Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  “Why not? Is it any harder than going over the top? Or than a gun- crew trying to register hits even though they know the enemy cruiser is bound to blow them to atoms within the next half-hour?”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Brown’s voice sank to a whisper, then sharply rose as he added: “But, anyhow, I know what I’D do if you were a brass-hat and I was a Tommy inside one of the damned things. I’d steer it miles and miles behind the lines till I found you and then chase you with it!”

  Parceval smiled quite tranquilly. “You’re a humourist, Brown, I can see. But the fact remains—and in this I’m quite serious, even if you aren’t—that we have here something that may have possibilities. MAY—I won’t say more than that. What we saw this afternoon was, of course, little better than a fiasco, yet—”

  “You’re not going to have that fellow risking his neck again, surely?”

  Parceval’s voice cut suddenly icy. “Not HIM, Brown, I promise you that. Perhaps somebody else whom you’ve never met and aren’t likely to worry about. You’re only a sentimentalist, you know.”

  “WHAT?” It was certainly the last accusation Brown would ever have levelled against himself.

  “A sentimentalist, I said. You’re also quite drunk, and your thumb’s still bleeding, by the way…. Now listen to me. This invention may or may not be capable of the adaptation I have outlined. The chance, however, seems to me worth taking. What I propose is that we—the three of us—should form ourselves into a small syndicate for its development. You, Mathers, with your motor-factory, would be a great help—that is, of course, if the venture appeals to you.”

  “It does, Sir George. Decidedly, it does.”

  “Good! But it isn’t all quite plain sailing yet. First of all, we must buy out Palescu’s rights. We want to be absolutely fair to the young man, but at the same time we must protect ourselves, and it will be equitable, I take it, if we bid for what he has offered us—namely, the rights of his invention as a means of landing passengers from aeroplanes. Any other value it may subsequently acquire as a result of OUR efforts will clearly have nothing to do with him at all—which is why we must negotiate cautiously. I know what inventors are like—I’ve had experience of them before now. Once our charming young friend suspects that the War Departments of the world may be interested in him, he’ll begin to fancy himself a Hiram Maxim right away. Nevertheless, as I said, we must be scrupulously fair. What would you suggest, Brown, as a rough estimate of the COMMERCIAL value of the invention?”

  “I’ll see you damned before I have anything to do with the business at all.”

  Parceval’s lips tightened. “Very well. Then it rests between me and Mathers. I’m sorry you feel inclined to miss the boat in this affair, Brown. I should have thought you’d have been rather glad of a chance to make a little spare cash just now. However—” He paused meaningfully, and then continued: “I really don’t see why you need be so cantankerous about it, anyway. There’s no particular reason why you should join us if you don’t want to—I merely offered you the chance because it was through you that I got into touch with Palescu, and also because I wanted to put something good in your way. I can’t think why you should be so bad-tempered about it.”

  Neither could Brown. He could not have explained, at that moment, exactly what was causing his mood of quite hellish exasperation. Was it the cumulative effect of losing money, of becoming steadily poorer and poorer for ten years? Was it the combine’s recently issued balance-sheet, which had seemed more puzzling the oftener he sought to interpret it? Was it Parceval, whom he had never liked, but who had never before stirred him to such a pitch of mental and temperamental soreness? It was hardly likely to be any scruples as to the ethics of manufacturing war material, since Brown and Company had been doing this for years whenever they got the chance. Nor could it be the prospect of a sharp deal with Palescu, for Brown had learned by sufficient experience that if you did not outwit inventors they would joyfully outwit you. None of these reasons separately could account for his feeling, and yet all of them together might have induced it, plus something else that was vaguer and hardly analysable—just a general awareness that the world was rotten, hopeless, something to hold one’s nose over while one made a business of scrabbling in the muck in search of… well, what? Money?

  And at that point Brown found himself yielding a bemused attention to Parceval’s eloquence as he described the possible success of the new enterprise. Profits—fabulous and unbogus, mystic entities that had become almost as rare in the business world as strawberries in January—dividends by the hundred per cent, orders that would reopen workshops, concessions that would entice a trickle of gold from all the corners of the earth. Rottenness festering in the sun and producing, for a few who were lucky enough, this precious yellow flower. A world that could refuse to buy such things as water-tube boilers and articulated compounds, yet could not, because it dare not, decline the purchase of a new weapon of self-destruction. The supreme, the Midas lure—something for which no government would ever hesitate to tax, to starve, and to pawn. Helpless, hopeless… and yet, what could one do?

  His mood, as transient as it was instinctive, had moved him to an effort of imagination which his natural indolence soon began to repel; after all, he reflected, a moment or two later, perhaps he HAD been rather foolishly snappish with a man who had only been trying to help him.

  “I’ll come in with you,” he said quietly, “if you’ll give Palescu five thousand.”

  “Five thousand? My dear Brown, I’m delighted that you’ve changed your mind, but really—five thousand! Remember what it is we’re paying for—merely the commercial value of something that hasn’t really a commercial value at all!”

  Brown retorted, with a last despairing petulance: “I don’t care about that. You’ve been talking about possible hundreds of thousands for us. Surely five isn’t too much for him. He’s young—he can do with it.”

  “We can all do with it, for that matter. But the chief objection is that any such large offer would immediately put the fellow on his guard—don’t you see? Still, though it’s a risk, I’ll double the sum I had originally in mind and say a thousand. I call that generous, and so, I think, will Palescu. And we must have our interview with him as soon as possible. You’ll join us then, and you agree to a thousand as an outside offer?”

  “Oh, all right, have it your own way,” answered Brown, as he had answered once before. He was suddenly tired, and with his tiredness there came a faint renewal of optimism, the drug to which he was accustomed.

  By the time the three negotiators met the Roumanian a few days later, Brown was once again in a mood to see most things cheerfully. Parceval had definitely promised him the loan as soon as the Palescu business was settled; the bank had agreed to a short delay in repayment; and Parceval, too, had been assiduous in kindling hopes for the future. “I don’t mind admitting, Brown, that you can be a great help to me in my negotiations with the fellow.” (It was already “me” and “my”, but that, after all, was only to have been expected.) “In fact, if you hadn’t joined in with us, I fear he would have thought it so peculiar that we might have had trouble in coming to terms at all. I’ll do the talking, of course, but you’ll be there as a—a—”

  “As a guarantee of good faith?” suggested Brown, not very tactfully, and Parceval laughed and replied: “Well, if you put it that way, perhaps yes. You see, he likes you—more than he does me or Mathers.”

  “He LIKES me?” echoed Brown, with sudden shyness.

  “Yes—seems to have taken quite a fancy to you.”

  Brown blushed with happiness. To be liked by this youth seemed somehow more satisfying than to have won the favour of any woman.

  They all met Palescu at an hotel in Bloomsbury where he was staying, and the youth’s welcoming smile made Brown feel that the interview was probably going to be a very pleasant one for everybody. He hoped so; he would enjoy it if it were; and, in fact, mightn’t it actually represent the beginnin
g of a new era of prosperity for himself, for his wife and daughter, for the workpeople at his factory, for the firm’s shareholders, and, of course, for Palescu too? A thousand pounds, as Parceval had said, wasn’t so bad. “You all right now?” he began, admiring, as he had done first of all in the train, the boy’s extraordinary good looks. “Feeling quite fit again? That’s good. We’re all going to go out and dine somewhere, I think.”

  Parceval and Mathers subjoined their enquiries and felicitations; then they hustled into a taxi and drove to the Café Royal. Parceval’s choice; and it reminded Brown of the old days, when he and his son had enjoyed themselves in London together; the Café was the place they had gone to, often enough—no, not really often enough—that was the point. That flying smash had happened so abruptly, cutting into the life of the father no less than of the son—making everything ever afterwards a little vague and unfinished. … He had the queer feeling now that a part of him was living over again in that twenty-year-old past, and that Palescu, smiling and chattering, was something more to him than a foreign stranger met for only the second time.

  During the meal conversation, at Parceval’s previous suggestion, was kept on general topics; and Brown felt that Palescu was avoiding no less carefully the subject which must be uppermost in his mind, as in theirs too. The youth talked quite amusingly, though, and kept appealing particularly to Brown, as if he, among them all, were an especial friend. Brown warmed to such an attitude, and was in a pleasantly flattered mood when at last he lit Palescu’s cigarette and then his own cigar.

  “Well,” Parceval said at length, “we’re all delighted to find you none the worse for what happened last week. And now, as perhaps you’ve already guessed, we’re ready for a chat about one or two matters arising out of that little adventure.”

  Palescu nodded, smiling at them all, but especially at Brown.

  “Of course,” Parceval resumed, “we realise, as you must do also, that the demonstration you gave was hardly a complete success. We were naturally a little disappointed….”

  And so it went on. Parceval was at his suavest, mellifluously and deprecatingly reasonable. But somehow, Brown sensed, Palescu was seeing through the reasonableness—not, of course, to any accurate perception of what lay behind it, but with a sufficient clairvoyance of the need for wariness. The smile faded a little from his face; he became alert, tense, unmoving. He kept nodding, saying “Yes” and “No,” and waiting for Parceval to go on speaking— perhaps hoping he would give himself away. Parceval was naturally in no danger of doing that. But the youth’s attitude could not but disconcert him a little; he had thought it would be fairly easy to come to terms. Several times, like two chess-players gradually becoming conscious of each other’s ability, they fell into a mutually baffled silence, and during one of these intervals Brown interjected, not very sensibly, he was aware, but with some idea of relieving his own private tension: “Jolly plucky to try out the thing at all, anyway. Damned uncomfortable to be stuck in the mud like that, I should think.”

  “Yes, damned uncomfortable,” answered the youth, with a mocking but somehow friendly smile. Then he turned to Parceval and the contest of wits was continued.

  At last Parceval got as far as saying: “Still, you mustn’t feel that we regret having interested ourselves in you. What are your plans for the future?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on several things.”

  “Do you propose to carry on with your invention—I mean, do you intend to try to bring it to some degree of success?”

  Palescu answered: “I consider I have already done THAT.”

  There was something cold and a little contemptuous in the retort that gave Brown a tiny thrill of admiration. How tepid and occasional, he reflected, was his own impatience of Parceval in comparison! He said: “Quite right, my boy, you haven’t done so badly”—and felt marvellously indifferent to the cautionary glare with which Parceval favoured him.

  Parceval, however, made haste to agree. “That’s true, of course, as Brown says. Please don’t misunderstand me. You’ve hit on an interesting idea—interesting, certainly—I don’t think anyone could deny that. And you’ve also put a good deal of work into it, and even if it hasn’t done all that we hoped, it might—sometime— give someone else an inspiration that might possibly be of use. To be quite frank, I and my friends here are prepared to—well, in a sense, to gamble on that slender chance. To the extent of a small sum, I mean. We wouldn’t object to paying you—oh, say five hundred pounds—for the full rights.”

  “If you wish to buy,” answered Palescu very calmly, “my price is ten thousand.”

  Parceval leaned back in his chair with an elaborately forced smile. “Utterly ridiculous! We’re wasting our time, then, if you really mean that. I’m sorry, personally, for it would have given me pleasure to think that you were making a little profit, but of course—”

  Mathers gave Palescu a shrewd and not unkindly glance. “Take my tip and don’t overreach yourself,” he remarked. “If you really don’t want to sell, all right, but if you’re merely in a bargaining mood you might as well bid for the moon as try to put it over a business man like Sir George here, or myself.” He added, by way of polite afterthought: “Or Brown.”

  Palescu smiled. “You Englishmen are no doubt the cleverest men in the world.” He glanced at Parceval and then at Brown, and Brown knew suddenly, with a further thrill, that the youth not only disliked Parceval but knew that he, Brown, disliked him too.

  Finally, over an hour later, a compromise was reached at six thousand five hundred. While Parceval was writing the cheque, Brown occupied the silence by chattering: “When my son was your age—he’s dead now—he was rather like you in some ways—having bright ideas and risking his life over them. In the end he lost his life. Flying, yes—twenty years ago, in the pioneer days. …” But Palescu was hardly listening; he was prudently reading through the document that Parceval had handed him to sign.

  With the transaction complete, the general tension dissolved into a more festive atmosphere. Brown called for a celebratory bottle of champagne, and there was much more drinking and chattering before the party separated. Brown was the liveliest of the four. He was quite boyishly elated, and when he bade goodbye to the Roumanian on the pavement outside, he shook hands with much fervour. “Well, if you’re ever in England again you must let me know,” he said. He could not, at that stupid moment of farewell, think of anything warmer to say, though he felt it; and with a fussy little gesture he searched in his pocket and reciprocated Palescu’s first intimacy—a visiting-card.

  A few days later, as he motored to Liverpool through the pleasant Cheshire countryside, he was still free from all misgiving. Parceval had lent him the necessary money, and he had had quite a cheery interview at the bank on the previous day. Moreover, his wife and daughter were due to arrive on the Berengaria during the late afternoon, and he was warmly looking forward to meeting them.

  A lovely blue-golden day, with the fields and villages shining with autumn. Just the time for welcome and home-coming.

  When, towards sunset, he stood on the landing-stage smoking a cigar and watching the liner curve importantly into the estuary, his heart pulsed happily within him. Wife, girl, money, the future— everything looked all right again. He found it easy to think so, and that the world, after his recent bad dreams about it, wasn’t really so bad. Even Parceval wasn’t. He didn’t care for the man a great deal, but he had to admit he was a smart fellow.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR. — SYLVIA SEYDEL

  The club-house at Santa Katerina followed the Amerind tradition of pink adobe; it stood on the edge of a cliff, overlooking the milk-blue Pacific, and from the long, round-arched sun-balcony the millionaires’ yachts and speed-boats could be observed in all their toy-like diversions. On the landward side a path led along a steep arroyo through eucalyptus woods to a Greek temple and a so-called natarium, both of white marble and designed in the classic Ionic style. The whole est
ate, which included an eighteen-hole golf-course and a bathing beach by the sea and tennis-courts and a landing-ground for aeroplanes, belonged to an exclusive and expensive country club which in the spring of 1929 had exuded dollars, both corporately and individually; and the result, after commissioning an architect of genius, was principally the club- house. It rose up like some fantastic dream-palace amidst the white yucca blossom, at sunset rosy-red and rather unbelievable against the background of sky and hills. That, of course, was if one approached it from the sea. From the land, however, it displayed a peculiarity; part of the central block, to some extent obscured by trees, was still unfinished, so that a gap of naked steelwork intervened between the two ten-storey wings. This gap was a legacy of the Wall Street crash in the autumn of 1929, and the consequent discovery that even the purses of film-magnates and realtors were not quite bottomless.

  But, even so, the club-house at Santa Katerina stood for the peak achievement of a civilisation; or perhaps for a ripeness which by the summer of 1931 had turned to over-ripeness. There had been rumblings and mutterings from afar, recorded on that seismograph of calamity, the ticker-tape; for instance, Sylvia Seydel, the movie-actress, was supposed to have dropped a million dollars in General Motors stock. So much was probably no more than she had earned during the past two years, but she was over thirty now; salaries were being cut; younger rivals were coming along; the future was less reckonable than had seemed likely. Still, as she walked from the club-house to the natarium on a perfect June afternoon, an observer would not have sensed her misgivings. That little procession—the film-star with her retinue of friends, secretaries, and miscellaneous hangers-on—approached the swimming-pool through the heavily scented woods, splitting the sunshine as it fell in slabs across the path, and stirring the green dusk with their talk and laughter. But there was another sound, a murmur that swelled into a roar as they reached the sun-drenched colonnade; voices threaded into pattern by the ribbon-melody of jazz; Santa Katerina en fęte for a water-party. Sylvia had seen such spectacles many times before—far too often for her to be impressed particularly on this occasion; yet it was, in fact, a scene of almost breath-taking loveliness. The architect who had chosen just that spot for a swimming-pool, and had made his employers pay for white Carrara marble, had shown mystic insight; there was a pagan rapture in the poise of the slim columns reflected lambently in the water; to be alone there, at midnight under a high moon, would have put one amid the ghosts of dead Hellas. Yet to be there in the throng that afternoon was more—it was perhaps to see Hellas come to life again.