Contango (Ill Wind) (4 page)

He was asked, of course, about that final tragic pilgrimage to the
Sultan’s palace with Franklyn, and he described it with an exactness
that made no glimmer of appeal for sympathy. The truth was, his anger, always
slow to rise, was now engulfing him in the blackest bitterness of soul. He
would not, by a word or by a movement of a muscle, plead with these people
who were so obviously bent on vilifying him. He sat rigid in the
straight-backed seat, his blue eyes fixed in a stare that only occasionally
quickened, and only at one spectacle—the clock that ticked away his
ordeal. Once or twice, faint with the heat, he found his attention wandering,
and generally it was some outdoor scene that flashed momentarily before him,
some remembered spot on one of his jungle expeditions, the place where he had
found the sciuropterus or that Polypodium carnosum. And then, breaking in
upon such ill-timed tranquillities, would come the chairman’s rasping
monotone: “Are we to understand, Mr. Gathergood… So, Mr. Gathergood,
it amounts to this, that you… Now, Mr. Gathergood, let’s be quite
clear about it—you say you … ” And so on.

Yet the Agent was never near breaking down under the strain. He was upheld
by his bitterness; relentlessly he gave reasons why he had done this or had
omitted to do that, and even the major’s querulous: “But surely,
man, you must have realised … ” only drew from him a quiet: “I
didn’t realise it, anyway.” Once the naval commander interjected,
apparently to the assembly in general: “Of course we must all remember
how easy it is to be wise after the event”; and Gathergood gave him a
swift glance in which just more was visible than mere assent. But on the
whole he preserved an outward emotionlessness that antagonised his hearers as
much as it disappointed them. The commander tried sometimes to counter this
by skilfully leading questions; he remarked, for instance, at one juncture:
“I should think, Gathergood, you must be feeling yourself rather an
unlucky fellow. Things seem to have gone persistently wrong in all your
calculations—a sort of chapter of accidents, eh?”

Gathergood began to respond: “Yes, and as a matter of fact…”
and then checked himself sharply; whereat the major, pouncing to the
occasion, barked out: “Continue with what you were going to say, Mr.
Gathergood.”

“Nothing of any consequence—a mere reflection of my own that
can hardly matter.”

“Never mind, let’s have it,” snapped the major, enjoying
himself; and the chairman nodded emphatically.

“I was only thinking that the whole thing began with an
accident— quite a trifling one—Morrison’s hat blowing
into the sea—”

Again the wave of exasperation passed across the faces. But the end was
near. On the afternoon of the fifth day Gathergood was suddenly informed that
he need not stay further or attend again. He bowed to the chairman and
walked, briskly limping, from the room. He felt that the manner of his
dismissal was that of a conviction and sentence all in one. Even the Eurasian
attendant with whom he had left his hat treated him with barely concealed
superciliousness.

That evening, while he was taking coffee in a corner of the hotel lounge,
he was surprised to be accosted by the naval officer who had been a member of
the committee. His name was Holroyd, and after a few perfunctory remarks he
planked himself down at the same table. Gathergood, though not especially
anxious for company, offered a drink, and they chatted together for some
time, but without mentioning the enquiry; then Holroyd suggested that the
Agent should stroll over with him to his hotel, the De la Paix, for another
drink. Gathergood agreed and they finally sat up in Holroyd’s private
room till nearly midnight. The commander, in this more intimate atmosphere,
was breezily candid. “I daresay you’ve guessed by this time,
Gathergood, that you’re going to get all the blame—which I
don’t suppose you deserve—nobody does deserve what he gets in
this world, whether of blame or anything else.”

Gathergood said very little in reply; he had explained himself
exhaustively and in public for four days, and had no desire to go all over
the ground again. He merely sipped his whisky and let Holroyd go on
talking.

“The question is,” continued the commander, “what are
you going to do now that the show’s over?”

That was the question, undoubtedly; and from the moment of his dismissal
from the enquiry-room Gathergood had seen it confronting him. He answered, a
trifle curtly: “Well, I don’t want to stay here.”

“I should jolly well think not…. How’re you feeling now, by
the way? Pretty rotten, I expect, after your leg-smash and all the strain of
the talky-talky.”

“My leg’s healed well and I feel all right.”

“How about putting in for a spell of sick leave, anyhow?”

“I don’t consider myself really ill.”

Holroyd grunted. “Well, Gathergood, if you won’t take the
hint, it’s no use beating about the bush. I’m here, speaking
quite frankly, to make a definite suggestion to you—put in for leave
and get away back home. Not necessarily to England—in fact, on the
whole, I’d say not England, for the time being. Take a long foreign
holiday somewhere—nice little places in France or Italy… anyway,
clear off pretty quick out of this rotten hole. There’s going to be a
hell of a rumpus when the report comes out, and if you take my tip, you
won’t wait for it.”

“I’m due to retire next year, you know.”

“Then it fits in rather well, doesn’t it?”

“I’d rather have served out my full time. Not in Cuava, of
course, but—”

Holroyd shook his head. “I’m damned sorry, Gathergood, but you
can wash out all idea of that. Absolutely no point in mincing matters, is
there? But if I were you, I wouldn’t fret about it. ’Be damned to
you’—that’s the feeling to have when fate gives you a
knock in the eye.”

“I see,” replied the Agent quietly. For the first time then he
showed signs of emotion, though only for a few seconds. His mind received the
full impact of the future, recoiled a little, and then steadied itself.
“Yes,” he added, in control again, “I think that’s
just about my own attitude too.”

That midnight, as soon as he was back in his own bedroom, he wrote out a
formal application for leave, received an affirmative reply by return of
post, booked his passage on a French liner bound for Marseilles, and sent his
former Chinese cook two hundred dollars and instructions for the packing and
transhipment of his belongings from Cuava to a furniture depository in
London.

“Oh, dear, now it all begins again,” thought
Miss Faulkner, scampering along the platform with her usual smile of
sprightly welcome. She had a mixed collection of books and papers under her
arm. She nearly always had. And she was nearly always smiling, or scampering,
or both. The clanking carriages drew slowly in, pulled by an electric engine
that stood at the far end ticking like an enormous clock. Faces appeared at
windows—windows that bore the labels of an English travel
organisation, and Miss Faulkner, still scampering, shouted out: “Hello,
everybody—is the train early, or am I late?” which was the kind
of remark which, in her estimation, put people at their ease immediately and
helped them to begin a holiday in the right spirit.

The train was from Calais; its passengers had been travelling all night
and the day before. The women looked heavy-eyed and bedraggled, the men were
blue-chinned after two days without a shave. They came from the vague
hinterlands of suburb and provinces, urged across eight hundred miles of land
and water by an enterprise which was not their own, but that of a limited
liability company working for profit and earning (in normal years) some
fifteen per cent. This organisation, after the manner of its age,
manufactured the demand which it afterwards proceeded to supply. Its
brochures were superb examples of art-printing and chromo-lithography, and
its well-known advertisement of a pretty girl smiling over the rail of a
Channel steamer in excessively calm and sunny weather had been painted by a
R. A. At the other end of the business, however, expenditure was less lavish.
The usual practice was to charter a second-rate hotel for the season at such
a price that its proprietors, to make any profit at all, had to supply
inferior food. Another economical plan was to employ, instead of full-time
guides and couriers, a semi- amateur staff of part-time workers, most of them
school-teachers, who were willing to work during their summer holidays for
very little more than pocket- money.

Miss Faulkner was one of these people. She was small-built, pert-faced,
bright-eyed, and aged thirty-seven. Just the person for the job, most people
said: by which they meant that her London Matriculation French was understood
by foreign railway-porters who knew English, that she possessed a sheepdog
aptitude for yapping (though pleasantly) at people’s heels till they
had all climbed into the right vehicles, and that her smile was of the kind
usually described as “infectious.”

“Ah, well, it’s a nice day, that’s something,”
thought Miss Faulkner, marshalling the arrivals and seeing them installed in
a couple of late-Victorian horse-omnibuses. “Yes, aren’t they
sweet?” she said cheerfully. “I believe there’s some talk
of putting them in the local museum.” People always laughed at that.
She darted about, answering questions, giving orders, ticking names on a
list, already memorising faces; really an exceptionally capable woman. And
smiling all the time. A rather wide smile, showing good teeth, but (if one
bothered to notice such things) a smile that did not cause much to happen to
the rest of her face. “Yes, Mrs. Walsh, your bag will be all
right—all the luggage is coming along afterwards,” she sang out;
and Mrs. Walsh, a granitic matron who might otherwise have given trouble, was
instantly captivated.

“We’ve been having it quite hot here lately,” continued
Miss Faulkner, in the omnibus, launching the regulation chitchat about the
weather. “And I see from the papers it’s been cold and rainy in
England…. Yes, we get all the English papers here a day late…. There,
that’s the Jungfrau—that big one over there. Rather fine,
isn’t it?” And privately to herself she reflected: “I must
write to George immediately after lunch, or I shall never get a
chance.”…

Just as the horses turned out of Interlaken’s main thoroughfare into
the side-street leading to the hotel, a man stepped off the kerb and would
have been run down had not a shaft caught his arm and jerked him back. One of
the horses half-stumbled, and the driver pulled up and began to shout angrily
in German. There seemed here the makings of an awkward little scene, and it
was in just such an emergency that Miss Faulkner was at her best. Climbing
down from the omnibus she first commanded silence from the driver and then
approached the pedestrian. He was well-dressed, she noticed, and she was
relieved to find that he was English. “It was entirely my own
fault,” he admitted, calmly. “I wasn’t looking where I was
going at all. Fortunately I’m not hurt.”

“Oh, well, if that’s the case, there’s really nothing
more to be said, is there?” replied Miss Faulkner, flashing her smile.
“I’m glad you’re all right. Good morning.”

The man raised his hat and walked off, and Miss Faulkner, continuing her
smile to her people in the omnibus, climbed in again. “Really,”
she said, as the journey was resumed, “if people WILL do these
things—” Somebody cried: “Day-dreamin’, that’s
what he must have been doin’,” and Miss Faulkner echoed:
“Yes, that’s just it!” with an air of finding the remark a
perfect and wished-for expression of her own feelings. There was thus a
second person captivated.

When the hotel was reached, Miss Faulkner presided briskly over the usual
commotion about rooms; then came lunch, during which, from the head of the
long table, she made the speech she always made at first meals. It was one of
carefully mingled exhortation and facetiousness—all about being
punctual, making the best of things, keeping together on party expeditions,
and taking warm clothing on the mountain trips. “Oh, yes, and
there’s just one other thing— some of you may already have
discovered that foreign hotels don’t supply soap. If you haven’t
brought any with you, there’s a chemist’s shop just round the
corner where they speak English.” Somebody cheered. Miss Faulkner
smiled. And then: “Perhaps we’d better not plan anything for this
afternoon, as I daresay many of you feel tired after the journey and would
like to rest.” She gazed round the tables with a look of slightly
intimidating enquiry, and the response came easily to her bidding, in the
form of mumbled assent. “All right. Then we’ll meet again at
seven-thirty for dinner.”

Thank goodness, she thought, escaping through the crowd—that left
her free for the afternoon. She went up to her bedroom and dragged a wicker
chair to the window. The view was not of the Jungfrau, as all the
advertisements would have led one to assume, but of a row of similar windows
overlooking a small well-like courtyard in between. Free for the afternoon,
Miss Faulkner echoed to herself, as she got out pen and paper and began to
write. The letter was to her brother, who worked in a stockbroker’s
office in Old Broad Street. She wrote:

“DEAR GEORGE,

“Thanks for sending on my correspondence. The weather here has been
hot, which I don’t mind, except that it makes people dawdle, and I have
to keep on chivvying them to catch their trains. They’ve been a rather
dull crowd so far, and this week’s new arrivals don’t seem much
different. Still, I suppose it’s all to the good that they should come
out here instead of going to Margate or Blackpool or places like that.
I’m sorry you didn’t like the Virginia Woolf—I thought it
quite marvellous. Mrs. Ripley writes that she’d like to borrow my notes
on Silesian minorities to use in a paper she’s getting up, so if she
calls, they’re in the third drawer of my bureau desk, but please
don’t mix up the other papers in it. I expect I shall be returning
to-day fortnight. I hope you’re managing all right in the flat, and
don’t forget to leave the cats their milk when you go out in the
mornings. This is in haste, as I simply haven’t a moment to spare.