Contango (Ill Wind) (34 page)

Hartill considered. “On the whole, sir, I think if I were you
I’d take a chance of finishing the trip this way. If the trouble is
only what I think it is, I ought to be able to put it right quite
soon—especially if Mr. Jevons can give me a hand. And this is a good
place for taking off.”

“Of course I’ll help,” said Jevons. “But where are
we, anyhow?”

Hartill shook his head. “Couldn’t say, exactly. I’ve
been flying mostly by the compass, and in this misty kind of weather
it’s difficult to get one’s bearings. I should say somewhere
about the middle of England.”

Elliott said he would wait. He took off his flying-kit, lit a cigar, and
watched the preliminary activities of the others. After the roar of the
engines his ears were conscious of a peculiar, deep silence, a silence that
seemed alive in the earth. He walked round the machine in a wide circle,
scanning the horizon not very intently and filling the still air with the
aroma of his smoke. Probably, he reflected, someone had seen the descent, and
a farmer or farm-servant would be along soon. He would have to pay something
for the damage to the crops…. A rabbit loped across the corner of the
field, and he felt glad that he had decided not to look for a railway
station—much pleasanter to stay where he was and take the chance, as
Hartill had advised. The chance, yes—it was chance again. What
incalculable millions in odds, for instance, had lain against his ever seeing
this field and that rabbit. He went to the hedge and looked over, but the
view was only of another field and another hedge. He walked along by the side
of the barley till he came to a gate that had a smooth and gnarled top-bar,
as if it had served for decades of anonymous musings. He climbed up and
joined the invisible company, smoking in deep contentment. The silence and
sunshine and scents had all the vivid rapture of a dream-memory of boyhood,
so that when he asked the question “Where am I?” an answer seemed
necessary in time as well as space. But where, after all, WAS he? Hartill had
said “Somewhere about the middle of England,” but that scarcely
conveyed very much. He called out across the field: “I’m going
for a stroll to see if I can find out where we are,” and Jevons looked
up and shouted back: “All right, but don’t be too
long—Hartill says we’ll be ready in half an hour.”

Waving cheerfully to them both, Elliott clambered over into the next
field, walked across it, and then another field, till he came to a copse of
beech-trees bordering a lane. He wondered which way led to the nearest house.
It was a narrow lane, with cart-ruts marked here and there by motor-tyres,
and in both directions it curved to give no horizon but of hedges. But the
hedges were full of pink may-blossom, and Elliott thought it one of the
loveliest views he had ever seen. He turned to the right, half-facing the
sun, and began to walk on; after a few hundred yards the lane twisted again,
and he saw a signpost ahead. Ah, he thought, that would tell him everything;
and besides, someone would certainly pass by if he waited a few moments at a
cross-roads. He quickened his steps and soon perceived that it was a very old
sign-post, tipsily aslant, and with lettering so weather-worn that no passing
motorist could possibly have read it. Nor did it mark a cross-roads, but only
a junction of another lane that looked neither more nor less important. And
one of its arms had fallen off, while the remaining two pointed so vaguely
that their intentions were far from clear. Elliott could just decipher, on
one arm, “To Upeasy 1/2 m.,” and on the other, “To
Beachings Over 2 m.”

Of course he had never heard of either place. He could not even guess at
their county. But if Upeasy were only half a mile away, he wondered if he
might have time to walk there, make enquiries, and return. He stood on tiptoe
and looked over the hedge. A little way off he saw a round green rise, hardly
to be called a hill, with a tiny spire pricking gently into the blue. Upeasy,
that must be. It looked a long half-mile, even if the lane were not as
meandering as it promised to be; so perhaps he had better not set out to walk
there, after all.

A little girl with very bright golden hair came into view and gazed at him
timidly as she approached. He smiled and asked her several questions about
the locality, hoping to elicit the name of some neighbouring place that might
be known to him; but she was shy, or perhaps too young to understand; and all
he could obtain were repeated mentions of Upeasy, whither it appeared she was
on her way to school. Then he reflected that it would be quite simple to look
the matter up in some book of reference when he reached London, so he need
not bother any more. He smiled at the child again and gave her sixpence,
which she accepted very doubtfully, and then held tightly in her hand as she
scampered off along the lane. When she was nearly out of sight behind the
curve of the hedge she looked back, and Elliott waved his hand, but she took
no notice.

Suddenly, alone again, he was stirred by echoes of the words he had read
out at breakfast that morning, and as he glanced again at the names on the
signpost, he felt that all the glory of England lay in them, far more than in
palm and pine and the rest of the showy Kiplingerie of empire. And if, he
thought, England should some day perish, other countries might grow to be
stronger, wiser, or richer, but none would ever have the absurd and exquisite
tenderness of English villages, linked by the hedge-bordered lanes.

He looked at his watch—five to two. Perhaps he ought to be
strolling back. He put out his hand and touched the old wood of the signpost
as if to receive some mystic blessing in farewell; and the whimsical
remembrance came to him that his political opponents had sometimes called him
“a little Englander.” What a phrase—and how like England
to use her own name thus derisively! He spoke the words softly to himself as
he walked back along the lane—little England—LITTLE England….
Then, in a mood of strange enchantment, he vowed that he would never probe
the secret; the atlas should keep its trivial knowledge, while he himself
clung to Upeasy and Beachings Over as symbols of things not to be expressed
in any other words.

When he reached the field Jevons had been looking for him. “Oh,
there you are, sir. We wondered if you’d got lost. Everything’s
all right now. Did you find out where we are?”

“No,” answered Elliott. “I still haven’t the
slightest idea.”

“We haven’t seen a soul either. Dead-and-alive sort of place,
wherever it is.”

“Yes, it’s quiet enough,” Elliott said, happily
regarbing himself for the journey.

Just over an hour later, after a fast flight, the plane landed at Hendon.
He motored with Jevons to the Foreign Office immediately, buying on the way
the afternoon papers that were just on sale. They gave no news except what he
already knew, though they spun it out with an account of Tribourov’s
career and of similar outrages in the past.

Tommy Luttrell, one of the parliamentary undersecretaries, was waiting for
him in his private room. “Glad you could manage it, Elliott—the
Chief thought you ought to be on the spot. Rotten thing to have happened just
when the Conference looked like doing something.”

“It’s often the way,” said Elliott calmly. “Any
more news?”

“The woman’s dead, but there’s no further information
about Tribourov. The Russians are threatening to leave the
Conference.”

“Yes, one rather expected that.”

Luttrell nodded. “Little as I like them, I’m bound to admit
they have a case. It seems the dead woman was a Russian emigrée—
belonged to an aristocratic family in Tsarist days—and she’d got
herself into a job of chambermaid at the very hotel where Tribourov was
staying. Pretty slack on the part of the authorities, you know. You’d
have thought they’d have taken a few obvious precautions, especially as
they knew that threats had already been made against the fellow.”

“But she didn’t shoot him in the hotel, did she?”

“No. Might have done, I suppose, but probably she wanted
publicity—that kind of maniac is like that. It was in the corridors of
the Conference building, with scores of people looking on. Incidentally, she
was a French subject by marriage, which might have complicated matters if she
hadn’t had the tactfulness to die. There ought to be a message from
Walton soon about Tribourov—I should guess they’re probably
waiting for some report from the hospital—maybe after an
operation.”

“It’s a damnable sort of business, Luttrell.”

Luttrell answered, as befitted a younger man, in the younger idiom.
“Yes, perfectly bloody. Did you know him?”

“Not personally…. Of course, if the Russians do leave, everything
goes to pot.”

“Yes, looks like it.”

“I’d better see Lindley. Where is he?”

“Over the road, waiting for you.”

“Right, I’ll go along. You might stay here, Jevons, and
telephone Barrowby I shan’t be able to get to the dinner to-night.
Smooth him down if you can—he’ll be pretty sick about it. Tell
the broadcasting people too, and then wire Kennersley that I can’t be
back at Chilver for a few days. He’ll probably guess what’s
happened.”

“Very good, sir.”

An hour later Elliott left the house in Downing Street. He would have
liked a walk in the Park, but at that time of day there would be too many
there who recognised him, and he didn’t care for ostentatious shadowing
by detectives. He hailed a taxi and asked to be driven slowly round Hyde
Park, by the inner road; he wanted an hour or so alone to think over what the
P. M. had said. It had been disquieting, though not absolutely unexpected, to
learn of important forces in England opposed to the Conference, and ready to
welcome the Russian withdrawal, if it took place, as an excuse for British
withdrawal too. Lindley had mentioned the names of certain newspapers and big
industrialists. The position was complicated by the fact that at the moment
Elliott was technically a nobody; until East Northsex actually made him its
member he could neither speak in the House nor take part officially in
Cabinet councils. For six more days he would be thus muzzled, and during such
an interval much—too much—might happen.

Anyone who chanced to look into the cab as it skimmed past the crowds on
the sidewalks, would have seen an old man, white-haired and hatless, leaning
in a corner with his chin resting in the palm of one hand. A thoughtful,
perhaps slightly troubled attitude, and one that emphasised the years.
Sixty—spent in a struggle that was not yet over…. At fifteen, after
a grammar-school education, he had begun in the office of the Creeksend
Colliery; at twenty-five, Oxford, attained by means of mathematical
scholarships; at thirty, admittance to the Bar; from thirty to forty,
lawyering and political work; M.P., after five unsuccessful tries, at a
by-election in 1912; the War; the peace; but the struggle continued. There
had been nothing absolutely sensational in such a career—no Limehouse
or Sidney Street to tie a label on it. He doubted whether he could feel sure
of being mentioned in any history exam-paper of the year 2032. He was not
particularly modest, but he was far too self-critical to be conceited. On the
whole, he did not think his life could be counted a failure; he was certainly
not a Lloyd George or a Disraeli, but he was perhaps near the front of the
second rank. He had worked hard and had usually managed to do the jobs he had
tackled. He had kept himself free in thought, cautious in speech, and
practical in action. He had altered his opinions, not once, but constantly;
he had changed parties; he had been illogical and inconsistent, and had grown
used to being called, from right and left respectively, a woolly-headed
visionary and a hard-boiled legalist. Sincerely hating war, he got on rather
better with soldiers and sailors than, as a rule, with professional
pacifists; privately something of a sceptic, he nevertheless disliked
blasphemy and would always defend religion. In these and other ways he had
for three decades offered discrepancies of belief and behaviour which hostile
critics could and did denounce as hypocrisy, but which he himself knew to be
nothing of the sort. The fact was (as he often joked) he was English, and
therefore handicapped by race for the task of governing England—a
remark which he would amplify by claiming to be the only member of the
Cabinet who wasn’t wholly or partly Scottish, Irish, Welsh, or Jew.

But this Conference fretted him a little. It was, in a sense, the fruition
of the policy of reasonableness which he had always championed; it was an
attempt to find a common denominator in European politics that would attract,
not the visionary and the diehard, who must be left to cancel each other out,
but the vast body of experienced practical opinion in every country. And to
see it all jeopardised, at the last moment, by a bullet! He wished he had
gone out to the Conference himself, instead of Walton; Walton was a good
fellow, but not perhaps over-supple in an emergency. After a third circuit of
the Park he gave the driver the name of his club in Pall Mall, and on arrival
rang up the Office and spoke to Jevons. But there had been no more news.
“I’m dining here and will look in later on,” he said.

Petrie, who had the Colonies, was at the next table, and asked him how the
by-election was going. Then they discussed the Tribourov affair and politics
generally. Petrie said that any revolutionary government that had used the
weapon of assassination before its rise to power must expect the same weapon
to be turned against it afterwards; and Elliott agreed, but added that he
thought assassination all the more terrible because it was really so logical.
“If you believe quite passionately that a certain person is a social
menace, what more meritorious than to risk your life in ridding the world of
him? Perhaps the chief reason why we in England aren’t much given to
that sort of thing is that we don’t believe passionately enough. After
nearly a thousand years of nationhood, we’re sure enough of ourselves
to admit our own private doubts.”