Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

“Something else may have happened too. Isn’t it a bit dreadful, Paul, to be willing to risk so much? Supposing you hadn’t caught up with me in the street—suppose I’d had hours to walk and think and worry… wouldn’t it have mattered to you at all? Perhaps you’d have laughed all the more… And I nearly got run over.” She began to laugh herself at last, though with a touch of hysteria. “Quite a joke, on every score. And all those things you said about Harry—the nonsense you invented—how CAN you use your friends like that?”

“Now look, Carey, I only called him a bore—and I think he is, but if you don’t, that’s fine—he’s not a bad fellow, we both know that…” Then he caught a note behind her laughter that made him add, in simple wonderment: “You aren’t REALLY upset, are you?… Oh, if you are, I’m sorry. I’m a son of a bitch at times like this—I have the damned play on my mind—I don’t think of anything else. But if you ever leave me I don’t know what I’ll do… that’s what I was thinking all the time I was talking the nonsense—I was thinking, suppose it WAS true, suppose you WERE carrying on with Harry or some other man… what WOULD I do?”

She was laughing now in the sheer pleasure of hearing him confess so much. “Stifle me, perhaps, as in the play?”

“No, I’d think you were lucky and I deserved what I got, because I know I’m not good enough for you. I mean that, Carey.”

They made love, then had drinks, then looked over the drawings to decide what had to be changed. By that time it was dusk and he declared his cold so much better that he would enjoy a good dinner in town, so they went to the restaurant in Lisle Street in a mood of celebration. After the bizarre events of the day she was very happy.

The extraordinary thing was that when she rehearsed in the morning there was such a marked improvement in her performance that she startled herself as well as the others. For the first time in her life she enjoyed an experience that was later to become the thing aimed for—a sudden swimming bliss in which her own self split effortlessly into two identities, the one Desdemona, the other a calm observer of herself acting. When she finished there was no need for Paul to tell her she had been excellent. She knew it in her bones, with a warm satisfaction that made it pleasant to reply quietly: “You said I would be, didn’t you?”

Paul, of course, enjoyed no such serenities. Nor, she was sure, did there ever come to him a sense of incredibility in the contrast between this terrific emotional and creative effort on the part of a dedicated few and the apathy of the multitude which, if the play were to succeed, it must conquer and divert. She had an idea that Paul regarded audiences too arrogantly even to think of this, much less to be appalled by it; he would give people not what THEY wanted, but what HE wanted, thus involving him in the further task of making them WANT what he wanted. No one could essay this without an eagerness to be consumed, and it was true that, as opening night approached, Paul reached flashpoint; his whole being clenched into a total effect of alertness, so that it could be said that he neither saw nor heard, but constantly watched and listened. She wondered how he could keep it up, but she guessed that some of the physical energy he forbore to expend was somehow transmuted into these more combustible channels. Yet there was nothing of the conventional ascetic about him; he ate prodigiously (he could do this without gaining weight during such stressful days), drank quite enough, smoked cigars all the time, sat up half the night and fell into dreamless sleep from about 4 A.M. till 10. While he was asleep his breathing was often imperceptible, he rarely turned or stirred, and his face, usually pale because he spent so little time out of doors, became paler still; there was only one word that occurred to her, though she tried never to think of it—he looked DEAD, as if he had switched off the waking turbine by some act of deliberation. Physically he grew lazier as the ultimate ordeal approached; he would call a taxi for the short distance to the theatre, and during later rehearsals he would sit in one of the back-row seats for hours on end, summoning actors next to him for private talk. Or else Foy would arrive with news about programmes, posters, advertisements, box-office arrangements, and be regally motioned to another adjacent seat to wait his turn. Paul had a lively finger in every pie, and was quite capable of making the size of the ticket-stubs an issue for first-class bickering. It was against his nature to delegate authority, he much preferred to enlist willing slaves; and perhaps Carey’s appeal to him to treat Foy more generously did have some effect, for during the final weeks of preparation Paul received him back to favour in the role of an overburdened but unfailingly cheerful office-boy.

To Carey the kind of man she had married became a source of increasing wonderment. She was aware of his separateness in a world she could not invade with him, and when he returned to her, as from this world, it was often to talk of its glories in a way that might have bored her had she not loved him. She knew him too well now to expect him to share so many simple things that she enjoyed—a few hours taking pot-luck at a local cinema, fun with the landlady’s cat, a walk on Hampstead Heath in the morning, with the yellow autumn sun peering through mists above London’s roof-tops. Yet she remembered that their first real acquaintance had been during a long walk in Phoenix Park, and that on the night before he left Dublin he had actually walked the mile or so from Rowden’s house to her own in Terenure. Walking thus became a symbol of what he had once done, for her and with her, but would no longer do. Was it because, as with his first cordiality to Foy, he could always bring himself to do things if he thought them worth while for some personal end? She did not much care. If he had been so keen to know her that he had paid a price of any kind, it only proved how keen he had been. And he still was, she knew that, because he had explored so much more of the ways in which she could help him. She sometimes thought that after the crisis of love-making came a second and perhaps to him a deeper one that had grown up out of her own subconscious desire to play whatever part he cast her for; in this she would cradle him in an embrace that was almost sexless, yet as close to him (she felt instinctively) as she could ever get.

Once he talked about his mother in Milwaukee. “She doesn’t get on too well with my brother and his wife. The first thing I’ll do when I’ve made some money is to take her away somewhere else—New York, London, anywhere —she wouldn’t mind, so long as it’s near me… I suppose you’re surprised to find I have an ambition in life that isn’t connected with the theatre?”

“Yes,” she answered. “But I’m rather glad. It seems to give me a chance.”

It would be an exaggeration to say that Paul Saffron’s Othello (Shakespeare’s being a name too well known to be worth mentioning) at the Nonesuch Theatre, Hampstead, on December Twenty-Seventh, Nineteen-Twenty-Two, made theatrical history; it was, however, a big event in the lives of both Paul and Carey, because it was their first success together, so they could both feel they were lucky for each other. The London press was favourable, and since praise for a Shakespeare play is primarily for the production, Paul could not have found a better vehicle to advertise himself. Carey was praised too, her performance being hailed by one important reviewer as “the only Desdemona I ever saw who didn’t seem more dumb than innocent”.

In other respects Paul’s optimistic prophecies proved wrong. Foy did not make any fortune, nor did his theatre achieve the fame that would establish it in the regular West End firmament (indeed, the controversy about ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore had given it far more spectacular publicity). The truth was that only a limited number of people wished to see Othello, however well done, and only a limited number of these would make the journey by Tube to Hampstead. The play, moreover, had been staged so expensively, to meet Paul’s every whim, that it could yield only a moderate profit if the house were always full, and after the first few weeks there were enough empty seats to whittle down any accumulated surplus. All of which might have been called a disappointment by those who remembered Paul’s extravagant forecasts. Paul was not one of them. He seemed unperturbed, even bored by the box-office returns, and once he casually remarked that he had never expected financial success at all, and that the excellent critical notices were a complete satisfaction of his aim. Whether or not this was true, Carey reached a tentative conclusion that in the larger sense he was indifferent to money; what he did want were plaudits, power, prestige, and the satisfaction of a boundless artistic ego —plus, of course, enough of someone else’s money to spend and, if necessary, to lose. There remained, however, a question she could not answer either then or whenever afterwards it recurred—was his tremendous all-embracing optimism before the opening night of any of his plays authentic, or part of an enthusiasm deliberately generated as part of the basic strategy of stage-direction? Or, to put it another way, did he always fool himself when he fooled others?