“Maybe he isn’t. It isn’t personal, anyhow.”
“Then what is it?”
“I—I don’t know. That’s why I can’t blame your father for not quite sizing it up. I can’t blame anybody. Not even myself. It’s my fault, but I don’t blame myself for it. Does that give any clue?”
He smiled. “He must mean a lot to you…”
“Which of them are you talking about?”
“Paul.” He went on smiling. “This is a funny conversation. I still say, though, he must mean a lot to you.”
“I don’t know… I don’t know WHAT he means.”
“But you’re looking forward to the excitement of working with him again. I’ll bet you are.”
She looked up, transfixed with a certain incredulity. “Looking forward to it? You really think that?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
“Norris, I’m DREADING it.”
“Then why do it?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“There we are again.”
“Yes.”
“You just HAVE to do it?”
“Yes, in a sort of way.”
“Maybe I know how you feel. We’re both built a bit like that. You facing your ordeal and I… if I can find one worth facing…”
“I hope you can, Norris. And I hope it isn’t too much of an ordeal. Mine won’t be more than I can help. I shall do my best to enjoy a new experience.”
“You make it sound like a school teacher visiting the Carlsbad Caverns.”
“Now whatever made you think of that?”
“I’m trying hard not to be serious. You once asked me not to be. Now I ask you not to be. Let’s have a good time till you leave—just a hell of a good time, as if we hadn’t anything on OUR minds… do you think we could?”
“I’ll try.”
And indeed a curious tranquillity settled on them both as they went about together during the days that followed. They had the good time, doing nothing specially new, just the things that had by then become routine. To Carey the whole interval had a quality of swanlike timelessness, as if anchored neither to past nor future. She thought of a river above a fall, the water rolling deep and unknowing.
Not till the last day was Paul mentioned again, and then quite casually by her. It was in her room, amidst the confusion of packing, that he exclaimed: “Carey, I said it before and I’ll say it again—you’ll be a big success in films. You’ll photograph like an angel.”
“Paul says the left profile isn’t quite so good.”
“Oh, he does, does he? Perfectionist. I’ll bet he doesn’t understand you half as well as I do.”
“In some ways he doesn’t understand me at all.”
“No? Really? I’d like to meet that guy some time.”
“Maybe you will.” She laughed, but nervously, as if the thought gave her a mixture of fear and pleasure. “It’s too bad I once told him you were a writer. He hates writers. But perhaps by that time you’ll be a doctor.”
The maid entered with extra things to be packed, and there was no more chance to talk.
* * * * *
On the train to Chicago she had a moment of supreme dejection when she wondered if she were doing the most foolish thing of her life. At the peak of misgiving she would have gone back, no matter at what cost in surrender or complication, but of course it was impossible, and the moment passed.
She had waved through the window at Grand Central and seen father and son standing together as the train moved out. There had also been a photographer from the New York office of Majestic Pictures. She had posed for him on the platform and he had wanted to take the three of them in a group, but Austen, with his usual phobia about publicity, had curtly declined. Or had his reason been only that? It would have been a good way to contradict the rumours already in circulation, if he had wanted to. She could not read into Austen’s mind, and she realized now that she had never been able to, completely.
Soon it was evening and she felt less troubled—she could enjoy the cosiness of the drawing-room, the lights of the little towns as they flashed by, the glances of fellow-passengers in the diner, some of whom doubtless recognized her. She went to bed early and slept fairly well, and in the morning, after the transfer at Chicago, settled down to a couple of usefully contemplative days alone. It was for this reason she had not travelled by air or with Paul. He was to fly out in time to meet her, possibly at the train when she arrived.
As the miles passed and she stared out of the window for long stretches, it seemed to her that she remembered more than she observed, for it was over twenty years since she had made this same westward journey, but then by road, with Paul, in a model-T Ford. She herself had driven, and in those days it had not been such an easy trip—long spells of dirt road between towns, changing tyres in the dust, the radiator boiling over on mountain grades, nights spent in cheap hotels, sometimes in the car to save a dollar. But to her (as that vacation in Ireland to Norris) the whole experience was deep in the mythology of the heart… the tree-shaded towns of Ohio, a whiff of snow in Kansas, sunrise on the redlands of Arizona. And now the air-conditioned luxury of the Super-Chief was the measure of the years of change.
* * *
PART FIVE
One day about half-way through the shooting of Morning Journey the leading man, Greg Wilson, called Carey to come and look at what was going on. She had been resting during a scene in which she did not appear, and the portable dressing-room, tucked away in the corner of the big stage, had a privacy that no one would wantonly disturb. But Greg, whom she had come to like during their work together, evidently thought the reason good enough. At first glance nothing was unusual. There had been one take already and there was to be another. Technicians were checking the lights; the camera was being reloaded; the customary appearance of noisy chaos was in full show. Paul had slumped in the canvas chair, his head sunk forward as if he were half asleep —a characteristic attitude that often concealed a sharp scrutiny of what was in progress. Greg, ill-clothed and unkempt for his part, looked very different from the hero of his usual type of film, and clearly he was excited at the difference and a little vain of himself. Two other actors, one a girl, were also waiting to begin. The scene was the interior of a country cottage, nothing special or expensive about it.
Paul said something and the bell rang for silence.
“Well, here we go,” Greg whispered to Carey. “Watch me—I’m good, but watch Barrington too—he’s better.”
Carey watched. Morning Journey was really nothing but a cops and robbers picture (as Paul had said scornfully at the outset), and any similarity between itself and life would, in the ordinary way, have been purely detrimental. However, once Paul had schooled himself to the actual job of shooting, the usual change in his attitude took place; Morning Journey became then contemptible only to the extent that it owed its origin to a mediocre novel and its later shape to a couple of script writers. There was, of course, the permanent slur (liable to be brought up at any moment in any argument) of its being a Majestic picture and therefore a victim of over-all and predestined contamination. The odd thing was that with all this Paul managed to combine a tremendous intention of his own to make every scene as good as he knew how, and an overmastering pride in every fragment of his work. The result was something in which life-likeness, if not life itself, sneaked in by all kinds of crannies; or, to quote a later critic who was mainly hostile, the picture was full of “directorial flourishes”. It was one of these that Greg had called on Carey to witness. The opening situation was simple: at night two escaping prisoners-of-war approach a woodcutter’s cottage high in the Bavarian Alps. The men are weary and famished, almost ready to give themselves up; in this mood they enter the cottage seeking food and shelter. To their astonishment they encounter no one, though lamps are lit, there is a fire burning, and a table is set for a meal. The men fall to on what is to hand—hunks of bread and cheese and pitchers of milk; then, with the edge of hunger dulled, they
become aware that there IS someone else. They hear footsteps and a girl’s voice singing. They stand transfixed when the door opens and the girl, beautiful of course, brings in more food for the table. Amazingly she does not seem to notice them, though they have had no time to hide. The men are desperately uncertain what to do. Should they seize her, gag her, and tie her up, so that she cannot give the alarm till they are well away? Or should they throw themselves on her mercy? One of the men (Greg), realizing the truth sooner than the other, covers his companion’s mouth in a frantic signal for silence. FOR THE GIRL IS BLIND. But already she has HEARD. They try to edge towards the door while she greets them cheerfully: “Hello. Sit down and have some food. Who are you? How many are there of you? Did you find them yet? They’re probably across the border by now. Did you meet my father?—he said he’d climb to the ridge.” The men dare not speak and their silence puzzles her. First she thinks it is a joke. “Hans, I know it’s you—answer me—stop being silly. Who is it with you?” All at once, in the continuing silence, panic is born and she suspects the truth—that the intruders are not the pursuers, but the pursued. Her aim is then as much to escape as theirs is, and in rushing out of the room she stumbles over a chair. The second man, with instinctive kindliness, takes a step to help her, but has to be restrained by Greg. Once outside the room the girl screams for help while the two men make their exit from a side window.
A remarkable scene, if only because the star of the picture had nothing to say in it. But two other things made it equally remarkable. One was the almost intolerable suspense, the ballet-like dumb show of the two fugitives counter-pointing the fluttering rhythms of the blind girl. The other was the identity of the actor sharing the dumb show with Greg. He was Jerry Barrington, an old-timer from silent-picture days, whose failing (apart from drink) had always been regarded as an invincible inability to speak lines. But now, in a rather unexampled way, he did not have to speak lines. It was really very fortunate for the picture. Yet that impulse of his to help the blind girl when she stumbled had had a rare beauty in it, something that had momentarily transfigured the face and movements of a rather second-rate performer.
Yet another point might have been noted—that the scene bore small resemblance to anything in the script, in whose mimeographed pages the girl had not been blind, and the men, before they could fill their pockets with food and get away, had had to dodge in and out of rooms like erring husbands in a French farce.
After the word “Cut” there was a spell of continued tension as if even hard-boiled technicians were impressed; then Paul added: “Print the first one,” and everybody laughed. Already he had become somewhat notorious for saying that.
Greg joined Carey at the edge of the suddenly unloosed commotion; Paul was already talking to the camera-man about the next scene.
“How does he do it?” Greg exclaimed. “An old ham like Barrington…”
Carey said: “I’ve never seen Barrington before.”
“That’s the point. Nobody’s ever seen him before… How does he do it? Paul, I mean.”
She said: “It was the same in the theatre. He had a way of getting things out of people.”
Greg nodded. “Now go back and finish your nap. We shan’t be wanted for another hour at least.”
“I’m glad you fetched me, Greg. It’s a wonderful scene. Who changed it this way?”
“Can’t you guess? The writers haven’t been near the place. They’ll probably kick when they find out, unless they know a good thing when they see it, and who does, when it’s somebody else’s?”
“Did Randolph approve?”
“He wouldn’t have been given a chance only he happened to come on the set while the whole thing was being cooked up and re-rehearsed. I don’t think he really liked it. He finds it hard to like anything that Paul does at the last minute without consulting him. But the big row was because Paul wanted the girl to speak in German—said it was more natural and the words themselves didn’t matter—the voice would give the meaning. Of course Randy wouldn’t stand for that, and Paul had to give in. The rest he did the way he wanted it.” Greg laughed. “What a way to make a picture! And yet WHAT a way—if you can do it!”
She had already admitted Greg to full membership in the conspiracy of those who knew the formula derived from measuring Paul’s faults against his virtues.
“Personally,” she said, “I agree with Randolph about the German. Paul goes overboard sometimes.”
“Sure. Ninety per cent of Paul and ten per cent of Randy make a good mixture.”
“I think I’ll drop by and talk to him before I go home. Perhaps I can smooth matters down a bit.”
“Couldn’t do any harm. He likes YOU.”
So she called at Randolph’s office before leaving the studio that evening. She didn’t defend the changed scene, but chatted about it in a seemingly impartial way and somehow conveyed her own satisfaction with the progress of the picture as a whole. Randolph, frosty at first, thawed under her influence till at last he admitted that some of the scenes LOOKED all right. The test, of course, would be in the public’s reception. He was a tall dome-headed tweedy fellow in his late fifties, as proud of his Bond Street shoes as he was of his hundred-odd pictures that, over a period of twenty years, had earned fabulous profits without ever collecting a single award or distinction. He was not cynical about this, merely matter of fact. Picture-making was an industry; art was all right, but it usually did not pay. If by chance it did, it was either a fluke, or else the artist involved had been kept in careful check by men of proved experience. He himself was a man of proved experience and he was determined to keep Saffron in check, but Saffron, being not only an artist but also a so-and-so, was harder to check than most artists. This was his attitude, which he did not put into words, but which Carey understood perfectly. She had even a certain amount of sympathy—not with it, but with him, for Paul’s habit of rewriting scenes at the last minute was really inexcusable. But then Paul had found many other things inexcusable. His first big row with Randolph had occurred after the first day’s shooting when the two of them, along with Carey, Greg Wilson, and a fourth man, had sat in the back row of a projection-room to see the rushes. The fourth man, introduced indistinctly, was ignored until Randolph suddenly addressed him across the others. “Cut from where the girl enters the room to the long shot of the cab arriving. Then go to the two-shot inside the cab.” Paul rose from his seat immediately. “What’s going on? Are you joking? Who is this fellow?” The fourth man, who had been taking notes, was then solemnly reintroduced as a cutter. Paul erupted for about ten minutes. It was then explained to him that Majestic Pictures Incorporated employed producers to produce, directors to direct, and cutters to cut. Paul said he would do his own cutting or quit. He had had to concede control of production, casting, and music, but there was a limit beyond which he would not surrender. The argument continued in the darkened projection-room until Randolph was fuming and Paul had begun to inveigh against the entire output of Majestic Pictures, hardly any of which he had seen. The cutter sat silent, aware that his salary did not entitle him to an opinion. In the end the matter was left somewhat undecided, with Carey and Greg appealing to both sides to wait till the picture was finished before any cutting was done at all. “If it’s good,” she said, “surely it won’t be hard then to agree on the details.” This may not have made much sense (since it would always be hard for Paul to agree with anyone else on anything), but it provided a needed excuse for shelving the issue; but of course Randolph hated Paul from then on, and Paul, who already hated Randolph, began a grim accumulation of ammunition for the eventual fight. One of his procedures was to see earlier pictures that Randolph had produced, whenever the chance occurred, and gloat over the details of their badness.
There were other troubles. Randolph’s way of shooting a picture (he had been a director himself in his time) was to make a long master-shot of everything in a scene, then break it up into medium and close shots, ‘favouring’ the star?
??for naturally, under the star system, who else could be ‘favoured’? The final jigsaw was then assembled in the cutting-room, where, if any supporting actors were so good that they drew too much attention, the error could be corrected by blanketing their voices against the star’s close-up. This had been done so often in all Majestic pictures that it had become a formula which Randolph took for granted; even to question it seemed slightly impious. Paul not only questioned it, he called it nonsense. First, he did not believe in master-shots, and he hated close-ups of faces while other actors were speaking. And he liked the camera to move, not to chop and change from one fixed position to another. Nor did he believe a scene could be stolen except by what deserved to steal it —which was good acting against bad acting. He thought Greg Wilson, for instance, was a pretty bad actor, and hadn’t wanted him in the picture at all. Randolph, however, knew that Carey had no following among movie-goers, and had insisted on casting Majestic’s biggest box-office name opposite her. Carey was prepared to agree that in this Randolph might be wise, but Paul resented it until one day Greg told Paul that no director he had ever experienced had done so well with him. This flattered Paul and made him think Greg not nearly as bad, which was the necessary self-hypnosis before Paul could make him, as he presently did, rather surprisingly adequate.
As for Carey herself, her introduction to a new technique of acting, if it were such, seemed less significant than a return to the discipline of working with Paul. After an anguished rehearsal of the first scene, she wondered what had ever possessed her to undertake a renewal of this ordeal voluntarily; a hundred memories assailed her, mostly of similar anguish when she had been unable to please him during stage rehearsals; she might have guessed he would have become no more indulgent with the years. But then one day while she was before the camera in a rather difficult scene, another memory touched her —the renewal of that curious trance-like bliss that told her she was ACTING, and with it the renewal of ambition to act, and of the feeling that what she was doing mattered by some standard shared by other arts. She tried to catch Paul’s eye when the scene ended, but he was looking elsewhere; she heard, however, the inflection in his voice as he spoke the one word “Print,” and in that she had her answer. She felt suddenly radiant. It was all worth while. God knew how or why, but it was.