Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  The man seemed surprised to be accosted thus and with such volubility. “I assure you I haven’t even a bruise to show for it,” he answered, looking her down with very blue eyes.

  “I’m so glad…. It’s marvellous weather, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, great,” he replied.

  Miss Faulkner, smiling again, recrossed the road to her own hotel. Obviously a gentleman, she had confirmed; his clothes, his accent, his manner, all were satisfactory. For she had belonged to the Left Wing of the English Labour Movement long enough to know that though you might attack gentlemen, as a class, and even, as a measure of social reform, seek to abolish them, they yet remained, as individuals, most charming and agreeable people.

  For the rest of the time before dinner she busied herself with the findings of a commission whose bulky minority report she had been somewhat pointlessly carrying about all day.

  Miss Faulkner was the headmistress of a council-school in Bermondsey. She was clever, successful, and possessed an abundance of energy as well as that immense capacity for taking pains which, whatever else it is, certainly is not genius. But, genius apart, she was a talented woman; she could speak fluently at meetings, serve effectively on committees, and bully a school-inspector into overlooking the fact that her children, though skilled at clay-modelling and pastel-drawing, were unfortunately less able to read and write. Her ambition was some clay to become an M.P., and to this end she was already associated with many of the movements and campaigns of advanced Socialism. Not that she was by any means insincere. A passion almost flame-like in its intensity sustained her in her many activities; she really did possess a love for humanity, and the further removed humanity was, both in space and time, the more she loved it. Her favourite school lesson, for instance, was one in which she described the sufferings of the little boy chimney-sweeps in the early nineteenth century; and in modern times a Chinese famine, especially when documented by Blue Book or White Paper statistics, could move her to genuine tears of compassion. With the local unemployed she would probably have sympathised almost as warmly had not so many of them approached her for personal help. “My good man, I can’t give to everybody,” she would say; which was true enough, for four hundred a year did not go far when one had a half-share of a flat in West Kensington, and when even the telephone- bill often came to ten shillings a week. She was, anyhow, continually giving money away, more often in guineas than coppers, and her chief reason for spending August as she did was to obtain a healthful holiday of a kind and duration that she could not otherwise have afforded.

  Besides, as she often remarked to friends in England, it was a means of doing good to others as well as to herself. “I don’t see why the loveliest places in the world should only be visited by the rich,” she would say, with that clear-voiced truculence especially designed by nature for the painless extraction of “hear-hear’s” from an audience. “We get the middle classes as a rule, you know, and though they may be a little tiresome at times, one does feel that one is helping them to enjoy experiences they ought to have. Sometimes we even get actual working- men—we had a most intelligent engine-driver only the other week. I think that sort of thing is just splendid.” Miss Faulkner always spoke of working-men as of some astonishing natural phenomenon which she had studied for a university doctorate.

  That evening she saw the man at the “Oberland” again. He was taking coffee on the terrace after dinner, and from the crowded lobby of the “Magnifique” she could observe him whenever anyone pushed open the swing-doors to go out or come in. He was reading a paper and smoking a cigar, and in the light of the orange-shaded lamp at his elbow she could see that his hair was greyish. Elderly, therefore. And by himself. On business? But no; she had not thought he looked a business man. And suddenly, perhaps because the report she had lately been reading was connected with it, she imagined him as having something to do with the League of Nations. Its headquarters were at Geneva; what more likely than that its personnel should take trips to Interlaken? But that, of course, raised a possible doubt as to his nationality; his accent might be perfect, but might not a League official have a perfect English accent without being necessarily English? He must be Nordic, on account of his blue eyes; and she therefore imagined him a German, because she had an emotional pity for Germans and because at one moment, when she glanced at him, she thought he looked rather sombre. Pondering, perhaps, on the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles or on the problem of the Polish Corridor.

  Later that evening, after he had left the terrace, she went out for a short stroll and, on the way back, stopped to chat a while with the uniformed porter of the “Oberland,” whom she knew quite familiarly, and who graciously permitted the exercise of her French. After discussing the chances of the next day’s weather she said, abruptly: “Oh, by the way, who is that man who was taking coffee on the terrace just now—sitting by himself at the table near the lamp?”

  “An Englishman,” replied the porter, with half a wink. “A Mr. Brown, of London.”

  Miss Faulkner was disappointed. Her pitying thoughts of a derelict schloss in the Rhineland and of a family starved to death in the blockade subsided painfully; as a Mr. Brown, of London, he was clearly less remarkable. And then, entering the hotel on the other side of the road, she added, what was quite obvious, that it was of absolutely no consequence who or what he was, and that he would probably be gone to-morrow, anyway.

  But he had not gone on the morrow. He was seen (by Miss Faulkner) having breakfast on the terrace while she shepherded her party to catch the train for the Schynige Platte. She smiled and he nodded. It was another lovely day, pleasantly cool on the mountain-top, though hot down below. She functioned with her usual sprightliness, smiling at least a hundred times as she gave advice as to the purchase of drinks and picture-postcards. On the way back she could not help wondering if Mr. Brown, of London, had yet left the “Oberland.”

  He had not. She saw him that evening on the terrace, but he was engrossed in a book and did not look her way.

  The next morning there was no sign of him, and she was surprised in the afternoon to discover, from a casual question to the porter, that he was still staying. It did not matter, of course. She smiled hard throughout dinner and gave a pithy little lecture, in her best schoolmistress manner, about the Gorges of the Aar that were to be visited on the following day.

  She saw nothing of him then, either. But on the day after that, the Wednesday, by sheer chance they met on the train to the Jungfraujoch. It was an expensive excursion, costing over two pounds extra, and for that reason she had only half a dozen of the party under her charge. They had already entered the train and she had climbed in after them and found a vacant seat before noticing that he was opposite her. “Good morning,” she said, with brisk eagerness.

  “Good morning,” he answered.

  He had a book open on his knee, and she obeyed a natural impulse to decipher the title upside down. It was Shaw’s “Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism.” Her eyes glinted; surely it was a good sign when a man was found reading Shaw in a train. She meant (for she was already aware that he interested her) that it was so much the more likely that they would have tastes in common. And she slightly revised her picture of him as a German delegate to the League of Nations; perhaps, if the Shaw were any evidence, he was in the International Labour Office. “A fascinating book,” she commented, keenly.

  He looked up and answered, after a pause: “Personally, I’m finding it rather dull.”

  “Really?” She yet contrived to smile. She knew there were lots of people nowadays who thought Shaw a back number, and she remembered once hearing a pert Communist at a committee meeting say that Shaw’s book would have been much more interesting had it been an Intelligent Socialist’s Guide to Woman.

  “Of course Shaw’s getting very old,” she said, with a hint of unutterable drawbacks.

  “Yes, he must be.”

  And then she remarked in the casual way she had so often found effectiv
e: “I can’t say I was ever impressed with him myself. He talks at you rather than to you, and it gets on one’s nerves after a time. At least it did on mine.”

  Here, of course, his obvious cue was to express surprise that she had actually met Shaw, and the fact that he didn’t only disappointed her until she realised that he was probably so used to meeting famous people himself that it had hardly struck him as remarkable. She became quite certain, at that moment, that he was “somebody.”

  All he said was the one word “Indeed?”

  She was just a little discouraged by this, and did not speak again until they had to change trains at Lauterbrunnen. Then, amidst the warming sunshine, she thought, with sudden boldness: “I’m interested in him and would rather like to get to know him; why shouldn’t I, then, deliberately enter the same carriage and sit next to him in the new train?” After all, nobody would ever blame a man for doing that, if he were interested in a girl…. That final argument, with all that it implied in connection with the equality of the sexes, clinched the matter. Miss Faulkner waited till the man had chosen a seat in the train that goes up to Wengen and Scheidegg, and then led her small party in after him. “Here again,” she exclaimed brightly, banging the window down. He smiled— a rather slow, cautious smile, as if for the first time he were taking real notice of her. “You are going up to the Joch?” he queried.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a long journey, but well worth it. Is this your first visit?”

  “Yes.”

  She felt rather glad of that. “You’ll be impressed, on a day like this. I was, tremendously, when I first came. In fact, I always am.”

  “You come pretty often, I suppose?”

  “Once a week during August.”

  “Oh?”

  “You see, I’m only here for the month. This is really my holiday….” And in a quarter of an hour—before the train reached the green slopes and red-roofed chalets of Wengen—she had told him all about her job, her school in Bermondsey, and her friendship with Bertrand Russell. He listened politely, without saying very much. At Scheidegg, where there was another change of trains, she kept the conversation going so incessantly that it would have been nearly impossible for them not to re-seat themselves together. All this time she had been somewhat neglectful of her party, but as soon as the train set off she rose and delivered, in her very best style, a short account of the building of the Jungfrau Railway, its cost, difficulties, and the number of lives lost during its construction. When she had finished she smiled at everybody, and then, sitting down, bestowed a little private smile upon the man next her. “I hope you weren’t startled by my sudden burst into professional activity,” she began.

  “Not at all,” he answered. “On the contrary, it was most interesting—all that you said. A marvellous piece of engineering… And another thing interested me too.”

  “Yes?”

  “The way—if you’ll excuse my being personal—the way you managed to make yourself heard above the noise of the train without shouting. I—I could never manage to do that.”

  She laughed. “Have you tried?”

  “Not exactly in trains. But I’ve had other experience. I suppose it’s partly knack and partly the voice one’s born with.”

  “Surely not THAT,” she answered. “Babies can always make themselves heard anywhere. At least, my babies can.”

  This time it was he who laughed. “Yes, of course.”

  A moment later it occurred to her to add: “I meant my official babies, you know—the children of four and five at my school. I haven’t any other kind of babies.”

  Accepting the information, he seemed a little pensive afterwards, and by the arrival of the train at the terminus Miss Faulkner thought she had progressed distinctly well, though she was forced to confess that she knew scarcely anything more about him. And yet to have led the conversation to babies! She smiled with extra emphasis as she gave her people the usual cautions about wearing sun-spectacles and not over-exerting themselves at the unaccustomed altitude. Babies, indeed! For she had a sense of humour, no less acute because it sometimes and for long intervals deserted her completely.

  Few places could have been more helpful to the ripening of acquaintance than the Jungfraujoch. In the restricted area round the station and hotel there was little to do except send off picture-postcards, peer through the telescopes at distant skiers, and enjoy the novel combination of blazing sunshine and deep snow. Miss Faulkner found renewed opportunities of talking to Mr. Brown, and Mr. Brown no opportunities at all of escape. It was typical of her that, however much she might let her imagination soar as to his possible identity, she perceived quite clearly that he was not—not yet, at any rate—attracted by her. Probably, she decided, he was not a man who cared for women at all. But she was far from being daunted. If you wanted to get anything in this world, she had discovered, you usually had to set out in pursuit of it—quite shamelessly, if need be. This certainly applied to such things as headships of schools, presidencies of societies, and political candidatures; no doubt also to friendship. She had once read somewhere that liking other people was half the battle towards making them like you, and the theory gave her confidence to go “all out” in getting to know this man. Why not, if she wanted to?

  She certainly made the most of her time during that long, hot afternoon two miles high. Not only were the topographical but also the meteorological circumstances favourable; there was something exquisite in that hard, dry, sunlit brilliance, some sense of being suspended above and beyond the normal earth. She basked with him on the edge of a rock and gazed over the ten—or was it twenty?— miles of snowy wilderness; then they turned their tinted glasses on the knife-edge of the Jungfrau summit, its outline crystal-yellow against a storm-green sky. Mr. Brown talked about mountains and said he would like to do some climbing in the Alps; he had had a little experience elsewhere, though not where there was snow. Some young climbers at his hotel, he said, had asked him to join their expeditions, but he had so far declined because he felt it might be too strenuous for him; after this, however, he thought he might perhaps give himself a trial if he were invited again. Which gave her the chance of asking: “Are you staying long, then?” And he answered: “I don’t really know. I—at the moment, that is—I haven’t decided.”

  She could not resist a further probe. “Of course, if you’re taking a rest-cure, or recovering from an illness, or anything like that, I daresay you oughtn’t to climb.”

  “No, there’s no reason of that kind.”

  “Perhaps you’re one of those lucky people who’re never ill?”

  “But for occasional bouts of malaria, I keep pretty well, I must say.”

  “Malaria’s bad, isn’t it? I suppose you picked it up out East?”

  “Er—yes.”

  “During the War? I know several men who did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  He said that almost rudely. But she did not mind. They travelled back to Interlaken together, and all the way she kept the conversation going, somewhat to the continued neglect of her people. She did not mind that, either. She felt she had badgered the man quite enough about his private affairs, and must now set herself out to make up for it by being interesting and amusing. She more than partially succeeded, for she was well-informed, and had a good command of words as well as a retentive memory for the bright sayings of others. Her account of Soviet Russia, for instance, which she had visited for ten days on a lightning tour of co-operative societies, made him laugh several times. At the end, when they separated for their respective hotels, she said, with an air of suddenly realising it: “I say, I do hope I haven’t bored you. I’m afraid I sometimes get rather carried away by these big topics.”

  “Not at all,” he answered, gravely, and added, with a ready smile: “At least you’ve given me plenty to think about…. Good night.”

  “Perhaps we shall meet again if you’re staying on here?”

  “Per
haps so. Yes, certainly we may.”

  She hastily changed for dinner and faced at the dining-table a group of faces that eyed her none too cordially. The story that she had spent most of the day talking to a man from the hotel opposite had evidently spread. She decided to be particularly charming; indeed, she was—she was almost radiant. Then, if not before, her case could have been definitely diagnosed.

  Miss Faulkner was by no means ignorant of love. She had been in love, and she had also read about it, not only in novels, but in physiological and psychological text-books. She had skimmed through the better-known works of Freud, Jung, Adler, Krafft-Ebbing, Havelock Ellis, Malinowski, and Stopes; she knew all about the Trobriand Islanders, and she was aware that the perception of beauty in moonlight or Mozart was largely an affair of the glandular secretions. Like most women possessed of her type of ambition, she fully realised the likelihood that she would never marry; nor did the prospect worry her much. Apart from the fact that she could not do so and keep her job, the ordinary routine of married life—shopping, babies, and cinema matinées—gave her no thrills of anticipated bliss. If she were ever to accept a man, he would have to be of an exceptional kind, and as that kind was not very likely to come her way, she was quite reconciled to remaining single. She liked children, but in mass rather than individually; and though she was certainly not undersexed, a good deal of what might have been sexual went out of her in other forms of energy. Sublimation, of course; that was another of the things she knew all about. And besides, in these days (1930) one need not be a prude. She did not object to an occasional flirtation, and she had, in her late twenties, adventured rather more than tentatively with a certain university extension lecturer who was now a Labour M.P. It had been her one practical experiment in a subject which she knew well enough in theory, and she had been hit pretty hard when he left her for a fat-legged Jewess who had written a banned novel. For a few days afterwards she had been unconsolable, weeping a good deal, and explaining to her teaching staff that she was on the verge of a breakdown from overwork. By the following week, however, she had salvaged most of her serenity at the cost of a rather greater urge to sublimation than ever. It worked well, indeed, this doing without men; and its very success reinforced her determination to make no surrender but to the most superior applicant.