Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  “But of course,” she interrupted, “nobody was such a fool as to give you any.”

  He laughed. “That’s just where you’re wrong, Sylvia. A good many weren’t, but in the end I sold it to three Englishmen. I met the first of them, rather a nice chap, in a train in France, and when he got to England he must have told two of his friends. One was quite a big gun—knight or baronet or some kind of title. He was a keen business man all right—his keenness nearly killed me, in fact. He had me make a model of the thing and try it out myself from an aeroplane. It came down head- foremost into some mud, and that was nearly the end of me.”

  “But, my dear Nicky, why ever did you let yourself do it? Surely it wasn’t worth risking your life for?”

  “No, I suppose not, but, to tell you the truth, I got so interested in it I almost believed in it myself by that time. You see, I’d posed as the inventor, and in the end I think I must have come to feel as an inventor does feel—rather proud, you know, and confident…. Do you understand?”

  “It would be too much of an effort to try. But go on. What did the Englishmen say when you were nearly killed?”

  “They took me out to dinner and said quite a lot—too much, indeed, if they’d only known. For I could see that although they talked of the thing as a failure, they were really quite keen on having it. Heaven knows why, but, naturally, I wasn’t going to object. They offered me five hundred pounds, after a lot of chatter—if there hadn’t been that, I might have accepted it. As it was, I bluffed hard and asked for ten thousand. We came to terms at last just a little bit more than half-way. Then I packed up and came over here.”

  “On the proceeds of selling a dud invention to three keen business men? You’re a genius, Nicky. Have you still got the money?”

  “I lost half of it right away on Wall Street.”

  “Not such a genius, then, after all. No cleverer than the rest of us, in fact.”

  “Oh, but it won’t happen again like that. One can do anything once—there’s no blame in a first time. But if one does anything more than once, then in my opinion it ought to be the devil of a fine thing to do.”

  “How old are you, Nicky?”

  “Twenty.”

  “Of course I don’t believe you.” She began to laugh. “I don’t really believe anything you’ve been saying. Well, perhaps not more than half, anyhow. You’re such an extraordinary liar.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Not a bit. So long as you continue to be so much more agreeable than most people who tell the truth, I don’t care.”

  “What DO you care about?”

  “Not very much.”

  “I thought not,” he answered meditatively. “Very sensible, no doubt, but I wonder if it’s altogether the right attitude for you? I went to see your last picture the other day and I wondered what it was that just missed fire. Now I know…. Sylvia Seydel with the million-dollar smile and the don’t-care eyes.”

  “If you’re suggesting that for a publicity slogan, I’ll consider it. And what is caring, anyway?”

  “I should say it’s a sort of general excitement that helps one to see and hear, not only with the eyes and ears, but with the solar plexus as well. This view—the sea down there—the eucalyptus woods—those yellow cactus flowers in the moonlight—don’t you feel it just a little bit in your tummy? I do.”

  “Funny creature you are, Nicky!” she cried, laughing at him; and then added, with a sudden change of voice: “As a matter of fact, I’m tired of it all—it is wonderful, I know, but I’ve seen it for years and years, and it’s done nothing but just go on being wonderful. You forget that I’m thirty, not twenty—I want more than views and moonlight.” She checked herself and went on, forcing herself to laugh again: “At present, for instance, I want a drink. Do go and get me one, or I shall howl.”

  The truth was, she had begun to be really worried about her future. In a sense, of course, she had nothing much to worry about; she was one of the half- dozen best-known stars in the world; her name was almost a household word; and she was worth at least a million dollars, even after all possible losses on stocks. She could retire in six weeks’ time, when her contract expired, and spend the rest of her life in luxurious comfort at Palm Beach or on the French Riviera; nor, if she did, would her name fade completely from the public memory. She was on the edge of history; she would never cease to be—“Sylvia Seydel—don’t you remember?—the girl who was in ‘Home from the Sea’ and ’Fidelity’.” From the difficult peak of her profession she could look back upon twelve years of such protracted girlhood—ever since, in her late teens, she had run away from a department store in Philadelphia. She had fought her early battles in that rough-and-tumble age before the cinema began to give itself airs and a Chaplin premičre became an international event; she had known Hollywood as a small colony less than a quarter its present size; she remembered when cultured people still felt they had to excuse themselves for being seen at the movies. How people would laugh now, if “Fidelity” were to be revived—the picture which, in its day, had broken every record and had made Sylvia’s the second best-known smile in the world! And compare the crude obviousness of “Home from the Sea” with the sophisticated wit and polished intricacy of “Her Husband’s Wife”! Marvellous advance in less than a decade; and yet, looking back, she could not but feel a halcyon, garden- of-Eden quality in those pioneer days. Silent films, then, of course; which, by an odd paradox, gave her memories principally of noise—of producers yelling through megaphones, of creaking floors and clattering scenery; you could laugh, whistle, sneeze, or cough without anyone bothering; there seemed, in retrospect, a gloriously impromptu freshness about it all. And then those mornings setting out at dawn on location work, the whole company in open cars like an enormous picnic party; driving forty or fifty miles into the San Jacinto mountains; grape-fruit and coffee under the trees in some lonely sunburnt valley; then the job of the day, which usually involved sheriffs, horses, revolver-shooting, and kisses in almost equal proportions. And lastly the drive home in the evening, under the big Californian moon, tired and hungry, with everyone laughing and telling yarns. …

  But now the skyscraper offices of the film companies soared upwards to tell the world that the cinema was no longer an amusement for children. Aesthetic Germans and Russians swarmed everywhere with their chatter of “montage” and “values”; camera-men no longer had Bowery accents and chewed cigars; the vast studios, with their time-clocks and their silence rules, were the churches of a new and colder ritual. Not that Sylvia particularly disliked the talkies. Her voice and accent were acceptable, and she had accommodated herself well enough to the change-over. Her feeling was vaguer than dislike, but also less conquerable—a regret for times that were gone, for triumphs hardly to be repeated.

  She felt sometimes, too, that she had had her day and might better abdicate with dignity than be pushed eventually from the throne. The younger stars, brought up in the talky tradition, already counted her a back number; and the more famous producers evidently did not consider her worth their attention. That was partly the trouble with her last picture; nobody had really believed in it, neither the Vox people nor herself. It has been made because she was under contract, and because the name “Sylvia Seydel” still had immense drawing power, not because anyone had been terribly interested in the job itself. It piqued her a little to find that Nicky had diagnosed the deficiency so promptly.

  Well, should she yield her position while the manoeuvre could still be performed with grace? Twelve years was a long span; she had done her lifework, or served her life-sentence, whichever way one chose to look at it. She could leave the future to those who were better equipped to deal with it—a future, incidentally, which she need hardly envy them. She did not particularly study affairs, but she was dimly aware that she had sailed to fortune on the crest of a wave, and that her successors must make what they could out of the slough. In her private mind she felt quite certain that when she met the Vox people after
the expiry of her present contract they would agree to a renewal only at a very much lower figure. She knew it, and was in a way reconciled; yet she knew also that the blow, when it fell, would come crushingly and with a revelation of failure. Yet it could be forestalled, if she chose, by an announcement of her impending retirement. Then there would be farewell parties, speeches in her honour, a last blaze of publicity throughout the world, and for ever afterwards—not quite oblivion.

  All this was in her mind one evening when she and Nicky went to a Chinese party at the Statlers. Statler owned an oil-field and was married to a pretty Chicagoan who had but recently been a student at Berkeley; there was something odd, but not wholly unattractive, in the relationship between the rough, almost illiterate man of fifty and the cultured girl in her very early twenties. She had sold herself to him, no doubt; but then, too, there was a sense in which he had also sold himself to her. He was childishly devoted, rather like a fierce wolf-hound that she had tamed; it was amusing to watch him going round saying “Howdy” to all her exquisite friends. Sylvia rather liked him, and was by no means put out by his occasionally Rabelaisian humours.

  The Statler home had a fantastically lovely garden-roof overlooking the sea, and here, since the night was warm and there was a bright moon, the party took place. Sylvia was a Manchu princess, Nicky a mandarin—not especially original of either of them, but their costumes and looks made them conspicuous even in a gathering where wealth and beauty were flaunted rather than displayed. Statler had been a “bear” operator on Wall Street since the autumn of 1929, and was reputed to have made himself a multimillionaire out of the slump; certainly when his wife gave a party his cheque-book was always opened wide beforehand. All the servants were genuine Chinese, and padded round, as dusk fell, lighting real Chinese lanterns; there was an authentic Chinese musician with his yueh-chin, or moon guitar, plucking notes that seemed to dissolve into the air as they were sounded; and another marvellously-gowned fellow with a drum on which the painted dragons looked actually writhing, so strange was the compulsion of movement and rhythm. Heaven knew where all these persons and properties had been obtained—or, rather, Statler’s bankers knew. And there was, to Sylvia, a curious feeling of unreality and impermanence about it all, symbolised by that roof-top islanded above the sea and shore. As the lanterns swayed in the breeze, and the surf-smell rose to mingle with that of sandalwood incense, she felt suddenly that the whole artifice of the scene, with all its beauty, was but a flower of catastrophe; that Statler, standing a little apart from his guests, was the chance beneficiary of some vast and nearly universal doom. She saw behind the flickering coloured globes and the laughing couples the darker pageant of headline news—ruined homes and bankrupt farms, closed factories, bread lines, apple-sellers on the Fifth Avenue kerb. The vision was partly born of her own big losses. Two million dollars altogether, she reckoned; it had all gone somewhere, perhaps into an abyss from which Statler and his kind had had the magic knack of rescue. It half-amused her to think of him as the man who had somehow taken her money. He was standing near the guitar-player, slightly absurd in a presumably military uniform, and gazing down at the musician with a simplicity nearly as inscrutable as the Oriental’s. She went over to him and chatted for a time; he had a rather pathetic air of being honoured by her attention, and she felt comfortingly that at least he belonged to the generation for whom Sylvia Seydel was still the greatest name on the screen.

  She knew him well enough to ask, at length: “Tell me, Mr. Statler, d’you think Steel Common are going down any more?”

  “Surely,” he answered, with dove-like gentleness.

  “You think I ought to sell, then? I bought mine at a hundred and forty.”

  “Yeah, you sure oughter sell.”

  “You seriously mean that?”

  “Yeah, I surriously do.” After a little pause he went on: “I dunno your Chinese friend, Miss Seydel. He came up to me a moment ago but I guess he don’t understand our lingo very well.”

  She began to laugh. “Oh, you mean Nicky—he must have been up to one of his games! Prince Nicholas Petcheni’s his full name, and he speaks quite perfect English.”

  “You mean to tell me that guy isn’t Chink at all?”

  “Why, of course not. He’s a Roumanian.”

  “Acts for the movies, I suppose?”

  “No, he’s my secretary.”

  “Well, Miss Seydel, all I can say is, you’ve gotten a durned fine actor as a sekertary. Look at him now….”

  They both looked. Nicky was dancing with a tall, pale girl who was convulsed with laughter, apparently by something he had just said or done. But his antics were more than merely laughable. He had, in some extraordinary fashion, converted himself into the almost real thing; his chinoiserie was more than improvised, it was stylised. From the little tippling movements of his feet to the slightly bent shoulders and slanted head, he WAS the Celestial; he had even managed to alter the contour of his features, while from his lips there came a sharp bubbling treble that was in itself a perfect caricature.

  “Yes,” said Sylvia slowly, “he’s rather good, isn’t he?”

  She liked to add her own careful and discriminating praise of him to the keener enthusiasm of others. In her troubled reckonings and assessments of herself and her future, he at least must be counted a triumph; it was something, anyhow, to have snatched him away from the Palmer woman and to have installed him amongst her own entourage. He was well-known now all round the film-colony; he went everywhere, sometimes with her, often with others; the women were wild about him, and even among the men he was rather surprisingly popular. Probably, she reflected, people were saying that she and he were living together. She hardly minded; it was the kind of rumour that did a film- star no harm, provided she hadn’t always to be put to the trouble of substantiating it.

  Sylvia’s experience of men had been both considerable and, on the whole, unfortunate. Her first husband, whom she had married at seventeen, was a production manager in one of the old and now defunct film companies; they had had an idyllic honeymoon and a fairly happy year, after which he had capriciously thrown up his job to become a realtor in Kansas City. She declined to accompany him there, so he left her and found some other woman eventually; thus she got her first divorce. This experience made her decide that if ever she married again it would be for money, not for love. Three years passed, and then one day an exceedingly rich corset-manufacturer from New Jersey visited Hollywood, met her, became preposterously amorous, and found that her terms were marriage and the continuance of her professional work. He agreed, and built a house on Millionaire Drive at Pasadena in token of complete submission. He was an Italian of between forty and fifty, with a swarm of children accumulated from vaguely complicated previous alliances; there were still a houseful of them even after three had been killed in a motor-smash. Sylvia disliked most of them intensely and soon came to dislike their father too, especially when he insisted on her providing them with additional half-brothers and sisters. At last, after many squabblings and turbulences, the crisis was reached; she left him, and in due course he discovered a state that was willing to give him a divorce for mental cruelty. But though matrimonially a failure, she did not count her year with the corset-manufacturer a wholly wasted effort. Its results were manifest, even if not in the semblance he would himself have preferred; it was his money that helped her to establish a social status in the film-world, to say nothing of its fruition in the form of the house at Pasadena, and a new corset-factory Los Angeles.

  Her next marriage came after her big success, when she was a world-famous personage and had a growing fortune of her own. She decided this time that she would marry into her own class—i.e. a film-actor; and she chose Jeremy Baxter (né Schmidt), who was almost as world-famous as herself. She did not exactly fall in love with him; rather it might be said that she manoeuvred herself, with a little strain, into that condition. She had a hazy idea that they might set up a ménage of slightly notorious domesti
city—something, perhaps, after the Pickford-Fairbanks model. Unfortunately Jeremy was not the ideal husband even if she had been the ideal wife. Her synthetic affection for him did not survive the first night, nor her tolerance the first week; she was hardly straitlaced, but after he had been involved in a court case over some girl whom he had stripped naked and tarred and feathered on a speedway, she thought her lawyers might as well do the rest.

  Her third set of divorce papers arrived during those weeks at Santa Katerina, those weeks of indecision about her future. “There you are, Nicky,” she said, tossing him the lawyer’s letter. “I’m through with men now, thank God.” He laughed and stooped to her bare shoulder with his lips. The relationship between them was peculiar—so peculiar that she decided it must be a part of him, not of her, and therefore, like so much else that was his, completely incomprehensible. She liked him, and assumed that he must like her too; he flirted with her occasionally, and she did not object. She permitted him many intimacies which with other men might have been impossible, except at a price; their bedrooms were on the same floor, and he wandered in and out at all times of the day and night. It wasn’t that she had any particular faith in his honourable intentions; indeed, she was never quite certain what he would do next, or to what fantastic gallantry he might eventually be impelled. There was a childlike quality in him which made nonsense of all the usual gradations of amorous dalliance; yet she was aware that this quality might well be just as bogus as his princeliness. She was not exactly on her guard against him, but she was determined never to expect too much or to be prepared for too little. Meanwhile, so long as it lasted, she could enjoy his company and take whatever he offered that she found acceptable.

  Then, quite suddenly, there was a development. They had gone for a long week-end’s motor-trip to Monterey, and there, on that extraordinary bleak promontory, the languorous south seemed to end up with a shudder; there was a hint of foreboding in the darkly waving cypresses and the wind that was nearly a gale. Nicky stood for a long time on the cliff-edge, gazing far out over the ocean; and it was then, all at once, that the idea approached her in the guise of a problem—could he really be accused of always posing when it was so natural for him to pose? For, in that changed scene, his whole attitude was changed; she could see his face in profile against the wind, and it was full of a majestic seriousness; his forehead seemed almost to slope back more nobly; certainly his lips and nostrils were quivering in new contours. “Nicky,” she cried, astonished, “what ARE you doing? Come and help me unpack the food.”