Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  These duties were arduous, but simple. Over her head, as she sat in an alcove at one end of the long corridor, were eighteen numbered bells, representing the eighteen rooms under her charge. If there was a ring, she had to hasten to the corresponding room; but during the often long intervals of waiting she could read or sew if she cared. In the evenings, however, the corridor light was so poor that she usually did nothing at all, except fall into a doze. Her hours were from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. and from 2 p.m. until midnight, on alternate days, and with only short pauses for meals. M. Capel had known how to drive a hard bargain.

  She had been at the “Corona” for just a week, and it was her first experience of such work. Before that, there had been nightmarish months of slowly encroaching poverty, as her income as a music-teacher had felt the full blast of the world-slump. Before that, she had had for a time the post of governess to an epileptic child; and before even that, she had been the wife of a casino-croupier, who had finally left her with nothing of any commercial value except French nationality. And in the days before wifehood there had been the gradual, bitterly reluctant acceptance of changed times and facts—the bartering of jewels in back-parlours of shops, the signing of “Paula Mirsky” with less and less of a flourish as one came to realise how little it counted. Farthest of all, came those ancient days before 1917, and still more anciently before 1914—one dreamed of them sometimes, but one tried not to remember.

  Paula was now thirty-three—tall, dark-haired, sombre-eyed, slender-nosed, always rather pale. Her husband, a swaggering Provençal, had been consistently unfaithful, but that had not mattered much, because she had married only in the first panic of finding herself without money. After two years of him she had had enough of men, and the enoughness was written genuinely in her face.

  As she took her post at the end of the corridor that evening she felt, in the same genuine way, that she had probably had enough of life as well. Still no letter from Leon. Still no information about him from anyone. She sat down on the small, cane-bottomed chair and faced the now familiar vista of doors and carpet. There was a murmurous stir from below—sounds of voices, of luggage being moved, of lift-doors clanging, the whine of the ascending compartments. Soon the noise invaded her own corridor, but it did not concern her yet; she sat motionlessly, while porters passed her with heavy trunks, page- boys skipped ahead of men in large travelling overcoats who sauntered along with their hands searching for small change. The delegations, she thought, in a kind of daze. Then, inevitably, the bells above her head began to ring.

  For an hour or more after that she was continually busy. There was no running water in the second-floor bedrooms, and as most of the arrivals wanted to wash, she had to fill cans of hot water from the tap adjoining the bathrooms. Some of the men were obvious Germans and looked pleased when she replied to them in that language, which she spoke fairly well; but her accommodation had been automatic. She had little interest in personal identities; they were all no more to her than the occupants of certain rooms. She felt fatigued and listless; her legs took her backwards and forwards, but her mind all the time was clogged with wondering about Leon and why he had not written. In one of the rooms, Number Two-five-seven, a man began some long story about his luggage having gone astray; he spoke in school-book French, and had a deep, rather husky voice which somehow did not match his face, which was very round and red and shining. He went on with his story, which finally led to a request for some soap. “Soap?” she echoed, picking up the trail of a speech to which she had not really been listening. But then he suddenly said: “Pardon, m’mselle, you look ill. Don’t bother about the soap—I can do without it for the time being.”

  “But no, I can get you some.”

  When she brought it to his room he was talking in German with a group of other men; he just said “Thanks,” and she left it on the wash-hand basin. Then she went back to her chair in the alcove. Most of the arrivals had already gone down to dinner; it would be a slack time now until about ten o’clock. She closed her eyes, and the feeling came to her once more that life was just no good at all unless she were soon to hear from Leon.

  She had not seen him since 1927, when he had been over on a short holiday from New York, but he had always (until of late) written to her regularly, and had sometimes helped her by small remittances. She had cherished all along the most confident belief in his genius, and had read and re-read the art-critiques which he sent her from time to time. Her feeling for him was somehow deeper than that of sister for brother, deeper even than that of one survivor of a family for the only other. He represented, to her, the bare chance of rising, phoenix-like, out of the ashes of disaster; he was the only living link between the past and any sort of a future. The very fact that, but for his one short visit, she had not seen him since the darkest days of all, gave emphasis to this symbolism; for he alone, it seemed, had acquired a second status after events had robbed him of his first. To become a famous New York art-critic instead of a wealthy landowner near Rostov-on-Don was not too bad an exchange; it was possible, anyhow, to think of it hopefully. And she had been thinking of it hopefully for ten years. It stood for all that was “not quite” in the totality of ruin.

  The long evening began; the man who had asked for the soap passed with his friends on the way to the lift, still talking animatedly. She did not often notice faces, but she could not help looking at his—it was so cheerful and pink, like a grown-up choir-boy’s, she thought…. Then, after the clang of the lift-gate, she was alone in the muffled silence. It was at such moments that, though she tried to forbid them, the memories came—of Yalta, in the Crimea, where her parents had had a villa when she and Leon were children; of Eastertide in St. Petersburg; of hotels like the “Corona” at which she had stayed as a girl. For her father had been extremely rich, and she and Leon had already seen a good deal of Europe before 1914. She had many memories of Switzerland, the Rhine, Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, and Rome; of her father, tall and fur-coated, losing his temper with railway- porters, and of her mother dutifully pacifying him; and of Leon in his cultured voice instructing them during their perambulations of Italian picture- galleries. But her most poignant memory was of Leon in the tight-fitting, gold- laced uniform of his crack regiment. Only the fact that he didn’t sympathise with it had prevented him from fighting heroically in the war against the Germans; she was sure of that, and sure also that his attitude had been thoroughly right. For had not that war, after all, led directly to the Revolution? Oh, if only… if only…

  It always came to that, in the end. Pictures raced through her mind, like a worn and flickering cinema-film, meaningless except for that single torturing motif—if only…. So much of all that had happened could have been avoided; so much of it very nearly hadn’t happened. If, for instance, the English had burst through the Dardanelles and taken Constantinople in 1915? Or if Denikin had had just a featherweight of better luck in 1919? If only these, to take but two of the vividest near-happenings, had eventuated, then she would not be listening for bells in a hotel corridor in 1932, nor Leon have been sent to the edge of the world to report an earthquake.

  She fell into a doze and did not waken till one of the bells began to tinkle. It was after ten; she would be busy from now on, carrying more hot water. Just before midnight, when her duty ended, the man with the choir-boy face passed her alone, going to his room. “Good night,” he called out. “I hope you’re feeling better now.”

  “Yes, thank you,” she answered. “Good night, sir.”

  He had a pleasant smile, she thought, as she undressed a few minutes later in the drab attic which she shared with another hotel servant.

  In the morning it was her turn to begin work at six. Two hours later she tapped on the door of Number Two-five-seven and received a deep-voiced, cheerful reply. She filled a can of hot water and placed it on the mat outside the door. Next the boots brought along a pair of brown brogue shoes. Then the waiter arrived with coffee and croissants. Finally came the porter bringing a t
runk and suit-cases—evidently the luggage that had gone astray the previous evening. She felt what she so rarely felt—a tinge of personal curiosity, in return, as it were, for the man’s previous enquiry about her. She glanced casually, in passing, at the labels on the luggage; they bore the name “Tribourov” and the emblematic seals of the U.S.S.R.

  That gave her a shock. She had assumed, without ever wondering much, that the man was German. And then the labels on the bags, names of Russian cities printed in Russian characters… they brought her face to face with something she was hardly prepared for. She had known, of course, as all the staff knew, that the Russian delegation were coming to the hotel, and she had known, too, if she had ever considered the matter, that they would all be Reds (what else could they be, indeed?), yet somehow she had not expected their identities to concern her any more than those of other hotel visitors.

  This man Tribourov was, incidentally, the first Soviet personage of any consequence whom she had ever seen. Before 1919, when she had escaped from Russia, her contacts had all been with soldiers, minor officials, and miscellaneous ruffiandom; such men as Lenin, Trotsky, Kameneff, Radek and the rest, were mere names to her as to the rest of the world, though she felt for them a fierce, blistering detestation that was shared by most of her companions in exile. The so-called hatreds of the actually warring nations were mild beside it, and proved their mildness by collapsing like pricked balloons after the Armistice, leaving no greater soreness than between ally and ally. But the loathing of White for Red, of the dispossessed for the aggrandisers, was a darker, more searing thing, a poison in the blood, which ten years of banishment had sharpened rather than assuaged. There were men in Paris, in Berlin, and along the coastline of the Riviera, whom a chance-seen photograph of Lenin could suddenly intoxicate with rage; they hated that dome-like Mongol face with a hate that came less from their heads than from their bowels. And in their waking dreams they saw themselves warriors recrossing frontiers of time as well as space, wading back through rivers of blood to the gilded salons of 1914. The least thing could quicken the ferment of such anticipations—a glass of Clicquot stood them by a friend, a glimpse of glittering epaulettes, the sound of a band playing Tchaikovsky.

  And if this were true of men, it was doubly so of the women, whose dispossessions had often been more humiliating. There came a day in their lives when they had sold the last jewel to the last Jew, when they found that the tale of gentle birth merely bored where it did not antagonise; then, taking the plunge, they became French, German, Swiss, burying the past in its own black memories. Sometimes, like Paula Mirsky, they married foreigners and acquired a new nationality in law. By their neighbours, employers, and new-found companions the past was not only unknown, but unsuspected; and even in their own souls it might seem to die. Then, abruptly, something would set the old fires re-flickering.

  This happened to Paula when she saw the labels on Tribourov’s luggage. There were similar labels on other men’s luggage, but only Tribourov’s affected her, because only Tribourov had made her aware of him personally. The rest were mere embodiments of room-numbers; he alone was a man, and as a man he invaded her life. He was, she had thought at first, like a grown-up choir-boy, and the rather impressionist description still stood when she noticed him further. And it was perhaps appropriate that his first contact with her had been in connection with a demand for soap. For his face looked always as if it had just been scrubbed; there was that ripe, schoolboyish freshness about his skin. It was in his manner, too; he was always cheerful, brisk, jauntily good-humoured. He had a deep laugh, and seemed very popular, not only with his fellow-delegates, but with Germans and visitors of other nationalities. Usually, as he came striding along the corridor, he wore a black felt hat that was pushed a little too far back on his head, and smoked a cheap Maryland cigarette which, as often as not, he threw away half-finished into the plant-pot near the lift. There was nothing really striking about him; he was average in height and figure for the middle-aged man that he was, and it seemed somehow irrelevant as well as impossible to decide whether his looks were good or otherwise. He was certainly not handsome in any conventional sense.

  She felt, in observing him, a sensation that was partly one of horror, and she had the same feeling when she was attending to his room. Cheerfully he strode, as it seemed to her, over the ruined lives of such as herself; and with that same jaunty briskness he held control of the blood-guilty machine. She avoided his eyes when they met, and never answered his occasional remarks with more than the minimum of words. Even contact with his possessions stirred her inwardly; there was a photograph of a woman which he had put on his dressing- table, and she felt a contempt for both the pictured face and for the sentimentality of the man who carried such a reminder about with him. His wife, she presumed, if men such as he had any use for the term; and she imagined them living in absurd magnificence in some mansion that had belonged to a pre- Revolution aristocrat. Probably the silver frame of the photograph had a similar history.

  Once, when she brought him hot water before dinner, he said suddenly: “I heard you talking in German this morning to the man across the corridor. You speak it very well.”

  She smiled slightly without replying.

  “Better talk in German to me in future,” he added. “My French isn’t very good.”

  “If you prefer, certainly, sir.”

  He then continued, in fluent and well-accented German: “They work you long hours in this place.”

  “I’ve nothing to complain about.”

  “No? Do you get decently fed?”

  “Quite.”

  He threw his half smoked cigarette into the empty fire-grate— where, she reflected, she would later on have to clear it up. “Look here, I’m not talking to you as a superior to an inferior. If you find my questions impertinent, you can say so—and, on the other hand, if you don’t find them so, you can answer them with more than ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘No, sir.’ I’m interested in the wages and conditions of hotel-workers, because a little while ago I carried out a reorganisation of the hotel industry in Moscow and other big cities in the Union.”

  Still she made no reply, and after a pause he went on, abruptly:

  “Well, thank you for bringing me the water.”

  She had snubbed him, she told herself as she left his room; and her heart glowed with a nearer approach to ecstasy than she had felt for a long time.

  Meanwhile the Conference was in full swing, providing daily columns for hundreds of newspapers throughout the world. Paula, however, did not often read newspapers. That core of inward bitterness left her little feeling of concern with the strange hazards and groupings of the post-War nations, and it was quite by chance that she saw Tribourov’s name and photograph in a local journal, together with a report of a speech he had made. She read it scornfully, finding in it all kinds of unlikeable qualities, from hypocrisy to errors of style. Yet the odd thing was that while she was reading she could both see and hear the man—could hear his deep voice uttering certain words as she knew he would utter them, and could see his round, glistening cheeks bulging with excitement as she knew they would.

  One afternoon he met her in the post office, where she had just received the usual reply that no letters had arrived for her. He raised his hat and passed some comment on the weather, after which she saw him walk over to the telephones. Two heavily-built men accompanied him across the crowded floor and stood outside the door of the box.

  That evening, when she made her usual visit to his room, he said cheerfully: “Oh, did you notice my bodyguard this afternoon? The Government insists on it—for my safety.”

  “Indeed?” She had betrayed interest before she could check herself.

  “Yes, I understand they’ve discovered a plot to kill me. But I’m not worrying, though it’s a nuisance to have those two hefty fellows at my heels wherever I go. They’re downstairs now, smoking long cigars and trying not to look like the most obvious plain-clothes detectives you ever set
eyes on. It makes a man feel such a child.”

  She thought that he LOOKED like a child, too—at that moment a child just slightly cross over a trifle.

  “Well,” he added, “as I said, I’m not worrying. If they want to get me and try hard enough, I suppose they will. But they won’t achieve anything much by it. There are plenty of others to carry on my work.”

  “But it would be a gesture,” she said quietly.

  He showed surprise at her remark—the first one of any individuality that she had yet made. “Oh, yes, I suppose you could call it that,” he admitted. “But the world is tired of gestures. It cries out for acts that have a meaning in themselves. This Conference—” He stopped, laughed suddenly, and added: “I’m afraid I should soon bore you if I were to begin talking about it. As you say, my assassination would be a gesture. And perhaps it couldn’t happen more appropriately than here—in this city of gestures.”

  As she arranged the towels on his wash-hand stand he went on: “It’s lucky, anyhow, that I have no personal dependents.” Her eyes strayed for an instant and he was quick to see and interpret the glance. “Oh, you’ve noticed the photograph? That’s my mother. She died ten years ago, in one of the influenza epidemics.”

  It had been little use snubbing him after all, she reflected later, during the long hours of waiting in the corridor. But his talk of assassination had curiously impressed her; and when, on the following morning, she looked out of one of the second-floor windows and saw him drive off in his car to the Conference, she had half-thoughts that she would never see him again. And, rather oddly, just about the middle of the morning there was great excitement among a group of waiters and chambermaids on one of the landings, and when she approached them she was sure they were going to tell her that the occupant of Number Two-five-seven had been killed. But it was only some business about a Spanish lottery in which one of the waiters thought he held a winning ticket.