Contango (Ill Wind)

by James Hilton

  She told him then about her brother in America, and his confident, dominating manner changed at once to a pacifying tenderness. He took her into his arms and comforted her with intimacies that were childlike in their simplicity. “But, my dear Paula, why on earth didn’t you mention it? I had no idea you were so worried. We could easily have called at the post office on our way. But we’ll go there first thing in the morning, anyhow.”

  He was so kind, and she hated him for it almost as much as she loved him. “But I FORGOT—don’t you see?” she cried, with sombre emotion.

  In the morning they drove back through spring sunshine and showers. He put her down at the post office and then drove himself on to the Conference. She had promised a further meeting, but had declined to fix any definite arrangements.

  When she asked if there were any letters and the clerk handed her one, she went very pale. It had the New York postmark.

  She opened and read it. Then she went out into the street and walked along past the shop-windows.

  An hour later she was still walking, vaguely from street to street. Her mind gave her questions that were like hammer-blows. Why had he ever gone to Maramba? Why had he gone to Rio, to America at all? What had driven him so far from his own home, to these fantastic places? Oh, if only… if only…

  She came to the post office again and went to the counter with the envelope. “Can you tell me when this arrived?” she asked.

  “Yesterday afternoon,” replied the clerk, glancing at it. He knew her by sight and added: “It was here at the time you usually call.”

  She went out, trembling in a way that attracted attention from several persons who saw her.

  All that night the letter had been there waiting for her… all that night.

  A half-crazed survivor… and Leon dead….

  * * *

  CHAPTER NINE. — HENRY ELLIOTT

  When Elliott came downstairs on the morning of his sixtieth birthday, he felt glad to have been born at the right side of the year. It was all very well when you were young, having birthdays in late summer or autumn; but when you entered the seventh decade you wanted the leaves to be fresh on the trees and no sign of decay to greet you. There was enough of that in your own body, even if you were what was called a “well-preserved” man. Elliott, taking a mirrored glimpse of himself as he crossed the hall to the breakfast-room, could certainly congratulate himself on being that. He was tall, with not even the beginnings of a stoop, and no trace of a paunch either; and his hair was even more of an adornment than before it had turned grey. “I ought to be good for another ten years,” he reflected, blinking in the sunlight that poured through the mullioned windows. After all, Disraeli was premier at seventy-four, Gladstone at eighty-four… and Pitt at twenty-four, for that matter. Good heavens, think of it. It all proved, if it proved anything at all, that age didn’t matter.

  As he entered the breakfast-room the Sealyhams scrambled around him, and his host’s children, John and Rose and Elizabeth, got up rather shyly; the two girls smiled, but John, who was eleven and the eldest, spoke up: “Good morning, Mr. Elliott. Many happy returns of the day.”

  “Thank you, John, thank you,” he answered, in his rich, mellow voice; and then he bowed to his hostess, a tall, fair, beautiful woman of scarcely middle age, and said, with the quietness of old friendship: “Good morning, Fanny.”

  “Morning, Harry. I say the same as John, you know.”

  He smiled and thanked her, and saw that the children were still shyly standing. “Do please sit down,” he added, and then, with a laugh: “No, no, Fanny—I’ll serve myself—I’m not an old crock yet.”

  Thank goodness, he thought, as he gave himself an egg and some bacon, he could still eat like everybody else—no fads about orange juice and rye-biscuits and that sort of thing. He carried the plate to the table and then saw that the cloth nearabouts was heaped with parcels tied up in coloured ribbon and each with a little label on it. He was surprised, scarcely realising what it all meant, at first; it hadn’t somehow occurred to him that this would happen. “To Mr. Elliott, with love from John.”

  “To Harry, from Fanny, with best love.”

  “To Harry, from Bill….”

  He knew that the children’s eyes were intent on him. “I’m not going to open a single one till your father comes down,” he said, “and then we’ll all look together.”

  “Father’s in his bath,” said John, with pluck.

  “I know he is. He wished me many happy returns before any of you.” And he laughed again. He was happy, and a little sad, because of all this birthday business.

  The Kennersleys—Lord and Lady Kennersley—were among his oldest friends. The family had helped him as a boy; it was in this same house, in the library, that he had received his first big encouragement. He had been a junior clerk in the company office then, at twenty-four—the same age that Pitt was premier. “I hear you’re working for a scholarship to Oxford, Elliott. I hope you do well. And if it would help, you can take time off from now till the examination—with pay, of course.” That had been the old man, whom everyone had supposed to be so ferocious. Elliott had been very nervous of HIM, and nervous, too, of the big rooms and the fine furniture. And now, he reflected, the old man’s grandchildren were actually nervous of him. They kept looking at him over the rim of their cups, and looking away when he caught them at it.

  Lord Kennersley entered, crisp, jovial, plus-foured for the day’s activities. “Hullo, kids. Undone the parcels yet, Harry?”

  “I’m waiting for all of you to help me,” Elliott answered.

  Kennersley was five years his junior; they had been friends at Oxford, and during Elliott’s early career had shared bachelor rooms in London. Not until ten years after succeeding to the title had Kennersley married, and then, rather surprisingly to his friends, he had chosen a musical comedy actress, very much younger than himself, of no family, small education, but immense vivacity and charm. She had (it was currently reported) been his mistress first of all, and then, a eugenist malgré lui, he had very sensibly made her the mother of his heirs. The marriage had proved a quite astounding success. She had fitted herself to aristocratic domesticity as easily as to a new part in a play that was going to run for ever, she made an excellent wife and mother, and she had become delightfully popular amongst all Kennersley’s intimates. Since his own wife’s death, Elliott could certainly count her his greatest woman friend.

  Breakfast was held up indefinitely by the opening of the parcels. There was a gold cigarette-case from Bill, a leather wallet from Fanny, a tie-press from John, Blake’s poems from Rose, and a leather-bound address-book from Elizabeth. Elliott thanked them all. How nice they were to him, but he wished the children weren’t so shy. John blushed when Fanny said: “He WOULD buy you a tie-press, Harry. He said you needed one.”

  “There seem to be about a million other things for you in the hall,” said Kennersley, grinning. “You’ll have to get Jevons to help you through with them afterwards. I had them all shoved on one side, so that you wouldn’t be detained on the way clown. After all, we think we ought to come first.”

  “You do,” said Elliott sincerely.

  Then they all went on with their food, excited and happy after the little scene. Kennersley helped himself to enormous quantities of eggs and bacon and kidneys and sausages. “Well, what’s the programme to-day?” he asked, at length.

  “I’ve got the meeting at Sibleys at eleven. Then the executive at half-past five. To-night, of course, there’s the big dinner.”

  “Not much of a birthday for you.”

  “Never mind. It’s begun well.”

  He saw the cyclist newsboy pedalling up the drive with the morning papers, and a minute later the butler brought them in. Kennersley gave him his choice; he took The Times, but only glanced at the middle page. Kennersley took the Mail. “Anything fresh?” called out Fanny, as she poured more coffee. “No, doesn’t seem to be anything,” muttered her husband, chewing hard.
>
  Elliott smiled to himself. War in China; Revolution in Salvador; Conference Hitch…. No, doesn’t seem to be anything. Staring out of the window again, he could understand. It really did look as if Chilver were in the middle of a world in which nothing happened. The lawns sloped down to a belt of trees beyond which, at a mysteriously unreckonable distance, a line of wavy green-brown hills met the blue. There was no sound except the distant clank of a horse-drawn roller. Exquisite world! For centuries there had been no war at Chilver, no revolution, no hitch of any kind; but could one be sure that none was now threatening? Elliott felt suddenly oppressed with all the knowledge that these people did not share. This fine, friendly fellow, not much more than an overgrown boy, with his income of many thousands a year derived largely from coal-mining royalties, which he spent profusely on running model farms that did not pay and on giving employment to grooms, harness-makers, and jockeys; this charming girl-woman, daughter of a Notting Hill tobacconist, whose chief interest in life, next to her three lovely children and her husband, was the breeding of Sealyhams—how casual and planless their lives were, and how unsure of survival in a world that might decide to take itself with scientific seriousness! Perhaps that sort of a world was coming. And then, whimsically, it occurred to him that even if it did come, England might, as usual, contrive some queer compromise, some amazing non sequitur like the British Commonwealth or the Thirty-Nine Articles.

  So Elliott’s thoughts ran on, as he glanced through the newspaper, half-seeing the printed words, but half-watching the children watch him. He was very fond of children. He took up the volume of Blake’s poems and smiled at Rose, who had given it him. “This is a good book,” he said. Then Fanny looked up and began to talk about poetry. She was really much more at home with dogs, but it was a weakness of hers to pretend that she was passionately interested in all “cultured” things. Bill made no such pretence, but he had a wholesome respect for what he believed to be his wife’s superior enlightenments, and Elliott would have done anything rather than disabuse him. Charming and delightful Fanny—and never more charming than when she was talking nonsense about literature. Elliott listened to her with an amused affection that made him want to ruffle her sunlit hair and ask her where she had learned it all. “Yes, it’s fine stuff’,” he agreed, when she made a pause.

  “I wonder, Harry, if you would read the children something—that marvellous poem—you know the one I mean—I’m sure they’d never forget it if you did—”

  Elliott wondered if he dare wink, very slightly, at John. He was sure they would never be allowed to forget it. It was another of Fanny’s pleasant weaknesses—like the visitors’ book in which everybody had to write something “original.” (Elliott had once rather shocked her, after a week-end, by writing: “Thoroughly satisfied. At Cooking and Everything Tip-Top. Can cordially recommend Chilver to anyone who likes a real Home from Home.”) He knew that years hence she would be saying at her dinner-parties: “Do you remember, Rose, that morning when Mr. Elliott—you know, THE Mr. Elliott—read us that poem of Blake’s out of the book you gave him for his sixtieth birthday?”

  “Certainly,” he replied, and turned to the well-known lines which he guessed were probably all of Blake that Fanny had ever read. He began in a mood of gentle raillery, thinking of her, and wondering if the children were principally awed or bored, and noticing how the dogs half-asleep in front of the fire looked up curiously as they heard the different intonation. He had a beautiful voice, and he knew it, quite simply and without conceit. But when he came to the lines: “I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,” he was caught up by something both in himself and in the words. He was the fighter still, at sixty. He would not cease from mental fight, nor would his sword sleep in his hand, till he had built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land…. He finished, a little moved by the beauty of the words, but more by the beauty of the scene out-of- doors and by Rose’s face turned to him.

  During the recital Jevons, his secretary, had quietly entered the room and now made his salutations. He was a slim, handsome, and extremely clever youth of thirty or so, with a well-bred cynicism that disguised emotion and opinion alike.

  “That’s a grand poem,” said Kennersley, to whom anything was poetry that had rhymes and was read in an odd sort of voice.

  “Yes, it’s good, Kennersley,” said Jevons, dexterously slicing an egg on to his plate. “But I always catch myself boggling at the word ‘Jerusalem.’ It gives the poem a faintly Zionist flavour. And, anyhow, when you’ve seen Jerusalem, you wouldn’t want to build it anywhere.”

  Elliott laughed. “My point, if it comes to that, is that I wouldn’t want to build any city—there are far too many already. I’d leave the green and pleasant land alone.”

  And so they went on rather frivolously chatting, until Kennersley’s big Daimler, garlanded with pink rosettes, drove up to the front entrance. “Well,” Kennersley said, seeing them off, “you’ll have an enjoyable drive—for the first twenty miles, at any rate. I hope everything goes along all right. We’ll all be listening in to you at eight-thirty, and I’ll be up when you get back. Goo’bye. Goo’bye, Jevons.”

  Elliott was thinking, as he swished through the lanes and villages: “This is my constituency.” … He found it rather hard to realise. Those labourers in the field over there, and the man lowering the sun-blind outside that shop, were, by the inexorable casualness of English politics, installed for a moment as high instruments of fate. It had happened peculiarly. In a recent general election Elliott had won an industrial seat by a small margin. Then, several weeks later, when he had got well to work at his new Cabinet post, somebody had discovered certain technical irregularities that rendered the contest invalid. There had been no suggestion of moral culpability, and an Act of Indemnity had been rushed through Parliament to save him from the quite crippling fines to which he was liable; but no Act could spare him the trouble and expense of re-election. Nor was it beyond doubt that, with such a small majority, he would be re-elected. In this emergency, the machine of English politics had been swung to another angle, with the apparently inconsequent result that an elderly member for an exceptionally safe seat had applied for the Chiltern Hundreds. It had been hoped that Elliott would be elected without a fight, but at the last moment the local opposition party had put up a candidate.

  Thus Elliott found himself motoring on this May morning of his sixtieth birthday through the constituency of East Northsex. Occasionally, on small boards and in windows, he noticed the familiar command “Vote for Elliott.” He was certain to get in, for the Kennersley influence was still strong in the almost feudal countryside. There was only one place, Sibleys, in which he might expect opposition; it was on the edge of a mining area, and had a few factories, at one of which he had arranged to address a lunchtime meeting of workpeople.

  A freakish arrangement, when one came to think about it, he reflected. Fate might make of him the pivot on which the wheel revolved through Paris, Rome, Washington, Geneva; but England, parochial to the last, insisted on this geographical attachment to its own hills and vales. Whatever he was, history- maker or world-spokesman, he must remain the member for East Northsex, and in all his plans for the regeneration of mankind he dare not forget that Sibleys wanted power to run omnibuses or that Chilver was disappointed with its sewage arrangements. Perhaps it was not a bad method, in the way it worked out. But he despaired of explaining or justifying it to any highly intelligent foreigner.

  The sky was clouding over and drops of rain already speckled the car- windows. He looked out upon the changing scene, talked a little to Jevons, slit open envelopes and glanced through letters, turned to the newspaper again. The rich fields and unspoilt villages merged into a more urbanised area; tram-lines began; a horizon of coal-tips and chimneys lifted up. He had never been in this part of the country before, yet he was going to represent it— what a haphazard business! He said to Jevons, pointing ahead: “Surely I don’t take in a
ll that?”

  Jevons laughed. “Lucky for you you don’t, sir. That’s Loamington. Sibleys, which is where you end, is this side of it—a sort of suburb.”

  The traffic thickened in narrowing, mud-splashed streets; rows of industrial cottages straddled a nearby hill like flying buttresses, and in the trough below it the flat roof of a factory gleamed pewter-coloured in the rain. “Sibleys,” said Jevons. Elliott looked out with interest, commenting: “I don’t think I’ve ever been here before.”

  “No? But I thought you were a native of this county, sir?”

  “So I am. I was born at Creeksend, about twenty miles the other side of Chilver. But I never came here in those days—so far as I can recollect. Nor during any of my visits to Chilver since.”

  “Well, it’s hardly a spot they’d take you to for a picnic, I admit. But don’t tell the crowd it’s your first visit. You see, we’ve made a lot of your being a local man. A Northsex man for Northsex— you know the tag.”

  Elliott laughed. “Dear me, Jevons, couldn’t you think of anything more original?”

  “I could; but I was very careful not to. Originality has lost many an election-contest.”

  “What a game it is… WHAT a game….”

  He felt a little weary, as he usually did, on the eve of a meeting. Not, of course, that he had any doubts or apprehensions about it. He had probably addressed some thousands of political gatherings during his career, and no amount of hostility or heckling ever bothered him. He had a good platform manner, a strong voice, and a quick brain that could turn a point against an interrupter without making a lifelong enemy of him. He was what was called “popular.” The cartoonists liked his hair, which they always converted into a sort of halo; thousands of people all over the country referred to him as “Harry.” He had no personal enemies that he knew of and all his privacies were public—that his father had been a country schoolmaster, that his married life had been idyllic, that his two sons had been killed in the War, and that he enjoyed a good cigar.