“Oh yes,” he answered eagerly. “You aren’t nearly as badly off as others.”
Less was left than she had expected, though there would have been nothing at all had she delayed action; she had that much consolation. She did not definitely worry, but it was discouraging to find that taking one’s medicine in one gulp could not close the issue, for all around her as the days passed and the market fell further, reverberations affected her life in countless ways—through the changed fortunes of her friends, the atmosphere in shops and restaurants, and by a sharp down-turn in theatre prosperity. There was talk of cutting admission prices and salaries, and though nobody had yet suggested the play should be taken off, already it looked as if it would not last far into the new year. People said how fortunate that it was a comedy, since in bad times everybody wants to laugh. Carey heard this truism so often that she began to feel like medicine herself, and she wondered if it made her act better or worse; Paul could doubtless have informed her.
One of his most irritating habits was that, in letter-writing as in personal argument, he was capable of blandly ignoring what had been said or asked by the other party. He did this in a way that would have been almost more forgivable had it been deliberate, but Carey knew that it represented the absence from his mind of any real concern for anything outside the circle of his own dominating interest at the time. Thus, in reply to her letter, he made no comment about the sale of his stocks, and neither confirmed nor denied that he had put money into the Everyman project. And when, in a second letter, she told him frankly she had lost heavily herself, and that all phases of New York life were hard hit, including Broadway—to all this he replied by a casual suggestion that maybe she could sell Mapledurham —he had always thought it was too expensive for what they got out of it. The rest of his letter was about the beauty of some lakes near Berlin where he was apparently working on the picture. And in a postscript he added: “Sounds like a bad theatre season over there. I hope mother isn’t worried. Try to cheer her up.”
This reference to his mother further exasperated Carey, because, of all the people she knew, Paul’s mother had least to worry about. The first thing he had done when success came was to fulfil an ambition to bring the old lady from Milwaukee to New York and set her up in an apartment of her own; then, with the profits of his first long run, he had bought her a comfortable annuity. All of which had been very dutiful and sensible, but it did, Carey felt, put Mrs. Saffron in a position where she needed less cheering up than a great many younger people. She was a woman of strong character and personality, rather terrifying in some ways (‘fabulous’ was the adjective she tried to live up to), and Paul’s devotion to her was probably the most consistent emotion in his life. As such, Carey had been careful to respect it, but she was constantly amused by the aspect of angelic boyhood he assumed whenever he was with his mother. Play-acting himself down to the level of a teen-ager, he was often quite ridiculous; yet there must have been something in it, for no matter how dark or tempestuous his mood, he could always appear frolicsome with her.
Carey made a special visit in response to the postscript. Paul had been in the long-established habit of paying his mother a short call every day, except on Sundays, when she came over to dinner; since he had been away Carey had kept up the Sunday dinners and made one or two return calls during the week. This could have looked like kindness to a lonely soul, except that Mrs. Saffron was neither lonely nor the kind of person who is called a soul. She enjoyed her independence, she could afford a daily maid, and she had a visiting clientele of elderly admirers who accepted her domination and constantly lost small sums to her at pinochle; moreover her health was good, and most mornings she pottered briskly about the Fifth Avenue shops with an eagle eye for a bargain. Carey always felt during her visits that she was being treated to a special demonstration of how close were mother and son, for invariably Mrs. Saffron could produce a letter from Paul which she did not show or read in its entirety, but quoted a few sentences from here and there. Apart from the fact that these letters were longer and more regular than the ones he sent to her, Carey thought them unremarkable; Paul was not a good letter-writer. This time, however, Mrs. Saffron’s voice was charged with extra emphasis as she made the usual opening announcement: “I’ve just heard from Paul, my dear…” She went on, as if she couldn’t wait for even the most perfunctory response: “He says you’ve been losing money in the stock market.”
“Oh yes, a little.” So Paul, despite his anxiety that she should not worry, had given her the news.
“I’m sorry you weren’t as smart as he was.”
Of course that explained it. Her own loss made a neat dramatic contrast to the good news he had been able to give his mother about himself.
She said: “Yes, I am too.”
“Of course, he talked to me about it beforehand, and I said to him, ‘Son,’ I said, ‘it’s your money, you made it, you do what you want with it.’ So I guess that’s what made him sell at the right time.”
Carey had no comment.
“It’s rather funny what he said about it in his letter.” Mrs. Saffron put on her spectacles, searched for the page, and ran her finger down with a great show of omitting other things. “He says… this is what Paul says, my dear… he says, ‘I’ve just seen some American papers and oh boy, Wall Street certainly did take a beating. I can just imagine how old Reeves must feel. I didn’t dare tell him I was going to bring the cash to Germany to make a picture—he’d have raised such a shindig—but golly, even if the picture’s a flop I won’t be worse off than if I’d left things as they were…’”
How true that was, Carey reflected, and how characteristic in a letter to his mother were such expressions as ‘Oh boy’, ‘shindig’, and ‘golly’— a kind of slang he would never have dreamed of using elsewhere.
Towards the end of November he wrote that the picture was going well but more slowly than he had expected, so that he couldn’t return till some time in the New Year, perhaps March or April if he could manage it. For the first time, in that letter, he showed interest in her affairs—he hoped the play was still making money and that she hadn’t lost ‘too much’ in the market crash. If she had, and had any use for a thousand dollars or so, there was that much cash in a safe-deposit box of his (he gave the number and location) which he had forgotten to empty when he left—she was welcome to it. As for the picture, it was going to be wonderful. It was also the first time he had sounded such an optimistic note about the work he was doing.
News of the delay in his return did not prevent this letter from cheering Carey considerably. She was touched by the evidence of his concern for her, even though the form it took had a typical streak of impracticality. She replied: “Darling, it was sweet of you to tell me about the safe-deposit box, but I really don’t need the money and in any case the bank wouldn’t let me touch it if it’s in your name—didn’t you know that?… The play’s still running and audiences seem to be picking up a little, and I’ve been approached in a vague way about several other plays next year, so I don’t think I shall be out of work. Even if I were, I could enjoy a holiday, and I’m not PENNILESS, you know. So please don’t worry about me, and take all the time you need for what you want to do… I see your mother regularly and she tells me you’ve lost ten pounds and are very proud of it—I know what this is a sign of—the creative yeast beginning to ferment, didn’t you once call it that? Don’t work too hard, though, and give me more news of the picture—I’m so happy about it…”
She spent a busy but enjoyable Christmas, and on New Year’s Eve she wondered sentimentally but not anxiously what Paul was doing, and figured out that it was already New Year’s Day in Europe. She sent him a cable.
The play finally petered out in the third week of January, and though she was not definitely signed for a successor, there was another comedy by the same author shaping up and with an obvious part for her. She took a trip to Florida with theatre friends and was back in New York by the beginning of Marc
h, the earliest month that Paul had said he might possibly return. Recent letters, however, had not confirmed this, or indeed mentioned the matter again. His last letter had been from Riesbach, near Interlaken, Switzerland, where he had taken part of the company on location, so he said. He did not explain further, and Carey wondered how Swiss scenery could become necessary in a film of Everyman; but she was not especially surprised.
Then one Sunday as she was walking through the lobby of the Plaza for lunch she ran into Malcolm Beringer. She almost literally ran into him, and was sure from his instant look that he would have avoided her if he could. Even his suavity deserted him a little as she made him stop. “Malcolm! I didn’t know you were back from Europe even—Paul never tells me things. Can’t you sit down for a moment and give me all the news?”
She practically forced him to a chair and hoped he did not see her hand trembling as she offered him a cigarette. She had a sudden premonition of things not quite right. “So you left Paul there? How is he? Tell me about the picture… He writes that it’s going ahead well.”
“I believe it is,” Malcolm agreed, but without enthusiasm.
“You BELIEVE it is? Don’t you know?”
He said: “I left Berlin in November. I can’t say what’s been happening since.”
“But I thought you and Paul were working together?”
“We were… till then.” He continued, with a faint smile: “It’s a long story—much too complicated to explain.”
“I’ll bet it’s complicated. Anything to do with Paul usually is. What did you do—quarrel?”
Then his faint smile vanished altogether. “We didn’t see eye to eye about certain things.”
“Of course you didn’t. I was always surprised how well you got on at Mapledurham. Paul’s not what you might call one of nature’s collaborators.”
“It wasn’t exactly that.”
“Oh, wasn’t it?”
He fidgeted to the edge of the chair, scrutinizing the passing crowd as if hoping for rescue by someone. “You’ll excuse me, Carey, I ought to be looking for a man who’s coming to lunch with me.”
“So ought I, but both of them can wait. You’ve just time to tell me very quickly what happened.”
“Why, nothing happened—particularly.” He stubbed out his cigarette and let his long slender fingers tap some message of uncertainty on the table-top.
“Then what is it that’s too complicated to explain?”
“Why don’t you ask Paul?”
“How can I ask him about nothing particular—and that’s what you say happened?”
“It’s all too personal, Carey, and if Paul doesn’t mention it perhaps he thinks it’s of no importance. And perhaps it isn’t.”
“You must know how that kind of answer scares me.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t think there’s anything to get scared about.”
“Mysteries always scare me. You’ve made me feel I want to leave for Germany tomorrow.”
“Switzerland now, I understand.”
“Yes, that’s right. Some place near Interlaken.”
“You know that? He told you where he was?”
“Of course. Why shouldn’t he?”
A very elegant young man approached the table, bowed slightly, and had to be introduced. Malcolm did not ask him to join them. Carey said lightly: “Pity there isn’t time for a longer chat. Maybe we could have dinner together soon—”
He murmured something about having to leave for Washington. She didn’t believe a word of it and she knew he knew she didn’t. She added, shaking hands: “Well, I might take a trip to Interlaken one of these days— would you recommend that?”
“They say it’s a very beautiful place.”
Oh God, she thought—couldn’t you have thought of a better exit line, and you supposed to be a writer?… And then she remembered something that Paul had once said, that all the time-worn clichés that sound too absurd nowadays for any modern play are still used in life by people who are either too unsophisticated or too disconcerted to think of anything more original. And of these Malcolm could clearly belong only to the second class.
She acted a part throughout lunch, appearing very carefree; it was easier to overdo it than merely to quell a mounting nervousness. Later that day she wrote to Paul, saying that she had met Malcolm accidentally and that he had given her the news. She did not say what news, and hoped that the equivocal phrase might evoke some revealing answer. But it failed to do so; the letters Paul continued to write, both to her and his mother, were no different and contained no mention of Malcolm at all. It was maddening, the way he could ignore things. After a month of it, and with the new play still not definitely lined up, she came to an abrupt decision. She WOULD go to Interlaken. To Mrs. Saffron she made the excuse of another trip to Florida; what the old lady would think when no letters from Florida arrived she neither knew, nor in the mood she had reached, particularly cared. She caught the Olympic and reached Paris on an April day whose flavour gave her a pang. She and Paul had spent much time in that city, and had loved it, but now she merely hastened across from one station to another. Travelling all night, she arrived in Interlaken the next day about noon. She had never visited Switzerland before, and the loveliness as she stepped out of the train was overpowering. A cab-driver said that Riesbach was several miles away, a tourists’ resort with a hotel, approachable only by steamer across the Lake of Brienz. It sounded so remote she didn’t think she would want to stay there if Paul had gone back to Germany, which was a possibility; so she booked a room at an hotel near the station and left her luggage. Then she took a cab through the town to the lakeside and boarded the tiny paddle-steamers. She was already more, or perhaps less, than entranced; she felt that the beauty surrounding her hit below the emotional belt. And how industriously the Swiss had exploited everything, never vulgarizing though sometimes prettifying, building their parks and esplanades into perfect line with the white cone of the Jungfrau, running funiculars here and there to catch a special view, electrifying their trains into docile cleanliness; it was unbelievable that people should have come to such cosy terms with grandeur. The whole place, with its keen bright air and gay decorum, had an air of holiday that made Florida, steeped in stock-market and real-estate gloom, seem like a melancholy shambles by comparison.
The boat chugged across the lake, putting in at various resorts before arriving at Riesbach. Only a few passengers alighted there. The hotel was perched high above the water; a funicular climbed to it from the dockside. Every step in this long verifying journey from New York seemed to have increased her excitement in geometric progression; the ocean crossing, lasting a week, had been tense but endurable; the overnight train from Paris had left her restless; the boat trip across the lake had been an excruciating dream; and now these few minutes in the funicular seemed the culminating race of her heart to some kind of extinction. But at the very end, at the hotel desk as she asked if a Mr. Paul Saffron were staying there, she was becalmed. Yes, they said, but he was out at the moment—he was probably taking a walk in the woods. Doubtless he would be back soon. Would she care to wait? She agreed, and sat down in the lobby for a while. Then she went to the terrace and saw the trail leading into the woods with romantic deliberateness, the little signpost giving time in hours as well as distance in kilometres—all so neat and satisfactory, so safe in an unsafe world. She began to walk along the trail, not intending to go far, in case Paul might return by some other route. The woods were cool and fresh-scented, sloping to the lake at an angle that gave sudden glimpses of blue amidst the green. Wild flowers, buttercups, and crocuses speckled the undergrowth, and at pleasing intervals a waterfall tumbled over rocks that seemed too casual not to have been arranged.
After ten minutes or so she turned a corner and saw two people some hundred yards ahead, and one of them, she thought from the slow walk, could possibly be Paul. The other was a girl. But what surprised her was that he was carrying a huge clump of wild flowers and that eve
ry few yards both he and the girl stopped to gather more. This was so totally unlike Paul, who cared for flowers only enough to buy them at high prices, that she almost doubted her own recognition till she came closer and could see the familiar head balanced heavily on the familiar shoulders. The rest was less familiar, for he was wearing shorts, woollen stockings, and boots spectacularly different from anything in his American wardrobe. Then she noticed that the girl had straw-coloured hair of the kind usually provided by wig-makers for use in Wagnerian opera.