Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

Something else emerged as an insight into his make-up; the play being now launched, he clearly suffered a kind of spiritual anti-climax. He idled and became restless, flinging himself into occasional re-rehearsals as if in desperate intent to recapture something. During the nightly performances he would watch from the wings in a state of excitement mainly self-induced because he felt it his continuing duty to inspire and encourage, but the effort wore thin at times, and on the way home afterwards he was often morose until she had cheered him, as she always could and did.

Othello lasted twelve weeks and then ended not because of Foy’s insistence on a profit (as Paul wrote years later in a book of reminiscences, though it would not have been too unreasonable even if true), but because Paul himself had by that time received several offers to direct plays in the real West End and had already chosen one of them—with a part for Carey, of course. Foy sized up the situation shrewdly and was amiable enough to do so without resentment. It had been all right while it lasted, he told Carey, though he added: “You probably think Paul and I have got along pretty well, but actually there’ve been a few times when I’d have punched his nose if I hadn’t remembered that hitting a genius is like hitting a woman—except that they deserve it oftener.”

“So you’d call Paul a genius?”

“I wouldn’t dare deny it if someone else challenged me. Just watching him taught me more about the theatre in four months than I’d learned before in twenty years. He made me feel an amateur.”

She knew him almost well enough to reply: “That’s what he said you were”, but it would have been too much the sort of riposte that Paul himself could never have resisted. Yet there was, between her and Foy, and later between her and many other people, an awareness of Paul as a phenomenon to be discussed in a spirit of detached investigation, with no sense of personal disloyalty and little capacity to be startled or even hurt by what was revealed.

“So you see,” Foy added, “it’s been an experience for me and a stepping-stone for him—now he can push ahead and discover the facts of life, such as how many seats in the house, how much per seat, how much on the weekly salary sheet—that kind of thing. He’s so wonderful at everything else, he really ought to learn arithmetic… Anyway, I wish him well and I hope he scores a real hit with the new play.”

Paul didn’t. It was a flop—so instant and ignominious that he crossed the Atlantic immediately.

One day about six years later she was driving with Paul to the Pocono Mountains. Their play had closed down for the summer and it was a relief to escape from the heat of New York to the scarcely cooler but much more endurable countryside. They had a house near Stroudsburg and would spend July and August there; Carey loved the place, and if Paul treated it as a necessary boredom to be lived through from time to time, she was sure it did him good in many ways he would have strenuously denied. The servants from the apartment had gone on ahead and everything would be in order when they arrived—much more so, doubtless, than ever again during their stay, for Paul had a habit of disrupting household arrangements in town and country alike.

She had made this journey often enough for the Delaware Water Gap to have become a symbol of holiday, the mental border-line of work and relaxation. Now, as she saw it again, she could not restrain her delight. “Paul, it’s so good to be here at last—it makes me know how much I needed this.” The words and the way she spoke them sounded older than her looks, which were at the full radiance of twenty-four; but early success and early marriage had built in her an illusion of maturity that was at least as real as a part well played. She sometimes thought that the ways in which Paul had never grown up were compensated for by those in which she herself had done so fast and far.

Paul did not answer because he had fallen asleep. He was a little overweight (a long run always did that to him), and the drive had combined with a rather dull play script to make him drowsy. She gave him the warm yet wry scrutiny of a woman who had been married a number of years to a celebrity; that is, she enjoyed the spectacle of the hero unheroic— the large lolling head, papers crumpled under a finicky hand, the face dubiously sombre and far too pale. Enough of the world conceded now that Paul was a great stage director, including those who also thought she herself was a pretty good actress. She treasured that tottering compliment; it seemed to suit her private thesis that if she were even near good it was because she was near Paul.

As always when he was asleep he had that look of absence that sometimes scared her, making him ageless, so that it was odd, rather than hard, to realize he was only thirty-six. Probably he had only escaped being called a boy-wonder because in public he had never looked like a boy. But in this, as in so many other things, he ran to extremes—babyishness at moments, usually for her alone to witness and indulge; at other moments the air of being biblically, almost Mosaically old. Yet at all times in his work he wore the authority of one whose years had had no real meaning in his life. She often wondered what their children would have been—either geniuses or idiots, she told people, glossing over with a joke the fact that they could have no children.

She watched the familiar road as it curved alongside the river. Their house was half-way up a hillside a few miles ahead; fat maples surrounded it, which could have been why it was called Mapledurham, though there was a place in England of the same name that might have some connection. It was a pleasant house, old enough to have been worth an expensive modernizing; the rooms were large and cool to the eye; the gardens not too formal. And on their arrival there would be tea waiting, English style (coffee for Paul); Walter would have put on a white jacket and transformed himself from a caretaker to a butler of sorts, and his Airedale would break established rules by nibbling from her plate. All this to look forward to as the Packard covered the miles on a summer afternoon.

In sheer exuberance she chatted with Jerry during the last lap of the journey. He was a good-looking southern boy whom they had employed as chauffeur for several years and who had developed an affectionate tolerance for the habits of theatre people. He said now, offhand as usual: “Mr. Paul got another play in mind?”

She said no; the one they had been in all the year would be resumed in September.

“I just figgered he might have, though—he’s bin acting like he wanted one, these last few weeks.”

This alarmed her a little, for she had caught a whiff of the same misgiving herself. But she answered decisively, as if saying so could make it final: “He needs a rest, Jerry, and so do I. That’s what we’ve come here for. I don’t care how bored he is, he’s got to rest.”

It had happened before, and doubtless would do so again—that Paul, having launched a highly successful play, had tired of it after the first few months and was secretly longing for it to end, so that he could give his undivided attention to something else. Whereas Carey was always happy throughout a long run, because it meant comparative ease and assured prosperity—things she was human enough to enjoy as long as they would last. Of course Paul was comfortably off; they had both had luck during recent years, and a flop now and again could not harass them financially. But there was more than money in her reckoning. A new play was an ordeal, increasingly so as both Paul and the critics expected more of her; the weeks of rehearsal could become a nightmare of hard work and high tension— thrilling if it all ended in triumph, but no experience to be sought wantonly. And this wantonness was in Paul. It was not that he did not enjoy success himself—he worshipped it; but he was like a mountaineer who cannot relax on a summit to enjoy a smoke and the view, but must itch immediately to descend and climb another.