“That would be very kind of you.”
It would indeed, she reflected, considering they were so much sought after and he was someone she had met for the first time that day. She added: “If you promise to laugh at all the jokes, no matter how hard it is.”
“I promise. But why should it be hard?”
“Well, for one thing, they may not be such good jokes. And then, too, it must be pretty hard for a broker to see a joke in anything nowadays. My own broker’s having a nervous breakdown… Andy Reeves… I wonder if you happen to know him?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“He’s much older than you, I should imagine.”
“Now how old would you imagine I am?”
“I guessed fifty-five when I first saw you but you’ve been growing younger ever since.”
He seemed amused by that and she felt the beginnings of a mood she sometimes got into when she was emerging out of fatigue—a sort of impishness, making her say things that were quite helplessly silly and only funny to others if she found them funny enough herself.
Then suddenly she keeled over and would have slipped to the floor had he not held her. It could hardly have been the drink, for she had had only one; the bar was rather stuffy, perhaps that was the reason. People made way for an emergency that had happened many times before on ocean liners, except that in this case it wasn’t that particular emergency at all. As soon as he had helped her to the fresh air on deck she fully recovered, but he led her to her cabin and summoned the stewardess. He was very gracious and attentive and took his leave when the stewardess arrived. She didn’t feel ill, or quite well either, so she swallowed some aspirin, undressed, and went to sleep. The next morning the seas were rough again, so she stayed in bed all day. He sent flowers.
* * * * *
The morning after that the Berengaria arrived at New York. Amidst the last-minute scurry of packing and formalities she half wondered if she would see him again, but she did not look for him, and when the ship docked she followed her usual habit of waiting till nearly all the passengers were off before making her own way down the gangway to the customs. She soon found her luggage, among the last of the “S” group, but as she approached it an elderly stranger touched his hat, evidently recognizing her. “Mrs. Saffron? Mr. Bond asked me to help you through.”
“Well, that’s very kind of him, but I haven’t anything dutiable, so —”
“It’ll be easy then. Your car’s meeting you?”
“No, I’ll take a taxi; but please don’t bother—”
The man had already stepped to the customs officer and was saying something in his ear, with a result quite astonishing—the immediate passage of all her bags without inspection. Normally she disliked being singled out for special favour, but this time the act was performed so simply and quickly as to give her no time for embarrassment, and she was grateful besides, for she had had experience of customs men who seemed to have a special distrust of actresses.
While the man was giving further instructions to a porter she said half jokingly: “That’s one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen. Thank you, and please thank Mr. Bond. He really must know the right people.”
“Well, Mrs. Saffron, I dare say he does… He also asked me to give you this letter.”
She couldn’t figure quite what the man was—a servant, an employee? He hadn’t introduced himself by name and he was dressed as nondescriptly as an hotel detective. She thanked him again and read the letter on the way to her apartment. It said merely: “I’m sure you consider we owe each other at least one dinner. Will you let me know an evening that suits you after you get settled? Yours sincerely, Austen Bond (aged forty-six).”
Not till several days later did she happen to mention Mr. Bond to a friend as “the only man I spoke to during the entire trip—tall and rather handsome—something in a broker’s office, he said.”
“My goodness, not AUSTEN Bond, by any chance?”
“Why, yes.”
At which the friend laughed raucously. She was a lively old snob who fancied herself as a connoisseur of that over-world which is, in its way, quite as secret as the underworld; everything in her private who’s who depended on what KIND of duke, what KIND of millionaire, even what KIND of actress. Carey happened to be her kind, which was the kind that could be invited to the Colony Club. She said: “Well, darling, I guess you could call him something in a broker’s office if you wanted. D’you really mean you’ve never heard of him?… I suppose that’s possible—he’s not the type that goes popping toy balloons at night clubs. Neither are you, for that matter—you two ought to get on well together.”
“Oh, I don’t suppose we shall meet again.”
“You mean you won’t call him up?”
“I’ll be so busy with the play from now on. I think I’ll take it to the country and let it simmer in my mind for a few weeks.”
Michaelson gave her a typescript the next day, after which she went to Vermont to stay with the Whitmores, old friends whom she had known since the year of the struggle as she called it to herself—that first year in America when Paul couldn’t find any kind of job. The Whitmores had been the means by which he had finally got the chance he needed. They were comfortably off, but not rich, and the small paper-mill which they owned and in which Harry Whitmore worked was a mile from their house at the other end of the small town. An open invitation to visit them any time she could spare was her only effective consolation for having sold Mapledurham, and now she was quick to avail herself of it. She read the new play in the Whitmores’ garden, and thought it pretty good, but even while she thought so she was distrusting her own judgment—WAS it good, was it REALLY good? Of course there were comedies that made one laugh aloud at a first skim-through and later proved complete flops on the stage; perhaps the reverse could also operate. She certainly did not laugh or even smile during the several hours she gave to a careful reading, and afterwards she picked up a published copy that the Whitmores had of her last play and tried to imagine that that too was new —would it have seemed amusing either? But of course the test was invalid—the lines came to the ear as well as to the eye, and with the remembered laughter of an audience as punctuation. When Michaelson telephoned later in the day, eager to know her reaction, she had to tell him that she liked the new play well enough, because it would have seemed absurd to confess that her lukewarmness was probably due to some private mood of her own.
A few days later Michaelson arrived with contracts. He had made a special trip to get her signature. Somehow she had not expected there would be that degree of urgency, but such evidence of being sought after gave her a touch of cheerful panic. She signed, measuring the weeks till August, when rehearsals would begin. Plenty of time to work up the right mood of enthusiasm.
Towards the middle of July she returned to New York and met the author, who took her to lunch and proved, almost by algebra, that he had written a sure-fire successor to a success. But later the same day at a party she met another author who said he had heard a rumour that the new play was a bit of a let-down—what did SHE think? She used up all her new-found confidence in denying it vehemently.
That evening at her apartment she read the play again, speaking many of the lines aloud, and in the midst of so doing she remembered Paul’s remark: “It’s about time you were bored with comedy.” Was it that? Or was she still just tired?
Suddenly she doubted if she would be any less bored or tired had it been a tragedy and the greatest play ever written. And in that mood, a rather frantic one, she ransacked her desk for Austen Bond’s note and dialled his number. She knew, by then, who he was.
* * *
PART THREE
Austen Bond was not well known in the modern metropolitan sense— that is, to newspaper columnists, head waiters, and the man in the street. He was rich, and had his own importance, but the firm of investment brokers of which he was head was not one of those on everybody’s lips and he had no ambition to make it so. There
was something in his mental attitude that always preferred quality to size, and his place in financial circles was of this kind also; he was satisfied to make a personal fortune just less than sensational and to influence, occasionally and obliquely, those who had greater influence. The stock-market collapse had not affected in the slightest degree the routine of his private life, which had long been unpretentious. His attitude towards the future, including his own, was affected by his unspoken opinion that capitalism had begun to die. He did not think this was good, but he believed it was inevitable; and he had found, from a few scraps of early experience, that many people assume that the man who prophesies something, also wishes it to happen. In his case this was not true, and would have been absurd if it had been; but his knowledge of how easily and dangerously he would be misunderstood made him keep his mouth shut. He was less tempted to open it because he also believed that, on the scale of events that he foresaw, nothing he could do or persuade others to do could change the outcome to any worth-while extent. He therefore confined his activities to certain machinations of the market, in which it would have been as naďve to be a Marxian as a Seventh Day Adventist.
Within this somewhat chilly circumference the intimate structure of his life had developed, up to a point, quite genially and not very remarkably. He had been left money and a job by his father, a Wall Street man of the old school, while his mother had contributed good looks and an equipment of innate good taste in the arts. Education at Groton and Harvard had followed, after which there had been years of hard work. In 1920, aged thirty-six, he had married a New Hampshire girl who loved horses and dogs and enjoyed New York only as a visiting country cousin; so he had bought some land in Connecticut and there they had spent much of each year quietly and very happily indeed. In 1925 she had died in an influenza epidemic, leaving a boy of three named Norris. After that he had lived even more retiringly, but mainly in the old family house in the East Sixties that he had inherited from his father. He had an unmarried aunt who often played hostess at his small and not too frequent dinner-parties; he belonged to a few good clubs and liked to go to plays, art exhibitions, and concerts. During school holidays, when Norris was at home, he sometimes took the boy to places like the Metropolitan Museum and the Statue of Liberty. He had, behind a reserve that was hard to penetrate, a quietly inflexible will and a loyalty to those who worked for him, so that those who knew and liked him best were doubtless his employees and servants.
Austen had hardly expected to pick up an acquaintance with an actress on board the Berengaria. Not that he felt superior to the acting profession; on the contrary, he had a playgoer’s affection for its leading figures, and Carey had often pleased him from the other side of the footlights. But he would not, had anyone forecast it, have agreed that he was at all likely to take the initiative in getting to know her. What had made him do so was that she looked unhappy. Minutes before she saw him he had recognized her; then he had closed his eyes to wonder what could be the matter, for though he was not simple enough to think that comedy stars must always be gay, the contrast between his recollection of her on the stage and the way she looked in the adjacent deck-chair had been too startling to ignore. Perhaps it was just the effects of a rough crossing; he hoped so, but he wished he could find out. Finally a kindly curiosity had made him speak.
And of course she had proved to be a mixture of everything he remembered and much that he could now so pleasantly discover for himself, once the plunge had been taken; she still looked unhappy, yet she was good company, and certainly hard to put out of his mind when the trip was over.
During dinner on that first evening at home he had said to Dunne, his butler: “I suppose you got Miss Arundel through the customs all right?”
“Yes, sir. And she asked me to thank you. A very charming lady… and I MEAN a lady.” (Dunne, a Scotsman, was careful to avoid the behaviour of the stereotyped English butler—he was not obsequious, and he never used the phrase ‘if I may say so’.)
“Oh, and what makes you so sure of that?”
“She knew better than to tip me.”
Austen laughed—which did not mean that he failed to take the diagnosis seriously. He had a very high regard for Dunne’s social assessments; there was something professional about them, as if he himself were to offer an opinion of Portuguese Fours. Indeed, he had a high regard for the man altogether. As his father’s butler Dunne had been his boyhood friend, had taught him chess, and to ride a bicycle, and how to identify different birds in Central Park; Dunne had taken him for vagrant walks along Madison Avenue, explaining the difference between real and sham antiques in the shops; Dunne had lent him money when he had overspent his schoolboy allowance, had visited him at Harvard after his father’s death to break the news that his mother was seriously ill. And Dunne, after Fran’s death, though no one knew about this, had helped him through the worst crisis of bereavement. Austen had sometimes wondered if in an improved world, where there would doubtless be no master and servant, any other framework for such a relationship would be devised. If not, he would consider the improvement overrated.
When Carey telephoned, he felt a stab of pleasure as he heard her voice. After the long interval he had ceased to expect her to call; he assumed she must regard their acquaintance as a mere shipboard freak. He had a genuine modesty that made him consider himself dull by the standards that professional entertainers might set, and that an actress should seek his company must mean either that she liked him or that she was coldly appraising his social and financial eligibility. All his instinct was to believe Carey incapable of the latter.
He invited her to dine with him the following evening at his house, and her prompt acceptance sounded so much like that of an old friend that he let himself forget that they knew each other so slightly. Their telephone conversation was short, and that too pleased him; she could not, he reflected, have known how he disliked telephoning and how rarely he gave anyone his private number. Then he asked himself why he had, since the postal address would have sufficed, and the reason he fastened on was that he had wished to give her a better chance to act on impulse. After all, it was impulse that had made him speak to her on the Berengaria, and impulse, having begun so well, might claim a right to be encouraged. For him it was at least a novelty in a life so largely reasoned and reasonable. He sat in his favourite chair in the dark panelled library and meditated long after he had spoken to her. Only once did he have a flash of misgiving—when he wondered again if she would find an evening with him pretty dull—if, for instance, she would expect a lively party, or even for that matter a tęte-ŕ-tęte—for of course his old aunt would be present, he would observe all the proprieties, at any rate until friendship had become established. And he must tell her, he decided, why it was that he hadn’t invited her to a restaurant.
He told her while they drank sherry together in that same room the next evening. He noted her dress—black and gold, very becoming, and also tactfully suitable to whatever he or others might have been wearing, for in the brevity of his invitation he had given her no clues. He noticed also her grey-blue eyes and the little gap between one side tooth and its neighbour, a gap too small for a dentist to fill, yet a pleasing imperfection, especially when she gave the slightly twisting smile that matched her prevalent mood.
He was saying: “I hope you wouldn’t have preferred going to a restaurant, but the fact is, as long as Prohibition’s the law of the land I don’t care to break it publicly.” He smiled. “You can judge how moral that attitude is from the way I’m willing to transgress in private.”
“I think it could still be a moral attitude,” she answered. “They’re apt to be stronger than morals—or rather, they can hang on long after morals give up.”
Wondering what was in her mind, he went on lightly: “It also happens that I hate noise and commotion and sitting amongst strangers—except, of course, when it’s all made worth while by a good play. Tell me, how’s the new one coming along?”
He saw a shadow
cross her face till she made the effort of dismissal. “Oh, pretty well. I’ve read it and signed the contracts, but we don’t begin rehearsing till August, so there’s nothing much to do just yet.”
“No learning of lines?”
“Not till after the first readings—the stage-readings, I mean, with the cast and the director. So many changes are made then, as a rule —it wouldn’t help much to be word perfect in the play as it is… But learning lines isn’t hard once you get the real feel of the play. If you’re absorbed you seem to memorize even when you read it privately.”
“Is that happening to you with this play?”
“Well, no—not so much.”
“Then the play hasn’t absorbed you—yet?”
“Not altogether… which means that Paul might be right—Paul, my husband.”
“Yes, I know. What did he say?”
“He hasn’t read the play, of course—he’s in Germany—but when we met recently he said it was time I was bored with comedy.”
“And are you?”
“Oh dear, I’d better not be. He just put the idea into my head. I suppose I ought to be used to that by now—he’s so full of ideas—they shoot out like sparks when he’s directing.”
“And the director of the new play doesn’t have any sparks?”
“I haven’t experienced them yet. Maybe he will. Or maybe it’ll be my fault for not being electrified. I hope all this doesn’t sound too occult.”
“No more than my own work would sound to you if I talked about it.”
“But you don’t—and you set me a good example.”
“No, no—that wasn’t what I meant. I’m really interested in the theatre—not only as a playgoer but—well, for one reason —-because of you. So please go on. I wish I knew more about it— what rehearsals are like, how the director functions, and so on.”
“Come along and see, some day, if you think you’d enjoy the experience.”