Джеймс Хилтон: Morning Journey

The thought of leaving the city and driving into the mile-high mountains lifted her spirits again to a peak of their own; she changed into street clothes and went out. Her car had ample gas; she drove east along Sunset as far as Western, then turned north.

There was no doubt of her mental plight. She was in desperate need of reassurance which no one then available could give, and her own name on a darkened theatre marquee did nothing to help—rather the contrary, since it stressed the irony of being alone amidst so many sleeping strangers who knew her by sight and perhaps had warmed to her for a few moments of their waking lives. As she drove she felt the tingling of all her nerves into alternating fear and excitement, so that every car whose lights she saw in the rear-view mirror seemed to be following until it actually overtook; she was used to this illusion by now, and knew how foolish it was, but it made her drive a little faster than usual, though not recklessly. At the corner on Foothill where the climb began, the great eye of the observatory became a symbol in her mind of some ultimate scrutiny, and Professor Lingard himself a human answer to a different problem. For at their one meeting they had established kinship, she had been aware of it; she also guessed he was not a man to invite her to his mountain-top unless he had rather liked her. As she had said to Paul (the remark that had perhaps most of all shocked him), she found it easy to hit it off with men—Paul’s phrase for whatever there was of murk or mystery in his own concept of the relationship. She had an idea she would find it easy to hit it off with Professor Lingard if only his physical eye would leave the heavens for a moment… and at that she began to smile, for the quality in her that she freely agreed was sensual was always mixed up with smiling and fun—a comedy role that Paul had disapproved after the first entrancement, and Austen had accepted but never perfectly understood.

The mountains heaved into outlines against the blue-black sky; it was the smell of manzanita that crossed the roadway in gusts; the eyes of tiny animals blinked out of their secret, populated world… and there came to her mind the road over the Sally Gap, the climb so different from this, the car so different from this, herself so different from now, the point where she had left the road once and clambered through high gorse to the summit of Kippure; there had been tin cans on that summit, not left by picnickers but by gunmen on the run during the time of troubles—tin cans and rotting puttees and an old cartridge belt; and from the summit where one stood amongst the litter of men’s idiocy one could see far over the Gap to the great names of Wicklow—Mullaghcleevaun and Lugnaquilla that lay over the vale of Glenmalure…

And she remembered Paul as he had been for a little time after their marriage; his ways her own, his discovering joy over what was so natural to her, but partly as spectator even then, and later ceasing to applaud; his understanding of her that was deep at first, so that they had both felt that life could carry them on its own tide; but after a while the understanding had fled from the heart to the brain, and then (but only in his moments of greatness) back to a heart that was not hers.

She remembered that year in Los Angeles (for Hollywood had not yet become the magnetic, polarizing name), the year he had tried to crash the picture industry on the ground floor, and it would have none of him; the great names —Chaplin, Sennett, Lasky, Griffith. If only, she had often thought, if only someone then had given him a chance he might have become as great as they, and with an easing of so many frustrations that had bedevilled him since—not all, but many. In vain he had written letters, submitted ideas, sought interviews; his stage success in London had counted for nothing. That was the second year after their marriage, and he had already wooed the New York stage equally in vain. Careers also have currencies, and sometimes a prestige account in one country is not transferable to another; at any rate nobody in Hollywood was interested in English press clippings about Othello. They had rented a frame bungalow between Western and Vermont for twenty dollars a month, Paul assuming that even if he couldn’t find a studio job there was always journalism to fall back on. Gradually he had found how that, too, could fail him; either, after his taste of the stage, he could not write, or else the kind of thing he wrote had lost its small vogue. Merryweather was dead and there was no other editor interested in him. He kept on writing, nevertheless, and the stuff kept on coming back. Then, when they owed a couple of months’ rent, she had taken a job as waitress in a restaurant on Pico Boulevard—hard work, but she could earn enough to keep them both till at last his chance came to direct a play in New York —the one that led to the first big success.

And the strange thing was that this year in Los Angeles—the year he later chose to forget (because he thought of it only as the time and place of his failure)—had actually been the happiest in all her life. They had been so close together, and whenever she had returned from the restaurant or he after hours of fruitless job-seeking, the little house had been there to welcome them, its privacies their own and its tasks a pleasure. The first thing she had had to do was to patch the screens because of his phobia about flies; the second thing was to clip the pepper tree that did not let enough light into the room where he planned to work. And the last thing of all was on the day they left so jubilantly (he with the New York offer in his pocket); she had leaned out of the window as the taxi turned the corner, and something deep in her heart had said goodbye. For she had been able, in that house, to make him happy as never before or since; there he had needed her enough to accept the clearance she could make in the thickets of his emotions —a sunlit clearance before the jungle grew again.

Strange, the moments of pure emotion one remembered. There was a play tried out at New Haven (or was it Philadelphia?)—it had flopped so badly it never reached Broadway, but a curious thing, a very curious thing, happened on the second night. It was a Civil War play, with Lincoln, McClellan, Seward, Pope, and others in it—poor fustian stuff, but Paul had believed he could make it spectacular—one of those mistakes of his that always seemed fewer than they were. Anyhow, there was this play, with authentic scenes and uniforms and guns booming off-stage; and on the second night the press agent had thought to invite local Civil War veterans as guests of the management. About half a dozen came—tottering into the front row and cupping their ears to catch the lines; afterwards Paul asked them on stage to meet the cast and be photographed. So they came, and nobody knew what to say except one old fellow who suddenly hobbled up to General McClellan and shook his gnarled fist in the actor’s face while his own became contorted with rage. “For Christ’s sake, you——, why weren’t you there to help us at Manassas?” He would have struck the actor had not others led him away. The whole incident was chilling to all who witnessed it, and made the paltry little play seem paltrier than ever. No one had any hopes of success after that; it was as if a curse had been laid.

How odd the mixture when memory sinks its net into the past and makes a random haul, with the mind quiescent and bemused over its find, savouring the items with infinite detachment. For it was indeed a series of other Careys whom Carey saw in all these wayward recollections—a young woman climbing Kippure, a waitress serving pie ŕ la mode, an actress in crinolines… and now a woman over forty with her name on a thousand marquees, driving an open Cadillac on a summer night to a mountain-top observatory.