Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  In the evening when she entered Tribourov’s room he was writing at the small table under the window.

  She performed her various duties as quietly and quickly as possible and was about to go away when he swung round and called out: “Hi, just a minute!”

  She stopped, with her hand on the door-knob.

  “Don’t be in such a hurry to go. I want to ask you something. Close the door again.”

  She did so, and moved a few paces across the room towards him. He lit a cigarette and grinned that rather chubby, babyish smile. “Look here… when you came in just now, I caught sight of your face in the mirror, and your look said: ‘Oh, so he’s still alive.’ Yet you didn’t say anything. Don’t you ever speak your mind?”

  She said, after a pause: “I didn’t wish to interrupt you in your work.”

  “Or to be interrupted in yours, either, no doubt. You’re not very encouraging. By the way, we must introduce ourselves. My name’s Tribourov, as perhaps you already know.”

  “Courvier is mine,” she answered, reluctantly but inevitably.

  “Courvier? That’s French?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yet you speak German perfectly? You’ll forgive my remarking that you aren’t quite the usual type of person in this kind of job.”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  He laughed his deep, booming laugh. “Well, I do know. And I should say, too, that you’ve had a good education…. All this is leading somewhere, I assure you—it isn’t just inquisitiveness on my part. The fact is, I was talking to our local trade representative this morning—he wants someone in his office with a thorough knowledge of German. So you see… it just occurred to me that the job might suit you better than this.”

  She stared at him in half-stupefied astonishment; it was the last thing she had ever expected, and the irony probed till she hardly knew whether she were feeling pleasure or pain, or being merely goaded to hysteria.

  “It’s very kind of you,” she managed to say at length. Just for a wild second she had the idea of telling him who she was, of making some kind of scene which would mean her leaving the hotel immediately. That she, of all persons, should be offered a post under the Soviets! That she should draw, as wages, a paltry fraction of the money that had been stolen from her! And yet, so complicated was life, here was this man contriving such a bitter jest out of what could only be pure kindliness of heart. She was angry, touched, and out of her depth in a sea of unfamiliar emotions; so that suddenly, standing there before him, she began to cry. She had rather thought that nothing more could ever make her do that. He sprang out of his chair at once and put his arm about her comfortingly, which made her cry all the more. “Now, now,” he kept saying, gruffly. “Don’t do that, don’t do that.” And again he performed that characteristic movement of throwing away the half-smoked cigarette.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as soon as she could speak.

  “Sorry? Oh, no, no, don’t say that. It’s all right. You mustn’t upset yourself. As for the job, just think it over and let me know by the end of the week. No—don’t talk about it now—there’ll be plenty of time later on. Sit here a moment and let me show you something. These have just arrived from Moscow. They’re photographs of a huge technical college that’s nearly finished. Tell me, have you ever seen anything like it anywhere else?”

  He was talking with a new eagerness, partly, she guessed, to fix her attention while she regained control of herself; but also with a personal enthusiasm that was obviously real. And here she was, again in this world of irony, admiring the vistas of class-rooms, and the palatial open-air terraces, as he described them to her in such exultant detail. “This is going to be the finest technical college in the world. It’s built on a site that used to be crowded with slums, and its entire yearly upkeep won’t be as much as the rents that used to be paid to the slum-landlords. Perhaps you are interested in housing, by the way? I have some rather wonderful pictures of the new workmen’s flats we’re building—let me show you—”

  But at that moment she heard the distant tinkle of one of her bells. “I must go,” she cried, getting up. “Someone has rung for me. Thank you—”

  “Not at all. We must have another talk.”

  But as soon as she was outside in the corridor she vowed that there should never be another talk. She was disturbed in mind as she had not been for years; all the emotions that she had buried deeply were raw and uncovered by such an encounter. She could not sleep that night, and the next day, when it came near her time for going on duty in the afternoon, she found herself in positive fear of that likely meeting with him again. Panic-stricken, she sought M. Capel and asked if she could be transferred to another floor. He was furious and refused to consider such a change; in that case, she said, she would have to leave, because the work was too hard in the rooms that had no running water. She had to think of some reason to give him. At this, however, he offered her a job in the hotel laundry, at a lower wage; which she accepted, on condition that she could go to it immediately.

  She felt out of a great danger when she had moved over. It was harder work, if anything, but at least it protected her from Tribourov. That, indeed, was the pitch to which she had been driven. She was fast becoming completely obsessed with the man. She seemed to find his name in every newspaper; that eager, apple-red face haunted her as soon as she closed her eyes. He represented, in her mind, all that she most passionately hated; yet the torture was in thinking of him also in a different way, as someone who had been kind to her. It upset all the neatly docketed past, the almost comfortable loathings and detestations that had held up the fabric of a decade’s exile. But the worst was over now, she felt; and if she did not see him again, the fire would doubtless die down after a while and leave her as before.

  Then one morning, several days after she had begun her new work, Capel sent her a message that “M. Tribourov, the gentleman in Number Two- fiveseven,” would like to speak to her, and would she call on him in his room shortly before dinner that evening? She returned no answer, but registered a firm decision not to go. Yet throughout the day a storm of uncertainty raged behind the outward mind that she had made up; there was a wavering of the body that had no connection with head or brain. At six, when the day’s work ended, she went to her attic bedroom and changed, as usual, into off-duty clothes. All the time she was doing this, she knew subconsciously that she was going to see Tribourov, though she still urged herself otherwise. At a quarter to seven she went to his room and knocked at the door. “Entrez,” she heard him call out, in his shamelessly bad accent.

  She went in. He was reading a newspaper and, as he saw her, flung the sheets aside with that familiar wave of the arm and rose to his feet. His voice, his movements, his round and smiling face—how well-known they appeared, after such small acquaintance with them; her heart ticked them off, as it were, while she sank into the instant comfort of his presence. Recognising in that a new sensation, she was amazed to think what it proved—that she had actually been wanting and longing to see him.

  “So you’ve come…” he began, striding towards her. “What on earth possessed you to… run away… like that…?” His words slowed down as if they had been braked by something in her eyes; for the first time she was returning his glance with a full one of her own. Then they moved to each other, in a curious, stumbling way. He asked her name. “Your first name, I mean. WHAT? PAULA?”

  “I don’t know yours,” she whispered, losing the last ache of mind and body in his caresses.

  “PAUL.” He shouted the word as if it were a command to an army. “That’s funny, isn’t it?… But, Paula, why on earth… Capel, you know, told me about it….”

  “I didn’t want to see you again—that was why.”

  “THAT was why, eh?” He began to laugh. “Well, why THAT?”

  “Why anything? Why did you ask me here just now? Why did I come? Why did you ever talk to me, take any interest in me at all? Why couldn’t we leave each other alone?”
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  He answered, more seriously: “Perhaps because we’re flesh and blood in this city of desiccated lawgivers. For my part, after I’ve heard my speeches translated three times—first into French, then into English, then into German—I feel… but no, don’t let me talk about it. It’s extraordinary, Paula—this—you, I mean. I was attracted from the beginning, but I had no idea… and I didn’t care to…”

  She interrupted, half-hysterically: “I know. You mean that you’re not the type that goes about seducing chambermaids in hotels. You’re a good man. A good Bolshevik.” She laughed. “But is it such a laughing matter, I wonder?”

  He kissed her again, more gently, soothingly, as if aware that she was on the verge of complete emotional collapse. “Let’s go out,” he said, abruptly. “We’ll drive somewhere. Will you come with me? PLEASE, Paula….”

  She nodded, every nerve endorsing the decision.

  She met him by arrangement half an hour later, at a spot nearer the outskirts of the city; he was alone, muffled up, in a big open Mercedes touring- car. “Jump in,” he cried, with the excitement of a boy setting out for a picnic. “I had a job to persuade my bodyguard not to follow, but I guess they’ll have a fine chase if they try to.” She clambered in and sat beside him.

  Her whole being responded to that drive in the starlight. It was as if for years certain of her nerves and muscles had been tightly clenched, and were now moving with painful, exquisite stiffness into freedom. The sensation of speed, of roadway and bright lights slipping past, the softness of the fur rug drawn up over her knees, the blue-black dimness of hill and mountain—all were as candles lighting up the various caverns of memory. Yet memory was endurable because, for the first time in all her womanhood, it was balanced by anticipation; they would go somewhere inland to dine, he had suggested, and those few minutes and hours of the future were enough to turn the scale.

  He drove very fast, without talking much; and she sensed, as he sat close and silent, the deep personal power of the man. He was dynamic; he forged ahead, as he was making the car forge ahead now; he drove with zest, but had never less than complete control. His eyes, slate-blue and gentle, scattered a swift, ruthless benignity over the world. She felt that he could look at death, his own or another’s, without a qualm; that he could order an execution, perhaps, with no more emotion than he would soon be ordering dinner. It was something to have wrung from such a man the confession that he had been attracted. Only of course, she hadn’t wrung it; he had given it freely, almost casually. She felt that though he had been concerned enough to worry Capel about her, there were strict limits beyond which he would not advance an inch unless she were there to meet him. How enviable to be so calm, so assured, so blandly economical of one’s desires! And with what mountainous simplicity he had indicated, in not quite so many words, that he hadn’t realised she was the kind of woman who would let herself be petted! The recollection of it made her feel at once ashamed and passionately shameless….

  She had no idea where they were driving, and did not recognise the quaintly-built upland village at which they stopped. Some kind of fair or festival was in progress, and the hotel was crowded with revellers drinking and celebrating. Not the Conference, however; it was a relief to have escaped from the atmosphere of that. A youth with a mandolin was playing and singing one of those shrill, lilting tunes that had innumerable verses known to his audience; through occasional gaps in the din a loud-speaker shouted from Radio-Toulouse. The proprietor, even amidst the press of business, was not disposed to turn away two chance visitors in such an opulent-looking car. He rose to the situation gallantly and supplied an excellent dinner on a first-floor terrace that was a bower of pink geraniums tinted more deeply in the matching shade of the table-lamp.

  Tribourov waved aside the proprietor’s apologies for the noise downstairs. “I like it,” he exclaimed, with deep gusto, and went on to explain further; but as the man quite obviously could not understand his stilted French, he turned to Paula and cried: “Tell him I like it because I like real people—tell him that after a week at the Conference—no, no, better not mention that—but tell him why I like it—you know what I mean.”

  Afterwards he went on: “These people shouting and singing make me feel as I do when I’m in Russia—living a life, not just acting in some rather bad charades. People—just ordinary people all the world over—always make me feel like that. How fine they are compared with the humbugs that govern them! Paula, to be here, with you, and amongst all this noise, is like returning to some sort of sanity. All week I’ve felt like a rude boy in front of a lot of weary schoolmasters. So weary, they are—so wearily scornful of what they haven’t the faith to believe in or the energy to hate. They haven’t even the energy to hate me.”

  “There are some who seem to have,” she said quietly.

  “Who?”

  “Those who are supposed to be plotting to kill you.”

  He laughed. “Oh, a few half-crazed survivors of the old régime— yes, I grant you them. But theirs is only a sort of private feud.”

  “You despise it for that reason?”

  “Well, I don’t think it’s big enough to matter—taking the long view, of course.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a big thing to have to begin life afresh in a foreign country? Don’t you ever fear the hate of those who’ve been driven to it?”

  “If they begin life afresh, they have no time for hate. And if they hate, it shows they aren’t beginning afresh. They’re merely wasting time, letting memories turn sour inside them.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean,” she answered, and gazed across the table with new and darker perception. She was aware that she loved and hated him simultaneously, with passion that clamoured equally for satisfaction of either emotion. She felt him, more than ever, part of the architecture of all her private and personal misery; yet as someone also who held the power of magic cancellation. Until that moment she had looked forward to the denouement, some time, of telling him who she was; but now, she realised, there would be no point in it; he had diagnosed her position, without knowing it was hers. She had let memories turn sour—it was a true indictment. But what else, after all? Was every injustice to be forgotten and forgiven in the cold radiance of this man’s benevolence? Or must one always, like nations, be wearied by debts owed and owing?

  Yet behind the stir of her thoughts her body was in many ecstasies. The food, the Liebfraumilch ’21, the velvet glow of the lamplight on the flowers, the murmur of voices and the brittle flan-flan of the mandolin—all touched her with sheerly physical reminders. Life was short; twelve years of exile, and then this night—how could one balance them, or need they balance at all? Something he had once said recurred to her: “The world is tired of gestures; it cries out for acts that have a meaning in themselves.” She felt again a strange power in him, reaching out in conquest that was partly rescue; and at that moment, from below, came the slur of a tango, wistful, gently insinuating. It made her lean forward across the coffee-cups and lay her hand over his wrist. “I can’t stand much more,” she whispered.

  “You’ve had enough of the music, Paula? If so, I’ll—”

  “No, no, it isn’t that.”

  “Perhaps you’ve had enough of me and my continual chatter?”

  “No, nor that either.” She told him of his victory with her eyes. “On the contrary, Paul.”

  “That’s good news. And a good dinner, too…. What would you like to do next?”

  Her fingers tightened over his hand as she replied, in a slow, deliberate whisper: “What would you like to do, Paul?”

  A few hours later he said, almost crossly: “So you still won’t tell me anything about yourself?”

  “No,” she answered, with tender finality. He had been questioning her relentlessly for some time. “No, Paul, no. Not even in exchange for your own life-history. Let’s both do without confessions.”

  They were in the small first-floor bedroom whose pine furniture and flowered window-
boxes distilled a pleasant mixture of perfumes. All revelry below had long since ended, leaving only the church-bell to sprinkle the quarters over roofs that seemed to echo them almost metallically in the silence. Those chimes had marked the seconds in the short moment of ecstasy.

  “And you won’t come back with me to Russia?”

  “Good heavens, no!”

  “I’m not joking, if that’s what you think.”

  “My dear Paul, I don’t think and I don’t care.”

  “And I suppose you don’t love, either?”

  “If this is love, then I do, for the time being. But don’t you feel, Paul, that some things are only just to be touched? If you grasp them, they either break or escape.”

  “And that’s how it’s to be with you and me? Only the touch?”

  “Yes, if we’re wise. You don’t really care for women. I don’t really care for men either. You have so many other interests—so have I. It would be a great mistake for either of us to—to exaggerate—this.”

  “I see. You want me to regard you as if you were just any ordinary woman who might have come along?”

  “Much more sensible, Paul, if you did.”

  “Except that any ordinary woman wouldn’t have even begun to attract me. You’re quite right—I’m not particularly keen on women, as rule. But YOU… well, I find I want more of you.”

  “Perhaps if you are ever here at another of these big conferences—”

  “I said MORE, not again.”

  “More? What makes you suppose there is any more?”

  “I believe there is, and I intend to make sure. By knowing you, I mean. I think we might find a fair amount of happiness in each other.”

  “You think so?” she cried, mockingly. “You think I could?” Suddenly she broke into hysterical sobbing. “Oh, no, no, no—I couldn’t possibly stand you like that! Already you’ve made nothing else matter to me for days and days—you’ve made me forget everything—why, I even forgot to-night—last night—something that was always on my mind before I met you—”