Contango (Ill Wind) (14 page)

It was at the same party that a very gushing lady asked him: “Oh,
yer Highness, would you ever be willing to marry morganatically?”
Instantly, with a little bow across the table to her, he replied:
“Certainly, madam—and Pierpont Morganatically too, if I
could.”

Afterwards, when the guests had gone, Sylvia congratulated him on a
witticism which would doubtless go the usual rounds. He smiled and answered:
“But what on earth made you say that you didn’t believe I was a
prince at all?”

“Merely an insurance premium, Nicky. If anyone finds you out, or if
you leave me and I have to get my own back, I shall then be able to call
witnesses that I suspected you all along.”

“Clever of you, Sylvia.”

“Not so very—only just a bit wise. Fetch me a drink.
I’m tired.”

He could, in addition to his numerous other accomplishments, invent and
mix the most satisfying potions. She looked at him over the rim of the glass
a moment later and was rather startled to reflect how well they were getting
on together. She had so few illusions about him, or about anyone, for that
matter. She knew that sooner or later some inquisitive person would look up
the Almanach de Gotha or something and find out the fiction of his ancestry;
indeed, she was a little surprised that such a thing hadn’t happened
already. Still, it was being good publicity while it lasted, and it would do
her no harm, provided she wouldn’t be left to look a fool. And apart
from his status, he was no doubt worth his wages. His company was amusing and
his talents were useful; and her own experience of three husbands had
disposed her to think that that was higher praise than could be accorded most
men.

Once, sitting at her feet in the bright starshine of her balcony, with the
beat of the Pacific surf a murmur far below, he gave her a long account of
the circumstances that had led to his coming to America. “You see, I
was in Russia doing business for my uncle, who was head of a firm of
engineers in Bukarest. In Moscow I met a young engineer who was dying; he
gave me plans of an aeroplane invention of his; he wanted me to take them out
of the country, because otherwise the Soviet people would get hold of them
and pay nothing at all. I said I would, and I took them first of all to
Germany, where I actually studied aeronautics to make myself understand the
business. It was a method of landing from an aeroplane in flight—a
sort of torpedo that you climbed into and steered down to the ground. Mighty
risky, I thought, but I was hard up, and it looked as if there were just a
chance of making some money out of it.”

“But of course,” she interrupted, “nobody was such a
fool as to give you any.”

He laughed. “That’s just where you’re wrong, Sylvia. A
good many weren’t, but in the end I sold it to three Englishmen. I met
the first of them, rather a nice chap, in a train in France, and when he got
to England he must have told two of his friends. One was quite a big
gun—knight or baronet or some kind of title. He was a keen business
man all right—his keenness nearly killed me, in fact. He had me make a
model of the thing and try it out myself from an aeroplane. It came down
head- foremost into some mud, and that was nearly the end of me.”

“But, my dear Nicky, why ever did you let yourself do it? Surely it
wasn’t worth risking your life for?”

“No, I suppose not, but, to tell you the truth, I got so interested
in it I almost believed in it myself by that time. You see, I’d posed
as the inventor, and in the end I think I must have come to feel as an
inventor does feel—rather proud, you know, and confident…. Do you
understand?”

“It would be too much of an effort to try. But go on. What did the
Englishmen say when you were nearly killed?”

“They took me out to dinner and said quite a lot—too much,
indeed, if they’d only known. For I could see that although they talked
of the thing as a failure, they were really quite keen on having it. Heaven
knows why, but, naturally, I wasn’t going to object. They offered me
five hundred pounds, after a lot of chatter—if there hadn’t been
that, I might have accepted it. As it was, I bluffed hard and asked for ten
thousand. We came to terms at last just a little bit more than half-way. Then
I packed up and came over here.”

“On the proceeds of selling a dud invention to three keen business
men? You’re a genius, Nicky. Have you still got the money?”

“I lost half of it right away on Wall Street.”

“Not such a genius, then, after all. No cleverer than the rest of
us, in fact.”

“Oh, but it won’t happen again like that. One can do anything
once—there’s no blame in a first time. But if one does anything
more than once, then in my opinion it ought to be the devil of a fine thing
to do.”

“How old are you, Nicky?”

“Twenty.”

“Of course I don’t believe you.” She began to laugh.
“I don’t really believe anything you’ve been saying. Well,
perhaps not more than half, anyhow. You’re such an extraordinary
liar.”

“Do you mind?”

“Not a bit. So long as you continue to be so much more agreeable
than most people who tell the truth, I don’t care.”

“What DO you care about?”

“Not very much.”

“I thought not,” he answered meditatively. “Very
sensible, no doubt, but I wonder if it’s altogether the right attitude
for you? I went to see your last picture the other day and I wondered what it
was that just missed fire. Now I know…. Sylvia Seydel with the
million-dollar smile and the don’t-care eyes.”

“If you’re suggesting that for a publicity slogan, I’ll
consider it. And what is caring, anyway?”

“I should say it’s a sort of general excitement that helps one
to see and hear, not only with the eyes and ears, but with the solar plexus
as well. This view—the sea down there—the eucalyptus
woods—those yellow cactus flowers in the moonlight—don’t
you feel it just a little bit in your tummy?
I
do.”

“Funny creature you are, Nicky!” she cried, laughing at him;
and then added, with a sudden change of voice: “As a matter of fact,
I’m tired of it all—it is wonderful, I know, but I’ve seen
it for years and years, and it’s done nothing but just go on being
wonderful. You forget that I’m thirty, not twenty—I want more
than views and moonlight.” She checked herself and went on, forcing
herself to laugh again: “At present, for instance, I want a drink. Do
go and get me one, or I shall howl.”

The truth was, she had begun to be really worried about her future. In a
sense, of course, she had nothing much to worry about; she was one of the
half- dozen best-known stars in the world; her name was almost a household
word; and she was worth at least a million dollars, even after all possible
losses on stocks. She could retire in six weeks’ time, when her
contract expired, and spend the rest of her life in luxurious comfort at Palm
Beach or on the French Riviera; nor, if she did, would her name fade
completely from the public memory. She was on the edge of history; she would
never cease to be—“Sylvia Seydel—don’t you
remember?—the girl who was in ‘Home from the Sea’ and
’Fidelity’.” From the difficult peak of her profession she
could look back upon twelve years of such protracted girlhood—ever
since, in her late teens, she had run away from a department store in
Philadelphia. She had fought her early battles in that rough-and-tumble age
before the cinema began to give itself airs and a Chaplin premičre became an
international event; she had known Hollywood as a small colony less than a
quarter its present size; she remembered when cultured people still felt they
had to excuse themselves for being seen at the movies. How people would laugh
now, if “Fidelity” were to be revived—the picture which,
in its day, had broken every record and had made Sylvia’s the second
best-known smile in the world! And compare the crude obviousness of
“Home from the Sea” with the sophisticated wit and polished
intricacy of “Her Husband’s Wife”! Marvellous advance in
less than a decade; and yet, looking back, she could not but feel a halcyon,
garden- of-Eden quality in those pioneer days. Silent films, then, of course;
which, by an odd paradox, gave her memories principally of noise—of
producers yelling through megaphones, of creaking floors and clattering
scenery; you could laugh, whistle, sneeze, or cough without anyone bothering;
there seemed, in retrospect, a gloriously impromptu freshness about it all.
And then those mornings setting out at dawn on location work, the whole
company in open cars like an enormous picnic party; driving forty or fifty
miles into the San Jacinto mountains; grape-fruit and coffee under the trees
in some lonely sunburnt valley; then the job of the day, which usually
involved sheriffs, horses, revolver-shooting, and kisses in almost equal
proportions. And lastly the drive home in the evening, under the big
Californian moon, tired and hungry, with everyone laughing and telling yarns.
…

But now the skyscraper offices of the film companies soared upwards to
tell the world that the cinema was no longer an amusement for children.
Aesthetic Germans and Russians swarmed everywhere with their chatter of
“montage” and “values”; camera-men no longer had
Bowery accents and chewed cigars; the vast studios, with their time-clocks
and their silence rules, were the churches of a new and colder ritual. Not
that Sylvia particularly disliked the talkies. Her voice and accent were
acceptable, and she had accommodated herself well enough to the change-over.
Her feeling was vaguer than dislike, but also less conquerable—a
regret for times that were gone, for triumphs hardly to be repeated.

She felt sometimes, too, that she had had her day and might better
abdicate with dignity than be pushed eventually from the throne. The younger
stars, brought up in the talky tradition, already counted her a back number;
and the more famous producers evidently did not consider her worth their
attention. That was partly the trouble with her last picture; nobody had
really believed in it, neither the Vox people nor herself. It has been made
because she was under contract, and because the name “Sylvia
Seydel” still had immense drawing power, not because anyone had been
terribly interested in the job itself. It piqued her a little to find that
Nicky had diagnosed the deficiency so promptly.

Well, should she yield her position while the manoeuvre could still be
performed with grace? Twelve years was a long span; she had done her
lifework, or served her life-sentence, whichever way one chose to look at it.
She could leave the future to those who were better equipped to deal with
it—a future, incidentally, which she need hardly envy them. She did
not particularly study affairs, but she was dimly aware that she had sailed
to fortune on the crest of a wave, and that her successors must make what
they could out of the slough. In her private mind she felt quite certain that
when she met the Vox people after the expiry of her present contract they
would agree to a renewal only at a very much lower figure. She knew it, and
was in a way reconciled; yet she knew also that the blow, when it fell, would
come crushingly and with a revelation of failure. Yet it could be
forestalled, if she chose, by an announcement of her impending retirement.
Then there would be farewell parties, speeches in her honour, a last blaze of
publicity throughout the world, and for ever afterwards—not quite
oblivion.

All this was in her mind one evening when she and Nicky went to a Chinese
party at the Statlers. Statler owned an oil-field and was married to a pretty
Chicagoan who had but recently been a student at Berkeley; there was
something odd, but not wholly unattractive, in the relationship between the
rough, almost illiterate man of fifty and the cultured girl in her very early
twenties. She had sold herself to him, no doubt; but then, too, there was a
sense in which he had also sold himself to her. He was childishly devoted,
rather like a fierce wolf-hound that she had tamed; it was amusing to watch
him going round saying “Howdy” to all her exquisite friends.
Sylvia rather liked him, and was by no means put out by his occasionally
Rabelaisian humours.

The Statler home had a fantastically lovely garden-roof overlooking the
sea, and here, since the night was warm and there was a bright moon, the
party took place. Sylvia was a Manchu princess, Nicky a mandarin—not
especially original of either of them, but their costumes and looks made them
conspicuous even in a gathering where wealth and beauty were flaunted rather
than displayed. Statler had been a “bear” operator on Wall Street
since the autumn of 1929, and was reputed to have made himself a
multimillionaire out of the slump; certainly when his wife gave a party his
cheque-book was always opened wide beforehand. All the servants were genuine
Chinese, and padded round, as dusk fell, lighting real Chinese lanterns;
there was an authentic Chinese musician with his yueh-chin, or moon guitar,
plucking notes that seemed to dissolve into the air as they were sounded; and
another marvellously-gowned fellow with a drum on which the painted dragons
looked actually writhing, so strange was the compulsion of movement and
rhythm. Heaven knew where all these persons and properties had been
obtained—or, rather, Statler’s bankers knew. And there was, to
Sylvia, a curious feeling of unreality and impermanence about it all,
symbolised by that roof-top islanded above the sea and shore. As the lanterns
swayed in the breeze, and the surf-smell rose to mingle with that of
sandalwood incense, she felt suddenly that the whole artifice of the scene,
with all its beauty, was but a flower of catastrophe; that Statler, standing
a little apart from his guests, was the chance beneficiary of some vast and
nearly universal doom. She saw behind the flickering coloured globes and the
laughing couples the darker pageant of headline news—ruined homes and
bankrupt farms, closed factories, bread lines, apple-sellers on the Fifth
Avenue kerb. The vision was partly born of her own big losses. Two million
dollars altogether, she reckoned; it had all gone somewhere, perhaps into an
abyss from which Statler and his kind had had the magic knack of rescue. It
half-amused her to think of him as the man who had somehow taken her money.
He was standing near the guitar-player, slightly absurd in a presumably
military uniform, and gazing down at the musician with a simplicity nearly as
inscrutable as the Oriental’s. She went over to him and chatted for a
time; he had a rather pathetic air of being honoured by her attention, and
she felt comfortingly that at least he belonged to the generation for whom
Sylvia Seydel was still the greatest name on the screen.