Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

“It’s a long story, Norris—too long to tell during a theatre interval.”

“You were married in Dublin, weren’t you, to your first husband?”

“No, not in Dublin—in London.”

“You don’t mind talking about him, do you?”

“Of course not.” After all, it was Austen who would not talk about him any more, who had doubtless never told Norris of his existence, though it was clearly impossible to keep the boy always in ignorance of such a plain fact.

“Is he alive?”

“Oh yes. We were divorced.”

“I knew that. Dunne told me. But that’s about all I do know. What sort of a person was he?”

She smiled, sampling the enormity of the question. Then she said, with far greater ease than she could have anticipated: “He was… IS, I mean… a very clever man… quite brilliant. He directed plays—I believe that’s what he’s still doing. That and motion pictures.”

Norris pricked up his ears, for he was a patron of the screen far more consistently than of the stage. “What’s his name?”

“Paul Saffron.” She saw no reason not to tell him, but more pressingly she could not think of any sensible way to evade the question. Yet she knew it would have displeased Austen.

“PAUL SAFFRON?… Oh, you mean those German pictures—Ohne die Wahrheit and Donnergepolter… Wonderful!… I saw them at a little theatre on Ninety-Fifth Street—there weren’t even any English titles dubbed in, but you could understand without knowing the language.”

“I didn’t know you’d ever seen them, Norris. You never mentioned it.”

“It was last Easter, just before you and father came back from Florida. I’m glad now I didn’t happen to mention it.”

“Oh?”

“Well, father wouldn’t have liked it, I’m certain.”

Had he gained THAT impression from Dunne? Or by intuition? She was relieved when the curtain rose on the second item of the one-acter programme —Lady Gregory’s Workhouse Ward, an old favourite and so ineluctably Irish that it could hardly survive a journey across the Channel, much less the Atlantic. Norris seemed to enjoy it to the full, but at the next interval he plunged immediately into a renewal of the earlier conversation. “Carey… where does Paul Saffron live?”

“I don’t know exactly. On the Continent somewhere.”

“Is he foreign? Is it Saffron?” He gave the word a French pronunciation.

“No—American. He was born in America.”

“I’d certainly like to meet him some day.”

To hear him say that gave her a shock which only in retrospect she found tantalizingly pleasant. She said: “You might, possibly, if you travel abroad later on, though I’d have to warn you against him.” And then, realizing how he might misunderstand unless she said more, she continued hastily: “I mean —he’d probably be rude to you if you didn’t have any particular reason to see him.”

“But if I said you were married to my father, wouldn’t that be a reason?”

“Oh, my goodness, I don’t know.”

“You think he’d be mad at ME? After all, I couldn’t help it even if you WERE my mother—and you’re not.” He went on, thoughtfully: “I’ll bet he’d be interested in me on account of you… What broke up your marriage with him?”

Carey felt herself flushing deeply; this was going too far, no matter how preordained it was that he must eventually explore and chart the situation. She contrived a laugh as she said: “I can’t discuss it, Norris. I’m sorry.”

“You think I oughtn’t to know things like that till I’m older?”

“Maybe—and if you WERE older you wouldn’t ask. Now please let’s talk of something else.”

“Sure. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m not upset at all, darling, but you mustn’t ask any more personal questions of that kind.”

As if to signify acceptance of her taboo he changed the subject abruptly by saying: “It’s odd, isn’t it, that I’ve never seen you act. Were you very good at it?”

“What?” She hadn’t been listening.

He repeated the question, adding: “Is THAT too personal, too?”

“Not a bit. It’s just hard to answer except by a plain no. I wasn’t VERY good… that is, I wasn’t a Bernhardt or a Duse. But I must have been FAIRLY good, or I wouldn’t have been able to take leading parts on Broadway.”

“With your name in electric lights?”

“Oh yes.”

Clearly he was impressed by that. He mused after a pause: “I’ve often wondered if people like them—Bernhardt and Duse—would disappoint us if we could see them today. There’s no way of knowing, exactly, is there? It’s different with an old film—you can make allowances if the print’s worn or the style’s out of date—the acting still comes through. But great stage actors—after they’re dead, how CAN you tell what they were like?”

“It’s true we can’t judge them ourselves, Norris, but we can read what people thought at the time—critics and others who wrote about them. We know from all that how good they must have been.”

“Just as YOU must have been.”

“Except that I was never in their class at all. And I’m not dead yet either.”

“It’s the same kind of argument, though. Circumstantial evidence… I still wish I’d seen you, Carey.”

She laughed. “Maybe you will, one of these days. We’ll get up a play some week-end at the farm. The Rushmores would love it, I know.”

“Oh, amateurs,” he said, not contemptuously, but with the most crushing disinterest. She did not wish to approve such an attitude, yet she could not bring herself to dispute it. She was relieved again when the curtain rose on the third and final item. It did not hold her, perhaps because it was a recently written playlet that evoked no memories—or perhaps because of the cross-examination she seemed barely to have survived. It WAS odd, though, that Norris had never seen her on the stage, so that he could not know that part of her which was professional and accomplished. Her life since marrying Austen had been too peaceful to provide acting moments off-stage, and even if it hadn’t been, she was probably too proficient to be suspected of them. So she was ruefully sure he had no idea how good she was; and she had a sudden vision of him, amazed and starry-eyed, bursting into her dressing-room after a triumphant opening night… ‘Oh, Carey, you were WONDERFUL!’… the word he had used about Paul’s films.

And yet, when she came to think about it, she did act occasionally— even with Austen. Sometimes, when she was the gracious hostess at a dinner-party, the thought had come that she was playing the role of his wife —not INSTEAD of being it, but in addition; so that he was getting double service. But Norris, she knew, got only single service—she never played any role with him, if only because she did not know what it would be. Stepmother? The word seemed as unfitting as any she could think of. That there was deep friendship between them she was certain, a warmth that had helped her reclaim him from the category of problem child. Or rather, she had tried to make Austen see the problem as the larger one of himself, herself, and the world.

And so in Dublin with Norris, and without Austen, she was thoroughly enjoying herself. One day they took the Terenure tram and walked past the semi-detached villa where James Fitzroy had learned his Gaelic to the last. Another day they visited Kingstown and climbed the hill to her great-uncle’s old house; he had died only a few years before, and a new house built close by obscured the view of the harbour on which he had so often trained binoculars. She remembered the spot (to within a dozen yards) where she had first mistaken Paul for an advancing gunman… only fourteen years ago, yet it seemed, and was, in another age, for by now the gunmen were in office and grown respectable—a typical Irish progression. Even the Abbey Theatre had followed it, becoming by now a rather conservative institution whose leading personnel had mostly left for the fleshpots of America, and in which the early plays of O’Casey were exhibited from time to time like upheld relics of an uproarious past. She felt not only a stranger in Dublin but a stranger to the kind of city it had become, and this made her feel a stranger to the kind of girl she had once been herself—not merely innocent, then, of what the world was about, but ignorant of the fact that the truth was not to be discovered. As the wife of a rich American she was doubtless now envied, and as a beautiful woman she could be admired, but as an Irishwoman she had been suspect from the moment the porters at the Shelbourne saw her Hartmann luggage and knew she would throw half-crowns about like sixpences. She was aware of all this, but it was Norris who gave it meaning. He, with his American birth, background, and accent, was REAL; and she noticed also that he was far less shy than in his own country. It was as if being a foreigner gave him greater confidence to be himself.