Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

“Hardly box-office, Paul.”

“Ah, how necessary that is! That’s why I came to see you. I’m getting a bit desperate.”

“Desperate?”

He nodded, then moved from the fire and sat carefully in an armchair. She studied him with an effort of concentration, ticking off in her mind the many changes which were not, in the aggregate, so very much—hair wilder and completely grey, the bones of the face more high-lighted, the eyes brighter than ever, the chin jutting below the lower lip, the hands red-veined and nervous. He could have been, as the journalist had said, at least in his sixties; one might also have guessed that he had lost much weight and was beginning to put a little of it back, but into a seemingly shrunken frame. Yet all in all he looked rather well, with something of an old man’s polished-apple health.

“I’m broke, Carey, and I want a job.”

She smiled. “I don’t know about the job, but I can give you some money.”

“No, I want a lot of money—enough to work with. I have an idea for a picture—box-office and also great… You know those sons of bitches in France won’t have me back to finish the last one? Won’t even let me into the country! The lies they spread—that I was pro-German, that I offered to make Nazi films for Goebbels—not a word of truth in any of it—not a word!”

“I’m very glad to hear that.”

“But they won’t believe me. They CHOOSE not to believe me.” He launched into a long account of his martyrdom, from which he emerged as his own hero and the victim of malicious conspiracy and calculated persecution. He had always had a tendency to consider himself either ill-fated or ill-treated —accepting good fortune as no less than his deserts, and misfortune as some species of deliberate evil planned against him. Carey was surprised to find herself regarding him dispassionately, noting the progress of his obsession; yet at the same time she felt a very simple sympathy. She tried to imagine what it could have been like for him to spend over three years behind barbed wire—the merely physical hardships—confinement, cold, bad food, poor medical care. Oddly, perhaps, it was not of these that he made most complaint—on the contrary, he referred to them almost derisively, and his recurrent phrase ‘that damned camp’ was in the mood he might have inveighed against ‘that damned waiter’ in a restaurant, or a neighbour’s ‘damned radio’. He even joked about his loss of forty pounds in weight (at one time), and the outdoor work in rain and cold that had given him arthritis. From what she could gather the conditions at the camp had been rough, but not vicious; there had been misery rather than cruelty, and the camp commandant seemed to have been merely a stupid martinet. Paul was contemptuous of him—“a man who broke his word to me on every possible occasion”. (This, in view of their relative positions, seemed to Carey revealing enough.) But his bitterest grudges were against fellow-inmates who, he said, had spread poison about him after the general release, so that he was now persona non grata with the French; and on a special pinnacle of detestation there was a certain Frenchman, formerly his own assistant director, who was now in charge of the company that had been making the Job film. “You can guess why HE doesn’t want me back. A second-rater. If HE finishes the film, it’ll turn into a glorified floor show—that’s his type of mind—drilling a few dancing girls and he calls it direction…”

He went on till at length Carey interrupted: “There doesn’t seem much you can do about it, Paul, now you’re here. And you ought to be glad you’re here —I’ll bet there are thousands in Europe today who’d change places with you.”

“Okay then, so I’m here. What do I care where I am, after all? I can work any place. But it costs more here. I want a million dollars.”

She smiled again. “That’s a nice round figure.”

“I’m serious.”

“But you don’t seriously think I can write you a cheque for it?”

“I haven’t asked you for money at all. I’ve merely said I’m broke and I want a job.”

“Then let’s be practical. I’d like to help you, but what’s really in your mind? That I should ask my husband?”

“Not if you’re going to talk to him about HELPING me. Why SHOULD he help me? I’m offering something—something that ought to appeal to him as a business man.”

“I doubt if it would.”

“You mean he isn’t tempted by eighty or a hundred per cent on an investment? Several of my pictures have made it—he can have the figures if he wants—”

“Paul… quite apart from all that, doesn’t it occur to you he might not want to do business with you at all?”

“I never met a rich man who wasn’t ambitious to make himself richer. Maybe he’s the exception.”

“Maybe he is. He certainly doesn’t put money before EVERY other consideration. You don’t know him.”

“I don’t want to. There’s nothing personal in any of this. I ask nothing for myself except employment for my brain, the pride and pleasure of artistic creation, and a pittance to live on.”

She laughed, partly because she knew what Paul’s idea of a pittance was, but chiefly because she was already transferring some of her indignation from Austen to Paul, and the load being thus more equally distributed made it feel less of a load altogether. She said: “Look, Paul, your affairs are no longer anything to do with me, so this is a free gift of advice. Get off that high horse and don’t be so arrogant. Because, if you can bear the truth, you’re not quite great enough to get away with it—you aren’t a Bernard Shaw or a Toscanini—”

“In my own field I am.”

He said that with the kind of simplicity that baffled argument even if it did not carry conviction.

“Well, anyhow, till the world admits you are—”

“Till then I must be on my best behaviour—or perhaps on my knees… is that it? And if I don’t—or won’t—what’s the alternative? Starvation? Even in that damned camp I didn’t have to BEG for a crust of bread.”

“Oh, stop talking nonsense—why must you dramatize everything? You’re not going to starve. But you’re probably not going to get a million dollars either… In the meantime, have some tea.”

“Thank you.”

She rang the bell. “And put your health first. It’s more important than any other plans you have. Is the treatment you’re taking for arthritis doing you good?”

“Yes, thank heaven.”

“I wish you’d let me pay for it… please, Paul, let me do that.”

“I would, but it doesn’t cost anything.”

“What?”

“It’s free—at the hospital. If I had some wretched little job bringing in a few dollars a week they’d put me in chains to make me pay, but as I haven’t a cent I get it for nothing. Isn’t that wonderful? Only the rich and the broke have a chance these days—the in-betweens are just out of luck.”

“But how do you LIVE? WHERE do you live? Are you in New York?”

He gave her an address.

“How do you manage without money?”

He grinned. “You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? I borrow where I can and run up bills. Didn’t you and I do that once? Don’t you remember?”

“But eventually, Paul…”

“Yes, I know. It’s a problem. After all, I’m a citizen, they can’t intern me here. I’m perfectly free to rob a bank, or hitch-hike to Florida, or panhandle on Forty-Second Street.”

She went to a desk and quickly wrote out a cheque for a thousand dollars while he went on talking. He talked wildly, extravagantly, and she only half listened. Then she came back and placed the folded cheque in the side-pocket of his coat.

“Thank you very much,” he said casually, without looking at it, but not ungraciously.