Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

“After the way Randolph botched the cutting?”

“Doesn’t seem to have done much harm.” (There were a few instances in which, from a commercial angle, she thought Randolph’s cutting had done good, but she would not invite the wrong sort of argument by saying so.)

“Harm? To whom? To what? The popcorn sales?”

“Oh, come now, Paul, you can’t talk like that. It’s been a critical success too.”

He sighed in a bemused way. “Ah, those critics. One of them said that in the street scenes I’d caught the pulse-beat of the American rhythm. That tickled me, not only because I don’t know what the hell it means, but because there was once a critic in France who said I was so much in tune with the Gallic spirit it was hard to believe I hadn’t been born in Paris. And in Germany when I made Berliner Tag they brought up my Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry to explain THAT miracle… All nonsense. People are people. Watch ‘em anywhere and you’ll see. Great discovery. The Saffron touch—even in a cops and robbers epic.”

“You know it isn’t really as simple as that.”

“SIMPLE? Whoever said it was simple? To see life as it is, plain, not gift-wrapped—why, it’s as hard as being note-perfect in the Hammerklavier.”

She tried to steer him back to her main point, which was that the chance he had taken had come off abundantly, and that from now he would find himself in demand on something like his own terms, if these were at all reasonable. She told him then about her lunch with the other producer. “No need to rush things. Let Michaelson do most of the talking. Just sit back and realize that Morning Journey puts you in a market that’ll go on rising for some time yet.”

“You’re a smart gal,” he commented absently.

“Am I? It’s the first time I’ve ever really wanted to be.”

“I know how you feel,” he responded moodily. “That’s why I’m getting out of the place.” He said that without any emphasis, as if it were not an important remark.

“WHAT?”

“You heard me, as they say in every damned script I’ve ever read out here.”

“Paul… what do you mean? What’s happened?”

And of course nothing had happened except the worst that could have, for Paul’s equanimity; merely that as a result of Morning Journey’s success he had been showered with scripts by producers and agents who hoped he might be interested in some property of theirs; a few of these scripts were averagely good, but many were old stuff dusted off and sent him on the ‘how can you lose?’ principle. Paul should have ignored them, or at least have glanced at only a few pages to convince himself of their quality, but it seemed that out of sheer obtuseness he had read them carefully—as carefully as he had journeyed to small theatres in out-of-the-way suburbs if ever one of Randolph’s earlier pictures had been showing there. The fact that he had always returned from these expeditions fuming was no indication that he had not derived a macabre pleasure from them, once he had decided that an indictment against Randolph must be built up with every available piece of material. And now, in a similar but larger sense, an indictment against the whole industrialized picture industry was brewing in his mind, and the pile of scripts he had been sent was just the yeast to make it rise. So it had risen—mountainously. He was in a mood, Carey realized, when he was probably intending to do something he wanted to do and was finding many excellent reasons besides the real one. He kept saying: “There’s no mutiny here, Carey,” and when she asked what he meant he said one of those things she knew he had either said before or had coined so happily that he would certainly say it again; he said that to breed art and keep it alive there should be a continual mutiny of ideas. “But there isn’t any here. This place is swarming with craftsmen who might have been artists if only they’d stayed away. And everybody’s scared—scared of each other, of the future, of gossip columns, of ulcers, of the public, of Washington, of censorship —there’s something gets into the blood from being scared of so many things all the time—you can smell it, and I’ve smelt it lately… These folks are afraid for their lives, they’ve built themselves a concentration camp that they’re all fighting to stay inside—a damned democratic de luxe concentration camp where you hold elections by postcard poll of morons and smart alecks, where you bypass the adult intelligence and shoot for the blood pressure of the twelve-year-old!”

“That reminds me of what Mitchell said,” she interposed mischievously.

“Mitchell? The writer? Did he? I don’t recall.” (But she knew he did; he would never forget Mitchell, who had answered him back, who had left him hurt, speechless, angry, with ghost-phrases in his mind for ever that he could only exorcise partially by purloining them and adapting them for his own use.)

But he was continuing now, in full flood: “Anyhow, that’s the way it is with the people here—they’re afraid for their lives and they’ll do anything for those lives except run for them—they could if they wanted—the gate’s wide open that way—the fence is to keep the crowd OUT, not IN. Well, I’M getting out. I know they’d never really let me do what I want here. They’d hate me, I’d never be one of them, they’d just give me squatter’s rights inside the barbed wire… Oh dear, now I’ve upset you, I suppose—I always do, don’t I?”

He hadn’t, by what he had said; it was the recognition of his mood that troubled her, for so often in the past it had been a storm signal in their personal affairs, and though it could hardly be that again, she was disturbed in a way she found hard to explain.

“So you’re thinking of going away?” she said wanly.

“Oh, not immediately. I mean, not tomorrow or the next day. Maybe in a few weeks. Greg’s asking for time off too. Hasn’t had a real vacation in years, he says. We’re going to do something—somewhere—maybe in Europe. Don’t know what—yet. And by the way, that’s a secret. Not a word or it’ll be in all the columns.”

“Paul, you know I never gossip… But about YOU, after all you’ve just said—I don’t know quite WHAT to answer…”

“Then that’s good news, because I thought you’d be mad at me.”

“MAD at you?… Oh, Paul, I’m too—too BAFFLED—to be that. I wish I knew what it is…”

“What WHAT is?”

“The thing that drives you. What IS it you go for in life? I know it isn’t money—I used to think it was success, but you’d get that here… Is it fame? Or power? Or pleasure of a kind—do you EVER get pleasure? Or is it something inside yourself that forces you?”

He gave her the look she knew so well, because it was the most frightening reply of all, as if he had switched off his mind to a care-and-maintenance basis until the subject was changed. He said blandly: “No particular mystery about it, Carey. I just have my work to do and—”

“I know, I know. And that’s what you call it—your WORK. But it’s more than that. Work’s only a word… Oh, words, they’re not much use, are they? Greg can say ‘vacation’ and it just means golf, but to you— “

“You don’t really like Greg, do you?” he interrupted, switching on his mind again.

He knew she did, and she knew the question he was asking was a different one. She answered: “It isn’t that, Paul… Oh, never mind Greg—he can look after himself—he’s established—rich—”

“Sure—nearly as rich as your old man and a damn sight freer with his money.”

There was generally in any of his arguments a single explosion, rarely more than one, of sheer vulgarity; it so often marked a climax that she almost welcomed it. She said quietly: “You may as well tell me just what’s in your mind, now you’ve begun. You think Greg will finance you in some picture of your own, is that it?”