Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

One of his most irritating habits was that, in letter-writing as in personal argument, he was capable of blandly ignoring what had been said or asked by the other party. He did this in a way that would have been almost more forgivable had it been deliberate, but Carey knew that it represented the absence from his mind of any real concern for anything outside the circle of his own dominating interest at the time. Thus, in reply to her letter, he made no comment about the sale of his stocks, and neither confirmed nor denied that he had put money into the Everyman project. And when, in a second letter, she told him frankly she had lost heavily herself, and that all phases of New York life were hard hit, including Broadway—to all this he replied by a casual suggestion that maybe she could sell Mapledurham —he had always thought it was too expensive for what they got out of it. The rest of his letter was about the beauty of some lakes near Berlin where he was apparently working on the picture. And in a postscript he added: “Sounds like a bad theatre season over there. I hope mother isn’t worried. Try to cheer her up.”

This reference to his mother further exasperated Carey, because, of all the people she knew, Paul’s mother had least to worry about. The first thing he had done when success came was to fulfil an ambition to bring the old lady from Milwaukee to New York and set her up in an apartment of her own; then, with the profits of his first long run, he had bought her a comfortable annuity. All of which had been very dutiful and sensible, but it did, Carey felt, put Mrs. Saffron in a position where she needed less cheering up than a great many younger people. She was a woman of strong character and personality, rather terrifying in some ways (‘fabulous’ was the adjective she tried to live up to), and Paul’s devotion to her was probably the most consistent emotion in his life. As such, Carey had been careful to respect it, but she was constantly amused by the aspect of angelic boyhood he assumed whenever he was with his mother. Play-acting himself down to the level of a teen-ager, he was often quite ridiculous; yet there must have been something in it, for no matter how dark or tempestuous his mood, he could always appear frolicsome with her.

Carey made a special visit in response to the postscript. Paul had been in the long-established habit of paying his mother a short call every day, except on Sundays, when she came over to dinner; since he had been away Carey had kept up the Sunday dinners and made one or two return calls during the week. This could have looked like kindness to a lonely soul, except that Mrs. Saffron was neither lonely nor the kind of person who is called a soul. She enjoyed her independence, she could afford a daily maid, and she had a visiting clientele of elderly admirers who accepted her domination and constantly lost small sums to her at pinochle; moreover her health was good, and most mornings she pottered briskly about the Fifth Avenue shops with an eagle eye for a bargain. Carey always felt during her visits that she was being treated to a special demonstration of how close were mother and son, for invariably Mrs. Saffron could produce a letter from Paul which she did not show or read in its entirety, but quoted a few sentences from here and there. Apart from the fact that these letters were longer and more regular than the ones he sent to her, Carey thought them unremarkable; Paul was not a good letter-writer. This time, however, Mrs. Saffron’s voice was charged with extra emphasis as she made the usual opening announcement: “I’ve just heard from Paul, my dear…” She went on, as if she couldn’t wait for even the most perfunctory response: “He says you’ve been losing money in the stock market.”

“Oh yes, a little.” So Paul, despite his anxiety that she should not worry, had given her the news.

“I’m sorry you weren’t as smart as he was.”

Of course that explained it. Her own loss made a neat dramatic contrast to the good news he had been able to give his mother about himself.

She said: “Yes, I am too.”

“Of course, he talked to me about it beforehand, and I said to him, ‘Son,’ I said, ‘it’s your money, you made it, you do what you want with it.’ So I guess that’s what made him sell at the right time.”

Carey had no comment.

“It’s rather funny what he said about it in his letter.” Mrs. Saffron put on her spectacles, searched for the page, and ran her finger down with a great show of omitting other things. “He says… this is what Paul says, my dear… he says, ‘I’ve just seen some American papers and oh boy, Wall Street certainly did take a beating. I can just imagine how old Reeves must feel. I didn’t dare tell him I was going to bring the cash to Germany to make a picture—he’d have raised such a shindig—but golly, even if the picture’s a flop I won’t be worse off than if I’d left things as they were…’”

How true that was, Carey reflected, and how characteristic in a letter to his mother were such expressions as ‘Oh boy’, ‘shindig’, and ‘golly’— a kind of slang he would never have dreamed of using elsewhere.

Towards the end of November he wrote that the picture was going well but more slowly than he had expected, so that he couldn’t return till some time in the New Year, perhaps March or April if he could manage it. For the first time, in that letter, he showed interest in her affairs—he hoped the play was still making money and that she hadn’t lost ‘too much’ in the market crash. If she had, and had any use for a thousand dollars or so, there was that much cash in a safe-deposit box of his (he gave the number and location) which he had forgotten to empty when he left—she was welcome to it. As for the picture, it was going to be wonderful. It was also the first time he had sounded such an optimistic note about the work he was doing.

News of the delay in his return did not prevent this letter from cheering Carey considerably. She was touched by the evidence of his concern for her, even though the form it took had a typical streak of impracticality. She replied: “Darling, it was sweet of you to tell me about the safe-deposit box, but I really don’t need the money and in any case the bank wouldn’t let me touch it if it’s in your name—didn’t you know that?… The play’s still running and audiences seem to be picking up a little, and I’ve been approached in a vague way about several other plays next year, so I don’t think I shall be out of work. Even if I were, I could enjoy a holiday, and I’m not PENNILESS, you know. So please don’t worry about me, and take all the time you need for what you want to do… I see your mother regularly and she tells me you’ve lost ten pounds and are very proud of it—I know what this is a sign of—the creative yeast beginning to ferment, didn’t you once call it that? Don’t work too hard, though, and give me more news of the picture—I’m so happy about it…”

She spent a busy but enjoyable Christmas, and on New Year’s Eve she wondered sentimentally but not anxiously what Paul was doing, and figured out that it was already New Year’s Day in Europe. She sent him a cable.

The play finally petered out in the third week of January, and though she was not definitely signed for a successor, there was another comedy by the same author shaping up and with an obvious part for her. She took a trip to Florida with theatre friends and was back in New York by the beginning of March, the earliest month that Paul had said he might possibly return. Recent letters, however, had not confirmed this, or indeed mentioned the matter again. His last letter had been from Riesbach, near Interlaken, Switzerland, where he had taken part of the company on location, so he said. He did not explain further, and Carey wondered how Swiss scenery could become necessary in a film of Everyman; but she was not especially surprised.