Contango (Ill Wind) (30 page)

As she arranged the towels on his wash-hand stand he went on:
“It’s lucky, anyhow, that I have no personal dependents.”
Her eyes strayed for an instant and he was quick to see and interpret the
glance. “Oh, you’ve noticed the photograph? That’s my
mother. She died ten years ago, in one of the influenza epidemics.”

It had been little use snubbing him after all, she reflected later, during
the long hours of waiting in the corridor. But his talk of assassination had
curiously impressed her; and when, on the following morning, she looked out
of one of the second-floor windows and saw him drive off in his car to the
Conference, she had half-thoughts that she would never see him again. And,
rather oddly, just about the middle of the morning there was great excitement
among a group of waiters and chambermaids on one of the landings, and when
she approached them she was sure they were going to tell her that the
occupant of Number Two-five-seven had been killed. But it was only some
business about a Spanish lottery in which one of the waiters thought he held
a winning ticket.

In the evening when she entered Tribourov’s room he was writing at
the small table under the window.

She performed her various duties as quietly and quickly as possible and
was about to go away when he swung round and called out: “Hi, just a
minute!”

She stopped, with her hand on the door-knob.

“Don’t be in such a hurry to go. I want to ask you something.
Close the door again.”

She did so, and moved a few paces across the room towards him. He lit a
cigarette and grinned that rather chubby, babyish smile. “Look here…
when you came in just now, I caught sight of your face in the mirror, and
your look said: ‘Oh, so he’s still alive.’ Yet you
didn’t say anything. Don’t you ever speak your mind?”

She said, after a pause: “I didn’t wish to interrupt you in
your work.”

“Or to be interrupted in yours, either, no doubt. You’re not
very encouraging. By the way, we must introduce ourselves. My name’s
Tribourov, as perhaps you already know.”

“Courvier is mine,” she answered, reluctantly but
inevitably.

“Courvier? That’s French?”

“Yes.”

“Yet you speak German perfectly? You’ll forgive my remarking
that you aren’t quite the usual type of person in this kind of
job.”

“I—I don’t know.”

He laughed his deep, booming laugh. “Well, I do know. And I should
say, too, that you’ve had a good education…. All this is leading
somewhere, I assure you—it isn’t just inquisitiveness on my
part. The fact is, I was talking to our local trade representative this
morning—he wants someone in his office with a thorough knowledge of
German. So you see… it just occurred to me that the job might suit you
better than this.”

She stared at him in half-stupefied astonishment; it was the last thing
she had ever expected, and the irony probed till she hardly knew whether she
were feeling pleasure or pain, or being merely goaded to hysteria.

“It’s very kind of you,” she managed to say at length.
Just for a wild second she had the idea of telling him who she was, of making
some kind of scene which would mean her leaving the hotel immediately. That
she, of all persons, should be offered a post under the Soviets! That she
should draw, as wages, a paltry fraction of the money that had been stolen
from her! And yet, so complicated was life, here was this man contriving such
a bitter jest out of what could only be pure kindliness of heart. She was
angry, touched, and out of her depth in a sea of unfamiliar emotions; so that
suddenly, standing there before him, she began to cry. She had rather thought
that nothing more could ever make her do that. He sprang out of his chair at
once and put his arm about her comfortingly, which made her cry all the more.
“Now, now,” he kept saying, gruffly. “Don’t do that,
don’t do that.” And again he performed that characteristic
movement of throwing away the half-smoked cigarette.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as soon as she could speak.

“Sorry? Oh, no, no, don’t say that. It’s all right. You
mustn’t upset yourself. As for the job, just think it over and let me
know by the end of the week. No—don’t talk about it
now—there’ll be plenty of time later on. Sit here a moment and
let me show you something. These have just arrived from Moscow. They’re
photographs of a huge technical college that’s nearly finished. Tell
me, have you ever seen anything like it anywhere else?”

He was talking with a new eagerness, partly, she guessed, to fix her
attention while she regained control of herself; but also with a personal
enthusiasm that was obviously real. And here she was, again in this world of
irony, admiring the vistas of class-rooms, and the palatial open-air
terraces, as he described them to her in such exultant detail. “This is
going to be the finest technical college in the world. It’s built on a
site that used to be crowded with slums, and its entire yearly upkeep
won’t be as much as the rents that used to be paid to the
slum-landlords. Perhaps you are interested in housing, by the way? I have
some rather wonderful pictures of the new workmen’s flats we’re
building—let me show you—”

But at that moment she heard the distant tinkle of one of her bells.
“I must go,” she cried, getting up. “Someone has rung for
me. Thank you—”

“Not at all. We must have another talk.”

But as soon as she was outside in the corridor she vowed that there should
never be another talk. She was disturbed in mind as she had not been for
years; all the emotions that she had buried deeply were raw and uncovered by
such an encounter. She could not sleep that night, and the next day, when it
came near her time for going on duty in the afternoon, she found herself in
positive fear of that likely meeting with him again. Panic-stricken, she
sought M. Capel and asked if she could be transferred to another floor. He
was furious and refused to consider such a change; in that case, she said,
she would have to leave, because the work was too hard in the rooms that had
no running water. She had to think of some reason to give him. At this,
however, he offered her a job in the hotel laundry, at a lower wage; which
she accepted, on condition that she could go to it immediately.

She felt out of a great danger when she had moved over. It was harder
work, if anything, but at least it protected her from Tribourov. That,
indeed, was the pitch to which she had been driven. She was fast becoming
completely obsessed with the man. She seemed to find his name in every
newspaper; that eager, apple-red face haunted her as soon as she closed her
eyes. He represented, in her mind, all that she most passionately hated; yet
the torture was in thinking of him also in a different way, as someone who
had been kind to her. It upset all the neatly docketed past, the almost
comfortable loathings and detestations that had held up the fabric of a
decade’s exile. But the worst was over now, she felt; and if she did
not see him again, the fire would doubtless die down after a while and leave
her as before.

Then one morning, several days after she had begun her new work, Capel
sent her a message that “M. Tribourov, the gentleman in Number Two-
fiveseven,” would like to speak to her, and would she call on him in
his room shortly before dinner that evening? She returned no answer, but
registered a firm decision not to go. Yet throughout the day a storm of
uncertainty raged behind the outward mind that she had made up; there was a
wavering of the body that had no connection with head or brain. At six, when
the day’s work ended, she went to her attic bedroom and changed, as
usual, into off-duty clothes. All the time she was doing this, she knew
subconsciously that she was going to see Tribourov, though she still urged
herself otherwise. At a quarter to seven she went to his room and knocked at
the door. “Entrez,” she heard him call out, in his shamelessly
bad accent.

She went in. He was reading a newspaper and, as he saw her, flung the
sheets aside with that familiar wave of the arm and rose to his feet. His
voice, his movements, his round and smiling face—how well-known they
appeared, after such small acquaintance with them; her heart ticked them off,
as it were, while she sank into the instant comfort of his presence.
Recognising in that a new sensation, she was amazed to think what it
proved—that she had actually been wanting and longing to see him.

“So you’ve come…” he began, striding towards her.
“What on earth possessed you to… run away… like that…?” His
words slowed down as if they had been braked by something in her eyes; for
the first time she was returning his glance with a full one of her own. Then
they moved to each other, in a curious, stumbling way. He asked her name.
“Your first name, I mean. WHAT? PAULA?”

“I don’t know yours,” she whispered, losing the last
ache of mind and body in his caresses.

“PAUL.” He shouted the word as if it were a command to an
army. “That’s funny, isn’t it?… But, Paula, why on
earth… Capel, you know, told me about it….”

“I didn’t want to see you again—that was
why.”

“THAT was why, eh?” He began to laugh. “Well, why
THAT?”

“Why anything? Why did you ask me here just now? Why did I come? Why
did you ever talk to me, take any interest in me at all? Why couldn’t
we leave each other alone?”

He answered, more seriously: “Perhaps because we’re flesh and
blood in this city of desiccated lawgivers. For my part, after I’ve
heard my speeches translated three times—first into French, then into
English, then into German—I feel… but no, don’t let me talk
about it. It’s extraordinary, Paula—this—you, I mean. I
was attracted from the beginning, but I had no idea… and I didn’t
care to…”

She interrupted, half-hysterically: “I know. You mean that
you’re not the type that goes about seducing chambermaids in hotels.
You’re a good man. A good Bolshevik.” She laughed. “But is
it such a laughing matter, I wonder?”

He kissed her again, more gently, soothingly, as if aware that she was on
the verge of complete emotional collapse. “Let’s go out,”
he said, abruptly. “We’ll drive somewhere. Will you come with me?
PLEASE, Paula….”

She nodded, every nerve endorsing the decision.

She met him by arrangement half an hour later, at a spot nearer the
outskirts of the city; he was alone, muffled up, in a big open Mercedes
touring- car. “Jump in,” he cried, with the excitement of a boy
setting out for a picnic. “I had a job to persuade my bodyguard not to
follow, but I guess they’ll have a fine chase if they try to.”
She clambered in and sat beside him.

Her whole being responded to that drive in the starlight. It was as if for
years certain of her nerves and muscles had been tightly clenched, and were
now moving with painful, exquisite stiffness into freedom. The sensation of
speed, of roadway and bright lights slipping past, the softness of the fur
rug drawn up over her knees, the blue-black dimness of hill and
mountain—all were as candles lighting up the various caverns of
memory. Yet memory was endurable because, for the first time in all her
womanhood, it was balanced by anticipation; they would go somewhere inland to
dine, he had suggested, and those few minutes and hours of the future were
enough to turn the scale.

He drove very fast, without talking much; and she sensed, as he sat close
and silent, the deep personal power of the man. He was dynamic; he forged
ahead, as he was making the car forge ahead now; he drove with zest, but had
never less than complete control. His eyes, slate-blue and gentle, scattered
a swift, ruthless benignity over the world. She felt that he could look at
death, his own or another’s, without a qualm; that he could order an
execution, perhaps, with no more emotion than he would soon be ordering
dinner. It was something to have wrung from such a man the confession that he
had been attracted. Only of course, she hadn’t wrung it; he had given
it freely, almost casually. She felt that though he had been concerned enough
to worry Capel about her, there were strict limits beyond which he would not
advance an inch unless she were there to meet him. How enviable to be so
calm, so assured, so blandly economical of one’s desires! And with what
mountainous simplicity he had indicated, in not quite so many words, that he
hadn’t realised she was the kind of woman who would let herself be
petted! The recollection of it made her feel at once ashamed and passionately
shameless….

She had no idea where they were driving, and did not recognise the
quaintly-built upland village at which they stopped. Some kind of fair or
festival was in progress, and the hotel was crowded with revellers drinking
and celebrating. Not the Conference, however; it was a relief to have escaped
from the atmosphere of that. A youth with a mandolin was playing and singing
one of those shrill, lilting tunes that had innumerable verses known to his
audience; through occasional gaps in the din a loud-speaker shouted from
Radio-Toulouse. The proprietor, even amidst the press of business, was not
disposed to turn away two chance visitors in such an opulent-looking car. He
rose to the situation gallantly and supplied an excellent dinner on a
first-floor terrace that was a bower of pink geraniums tinted more deeply in
the matching shade of the table-lamp.

Tribourov waved aside the proprietor’s apologies for the noise
downstairs. “I like it,” he exclaimed, with deep gusto, and went
on to explain further; but as the man quite obviously could not understand
his stilted French, he turned to Paula and cried: “Tell him I like it
because I like real people—tell him that after a week at the
Conference—no, no, better not mention that—but tell him why I
like it—you know what I mean.”

Afterwards he went on: “These people shouting and singing make me
feel as I do when I’m in Russia—living a life, not just acting
in some rather bad charades. People—just ordinary people all the world
over—always make me feel like that. How fine they are compared with
the humbugs that govern them! Paula, to be here, with you, and amongst all
this noise, is like returning to some sort of sanity. All week I’ve
felt like a rude boy in front of a lot of weary schoolmasters. So weary, they
are—so wearily scornful of what they haven’t the faith to
believe in or the energy to hate. They haven’t even the energy to hate
me.”