Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

He kept his word by asking no more personal questions (that is, about her previous marriage), but he often skirted the subject, and sometimes her unsatisfactory answers must have told him he had touched it. As when, for instance, he probed her acting career in Dublin—what parts she had played, how she had become successful, had it been easy or hard, sudden or gradual. She was deliberately vague, until he sensed she was concealing something; he then said: “Don’t you like to look back?”

“I don’t mind, Norris. Why should I?”

“I just thought you might have some regrets.”

“Darling, if you only knew how little I did here to have any regrets about. They only gave me the smallest parts.” She hoped the evasion would satisfy him, but of course it failed to.

“That wasn’t what I thought you might regret. It was the idea of giving it all up—later—after you’d been a success. I wondered if coming back here and thinking about it might make you wish you hadn’t.”

“Oh no. I was GLAD to give it up—you’ve no idea how exhausting the theatre can be, even if you are successful. Perhaps ESPECIALLY if you’re successful. Anyhow, I’ve been very happy since, and if I ever wanted to, I dare say I could go back.” She added mischievously: “Would it give you a thrill if I did?”

“ME? You bet. But not father.”

“I didn’t ever promise I wouldn’t go back.”

“All the same, he doesn’t expect you to.”

“That wouldn’t matter, if I wanted to do it.”

Then she checked herself, a little appalled. She wasn’t sure she had spoken the truth, but even if she had, it was hardly a thing to have confided in Norris. She must not let this vacation, with all its chances, generate a conspiracy between the two of them against Austen. She went on hastily: “Of course I don’t really mean that. It WOULD matter, but I’m sure if I wanted to do it your father would wish me to.”

To which Norris retorted derisively: “Why don’t you try him one of these days and see? Tell him Hollywood’s offered you a big contract to star in a film.”

“HOLLYWOOD? Why should I say that?”

“Well, it COULD happen, couldn’t it? Didn’t they ever go after you?”

“Yes, but—”

“Why did you turn them down?”

“Oh, there were many reasons—so many I can’t even remember them all.”

He said judicially: “You know, Carey, I think you’d be good on the screen. You’re so beautiful—you’d be a joy to photograph.”

“Well, thanks. I love compliments.”

He went on, still judicially: “And also, as you said, you aren’t one of the VERY great actresses. In films you don’t have to be… No, I mean it —I’m not kidding. I know something about films—at school we have a society to study them and I’m president of it. I’d like to direct films some day. That’s why I’m such an admirer of—of Paul Saffron…” He looked embarrassed to have mentioned the name, as if he felt it might constitute a breach of the agreement. “Anyway, what I said is true—I do think you’d be a success in films. You have the face and the voice and the personality.”

“Plus a slight knowledge of acting which I could forget if I found it a nuisance… Yes, I dare say you’d make a good director.”

“Oh? Why?”

“You’ve already learned how to flatter a woman one minute and squash her the next, so that she doesn’t know whether she’s in heaven or the doghouse.”

“Is that what they do?”

“Some do.”

We’re still talking about Paul, she reflected, and Norris guesses it… She took the boy’s arm (they were walking along O’Connell Street near the Pillar) and said: “Let’s go to a movie, if you’re so keen on them.” It wasn’t a specially good one, but he responded excitedly as to ice-cream, animals in a zoo, a catchy song, or any of a dozen other simple enjoyments. He was old for his age, perhaps, but there was also a sense in which he was young for his brains. Nor did she take too seriously his announcement that he would like to be a movie director. There was already a long list of trades and professions, from lion-taming to private detection, that he had declared himself in favour of.

A few days later they drove north to Belfast and the Giant’s Causeway, then crossed to Scotland and toured the Highlands. By this time Austen had finished his European business trips and was waiting for them to join him in London. They had an enjoyable week there, sightseeing and going to theatres, but perhaps the most interesting event was again one in which Austen had no part. It was during a day he had reserved for business appointments in the City; Carey and Norris were strolling along Oxford Street when a poster faced them outside a small cinema—it was of a youth and a girl, hand in hand, against an idyllic background of forest. Over it was the title in large type Passion Flower, and in brackets under it in small type: Erste Freundschaft. Clearly the English exhibitors had felt themselves able to improve on a literal translation. To Norris, however, the two titles offered more than a joke; he exclaimed, tugging at Carey’s arm: “It’s one of Paul’s pictures… YOUR Paul… Oh, we MUST see it… Carey, don’t you want to?”

She didn’t know whether she wanted to or not. Several times, in New York, she had seen films that Paul had made, and had enjoyed them under difficulties, aware that Austen would have been unhappy had he known about it, and half-conscious of guilt because of that. She wondered how she had happened to miss Erste Freundschaft: maybe that was the year they had spent so little time in New York. Norris was chattering on: “It’s probably our only chance, with father not with us—an old picture too—we mightn’t ever catch it anywhere else… Carey, even if you don’t want to see it, may I? Do you mind? I’ll be back at the hotel by five…”

She was staring at a name in even smaller type on the poster— “Wanda Hessely”.

“I’ll come with you,” she said.

The girl at the box-office told them, with complete lack of enthusiasm, that the ‘big picture’ had been on about ten minutes. They went inside. It was an old-fashioned building dating from the early days of films— very oblong, with a steep slope and bare walls. Not more than forty or fifty people were scattered about the middle. Carey and Norris found seats in an empty row. The print was old and flickered badly. The occasional English dialogue, flashed on the screen on top of the picture, was often absurd and always distracting. The sound track was worn, so that both voices and music sounded metallic. Twice during the performance the film broke and there were moments of dark silence that fidgeted everybody. And yet, against all these disadvantages, a vivid beauty was alive on the screen and somehow communicated itself, not only to Carey and Norris but to the small English audience who might well, after seeing the posters, have expected something very different.

For Erste Freundschaft was, in essence, nothing but a story of first love, but portrayed with such warmth and tenderness that its simplicity was almost disguised. There was no need for the overprinted English dialogue; one almost felt there was no pressing need for the German voices even if one had understood German. It was really (as Norris acutely remarked afterwards) a silent picture with the kind of accessory use for sound that silent pictures had had—no more.

Carey was glad the theatre was darker than most, for the film moved her in places, not so much to tears as to a helpless acquiescence that would have made her speechless had Norris offered any comment, but he did not; he seemed as enthralled as she was, though of course less personally. For he did not know she had met Wanda Hessely; and, come to think of it, the picture must have been made only a short time after that meeting at Interlaken. Carey’s acquiescence was partly with Paul’s opinion of Wanda—that she WAS a great actress, great enough to weave her personal beauty into the total spell of the picture; or perhaps this was Paul’s achievement. But it was when she came to thinking about Paul himself that acquiescence became most helpless yet also puzzled; for how had he ever managed to tell such a story? The man who made this picture is a man who understands love, she would have thought, had she not once been Paul’s wife. Yet the impact of what she had seen on the screen was so great that eventually she was thinking: he DOES understand, or did, in his own world, however far that has come to be from mine.