Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

She must have translated them somehow or other, because at lunch the same day she said: “The critics call it wonderful, Austen—I’m so happy for Paul’s sake. When can we see it over here?”

“I don’t know exactly. I must find out what the situation is.”

The situation was clear enough, had he made it so, but he was content to let it acquire and remain in obscurity, with the result that Everyman never reached America and was hardly seen at all outside Germany. It was not a commercial success even there. For some reason, also, fewer prints than usual had been made, and several were destroyed in a fire. Soon the film entered the category of those that are far more talked about by connoisseurs than seen by the public, and in due course it became somewhat legendary, like the reputation of its maker.

In 1936 Norris was fourteen, a shy sensitive boy, hard to make friends with. He was so far advanced in some of his studies (English and history, for instance) and so backward in others (mathematics and French) that teachers held widely different opinions of him, especially as he did not care for organized games and would not even pretend to. He was physically delicate, yet fond of long walks and uncompetitive outdoor exercise; in a quiet way his personality was effective, and at school he was never bullied though quite often bored. He adored Carey, whom he treated as he might have an elder sister, certainly not as he would have his mother, had she lived. Carey had been promising for years to take him on a vacation trip to Ireland, and at last, during this summer, the chance came, made easier because it could be fitted in with business visits that Austen had to make to various European capitals. Dublin was not one of them, so it was arranged that Carey and Norris should join him in London before returning to America.

Carey was thirty-one and something seemed to have happened to make her beautiful. She had never quite deserved this adjective during childhood or girlhood, but now there was a special ripeness about her that was conspicuous even in the company of other beautiful women; it was this that attracted artists, and several had done portraits of her that had been widely exhibited. Her marriage with Austen had been a happy one; they got along well, enjoying the domestic tranquillity that both valued so much and that made each of them precious to the other because they knew how shared and contributory it was. Austen was in his fifties, not much older in looks than when Carey had seen him first, but increasingly busy in a field which, amidst depression and the collapse of currencies, had become increasingly mysterious if not sinister. He remained unknown to the man in the street, though his marriage to Carey had made him slightly more newsworthy to gossip columnists had there been anything in his life to gossip about. There never was.

Carey and Norris left the ship at Cobh, while Austen went on to Southampton. She was looking forward to her first revisiting of Ireland since she had left it fourteen years before, but most of all she wanted to show Norris the country as if it were a gift to him from herself. They stayed in Cork for a night, rented a car the next day, and set out on the westward road through Bandon. Norris drove. Probably he was not supposed to at his age, but he was an excellent driver and tall enough not to be questioned. She relaxed in the small two-seater and watched the boy’s eager profile against the green background of Irish hills. Though he was not her real son, the experience came near to a fulfilment so profound that her eyes were proud, yet she did not know whether it was her pride in the country as seen by the boy, or in the boy as seen by the country. Because people did stare at Norris, or so it seemed to her, for she was never fully aware of how often they were staring at herself, or at the remarkably handsome pair of them. Norris, as he drove along the winding lanes, looked radiant. It was the first time they had ever faced a long spell together without Austen, and she knew he was happier now than if Austen had been with them.

They reached Glengarriff by evening and stayed at a hotel perched somewhat inland on a hill, with a view of the harbour over waterside woods. It was an old-fashioned place where the food was excellent, and where, in the absence of gas or electricity, oil lamps swung yellow beams into the shadows and guests carried lighted candles upstairs to their high-ceilinged bedrooms. All of this was the exact opposite, Norris said, of those places on the Boston Post Road where things are done by candlelight because the proprietor considers it part of the atmosphere he charges extra for. Norris had the wit to express a thought of this kind, and Carey was delighted because it seemed to her a sign that he would accept Ireland without too much regard for plumbing on the one hand or shamrock on the other. She knew how hard it was for Americans abroad to be neither condemnatory nor sentimental.

The next day they drove through Kenmare to Killarney, where the hotel was less primitive—indeed, in a forlorn and stupefying way, rather grand. Norris diagnosed Killarney as the kind of show place that every country needs, since it concentrates in one spot all the naďve elements in tourism, thus preserving other places equally and sometimes more beautiful. This verdict, Carey thought, was too cynical; but after all, he was at an age when cleverness runs to that and when the deliberately unromantic view-point almost achieves a romanticism of its own. In an earlier generation (hers, by a slight stretch of arithmetic) he would have been influenced by Shaw and Mencken; as it was, he gyrated amidst a vague flotsam of assorted disillusionments about war, peace, government, capitalism, religion, and sex —all of which created in him a personal attitude not more than skin deep. One of the troubles that Austen gave himself needlessly (and which made it harder for him to get to know the boy) was that he took at its face value so much that Norris said when he was merely flexing his mental muscles to satisfy an exhibitionist whim of the moment. Carey, as an actress, understood this intuitively.

“It isn’t what he says,” Austen had complained once, “it’s his whole outlook. He seems to have no faith in anything. Even if certain beliefs are questionable, one shouldn’t lose them till later on in life.”

“Austen, I think that’s far more cynical than anything Norris has ever said.”

Austen had tried to understand what she meant by that. But he remained (to his distress) incapable of coming to intimate terms with Norris, and the greater his effort the more intractable yet polite grew the barrier between them.

Norris had once asked her glibly: “What does father do all day to make him so serious in the evenings?”

Carey had answered: “What do YOU do all day to make you bait him so much when he comes home tired after his work? You seem to store up sharp things to say, and if he takes them all seriously maybe that’s because he doesn’t think they’re funny.”

But now, in Ireland, clouds such as this had lifted and it was clear that, without Austen, Norris was a less combative though still disputatious personality. They drove on through Limerick and Nenagh to Dublin, detouring on the way through the place in Kildare where she had lived until she was ten years old. The house was unchanged, but the farmland looked better cultivated, and in the neighbouring town there were modern stores and neon signs. Approaching Dublin she noted much development—streets of new houses that might have been on Long Island or outside London—“the sprawling anonymity of the suburbs”, Norris called it, pleased with his phrase, and Carey thought it good too, though not quite valid, for the brownstone houses that made up so much of metropolitan New York, or the Regency streets of Limerick, were in their own ways just as anonymous. And come to think of it, anonymity was honest, and if there could be anything more depressing than a row of identical suburban villas, surely it was one of those streets in which the builder makes each unit deliberately different from its neighbour. She chattered on these lines to Norris, and they were still arguing about it when they arrived at the Shelbourne. Then followed a week of sightseeing—art galleries, churches, the Zoo in Phoenix Park, and a long excursion to Glendalough and the Wicklow Mountains. But here again Glendalough, a show place, did not appeal so strongly to Norris as Glenmalure, the lonely dead-end from which the mountains rise steeply to the peak of Lugnaquilla. By a coincidence they went that same evening to the Abbey Theatre where Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen was in the bill. Norris was much taken with it. He had been to the theatre often in New York and had even seen the Abbey Players there during one of their tours, but the Dublin performance made him conscious of something in a different dimension. He tried to explain this to Carey, who was herself warmed by memories that came to her not only of the play but of the physical stage, the red seats, the black-and-gold striped curtain, and the tricky Dublin audience. She had told him, of course, that this was where she had made her first professional appearance, and he naturally put questions, all of which she answered as truthfully as she could till he asked: “What made you leave Ireland and come to America?”