Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

Those days of the shooting of Morning Journey passed for her in a curious enclosed dream.

She heard from Norris—a warm, friendly note, not very long, discussing mostly the books he had been reading, telling little of affairs at the house. He mentioned that Austen would soon leave on a business trip to South America and had suggested he should go along with him, but he didn’t know whether he wanted to.

She wrote a long chatty letter in reply, the kind Austen could see if it so happened, describing her work, the progress of the picture, and the life she was living. She added that the South American trip sounded exciting, maybe it was the sort of change he needed.

She did not hear from Austen, but to him also she wrote a long chatty letter, describing her work, the progress of the picture, and the life she was living.

It was certainly a hard one, much more so than she had expected. She was up most mornings by six, to be ready on the set by eight for hair-dressing and make-up. Paul was always there by then, having stayed up all night (she sometimes concluded) to rewrite the scenes. She and Paul lived in apartments several miles from each other; their first meeting of the day was on the sound stage, and in the evenings, even if they dined together at a restaurant, they rarely said good-night later than ten. On Saturdays she allowed herself to accept party invitations; Sunday was a day of rest unless Greg Wilson drove her to the mountains or the sea. He bored her a little when he talked almost continually about Paul. His favourite remark was that he didn’t know how two such wonderful people could ever have separated, and once he varied this by saying he couldn’t understand how she could ever have let Paul go.

“But I didn’t let him go,” she answered. “He let me go.”

“Oh,” Greg exclaimed and was then silent, as if her reply had led him to an entirely new train of thought.

Sometimes during the lunch recess she and Paul would sit in her dressing-room with sandwiches and coffee, and this was really the quietest time they ever had together, certainly the most intimate. There were few places more peaceful than a studio sound stage during this hour-long interval; the big lights were out, technicians and actors had all left the job, sound-proof doors were closed, the huge building with its high roof, dark interior, and mysterious shapes of equipment and scenery had the air of a cathedral dedicated to some new and strange religion. Paul was human enough then to fall asleep, or smoke his big cigars, or talk of anything that came into his head, or even rehearse something privately with her if he wanted. And she in turn would hear his complaints, give him advice, and sometimes coax him into a more amenable attitude for the afternoon. “Paul,” she kept saying till it was almost a refrain, “DO remember what a chance you have. I know you aren’t getting all your own way, but you’re getting a lot, and if this turns out a good picture you’ll be able to ask for much more. DO make compromises. You’re so good, Paul, you’ll have all you want if you’ll only play your cards properly now.”

He would often talk to her, in staccato and seemingly unrelated snatches, about his experiences in Europe, though there was one period he rarely mentioned, even inferentially—and that was his three years in the internment camp. Like certain other parts of his life it was clearly destined for obliteration in his memory—the final anathema that his ego pronounced on hostile eventfulness. What he did remember, constantly, were incidents in earlier films of his that illustrated some point in Morning Journey. As he progressed further with the picture and revamped more of it to suit himself, it naturally rose in his estimation till he began to feel about it almost as he had done about a new play before opening night—i.e. that it was a masterpiece. ALMOST—but not quite, for the different conditions of picture-making involved so many other persons over whom he had no control, and whom, therefore, he could not exalt by such comprehensive praise.

A specific scene in Morning Journey called for Carey to show by her expression the horror of discovering hate in the eyes of someone she had thought loved her—a difficult emotion, and Paul had rehearsed the scene several times without being completely satisfied. During the lunch hour that day he told her of a scene in one of his German pictures in which the situation was as follows. A wife had been having an affair with a much younger man who was already tiring of it. At the crisis of a bitter quarrel, the woman turned a revolver on herself; the youth managed to wrest it from her and the quarrel then continued more hotly than ever. At a second crisis he became so incensed that, still holding the woman’s revolver, he pointed it at her and pulled the trigger. There was no report, and the woman’s eyes conveyed what had happened. SHE had known, but HE had not, that the weapon was unloaded. SHE had been merely putting on an act to impress him, but HE had been actually ready to kill her.

“I didn’t speak much German in those days,” Paul added, “and when I rehearsed the scene I told the actors to say anything they wanted to make it sound like a quarrel. Later on we had a writer, but I never even bothered to have his lines translated for me. It was the woman’s expression I was aiming for—the awful awareness in it. I got what I wanted too, because she was Wanda Hessely and Wanda could do anything. Remember her? You met her at Interlaken that time.”

“Yes, but I’m not as good an actress, you said.”

“That’s so. But you’re good enough.”

“And her scene was easier.”

“No—just as hard.”

“Anything’s easier with guns and things to play with.”

“Try it then.”

“Our scene?”

“No—the one she did. I’ll play the man. This is your gun.” He picked up the metal tube that had contained one of his big cigars. “Adlib the dialogue—anything… let’s go… Why not? Can’t do any harm.”

They went through the scene after a fashion, but Carey was less adept at improvising dialogue than Paul, and it struck her amidst her own difficulty that in adlibbing a quarrel he was very much on his home ground. The whole experiment was not very satisfactory and they ended by laughing. “Maybe it’s helped, though,” Paul said.

“By the way,” she asked, “what happened to Wanda Hessely?”

He shrugged. “There was a rumour she was killed in one of the Berlin air raids.”

“Oh dear, I hope not.”

He exclaimed sharply: “You what? You hope not? You dare to hope that out of all the millions of innocent people slaughtered during those horrible years SHE should have been spared—just because you happened to meet her once! What sublime egotism!”

The remark was so startlingly outrageous that she would have flared up but for the look she caught in time—the look that told her, out of long experience, that he had spoken thus to conceal some deep feeling of his own. He had always been like that, and only for a short time, just after their marriage, had she been able to free him a little. It was the more curious because in his work he was superbly free; without sentimentality or shrinking he could examine and expose the tenderest emotions. But off duty, so to say, certain rigidities clamped down, engendering even a perverse desire to appear callous, so that it was often at such moments that he said things that were most remembered against him.

She said, as to a child: “Don’t be silly, Paul.”

One evening, on impulse, she visited a doctor—not a fashionable one, or a specialist of any kind—just a local man whose office she had noticed near her apartment. She had begun to feel a peculiar tiredness lately, to which broken sleep had doubtless added. The doctor listened to her vague description of symptoms, examined her heart, and asked what was making her so nervous. She said she didn’t know. He then fumbled a few questions that would soon have led to an intimate discussion of her personal affairs, but she discouraged him and he ended by telling her she had a slight heart condition, nothing serious provided she avoided overwork and, above all things, did not worry. He advised a vacation if she could take one and she promised she would, very soon. She thanked him then, paid his fee, and felt both relieved and somehow much older as she left his office.