Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

So they were married, after the necessary period of waiting, at a register office in the Strand. A Catholic priest had previously declined to solemnize a mixed marriage except on conditions, but later, on learning that a civil ceremony had already taken place, he complied. The service, at a church in Putney, was attended by Aunt Sylvia and her husband; after which the couple enjoyed a gay wedding breakfast among the wire-haired terriers. Paul was, for the first time in his life, superlatively happy; a cloud that had seemed to overshadow him was lifted, and in the unimagined radiance he realized how dark it had sometimes been. He wrote exultant letters to his mother, to Rowden, to Merryweather, and to half a dozen others. All sent their congratulations except Rowden, and Merryweather was generous besides; he suggested some articles about England and enclosed a cheque on account.

They spent a week at a seaside hotel by way of honeymoon; then one afternoon Paul took Carey to Hampstead, a part of London he especially liked. Careful search yielded nothing they could afford except a small second-floor flat (first floor, as the English called it), but it was conveniently close to the Tube station as well as to an old-fashioned public-house where, of an evening, writers and artists mingled with artisans and clerks in mutual unawareness of any trick successfully performed. Paul fitted easily into this society, and it was soon known who he was; he made friends and enemies as promptly as always, but fewer enemies than usual, since much was forgiven a stranger and a good talker, and it was also possible that his private happiness surrounded him with a visible aura of fellowship. Anyhow, it was in this pub that he met a man named Henry Foy who owned and subsidized a theatre in the neighbourhood—an old barn of a place, full of dry rot, moth-eaten scenery, and other drawbacks, but not too far from the Tube, and therefore accessible to a London West End theatre audience. Comfortably off, unmarried, and in his fifties, Foy was something of a dilettante; he had produced and directed plays himself, but so poorly that critics had generally ignored him except by attending his parties, which were frequent and colourful. He was a likeably gregarious personality, and there was no doubt that if he ever did anything remotely worth while everyone would jump to praise him. Besides a passion for the theatre which did not quite amount to devotion, he had a certain flair for new ideas and a willingness to try them which a more balanced mind or a more restricted pocket-book might well have checked. He had put on such plays as Brieux’s Les Hannetons, Hauptmann’s Hannele and Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, but none of these had done well, or attracted much comment. Not till he tried Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore did fortune smile; certain local groups objected to the title in lights over the theatre entrance, a newspaper controversy was stirred up, and many Londoners thereby discovered the existence (and even more important) the whereabouts of the Nonesuch Theatre. It was just after this succčs de scandale that Foy met Paul and was instantly captured by the idea of an all-Negro Othello except for a white Othello (that random product of good wine and good talk at the Venton League dinner-table). Foy wanted to stage it immediately, for it was the sort of thing he had always been happy to lose money over, like The Duchess of Malfi in modern dress, or Hauton Timorumenos as a musical comedy. They left the pub arm in arm, Carey between the two men; at Foy’s big house in Well Walk they talked till long past midnight, electrically conscious that something important had happened in their lives. Unfortunately, as they found no later than the next morning, there were not enough Negro actors then in London to make the project feasible; but by that time Foy was keen on the play even if it were to be produced normally; or rather, he was hypnotized into a belief that anything with Paul in control would be better than anything else. It was luck indeed for Paul to have met such a man. Within a few hours Foy had engaged him to direct and choose a cast, and what had once been a joke became suddenly and fatefully true—Carey Arundel as Desdemona. A great chance for her, undoubtedly, and in grabbing it she was to learn much about acting and Shakespeare and herself, but even more about the man she had married.

The first thing she discovered was that his work made him a changed person. He was possessed, and by something that could excusably be called a devil, since angelic possession exacts no price in sweat and fury. It had one curious and immediate effect; he was only in his late twenties, yet as soon as he took the stage he seemed old enough for no one to think of him disparagingly as young—at least ten years were added in appearance, plus an indefinable quality that made Foy once remark to Carey: “Is he aiming to be a maestro, or does it come naturally? It’s a continental trick— English and Americans as a rule don’t pick it up.” Carey was more surprised than Foy, because her own limited theatre experience had prepared her so little for the effort that Paul demanded from everyone around him, including herself. It was a demand outrageous enough to stifle the protest that anything more reasonable might have drawn. For he had made it clear from the outset that he must be taken as he was or not at all; that being established, the situation left no opening for lukewarmness or compromise. Very soon she came to know what he had meant by defining a director’s role as the communication of excitement. Hour after hour were spent, not in speaking or memorizing lines (which, in the beginning, he made light of) but in discussing the play from every angle until a law of diminishing returns seemed to operate and arguments became sharper without being more helpful. Up to that point, however, he had incited controversy; one dispute over the precise motivation of Iago’s behaviour grew so heated that the actor taking that part walked off the stage in a huff. Paul dragged him back, exclaiming loudly enough to be heard by all the rest: “D’you realize what you’ve been doing? Here’s a complex academic point in the interpretation of a character in a play written three hundred years ago—yet today on this stage you were almost coming to blows about it!”

Iago began to stammer apologies.

“No, no,” Paul interrupted. “It’s wonderful! Because it shows we’ve taken the first step—we’re beginning to think the characters matter to us —we’re shouting about them as if they were people we know. That’s what I hoped for. But now comes the next step. Understanding is a BASIS for emotion, but no substitute. From now on we must begin to FEEL. The mind has had its feast—now comes the turn of the heart.”

Paul had a store of such gaudy sayings about acting and theatrecraft —“Just as the stage is larger than life, so words about it can afford to be bigger and more extravagant,” was another of them. They did not always probe deeply, but they decorated his instruction and were apt to seem talismanic towards the end of a gruelling rehearsal. He got along well with the cast; he was thoughtful of them as artists, and the excitement he generated helped them to endure his occasional tantrums. As usual, there was no one at the Nonesuch Theatre shrewd enough to find out exactly how little Paul had done in New York, so he could magnify that achievement, not only for personal vainglory but because he knew that the greater they thought he was the luckier they would think themselves. In all this he was sustained by his own passionate belief in himself as a child of destiny in the theatre; he was like a poor man writing post-dated cheques for large sums but with complete assurance that he was honest.

During this time his private happiness with Carey was equally sustaining, though he spent few daytime hours alone with her, and there was no moment of their lives, however intimate, which he was incapable of turning into a lecture or a lesson or some fragment of a rehearsal. In a half-amused way she relished this, for her own ambition had been rejuvenated and she was beginning to realize, not yet how much she was learning, but how little she had ever known before. She found she could help him too by her own greater tact in handling countless small situations—a stage-carpenter he had unwisely yelled at, the landlady of their flat who objected to Mozart on the gramophone at 2 A.M. He was usually inconsiderate about such matters. One thing, however, seemed large enough for her real concern—his attitude towards Henry Foy. Paul had become cool to the man, treating him offhandedly at rehearsals, sometimes omitting to consult him on points that were clearly in a theatre-owner’s and play-backer’s province. Carey rather liked Foy, who was always genial, conciliatory, and generous alike with hospitality and advice. But Paul declined to weigh all this. “Look, Carey, let’s face it —at bottom he’s an amateur, a dabbler—he’s actually a nuisance at rehearsals—if I can make him stop attending them so much the better.”