Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

Then one Sunday as she was walking through the lobby of the Plaza for lunch she ran into Malcolm Beringer. She almost literally ran into him, and was sure from his instant look that he would have avoided her if he could. Even his suavity deserted him a little as she made him stop. “Malcolm! I didn’t know you were back from Europe even—Paul never tells me things. Can’t you sit down for a moment and give me all the news?”

She practically forced him to a chair and hoped he did not see her hand trembling as she offered him a cigarette. She had a sudden premonition of things not quite right. “So you left Paul there? How is he? Tell me about the picture… He writes that it’s going ahead well.”

“I believe it is,” Malcolm agreed, but without enthusiasm.

“You BELIEVE it is? Don’t you know?”

He said: “I left Berlin in November. I can’t say what’s been happening since.”

“But I thought you and Paul were working together?”

“We were… till then.” He continued, with a faint smile: “It’s a long story—much too complicated to explain.”

“I’ll bet it’s complicated. Anything to do with Paul usually is. What did you do—quarrel?”

Then his faint smile vanished altogether. “We didn’t see eye to eye about certain things.”

“Of course you didn’t. I was always surprised how well you got on at Mapledurham. Paul’s not what you might call one of nature’s collaborators.”

“It wasn’t exactly that.”

“Oh, wasn’t it?”

He fidgeted to the edge of the chair, scrutinizing the passing crowd as if hoping for rescue by someone. “You’ll excuse me, Carey, I ought to be looking for a man who’s coming to lunch with me.”

“So ought I, but both of them can wait. You’ve just time to tell me very quickly what happened.”

“Why, nothing happened—particularly.” He stubbed out his cigarette and let his long slender fingers tap some message of uncertainty on the table-top.

“Then what is it that’s too complicated to explain?”

“Why don’t you ask Paul?”

“How can I ask him about nothing particular—and that’s what you say happened?”

“It’s all too personal, Carey, and if Paul doesn’t mention it perhaps he thinks it’s of no importance. And perhaps it isn’t.”

“You must know how that kind of answer scares me.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t think there’s anything to get scared about.”

“Mysteries always scare me. You’ve made me feel I want to leave for Germany tomorrow.”

“Switzerland now, I understand.”

“Yes, that’s right. Some place near Interlaken.”

“You know that? He told you where he was?”

“Of course. Why shouldn’t he?”

A very elegant young man approached the table, bowed slightly, and had to be introduced. Malcolm did not ask him to join them. Carey said lightly: “Pity there isn’t time for a longer chat. Maybe we could have dinner together soon—”

He murmured something about having to leave for Washington. She didn’t believe a word of it and she knew he knew she didn’t. She added, shaking hands: “Well, I might take a trip to Interlaken one of these days— would you recommend that?”

“They say it’s a very beautiful place.”

Oh God, she thought—couldn’t you have thought of a better exit line, and you supposed to be a writer?… And then she remembered something that Paul had once said, that all the time-worn clichés that sound too absurd nowadays for any modern play are still used in life by people who are either too unsophisticated or too disconcerted to think of anything more original. And of these Malcolm could clearly belong only to the second class.

She acted a part throughout lunch, appearing very carefree; it was easier to overdo it than merely to quell a mounting nervousness. Later that day she wrote to Paul, saying that she had met Malcolm accidentally and that he had given her the news. She did not say what news, and hoped that the equivocal phrase might evoke some revealing answer. But it failed to do so; the letters Paul continued to write, both to her and his mother, were no different and contained no mention of Malcolm at all. It was maddening, the way he could ignore things. After a month of it, and with the new play still not definitely lined up, she came to an abrupt decision. She WOULD go to Interlaken. To Mrs. Saffron she made the excuse of another trip to Florida; what the old lady would think when no letters from Florida arrived she neither knew, nor in the mood she had reached, particularly cared. She caught the Olympic and reached Paris on an April day whose flavour gave her a pang. She and Paul had spent much time in that city, and had loved it, but now she merely hastened across from one station to another. Travelling all night, she arrived in Interlaken the next day about noon. She had never visited Switzerland before, and the loveliness as she stepped out of the train was overpowering. A cab-driver said that Riesbach was several miles away, a tourists’ resort with a hotel, approachable only by steamer across the Lake of Brienz. It sounded so remote she didn’t think she would want to stay there if Paul had gone back to Germany, which was a possibility; so she booked a room at an hotel near the station and left her luggage. Then she took a cab through the town to the lakeside and boarded the tiny paddle-steamers. She was already more, or perhaps less, than entranced; she felt that the beauty surrounding her hit below the emotional belt. And how industriously the Swiss had exploited everything, never vulgarizing though sometimes prettifying, building their parks and esplanades into perfect line with the white cone of the Jungfrau, running funiculars here and there to catch a special view, electrifying their trains into docile cleanliness; it was unbelievable that people should have come to such cosy terms with grandeur. The whole place, with its keen bright air and gay decorum, had an air of holiday that made Florida, steeped in stock-market and real-estate gloom, seem like a melancholy shambles by comparison.

The boat chugged across the lake, putting in at various resorts before arriving at Riesbach. Only a few passengers alighted there. The hotel was perched high above the water; a funicular climbed to it from the dockside. Every step in this long verifying journey from New York seemed to have increased her excitement in geometric progression; the ocean crossing, lasting a week, had been tense but endurable; the overnight train from Paris had left her restless; the boat trip across the lake had been an excruciating dream; and now these few minutes in the funicular seemed the culminating race of her heart to some kind of extinction. But at the very end, at the hotel desk as she asked if a Mr. Paul Saffron were staying there, she was becalmed. Yes, they said, but he was out at the moment—he was probably taking a walk in the woods. Doubtless he would be back soon. Would she care to wait? She agreed, and sat down in the lobby for a while. Then she went to the terrace and saw the trail leading into the woods with romantic deliberateness, the little signpost giving time in hours as well as distance in kilometres—all so neat and satisfactory, so safe in an unsafe world. She began to walk along the trail, not intending to go far, in case Paul might return by some other route. The woods were cool and fresh-scented, sloping to the lake at an angle that gave sudden glimpses of blue amidst the green. Wild flowers, buttercups, and crocuses speckled the undergrowth, and at pleasing intervals a waterfall tumbled over rocks that seemed too casual not to have been arranged.

After ten minutes or so she turned a corner and saw two people some hundred yards ahead, and one of them, she thought from the slow walk, could possibly be Paul. The other was a girl. But what surprised her was that he was carrying a huge clump of wild flowers and that every few yards both he and the girl stopped to gather more. This was so totally unlike Paul, who cared for flowers only enough to buy them at high prices, that she almost doubted her own recognition till she came closer and could see the familiar head balanced heavily on the familiar shoulders. The rest was less familiar, for he was wearing shorts, woollen stockings, and boots spectacularly different from anything in his American wardrobe. Then she noticed that the girl had straw-coloured hair of the kind usually provided by wig-makers for use in Wagnerian opera.