Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  The enquiry, held in one of the government buildings, began on the hottest day of the year; the stifling atmosphere, impregnated with the smells of dust and leather and teak panelling, affected everyone with fatigue or peevishness, and even the chairman seemed once or twice on the point of falling asleep over his opening oration. He was a pale and elderly civil servant, rather obviously timid in the presence of his colleagues, one of whom, a red- faced, bristling, stiff-backed major, had an air of challenging even the temperature to a trial of endurance. The rest of the committee comprised two members of the local legislature and a naval commander, a lithe, careless- looking Irishman with a nearly bald head and impudent eyes. In attendance on the five were a mixed bevy of white and Eurasian shorthand-writers and newspaper-men; while a small gallery at the rear was occupied by such members of the public as had been fortunate enough to secure cards of admission. There had been a keen demand for these among the friends of the committee, and the result was a quite fashionable audience, mainly of women eager for drama. Conspicuous in the front row, a single touch of black amongst the prevalently brighter colours, sat Franklyn’s widow.

  The chairman spoke long and tediously, and it was not till the second day, during which a heavy thunderstorm broke, that the gallery occupants could feel their patience rewarded. Late in the afternoon Gathergood was called. He had not been permitted to attend the earlier sessions, but newspaper reports had already given him some idea what to expect. Yet though he had thus prepared himself for the small insolences of cross-examination, it had certainly never struck him that he would be treated less like a witness than a prisoner on trial. Grimly, after his first hour of questioning, he perceived that things were to be even worse than had seemed possible. His words were being misquoted, his actions misdescribed, and his motives misinterpreted. With all his awareness of unpopularity, he had never guessed that even the bitterest dislike could frame such a conspiracy, or that, if framed, it could prevail with reasonable persons. But perhaps the men and women facing him were not reasonable. They represented him, for instance, as having condoned the murder of a white man by a native, and of having interceded with authority on the latter’s behalf. It was implied that he had definitely taken the part of the native Cuavanese in a matter affecting white prestige. His mission of pacification to the Sultan was held up as an act of humiliating unwisdom equivalent to handing a hostage to the enemy. He had, it was to be inferred, deliberately led Franklyn to his death. At this point in the proceedings Mrs. Franklyn broke down and sobbed audibly for several moments, while the chairman stuttered out a few sentences of sympathy. When the cross-examination was continued, Gathergood was uncomfortable as well as grim, and created a definitely bad impression on listeners already predisposed to receive one; his very carefulness in choosing words, which was normal to him, was taken for over- subtlety—as when, for instance, he answered: “No, it wasn’t that I thought Naung Lo innocent; I only thought that he might not be guilty.” This, spoken in slow, deliberate tones, sent a hot draught of exasperation across the room.

  He was asked, of course, about that final tragic pilgrimage to the Sultan’s palace with Franklyn, and he described it with an exactness that made no glimmer of appeal for sympathy. The truth was, his anger, always slow to rise, was now engulfing him in the blackest bitterness of soul. He would not, by a word or by a movement of a muscle, plead with these people who were so obviously bent on vilifying him. He sat rigid in the straight-backed seat, his blue eyes fixed in a stare that only occasionally quickened, and only at one spectacle—the clock that ticked away his ordeal. Once or twice, faint with the heat, he found his attention wandering, and generally it was some outdoor scene that flashed momentarily before him, some remembered spot on one of his jungle expeditions, the place where he had found the sciuropterus or that Polypodium carnosum. And then, breaking in upon such ill-timed tranquillities, would come the chairman’s rasping monotone: “Are we to understand, Mr. Gathergood… So, Mr. Gathergood, it amounts to this, that you… Now, Mr. Gathergood, let’s be quite clear about it—you say you … ” And so on.

  Yet the Agent was never near breaking down under the strain. He was upheld by his bitterness; relentlessly he gave reasons why he had done this or had omitted to do that, and even the major’s querulous: “But surely, man, you must have realised … ” only drew from him a quiet: “I didn’t realise it, anyway.” Once the naval commander interjected, apparently to the assembly in general: “Of course we must all remember how easy it is to be wise after the event”; and Gathergood gave him a swift glance in which just more was visible than mere assent. But on the whole he preserved an outward emotionlessness that antagonised his hearers as much as it disappointed them. The commander tried sometimes to counter this by skilfully leading questions; he remarked, for instance, at one juncture: “I should think, Gathergood, you must be feeling yourself rather an unlucky fellow. Things seem to have gone persistently wrong in all your calculations—a sort of chapter of accidents, eh?”

  Gathergood began to respond: “Yes, and as a matter of fact…” and then checked himself sharply; whereat the major, pouncing to the occasion, barked out: “Continue with what you were going to say, Mr. Gathergood.”

  “Nothing of any consequence—a mere reflection of my own that can hardly matter.”

  “Never mind, let’s have it,” snapped the major, enjoying himself; and the chairman nodded emphatically.

  “I was only thinking that the whole thing began with an accident— quite a trifling one—Morrison’s hat blowing into the sea—”

  Again the wave of exasperation passed across the faces. But the end was near. On the afternoon of the fifth day Gathergood was suddenly informed that he need not stay further or attend again. He bowed to the chairman and walked, briskly limping, from the room. He felt that the manner of his dismissal was that of a conviction and sentence all in one. Even the Eurasian attendant with whom he had left his hat treated him with barely concealed superciliousness.

  That evening, while he was taking coffee in a corner of the hotel lounge, he was surprised to be accosted by the naval officer who had been a member of the committee. His name was Holroyd, and after a few perfunctory remarks he planked himself down at the same table. Gathergood, though not especially anxious for company, offered a drink, and they chatted together for some time, but without mentioning the enquiry; then Holroyd suggested that the Agent should stroll over with him to his hotel, the De la Paix, for another drink. Gathergood agreed and they finally sat up in Holroyd’s private room till nearly midnight. The commander, in this more intimate atmosphere, was breezily candid. “I daresay you’ve guessed by this time, Gathergood, that you’re going to get all the blame—which I don’t suppose you deserve—nobody does deserve what he gets in this world, whether of blame or anything else.”

  Gathergood said very little in reply; he had explained himself exhaustively and in public for four days, and had no desire to go all over the ground again. He merely sipped his whisky and let Holroyd go on talking.

  “The question is,” continued the commander, “what are you going to do now that the show’s over?”

  That was the question, undoubtedly; and from the moment of his dismissal from the enquiry-room Gathergood had seen it confronting him. He answered, a trifle curtly: “Well, I don’t want to stay here.”

  “I should jolly well think not…. How’re you feeling now, by the way? Pretty rotten, I expect, after your leg-smash and all the strain of the talky-talky.”

  “My leg’s healed well and I feel all right.”

  “How about putting in for a spell of sick leave, anyhow?”

  “I don’t consider myself really ill.”

  Holroyd grunted. “Well, Gathergood, if you won’t take the hint, it’s no use beating about the bush. I’m here, speaking quite frankly, to make a definite suggestion to you—put in for leave and get away back home. Not necessarily to England—in fact, on the whole, I’d say not England, for the time being. Take a long fo
reign holiday somewhere—nice little places in France or Italy… anyway, clear off pretty quick out of this rotten hole. There’s going to be a hell of a rumpus when the report comes out, and if you take my tip, you won’t wait for it.”

  “I’m due to retire next year, you know.”

  “Then it fits in rather well, doesn’t it?”

  “I’d rather have served out my full time. Not in Cuava, of course, but—”

  Holroyd shook his head. “I’m damned sorry, Gathergood, but you can wash out all idea of that. Absolutely no point in mincing matters, is there? But if I were you, I wouldn’t fret about it. ’Be damned to you’—that’s the feeling to have when fate gives you a knock in the eye.”

  “I see,” replied the Agent quietly. For the first time then he showed signs of emotion, though only for a few seconds. His mind received the full impact of the future, recoiled a little, and then steadied itself. “Yes,” he added, in control again, “I think that’s just about my own attitude too.”

  That midnight, as soon as he was back in his own bedroom, he wrote out a formal application for leave, received an affirmative reply by return of post, booked his passage on a French liner bound for Marseilles, and sent his former Chinese cook two hundred dollars and instructions for the packing and transhipment of his belongings from Cuava to a furniture depository in London.

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWO. — FLORENCE FAULKNER

  “Oh, dear, now it all begins again,” thought Miss Faulkner, scampering along the platform with her usual smile of sprightly welcome. She had a mixed collection of books and papers under her arm. She nearly always had. And she was nearly always smiling, or scampering, or both. The clanking carriages drew slowly in, pulled by an electric engine that stood at the far end ticking like an enormous clock. Faces appeared at windows—windows that bore the labels of an English travel organisation, and Miss Faulkner, still scampering, shouted out: “Hello, everybody—is the train early, or am I late?” which was the kind of remark which, in her estimation, put people at their ease immediately and helped them to begin a holiday in the right spirit.

  The train was from Calais; its passengers had been travelling all night and the day before. The women looked heavy-eyed and bedraggled, the men were blue-chinned after two days without a shave. They came from the vague hinterlands of suburb and provinces, urged across eight hundred miles of land and water by an enterprise which was not their own, but that of a limited liability company working for profit and earning (in normal years) some fifteen per cent. This organisation, after the manner of its age, manufactured the demand which it afterwards proceeded to supply. Its brochures were superb examples of art-printing and chromo-lithography, and its well-known advertisement of a pretty girl smiling over the rail of a Channel steamer in excessively calm and sunny weather had been painted by a R. A. At the other end of the business, however, expenditure was less lavish. The usual practice was to charter a second-rate hotel for the season at such a price that its proprietors, to make any profit at all, had to supply inferior food. Another economical plan was to employ, instead of full-time guides and couriers, a semi- amateur staff of part-time workers, most of them school-teachers, who were willing to work during their summer holidays for very little more than pocket- money.

  Miss Faulkner was one of these people. She was small-built, pert-faced, bright-eyed, and aged thirty-seven. Just the person for the job, most people said: by which they meant that her London Matriculation French was understood by foreign railway-porters who knew English, that she possessed a sheepdog aptitude for yapping (though pleasantly) at people’s heels till they had all climbed into the right vehicles, and that her smile was of the kind usually described as “infectious.”

  “Ah, well, it’s a nice day, that’s something,” thought Miss Faulkner, marshalling the arrivals and seeing them installed in a couple of late-Victorian horse-omnibuses. “Yes, aren’t they sweet?” she said cheerfully. “I believe there’s some talk of putting them in the local museum.” People always laughed at that. She darted about, answering questions, giving orders, ticking names on a list, already memorising faces; really an exceptionally capable woman. And smiling all the time. A rather wide smile, showing good teeth, but (if one bothered to notice such things) a smile that did not cause much to happen to the rest of her face. “Yes, Mrs. Walsh, your bag will be all right—all the luggage is coming along afterwards,” she sang out; and Mrs. Walsh, a granitic matron who might otherwise have given trouble, was instantly captivated.

  “We’ve been having it quite hot here lately,” continued Miss Faulkner, in the omnibus, launching the regulation chitchat about the weather. “And I see from the papers it’s been cold and rainy in England…. Yes, we get all the English papers here a day late…. There, that’s the Jungfrau—that big one over there. Rather fine, isn’t it?” And privately to herself she reflected: “I must write to George immediately after lunch, or I shall never get a chance.”…

  Just as the horses turned out of Interlaken’s main thoroughfare into the side-street leading to the hotel, a man stepped off the kerb and would have been run down had not a shaft caught his arm and jerked him back. One of the horses half-stumbled, and the driver pulled up and began to shout angrily in German. There seemed here the makings of an awkward little scene, and it was in just such an emergency that Miss Faulkner was at her best. Climbing down from the omnibus she first commanded silence from the driver and then approached the pedestrian. He was well-dressed, she noticed, and she was relieved to find that he was English. “It was entirely my own fault,” he admitted, calmly. “I wasn’t looking where I was going at all. Fortunately I’m not hurt.”

  “Oh, well, if that’s the case, there’s really nothing more to be said, is there?” replied Miss Faulkner, flashing her smile. “I’m glad you’re all right. Good morning.”

  The man raised his hat and walked off, and Miss Faulkner, continuing her smile to her people in the omnibus, climbed in again. “Really,” she said, as the journey was resumed, “if people WILL do these things—” Somebody cried: “Day-dreamin’, that’s what he must have been doin’,” and Miss Faulkner echoed: “Yes, that’s just it!” with an air of finding the remark a perfect and wished-for expression of her own feelings. There was thus a second person captivated.

  When the hotel was reached, Miss Faulkner presided briskly over the usual commotion about rooms; then came lunch, during which, from the head of the long table, she made the speech she always made at first meals. It was one of carefully mingled exhortation and facetiousness—all about being punctual, making the best of things, keeping together on party expeditions, and taking warm clothing on the mountain trips. “Oh, yes, and there’s just one other thing— some of you may already have discovered that foreign hotels don’t supply soap. If you haven’t brought any with you, there’s a chemist’s shop just round the corner where they speak English.” Somebody cheered. Miss Faulkner smiled. And then: “Perhaps we’d better not plan anything for this afternoon, as I daresay many of you feel tired after the journey and would like to rest.” She gazed round the tables with a look of slightly intimidating enquiry, and the response came easily to her bidding, in the form of mumbled assent. “All right. Then we’ll meet again at seven-thirty for dinner.”

  Thank goodness, she thought, escaping through the crowd—that left her free for the afternoon. She went up to her bedroom and dragged a wicker chair to the window. The view was not of the Jungfrau, as all the advertisements would have led one to assume, but of a row of similar windows overlooking a small well-like courtyard in between. Free for the afternoon, Miss Faulkner echoed to herself, as she got out pen and paper and began to write. The letter was to her brother, who worked in a stockbroker’s office in Old Broad Street. She wrote:

  “DEAR GEORGE,

  “Thanks for sending on my correspondence. The weather here has been hot, which I don’t mind, except that it makes people dawdle, and I have to keep on chivvying them to catch their trains. They’ve
been a rather dull crowd so far, and this week’s new arrivals don’t seem much different. Still, I suppose it’s all to the good that they should come out here instead of going to Margate or Blackpool or places like that. I’m sorry you didn’t like the Virginia Woolf—I thought it quite marvellous. Mrs. Ripley writes that she’d like to borrow my notes on Silesian minorities to use in a paper she’s getting up, so if she calls, they’re in the third drawer of my bureau desk, but please don’t mix up the other papers in it. I expect I shall be returning to-day fortnight. I hope you’re managing all right in the flat, and don’t forget to leave the cats their milk when you go out in the mornings. This is in haste, as I simply haven’t a moment to spare.

  “Your affectionate sister,

  “FLORENCE.”

  That done, and the envelope sealed and addressed, Miss Faulkner wrote half a dozen other letters, after which she packed them under her arm with her usual mixed collection of books and papers, and went downstairs to the post.

  There was a box inside the hotel lobby, but she preferred the short walk to the little blue letter-box fixed to the lamp-post down the road. She scampered out, through the swing-doors, into the warm glare of the pavement. The sun was shining out of a sky that really was the blue of the picture- postcards, and even the Jungfrau looked somewhat like the advertised Jungfrau. Miss Faulkner, however, was not normally a person to rhapsodise over such matters. She walked straight to the lamp-post, inserted the letters, and walked back. Just as she climbed the hotel steps she noticed a man sitting on the terrace outside the Hôtel Oberland, the bigger and much more aristocratic hotel immediately opposite her own, which was the Hôtel Magnifique de l’Univers. She felt sure he was the man whom the omnibus had nearly driven down, and in seeking to verify the recognition she stared so hard that when he chanced to glance up she felt that the only thing possible to do was to smile. And having smiled, and having received in return a slight but courteous bow, she felt she must at least say something to excuse the smile. So she ran across the road and began: “I’m so sorry about the omnibus dashing into you like that—I do hope you weren’t really hurt. And I must say, even though it may be true that you weren’t looking, that man does drive round corners rather recklessly. It was very kind of you, anyhow, to take it as you did. I mean, it saved a lot of delay and argument.”