Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  “We stood there for a minute or so, facing each other without words. Then suddenly a woman came out of the hut and looked at us. That gave me my second shock. You know, Oetzler, I’m probably the last man in the world who could he called sentimental, especially about women, and you can imagine that I hadn’t been picturing any romantic affair between a stranded white man and a lovely sepia princess. I was prepared for the average Indian female, who generally isn’t good-looking to begin with, ages very rapidly, and has several diseases. But this creature wasn’t even that. She was the most incredibly ugly human creature I think I ever saw in my life. She had the usual flat nose and broken teeth and barrel-shaped body. She may have been old or young—one simply couldn’t guess. But the whole effect was made much worse by her being an out-size. She was big even by our standards—to the Indians, who are rather a stunted race, she must have seemed a regular giantess. She made Mirsky look puny, and he certainly wasn’t under average. Of course I could understand as soon as I saw her why the Indians at Yacaiba had all seemed rather lewdly amused at the situation— there’s always something a bit comic about the amours of a hefty woman…. Well, there you are—there’s your picture. I ought to add that she was quite as dirty as she was ugly, and that when she came up close she had a queer, ammoniacal smell that happens to be one of the few unpleasantnesses that I’ve never managed to get used to.”

  Lanberger reached for more whisky. “As you say, Russell, you could hardly call yourself a sentimentalist.”

  Russell went on. “Well, she looked me up and down, and I smiled politely, and then Mirsky said something to her in the native lingo, and I gathered it was by way of general introduction. I’d already given him my own name, of course. When I said he was off his head, I don’t mean that he was a raving lunatic. Far from it. His first instincts were quite naturally hospitable, and he motioned me to enter the hut out of the pouring rain. I did so, with him following me, and the woman following after him. My Indian guide stayed outside, watching events with much curiosity. The inside of that hut was pretty dreadful. It had about twenty smells, among them being those of chickens, drying pemmican, peppery cooking, and filth. There was a sort of wooden bench on which Mirsky invited me to sit. The woman went into a corner and squatted on some straw; I couldn’t see her properly, but I could feel that her eyes were still on me, and I had an additional feeling that she didn’t altogether like me or approve of my visit. Meanwhile I was rather waiting for Mirsky to say something, or at least to confirm the fact that he was Mirsky. He didn’t; but he asked me what he could do for me, if I had lost my way, did I wish for food, or anything. Quite courteous, indeed. I said: ’No. I came deliberately to see you. I was told you were here. I should like to talk to you.’ He smiled at that and said he didn’t know that we could find much to talk about. I didn’t fence around any longer then, but said outright that his friends were greatly concerned about him, and that I’d been sent by them to bring him back. To which he replied, equally outright: ’You’ll spare yourself a lot of trouble if you take my word once and for all that I’m not coming.’ Quietly just like that. There was nothing precisely in his tone, or words, or manner, to suggest that he wasn’t perfectly sane. But when I looked at him I saw his eyes again. They were the danger-signal. They were—I can only think of one adjective—they were HOT.

  “Naturally, I didn’t launch into arguments right away. To begin with, I wasn’t ready with any. It hadn’t really occurred to me that the fellow wouldn’t jump at the chance of quitting such a life. I just said: ‘Oh, that’s how you feel, is it?’ and let the matter drop for the time being. He was instantly courteous again, and offered me food and drink, which I decided to accept. I’m not particularly fastidious—I haven’t had to be in my life—but I confess that I heaved a bit over that meal. Just to see that woman eating was enough to turn one’s stomach. We drank chicha, which is made from maize, and is pretty alcoholic if you have too much of it. Afterwards both Mirsky and the woman chewed coca, but I declined to join in—not from any scruples, but because I don’t much care for the drug. We talked a little, just the two of us. Sometimes Mirsky said a word or so to the woman, but I gathered that he didn’t understand her language very completely. My attitude, which I thought was the best possible in the circumstances, was to pretend that the whole situation was the most natural in the world. From a good deal of our talk we might have been lunching at the Ritz-Carlton. Except that whenever I mentioned anything about the outside world he shut me up instantly—telling me he wasn’t interested. Nor would he talk about the recent past. He seemed to be living in a sort of ‘here- now’ world, as if he either couldn’t or wouldn’t exercise his brain over space and time. I’m not a psychologist, still less an alienist, and I don’t really profess to understand the man’s mental condition. But it did seem to me that his mind was somehow twisted. I’ll give you an instance of it later on…. I hope, by the way, you don’t think I’m spinning this out too much? There isn’t a great deal more to tell, anyhow.”

  “Go on,” Oetzler said. “It’s a most extraordinary story.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. I’ve known men go native before, but as a rule it’s drink or women that lead them to it, and they’d most of them give their eyes to get back, if anyone offered to help them. Mirsky, however, was a rather studious type, wasn’t he, not much given to the pleasures of the flesh?”

  Oetzler nodded. “He certainly didn’t drink heavily, and as for women, I should have reckoned him under rather than oversexed. Finnicky, in fact.”

  “Yes, you’re thinking of that woman,” Russell answered. “There was nothing undersexed about her, I can assure you. She was almost, if you take my meaning, a caricature of the thing. What’s the name of that English Jew who does queer sculptures that get his name in the pictures? Yes, Epstein, that’s it. She was Sex as Epstein might have personified it. I don’t say that, of course, merely because she was ugly. There was something else—something powerful and elemental and rather, to me, horrific in her. One somehow expected to see her surrounded by an enormous litter of children. Yet, so far as I could judge, she hadn’t any. Afterwards, when I got back to Yacaiba, I discovered that this was by no means remarkable, since the Chiriqui women vastly outnumber the men—sometimes by as big a ratio as ten to one. Nobody quite knows why, but it is so. The only theory I can advance is that just as during a War the will to survive produces an excess of males, a corresponding excess of females must represent a subconscious will to die. As a matter of fact, some of the tribes are dying—very rapidly.”

  “It must make the men rather proud of themselves,” said Oetzler.

  “Yes, I daresay. But most of them are only weedy little runts that sit around all day doing nothing, while the women work. Contrary to what you might expect, the men are by no means objects of worship by the women. The disproportion is so great that the women seem rather to despise them. There’s polygamy, of course, if you like to call it that, but it’s really more like promiscuity. Few of the children know their own fathers. The men’s function is just ‘service,’ in the stud-book sense, and I can’t say it adds to their dignity, even if it does to their importance.”

  “And the women?” queried Lanberger. “Do they play fair—share and share alike? Or do the good-looking ones, if there are any, elbow the others out of the way?”

  “So far as I could judge from very casual observation in Yacaiba, the women seemed to be pretty sensible about it. Perhaps they’d arrived at the soundest possible basis for a sexual relationship— that of not expecting faithfulness. Still, the bad-lookers do get left out—that’s natural enough.” He took a fresh cigar, paused while he lit it, and then added: “Which brings me back to the point—that woman. I should guess that SHE’D been left out, until she met Mirsky. Or, rather, she didn’t exactly meet him—she must have found him, probably when he was half-dead and half- mad of thirst in the forest. He didn’t deny that that was what had happened, when I put it to him the following day. Oh, yes, I sta
yed the night there. I’m afraid I’m telling this story rather badly. I stayed the night because I had to—the heavy rains had swollen the river so much that it was quite impossible to make the crossing. Mirsky walked down with me to look at it and then invited me to return with him and wait till the morning. I can’t say I was pleased, because we’d already had a long and exhausting argument and I could see that persuasion was useless.

  “Yes, quite useless. When a man says the sort of things that Mirsky said, and with that queer sort of danger look in his eyes, you can’t feel very optimistic about changing his mind. When I told him about his sister in Paris and how worried she was about him, all he said was: ‘She needn’t be. I’m well enough here.’ ‘But do you mean to say she’s never going to see you again?’ I asked, and he answered: ’She can see me here, if she comes. There’s room enough for her.’ After that it didn’t seem worth while to say much more. He talked a lot of wild nonsense about hating civilisation. Even art, too. He was in a mood to have put his foot through the canvas of the Monna Lisa if it had been anywhere near. He pointed to a rather repulsive looking beetle we saw crawling over the mud and said to me: ’You see that beetle? What is it? It’s a beetle, that’s all. What is it doing? Nothing particular that we know of. It’s just being a beetle. Well, that’s how I want to be a man.’ All that sort of talk.”

  “Not especially original,” commented Lanberger. “I begin to suspect that Mirsky must have had a complete set of the works of D. H. Lawrence somewhere in that hut.”

  Russell laughed. “I haven’t read much of Lawrence, so I can’t say, but of course the whole thing was absurd. Civilised man can’t go back to savagery all at once—he’s too self- conscious. The very last thing a savage ever does is to explain himself introspectively, as Mirsky was doing then. But he wasn’t altogether sane, remember. Those days and nights in the forest— exactly how many before the woman found him, I couldn’t quite gather—they’d done that much for him. As we came in sight of his hut on the way back he said something else that stuck in my mind. ‘I’ve got everything a man needs,’ he said, ’food, drink, a roof over my head, and a woman.’”

  “Well,” said Lanberger, reflectively, “it’s a point of view, at any rate. I can imagine many people who’re by no means mad agreeing with him.”

  “Oh, I’m not offering it as a proof of his madness,” Russell retorted. “And I could give you far better ones than that, in any case. … But I must tell you now how we spent the night. Mirsky and the woman slept together at one end of the hut, my Indian guide was in the middle, and I was at the other end near the doorway. As it wasn’t a large hut we were all fairly closely huddled. There was no artificial light, so we turned in as soon as it got dark. Of course I didn’t undress—I didn’t even take my boots off. There was only straw to lie on, full of fleas and insects. Usually I don’t get bitten much, but Mirsky must have been breeding an especially ferocious type. They and other things kept me awake, though there was every reason for me to be as tired as the guide, who began snoring almost instantly. I smoked a pipe or two and thought what a confoundedly queer world it was—to have sent a Russian aristocrat turned Yankee art-critic to sleep on straw in the middle of a tropical swamp with that monstrous female. As a matter of fact, it rather got on my nerves—the thought of them there, like that, only a few feet away. Of course I’m quite aware that I ought to allow for my own personal kink in such a matter. Frankly, I don’t care for women. I don’t even think that their naked bodies are beautiful—all those rather foolish curves and cushions. Now a man’s body, on the other hand… but I mustn’t digress. I want to tell you about that night. It was not quite pitch-dark—there was a small moon when the clouds let it be seen. I suppose, despite the fleas and the smells and the general uncomfortableness of things, I must have dropped off to sleep before midnight, because when I woke I had a distinct middle-of-the-night, as opposed to nearly-time-to-get-up feeling. I’m rather good at that sort of instinct; I also have an instinct for danger— it’s saved my life several times. In fact—which is what I’ve come to at last—I think it did so that night.

  “I woke up with a queer sensation that something was happening or about to happen—I felt it even before I remembered my whereabouts. And then, when I looked up, I saw, very faintly against the slightly pale oblong of the open doorway, a sight more terrifying to me than snakes or panthers.”

  Lanberger tittered. “Do we have to guess what it was? I suggest it was Mirsky being a beetle… . Sorry, Russell, I’m not really poking fun—it’s just that your quite frightful story begins to make me feel hysterical. I can’t help it. But do go on.”

  Russell continued: “The woman was standing over me. I could feel and smell, more than I could see her. And if, by the way, I had happened to be an admirer of women, I think that might have been enough to cure me for ever. I can get now, when I think of it, some of the fearfulness of that presence near me—once again, in the darkness, I had an impression of something elemental, and in a rather dreadful way, obscene. I won’t elaborate it, though. Perhaps more to the point is the fact that she was carrying something in her hand—something which, dimly outlined, looked to me very much like the axe that Mirsky had been using to chop wood.

  “I rather pride myself, you know, on keeping my head at these awkward junctures. After my first spasm of terror, I felt quite calm. The woman, I could see, was watching me, but I doubted whether she knew I had wakened. My revolver was touching my hand— if she intended murder I could forestall her by the merest pressure of a finger. I don’t know that I’d have felt much compunction about it, either—I’ve killed men for less, and I certainly didn’t feel in a chivalrous mood just then, even if I ever did. Anyhow, to cut the story shorter, I gave her the chance and she took it. I staged a noisy yawn, and saw her slink back, axe and all, into the shadows at the other end of the hut.

  “As you can guess, I didn’t go to sleep again that night. I lay awake thinking things over, and the best plan, in the circumstances, seemed a pretty quick exit in the morning. I just didn’t like the idea of that woman. The Indian tribes, you know, aren’t particularly intelligent, but they’re reputed to employ several highly original methods of slaughter, and I wasn’t sure that I knew them all. So at dawn I got up, waked my guide, and ordered him to prepare for the return journey. Mirsky and the woman heard me, and also got up. Mirsky protested against my going so soon, and wanted me to take a meal first, but I declined—to tell the truth, though it may sound ridiculous—I had a fear of poison. You see, I’d figured it out that the woman knew, whether he’d told her so or not, that I was scheming to take him away from her. It’s the sort of motive that grows with thinking about, and I reckoned on her feeling more murderous than ever after that middle-of-the-night fiasco. I didn’t hint anything of this to Mirsky, of course. I merely said that as it hadn’t rained during the night, I was anxious to take the chance of crossing the river. Mirsky said it would still be impossible to cross, but I said I would go down and try, anyway. So he went with me. My good-bye to the woman was somewhat frigidly polite.

  “It’s about a mile downhill from the hut to the fording- place, and Mirsky and I carried on a rather one-sided conversation most of the way. It was then that I said I supposed the woman had found him half-dead in the forest, and he just looked at me sardonically and shrugged his shoulders. I also said: ’I don’t know what sort of report I can make about you when I get back.’ He said: ’Why not tell the truth?’ I answered: ‘It’s too ghastly.’ He then said: ‘I suppose it’s the woman that makes you say that.’ I admitted as much, and he laughed in a sort of crackling way and answered: ’That’s just the trouble. You shouldn’t think about her. You shouldn’t think about women at all. They’re not made for it.’ I said they were generally considered to be of some importance in a man’s life. He said: ’Important, yes. So are the colon and the pylorus. But you only think about them when they’re not functioning properly. Thought is Mishap. That’s a decent sort of Proudhon defin
ition anyway. Look at your world when you return to it—compare it with the almost thoughtless world of the amoeba, or with the totally thoughtless orbit of Betelgeuse.’ ’All very well,’ I retorted, ’but the fact remains that what you’re saying now is very much the product of thought. You seem to have the disease as badly as anyone else.’ He laughed again at that, and we went on talking till we reached the river. I can’t remember a lot that he said. As you remarked just now, Lanberger, it probably wasn’t anything really original. But it would no doubt pass for originality if Mirsky were to come back here on a lecture tour, grizzled beard and Indian squaw complete. I can see the women’s clubs in Cincinnati and Akron, Ohio, going wild about him.”

  “He’d certainly make a bigger hit than he did as a highbrow art-critic,” agreed Oetzler. “But unfortunately you weren’t able to persuade him to such an interestingly new career, I gather?”

  “No, but he nearly persuaded me to go back with him to the hut. He said the river was very deep and had dangerous cross-currents, so that I’d probably lose all my tackle if not my life. The Indian guide was rather doubtful about it, too—the stream certainly was running pretty high. I was half-preparing myself to accept the inevitable—after all, I thought, I’ve got a revolver and know how to use it—when I happened to give another glance at Mirsky, and all at once my guardian instinct stepped in again. I can’t really describe the look that was in his face. It was just—if the oxymoron conveys anything—pure evil. I was aware then, as clearly as if I’d been told so outright, that he knew all about the woman’s planned attack on me, that he’d been a party to it, and that he wanted to get me back to the hut for a second and more successful effort. Of course, you can say if you like that I couldn’t possibly deduce all these things from a mere look, but I say I could and DID. And it made me settle quite finally that I’d got to cross that stream somehow or other. I told him so. He laughed and said he supposed I had a right to drown myself if I chose. Then he suddenly cried out, excitedly: ’You’re not going! You’re coming back with me!’ I answered, as calmly as I could: ’My dear Mirsky, nothing on earth would induce me to do that. If I can’t get across now, I’ll camp out here on the bank until the water lowers.’ He said: ‘You don’t like my establishment, then?’ I answered rather recklessly—perhaps you know how sometimes an idea comes to you which, if you thought about it twice, you’d reject, but it just captures you before you have time for the second thought. That’s what was happening to me then, as I said: ’Oh, I don’t mind your establishment at all, but I do object to being murdered in my sleep.’ I guessed that would bring things to a climax, but the precise climax it did lead to wasn’t among those I was prepared for. A rather curious change came over him. He just nodded his head, very slowly; and, believe me, Oetzler, it was as if, for a moment, the curtain lifted and he became as sane as you or me. ‘She’s a devil, that woman is, Russell,’ he said, in quite a calm voice.