James Hilton: Collected Novels (32 page)

I also discovered that Winslow had written a book of essays on moral philosophy that had attracted some attention in its field, and might have led to a useful subsidiary reputation had not his main career gone off at such a tangent. I was interested enough to get hold of the book. I found it a bit above my head, but I thought it showed signs of a first-class mind, and first-class minds are such rare things in our time and land that it becomes a crime, in my opinion, to frustrate, sidetrack, or otherwise stultify them. And his, at least, had been sidetracked at Kemalpan, for—apart from the career—there had been no succeeding books.

During the following months a trickle of further evidence came in, but none of it helpful to his case. A Chinese clerk reported that he had personally delivered the coded message from the telegraph station to Winslow’s bungalow, where he had handed it to a responsible servant; the servant said Winslow was out at the time, so he had placed it on his desk along with other messages and letters…The case also began to look blacker from another angle, for at the time the message was received it was known at the coast settlement that the lives of white refugees in the Sultan’s palace were endangered, so that if Winslow had been concerned with his own personal safety he must also have weighed it against the safety of others. About twenty, to be precise—including women and children. And to complete the indictment, it seemed reasonably probable that if he had managed to get the message through to the Sultan, the latter would have put up a defense instead of a surrender, and the five lives might have been saved. Altogether there was very little excuse for Winslow, and when, just about the time this later evidence came in, I got a letter from him in Ireland I was in a rather unsympathetic mood for considering it, especially as the first few sentences showed me he was asking the impossible. Briefly, he wanted a job. Not, of course, the same job in Kemalpan, or even that kind of job in that kind of place; yet, he argued, could not a decade of experience in the East, plus the knowledge of several obscure languages and dialects, be put to some use somehow and somewhere? What he hinted at was a job in some government office, where he could continue in the public service, however humbly.

I wrote back and told him how little chance he had. And a week later Mrs. Winslow herself came to see me.

It was another interesting meeting. I had heard of this Mrs. Winslow once before, in connection with her oft-quoted and misquoted remark about Hitler at the Batavia dinner party; I hadn’t disliked her for that (because it seemed to me she had probably been misunderstood), but it had given me an impression that she was a dangerous partner for a man of affairs. And now, when I saw her across my desk, I was immediately struck by a certain controlled intention in her whole look and attitude. She faced me as if she knew what she wanted and meant to get her own way at all costs. After a mere good-morning she plunged right in—couldn’t I possibly find her husband some desk job in Whitehall? Apparently my letter had been the final blow to his hopes, and she was afraid of a breakdown if he didn’t find some work where he felt he could be useful. And though she herself preferred to live in Ireland, she would not say no to London if Jeffrey had to be there. She talked of living in London as a sort of sacrifice she would make for her husband if the Government in return would do its part.

I told her flatly it was impossible, and when she stressed the personal angle I delicately hinted that government posts were not handed out to prevent breakdowns. The Kemalpan incident, I said, was of a kind that they must both recognize had called at least a halt to Jeffrey’s career. At that she began to protest and argue, but of course I wouldn’t go over all the details with her. “Even assuming some tragic mistake, one can do nothing about it now. Men’s careers have been ruined before by mistakes—it would be nothing new.”

“You look at it very coldly,” she said.

“I look at it very logically,” I answered. “The whole incident, affair, or whatever you call it, is closed now and can’t be reopened unless some totally new item of evidence should crop up. And that’s so unlikely that we can almost say it won’t happen.”

She then said quietly: “It can happen. That’s what I came here for—to tell you something. It was I who intercepted the cable. I decoded it, found out what it meant, then decided that Jeffrey shouldn’t ever see it. Of course he doesn’t know I did that, or that I’m admitting it now to you.”

She waited for me to show surprise, and perhaps I did, but it was not surprise at what she said so much as surprise that she should expect me to believe it. Naturally I didn’t. But it would have been equally unwise to dismiss the matter without further probing.

“What made you do such a thing?” I asked guardedly.

“I just had to,” she answered. “The telegraph line was cut, so I knew he’d want to take the message himself, and as the country was in the hands of the rebels I didn’t think he’d have much chance of getting through. And he might have got killed.”

“He might,” I agreed. “And five others did.”

She said nothing.

“Probably as a result of the message not being delivered.”

“I wouldn’t say
probably. Possibly.
”

“You knew the planters and their families were in danger when you intercepted the message?”

“Yes.”

“And you deliberately let them take their chance in order to ensure your husband’s personal safety?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you think that rather indefensible?”

“I’m not defending it. I’m just saying it’s what I did. My husband was dearer to me than a crowd of people I didn’t know.”

“How many people would you be willing to sacrifice for such a reason?”

She didn’t answer.

I went on, with more sarcasm: “Or shall I put it this way—at what point would the lives of strangers, by sheer weight of numbers, tilt the balance against the life of the man you love?”

She answered: “Never.”

“So you’d sacrifice millions, if one can conceive of such a situation?”

She nodded.

She really was at this point beginning to surprise me. It’s rare that people, especially women, are willing to let a logical point be pressed home. I said, rather severely: “I’m glad to think you are probably unique in looking at things that way.”

“Oh, but I’m not,” she answered. “In wartime wouldn’t you press a button, if you could, to destroy a million of the enemy rather than lose a single life on your own side? Then why is my attitude so extraordinary?”

What
was
extraordinary, of course, was her argument, and it was one that didn’t seem to me profitable to continue. I was still disinclined to believe her confession, but I was clear in my mind as to the implications of the alternatives. Either she was lying to save her husband’s reputation—in which case one could possibly like her for it; or she had actually told the truth—in which case she was ruthless, unprincipled, and wholly the kind of wife whom a man in a responsible position should not have.

But in any case nothing could be done. Even if her confession were accepted at its face value it would not help Jeffrey to get his job back. The most it could do would be to win him a measure of half-incredulous sympathy.

I explained all this to her, and it seemed to me that she picked up the cue, as it were, and from then on made a bid for the sympathy. Jeffrey, she repeated, was on the verge of a breakdown. All he asked was some job, however small and ill-paid, just to give him the feeling—perhaps even the illusion—that he had not been dishonorably discharged. It had even come to the point, she said, that their marriage might founder if he could not get such a job; he was finding it hard to settle down in Ireland, and the book he was trying to write was not going well. This was the first I had heard about another book and I asked her for details. She said it was a book about the Far East—one he had long projected—something rather scholarly and definitive. She had been urging him to use up his time that way ever since he came home, and surely conditions in Ireland were ideal for authorship—a quiet place in the country, nothing else to do, and ample money to live on. “Really,” she added, “he’s quite well off—there’s no reason why he should worry about a career, or about writing books either, so far as that goes. The whole Kemalpan business wouldn’t matter if only he didn’t think it mattered.”

“Perhaps, though, the relatives of the people who were killed there might still think it mattered.”

“Oh,
them.
I wasn’t thinking about
them.
”

And she wasn’t. She was just thinking of herself and Jeffrey. That seemed to close the argument quite finally. I got up and made it clear that there was nothing more I could say or do.

During the next few weeks I found myself wondering even more compellingly about the Winslows. First,
he
had interested me, then she; but now my interest in each of them separately was more than redoubled in them both. What went on between such a pair? What sort of thing was their life together? If she had been lying on his behalf, it was possible that the appalling selfishness of her argument might not have been sincere. Or had she been telling the truth, as to both fact and attitude? To summarize it another way: if she were a liar, one liked her better and her husband less; but if she were not a liar, one disliked her intensely and felt sympathy for her husband. And I still could not properly make up my mind. I have rarely been so puzzled about anything. Then suddenly more evidence filtered through—I needn’t go into details, but it was a kind that weighed down one of the scales pretty conclusively. She
had
told the truth. She
had
intercepted the message. Which meant that Jeffrey himself was neither a liar nor a coward, but at worst a victim. The revelation swung me into a mood in which I recollected our meeting and how much, from first appearance, I had liked him. I remembered his quietness, his austere dignity, the simple unassumingness which, I knew, concealed a mind whose quality had been demonstrated. So on impulse I wrote him a friendly letter, saying nothing much except that I hoped he was getting on all right and that if he ever visited London he might find time to have lunch with me. To my surprise he answered by return and took the invitation with far more seriousness than I should have thought. He would have been so glad, he said, to come to London and see me (I hadn’t suggested that, by any means), but he was not very well and couldn’t get away…would I, however, visit him in Ireland—stay a week or two—there was good shooting, fishing, climbing, if that sort of thing appealed to me? He would be very happy, and please make it soon, because the late summer (and it was then August) was perhaps the best time of the year at Carrigole.

It happened that I had not had a holiday that year, and though the idea of visiting the Winslows seemed quite fantastic at first, I soon found myself thinking of reasons why I might take Jeffrey at his word. After all, I liked him; it might even be that if he were feeling low-spirited I could help him by talk and companionship. But I will not disguise that my overmastering motive was sheer curiosity. I wanted to find out what sort of people they both were, in their own home and with their own domestic problems. And at least it could do no harm to call on them if I happened to be holiday-making thereabouts.

So I looked up Carrigole on the map and found it was a dozen miles from Galway—a small place, not very accessible, in a district of lakes and mountains. And that’s why I asked you, Boswell, if you ever knew the Winslows in Ireland, because I should have liked your opinion of Carrigole.

It began to rain when I first came within sight of it. I had hired a car for the last stage of the trip and all the way I felt oddly excited about getting there. Actually I had never been in Ireland before, and crossing the country from Dublin it had occurred to me that even the trains were antique—and not contemptibly, as on so many out-dated railways all over the world, but honorably, with dignity, like good sound Victorian mahogany furniture. And when, at Galway, my train reached its destination, there was again the contrast with other railheads I had seen; for here was no mere petering out into obscurity, but a grand finale in stone—the massive quayside station, far too large and almost as quiet as a cathedral, shaking a granite fist into the sea.

But my first glimpse of Carrigole was equally memorable—or perhaps the mood I was in gave me extra percipience—a kind of mystic awareness I am naturally distrustful of, but can’t deny exists, at certain rare times and places. I knew Ireland was supposed to be like that, and therefore I was perversely surprised to find it so. Through the rainswept windows of the car I saw blue smoke drifting over the roofs of whitewashed cottages, and beyond them a mountain rising into clouds that totally covered the summit. I gathered, from the map on my knee, that this must be Slieve Baragh, not much higher than a hill, yet as I saw it then for the first time it seemed in another world of measurement. Presently the car slowed down for the village, and here the swollen clouds dipped lower, bringing no raindrops but emptying silently; Slieve Baragh was now hidden behind a curtain that suggested Himalayan heights—and yet, I remembered again, it was not much of a mountain—a mere two thousand feet. I couldn’t help making other mental notes of the near and the practical—the uneven walls and mud-brown pavements, the butcher who called himself a “flesher” and the chemist’s shop magnificently styled a “Medical Hall.” I wound down the side window to catch the whiff of peat on the wet breeze as the car bumped over a bridge across a river—only a minor river, like the minor mountain, but turbulent now as it filled almost directly from the sky.

A mile or so past the village the Winslows’ house stood behind a drenched garden, and Jeffrey was waiting at the gate in the rain. He looked pale and worn, and there was intense nervousness in the way he greeted me.

I ought to describe the house; it was substantially built, thick-walled and small-windowed, in a style conditioned by roaring Atlantic gales for half the year, and political troubles for half a century. These indeed had left the house, with its most conspicuous attribute—a large, burnt-out wing, blackened and roofless, which provided a ready topic of conversation. “They tried to burn the whole place down in ’twenty-two,” Jeffrey explained. “Livy got it cheap because it hadn’t been lived in since then and needed so much repairing, but part of it’s beyond repair—it would be too large for us, anyway. We have a couple of servants and the boy when he’s home from school—that only makes five…”