Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  That night, in their bedroom, she remarked that he had talked very little during the evening, and asked if he had been tired. The question, coming then, focused all his complicated discomforts into a single pinpoint of misery, so that he answered, rather amazed at the extent of his own suffering: “Yes, I was tired. The people didn’t interest me, and I didn’t want to bother with them. Why should I bother with people if I don’t feel like it?”

  “Only that you always used to be so amusing in company, Nicky—”

  He flared up suddenly at that. “Oh, God, must I always be what I always used to be? That’s the fault of everything—to have to go on doing the same thing, being the same thing—it’s like that with films—because of one, you’ve got to go on making two, three, four, five, six!”

  “Nicky, my dear, I don’t know why you should let yourself get in such a rage. Just because your success has been wonderful—”

  “Yes, I know it’s because of that. It’s only the happy failures who have freedom to swop grooves. If you’re unlucky enough to be a success, you’re expected to stay where you’re put so that mass- hysteria knows where to find you…. Oh yes, it’s wonderful all right. But I remember I once said that the Californian scenery was wonderful, and you told me that you were tired of it because it just went on being wonderful. A wise remark, that, Sylvia.”

  “I was despondent in those days, if that’s what you mean. I remember how I envied you your eagerness for things—you had plenty of it then.”

  “Well, I don’t envy you yours now. I could stand you enjoying all this success if you were only a little privately amused by it. But I don’t think you are. I think you really believe that ’Red Desert’s’ a masterpiece.”

  “I certainly haven’t reached the point of despising it, as you apparently have.”

  “I don’t despise it—I just think it’s ridiculous. The idea of the Indians was all right to begin with, but the ending you let them stick on was utterly fatuous. Of course if it was merely money you wanted, that’s a sound reason, I admit. But why go on pretending that the thing’s still any real good?”

  “You agreed to the change of ending yourself.”

  “Oh, yes, I’d have agreed to anything. To tell the truth, I was so damnably bored by the whole business by that time that—”

  Even the squabble, he reflected heavily, was proceeding with the orderliness of routine. They had had many such, during their four months of married life, and all had left their sincere affection for each other entirely unimpaired. But now he felt only saddened instead of slightly exhilarated by the quick-fire exchange, because he could sense behind it the pull of so many tenuous threads of emotion. He felt uneasy, exacerbated, aware of a host of irritating tendernesses. He said, pacifying himself: “Oh, what’s the good of all this wrangling, Sylvia? I’m in a filthy temper. I think I’d better work it off on some of those signatures. There are still about a million of them to be done.”

  “Oh, don’t bother, darling, if you feel tired. They can wait.”

  “No, no, I couldn’t sleep if I tried—I may as well get on with them.”

  He put on a dressing-gown and passed through the adjoining rooms into the one that had been fitted out as a temporary office. Here, on a large table, lay his job—mysterious and cabalistic, the writing of two curious words, with his own hand, on pieces of paper— the last lip-service to personality demanded by a rubber-stamp world—and even then the personality was bogus. The trouble with modern fame, he decided, wielding his fountain-pen, was that it so soon became humourless. It had been fun, at first, being fęted by celebrities and having money enough to buy fur-overcoats and Cadillacs; just as it had been fun at first, in fact rather a lark, to go picture-making in the mountain-deserts of New Mexico. New sensations were always interesting up to a point, but the point was so fatally often that at which they ceased to be new. He swung round to the window—it was on the thirtieth floor or so—and watched the glittering panorama which represented the strange world that he had conquered. But had he conquered it, or had it only conquered him? On a desk near by lay an enormous heap of unopened letters, forwarded from the film company’s headquarters in Los Angeles and all addressed to him by unknown admirers. It was his secretary’s job to deal with them, of course; the usual procedure was to send a polite reply enclosing one of the signed postcard photographs. But he opened half a dozen himself, in mere curiosity, and glanced through their contents—ill-spelt appeals for money, hard-luck stories from out-of- works, maudlin sentimentality from schoolgirls, passionate unburdenings from bourgeois wives in big cities… . He threw them back into the heap after a few moments, in a mood of utter nausea. And these letters, he realised, came by every post, all the year round, and not only to him, but to Sylvia and every other screen-idol. They were his fan-mail, individually of no importance, but to be carefully counted and classified as an index-figure of his rise or fall in the public esteem. He took up his pen and scribbled ‘Raphael Rassova’ once more, but the name, facing him now so absurdly on all sides, transfixed him into panic as he thought of the three more films that he was promising to make. He couldn’t do it; he knew now that he couldn’t and wouldn’t. To have to stereotype himself like that, with the same theme always repeated da capo al fine—was it not all a sort of harlotry, standardised harlotry for those standardised brothels of the machine-mind—the cinemas? The phrase, pleasing him intellectually, converted his momentary cowardice into rebellion. He suddenly felt a vast grudge against those who were offering him, under the guise of success, this rigid and dingy slavery. He was to become a part of the huge mass-production plant of Fordised emotions, a rare and expensive raw material surrendered to the machine. It made him think of a paragraph he had seen in a woman’s journal a few days before, suggesting that Raphael Rassova would soon be second only to the Prince of Wales as an object of feminine adoration; and the recollection gave him a quickening sympathy with that enigmatic figure across the ocean, a man nearly old enough to be his father, yet condemned to everlasting Peter-Panhood by a country haunted by the spectre of its own old age. But he, anyhow, had been born to it, had had half a lifetime in which to get used to seeing his photograph, like that of a rather forlorn head-prefect, on magazine-covers and chocolate-boxes. It was harder to accept such bondage voluntarily, and for no visible reward except the power to spend money with as little genuine freedom as one had been permitted to earn it.

  The spectacle of that future, dimly menacing as it had been for weeks, revealed itself more monstrously as he sat pondering alone. He saw its tentacles closing in on him with every moment; already the giant machine was being prepared for his bodily insertion. He felt as if it were about to pulp him into nothing but a phallic symbol to be held up before the stiffening glare of the mass-mind. That phrase pleased him too; he felt protected, somehow, by his own power of mental invective. A little cheered, he turned more tranquilly to thoughts of Sylvia. He liked her, and would have liked her nearly as much if she had been a man. The little difference, never important to him, had grown less so with familiarity. Perhaps in that sense it was a mistake for him to have become anybody’s husband, even a fourth one. A sudden consciousness of his own personal tragedy came over him at that moment. He was rootless, like so many of that war-spoilt generation; without parentage, nationality, or religion, he had developed a sacred petulance of spirit which was all he could confidently call his own. But it was too fragile to bear the imposition of outside ties. The thought of himself as a father, or as an old man, made him fret uneasily; he had no reserves of stability, his only happiness lay in movement, though whether, in the long run, he was chiefly pursuing or escaping, he could never be quite sure. Just now, at any rate, he wanted definitely to escape—from New York and America altogether; yet, if he did, he wondered if Sylvia could possibly understand that he was no more tired of her than an explorer is tired when he moves on. All he hoped was doubtless the impossible, that she could let him go as joyfully as he, if she were but joyful at all
, could leave her.

  He went to bed, slept badly, and rose in the morning restless as from a series of nightmares; after breakfast he left Sylvia busy with maids and secretaries and took a brisk walk along the pavements, wearing his hat and overcoat as disguisingly as he could. Even that, for instance, had been an exciting sensation at first—the continual expectation of being recognised by strangers; but by now it had become nothing but a fierce unpleasantness. He walked fast, eyeing shop-windows furtively, and managed to remain unnoticed for a time; but along Broadway some girls coming out of a department-store identified him. There were shrill cries of “Rassova,” and before he could gather his wits he was hurrying along with a shouting and cheering mob at his heels. He turned into a side- street, increasing his pace and throwing a smile to his pursuers; a woman seized his hand and shook it vehemently; then, with the smile still streaked across his face, he saw an open doorway and swerved into it, blindly pushing open the inner doors to which it gave access. To his surprise he found himself in a church. It was too dark to see clearly, but he caught a distant glimpse of another occupant and hurried towards him. “Excuse me,” he began, rather breathlessly, “but is there a different exit out of here? I want to get away from a crowd that’s following me—you see, I’m Raphael Rassova.”

  Despite the urgency of the matter, he could not restrain a thrill of pleasure when he found that the man had clearly never heard of the name. “Rassova, the movie-actor,” Nicky explained, and the man answered, in a quite unimpressed voice: “Oh, I see…. I’m afraid you’ll have to go out by the way you came in, but there’s a room where you could wait for a time. I’ll tell the crowd to clear off, if you like.”

  “Thanks,” said Nicky. “I’m terribly obliged to you.”

  Only then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom of the interior, did he perceive that his rescuer wore clerical costume, and a few minutes later, sitting by the fire in a comfortably furnished vestry, he realised from pictures on the wall that the church was Roman. After an interval the priest rejoined him and began to chat casually and still without the slightest inquisitiveness. When Nicky out of courtesy volunteered further information about himself, he merely said: “Oh, yes, I understand— some of the people in the crowd told me about you.” He spoke in a way that rather charmingly avoided both contempt and any excessive interest.

  “Perhaps you didn’t believe me till then?” Nicky suggested.

  “Well, it did just enter my mind that you might be an escaped gunman.”

  “And even so, you’d have asked me in here to wait?”

  “Why not?” He laughed, and Nicky laughed, and they were instinctively aware of liking each other. He was about thirty, Nicky supposed; a sandy-haired, rather stockily-built man with very bright grey-blue eyes and a pale, pleasantly absent-minded face. An Irishman named Byrne, he said, and not attached to that particular church—merely a friend of the priest in charge. He himself was shortly going out to a parish, if it could be called such, in South America—a tract of swamp and jungle that he could not cross in less than a fortnight, so he would have plenty of work. He was sailing at the end of the week, on the Megantic. After he had talked for some time about his own affairs, he seemed to recollect that Nicky had his too, and remarked that it must be annoying to be so famous that one daren’t walk about the streets— “Though, of course,” he added, shrewdly, “it’s good advertisement for you, I suppose, so you can’t really object to it.”

  “I loathe it,” answered Nicky, and began to say a great many things that were in his mind. Gradually, however, as he talked, there came upon him a curious and entirely novel sensation—the sensation that somebody else was not overwhelmingly interested in him. It was not that the priest was inattentive, or showed any signs of boredom or displeasure; it was merely his very gentle air of having had, all along, more pressing matters to think about, and of still, despite Nicky, contriving to have them. Nicky was puzzled. All his life he had been used to occupying the centre of the stage; his good looks and wits had won it for him, equally from men and women, and though he was always prepared for hostility, the one thing he never expected was indifference. Yet this man did seem, in a sort of way, indifferent. It was agreeable to find him unmoved by the name of Raphael Rassova, but less so to find him equally unmoved by the bitterest unmasking of that personage. All he said, in reply to a particularly eloquent fulmination, was: “Yes, you must find it very tiresome. But of course it’s in your power to give it up just as soon as you like.”

  They chatted for some time longer and exchanged cordial good wishes before Nicky took a cab back to the hotel.

  That night he told Sylvia that he must go. But the strange thing was that, in the very telling, he was aware of a sense in which he would have to leave something behind, in which he would be linked to her always; indeed, he felt a touch of excitement in the romantic possibility that he might even some day come back. And what had seemed likely to be a grand emotional climax turned out, after all, a mere businesslike discussion of holiday plans. She said she had noticed his need of a change—a complete change; and though it would necessarily upset a good many arrangements, Vox and those other people would have to put up with it. “It’s no use you staying here and having a breakdown, is it?” Then, almost unimportantly, she added: “Do you want me to come with you? I don’t suppose you do—you like having adventures on your own, I know. And I shall be very busy—probably Vox will have work for me to do.”

  He gazed at her as at some miracle being enacted before his eyes. “I’m glad you don’t mind,” he said at length. “You’re really enjoying yourself here, aren’t you, amongst all this fame?”

  “Pretty well,” she replied. “But you’re evidently not, so you’re quite right to take a rest from it. Where, by the way, do you think of going?”

  “I thought of Buenos Aires, to begin with. I’ve never been to South America.”

  “I have. You’ll like it.”

  He had two more days in New York—amply filled by the joyous preparations for departure. No public announcement was issued, and careful attempts were made for at least a partial incognito on board. Sylvia, who had had much experience of these matters, was full of useful help and suggestions; she bought him books for the voyage, and superintended all the details of tickets, passport, and luggage. On the last night before the Megantic was due to sail they went out to dine at a fashionable dancing-restaurant, and some of his lost enthusiasm returned to him as he gazed across the table at his wife. HIS WIFE. He thought her very adorable, and the joke of their being married was perhaps, after all, as good as most. His humour rose into exultation as the night proceeded; he did not even object when the spotlight was turned on them and, in response to calls from the other diners, he had to get up and make a little speech. At that very moment, he was thinking, the cabin-trunks were on board, and his valet might be laying out his day-clothes for the last time.

  Later, at the hotel, she said: “You know, Nicky, you were wrong when you said I’m not privately amused by this success of yours. I AM. I DO think it’s funny. And I think you are, too.”

  He laughed, and answered, to a question she hadn’t asked: “Yes, it’s queer—the way I always get tired, and want to change, and do something else. I feel rather sick with most things, after a time. I can’t settle myself. Not that I particularly want to, of course.”

  “What DO you want? Do you know?”

  “Not in the least. Except that, in a general sort of way, I want to be ME.”

  “You’re YOU all right. You needn’t have any fears about that.”

  “Well, YOU’RE another YOU. We’re quits at the rather silly game…. Which is all talking nonsense, of course.”

  “Yes, all nonsense. Good night, Nicky.”

  “Good night, Sylvia.”

  The next day, on board, he renewed his acquaintance with the priest, and as the voyage progressed they became good friends. Byrne, however, was still far from showing signs of being impressed by Nicky, and
Nicky was still rather delightedly puzzled over the phenomenon. And yet the Irishman by no means discouraged the youth’s more impulsive companionship. He had an air of slightly detached tolerance that was a little less than chilly, though not quite warm; and Nicky felt again that the root of the attitude was the simple fact that he himself was not, and never could be, a salient feature of this man’s life. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of it, he was the more tempted to be frank, and he did not disguise, but rather even paraded, the fact that his brief past had contained many incidents of which the stricter moralist might disapprove. During those lengthening days in southern waters, with the coast of Brazil looking sometimes no more than a stone’s throw away, the two talked a good deal between adjacent deck-chairs; or more accurately, Nicky confided, and Byrne listened. It was a new and somewhat difficult experience for Nicky to tell the exact truth; yet his life-story, even without the embellishments he usually added to it, was quite a vivid chronicle. Born after his father’s death, he had lost his mother at the age of five; she had died during the flight of refugees when the Germans invaded Roumania in 1916. The family had originally had money, but it was all lost; and a tragic childhood had merged inevitably into disturbed and fitful youth. He was luckier than most in having had two thief-proof assets—brains and good looks; and during his boyhood he had sensed that his only chance of survival, let alone of happiness, lay in the exploitation of these for what they would fetch. In a world of paupers and profiteers he had contrived a technique of living, and that this technique was not too squeamish in what it permitted itself must, he argued, be laid to the charge of a society that offered him nothing he wanted on any other terms. “I don’t grumble at the tricks fate has played on me; but I do say that I’ve never been able to discern in them any moral code obliging me to abide by its rules in return.” He gave Byrne various examples of unregretted misdeeds and seemed surprised when the priest was neither shocked nor condemnatory. “As for personal lies about oneself, I almost hold that one is entitled to them— they’re a protective covering in the choice of which one may show good or bad taste just as in clothes. I happen to be telling the truth now, to you, but that’s merely for the novel sensation of nakedness.”