Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  JAMES HILTON

  CONTANGO

  US TITLE: ILL WIND

  First published by Ernest Benn Ltd, London, 1932

  Published in the USA as “Ill Wind”

  * * *

  “A common soldier, a child, a girl at the door of an inn, have changed the face of fortune, and almost of Nature.”—BURKE.

  “History seen from a distance produces the illusion that it is rational.”—SAINTE-BEUVE.

  “To reflect how easily the course of things might have been different is to learn perspective and humility.”—JOHN BUCHAN.

  “The random element in the Universe always increases.”—EDDINGTON.

  * * *

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Charles Gathergood

  Florence Faulkner

  Stuart Brown

  Sylvia Seydel

  Nicholas Palescu

  Leon Mirsky

  Max Oetzler

  Paula Courvier

  Henry Elliott

  * * *

  CHAPTER ONE. — CHARLES GATHERGOOD

  “Curious, the way things do jump out of nothing. This affair seems to have been begun by a hat blowing off.”

  To Gathergood, as he said this, sitting on his bungalow verandah at Cuava with the temperature over a hundred in the shade and his whole body perspiring with the slightest movement, there came the sudden realisation of unpopularity. He had been conscious of it, at times, before; but never quite so definitely. He wondered if the planters had been telling tales against him, but he did not trouble himself much with the possibility; it was far too hot—an hour for anything rather than unpleasant speculation. He added, stiffening his glance as he met the eyes of the man across the table-top: “Of course it’s bad enough, in the result, but I’m not so sure that as much underlies it as you think.”

  “You mentioned something about a hat blowing off?”

  “Yes, Morrison’s hat. He was walking down from the club after tiffin, and just there”—he pointed with a jerk of the head—“where the path curves round the cliff his hat blew into the sea. He called to a native down below on the quayside to get it for him—a young Cuavanese named Naung Lo—but the fellow didn’t hear him, apparently. Morrison then scrambled down the cliff himself and made a scene. That’s as far as we can get before the evidence begins to be conflicting.”

  “A planter named Franklyn was with Morrison, I understand?”

  “Yes. Of course it’s on Franklyn’s evidence that Naung Lo was arrested. He says Naung Lo pushed Morrison into the sea.”

  “Well, is there any doubt of it?”

  “Naung Lo says he didn’t push him. He says he didn’t hear what Morrison had shouted, that Morrison then came down and hit him, that there was a bit of a struggle on the edge of the quay, and that Morrison suddenly toppled over. He also says that Morrison was drunk.”

  “And I take it you accept this version of what happened in preference to Franklyn’s?”

  “No, not altogether. I daresay Naung Lo may have pushed—I don’t see how, if there was a struggle, he could have avoided it.”

  “Franklyn says Naung Lo hit first.”

  Gathergood was silent a moment. Then he replied, rather slowly: “It’s too hot to take you to the scene of the affair or you’d realise that Franklyn, being thirty yards away at least, may not have been in the best position for seeing exactly what did happen. Naturally he was indignant about the death of his friend.”

  “You wish me to infer that his evidence is false?”

  “By no means, Humphreys,” answered Gathergood sharply. “I don’t suggest anything of the kind. But Franklyn admits that he stayed on the path up above, while Morrison climbed down to the edge of the quay where the whole thing took place.”

  “But he doesn’t admit that Morrison was drunk.”

  “No. Drunkenness is perhaps a matter of opinion. I can only say that I should have called him drunk when he left the club—I was there and I saw him. But that, of course, was half an hour earlier. Some men quickly throw off the effects.”

  A long silence followed, which Gathergood broke by adding: “I think I should point out also that Naung Lo is slight in build, while Morrison was a six-footer. It seems unlikely, on the face of it, that the smaller man would begin the attack, without weapons— and no weapons were found on or near him afterwards…. And, of course, Morrison’s death was in some sense an accident, anyhow—he certainly wouldn’t have drowned if his head hadn’t struck a stone that stunned him.”

  “Franklyn went to the rescue, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. And Naung Lo stood by and gave what help he could. A point in his favour, I should be inclined to think.”

  “Well, now we’ve had all the points in his favour—unless there are some more—perhaps we can consider those against him. He’s been in prison, they tell me?”

  “Yes, several times—for theft. I don’t claim that he’s a highly moral character in any way.”

  “And he was once in the employ of Morrison, but got the sack?”

  “Yes, Morrison had to sack a good many natives. So have all the planters round here, with rubber down to fourpence a pound. The biggest item of evidence against the youth—I’ll tell you to save you the trouble of finding it out for yourself—is that he’s undoubtedly been heard to utter threats against Morrison. Morrison thrashed him once, and he swore to get even with him. He probably deserved the thrashing—though, on the other hand, Morrison was rather noted for that sort of thing.”

  “Well, it establishes a motive, doesn’t it?”

  “Certainly.”

  The two men, Gathergood the Agent and Humphreys the Vice-Consul from the mainland, faced each other again in a lengthy silence. Then Humphreys said: “Of course, Gathergood, people are rather expecting you to do something about it.”

  The Agent replied quietly, scarcely moving a muscle in the almost intolerable noonday heat: “I’m doing what I can, Humphreys. I’m trying to find out if there were other witnesses of the affair.”

  “Still, you know, witnesses or not, the awkward fact remains that here you have an Englishman dead and a native somehow or other responsible. These things have a way of leading to trouble if they’re not smartly dealt with. What’s the present position?”

  “Naung Lo’s in jail awaiting trial, or perhaps I should rather say, awaiting sentence. Cuavanese law is primitive, but quite brisk on these occasions. As soon as the Sultan decides that he’s guilty, he gets his head chopped off right away.”

  Humphreys raised his eyebrows with a certain blandness. “And may I enquire if you have seen fit to offer His Highness any advice in the matter?”

  Gathergood answered, still without movement: “The Sultan asked me if I thought the youth should be put to death and I said not yet, at any rate, because it seemed to me there were doubts.”

  “Well, I suppose you know your own business best—or should do. But in these days, with all these political crimes everywhere— India, Burma—”

  “Yes, quite, but I don’t think this has anything to do with it.”

  “You’re by nature an optimist, perhaps?”

  Gathergood half-smiled. “No, I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t call myself a pessimist, either. I just think one ought to preserve one’s sense of proportion, that’s all….”

  Humphreys stayed on for a few days and then took the coastal boat back to the mainland.

  Gathergood was forty-nine, and had spent a quarter of a century in various parts of the East. He had never married, nor had rumour ever associated him with a woman, white or coloured. He was aware that women did not particularly care for him, and he had never found their indifference hard to endure. With men, individual men, he had sometimes wished he could become more intimate
, but even the wish for this had rarely been enough to make for keen disappointment. He knew, as indeed it was impossible not to know, that his intrusion into Cuavanese society had scarcely been a social success. He was neither gallant enough for the planters’ wives nor sufficiently alcoholic to be considered a good fellow by the planters themselves; whilst among the natives a reputation for fair dealing was outweighed by an unwillingness to give a dollar tip when half a dollar was ample. Moreover, all these negations were much emphasised by his having come to Cuava in 1927, after Bullenger, whose reputation for hard drinking and hard wenching had fitted easily into the spacious prosperity of the rubber boom, so that those golden years were still remembered in some such phrase as: “Ah, that was in poor old Bullenger’s time.” A tribute, wistfully inaccurate, since the man had been neither poor nor old, but had died wealthy and prematurely of cirrhosis of the liver; and a censure, by implication, on the stiff, more difficult fellow whose succeeding regime had coincided with Cuava’s decline from affluence to penury.

  In appearance Gathergood was tall, spare, and nearly as brown- complexioned as some of the Malays; he had fine teeth and a strong chin, but was not otherwise good-looking; his chill blue eyes repelled more often than they attracted. In speech he was decisive, but rather slow; indeed, his eyes more often commanded than his voice.

  After the departure of Humphreys he went on with his job, which was not normally very onerous, and was decidedly not among the plums of the service; apart from acting as go-between for British merchants doing trade with Cuava, giving occasional advice to the Sultan, and attending to such matters as quarantine and the immigration of British Chinese from Hong-Kong, there was not a great deal to do. His bungalow, which included an office, stood on a spit of land just above the water-front, and was chiefly built of reed and thatch after the local fashion. A few of the planters had been able to afford Europeanised bungalows out of the profits of the boom years, but on the whole Cuava was still primitive in these matters—owing chiefly, no doubt, to the fact that it remained a native state, under a Sultan who enjoyed a more than technical independence of the authorities at Singapore and Batavia, though faintly compelling eyes were often cast upon him from those quarters.

  Cuava, capital of the island and state of the same name, was the only white settlement, and its white population, due to the slump in rubber, was rather rapidly decreasing. Perhaps forty or fifty survivors of a once prosperous community lived on the two hills that lay behind and above the native kampong; a few of them had their wives, but most were considerate enough to make do with the resources of the locality. There was a Welsh doctor who shared his activities between Cuava and another island a day’s journey distant; and there had once been an American missionary who had been converted from missionary work by the superior opportunities of buying up rubber estates. Occasionally a European sea-captain came ashore and spent a few days drinking and yarning at the club. This latter institution, inevitable where two or three Englishmen are gathered together, was the centre of Cuavanese society, the fount of its corporate wisdom, the source of its rumours, and the sounding- board of its various opinions. It stood on the hill nearest the estuary, adjacent also to the plantations, and surrounded by billowy land which enthusiastic new-comers always dreamed of turning into a golf-course until they had their first experience of the sweltering Cuavanese summer.

  Down in the native kampong on the water-front there was reckoned to be a mixed population of some ten thousand Malays, Chinese, and Sikhs. Many of them had been attracted from overseas when work and pay on the plantations were both plentiful; now, with these conditions at an end, an existence not far above the starvation line was somehow contrived. They lived in ramshackle huts on the edge of the river-mud, and except when they caught cholera or smuggled gin authority was glad enough to leave them alone.

  Authority, indeed, resided five miles inland, well removed from the commercial and maritime atmosphere. There, enclosed by primeval jungle, was situated the Sultan’s palace, with its private apartments, its imperial harem, and its government offices, council chamber, prison, and military arsenal; a mysterious and legendary place to the white planter who rarely or never visited it.

  Gathergood had acted for four years as a species of liaison officer in this complicated and peculiarly balanced society, and that he had not achieved the personal popularity of his predecessor did not by any means signify his failure at the job. On the contrary, he had comfortably surmounted all the various minor difficulties that had arisen from time to time; his relations with the Sultan were good, and his periodic reports to Singapore models of humdrum neatness. His job was not the kind that all men would have envied, but he himself had no particular complaint to make of it. The Sultan’s government was strong and fairly free from corruption; his own health was excellent; he was used to loneliness; and, perhaps most fortunately of all, he had no investments in the local estates and his salary did not depend on the price of rubber. Yet, during the days that followed the departure of Humphreys, he was aware of a changed note, a feeling of tension in the air, not lessened, he guessed, by talks which Humphreys had had with the leading planters during his visit. As he dictated business letters to his one Eurasian clerk he did not fail to observe the look of feverish enquiry in the violet-brown eyes that stared above the typewriter-roller. Recent events had provided sensation for bungalow and kampong alike; already the dead Englishman was beginning to acquire among the planters the legendary habiliments of martyrdom. And among the natives, too, there were hints, rather than evidences, of trouble; wage reductions on the estates had prepared a soil well suited to the flowering of unrest. All this Gathergood sensed with an involuntary stirring of distaste; he lacked sympathy with the jingo impulsiveness of the planters nearly as much as with the Bolshevist nonsense that was beginning to permeate the mob.

  With relief, when he had discharged his daily routine of duties, he turned as a rule to his botanical specimens, of which during his years in Cuava he had made a large and varied collection. It was probably, he sometimes thought, the most complete of its kind in the world, since the island seemed to have been just as unaccountably neglected by naturalists as by explorers. That range of mountains, for instance, barely visible on a very clear day from the rubber estates—curious, he thought, that none of the planters ever desired to climb or investigate them. Gathergood had done so several times, struggling through difficult miles of mangrove swamp and jungle. “Was it worth while?” he was once asked on his return. “Did you strike any gold reefs, buried treasure, tin deposits?” He had answered, with a simplicity so odd that it was misread as a pose: “Hardly that, but I did find two quite remarkable things on the summit—a small lake that always had ice on it in the early mornings, and little blue forget-me-nots, growing just as they do in England.” Which was a type of remark that proceeded rather eccentrically from the mouth of a British Agent in a club-room of rubber-growers.

  One morning, while his enquiries into details of the Morrison case were still pending, one of the younger planters, not long out from home, called on him and remarked with candid indiscretion that the planters were not at all satisfied with the way matters were developing. “And neither was that fellow Humphreys,” continued the youth, even more indiscreetly.

  “And neither am I,” added Gathergood.

  The youth went on: “Not of course that Morrison was a saint, by any means, but, still, the poor beggar’s dead, and we’ll have the whole pack on top of us if we let ’em get away with a thing like that. It’s the example to the rest that’s so damned dangerous.”

  “I hope not, if we all keep our heads.”

  “That won’t help things much, with the tappers already talking revolution. Perhaps you heard of the strike of coolies this morning?”

  “Some small trouble over a shipment. It’s settled now. There’s trouble all over the world, for that matter. We mustn’t get excited.”

  “You keep on saying that, sir, while all the time things are headi
ng for a crisis.”

  Gathergood smiled, more charmed than displeased by the frankness of the outburst. He guessed a little of the resentment smouldering behind the youth’s words, that dream of being lordly and prosperous that had wilted during a few months’ experience of dragooning natives on a nearly bankrupt plantation. Gathergood felt sorry for him. He touched his arm—a rare thing for him to do to anyone—and answered: “Don’t worry. When I next see the Sultan I’ll indicate to him, if I can, the desirability of keeping his kampong hotheads under control. He doesn’t want trouble, remember, any more than we do.”

  “He’ll get it, though, if he’s not mighty careful, sir. It’s pretty obvious he’s shielding Morrison’s murderer. It can’t go on. Everyone knows these native states are ana—ana”—he stumbled over the half-known word and added, more confidently—“out-of-date.”

  There was a certain pathos, to the Agent, in the triteness of all that. It was rather like saying “I do think flowers are lovely” at a horticultural show. On the club verandah it was the everlasting small change of minor grousing; while in Singapore civil servants had grown grey in turning it into Blue Book prose. Gathergood did not conceive it his duty either to have or to express an opinion on the subject. Cuava was Cuava; he was content to accommodate himself to the system as it existed. He took little interest in politics, and had no passionate conviction that direct control from Singapore would be an improvement. He said, comfortingly: “All the same, I shouldn’t worry, if I were you.”

  But the youth’s remarks had made him feel that he might, perhaps, expedite his visit to the Sultan. He went that evening.

  Gathergood had no car; the lack of roads in Cuava made one an unnecessary expense. There was, it is true, a track of sorts leading steeply up to the Sultan’s palace, but the Agent preferred the more tranquil if slower method of having his native boys paddle him upstream to a point from which the palace lay but half an hour’s walk uphill. He had travelled thus on many occasions, and had perfected a pleasurable technique in sparing his boys as much expenditure of energy as possible. He first let the canoe drift across the estuary with the incoming tide; then he steered his way amongst the slow channels of the mangrove swamps, thus escaping the force of the current in midstream. It was possible, except at the height of the dry season, to traverse almost the entire distance in this manner; the journey took time, but there was rarely any particular reason for hurry. Nor did Gathergood find the scenery tedious as others might have done; the swamps were certainly desolate, but he could find plenty of interest in them, the more so as their tangles of rotting foliage had often yielded important additions to his naturalist’s collection. He liked the play of light, especially towards sunset, on the pale, sword-like nippa leaves; and the swish of the wind through them amused him sometimes by its likeness to human whispering.