Джеймс Хилтон: Morning Journey

“Already? This is as far as you go? Well, thanks. Very good of you. Can I get a street car from here into Dublin?”

STREET CAR? “Oh yes, of course. They stop over there.” She pointed.

“Much obliged for the lift,” he said, climbing down with caution. She noticed he was not very agile. “It’s a hot day,” he added, mopping his forehead. “How about having a cup of tea somewhere?”

“And what would I do with the horse?” She half smiled, not so much to him as to herself about him. Maybe he thought a two-year-old would wait at the kerb like a car—a city fellow, evidently (she was wrong about that, for he came from Iowa, but she was basically right, since he had always been peculiarly inept at country ways). Paul Saffron. He had told her his name but had shown no curiosity about hers, and that too had rankled, giving her a sudden defensive pride in being Irish, and in the duality of Irish life that made nobody either countrified or citified to an absurd extent.

He was still mopping his forehead. “I wonder, then, is there a place I could get some ice-cold beer?”

“Ice in Dunleary in the month of August?” She shook her head at a rueful angle… PAUL SAFFRON. “And besides, the pubs aren’t open yet.”

“I see. Like the English. I thought you were free of them now.”

“Sure, but they had us so long we learned all their bad habits.”

He grinned. (More for his article. Irish counterpart of the New York taxi-driver—never at a loss for an answer.) “You said some name just then that I didn’t quite catch?”

“Dunleary? It’s the new name for Kingstown. Or rather the old name before our oppressors changed it. So we changed it back. It’s spelt Dun Laoghaire… And Dublin is Baile Atha Cleath.”

“Tell me that again. How must I say it?”

“Better not say it at all, or nobody’ll know what you’re talking about. It’s a craze they have these days for turning everything into Gaelic. Dublin’s still good enough for most people.” She gave ‘Dublin’ this time the caressing, almost Brooklynese vowels of the patois.

He looked as if the whole subject of place names and pronunciations were infinitely beyond his comprehension, for he had heard again that peculiar note in her voice that set him listening without taking in the words. It made him, from the sidewalk, give her a slow upward scrutiny and then put the question that had been in his mind from the first. “What’s the matter with your leg?” For she was still sitting on it.

“‘Tis broke,” she answered.

Her voice was so much in his ears that he didn’t immediately show that he caught the joke; and this, it seemed, was an extra joke at his expense, for after a few full seconds of relish she drove off laughing.

When she got back to the house on the hill, she could not stop thinking about the American, for he had told her, amongst so much else, that though his current task was journalism, he had directed plays in New York and the real love of his life was the theatre. Which would have been a natural cue for her to tell him about herself, but she had failed to do so, partly because she was still recovering from the initial shock of the meeting, but chiefly because his complete absorption in his own affairs had teased her to a more and more deliberate concealment of hers. She would not disclose anything that would interest him so much. Or would it? As soon as the doubt prevailed she wished she had told him. Fortunately, it would be easy to let him know, since there were only three Dublin hotels at which he would be likely to stay.

Neither could Paul, on the tram, stop thinking of her, and for a reason that flattered them both: he had already diagnosed what he called a histrionic personality. Not, of course, that it was specially rare; many types in all walks of life were apt to be so equipped (auctioneers, athletes, and the clergy, for instance); besides which, one often met the unlikeliest people who made their personal or professional world a stage and their own lives a continuous play. To be an actor, a real actor, much more was needed than any kind of personality; nevertheless, to have the right kind was a good start.

By midnight of that August evening he was already blaming himself for the incredible stupidity of not having enquired even the girl’s name—how on earth could he trace her, even if he should want to? For it might well become a whim to do so, as casual as her own voice answering him about her leg. “‘Tis broke.” It was the way he would have liked her to say it if it had been a line in a play.

By that same late evening Carey was writing three identical notes addressed to Mr. Paul Saffron at the Gresham, the Shelbourne, and the Hibernian hotels. She wrote that since he had stressed so much his interest in the theatre, doubtless he would like to visit the famous one in Dublin, so she would leave a couple of tickets for next week’s opening night for him to pick up at the box office in Middle Abbey Street. She signed herself ‘Carey Arundel’, but she still left it to him to discover, if and when he cared to, WHAT she was.

He was not, as it happened, staying at any of the three hotels, but at a private house called Venton League, the home of a rich brewer whom he had met at a party in London, and who had promptly extended the invitation on learning of his Irish visit. Brewing, one of the more historic trades, has almost escaped the stigma of being a trade at all, and its distinguished dynasties rank high and are considerably international; Michael Rowden, in his late fifties, was a fine fleur of the culture, a Rothschild of his line, with family connections well scattered across England, Europe, and America, and financial interlockings from Milwaukee to Dortmund. Had he been a younger son he might have made an excellent diplomat, bishop, or even cardinal (for he was both a Catholic and a bachelor); as it was, he sold beer (with an inverted snobbery that made him thus describe his business), drank wine, collected French impressionist paintings, and found ample time to cultivate the habits of a gentleman-savant. Temperament and wealth insulated him from most of the troubles of life, even from the Irish ‘troubles’, for neither side wished to drive into exile a man so eminently taxable. The hotheads had once put Venton League on their list of large houses to be burned, but Rowden had let it be known that he didn’t much care; its destruction would spare him the eventual problem of whether to demolish it for villa development or bequeath it to Holy Church for some institutional use. And there really was a sense in which he did not care; he would be quite happy, if he had to be, in London or Palm Beach or Capri. Yet Venton League did, for all that, give him a special sort of satisfaction; it was the house of his ancestors, as far back as four generations, and family pride, well tempered with cynicism about it, was strong in him. Moreover, since this was Dublin and not any other place in the world, there was a uniqueness in the kind of life he could live there—an eighteenth-century quality marvellously and miraculously preserved into the fabric of the twentieth. Leisurely elegance, half urban and half arcadian, part scholarly, part merely sophisticated, gave a ripeness even to anachronism; the kitchens were monstrous and old-fashioned, yet the bathrooms combined the luxuries of ancient Rome and modern America; the library windows offered a view of formal gardens backgrounded by green mountains, yet at the end of the half-mile carriage drive, and just outside the lodge gates, the threepenny tram started for the Pillar in O’Connell Street. All this suited him and immensely intrigued his constant succession of house guests. For as a suave Maecenas to young men of promise he performed a function all the more admirable because he took so much pleasure in it; at Venton League there was always apt to be some visiting painter, writer, musician, or even tennis champion, and the language at dinner was almost as often French or Italian as English. Rowden had not needed much acquaintance with Paul at that London party to decide that he would make an apt recruit, both culturally and racially, to the Venton League ménage—a young American with literary and theatrical connections… good… he could stay as long as he liked.