Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  The car was threading a steep street in between rows of huddled, meanly- built dwellings, in some of whose windows he could see the display of his own name and photograph. Men and women stood at their doors, a few of them giving a cheer as he went by. The factory at the foot of the hill loomed suddenly close. “Is this the place?” he asked Jevons.

  “Yes. You’ll find them a pretty easy lot—there WAS a time when they’d have been FOR you to a man, but lately they’ve come under the Loamington influence a little. Loamington’s a hotbed, of course.”

  “This place looks bad enough. Is there anything special I ought to know about it—local unemployment, or anything?”

  Jevons had been working in the constituency for some days and was, in this as in all other connections, a complete encyclopćdia with the unencyclopćdic knack of giving only as much information as was really wanted. “Sibleys,” he answered, “depends on the factory, which makes machine-tools, and is on halftime at present. You’ll probably hear a lot of complaints about housing. The trouble is, all this property is nearly a hundred years old and the landlords nowadays can’t afford to do repairs. It’s mostly leasehold. The Kennersleys own the ground rents…. Oh, and there’s one other thing you might make a note of—there’s a fellow named Collins in the Loamington football team—he comes from Sibleys and the folks are very proud of him…. That’s all, I think.”

  Elliott nodded. Invaluable fellow, Jevons. The car swung through wide open gates into an ugly courtyard and pulled up outside a block of offices. A fat man in morning coat and spats, looking rather ridiculous as he stood in the rain, seized the door-handle and gave Elliott an effusive welcome. Elliott, who was dressed in an ordinary and, if anything, rather shabby lounge-suit, remembered him as Sir Compton Turnpenny, one of the New Year’s knights. They had met before; Elliott had trained himself to have a good memory for faces. He offered congratulations, introduced Jevons, and then passed into the offices, where there were introductions of various other men, whom he similarly and quite automatically memorised for the future. He chatted about the weather and declined a drink. Fortunately, just before the time arranged for the meeting, the rain stopped, and he walked out, with Turnpenny, Jevons, and the rest, to an improvised platform in an inner yard with a littered horizon of bricks and slates. England’s green and pleasant land… he could not help thinking, not with irony, but with deep compassion for anyone compelled to live amidst such scenes who hated them as much as he did. The employés began to swarm out of the surrounding buildings, men, women, and girls; they had all been allowed time off with pay, so there was a guaranteed audience. Elliott climbed up and gave them that good-tempered smile without which his entire career would probably have been undistinguished. Some of the girls began to cheer noisily and shout “Good old Harry.” He gave them an especial smile.

  Turnpenny introduced him in a fulsome speech that jarred as many another speech had jarred during Elliott’s quarter-century of political life, but he had cultivated as tough a hide for compliments as for abuse, and neither could get him rattled. Most of the time he let his thoughts wander, while he distantly contemplated what he was going to say. He never prepared much beforehand, except on very important occasions in the House. He had the gift of smooth, extempore speech on any subject; the words came easily, yet not prosily. Turnpenny, on the other hand, was thumping his fists like a stage orator, and nothing, perhaps, but his position as managing director of the firm prevented the crowd from openly jeering. Elliott almost wished they would. He felt in a curiously wilful mood—as if he wanted to do something unusual, a little shocking. Turnpenny’s emphatic assurances that a vote for Elliott was a vote for the abolition of unemployment, cheaper food, higher wages, British world-supremacy, and various other items, made him feel wistfully sympathetic with the half-listening crowd. He looked at their faces and tried to catch the glance he wanted to see—that of alertness, independence, the sublime you-be-damnedness of free-souled men. Instead, he saw cynicism here and there, vapid approval in a few places, but for the most part only apathy and weariness. They too, perhaps, knew what a game it all was. Then suddenly the vagrant idea came to him—suppose he were to give them, instead of the usual meaningless stuff, the simple truth, so far as he knew it? Suppose he were to begin: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid I haven’t very much good news for you, and I can’t make you any exciting promises. Frankly, I’m a little pessimistic about things in general. The world’s in a pretty bad way, and perhaps it isn’t quite so much a matter of supremacy as of survival. One man can do little in the face of events, but of course I shall try, as I’ve tried all along. Owing to the rather absurd machinery of the English electoral system I have to ask you for your votes; and I must confess I don’t know why on earth you should give them to me—certainly not, I should hope, because I’m a Northsex man. Of course, if you agree with my policy, that’s a reason; but then my opponent’s policy isn’t so bad, either, and I’m sure his intentions are just as honest as mine. And then I’m afraid in a lot of ways you don’t know my policy, and wouldn’t understand it if I told you—all this business about foreign affairs and the gold standard and so on. Also, there’s the disquieting possibility that my policy may be wrong after all. Frankly, I can’t think why you should give me such a big blank cheque, except that somebody has to have one, and if it weren’t me, it might be someone even less reliable. But remember, I can’t honestly promise anything. I can’t even promise not to make awful mistakes. Some little thing I do, with the best will in the world, may start a war long after I’m dead—a war that may perhaps claim the lives of your children. Remember that, when you’re shouting ‘Good old Harry.’ And remember, too, that I shan’t have much time to be bothered about you once you’ve elected me….”

  What a sensation, he thought, impishly, if he were to address them like that? He could imagine Turnpenny’s horror, the gasps of a million newspaper-readers the next morning, the outraged eyes of the Prime Minister when he heard about it…. It would doubtless be the end of him, politically. Well, well, he wasn’t exactly anxious for that. He smiled to himself and wondered what had come over him that he should even think such things. Perhaps it was a sixtieth birthday feeling.

  Of course, when the time came, he made a vastly different speech. He did not hold out too many promises, but he sounded a note of cautious optimism, and remembered to bring in Collins, the Sibleys footballer. He sensed familiarly the crowd’s change of mood from sulky hostility to tolerant good-humour. Most of them would go away and say he seemed “a good sort.” Probably no one would support him who had already decided not to, but he might secure a few dozen votes that would otherwise not have been given at all.

  During the latter half of his speech a clerk from the offices approached the platform and whispered something to Jevons, who immediately climbed down and disappeared with him. A few moments later Jevons returned, touched Elliott on the elbow, and passed him a slip of paper. Elliott stared at it, automatically continuing a sentence meanwhile. In Jevons’s neat scribble he read: “Important message from London. Should end up soon if I were you.” With the very slightest inclination of the head, Elliott handed back the slip. He went on talking for three or four minutes, finishing with a brisk peroration that earned the first gust of enthusiasm that had yet been born upon that dreary scene. It was typical of him that even an acute observer or listener could hardly have suspected any curtailment, so smoothly did the words and sentences succeed each other. During the quite lively cheering that followed, Jevons leaned across anxiously and whispered in his ear: “Trunk call from the F.O., passed on through Chilver. Rather bad news about the Conference. Tribourov’s been shot and everything’s in a hell of an upset … yes, SHOT. The P.M. wants you in town at once.”

  “Good God!” exclaimed Elliott, under his breath, and went a little pale.

  “I took the liberty, sir, of ringing up the aerodrome people.”

  “Quite right… quite right. We’ll get away.”

 
He signalled to Turnpenny and murmured a few words that set the latter on his feet to announce pompously that their future member had to dash away on important business, but that before he left they would all wish to give him three rousing cheers, etc., etc.

  Five minutes later, as the big car slewed through the factory gates, Elliott said: “Now you can tell me all about it.”

  “There’s not much to tell as yet, sir. It’s only just come through—just the bare message without details. It seems he was fired at during the Conference session this morning. A woman did it, and shot herself immediately afterwards.”

  “Yes, yes, but Tribourov—is he dead?”

  “He wasn’t killed outright. Neither of them were. That’s all the information there is, so far.”

  “Who ’phoned you?”

  “Tommy Luttrell. He seemed to think it might have serious repercussions.”

  Elliott nodded. “Yes, of course, there are all sorts of things it might lead to.”

  Then for a long time he was silent. Through the car-windows now the words “Vote for Elliott” on hoardings conveyed a touch of mockery in their insistence. Soon, however, he had passed the limits of his constituency and was in Loamington. How innocent everyone looked to him—the policeman on point-duty, the streams of hurrying passers-by, the tram-conductor exchanging badinage with a lorry-driver—innocent as had been the crowds in London and Berlin on that morning of Sarajevo. And he, threading through their midst, was their appointed leader. At that moment he felt more like a blind engine-driver in charge of a train for whose journey the points had been set by lunatic signalmen.

  “I don’t think I ever met him,” he said at length. “He must be one of their new men—capable, I should say, from his speeches. Poor chap…. You know, Jevons, it makes one realise what a chancy thing history is. A mere quarter-inch in the track of a maniac’s bullet can alter everything.”

  “Yes—and also when the pistol refuses to work, like Clive’s. I often wonder exactly how different things would be to-day if he HAD done himself in. No Ind. Imp. And no Amritsar. Perhaps even no Gandhi…. Though I suppose the really big things in history would mostly have happened anyhow.”

  “Would they? Or does blind chance play a bigger part in affairs than we can easily reckon?”

  “Still, sir, even if Columbus HADN’T discovered America, somebody else would certainly have committed the indiscretion sooner or later. That’s what I mean. And the war with Germany—I should say that was fairly inevitable, too.”

  Elliott paused to light a cigar. “I might grant you your first example, but definitely not your second. We were just as near war with France over Fashoda or with Turkey over Chanak as we were with Germany at the end of July ’fourteen. A few hair’s breadths might have steered us clear of that as they did of the other two.”

  “But don’t you think it had to happen some day?”

  “No, I can’t see why. Frankly, I’m chary of believing in these big inevitabilities, except in the sense that if you play cards often enough, it’s inevitable that you’ll some time get a hand with four aces in it. Looking on history as a mathematician rather than as a historian, it seems to me that the most trivial things have led up to the most colossal… for instance, just to take one example out of many, I could easily demonstrate that the War was really won on the 10th of August, 1911, by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”

  “I’ll buy it,” answered Jevons, laughing.

  “I remember that day as one of record heat for this country—ninety-seven in the shade, or something like that. The House of Lords were taking the vote on the Parliament Bill, and the Archbishop, whose attitude till then had been doubtful, decided to vote in favour, and took eleven bishops with him. As the FOR majority was only seventeen, he may be said to have turned the scale. Well, now, consider—merely as an essay in the pluperfect subjunctive— what would have happened had he voted AGAINST. The Bill would have been thrown out. We know now that in such an event the King would have created four hundred new peers—all Liberals, of course. And a Liberal House of Lords would certainly have passed the Irish Home Rule Bill without delay. Which, in turn, might very well have led to the coercion of Ulster and such disaffection in the army that we could not have entered the War against Germany as promptly as we did, even if at all. And if the British Expeditionary Force had not been in France just when and where it was would the miracle of the Marne have taken place? And if Germany had won that battle, isn’t it arguable that she would have taken Paris and been able to dictate a victorious peace?… So, you see, in this particular sense, an Archbishop voting on a hot day in the English House of Lords held in his hands the future destiny of the world.”

  “Ingenious, sir. Yet you could hardly say he caused the defeat of Germany.”

  “Oh no, that would be an obvious misinterpretation. We really want a word for something that leads quite logically to something else, yet in a way that both moralists and historians decide to ignore. Of course, the example I gave you seems remarkable, because we can trace it and see it, but there must be millions of similar threads which we can’t trace at all, even though our entire lives are woven out of them.”

  Jevons laughed again. “All of which seems to show that History, as Henry Ford said, is bunk.”

  “No, I don’t go as far as that, but I’d perhaps agree that history professors should take a short course in the mathematics of chance and probability.”

  “Or would it be less bother, sir, to teach history to insurance actuaries? Still, it’s an impressive idea, though I’m not quite certain where it leads to, unless straight back to Calvinism and predestination.”

  “Oh, good heavens, no—not by any means! If only Calvin had been a bridge-player he’d have known better, because life is as much like a card-game as anything else—if you can imagine a game in which the cards are unlimited and the players can’t agree on having any rules…. But you’re encouraging me to be platitudinous, Jevons. Did the aerodrome people say they could have a machine ready?”

  “Yes. And it’s fine weather down south, they told me, so we ought to have a quick and pleasant journey.”

  Shortly after noon they pulled up on the concrete arena in front of the hangars. An R.A.F. machine stood near by, slowly ticking over. Elliott chatted to the pilot while the latter helped him on with his flying kit. He knew Captain Hartill well, having been piloted by him many times before, and he climbed with Jevons into the small cabin with some eagerness for the familiar sensations. He liked flying, and liked also the type of man that the new profession was breeding. If he had been younger he would certainly have learned to fly himself. One reason he favoured air-travel was because it seemed a return to smallness and individuality after a century’s trend towards bigger and bigger units; compared with the train and the ocean liner, it suggested independence, the sturdy freedom of solitary man. In that sense he had accepted Lindbergh’s as a more epic achievement than Columbus’s, though it had also occurred to him that this very independence might some day make for the breakdown of society. It did not require a great deal of imagination to picture a world in which power had passed into the hands of Al Capones with their private bombing squadrons. An appalling possibility, but it undoubtedly existed. To Elliott, as he watched the fields diminishing till his view was like that of a fly on a ceiling looking down on a patchwork quilt, it did seem that everywhere the forces of lawlessness and disintegration were gaining ground; but that in England, though a strong attack was in progress, the social fabric was holding out with a toughness that proved its quality. His thoughts ran on, and set him wondering whether that toughness lay somehow rooted in the million absurdities that belonged, not to a Five Years’ Plan, but to five centuries’ planlessness. This very by-election, for instance, forced on him by technicalities over which even he, a lawyer, had unwittingly stumbled; and the vast paradox of an empire, in population chiefly non-white and non-Christian, governed by a minority whose peculiar gift to the world had been the principles of democr
acy. No Home Rule for India, yet an Indian might sit in the English Parliament for a constituency within a tram-ride of the House itself! But England was like that, and like so many other things as well; just when, in mind, one had fixed her with what seemed an adequate generalisation, she suddenly sprang some terrific freakishness that shook any logical scheme to bits. And throughout history this same freakishness had abounded, from the time she had allowed a king’s debaucheries to decide her religion, to the fourth decade of the twentieth century, when her people could still wonder whether an Act of 1781 ought to prevent them from seeing a cinema-show on Sunday.

  Suddenly, rising above the thin vapours, the plane plunged into sunlight as into a warm, golden bath. Elliott, in the midst of a sandwich-lunch, smiled exultantly at Jevons; the roar of the engines was too loud for conversation. He felt lifted, at that moment, to an extraordinary pitch of serenity; flying always made him feel like that, as if, in leaving the physical world, he had literally left its troubles behind. Tribourov, the Conference, the by- election—how easily, if spuriously, one could purchase the sensation of escape from it all!

  The flight had lasted over an hour when he noticed an occasional spluttering amidst the steady thrum-thrum of the engines. Once Hartill stared round and gave a jerky shrug of the shoulders that might have meant anything. Elliott was not alarmed, but he was surprised when he realised from the return to mistiness that the plane must be losing height. The spluttering continued, and soon, as through a window abruptly uncurtained, he saw land below—that same patchwork of greens and browns, with the shadow of the plane crawling across them like some strange insect. “We’re descending,” he shouted in Jevon’s ear, and Jevon shouted back: “Yes, I think something’s gone wrong with one of the engines.” “Well,” thought Elliott, munching his last sandwich, “if we’re killed, we’re killed—it’s as good a way as Tribourov’s, anyhow.” He felt beatifically calm. The machine continued to swoop, till the landscape was almost scampering underneath—fortunately it was open country—fields, hedges, a few trees, a lane, more fields and hedges—all swimming in misty sunlight. “I think he’s trying to land,” Jevons shouted; and Elliott nodded, still without much feeling of concern. It occurred to him, with a flash of perception, that he was at that moment trusting Hartill just as all over the country millions of people, Hartill included, were having to trust HIM. He thought: “Yes, ‘Vote for Elliott’s’ all right, but just now Hartill’s my man—good old Hartill. Vote for Hartill….”