Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

“I think I know what you mean. Too Jules-Vernal, my husband once said. My first husband,” she corrected herself, and then wondered why it had mattered enough to do so.

He smiled. “Jules-Vernal? Of course, people still believed in progress in those days, so Jules Verne was just a romantic, but today, when every amateur talks calamity at every cocktail party… I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to sound superior.”

“But you probably are superior—that’s why I’m asking you these things. Isn’t there anything we can do—any of us—you— or even me?”

“That again I don’t know. The problem seems to be worrying the best minds in the world—”

“If they ARE the best. And you’re just an astronomer. So you’ll go on with your work—up here—till the whistle blows?”

“Well, won’t movie people go on making pictures—”

“—and bankers go on making money and lawyers go on filing suits and everyone else go on with whatever they do for a living?”

“Why, yes, I expect they will.”

She said, after a rather tense pause: “You know, professor, it all reminds me of a play I was once in—a dreadful thing which we all realized was dreadful, yet we kept on rehearsing in a sort of hypnotic trance as if we were stuck in a groove of disaster and had to go through with it to the end.”

“What happened?”

“It flopped—just as we’d all known it would.”

“And what do you think could have been done to prevent that?”

“Somebody—maybe me, because I was the star—somebody after the first rehearsal should have said: ‘Are we all crazy?’”

“But if you all were, how would that have helped?”

During the argument his voice had grown colder and more distant, until this last remark was more like an answer in ice, a final verdict, than a question. Then he got up, as if to change both the temperature and the perspective. She still looked at him without moving. If only she could stay a little longer…

She said: “I’m not crazy any more like that. I think I would know now, and warn the others in time… IN TIME, of course, is the whole point. IS there time in the world today? Oh, but there must be. If we need a miracle we must have one. Suppose you were lost in a cave in pitch darkness, would you lie down and die or fumble around to try to find a way out?”

“I’d try to find a way out, because I’d know there was one, since there’d been a way in.”

“But maybe the way out today ISN’T the way in. Perhaps that’s the mistake we’ve been making.” She broke off with a bemused smile. “I don’t know why I suddenly feel so optimistic. Could it be the altitude? How high is it here?”

He smiled also. “Five thousand seven hundred feet. And that reminds me of something somebody once said—Chesterton, I think—about the difference between the mathematician and the poet. The mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head, the poet tries to get his head into the heavens… But here, you see, even without being a poet…”

“I have a stepson who’s neither and yet he tries to do both,” she interrupted. The word ‘stepson’, which she could not recall using before about Norris, threw her like a fluffed line in a play, so that she went on, less securely: “He had an idea to study medicine and go out to some tropical island and doctor the natives. No particular reason except that he thought he’d rather do it than anything else.”

“Then he should. That’s one of the best reasons for doing anything.”

“I’m so glad to hear you say that.”

He was looking at his watch. “I think everything will be ready by now… Oh, but before we go—I mustn’t forget.” He pulled open the drawer and found the little girl’s autograph book. He was the naďve one now, warmer and closer. “Her first name’s Milly—she left it for me to write in, but when she finds your name too…” He offered his pen.

“Why, of course.” She took the book and wrote in it: “For Milly from Carey Arundel with love. ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.’” And the date.

“It’s really most kind of you to take the trouble, Miss Arundel.”

“Oh no. No trouble at all. I wish it were always as easy to give a little pleasure.”

Then he saw what she had written. She could see it startled him. “That’s… that’s very nice. But I’ll have to explain it to her, won’t I?”

“You can show her the label on the record and say you played it here tonight and I wanted to do something, somehow, so that it shouldn’t ever be forgotten.”

“_I_ wouldn’t have forgotten… Shall we walk over now?”

He guided her again by flashlight along the pathway that led across the rounded hump of the mountain-top to the Observatory. The huge aluminium structure glistened dimly as they approached it. He began to talk about what she would presently see, and after she had met his assistant (a good-looking youth named Christianson) his manner became progressively more impersonal. It was doubtless the same little lecture he had given to countless other visitors—terse, elementary, decked out with a few simple-minded witticisms. He even perpetrated the most obvious of all—“A star come to look at the stars,” he told Christianson. It was all Miss Arundel this and Miss Arundel that, but she knew that in a truer sense his politeness and admiration stopped short of real concern; she was just a charming inhabitant of a lower world who earned as much in a week as he did in a year; AND HE DID NOT CARE. Out of sheer kindness he would have done as much for her, perhaps more, had she been Mrs. Anybody from Anywhere.

When they left, after an hour or so, he asked if she would like some coffee, but she felt he hoped she would decline; she had heard Christianson locking up as they walked away, and it occurred to her that probably they would both go to bed as soon as she had gone.

Christianson caught up with them as they reached the parking lot. It was about a quarter to four. He said: “It’s almost dawn. You’ll see the sunrise before you’re home. Wouldn’t you rather have the top up? It’ll be chilly.”

“No, I like it open. I’ll wear this extra coat.”

Lingard helped her on with it. “What a beautiful car! You should hear my old jalopy wheezing and sputtering when I bring it up here… Mind how you take the curves.”

She put out her hand. “It’s been so nice, professor. I can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed it.”

“The firmament or the argument?”

“Both. And Bach too. Now THERE’S a man who had his head in the heavens.”

“Yes, and didn’t do too badly on earth either. I think he had twenty children.” He laughed and turned to Christianson. “I played my favourite record for Miss Arundel while we were waiting. The Chorale.”

She laughed back as she answered: “Why, of course, THAT’S why I feel optimistic. Bach abhors a catastrophe too… Twenty, did he? How wonderful!… And please, professor, do give me a ring when you come down to earth—either of you, or both of you—I’m probably going away fairly soon, so don’t leave it too long… Oh dear, I’m not in the book —I’d better give you my number.”

She began fishing in her purse, but he said: “Just tell it to me. I can always remember numbers.”

“You’re sure you can? It’s Excelsior 16641.”

“That’s easy. Happens to be the square of 129… Good night, Miss Arundel. And thanks again for the autographing.”

“Good night… Good morning, rather. Goodbye, Mr. Christianson.”

She started the car and drove away. What she intended to do was not even then quite clear in her mind; final decision, like Paul’s, might come by chance or caprice, some lightning alchemy of time or place. The music, like the road, like something in her own head, went round and round—and who would have thought that 16641 was the square of 129? That revelation, with all its hint of things hidden before one’s own eyes, made some mental link with the look of emptiness as she turned the downhill corners; it was almost dawn, but the sky seemed blacker, far more abysmal than on the way up. No doubt cars had met with accidents or near-accidents on this road before; the headlights showed up the scuffs on the guard-rails. No guard-rails on the road over the Sally Gap, where she had driven once with her mother and Fitzpomp in an old-fashioned horse-drawn wagonette—skies cloudy-clear, mountains blue-green in the sun-shadow, no talk of trouble in those days, so it must have been before the Easter Rebellion; that would make her eleven years old or less. Poor little Fitzpomp with his asthma pills and Gaelic verbs and the muscle-building machine. Those walks with him, her little-girl’s hand in his, sometimes through the fields beside the Dodder, or along the Blessington road where the steam tram tooted a greeting as it passed… and then the final scene, obliterating all others when she let herself think of it… the house in Terenure that Sunday morning, poor little Fitzpomp, leaving her that letter… unwilling for her to think (even if she could) that it was all a mishap—unwilling to quit the play without the fullest value of an exit. And the quote from Seneca—the stoic quote—“One cannot complain of life, for it keeps no one against his will “. Perhaps, though, if one had acted professionally in life, one could more easily resist that last temptation—as a good actor will sometimes, for the sheer selflessness of it, take his leave as unmemorably as he can. Or perhaps if one had (to use Paul’s phrase) a ready-made audience for the next thing one did, no matter what it was, one could choose that next thing, no matter what it was, with some deep regard for others… Poor Fitzpomp, with no ready-made audience at all… She saw in passing that at one point the guard-rail was broken; maybe some car had actually gone through. She thought of the crash, the curving fall, the few seconds of being almost airborne… she remembered a scene like that in a movie, a car upturned at the foot of a cliff, its occupants dead, but a radio freakishly undamaged, and music—dance music—going round and round… She switched on her own car radio. Sure enough, dance music. Then, after a moment, an early morning news bulletin… Berlin… President Truman… the Iron Curtain… a sentence that made her laugh aloud. “Mother Nature went on a rampage yesterday in our nation’s capital.” How Paul would enjoy that. Mother Nature went on a rampage. She had always had far more time for radio listening than he, and had gathered these flowers whenever she chanced on them and offered them to him like nosegays. She must remember that one, if… if, that is, she ever saw him again. Then suddenly she heard his name.