Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

The dinner, Austen thought, was a definite success. Of course the food and drink were excellent, they always were (another of the advantages of home, or rather of being able to afford a French chef), and the conversation did not flag amongst the three of them. He knew Carey must be enjoying herself, because he could imagine that a stranger meeting her for the first time would not think her unhappy at all, though he himself still caught a darker mood behind her gaiety—not that the gaiety was ever false. It was strange to feel such confidence that he understood her, so that after coffee, when Aunt Mildred excused herself to go to bed early, he hinted at a movie with the near-certainty as well as the hope that she would decline. She said: “Frankly, I’d rather see pictures in the afternoon when I’ve nothing else to do.”

“Good. Then let’s take it easy.”

They went by elevator to the roof above the sixth floor, where a small secluded garden had been laid out in tubs and boxes. The air wafted the flavour and sounds of the streets, yet it was a pleasant place to relax on a summer evening. When she finally left, not long before midnight, she said warmly: “I HAVE enjoyed myself—I like going somewhere without being involved in terrific plans to go somewhere else—I like sitting and talking to someone who doesn’t feel it’s boring to do just that.”

He said: “I hope we’re going to meet again—often.”

“Oh yes. And don’t forget to come to a rehearsal. Not just yet—one of the last would probably be most fun for you. That would be late in August.”

“And in the meantime… during the hot weather… I have a farm in Connecticut—sometimes I invite a few friends there for the week-end —if you’d care to… if you like the country…”

“I love it. I was born on a farm. So was Paul—but he hated it. That’s a strange difference between us—or perhaps between Iowa and Ireland, though I’ve never seen Iowa.”

“Then I’ll arrange something quite soon. Not a big party. Do anything —or nothing—swim, dance, play bridge—”

“Which of them do YOU do?”

“Bridge I rather like, but that won’t matter—there’ll be others who don’t play, and the effort to entertain you will be very slight indeed. For myself, during the daytime I mostly potter about with the man who runs the place for me—sometimes I ride over a few fields and try to think I’m a genuine farmer.”

“But you really enjoy it—pottering about like that?”

“Oh yes, I wouldn’t do it otherwise—why should I? It’s like you with a new play—if you didn’t like it, you wouldn’t feel you had to act in it… May I fix a date, then, and let you know? We might drive out together.”

There were many things that surprised him after she had gone. To begin with, that he had invited her to the farm at all, and also that, in doing so, he hadn’t told her the complete truth. He was a little appalled by what faced him now—a reopening of old memories, an ultimatum to grief, arrangements and complications and decisions, the welcome of local people who hadn’t seen him for years and would regard his return as evidence that a new stage in his life had been reached. And perhaps it had. In the morning he told Dunne of his intention and actually asked the old man whom he should invite—he was as uninterested as that in all his guests except one. Dunne pondered and spoke a few names. They were not of close friends, for Austen hadn’t any, except Dunne himself; but there were many people he knew fairly well, and liked, and who liked him. After a list had been compiled he said: “I think I’ll ask Mrs. Saffron too—she’s charming, isn’t she? I could see you were thinking that yourself last night.”

“I was indeed, sir.”

Austen looked up gratefully. He wondered, at that early stage, how he would have acted had his butler disapproved.

The farm was about two hours’ drive from the city and a dozen miles inland. A house dating from Revolutionary times formed a nucleus that had been cleverly added to; there was a large barn where dances and parties could be held, as well as a group of modern guest cottages. The land sloped from the main building to a stream, widened in one place to make a swimming-pool that seemed a part of the natural landscape. Trees fringed a formal garden, and there were woods beyond, rising to a ridge. The whole property covered six or seven hundred acres, most of it tilled; there was a second farmhouse, not so old and much more practical, in which Grainger lived. Grainger, like Dunne, had worked for Austen’s father.

When Austen arrived with Carey towards evening on the last Friday in July he braced himself for the shock of seeing again the place where he had been so happy, but the shock was not what he had expected; it struck, but without the leaden bruise; it was more a sharpness that made him specially sensitive to Carey at his side. “Well, here we are,” he said, as they drove up. He hoped she would catch, as he did, the beauty of the old brick in the sunset glow, and when she remarked on it, as surely as if he had pointed it out, an unbelievable pleasure filled him. They left the car, Dunne (who had been there since morning) helping them and taking the bags; the familiar entrance and hall beyond faced him without challenge. He had thought he would remember Fran; but instead he could think only of Carey.

Several other guests had already arrived; more were expected later. They were not celebrities, though not nonentities either—the Peter Rushmores, he an architect, had probably the best-known name. There were no brokers or financiers. Austen did not like to talk his own shop, but other people’s interested him—he had a wistful curiosity about such things as how to run a woman’s page, or excavate for a sub-basement, or cook clam chowder. All the people he liked enough to have at the farm were working people, in an extended sense; it was not that he did not care for drones, but that drones were usually the kind of people he did not care for. And perhaps because the people he did care for were attractive and hard-working, they were often successful in their own fields—successful enough for them not to think of him primarily as a person ‘worth knowing’. He was, indeed, immensely wealthier than they were, and quick to help them in any financial emergency (there had been some lately, since the stock-market collapse), but he liked their own success to guarantee him against the fear that their friendship could have any ulterior motive. To this extent, wealth had been a restrictive influence in his life; it had made him cautious in affection, not because he was afraid of being sponged on, but because he shrank from an emotional investment that might turn out humiliatingly. In a profound sense he knew the corrupting power of wealth, and on a scale impossible to convey to anyone outside his own business; he knew that not only individuals but whole classes and generations and empires could catch the Midas infection, and it was his belief (private, like most of his beliefs) that America in the ‘twenties had been so infected. Apart from the personal havoc which was tragic and obvious around him, he could not regret what had been happening in Wall Street since the previous October; but he would never say so, because his own position as either Cassandra or moralist would be clearly impossible. Once again his impulse to be secretive was geared to the likelihood that few people would understand him. On perhaps the worst day in Wall Street’s history a frenzied speculator had somehow pierced his line of clerks and secretaries and demanded face-to-face how he could reconcile it with his conscience to profit out of national disaster. Austen must have been disturbed or he would not have replied, as he did: “The national disaster is not that prices should now fall, but that they should ever have been forced so high. To that disaster I did not contribute—on the other hand, my own operations tended to prevent them from going higher. And today, my friend, while you have been adding to what you call the disaster by selling, I have been supporting prices by buying back. The fact that I personally profited is immaterial.” It was the only time (and an ill-chosen one) that he attempted a logical, indeed a classic defence of his own function, and the reason (illogically) was that the troubles of other people did affect him, and all the more because even to say so would have seemed hypocritical.