Contango (Ill Wind) (9 page)

His fluency suggested that the specifications had grown familiar to him by
repetition, and Brown smilingly interrupted: “What I should like to
know is the degree of skill required in the person doing this steering
job?”

“No more than in driving a car.”

“Some of us prefer a chauffeur, even for that.”

Palescu shrugged his shoulders. “Ah, but the modern
man—”

“You think he’s likely to take kindly to your aluminium cigar,
eh? I doubt it. Personally, I’d rather lose half an hour and get
carried on to Le Bourget, or wherever it is—assuming I were compelled
to go up in the air at all.”

“Nevertheless, sir, I believe it would revolutionise air-travel. I
estimate that if a gyrector were released from an aeroplane over Croydon, it
could land on any fairly large London roof within ten minutes.”

“Really?” Brown proffered his gold cigarette-case and then a
match. He was, in a sort of way, enjoying himself. How infinitely charming
was this spectacle of youthful ambition, and what a tender cruelty there was
in deflating it! “How would the poor fellow inside be spending his time
during those ten minutes?” he continued, banteringly. “Would he
be sitting or standing or what? Kneeling, of course, would be most
appropriate.”

“He would be lying comfortably face forwards—”

“On his stomach? I wouldn’t call that comfortable. Besides, it
would crease all his clothes. You can’t seriously expect any man over
fifty to want to do gymnastic exercises in mid-air. Would he be able to see
anything?”

“Oh, yes. He’d have to see in order to steer.”

“Ah, I’d forgotten those gyroscopic controls you mentioned.
And also the little two-stroke engine puffing away at his heels. He
couldn’t smoke, I suppose?”

“I’m afraid not. Though no doubt—”

“You might add a special smoking compartment later on,
perhaps?” Brown began to chuckle, and was pleased when Palescu joined
in the laugh against himself. “I don’t think you’re taking
me very seriously, sir,” said the latter.

“Well, well, my dear boy, you mustn’t mind if I concentrate on
a few flaws in your otherwise brilliant idea. And this estimate of yours,
about landing on a roof in ten minutes—what’s it based on?
Tangents and decimals and what not, I suppose, all worked out on paper. There
haven’t yet been any practical demonstrations, have there?”

“No, because I can’t find the money. But the plans are all
complete—I have them in my pocket now—”

“Then there’s always this consolation—Providence, by
keeping you hard up, is probably sparing your life.”

“Maybe, sir, but I hope I shall soon find someone who holds a
different opinion. My uncle’s firm would have financed me, if times
hadn’t been so difficult. I’m now trying to interest a French
aeronautical firm—that’s why I’m on my way to
Paris.”

“Good! I wish you luck—joking apart, I do sincerely. And even
if this idea of yours doesn’t come to anything, don’t
despair—you’re young and you’ll have many more
chances.” Brown paid his bill, adding an adequate but not extravagant
tip, and then stared through the window. “Chaumont, wasn’t that?
We ought to be in Paris by five. … Well, good-bye—it’s been
pleasant to have a talk.”

Palescu shook hands, and Brown responded very cordially. Charming youth,
he reflected, as he made his way back along the swaying corridors to his own
first-class compartment, and he further reflected, almost with amazement,
that his own boy, had he lived, would now be in his middle thirties.

Brown stayed in Paris overnight and continued the journey to London the
following day. He took a room at his club in Piccadilly. There was no
particular hurry to go on to his home in Cheshire, for his wife and daughter
were away, the household staff were not expecting him yet, and the house
would probably be in the hands of decorators.

At the club he met Mathers, one of his co-directors. They shook hands and
took coffee together in the lounge. “Yes, I’m not sorry to be
back in some ways,” Brown said, “though I do rather wish it
hadn’t been my first visit to Italy. I’m bound to have collected
a few unfortunate impressions.”

Mathers nodded sympathetically. He was a shrewd man-about-city and a great
friend of Sir George Parceval, the chairman of the company; so that he knew
that Brown had been to Italy after some money which, for all the likelihood
there was of extracting it, might as well have been down the throat of
Vesuvius. “Any chance of salvage from the wreck?” Mathers
queried.

Brown shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Looks as if Parceval
will have to wipe the whole thing off as a bad debt.”

“How much does it amount to—roughly?”

“Between fifty and sixty thousand pounds.”

“I say… he won’t like that. Why can’t they
pay?”

“The slump has hit them. They’re old customers of
ours—quite honest. People give you the same answer
everywhere—the crisis; it seems to be the universal reason for
everything.”

Brown felt irritable as he discussed the matter; it was as if there were
in the very atmosphere, of Mayfair no less than of Turin, some noxious
element which he could not dispel, combat, or even identify. Changing the
subject, he went on: “I took a short holiday in Switzerland on my way
back.”

“Ah, that must have been more cheerful. Where did you
stay?”

“Interlaken, to begin with. My first experience of really high
mountains. Of course, when I was in India I often saw the Himalayas, but
somehow they don’t really count—they might be a theatre back-
cloth for all the use they are to the ordinary person. But Switzerland has
tamed everything so magnificently—railways and funiculars to take you
everywhere and hotels to give you whatever you want in most unlikely
places—yes, I found it all very enjoyable. I should have stayed there
longer, only a rather odd business happened that spoilt things just a bit
towards the end, and made me leave suddenly.”

“Oh?”

“You’ll laugh when I tell you. Some woman—a guide to
one of those tourist-parties they have—apparently mistook me for
somebody else and fairly pestered the life out of me. My hotel happened to be
opposite hers, and I simply daren’t show myself without her dashing out
to talk. One awful day she got into the same train with me going to the
Jungfrau mountain—that’s a wonderful trip, by the way—and
never stopped chattering for seven hours. Really, I’m not exaggerating.
In the end, I left Interlaken and went up to Mürren, chiefly to get away from
her, and bless me if she didn’t follow me there. Then it turned out
she’d thought I was someone else—or so she said—somebody
named Gathergood, who’d been a British Agent somewhere or
other—I think she was probably a little off her head, if you ask
me.”

“You don’t mean the Gathergood who got into trouble over the
Cuava outbreak a few months ago?”

“I don’t know. I don’t always see things in the papers.
What about him?”

“There was some bother with the natives, and he funked pretty badly
and caused the death of a white planter—that’s roughly what I
seem to remember, though I wasn’t very interested in the
case.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem much of a compliment to be mistaken for
him, then. Anyhow, I could see there’d be no holiday worth while if I
stopped anywhere within reach of the woman, so I packed up and came away
before my time. Odd sort of thing to have happened.”

“Not so odd as you might think. The world is full of queer women.
Did I ever tell you about the one who accosted me once in—”

Mather’s stories were long and strictly conformable to type. They
invariably depicted him as the object of perfervid passion on the part of
some female, a passion whose fruits he had somewhat nonchalantly gathered,
but only after a most fastidious scrutiny as to ripeness. There was a
ripeness, indeed, about Mathers himself. Short in stature, with chubby
cheeks, a completely bald head, and a rather quick-firing smile, his nickname
amongst his business associates was unprintable, but implied a certain
popularity. He was the type that rotary clubs offer to the world as
ambassadors of goodwill towards men, and the fact that he made, on the whole,
more friends than enemies may perhaps be held to justify the choice. Brown
liked him well enough.

Mathers said, finishing his yarn a quarter of an hour later: “So,
you see, Brown, that kind of woman is fairly common everywhere. If
she’d been pretty it might have been rather fun for you.”

“She wasn’t pretty.”

“Well, anyhow, she gave you a memorable
experience—that’s something to have happened on a holiday. I
don’t suppose you met anyone else who’ll stick in your mind as
well, eh?”

“Probably not. There were some fellows at Interlaken whom I got to
know, but I didn’t find them very interesting. Quite the pleasantest
person I did meet was a young Roumanian on the train to Paris—a really
delightful youth who was on his way to try and sell an invention to a French
aeroplane firm. Had an English mother, he said, so he spoke English
perfectly. And he was full of that same cheeky sort of optimism
that—that my own boy used to have. You never met him, did you? He was
just like that—had the most amazing ideas that weren’t of any
practical use, yet he always believed quite firmly that they were going to
make his fortune and turn the world upside down.”

“What was this Roumanian’s bright idea?”

“Oh, what he called a ‘gyrector’ to land passengers from
aeroplanes.” Brown gave a sketchy and slightly satirical exposition.
“Perfectly mad, of course. I should think the Frenchmen will have a
pretty good laugh over it, though they won’t be able to help being
charmed by the fellow personally.”

“He didn’t try to get you to take it up, I suppose?”

“Naturally, I was careful not to let him guess who I was.”

They both laughed and then went on talking about other matters.

Not that Brown was anyone of any special importance. He was merely the
head of the firm of Brown and Company, recently absorbed in Amalgamated
Engineers, Limited. Brown and Company was quite an ancient concern of its
kind, having been founded by an ancestral Brown at the beginning of the
nineteenth century; its detailed history, indeed, would provide a useful
epitome of the Industrial Age itself. Brown the First had begun as a workman
in the famous firm of Boulton and Watt; with initiative to launch out
independently and the luck to do so at the right moment and on a rising
market, he had ended as a fairly rich proprietor of a small but prosperous
business. Throughout the Victorian era that prosperity had developed, not by
leaps and bounds, but with an intermittent progress that made the
privately-held shares a more acceptably gilt-edged investment year by year.
After 1900, when the firm became a public company, profits had fallen off a
little, but during the War years munitions contracts had made Brown little
less than half a millionaire. Then had come the slump, the long years of
deepening depression, until in 1928 he had met Sir George Parceval and been
induced to join up with a group of similar companies to form the
merger-combine, Amalgamated Engineers, Limited. That promises of a quick and
automatic return to prosperity had not been fulfilled was due, no doubt, to
the world-crisis, against which even a Parceval could not contend.

This Stuart Brown, great-great-grandson of the founder, was not much like
that fiercely individualist pioneer. By the time it reaches a fifth
generation, a dynasty usually manages to produce some divergence from
original type, and Brown the Fifth was certainly divergent. In appearance he
was tall, slim, clean- shaven and blue-eyed; a flatterer might even have
added, distinguished-looking. But a detractor could equally have specified a
forehead that was not quite decisive, and a general air of casualness that
just escaped the excuse of elegance. Born a Northerner, well educated in the
usual public-school tradition, and of intellect sufficient not to have
absorbed that tradition too thoroughly, Brown was a likeable and even
interesting personality, but he wore an almost constant air of observing life
rather than participating in it, and his frequent pose of being the
hard-headed business man was merely amusing to his friends. His tastes were
quiet; he liked his garden, and music, and certain kinds of books; he did not
care for sport, and was bored by much of the ordinary routine of
pleasure-seeking. He was, in fact, too lazy to be fashionable in these
matters. But he had a discriminating affection for good clothes, good food,
good wine, good farming, good gramophone records, a good cigar, and, amongst
men, good company. Women bored him as a rule, though he was devoted to his
wife. She was an American of an old and quite poor Virginian family; he had
somewhat spoilt her, and their one surviving child, though pretty, was both
snobbish and extravagant. Both wife and daughter usually spent the summer
months across the Atlantic, and during such periods Brown could always fall
back into club-life and bachelorhood with a scarcely perceptible bump.

It was since their departure in June that everything had seemed to go
wrong. Even now, after his return from Italy, he was only slowly beginning to
discover how wrong they were, and when he took his seat at the long mahogany
table for the September board-meeting, his face expressed no greater concern
than a general peevishness at the continuing malaise of the world. He felt
rather tired and uncomfortable, but then he always did at those
board-meetings. The sleek panelled room in the palatial offices in Finsbury
Square struck such a different note from the one he had been used to in
pre-amalgamation days, when he and a few friends had settled Brown and
Company’s affairs by means of a weekly gossip in the works-office at
Stockport. Those cosier and more intimate scenes were linked in his mind with
prosperity, while this cold, Persian-carpeted magnificence was a background
to constantly expanding trouble. In some ways he wished he had never joined
the combine; it seemed pointless, anyhow, to attend the meetings, for he
rarely spoke or made suggestions. Between a dozen and a score other directors
sat with him, and he scarcely knew all of them yet by sight, much less
personally. They had all been brought in like himself; heads of individual
firms, they had yielded to the blandishments of Parceval’s talk about
rationalisation, with the perhaps appropriate result that their only function
nowadays seemed to be to listen to Parceval and vote as he told them.