement with Rowden on such an issue. The important fact was that the literary critic, likeable or not, was indisputably an inhabitant of the world that Paul claimed as his own. He said: “I certainly didn’t intend any disrespect and I’d hate to think he was so put out by anything I said that he wouldn’t visit your house again. Maybe I should write him a note?”

“I wouldn’t bother. He’ll be here again, don’t worry. He’s on so many committees he couldn’t leave me alone for long. Whenever there’s money to be raised for one thing or another these people change their tune.”

Again Paul felt the uneasiness; he could not allow Rowden to have that kind of last word. “If they do,” he retorted, “maybe it’s because they know so many tunes and changing them’s so easy. Don’t forget they have their opinion of you just as you have of them, and like you, they’re smart enough to keep it to themselves. When they ask for money you think they’re humbling themselves, and they let you think it because they figure they get more that way, but actually there’s something in them that your cheque-book couldn’t buy, and secretly you resent that, so you give it a nasty name—you call it an inflated ego.” Paul laughed to take away some of the sting. “Excuse me for being so personal. It’s all because I enjoyed meeting the people you had here today. They’re among the really important people in the world—a thousand times more so than all the politicians and gunmen —”

“Why don’t you add ‘and millionaires’?”

Paul laughed again. “That would be TOO personal, but it’s not a bad idea for my article.”

“I thought it was going to be about the little girl.”

“Oh, I start with her, that’s all. Then I work around to art and artists.”

“From what you said about her acting I shouldn’t have thought there was much connection.”

Paul felt that in a rather dangerous way a core of antagonism between them had been found and now needed only to be exploited. He said lightly: “The way I write, there don’t have to be connections. That’s the trick— anything’ll do that comes into my head.”

“So long as you keep a COOL head. Something I said just now seemed to rub you the wrong way.”

“No, but it made me realize what side I’m on.”

“Oh, come now, Paul, aren’t you rather deliberately misunderstanding me? You must know I’m not a philistine. I appreciate art and I respect artists as much as you do. If I don’t take them quite as seriously as some of them take themselves, that’s because I have a sense of humour.”

“No, sir, that’s because you have a million in the bank, or ten million, or whatever it is.”

Rowden flushed. “Please don’t call me ‘sir’. And believe me when I say I was far more amused than shocked by your gaffe this afternoon. It WAS funny —one of the really important people in the world—by your own estimate, not mine—and you send him scurrying off like a—like a spanked puppy!”

“I’ve said I’m sorry. What else can I do?”

“Not a thing—or you’d probably make it worse… Some more tea?”

“No, thanks.”

“When are you going to write the article?”

“Tomorrow, I think.”

“Fine. You can have the library here to yourself and I’ll tell Briggs you aren’t to be interrupted. Would you like a secretary for the typing?”

“Heavens, no—I do all that myself. What sort of life do you think I’m used to?”