“To a rehearsal?”
“Yes. I dare say I could sneak you in.” She laughed a little and his questioning look made her add: “I’m laughing to think how impossible that would have been if Paul had been here. One of his inflexible rules—no strangers at rehearsals.”
“I can’t say I blame him.”
“You would, if you’d ever seen him turn somebody out.”
“From the look on your face I can see you don’t blame him either.”
“Not with my heart, because I think I understand him, but with my mind I’ve called him all kinds of names.”
The way she said that made him catch his breath, for the words had a beauty that seemed to belong out of their context, as if she were speaking some kind of benediction on a vastly larger matter. Then his aunt came into the room and introductions broke the spell. Aunt Mildred was in her late sixties, obviously though not slavishly devoted to her nephew, a serene good-humoured woman. She had developed the technique of being an unobtrusive hostess without ever accepting the role of mere chaperon, and she and Carey liked each other in an instant way that neither of them took any trouble to conceal.
The dinner, Austen thought, was a definite success. Of course the food and drink were excellent, they always were (another of the advantages of home, or rather of being able to afford a French chef), and the conversation did not flag amongst the three of them. He knew Carey must be enjoying herself, because he could imagine that a stranger meeting her for the first time would not think her unhappy at all, though he himself still caught a darker mood behind her gaiety—not that the gaiety was ever false. It was strange to feel such confidence that he understood her, so that after coffee, when Aunt Mildred excused herself to go to bed early, he hinted at a movie with the near-certainty as well as the hope that she would decline. She said: “Frankly, I’d rather see pictures in the afternoon when I’ve nothing else to do.”
“Good. Then let’s take it easy.”
They went by elevator to the roof above the sixth floor, where a small secluded garden had been laid out in tubs and boxes. The air wafted the flavour and sounds of the streets, yet it was a pleasant place to relax on a summer evening. When she finally left, not long before midnight, she said warmly: “I HAVE enjoyed myself—I like going somewhere without being involved in terrific plans to go somewhere else—I like sitting and talking to someone who doesn’t feel it’s boring to do just that.”
He said: “I hope we’re going to meet again—often.”
“Oh yes. And don’t forget to come to a rehearsal. Not just yet—one of the last would probably be most fun for you. That would be late in August.”
“And in the meantime… during the hot weather… I have a farm in Connecticut—sometimes I invite a few friends there for the week-end —if you’d care to… if you like the country…”
“I love it. I was born on a farm. So was Paul—but he hated it. That’s a strange difference between us—or perhaps between Iowa and Ireland, though I’ve never seen Iowa.”
“Then I’ll arrange something quite soon. Not a big party. Do anything —or nothing—swim, dance, play bridge—”
“Which of them do YOU do?”
“Bridge I rather like, but that won’t matter—there’ll be others who don’t play, and the effort to entertain you will be very slight indeed. For myself, during the daytime I mostly potter about with the man who runs the place for me—sometimes I ride over a few fields and try to think I’m a genuine farmer.”
“But you really enjoy it—pottering about like that?”
“Oh yes, I wouldn’t do it otherwise—why should I? It’s like you with a new play—if you didn’t like it, you wouldn’t feel you had to act in it… May I fix a date, then, and let you know? We might drive out together.”
There were many things that surprised him after she had gone. To begin with, that he had invited her to the farm at all, and also that, in doing so, he hadn’t told her the complete truth. He was a little appalled by what faced him now—a reopening of old memories, an ultimatum to grief, arrangements and complications and decisions, the welcome of local people who hadn’t seen him for years and would regard his return as evidence that a new stage in his life had been reached. And perhaps it had. In the morning he told Dunne of his intention and actually asked the old man whom he should invite—he was as uninterested as that in all his guests except one. Dunne pondered and spoke a few names. They were not of close friends, for Austen hadn’t any, except Dunne himself; but there were many people he knew fairly well, and liked, and who liked him. After a list had been compiled he said: “I think I’ll ask Mrs. Saffron too—she’s charming, isn’t she? I could see you were thinking that yourself last night.”
“I was indeed, sir.”
Austen looked up gratefully. He wondered, at that early stage, how he would have acted had his butler disapproved.
* * * * *
The farm was about two hours’ drive from the city and a dozen miles inland. A house dating from Revolutionary times formed a nucleus that had been cleverly added to; there was a large barn where dances and parties could be held, as well as a group of modern guest cottages. The land sloped from the main building to a stream, widened in one place to make a swimming-pool that seemed a part of the natural landscape. Trees fringed a formal garden, and there were woods beyond, rising to a ridge. The whole property covered six or seven hundred acres, most of it tilled; there was a second farmhouse, not so old and much more practical, in which Grainger lived. Grainger, like Dunne, had worked for Austen’s father.
When Austen arrived with Carey towards evening on the last Friday in July he braced himself for the shock of seeing again the place where he had been so happy, but the shock was not what he had expected; it struck, but without the leaden bruise; it was more a sharpness that made him specially sensitive to Carey at his side. “Well, here we are,” he said, as they drove up. He hoped she would catch, as he did, the beauty of the old brick in the sunset glow, and when she remarked on it, as surely as if he had pointed it out, an unbelievable pleasure filled him. They left the car, Dunne (who had been there since morning) helping them and taking the bags; the familiar entrance and hall beyond faced him without challenge. He had thought he would remember Fran; but instead he could think only of Carey.
Several other guests had already arrived; more were expected later. They were not celebrities, though not nonentities either—the Peter Rushmores, he an architect, had probably the best-known name. There were no brokers or financiers. Austen did not like to talk his own shop, but other people’s interested him—he had a wistful curiosity about such things as how to run a woman’s page, or excavate for a sub-basement, or cook clam chowder. All the people he liked enough to have at the farm were working people, in an extended sense; it was not that he did not care for drones, but that drones were usually the kind of people he did not care for. And perhaps because the people he did care for were attractive and hard-working, they were often successful in their own fields—successful enough for them not to think of him primarily as a person ‘worth knowing’. He was, indeed, immensely wealthier than they were, and quick to help them in any financial emergency (there had been some lately, since the stock-market collapse), but he liked their own success to guarantee him against the fear that their friendship could have any ulterior motive. To this extent, wealth had been a restrictive influence in his life; it had made him cautious in affection, not because he was afraid of being sponged on, but because he shrank from an emotional investment that might turn out humiliatingly. In a profound sense he knew the corrupting power of wealth, and on a scale impossible to convey to anyone outside his own business; he knew that not only individuals but whole classes and generations and empires could catch the Midas infection, and it was his belief (private, like most of his beliefs) that America in the ‘twenties had been so infected. Apart from the personal havoc which was tragic and obvious around him, he could not regret what had been happening in Wall Street since the pre
vious October; but he would never say so, because his own position as either Cassandra or moralist would be clearly impossible. Once again his impulse to be secretive was geared to the likelihood that few people would understand him. On perhaps the worst day in Wall Street’s history a frenzied speculator had somehow pierced his line of clerks and secretaries and demanded face-to-face how he could reconcile it with his conscience to profit out of national disaster. Austen must have been disturbed or he would not have replied, as he did: “The national disaster is not that prices should now fall, but that they should ever have been forced so high. To that disaster I did not contribute—on the other hand, my own operations tended to prevent them from going higher. And today, my friend, while you have been adding to what you call the disaster by selling, I have been supporting prices by buying back. The fact that I personally profited is immaterial.” It was the only time (and an ill-chosen one) that he attempted a logical, indeed a classic defence of his own function, and the reason (illogically) was that the troubles of other people did affect him, and all the more because even to say so would have seemed hypocritical.
That week-end at the farm made proof, if he had ever needed it, that Carey could come close to his heart and mind if she wished. Whether this was likely he could not yet decide. But he guessed that her husband’s return (in September, she had said) would set limits to whatever had not been accomplished before.
“You must be looking forward to it,” he said, as they inspected the stables and milking-sheds that Sunday morning.
“Oh yes,” she answered eagerly, and then added, as if she were having to think it out: “Yes, I think so.”
“Only that?”
She laughed. “It’s really quite a lot. I couldn’t ever really explain just how I DO feel about Paul.”
He took that as a closure of the subject till she went on: “It’s strange —I’m quite happy without him so long as I know he’s happy. I don’t miss him, exactly, and I know when he does come home what a to-do there’ll be —everything upside down, the whole of my life in an uproar. He CONSUMES people. It’s probably good for me, though—I’m naturally rather lazy.”
“How’s his film progressing?”
“All right, I suppose. He doesn’t write much about it.”
“Don’t you ask him?”
“Yes, and he doesn’t answer.”
“So he doesn’t answer, and you don’t miss him, and you don’t really want your life to be in an uproar, and yet… there must be an ‘and yet’.”
“There is… but I don’t know what it is.”
“It might be love.”
“Yes, it might, mightn’t it? I expect we all love differently.”
They walked some way while he told her about the farm, the way he had acquired it, and his plans for development. Apparently it had been only half arable land at first, and he had made a point of reclaiming more and more each year, clearing, liming, and fertilizing; he had taken a scientific interest in soil conservation and had experimented with different kinds of crop rotation. Everything that modern farm management could do was still in progress, for he had good men working for him; but the way he talked of it somehow conveyed a revival of his own interest after a long interval, and he could guess that she sensed this. So he said abruptly: “I misled you when I asked you here. I gave you an impression that these week-ends were a normal thing for me. Actually this is the first time I’ve been here since my wife died.”
“Yes, the Rushmores told me.”
“You must have thought I hadn’t been very frank.”
“I don’t think it matters, now that I know.”
“I’m glad you know. Fran and I were so very happy.”
“I was told that too.”
“I didn’t think I’d ever have the nerve to face all the memories— places we did this and that, the walks we took—Sunday morning walks just like this… My boy Norris comes home from school soon. Will you spend another week-end here and get to know him?”
“I’d like to very much.”
He took her arm. “Good—because we must make the most of our time, mustn’t we, before your play opens?”
“Yes, I’ll be pretty busy then, one way and another.”
He was fairly sure that the same interpretation of that was in both their minds.
* * * * *
She visited the farm again in August, but this time he had no one else there except Norris and Aunt Mildred. He had expected Norris to like Carey, and the boy did, but it somewhat amazed him that she seemed to enjoy the meeting for its own sake. He himself was devoted to his son, but he found it hard to establish contact with a somewhat difficult eight-year-old, and he had set the age of fifteen in his mind as a date from which he and Norris could really begin to understand each other. And of course it would be easier still, later on. He looked forward most of all to a young man, home from Harvard, discovering his father as an equal.
“He’s so friendly and intelligent,” Carey said. “It’s fun to talk to him.”
“Because you know how.”
“Well, most children are actors, so we have that in common… Paul used to say he could make an actor of any child under ten—and UNTIL he was ten.”
“Did… does Paul like children?”
“I think he would have, if we’d had any. Whenever he directed children in a play he was like a rather sinister Santa Claus, if you can imagine such a thing. They were fascinated.”
“As you were too.”
“Me? Oh no, I wasn’t taken in for a moment.”
“I meant that you must have been fascinated in some kind of way— when you first met him… A man so… so remarkable…”
“Oh, THEN! Yes, I was seventeen and he came to Dublin on business. He was the first brilliant man I ever knew. And the MOST brilliant. He always has been. I only wish he’d be brilliant now about the new play.”
“It’s worrying you?”
“Not exactly. It’s just that I’m not excited enough. One ought to be excited about a new play.”
“Or else not be in it at all?”
“But the part’s made for me—written for me, in fact. I don’t know what there is wrong—maybe nothing. I expect I’ll be all right on the night. That comes under the heading of famous last words.”
“You don’t get nervous?”
“Heavens, yes. Paul does too—he can lose ten pounds during rehearsals. And that doesn’t do him any harm either.”
“He’s a big man?”
“BIG?” The word seemed to amuse her. “Well, he’s… I think I’ve got a photograph.”
She opened her handbag and found a snapshot. “I took this several years ago—it’s good because it doesn’t flatter like the professional ones.”
Paul was unlike anything Austen had in the least expected, and from then on, in a curious way, he thought of Carey a little differently.
He said: “A personality—one can tell that… And what a pretty garden!”
“It is, isn’t it? Only a small place, near Stroudsburg, not really as beautiful as here, but I used to love it.”
“You don’t go there any more?”
“We had to sell—or rather, I had to—last year. I lost a lot in the market and I didn’t think I could keep up two homes.”
“Didn’t you once tell me Paul sold out at the top?”
“Oh yes, HE did. He was smart—or else lucky.”
He gripped her arm. “I’ll tell you one way he’s lucky, and that’s to have you… I hope he realizes it.”
“But I’m lucky too. I’d never have been successful on the stage without him.”
“You’re very modest to say that. Does he agree with you?”
“You bet he does. HE’S not modest.”
She laughed, and he had again a feeling which only now he was able to put into words for his own private consideration later: that Paul did not make her happy, but that in some incurable way she was able to take delight in him.
* * * * *
> She had scored such a definite hit with Norris that it was obvious to assume another meeting soon. Austen was pleased on the boy’s behalf, but he was also glad for himself because it meant a further stage in their own advancing friendship. He knew by now that he was very much in love with Carey.
They met often during the weeks that followed. She visited the farm at week-ends, when there were sometimes, but not always, outside guests; she dined frequently at the house in the East Sixties, where there was usually only Aunt Mildred with them. He realized that she found, both at the farm and at the house, some kind of comfort that appealed to her. As the rehearsals for the new play got under way, he guessed that what he could offer, if nothing else, was actually a refuge from the theatre—a place where she could not be reached on business, where she need not talk or even think about it if she wished not to. He had once called for her at her own small apartment, and during the short time he was there had heard her end of several long telephone conversations; they had sounded to him as if the play were in trouble of some kind, though when he hinted this she said lightly that it was no more than usual. But she had seemed harassed and glad to escape.
One evening she arrived at his house with a look that did not wear off after the first drink. He gave her time to tell him anything amiss that might have happened, and when she kept up the effort to talk gaily he asked what was the matter.
“The matter?… Why?… So I really AM a bad actress?”
“It’s because you know you don’t have to act with me, and that makes you half-act.”
“Oh, well, if that’s the case, I’ll tell you, though it’s not startling. I mean, it’s the sort of thing that’s happened before—and doubtless will again.”
“Trouble with the show?”
“MY show… No, not particularly. I had a letter from Paul this morning.”
He did not reply, and was surprised to find how fast his heart was beating.
She went on: “He’s in some kind of a mess with that film.”