She had to laugh at that. “It can’t be so long since you WERE his age, Paul. He must be thirty at least. So don’t treat him like a son.”
“Of course I wouldn’t. To him I’m just an older man who’s already made his way in the world. A very pleasant relationship can be had on that basis.”
“Like you and Mr. Rowden in Dublin?”
“Perhaps… though I hadn’t thought of it.”
(She knew she had touched a nerve. Rowden was dead; they had seen it in the papers some years back. Paul had been sad after reading the obituary and had said then, without subsequent explanation, “I don’t think I treated him very well. He wanted to help me and I wouldn’t let him.”)
She answered: “Perhaps, then, it isn’t Malcolm who’s anything like you used to be, but you who fancy yourself growing up to be like Mr. Rowden… Only I hope you won’t.”
“Oh? I wouldn’t be ashamed of myself if I did.”
“But I still hope you don’t.”
Some sort of major issue was being stated by them, but in a minor key and without emphasis. He said after a pause: “All I meant is that Rowden was kind to me and I wasn’t as kind to him as I ought to have been, in some ways. You don’t know all the facts.”
It was on her tongue to reply: “Perhaps you don’t, either”—but she checked herself and smiled. She said instead: “Darling, we’re getting into deep waters. Just don’t let Malcolm tempt you into anything you don’t really want. That’s all _I_ mean.”
He laughed and said there was no fear of Malcolm tempting him at all —either into what he wanted or what he didn’t want. “I only tempt myself,” he added. “And then, invariably, I yield.” This being the kind of epigram, half purloined as a rule, with which he liked to end an argument, she was satisfied to say no more for the time being.
But Malcolm still remained, to her at least, a somewhat mysterious person. Everyman to him was charged with modern significance; he read into it some vast cosmic meaning that Carey would not for the world have disputed. Paul, on the other hand, saw it theatrically—as sheer spectacle and drama. They were probably well matched as collaborators, which is what Carey soon discovered them to be; and again it alarmed her, if only because it was unlike Paul to be able to collaborate with anybody about anything. Then it appeared that Paul was actually planning picture shots while Malcolm was writing a script.
She pretended to be casual. “It’s all right if it interests you, Paul, but what does Malcolm expect to come of it? I hope you haven’t promised him anything. It’s so easy nowadays to get yourself in a tangle.”
“Oh, he’s not that kind. We have no written agreements, anyway. Nothing to sue about.”
“He can’t be working like this for fun, though.”
“Why not? What would you have him do for fun? Play golf?”
“All right, darling—enjoy your joke. Golf wouldn’t do your figure any harm.”
“I’m thinning it down again now. I lost two pounds last week.”
Another bad sign. She said, still trying to disguise her seriousness: “Paul, why don’t you tell me what’s in that busy mind of yours?”
“Sure. There’s no secret about it—never has been. I’ve always said that one of these days I’ll make a picture.”
“But when will you find the time? The play’s quite likely to run all through next year.”
“If it does it won’t need me to keep it going.”
This was the first time he had ever said anything so sensible, yet in another way so ominous. She replied, still casually: “True, of course. Plenty of people commute between New York and Hollywood.”
“Hollywood? Good God, you can’t imagine anyone there would be interested in Everyman?”
“Who would, then?”
Expansively he answered: “Only the public. Only Thomas, Richard, and Henry, to whose pursuit of happiness the movies ought to be dedicated. Only the kind of people who paid to see Shakespeare and hear Wagner and read Dickens—only the world audience that never has missed a good thing whenever one comes along.”
This was the surest danger signal of all, because she knew he did not mean it. Artistically he was an authoritarian; he did what pleased him and had small regard for popular taste as an arbiter of quality. But when it suited him he could take the opposite and currently fashionable view, and chance acquaintances who caught him in such moods were apt to retain a wrong impression for life. Carey, however, was not taken in. She knew that when he said something he did not mean he must be meaning something he would not say.
She said quietly (ignoring Thomas, Richard, and Henry, as well as Shakespeare, Wagner, and Dickens): “But what about Malcolm? Has he done film work before? Come to that, Paul, has he had any theatrical or dramatic experience at all?”
Paul gave her an affectionately derisive pat. “You’re so practical, Carey. I’m glad I can answer yes. Malcolm once worked with Reinhardt in Germany.”
“I shouldn’t have thought that would have recommended him to you.”
He began to chuckle in lazy anticipation of a point about to be scored. “Ah, but Reinhardt FIRED him. I checked up on it. They disagreed. You know, Carey, he practically told Reinhardt to go jump in a lake!” He added, still chuckling: “And in German, I hope.”
He had had this grudge against Reinhardt ever since their first and only meeting, though the real reason why the two had apparently disliked each other on sight was doubtless that they were both dictators and perfectionists. At any rate, they had had a fantastic tantrum about something —fantastic because in its final stages Reinhardt had volleyed in German and Paul in English, both shouting together, with a Reinhardt minion translating like mad between them, and Carey standing by in much embarrassment but with an awareness that she would find the incident exquisitely funny in retrospect. Which she always did—as now.
* * * * *
For the one thing she had held on to, throughout all the routines of effort and failure, effort and success, was a sense of humour. It was an odd humour, rooted in a profound acceptance of the incongruities of life and perhaps also in that background of Ireland and Catholicism which, though she might seem to have lost both, was—at a deeper level—beyond her power to surrender. Paul, she knew, did not laugh in the same way or at the same things; especially he could not laugh at himself. But gradually, over a period of years, he had grown used to the way she laughed at him, and at themselves; he believed he had conceded her the privilege, and she never let him realize it was something neither of them could have prevented. Nor did he know how many times her own special humour had eased him out of trouble. When he was most unreasonable there was a way her mouth could twist which was hardly a smile, yet could bring the temperature down like a breeze through an opened window.
So in admitting that she would have been nothing without him, she had private knowledge that he without her would have made extra enemies and kept fewer friends. The one field in which he was almost impeccable and infallible was the theatre itself—that abstraction which to him was far more than the building or even the play. The theatre freed him from all that made muddle in his life, so that on the stage decision came to him purely and instantly from something deeper than his mind and sharper than his brain. When he directed her in comedy he seemed even to understand her sense of humour, doubtless because he was then in control of it. To understand anything he had to be in control. “I’m right when I do what I want,” he had once told her. “I’m wrong when I try to compromise or please others.” He meant, of course, in his work, but it was perhaps natural that an arrogance so unarguably justified should tend to become a habit elsewhere.
Those weeks at Mapledurham during that summer of 1929 were somehow crucial to Carey; it was as if the Everyman-Beringer affair acted like a catalyst, intensifying a vision of things already seen obscurely. Her life with Paul, she realized, had acquired a texture. She must guard him constantly from the kind of mundane error he was prone to; on the other hand, in anything touched by
his infallibility she must not try to influence him at all, and for her own ultimate sake as much as his. The problem lay in the delimiting of worlds. Perhaps it was a good thing, she reflected with a twisted smile for herself alone, that popes should not marry.
Thus, when she saw that the Everyman collaboration was more than a whim, she ceased to be openly critical of it, though she kept a watchful eye on Malcolm. That young man spent most of his time at Mapledurham, walking over from Moat Farm early in the morning and returning late at night; he and Paul were closeted together (the old-fashioned phrase seemed to suit the situation) for five or six hours each day. Usually Paul had discussed all his work with her, seeking not advice, but a sounding-board for his ideas; about this Everyman project, however, he became gradually less confiding. Once when she taxed him with this he answered that he knew she didn’t approve what he was doing, so he had chosen not to worry her.
“But Paul, I’d worry still more if I thought you had secrets from me.”
“Well, it’s no secret any more. I’m going to make a film with Malcolm in Germany.”
“GERMANY?”
“They have the best techniques there—and in France—they’re the only places where the art of the film isn’t dying of infantile paralysis.”
“And it’s all… arranged… already?”
“Practically all.”
“Including the financing angle?”
“Sure. No trouble about that.”
She was at the breakfast-table with him (the only meal of the day guaranteed to be without Malcolm) when this conversation had sprung up, and she had an idea that unless she had broached the subject he would not have told her, even yet. She said at length, calmly: “I suppose you’re sure what you’re doing is the right thing, Paul.”
“No, I’m not sure, this time. It’s a new venture—an experiment. That’s why I’ve kept you out of it… But if it’s a success you can count on me—one of these days I’ll make you into a movie star.” He laughed and added: “Besides, you’d hate to walk out of a play that still has a few hundred nights to run.”
“I would, I’ll admit that. But it isn’t going to be easy for me, away from you.”
“Oh, you’ll manage. A play like that can jog along.”
“I wasn’t thinking about the play… When do you go?”
“Sail on August twenty-fifth.”
“You’ve even fixed that?”
“Have to book far ahead, the boats are crowded.”
“Yes, I know, but… well, when do you expect to come back?”
“Before Christmas… Carey, you’re not really upset, are you?”
“Darling, if you’re doing what you feel you have to do, then everything’s fine so far as I’m concerned. That’s the way I discipline myself—if I didn’t, you’d never put up with me. It’s a bit of a miracle, really, the way we manage to put up with each other. But I’ll miss you, Paul. That’s something I CAN’T help.”
* * * * *
She didn’t miss him nearly as much as she had expected; indeed, she was rather startled to find how much smoother in many ways life was without him. Provided he was doing what he wanted in that infallible world of his, she could face the few months of his absence with something more than equanimity. She missed him most at the rehearsals before the beginning of the new theatre season, for she knew there were things he would not have tolerated, that the play could have benefited from the kind of sprucing-up he would have given it; on the other hand, it was booked solid till January and the audience at the reopening laughed as loudly and as often as ever, not noticing (she was sure) the lack of that little extra quality that Paul could always squeeze out of a performance. Perhaps the squeeze did not matter so much, in a comedy. She was torn between a schooled integrity that insisted it did matter, and a feeling of relaxation in being able to do a competent job night after night without having to worry about what Paul had said to offend one of the carpenters, or the house-manager, or somebody from a newspaper.
He wrote to her, fairly frequently but irregularly, from Berlin, giving her little information about the Everyman project, but conveying an impression that all was going well with it. He hardly ever mentioned Malcolm, and her own gossip about New York and the play never drew his answering comment. She was not surprised at any of this. Again, so long as he was all right, doing the work that satisfied him, she was content. She went to a few parties and enjoyed herself, discovering reluctantly how pleasant it was not to watch for danger across a crowded room, for Paul’s feuds with so many people had always made acceptance of a party invitation something of a risk. More often, though, she spent pleasant hours by herself—reading, shopping, attending matinées of other plays on her own free afternoons. Life went easily—at the theatre, at her apartment, and in a curious way within her inmost self.
Towards the end of that October came the big break on Wall Street. Like most people she and Paul were ‘in the market’; not to do what everyone else was doing would have seemed perilously close to that act of selling America short, which was, of course, a sin as well as an error. So, as they had accumulated more cash than they could spend, they had acquired the services of Andrew Reeves to manage the surplus—an elderly, highly respectable, and even conservative stockbroker who recommended only the blue chips and was cautious about too much buying on margin. All had gone well, and there had come a time when Carey could reckon, without undue excitement, that they were probably worth a quarter of a million dollars between them. Carey, in fact, was the one who dealt with all financial matters; she and Paul had separate accounts, but Paul had told Reeves that Carey was the one to say yes or no to any specific proposition. For Paul was fundamentally bored with money except when he needed it, so that the less he needed it the more bored he became. He would sign cheques and documents without looking at them if Carey had approved them first, and she doubted that he knew the names of the stocks that had given him quite large paper profits.
Carey did not follow the affairs of Wall Street with any day-to-day preoccupation, but she could not miss the headlines on October 23rd, when market leaders plunged as many as fifty points. Alarm was in the air by then; it was already affecting theatre audiences. At her apartment after the performance she found a wire from Reeves asking for additional margin on certain stocks she held. The amount was not more than she could afford, but the drop in prices was so different from anything she or Reeves had considered possible that she wondered if she should sell out the stuff on which she and Paul still had a profit. It was a nuisance his having left without giving her legal power to act for him, but perhaps she could contact him by cable. The next morning she visited Reeves in his office on a day long to be remembered. Alarm had now mounted to panic, and she was aware of something in the atmosphere that touched her far beyond any question of personal loss—something she had not felt since those homeward journeys from the Abbey Theatre when there was shooting in the Dublin streets. She fought her way through yelling crowds into the broker’s sanctum and at last managed to get a word with him. She was dismayed by his appearance and by his wan smile as he struggled to close the door of an inner office so that their voices could be heard, but what shocked her most was the way his telephone kept ringing and he made no move to answer it. This, from a man so punctilious, seemed to her an utmost symbol of disintegration. She liked him, they had had many lunches together at downtown restaurants where he was obviously pleased to be seen with her, and he had attended all her first nights and had been half-affectionately proprietary when he paid his respects in her dressing-room afterwards. There had always been in his attitude a sense of kindly guardianship; his eyes upon her told others that here was a beautiful young actress who naturally knew nothing about business, so she had put her financial affairs in the hands of safe old Uncle Andy and could henceforth sleep at nights without worrying her pretty head about them. It was a fairy-tale relationship, harmless enough, and Carey had not discouraged it. And now Uncle Andy was running his fingers through his
whitening hair and refusing to answer telephone calls—perhaps from other pretty heads. “I can’t figure what’s happened, Carey. Of course it’s absurd—U.S. Steel under 200—that shows you how absurd it is… Too bad you didn’t take Paul’s advice.”
“Paul’s?… He never… why, what about Paul?”
He was too bewildered to notice her bewilderment. He went on, still with the same wan smile: “One of the few I know who got out right at the top. Good for him.”
Amidst the bedlam of that morning she finally elicited that Paul had actually visited the broker’s office in late August, had shown a lively interest in his holdings and what they were worth, and had shocked Reeves immeasurably by giving an explicit order to sell everything. It was obeyed, of course, and a few days later he had collected a cashier’s cheque, again in person. What he did with it, if and how he reinvested the whole or any part, Reeves couldn’t say. He had naturally assumed that Carey had known all about it. “I was surprised,” he said, “that you’d let him act like that, though God knows he was smarter than either of us.”
Carey made the obvious guess as to what had happened to the money, but she did not mention it to Reeves. What troubled her most was not what Paul had done, but the way he had done it; it was the first time he had failed to consult her on the business angle of any enterprise. She wrote to him, as soon as she got back to the apartment—a short, straightforward letter, saying she had learned he had sold out, which in view of what had happened since was fortunate, but why had he kept it so secret? And had he put money into the Everyman project? If so, she hoped he had a reliable lawyer or business manager in Germany to look after his interests. After she had mailed the letter, Reeves telephoned. He told her things had steadied a little during the afternoon, Morgan’s were supporting the market. Late that evening he telephoned again. He would be working all night, he said, to help his clerks bring some kind of order out of chaos. She hardly recognized his voice; it sounded not only strange, but the voice of a stranger. He added that after studying her account he was afraid the extra coverage she had agreed to send would not now be nearly enough. He was terribly sorry— it was for her to decide whether to put up more cash and hang on, or sell out and take the rather heavy loss. He was sorry it had come to that, of course she wasn’t the only one, there were thousands in the same position or worse —some had been wiped out completely. And he was sorry he couldn’t advise her what to do—after all, his advice hadn’t been so good lately, she would admit. True, if one believed in America at all, the market was bristling with bargains—U.S. Steel at 200, for instance— on the other hand some people, probably bear operators, believed prices could go lower. So that was how it was, he simply couldn’t advise her at all. He kept repeating that he was sorry till at last she realized whom he was reminding her of—an English butler they had had once who hid brandy in vinegar bottles and always apologized profusely when found out. She smiled then, knowing how utterly unlike a drunken butler Reeves could ever be, unless he and the whole world were to go as crazy as the market. It was cheering, anyhow, to find something to smile at. She said lightly: “Sell the stuff, Andy, and let’s get it off our minds. I was all for taking medicine at one gulp when I was a kid. And I never worried about money when I had none —why should I now? Besides, there’ll be some left, won’t there?”