Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

“Why, yes.”

At which the friend laughed raucously. She was a lively old snob who fancied herself as a connoisseur of that over-world which is, in its way, quite as secret as the underworld; everything in her private who’s who depended on what KIND of duke, what KIND of millionaire, even what KIND of actress. Carey happened to be her kind, which was the kind that could be invited to the Colony Club. She said: “Well, darling, I guess you could call him something in a broker’s office if you wanted. D’you really mean you’ve never heard of him?… I suppose that’s possible—he’s not the type that goes popping toy balloons at night clubs. Neither are you, for that matter—you two ought to get on well together.”

“Oh, I don’t suppose we shall meet again.”

“You mean you won’t call him up?”

“I’ll be so busy with the play from now on. I think I’ll take it to the country and let it simmer in my mind for a few weeks.”

Michaelson gave her a typescript the next day, after which she went to Vermont to stay with the Whitmores, old friends whom she had known since the year of the struggle as she called it to herself—that first year in America when Paul couldn’t find any kind of job. The Whitmores had been the means by which he had finally got the chance he needed. They were comfortably off, but not rich, and the small paper-mill which they owned and in which Harry Whitmore worked was a mile from their house at the other end of the small town. An open invitation to visit them any time she could spare was her only effective consolation for having sold Mapledurham, and now she was quick to avail herself of it. She read the new play in the Whitmores’ garden, and thought it pretty good, but even while she thought so she was distrusting her own judgment—WAS it good, was it REALLY good? Of course there were comedies that made one laugh aloud at a first skim-through and later proved complete flops on the stage; perhaps the reverse could also operate. She certainly did not laugh or even smile during the several hours she gave to a careful reading, and afterwards she picked up a published copy that the Whitmores had of her last play and tried to imagine that that too was new —would it have seemed amusing either? But of course the test was invalid—the lines came to the ear as well as to the eye, and with the remembered laughter of an audience as punctuation. When Michaelson telephoned later in the day, eager to know her reaction, she had to tell him that she liked the new play well enough, because it would have seemed absurd to confess that her lukewarmness was probably due to some private mood of her own.

A few days later Michaelson arrived with contracts. He had made a special trip to get her signature. Somehow she had not expected there would be that degree of urgency, but such evidence of being sought after gave her a touch of cheerful panic. She signed, measuring the weeks till August, when rehearsals would begin. Plenty of time to work up the right mood of enthusiasm.

Towards the middle of July she returned to New York and met the author, who took her to lunch and proved, almost by algebra, that he had written a sure-fire successor to a success. But later the same day at a party she met another author who said he had heard a rumour that the new play was a bit of a let-down—what did SHE think? She used up all her new-found confidence in denying it vehemently.

That evening at her apartment she read the play again, speaking many of the lines aloud, and in the midst of so doing she remembered Paul’s remark: “It’s about time you were bored with comedy.” Was it that? Or was she still just tired?

Suddenly she doubted if she would be any less bored or tired had it been a tragedy and the greatest play ever written. And in that mood, a rather frantic one, she ransacked her desk for Austen Bond’s note and dialled his number. She knew, by then, who he was.

Austen Bond was not well known in the modern metropolitan sense— that is, to newspaper columnists, head waiters, and the man in the street. He was rich, and had his own importance, but the firm of investment brokers of which he was head was not one of those on everybody’s lips and he had no ambition to make it so. There was something in his mental attitude that always preferred quality to size, and his place in financial circles was of this kind also; he was satisfied to make a personal fortune just less than sensational and to influence, occasionally and obliquely, those who had greater influence. The stock-market collapse had not affected in the slightest degree the routine of his private life, which had long been unpretentious. His attitude towards the future, including his own, was affected by his unspoken opinion that capitalism had begun to die. He did not think this was good, but he believed it was inevitable; and he had found, from a few scraps of early experience, that many people assume that the man who prophesies something, also wishes it to happen. In his case this was not true, and would have been absurd if it had been; but his knowledge of how easily and dangerously he would be misunderstood made him keep his mouth shut. He was less tempted to open it because he also believed that, on the scale of events that he foresaw, nothing he could do or persuade others to do could change the outcome to any worth-while extent. He therefore confined his activities to certain machinations of the market, in which it would have been as naďve to be a Marxian as a Seventh Day Adventist.

Within this somewhat chilly circumference the intimate structure of his life had developed, up to a point, quite genially and not very remarkably. He had been left money and a job by his father, a Wall Street man of the old school, while his mother had contributed good looks and an equipment of innate good taste in the arts. Education at Groton and Harvard had followed, after which there had been years of hard work. In 1920, aged thirty-six, he had married a New Hampshire girl who loved horses and dogs and enjoyed New York only as a visiting country cousin; so he had bought some land in Connecticut and there they had spent much of each year quietly and very happily indeed. In 1925 she had died in an influenza epidemic, leaving a boy of three named Norris. After that he had lived even more retiringly, but mainly in the old family house in the East Sixties that he had inherited from his father. He had an unmarried aunt who often played hostess at his small and not too frequent dinner-parties; he belonged to a few good clubs and liked to go to plays, art exhibitions, and concerts. During school holidays, when Norris was at home, he sometimes took the boy to places like the Metropolitan Museum and the Statue of Liberty. He had, behind a reserve that was hard to penetrate, a quietly inflexible will and a loyalty to those who worked for him, so that those who knew and liked him best were doubtless his employees and servants.

Austen had hardly expected to pick up an acquaintance with an actress on board the Berengaria. Not that he felt superior to the acting profession; on the contrary, he had a playgoer’s affection for its leading figures, and Carey had often pleased him from the other side of the footlights. But he would not, had anyone forecast it, have agreed that he was at all likely to take the initiative in getting to know her. What had made him do so was that she looked unhappy. Minutes before she saw him he had recognized her; then he had closed his eyes to wonder what could be the matter, for though he was not simple enough to think that comedy stars must always be gay, the contrast between his recollection of her on the stage and the way she looked in the adjacent deck-chair had been too startling to ignore. Perhaps it was just the effects of a rough crossing; he hoped so, but he wished he could find out. Finally a kindly curiosity had made him speak.