Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  He recognised a familiar scene as he glanced down the table at the alternating array of creamy neck and white shirt-front. Like most celebrities, they seemed to him ruthlessly self-centred; their talk spurted into the air like fireworks, and he was always fascinated to notice how little real connection the brightest salvos had with anything that had gone before, yet how cunningly the skilled conversational practitioner could devise an apparent sequence. And there were several skilled practitioners at work to-night, he noted. Indeed, he thought it very possible that no more brilliant talk was being manufactured anywhere in New York at that moment. The participants were all so cold and experienced; they shot their service so unerringly over the net; though one did get a little fatigued, as at tournament tennis, by the constant swivel of attention. Extraordinary fruit of civilisation, these tricks of verbal jugglery, played for a couple of hours over the silver and cut glass of a dining-table. To eat and talk—who had first thought of elaborating the simultaneous technique? Oetzler was indifferently aware that he himself was but a poor hand at the game; his words had a distressful habit of meaning something, which was why, rather than spoil the play, he usually preferred to be a listener. He liked, for example, to listen to Lanberger talking of the world-slump, envisaging the breakdown of civilisation as casually as he might announce the discovery of a new Czecho-Slovakian ballerina. He liked nearly as well to hear Wolfe-Sutton jauntily seconding a remark which, if true, must necessarily spell doom for them all; was there something fine, or else merely fatuous, in the way these people daintily improvised while so many Romes were burning? The ball of chatter kept on flip- flopping backwards and forwards, never missing a score, yet just as reliably never getting anywhere; once it seemed in danger of stopping, but Wolfe-Sutton rescued it at the last moment by interjecting: “Curious, isn’t it, the growing gulf between what we can all say, privately like this, and what we dare write and speak in public? We dope the millions with stuff that doesn’t even win from us a cynical smile.”

  Lanberger, red-haired and bronze-eyed, nodded. “Yes, and our host, if he won’t mind our being personal, is an example. In his newspapers he organises optimism like a drill-sergeant, but one of the few people he can’t influence is himself. Do we count him a hypocrite? Not at all. As a matter of fact, we hardly notice the discrepancy. We accept the fact that cheerfulness has to be dished out to the multitude just as we know that a boxer before a fight daren’t express the least doubt about winning.”

  Russell’s turn now. “Don’t be too sure, though, that the multitude is really taken in.”

  “You think they see through it?” queried Mrs. Drinan, in her brittle voice. “You really think they don’t believe all that they read in Mr. Oetzler’s newspapers?”

  Oetzler answered her mockery with an amused: “Good God, I hope they don’t.”

  Russell turned to him with a smile. “Probably people everywhere are developing resistance to mass-suggestion—after all, even the stupidest of us don’t rush to do all that the advertisements command us to. And I rather suspect that this matter of organised optimism is a case in point…. You know, perhaps, that I’ve just come back from the wilds—after twelve months away. Last night I went to a restaurant where there was a band playing optimistic songs. All about shouting for happiness and putting your troubles on the shelf—that sort of stuff. There was a pathos about it in 1930, when people took it with a sort of half- prayerful boisterousness—rather like a lot of drunks singing in a thunder-storm to keep their courage up. By last year the pathos had turned to obvious derision. But last night, mouthed by whispering baritones and crooning tenors—”

  “The Neo-Bantu castrati,” interjected Lanberger.

  “—it all struck me as different again. The folks weren’t cheered by it, they weren’t depressed by it, they weren’t even cynical about it. They just carried on with their ordinary business, which was eating and drinking and flirting, with no more attention than if the words had been a funeral lament.”

  Russell then resigned the ball to be tossed about by others. He was a man of nearer sixty than fifty; grey-haired, short-bearded, and inclined to mellow after a grim middle age and a somewhat riotous youth. He was fairly well off, unmarried, and good company— circumstances which had enabled Oetzler and himself to enjoy for years an acquaintanceship which, though it hardly warmed into friendship, was yet unhampered by all the more fruitful causes of estrangement. And, in a sense, one could not easily be a FRIEND of Odo Russell. A wanderer, a woman-hater, a writer of unconventional travel-books, and a man of intense physical courage, he had progressed beyond mere disillusionment to a state at which he might have been called unillusioned. It was magnificent, doubtless, but it was not lovable.

  Oetzler leaned forward and spoke to him across Mrs. Drinan, who was arguing vividly with someone at the other end of the table. “By the way, Russell,” he said quietly, “while you were out there, did you happen to hear anything of that fellow I wrote you about?”

  Russell looked up. “The Russian youth? Yes. I found him.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “Oh, he’s alive all right.”

  “Then he certainly ought to write to his sister in Paris—she’s worried to death. I don’t particularly blame him for letting me down if he found something better to do out there—we’ve all got to look after ourselves—”

  Russell interrupted: “It’s not quite so simple as all that, unfortunately. In fact, it’s rather a long story, so that perhaps—”

  “Yes, you must tell me about it afterwards.”

  The general conversation continued, and Oetzler pondered. So that Russian fellow was alive? Oetzler was glad; he had quite liked him, though he had never thought much of his art journalism. He remembered once, in a whimsical mood, offering him a salary of a hundred dollars a week if he could explain, simply and convincingly to the ordinary reader, just why a Botticelli was better art than a magazine-advertisement of a Marmon straight-eight … and he would have been worth the money, too, if he’d been able to do it.

  Oetzler had no further chance of speaking to Russell until later in the evening, when all the others had gone except Lanberger, who was staying the night. Then, as the three sat over the library fire with drinks and cigars, he said, recollecting the matter: “So you found Mirsky, then, did you?”

  Russell gave a half-glance at Lanberger. “I did, but it’s a complicated story, and—”

  “So you said before, but that doesn’t matter. We can put you up for the night, if you get too tired for the journey to your hotel.”

  “It’s also—in a way—rather confidential. I don’t know if—”

  Lanberger took the hint and rose at once, but Oetzler checked him. “I think we can accept a pledge of secrecy, eh, Russell? That is, of course, if you think it’s the sort of story that would interest a novelist?”

  “It might.”

  “Well, go ahead.”

  Russell took a sip of his drink, glanced for a moment at his two listeners, and began. His voice was pleasant, he spoke with easy fluency, and in conversation he had the same flair for words that had made his travel-books very readable. “I got your letter addressed to San Cristobal, Oetzler. And I must confess I was amused by your saying in it that perhaps I could make enquiries because you’d looked up San Cristobal on the map and had found that it was quite near Maramba. Well, I suppose it is quite near, judged by your standards, which are doubtless those of a private saloon-coach on the New York Central. As a matter of fact, the distance is about a hundred and twenty miles. There’s no road between the two places, no river, and not even a direct track. The trip has been done, at various times, but it’s about as rare as a crossing of Arabia or Tibet. That’s the sort of thing people don’t easily realise. Those hundred and twenty miles are more of a separation than any mountain range or ocean. They’re covered with forest, much of it dense and waterless in the dry season, and they’re the haunt of a dreadful little pest called the ihenna—a minute fly that can get throug
h any mosquito-net and through most sorts of clothing. There are also such minor inconveniences as snakes, tigers, and native tribes who still use poisoned arrows. Finally there’s no particular reason why anybody should ever want to get from Maramba to San Cristobal. Maramba does all its trade with the south and east, San Cristobal with the north and west— they’re in different spheres altogether. That’s what puzzled me so much when you wrote that the authorities in Maramba believed that Mirsky had crossed the river. I couldn’t think what his reason might have been. It was the maddest thing to do, and anyone in Maramba would have told him so. Two Canadians, by the way, attempted the journey last year and were never heard of again. Their bones are whitening somewhere in the forest, I suppose.”

  “Probably, after the earthquake, the Maramba people weren’t much interested in giving warnings,” put in Oetzler.

  “Maybe that was it. Anyhow, as soon as I got your letter, I made a few enquiries here and there—not really expecting to be told of anything. I talked to innkeepers, traders and people who might have heard any tales that were about. My own theory was that Mirsky had probably crossed the river out of mere curiosity, and perhaps ridden a little way into the forest and been killed somehow or other—there are a hundred ways of getting killed in that sort of country, particularly for that sort of youth. You didn’t give me much of a description of him, but he hardly seemed to me the pioneering type.”

  “Certainly not that, but he wasn’t a ninny, by any means, you know. He was in the Russian Revolution—I think he fought in one or two battles…. But go on—don’t let me interrupt.”

  Russell drank again. “I may as well get to the point of the story quickly. To my surprise, when I began to ask questions, I did hear, quite soon, of a rumour circulated by some Indians who had been in the town lately. They had mentioned a strange white man who was living in the middle of the forest in a native hut, and I gathered that the affair had been discussed by them as a sensation of some piquancy. That was just the vague impression I got, mind you, hearing the story third-hand like that. Naturally I asked for more details, but I only received doubtful replies, and it began to seem unlikely that I could trace the thing any further. Then, altogether by accident, I ran into a young fellow prospecting for the Standard Oil Company. He was one of those keen, eager youths that represent the very best that America has to offer the world—I don’t know how the company finds them all—”

  “Because it looks for them,” interposed Oetzler. “Because it finds the men who can do a job and then gives them a job to do. If the whole country were run half as well, we should be a good deal better off.”

  Russell nodded. “Yes, I daresay you’re right. I heard someone once say that Standard Oil was one of the three most wonderful institutions the world had ever known—the other two being the Papacy and the pre-War German army. They also, by the way, are well represented in San Cristobal. In fact, you won’t find any spot in the world where the hardships are too much for that extraordinary trio—the Roman missionary, the oil man, and the German ex-officer in search of a job. They’re cells of faith, hope, and efficiency in places where everybody else is sinking into a sort of sulky fatalism. Indeed, if our civilisation does crash, as we were all talking about at dinner, I’ll even back the triumvirate to build up another one…. However, that’s rather wandering from the point. What I was about to say was that this youth, Dyson by name, told me not only that he also had heard the rumour about the mystery man, but that the chap was supposed to be camped out fairly close to where the oil-men had lately been prospecting.”

  “They hadn’t seen him?” queried Oetzler.

  “They’d had something more important to do than look for him, I should imagine. But the name of their place was Yacaiba, and that’s where I set out for a few days afterwards.”

  “I hope it didn’t upset your plans a lot?”

  “I was interested. I didn’t mind. Yacaiba was a two day’s journey away, travelling on mule-back. There’d been heavy rains that had swollen the rivers, and what ought to have taken two days took eleven. You’ll find the place marked on the Government large-scale maps as if it were about the size of Denver, or Salt Lake City, but in reality it’s a collection of adobe huts inhabited by less than a hundred scrofulous Chiriqui Indians. Rather an extraordinary tribe, the Chiriquis, as I’ll tell you later. I’m giving you these details so that you’ll feel some meaning in those hundred and twenty miles between San Cristobal and Maramba. Yacaiba is less than half-way and a little bit off the straight line. Well, I got there and was hospitably entertained by some more young fellows of the same type as Dyson—they were terribly busy, and hadn’t come across the oil they were looking for, so I didn’t bother them much with my questions. All they could say was that the Indians talked of a gringo living somewhere in the jungle with one of their own women.”

  “Good God!” exclaimed Oetzler.

  Russell smiled. “Yes, that’s where you home-bred Americans prick up your ears. You’ve all got an anti-miscegenation complex. Six months in parts of South America would do you good—you’d find that the mating of white and native races isn’t thought of everywhere as it is in Tennessee and Alabama. Whole nations south of the Canal have been reared out of the first intermixtures of Spaniard and native Indian, and in Bolivia the half-breeds, the cholos, are in some respects the most promising stocks. So don’t think that the mere notion of a white man and an Indian woman was likely to shock anybody in Yacaiba.”

  “We’re too squeamish, I admit,” said Lanberger. “I wonder if we oughn’t to look to complete world-freedom in intermarriage as an ideal? It will probably come, when the European stocks have been overthrown from their quite temporary domination. After all, modern transport is making the world so small that this rigid and continuous in- breeding of the white races is almost beginning to look incestuous.”

  Oetzler said curtly: “I don’t like half-breeds.”

  “My dear fellow, I don’t myself particularly care for Poles and Lithuanians and Greeks, but I’m bound to confess that the whole gigantic mix-up of Teuton, Latin, Slav and Semite has given America its new note of vitality in the world. Why, then, must we suppose that a further admixture of Chink and Jap, or even pure nigger, wouldn’t add to the newness and the vitality?… But I don’t want to hold up the story.”

  “I’d got to Yacaiba, hadn’t I?” Russell continued. “Well, there was an Indian there who thought he knew where we could find the happy couple, so I engaged him as a guide and we set out into the forests. He said we’d be riding for a day, but once again calculations went all wrong; it took four days. And I’ll say this, having had three nights in it, that I consider that forest one of the most hellish things I’ve ever struck. Let me compare my own situation then with what must have been Mirsky’s when he entered from the other end. He was alone; I had an Indian who was supposed to know the place. He had no experience of pioneer hardships; I’ve had forty years of them. He was setting out to do over a hundred miles; my trip was less than thirty. He had a horse (so the Maramba people said, didn’t they?); I was on a mule, which is a much more reliable animal in such conditions. Also, he was new blood to all the insects; I’ve been so well inoculated that I’ve sometimes imagined that the brutes see me coming and deliberately keep off. On the whole, I’m glad I had those days and nights in the forest. They helped me to understand the sort of thing that he must have gone through before he was found.”

  “Ah,” said Oetzler. “He was found, then.”

  “Yes, but I seem to be getting a bit ahead with my story. On the fourth day we came to a few native huts by the side of a stream. The village, or whatever it deserves to be called, was completely empty, and the reason was obvious—the stream had recently overflowed and washed out the inhabitants. But about a mile away, on higher ground, surrounded by a small clearing which was in turn surrounded by the forest, there was this interesting ménage in full swing.”

  Russell paused, relishing his own technique of narrative. He w
ent on, eventually: “There was a rough timber hut with no windows, a large opening for a door, and a roof made of some kind of palm-leaf. The floor was just the earth, which chickens had scratched into inches of filth and dust. A very small maize field rose on sloping ground at the back—right up to the edge of the forest. There were a few rather scraggy cattle in a stockaded corral. It was dull and raining when I saw the place first, and the impression of the forest all around, a complete wall of black, was that of some huge, crouching animal waiting to pounce. Probably, had it been a fine day, I’d have thought it all looked very cheerful and homy. Anyway, there it was, and your friend Mirsky, dressed native-fashion in slip-slop trousers and nothing else, was chopping wood in the doorway.

  “Of course, I couldn’t be certain, then, that he was Mirsky. He had a beard and a moustache, his hair was long, he was very dirty— he didn’t look a bit like the man your letter had described. There was nothing for it but the ‘Doctor-Livingstone-I- presume’ gambit, so I went up to him, held out my hand, and said: ’Is your name Mirsky?’ He didn’t take my hand, he didn’t answer, and he gave me a look that I can’t really portray, but it showed me this much instantly—he was off his head.