Contango (Ill Wind) (5 page)

“Your affectionate sister,

“FLORENCE.”

That done, and the envelope sealed and addressed, Miss Faulkner wrote half
a dozen other letters, after which she packed them under her arm with her
usual mixed collection of books and papers, and went downstairs to the
post.

There was a box inside the hotel lobby, but she preferred the short walk
to the little blue letter-box fixed to the lamp-post down the road. She
scampered out, through the swing-doors, into the warm glare of the pavement.
The sun was shining out of a sky that really was the blue of the picture-
postcards, and even the Jungfrau looked somewhat like the advertised
Jungfrau. Miss Faulkner, however, was not normally a person to rhapsodise
over such matters. She walked straight to the lamp-post, inserted the
letters, and walked back. Just as she climbed the hotel steps she noticed a
man sitting on the terrace outside the Hôtel Oberland, the bigger and much
more aristocratic hotel immediately opposite her own, which was the Hôtel
Magnifique de l’Univers. She felt sure he was the man whom the omnibus
had nearly driven down, and in seeking to verify the recognition she stared
so hard that when he chanced to glance up she felt that the only thing
possible to do was to smile. And having smiled, and having received in return
a slight but courteous bow, she felt she must at least say something to
excuse the smile. So she ran across the road and began: “I’m so
sorry about the omnibus dashing into you like that—I do hope you
weren’t really hurt. And I must say, even though it may be true that
you weren’t looking, that man does drive round corners rather
recklessly. It was very kind of you, anyhow, to take it as you did. I mean,
it saved a lot of delay and argument.”

The man seemed surprised to be accosted thus and with such volubility.
“I assure you I haven’t even a bruise to show for it,” he
answered, looking her down with very blue eyes.

“I’m so glad…. It’s marvellous weather, isn’t
it?”

“Yes, great,” he replied.

Miss Faulkner, smiling again, recrossed the road to her own hotel.
Obviously a gentleman, she had confirmed; his clothes, his accent, his
manner, all were satisfactory. For she had belonged to the Left Wing of the
English Labour Movement long enough to know that though you might attack
gentlemen, as a class, and even, as a measure of social reform, seek to
abolish them, they yet remained, as individuals, most charming and agreeable
people.

For the rest of the time before dinner she busied herself with the
findings of a commission whose bulky minority report she had been somewhat
pointlessly carrying about all day.

Miss Faulkner was the headmistress of a council-school in Bermondsey. She
was clever, successful, and possessed an abundance of energy as well as that
immense capacity for taking pains which, whatever else it is, certainly is
not genius. But, genius apart, she was a talented woman; she could speak
fluently at meetings, serve effectively on committees, and bully a
school-inspector into overlooking the fact that her children, though skilled
at clay-modelling and pastel-drawing, were unfortunately less able to read
and write. Her ambition was some clay to become an M.P., and to this end she
was already associated with many of the movements and campaigns of advanced
Socialism. Not that she was by any means insincere. A passion almost
flame-like in its intensity sustained her in her many activities; she really
did possess a love for humanity, and the further removed humanity was, both
in space and time, the more she loved it. Her favourite school lesson, for
instance, was one in which she described the sufferings of the little boy
chimney-sweeps in the early nineteenth century; and in modern times a Chinese
famine, especially when documented by Blue Book or White Paper statistics,
could move her to genuine tears of compassion. With the local unemployed she
would probably have sympathised almost as warmly had not so many of them
approached her for personal help. “My good man, I can’t give to
everybody,” she would say; which was true enough, for four hundred a
year did not go far when one had a half-share of a flat in West Kensington,
and when even the telephone- bill often came to ten shillings a week. She
was, anyhow, continually giving money away, more often in guineas than
coppers, and her chief reason for spending August as she did was to obtain a
healthful holiday of a kind and duration that she could not otherwise have
afforded.

Besides, as she often remarked to friends in England, it was a means of
doing good to others as well as to herself. “I don’t see why the
loveliest places in the world should only be visited by the rich,” she
would say, with that clear-voiced truculence especially designed by nature
for the painless extraction of “hear-hear’s” from an
audience. “We get the middle classes as a rule, you know, and though
they may be a little tiresome at times, one does feel that one is helping
them to enjoy experiences they ought to have. Sometimes we even get actual
working- men—we had a most intelligent engine-driver only the other
week. I think that sort of thing is just splendid.” Miss Faulkner
always spoke of working-men as of some astonishing natural phenomenon which
she had studied for a university doctorate.

That evening she saw the man at the “Oberland” again. He was
taking coffee on the terrace after dinner, and from the crowded lobby of the
“Magnifique” she could observe him whenever anyone pushed open
the swing-doors to go out or come in. He was reading a paper and smoking a
cigar, and in the light of the orange-shaded lamp at his elbow she could see
that his hair was greyish. Elderly, therefore. And by himself. On business?
But no; she had not thought he looked a business man. And suddenly, perhaps
because the report she had lately been reading was connected with it, she
imagined him as having something to do with the League of Nations. Its
headquarters were at Geneva; what more likely than that its personnel should
take trips to Interlaken? But that, of course, raised a possible doubt as to
his nationality; his accent might be perfect, but might not a League official
have a perfect English accent without being necessarily English? He must be
Nordic, on account of his blue eyes; and she therefore imagined him a German,
because she had an emotional pity for Germans and because at one moment, when
she glanced at him, she thought he looked rather sombre. Pondering, perhaps,
on the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles or on the problem of the Polish
Corridor.

Later that evening, after he had left the terrace, she went out for a
short stroll and, on the way back, stopped to chat a while with the uniformed
porter of the “Oberland,” whom she knew quite familiarly, and who
graciously permitted the exercise of her French. After discussing the chances
of the next day’s weather she said, abruptly: “Oh, by the way,
who is that man who was taking coffee on the terrace just now—sitting
by himself at the table near the lamp?”

“An Englishman,” replied the porter, with half a wink.
“A Mr. Brown, of London.”

Miss Faulkner was disappointed. Her pitying thoughts of a derelict schloss
in the Rhineland and of a family starved to death in the blockade subsided
painfully; as a Mr. Brown, of London, he was clearly less remarkable. And
then, entering the hotel on the other side of the road, she added, what was
quite obvious, that it was of absolutely no consequence who or what he was,
and that he would probably be gone to-morrow, anyway.

But he had not gone on the morrow. He was seen (by Miss Faulkner) having
breakfast on the terrace while she shepherded her party to catch the train
for the Schynige Platte. She smiled and he nodded. It was another lovely day,
pleasantly cool on the mountain-top, though hot down below. She functioned
with her usual sprightliness, smiling at least a hundred times as she gave
advice as to the purchase of drinks and picture-postcards. On the way back
she could not help wondering if Mr. Brown, of London, had yet left the
“Oberland.”

He had not. She saw him that evening on the terrace, but he was engrossed
in a book and did not look her way.

The next morning there was no sign of him, and she was surprised in the
afternoon to discover, from a casual question to the porter, that he was
still staying. It did not matter, of course. She smiled hard throughout
dinner and gave a pithy little lecture, in her best schoolmistress manner,
about the Gorges of the Aar that were to be visited on the following day.

She saw nothing of him then, either. But on the day after that, the
Wednesday, by sheer chance they met on the train to the Jungfraujoch. It was
an expensive excursion, costing over two pounds extra, and for that reason
she had only half a dozen of the party under her charge. They had already
entered the train and she had climbed in after them and found a vacant seat
before noticing that he was opposite her. “Good morning,” she
said, with brisk eagerness.

“Good morning,” he answered.

He had a book open on his knee, and she obeyed a natural impulse to
decipher the title upside down. It was Shaw’s “Intelligent
Woman’s Guide to Socialism.” Her eyes glinted; surely it was a
good sign when a man was found reading Shaw in a train. She meant (for she
was already aware that he interested her) that it was so much the more likely
that they would have tastes in common. And she slightly revised her picture
of him as a German delegate to the League of Nations; perhaps, if the Shaw
were any evidence, he was in the International Labour Office. “A
fascinating book,” she commented, keenly.

He looked up and answered, after a pause: “Personally, I’m
finding it rather dull.”

“Really?” She yet contrived to smile. She knew there were lots
of people nowadays who thought Shaw a back number, and she remembered once
hearing a pert Communist at a committee meeting say that Shaw’s book
would have been much more interesting had it been an Intelligent
Socialist’s Guide to Woman.

“Of course Shaw’s getting very old,” she said, with a
hint of unutterable drawbacks.

“Yes, he must be.”

And then she remarked in the casual way she had so often found effective:
“I can’t say I was ever impressed with him myself. He talks at
you rather than to you, and it gets on one’s nerves after a time. At
least it did on mine.”

Here, of course, his obvious cue was to express surprise that she had
actually met Shaw, and the fact that he didn’t only disappointed her
until she realised that he was probably so used to meeting famous people
himself that it had hardly struck him as remarkable. She became quite
certain, at that moment, that he was “somebody.”

All he said was the one word “Indeed?”

She was just a little discouraged by this, and did not speak again until
they had to change trains at Lauterbrunnen. Then, amidst the warming
sunshine, she thought, with sudden boldness: “I’m interested in
him and would rather like to get to know him; why shouldn’t I, then,
deliberately enter the same carriage and sit next to him in the new
train?” After all, nobody would ever blame a man for doing that, if he
were interested in a girl…. That final argument, with all that it implied
in connection with the equality of the sexes, clinched the matter. Miss
Faulkner waited till the man had chosen a seat in the train that goes up to
Wengen and Scheidegg, and then led her small party in after him. “Here
again,” she exclaimed brightly, banging the window down. He
smiled— a rather slow, cautious smile, as if for the first time he
were taking real notice of her. “You are going up to the Joch?”
he queried.

“Yes. Are you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a long journey, but well worth it. Is this your first
visit?”

“Yes.”

She felt rather glad of that. “You’ll be impressed, on a day
like this. I was, tremendously, when I first came. In fact, I always
am.”

“You come pretty often, I suppose?”

“Once a week during August.”

“Oh?”

“You see, I’m only here for the month. This is really my
holiday….” And in a quarter of an hour—before the train
reached the green slopes and red-roofed chalets of Wengen—she had told
him all about her job, her school in Bermondsey, and her friendship with
Bertrand Russell. He listened politely, without saying very much. At
Scheidegg, where there was another change of trains, she kept the
conversation going so incessantly that it would have been nearly impossible
for them not to re-seat themselves together. All this time she had been
somewhat neglectful of her party, but as soon as the train set off she rose
and delivered, in her very best style, a short account of the building of the
Jungfrau Railway, its cost, difficulties, and the number of lives lost during
its construction. When she had finished she smiled at everybody, and then,
sitting down, bestowed a little private smile upon the man next her. “I
hope you weren’t startled by my sudden burst into professional
activity,” she began.

“Not at all,” he answered. “On the contrary, it was most
interesting—all that you said. A marvellous piece of engineering…
And another thing interested me too.”

“Yes?”

“The way—if you’ll excuse my being personal—the
way you managed to make yourself heard above the noise of the train without
shouting. I—I could never manage to do that.”

She laughed. “Have you tried?”

“Not exactly in trains. But I’ve had other experience. I
suppose it’s partly knack and partly the voice one’s born
with.”

“Surely not THAT,” she answered. “Babies can always make
themselves heard anywhere. At least, my babies can.”

This time it was he who laughed. “Yes, of course.”

A moment later it occurred to her to add: “I meant my official
babies, you know—the children of four and five at my school. I
haven’t any other kind of babies.”

Accepting the information, he seemed a little pensive afterwards, and by
the arrival of the train at the terminus Miss Faulkner thought she had
progressed distinctly well, though she was forced to confess that she knew
scarcely anything more about him. And yet to have led the conversation to
babies! She smiled with extra emphasis as she gave her people the usual
cautions about wearing sun-spectacles and not over-exerting themselves at the
unaccustomed altitude. Babies, indeed! For she had a sense of humour, no less
acute because it sometimes and for long intervals deserted her
completely.