Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  “I’ve only got his address in Bukarest. He’s probably back there by now.” Brown searched a moment in his pocket-book and found the visiting-card, “Here you are, if it’s any use to you.”

  “Thanks. When I write, if I do, I’ll mention your name and your meeting with him, if you don’t mind.”

  “The devil you will,” thought Brown, gloomily, but he lacked the energy to dissent, nor was there really much reason why he should. It had, however, suddenly occurred to him that he and his wife were the joint holders of forty-eight thousand preference shares in Amalgamated Engineers, Limited, and that the passing of the dividend would reduce their income during the current year from about six thousand to a little over four.

  That evening, at the club, he wrote a long letter to her, emphasising the poor state of trade, but avoiding the mention of any particular item of bad news. Time enough for her to learn the truth when she got home, he thought. After he had posted the letter he went to the second house of a music-hall, drank plenty of whisky, and went to bed. It was an unsatisfactory world, he decided, trying to sleep. He thought of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, all living their lives quite comfortably in a more ordered age—buying raw material and labour, selling the finished product, and pocketing the difference as neatly and as regularly as clockwork. All plain sailing in those days. You just made some useful article, charged a fair price for it, and there you were—with a steady income for life. And, what was more, you could go on making and selling without worry. Golden days! But now, with passed dividends and bad debts abroad and currency losses and income- tax…. Good God, what were things coming to? And he thought, for one supremely mournful moment: “Perhaps it’s as well my boy didn’t survive to carry on the firm, since the firm may not survive to be carried on.”

  What troubled him most were the family and household economies that would have to be made. His own personal wants were simple, but his wife and daughter spent a good deal; he would have to be unpleasantly frank with them when they came home. Perhaps one of the three cars could be dispensed with; his wife might use the big Daimler in future and he himself could make do with a season- ticket on the railway… But by this time his natural tendency to look on the brighter side of things had begun to reassert itself, and he fell asleep tranquilly, hopefully, and a little drunk.

  About a fortnight later Brown was still in London and Parceval rang him up at the club one morning. “Oh, hello, Brown. I’ve just arrived in town again after a flying visit to Paris. Literally a flying visit. I had to meet the steel cartel… . By the way, I took the chance of looking up your Roumanian friend. Nice fellow, as you said.”

  “He was still in Paris?”

  “Yes, and very glad to see me. It seems the French firm had just told him there was nothing doing, so he was pleased enough to try his luck somewhere else.”

  “Well, what did you think of his idea?”

  “Oh… interesting, you know. And probably no good. Most interesting ideas are like that. But I told him he could make a model of his tin-can arrangement down at my works at Chelmsford, if he cared to come over, so I expect he’s quite happily packing now.”

  “But you surely don’t think there’s anything in it, do you?”

  “Well, we shall know more about that when he shows us how it works, shan’t we?”

  “D’you mean to say he’s going to let himself be thrown out of an aeroplane in the thing?”

  “I suppose he is. He won’t find anyone else in a hurry to volunteer.”

  “I—I don’t much like it. He’ll kill himself.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. He needn’t take a very big risk—he can make his trial descents over some lake, with boats to bring him in if anything goes wrong.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “Of course—oh, of course. I like him very much, I may say. A delightful personality. …”

  But Brown had little time to think of the charming Roumanian during the next few weeks. Further cuts into his already straitened income seemed quite likely; added to which there came a rather peremptory request from his bankers to reduce a loan secured on shares of the combine. They had evidently got wind of the Italian and other losses, and were playing for safety. He couldn’t blame them, but he thought it was damned bad luck for everything to come crowding on top of him all at once. Of course he must meet them somehow—offer them some more shares or give them a mortgage on his Cheshire establishment, or something. He interviewed various high bank officials and found them sympathetic but definitely unwilling to accept any but gilt-edged securities as further cover for the loan, while his stockbrokers were even pessimistic about being able to dispose of some of his other shares at all. As for the house, the utmost he could raise on it was four thousand, and the bank people were asking for fifteen thousand immediately. Like most men who do not habitually worry, the sensation, being unfamiliar, turned quickly to panic. He tried to borrow from Mathers and several other friends, but either they didn’t possess the money or wouldn’t take the risk of lending. Finally, in complete desperation, he went to Furnival. But Sir George, though rich enough, did not by any means whip out a cheque-book and scribble with the alacrity of the copybook friend in need. He asked many questions with great minuteness and merely said, at the end: “I shall have to think it over, Brown, and let you know. It’s rather a big thing to ask, in these days… though of course I’d like to help you, naturally. By the way, your Roumanian friend is nearly ready. Could you possibly manage to come over to Chelmsford on Friday? There might be something to show you.”

  Brown promised to go. He spent most of the intervening days in a state of persistent and devitalising worry over his money affairs. It was not like him to fear the worst, but he could not subdue the waves of occasional despair that passed over him. His wife and daughter had already left Virginia on their way home, and the imminence of his meeting with them and of subsequent confessions reduced him to even deeper depression. For years he had had the habit of smiling cheerfully whenever his fellow business men were doleful; now he wondered if his cheerfulness had been based on a privately sheltered financial position which he had been lucky enough to occupy, and whether he would be any less doleful than the rest as soon as the tide of his personal ruin began to lap at his own doors. The newspapers, with their chatter of rationalisation and improved selling methods, made him feel sick. How the devil could he COMPEL customers to buy oil-pumps and water-tube boilers and reciprocating engines and all the other things that the firm manufactured? And how could he, as an ordinary man, be expected to pick his way amidst such pitfalls as frozen credits, depreciated exchanges, high tariffs, and defaulting clients?

  “Really, Parceval,” he exclaimed, in the car to Chelmsford, “it’s not enough to be a mere business man in these days. You’ve damned well got to be a Svengali and a Sherlock Holmes in addition.”

  Parceval laughed. “Quite true. Anyone can make things, but it often requires genius to sell them.”

  “Well, I’m not a genius, and I can’t help wishing I’d been born fifty years ago, when one could do a decent day’s work and draw a decent day’s pay for it without any worries.”

  “Come now, Brown, you know you’ve never done a decent day’s work in your life, for all your talk.” Parceval laughed again; such frankness, but slightly insolent, was a favourite manner of his with those whom he need be at no particular pains to conciliate. He went on, enjoying himself still more: “What you’re sighing for is a comfortable income without working for it at all, and you’re cross because the world’s beginning to wonder why you should have it. You’ve got to face facts, my dear chap—the easy-going days are all over. And that celebrated ancestor of yours would have said ‘Hooray’ to that, I fancy.”

  “I often wonder what he would have done in times like these.”

  “I can tell you. He’d have done now what he did then—adapted himself to the circumstances of the age and made a fortune…. Well, here we are—this is the spo
t I’ve chosen for our young friend to make his hit or miss. And, by the way, I haven’t arranged it as a public spectacle. There’s only you here, myself, Mathers, and a few workmen pledged to secrecy. Time enough for the flourish of trumpets, if any, later on.”

  The car pulled into the side of a narrow lane in rather pleasantly rural country. Parceval led the way across a few fields to a prettily situated sheet of water fringed with tall reeds. Amidst the sudden tranquillity of the scene, and under that cloudless October sky, Brown felt happier than he had been for days. Perhaps money did not matter so much, after all, so long as there were still such things as fields and sunshine. He wondered how much of England there was, secret and lovely like this, within a few hundred yards of the roads along which he so often motored. He sniffed the warm, hay-scented air and felt all his worries relax in almost muscular contentment.

  Presently Mathers joined them and Parceval explained his plans for the afternoon’s experiment. “The plane’s taking off from a field several miles away; I said we’d all be here by three o’clock. I don’t think the fellow will want to waste time. He’s very keen and plucky. Of course it’s a chancy business, but if he keeps over the water I think he can’t hurt himself much. The thing’s airtight enough to come to the surface.”

  To Brown the waiting, the shimmer of sunlight on the lake, and the spaciousness of that unknown countryside, seemed all a part of some very strange dream. He could hardly believe he was about to witness an actual and perhaps exciting event, and he missed even the approaching aeroplane till his attention was drawn to it by Parceval. Then, as he heard it zooming overhead, he felt a tense agitation rising in him. Twice the machine made a circuit of the lake, while the three principal spectators stared upwards.

  “He’ll do it soon,” said Parceval.

  Brown’s heart began to beat more quickly still, and then all at once to ache with a peculiar and almost intolerable apprehension. His own son had been killed like that—pioneering in the air in the early days of flying. He called to mind that dreadful day before the War; and then he called to mind the eager, smiling face across the table in the French train—he saw it continually, that smile of such undaunted belief in things that Brown was more than a little doubtful about. He thought as he stood: “We are old men, Parceval, Mathers, and I; and we stay here, safe and contemplative, watching that youngster risk his life.”

  Just then something that looked like an elongated drop of quicksilver detached itself from the tail of the aeroplane and began to slew round in a wide circle. It moved at first too fast for Brown to see anything but its shape and colour; but after a few seconds it swooped nearer to the water-level and exhibited details of whirring propellers and fins that glistened in the sunlight. “Like a baby Zepp, by Jove!” exclaimed Mathers, trying to focus it in his binoculars. Then, in the midst of seemingly effortless cruising, it checked its horizontal motion and all at once plunged headlong. It was perhaps thirty or forty feet high when that happened, and the dive took it just beyond the lake into a swamp at the water’s edge, where it buried itself nose-foremost with only the tail-propeller visible above the reeds.

  “Come on, let’s get him out!” yelled Brown, and began to run towards the scene, the others hastening after him. Striding up to his knees in mud and water, he kept thinking: “He’s there, he’s in that thing—it’s all my fault—it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t met him on that train—I MUST get him out—what CAN be happening to him all this time?”…

  He and the workmen tore and tugged at the metal monstrosity for nearly a quarter of an hour before they finally succeeded in dragging it to firm ground. Then they prised open the small entrance door, which had jammed, and pulled out a limp and huddled occupant. He was pale and unconscious, though not visibly injured.

  “Where’s an ambulance?” Brown cried to Parceval. “Didn’t you think of having one ready? Damnation, man, tell me where I can send to for one….”

  But there was no need, after all, with the two cars at hand; and in less than half an hour the youthful experimenter was being treated quite satisfactorily in a nearby hospital.

  That evening Brown, Parceval, and Mathers motored to London and dined at Parceval’s town house in Belgrave Square. They had already received a telephone message from the hospital to the effect that Palescu was suffering from no more than shock and very slight concussion, and would doubtless be quite well again in a week or so. Brown was mollified and relieved, but still rather retrospectively indignant. The good news made room again, too, for his own personal anxieties, the more so as Parceval hadn’t yet given him any answer about the loan.

  “Well, Parceval,” he said, when the servants had gone out and they could talk freely, “I’m sure we’re all glad that the boy’s all right. He’s had a lucky escape, and we’re lucky too, I should say, in not being partly responsible for a tragedy. As for the precious invention he risked his life over, it seems to be exactly what I said—not of the least practical use.”

  “No?” Parceval queried. “I thought myself it wasn’t too bad for a pioneer attempt. After all, it didn’t drop like a stone.”

  “Small consolation HOW a man drops if he DOES drop. Personally, I don’t see how you could ever expect people to trust themselves to such a terrifying contraption, even if it were made to work properly.”

  Parceval filled up Brown’s glass. “Well, I certainly admit that Palescu’s gyrector doesn’t look like having many commercial possibilities.”

  “Then for heaven’s sake don’t let’s encourage the fellow to run any more risks with it.”

  Parceval turned to Mathers. “What do you say?”

  Mathers agreed with Brown that there should be no more experiments if there were definitely nothing practical to hope for from them, which he feared was the case. “Unless, of course, the idea should be adapted to some other sort of use.”

  “Such as?” Parceval said quickly.

  “Well… perhaps the landing of mails, for instance.”

  “I see. I was wondering if by any chance you and I had been struck by the same notion.”

  “Come on, Sir George, let’s have it. Your notions are usually sound ones.”

  “This may not be a sound one at all. It’s completely up in the air—in more senses than one.” Parceval half-smiled, and then continued, speaking to Mathers, though it was on Brown that his beady, heavy-lidded eyes were turned more frequently. “Briefly this. There may be, as you hint, other uses besides the one our Roumanian friend seems to have thought of. There may even be uses outside the world of commerce altogether. Just let me put a hypothetical question. What would have happened if that gyrector, as he calls it, had been filled with explosives, and instead of coming clown into some soft mud in the middle of Essex had dropped from three or four miles high on to the roof of the Bank of England?”

  Mathers and Brown spoke instantly and together. Mathers said: “I don’t see anything very new in that—the Germans used aerial torpedoes in the War, didn’t they?”

  Brown exclaimed: “You mean if—if it had been filled with explosives instead—of—of having a man inside it?”

  Parceval shook his head to each of them separately and then jointly to them both. “No. Not at all. I mean explosives and the man. The man to steer, of course—that’s the whole point of the invention. You see? You see, Mathers? Hardly something that even the Germans thought of, eh? I think you’ll admit that it is a rather—novel—sort of idea.”

  After a long pause Mathers responded thoughtfully: “Yes, it’s an idea, Sir George. By Jove, yes, it is an idea.”

  Brown said: “Good God, what an appalling notion!”

  Later, in arm-chairs in the long leathery room which Parceval called the library, and with coffee and liqueurs before them, they discussed the matter further. Parceval argued that it would be, on the whole, a very humane weapon, since it would remove all necessity for promiscuous bombing of defenceless cities. The gyrectors would be aimed unerringly at the objects they were int
ended to destroy—docks, railways, government buildings, and so on—not houses, hospitals, or crowded streets.

  “And though, as you say, Brown, it means certain death for the— er—the operator, in what way does that introduce any new or especially dreadful element into warfare? Isn’t it common enough for soldiers to face certain death? And it would be instantaneous, remember. No suffering, no mutilations, no lingering for days on barbed wire. A clean death, you may call it.” He paused impressively and lit a cigar. And there was, he said, another thing in its favour. It had always seemed to him that one of the most terrible features about war was the way it took toll of the strongest and most virile among the world’s manhood. Wasn’t it curiously obtuse that the survival of the fittest, nature’s harsh but salutary law, should be reversed by civilised nations whenever they fought in battle? “This development I’ve been trying to sketch out would make for the redressing of that unfortunate balance.” He spoke suavely, as to a company of invisible shareholders. “It would give the physically second- rate man a chance to serve his country and display heroism no less than the first-rate.”

  It was at this point that certain troubled emotions in Brown, combined with the undoubted fact that he had drunk too much, became articulate in the guise of a rather macabre whimsicality. “Hear, hear,” he cried, banging his liqueur-glass on the table-top in mock applause. “You make a damn fine speech, Parceval. Call up the C3s in the next war! And then we’ll have all the old ladies writing to The Times to complain of the number of UN-fit men they see in mufti! But perhaps you’d organise your suicide club on a voluntary basis? Let ’em all register in peace-time and draw a dole and wear an armlet or something.”

  “Well, if you MUST joke about a serious matter—”

  Brown’s fingers suddenly snapped the stem of the empty glass he was holding, and there was a pause while he muttered an apology and bound his thumb, which had been cut slightly. Then he went on, more steadily: “D’you really think, Parceval, and you too, Mathers, that a fellow boxed up in a tin coffin is going to spend his last moments caring whether what he hits is the right roof or the wrong one?”