Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

“Who?”

“This Austen Bond.”

“Oh, HIM… He’s… why, he’s older than—than you, and rather quiet in manner, and… and he’s kind.”

“Sounds like an epitaph.”

She smiled, glad of his change of mood to break the spell she had recently been under. “If it does, Paul, it isn’t such a bad one.” She looked at her watch. Four o’clock already—she must be getting back home. It was all over.

He knew that too, and signalled the waiter.

They shared a taxi as far as Saks’, where she said she had to make a call. During the journey they talked incessantly and quite trivially. As the cab drew up outside the shop she said: “Paul, I’m glad we met. And I do hope you keep on having success… Goodbye, Paul.”

He took her gloved hand and put his lips to it, whether impulsively or from Continental habit she could not tell. “God rest your soul, Carey. We’ll see each other again.” (Drama in that too, doubtless, both in the Catholic invocation and in the emphatic prophecy of something so uncertain.)

She smiled and kept smiling from the kerb till the cab drove away. As if to complete an ordered cycle of events, she entered Saks’, walked round, then left by a different door and took another taxi home. Norris was at college, Austen had not yet returned from downtown, and Richards (the butler whom they still called ‘new’, though it was four years since Dunne’s death) said there had been no calls. She sat by the fire in the library and glanced through the afternoon papers. News from Europe looked bad again. She thought of Paul packing in his hotel room, having dinner somewhere (he could find company if he wanted it), perhaps going to a theatre, then driving down to the pier to catch the boat. He had not named it, and she consulted the list to find what sailed at midnight. The Bremen.

Austen came in, and they had the usual drink before going up to change, then another drink before dinner. She gazed at him admiringly, challenging herself to think how handsome he was for fifty-five. And so KIND… “Carey, you look exhausted.”

“Do I? Goodness knows I haven’t done much—just a few odds and ends of shopping.” (IDLE? Could the word be used about her life? She managed Austen’s domestic affairs efficiently, she was on committees of various organizations, she gave teas and lunches to raise funds for good causes…)

“Must be the weather, Carey. When it began that sleeting drizzle this afternoon I kept wishing we’d stayed a few weeks longer in Florida.”

She hadn’t really noticed the sleeting drizzle. She said: “We can look forward to the summer. It’s nearly April already… Do you think there’ll be a war in Europe?”

“I imagine so.”

“When? This year?”

“Oh, I can’t say that. I thought you meant within the foreseeable future.”

“How far into the future can you foresee?”

He smiled. “Why do you ask? The news in the paper?”

“It’s serious, isn’t it?”

“I think it is.”

“Isn’t there ANY kind of security anywhere?”

“You mean some country to run to or put money in?”

“More than that. Isn’t there some way of feeling that whatever happens certain things in one’s own life are safe? Maybe that’s a selfish feeling, but it’s what I mean by security.”

“I’d call it only an ILLUSION of security at best, but of course for those whom it satisfies it’s all right.”

“Well, how can one get it?”

“I don’t really know. I suppose some people BUY it—hence the uses of good investment stocks. And others imagine it—perhaps religion helps in that.”

“Oh dear, what an icy way of looking at things.”

“It’s an icy world, Carey, except for the small corner of warmth at one’s own fireside.”

She knew he was telling her, obliquely in his fashion, how much he loved her, and it was comforting, but at the moment she found it easier to be disturbed by the remarkable similarity of Paul’s views and his about security. Nothing, she felt, could symbolize insecurity more than their agreement.

On an impulse to treat him as frankly as he deserved, she said: “Guess whom I saw today on Fifth Avenue?… PAUL… of all people.”

Just as Paul would make drama, so Austen would destroy it if he could. He answered, in a tone that could have been a parody of an Englishman receiving news that his house was on fire: “Really? What was he doing in New York —or didn’t you stop to talk to him?”

“He’s sailing back to Europe tonight. He dragged me off to lunch, and it was all I could do to keep him from taking me to Twenty-One. We went to a place on Upper Broadway. I don’t suppose anyone saw us.”

“Doesn’t much matter if they did. How is he? Quite prosperous nowadays, I believe.”

“He seems to be. His mother died. That’s what he came over for. Just a short visit. He has big plans for a new picture.”

“Still in Germany?”

“No, France now.”

“Well, that makes a change. He’s really a true internationalist—he doesn’t care where he lives provided he can do the work he wants… He didn’t talk of coming back here to direct any more plays?”

“No, and I don’t think he will. The stage doesn’t give him the chance to be such a dictator. Or so I gathered, though of course he didn’t put it that way. In films he can control more people more of the time.”

“Provided he makes it pay. One flop and that kind of dictatorship can end up pretty badly. The same, by the way, applies to Hitler. He can’t afford to have a flop either. As long as he goes on winning he’s safe, but sooner or later something else will happen and… By the way, has Paul married again?”

“He didn’t say. I should imagine not.”

“You mean you didn’t ask?”

“To tell the truth I never thought about it. Paul married or unmarried makes so little difference to the kind of person he’d be—”

“And which he still is, I presume?”

“Oh yes. I thought at first he’d changed a lot, but it was only the shock of seeing him. He doesn’t look much older.”

“Fatter? You always told me he put on weight easily.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps not. He looked more… to me… it’s hard to think of the right word…”

“Well, now, what DID he look?”

Austen was smiling and she answered honestly, yet knowing it would take the smile from his face: “He looked GREATER, Austen.”

It had always been Austen’s dream that as Norris grew older their misunderstandings would disappear and a friendly father-and-son relationship develop; but this did not happen by the end of the boy’s schooldays, and Harvard, which was to have performed the miracle if nothing else could, proved a special disappointment. For it was there that Norris became avant-garde both artistically and in politics, and this worried Austen all the more because he found it difficult to tell either Carey or Norris exactly why. Clearly it was not because he was shocked by the boy’s opinions as such, and it annoyed him to guess that Norris thought so. But it was one thing for himself, in private and with regret, to doubt the future of the capitalist system, and quite another thing for Norris to do so openly and disputatiously. Thus even the feeling they shared was a barrier rather than a union, especially with the approaching need for Norris to consider what he was going to do in the world.

Years before, when a brash newspaper reporter had asked Austen to what he attributed his business success, Austen had been stung to the epigram: “I always sell too soon.” Actually this was true; he had sold out, and what was more, sold short, as early as 1928, and during the first half of 1929 it had required iron nerve not to admit himself wrong and get back into the market. The years that followed had trebled his fortune, and during this period there had doubtless developed the tight-lipped ambivalence of his attitude towards life. For he was a genuinely kind man, devoted to the few whom he considered his friends; and the spectacle of ruin all around him, the ruin that was of such profit to himself, gave him a complete absence of personal pleasure as well as grim satisfaction in finding how right he had been.