Contango (Ill Wind) (25 page)

Russell’s turn now. “Don’t be too sure, though, that the
multitude is really taken in.”

“You think they see through it?” queried Mrs. Drinan, in her
brittle voice. “You really think they don’t believe all that they
read in Mr. Oetzler’s newspapers?”

Oetzler answered her mockery with an amused: “Good God, I hope they
don’t.”

Russell turned to him with a smile. “Probably people everywhere are
developing resistance to mass-suggestion—after all, even the stupidest
of us don’t rush to do all that the advertisements command us to. And I
rather suspect that this matter of organised optimism is a case in point….
You know, perhaps, that I’ve just come back from the wilds—after
twelve months away. Last night I went to a restaurant where there was a band
playing optimistic songs. All about shouting for happiness and putting your
troubles on the shelf—that sort of stuff. There was a pathos about it
in 1930, when people took it with a sort of half- prayerful
boisterousness—rather like a lot of drunks singing in a thunder-storm
to keep their courage up. By last year the pathos had turned to obvious
derision. But last night, mouthed by whispering baritones and crooning
tenors—”

“The Neo-Bantu castrati,” interjected Lanberger.

“—it all struck me as different again. The folks
weren’t cheered by it, they weren’t depressed by it, they
weren’t even cynical about it. They just carried on with their ordinary
business, which was eating and drinking and flirting, with no more attention
than if the words had been a funeral lament.”

Russell then resigned the ball to be tossed about by others. He was a man
of nearer sixty than fifty; grey-haired, short-bearded, and inclined to
mellow after a grim middle age and a somewhat riotous youth. He was fairly
well off, unmarried, and good company— circumstances which had enabled
Oetzler and himself to enjoy for years an acquaintanceship which, though it
hardly warmed into friendship, was yet unhampered by all the more fruitful
causes of estrangement. And, in a sense, one could not easily be a FRIEND of
Odo Russell. A wanderer, a woman-hater, a writer of unconventional
travel-books, and a man of intense physical courage, he had progressed beyond
mere disillusionment to a state at which he might have been called
unillusioned. It was magnificent, doubtless, but it was not lovable.

Oetzler leaned forward and spoke to him across Mrs. Drinan, who was
arguing vividly with someone at the other end of the table. “By the
way, Russell,” he said quietly, “while you were out there, did
you happen to hear anything of that fellow I wrote you about?”

Russell looked up. “The Russian youth? Yes. I found him.”

“He’s alive?”

“Oh, he’s alive all right.”

“Then he certainly ought to write to his sister in
Paris—she’s worried to death. I don’t particularly blame
him for letting me down if he found something better to do out
there—we’ve all got to look after ourselves—”

Russell interrupted: “It’s not quite so simple as all that,
unfortunately. In fact, it’s rather a long story, so that
perhaps—”

“Yes, you must tell me about it afterwards.”

The general conversation continued, and Oetzler pondered. So that Russian
fellow was alive? Oetzler was glad; he had quite liked him, though he had
never thought much of his art journalism. He remembered once, in a whimsical
mood, offering him a salary of a hundred dollars a week if he could explain,
simply and convincingly to the ordinary reader, just why a Botticelli was
better art than a magazine-advertisement of a Marmon straight-eight … and
he would have been worth the money, too, if he’d been able to do
it.

Oetzler had no further chance of speaking to Russell until later in the
evening, when all the others had gone except Lanberger, who was staying the
night. Then, as the three sat over the library fire with drinks and cigars,
he said, recollecting the matter: “So you found Mirsky, then, did
you?”

Russell gave a half-glance at Lanberger. “I did, but it’s a
complicated story, and—”

“So you said before, but that doesn’t matter. We can put you
up for the night, if you get too tired for the journey to your
hotel.”

“It’s also—in a way—rather confidential. I
don’t know if—”

Lanberger took the hint and rose at once, but Oetzler checked him.
“I think we can accept a pledge of secrecy, eh, Russell? That is, of
course, if you think it’s the sort of story that would interest a
novelist?”

“It might.”

“Well, go ahead.”

Russell took a sip of his drink, glanced for a moment at his two
listeners, and began. His voice was pleasant, he spoke with easy fluency, and
in conversation he had the same flair for words that had made his
travel-books very readable. “I got your letter addressed to San
Cristobal, Oetzler. And I must confess I was amused by your saying in it that
perhaps I could make enquiries because you’d looked up San Cristobal on
the map and had found that it was quite near Maramba. Well, I suppose it is
quite near, judged by your standards, which are doubtless those of a private
saloon-coach on the New York Central. As a matter of fact, the distance is
about a hundred and twenty miles. There’s no road between the two
places, no river, and not even a direct track. The trip has been done, at
various times, but it’s about as rare as a crossing of Arabia or Tibet.
That’s the sort of thing people don’t easily realise. Those
hundred and twenty miles are more of a separation than any mountain range or
ocean. They’re covered with forest, much of it dense and waterless in
the dry season, and they’re the haunt of a dreadful little pest called
the ihenna—a minute fly that can get through any mosquito-net and
through most sorts of clothing. There are also such minor inconveniences as
snakes, tigers, and native tribes who still use poisoned arrows. Finally
there’s no particular reason why anybody should ever want to get from
Maramba to San Cristobal. Maramba does all its trade with the south and east,
San Cristobal with the north and west— they’re in different
spheres altogether. That’s what puzzled me so much when you wrote that
the authorities in Maramba believed that Mirsky had crossed the river. I
couldn’t think what his reason might have been. It was the maddest
thing to do, and anyone in Maramba would have told him so. Two Canadians, by
the way, attempted the journey last year and were never heard of again. Their
bones are whitening somewhere in the forest, I suppose.”

“Probably, after the earthquake, the Maramba people weren’t
much interested in giving warnings,” put in Oetzler.

“Maybe that was it. Anyhow, as soon as I got your letter, I made a
few enquiries here and there—not really expecting to be told of
anything. I talked to innkeepers, traders and people who might have heard any
tales that were about. My own theory was that Mirsky had probably crossed the
river out of mere curiosity, and perhaps ridden a little way into the forest
and been killed somehow or other—there are a hundred ways of getting
killed in that sort of country, particularly for that sort of youth. You
didn’t give me much of a description of him, but he hardly seemed to me
the pioneering type.”

“Certainly not that, but he wasn’t a ninny, by any means, you
know. He was in the Russian Revolution—I think he fought in one or two
battles…. But go on—don’t let me interrupt.”

Russell drank again. “I may as well get to the point of the story
quickly. To my surprise, when I began to ask questions, I did hear, quite
soon, of a rumour circulated by some Indians who had been in the town lately.
They had mentioned a strange white man who was living in the middle of the
forest in a native hut, and I gathered that the affair had been discussed by
them as a sensation of some piquancy. That was just the vague impression I
got, mind you, hearing the story third-hand like that. Naturally I asked for
more details, but I only received doubtful replies, and it began to seem
unlikely that I could trace the thing any further. Then, altogether by
accident, I ran into a young fellow prospecting for the Standard Oil Company.
He was one of those keen, eager youths that represent the very best that
America has to offer the world—I don’t know how the company
finds them all—”

“Because it looks for them,” interposed Oetzler.
“Because it finds the men who can do a job and then gives them a job to
do. If the whole country were run half as well, we should be a good deal
better off.”

Russell nodded. “Yes, I daresay you’re right. I heard someone
once say that Standard Oil was one of the three most wonderful institutions
the world had ever known—the other two being the Papacy and the
pre-War German army. They also, by the way, are well represented in San
Cristobal. In fact, you won’t find any spot in the world where the
hardships are too much for that extraordinary trio—the Roman
missionary, the oil man, and the German ex-officer in search of a job.
They’re cells of faith, hope, and efficiency in places where everybody
else is sinking into a sort of sulky fatalism. Indeed, if our civilisation
does crash, as we were all talking about at dinner, I’ll even back the
triumvirate to build up another one…. However, that’s rather
wandering from the point. What I was about to say was that this youth, Dyson
by name, told me not only that he also had heard the rumour about the mystery
man, but that the chap was supposed to be camped out fairly close to where
the oil-men had lately been prospecting.”

“They hadn’t seen him?” queried Oetzler.

“They’d had something more important to do than look for him,
I should imagine. But the name of their place was Yacaiba, and that’s
where I set out for a few days afterwards.”

“I hope it didn’t upset your plans a lot?”

“I was interested. I didn’t mind. Yacaiba was a two
day’s journey away, travelling on mule-back. There’d been heavy
rains that had swollen the rivers, and what ought to have taken two days took
eleven. You’ll find the place marked on the Government large-scale maps
as if it were about the size of Denver, or Salt Lake City, but in reality
it’s a collection of adobe huts inhabited by less than a hundred
scrofulous Chiriqui Indians. Rather an extraordinary tribe, the Chiriquis, as
I’ll tell you later. I’m giving you these details so that
you’ll feel some meaning in those hundred and twenty miles between San
Cristobal and Maramba. Yacaiba is less than half-way and a little bit off the
straight line. Well, I got there and was hospitably entertained by some more
young fellows of the same type as Dyson—they were terribly busy, and
hadn’t come across the oil they were looking for, so I didn’t
bother them much with my questions. All they could say was that the Indians
talked of a gringo living somewhere in the jungle with one of their own
women.”

“Good God!” exclaimed Oetzler.

Russell smiled. “Yes, that’s where you home-bred Americans
prick up your ears. You’ve all got an anti-miscegenation complex. Six
months in parts of South America would do you good—you’d find
that the mating of white and native races isn’t thought of everywhere
as it is in Tennessee and Alabama. Whole nations south of the Canal have been
reared out of the first intermixtures of Spaniard and native Indian, and in
Bolivia the half-breeds, the cholos, are in some respects the most promising
stocks. So don’t think that the mere notion of a white man and an
Indian woman was likely to shock anybody in Yacaiba.”

“We’re too squeamish, I admit,” said Lanberger. “I
wonder if we oughn’t to look to complete world-freedom in intermarriage
as an ideal? It will probably come, when the European stocks have been
overthrown from their quite temporary domination. After all, modern transport
is making the world so small that this rigid and continuous in- breeding of
the white races is almost beginning to look incestuous.”

Oetzler said curtly: “I don’t like half-breeds.”

“My dear fellow, I don’t myself particularly care for Poles
and Lithuanians and Greeks, but I’m bound to confess that the whole
gigantic mix-up of Teuton, Latin, Slav and Semite has given America its new
note of vitality in the world. Why, then, must we suppose that a further
admixture of Chink and Jap, or even pure nigger, wouldn’t add to the
newness and the vitality?… But I don’t want to hold up the
story.”

“I’d got to Yacaiba, hadn’t I?” Russell continued.
“Well, there was an Indian there who thought he knew where we could
find the happy couple, so I engaged him as a guide and we set out into the
forests. He said we’d be riding for a day, but once again calculations
went all wrong; it took four days. And I’ll say this, having had three
nights in it, that I consider that forest one of the most hellish things
I’ve ever struck. Let me compare my own situation then with what must
have been Mirsky’s when he entered from the other end. He was alone; I
had an Indian who was supposed to know the place. He had no experience of
pioneer hardships; I’ve had forty years of them. He was setting out to
do over a hundred miles; my trip was less than thirty. He had a horse (so the
Maramba people said, didn’t they?); I was on a mule, which is a much
more reliable animal in such conditions. Also, he was new blood to all the
insects; I’ve been so well inoculated that I’ve sometimes
imagined that the brutes see me coming and deliberately keep off. On the
whole, I’m glad I had those days and nights in the forest. They helped
me to understand the sort of thing that he must have gone through before he
was found.”

“Ah,” said Oetzler. “He was found, then.”

“Yes, but I seem to be getting a bit ahead with my story. On the
fourth day we came to a few native huts by the side of a stream. The village,
or whatever it deserves to be called, was completely empty, and the reason
was obvious—the stream had recently overflowed and washed out the
inhabitants. But about a mile away, on higher ground, surrounded by a small
clearing which was in turn surrounded by the forest, there was this
interesting ménage in full swing.”