Contango (Ill Wind) by James Hilton Read Free Book Online

now—sitting
by himself at the table near the lamp?”
    “An Englishman,” replied the porter, with half a wink.
“A Mr. Brown, of London.”
    Miss Faulkner was disappointed. Her pitying thoughts of a derelict schloss
in the Rhineland and of a family starved to death in the blockade subsided
painfully; as a Mr. Brown, of London, he was clearly less remarkable. And
then, entering the hotel on the other side of the road, she added, what was
quite obvious, that it was of absolutely no consequence who or what he was,
and that he would probably be gone to-morrow, anyway.
    But he had not gone on the morrow. He was seen (by Miss Faulkner) having
breakfast on the terrace while she shepherded her party to catch the train
for the Schynige Platte. She smiled and he nodded. It was another lovely day,
pleasantly cool on the mountain-top, though hot down below. She functioned
with her usual sprightliness, smiling at least a hundred times as she gave
advice as to the purchase of drinks and picture-postcards. On the way back
she could not help wondering if Mr. Brown, of London, had yet left the
“Oberland.”
    He had not. She saw him that evening on the terrace, but he was engrossed
in a book and did not look her way.
    The next morning there was no sign of him, and she was surprised in the
afternoon to discover, from a casual question to the porter, that he was
still staying. It did not matter, of course. She smiled hard throughout
dinner and gave a pithy little lecture, in her best schoolmistress manner,
about the Gorges of the Aar that were to be visited on the following day.
    She saw nothing of him then, either. But on the day after that, the
Wednesday, by sheer chance they met on the train to the Jungfraujoch. It was
an expensive excursion, costing over two pounds extra, and for that reason
she had only half a dozen of the party under her charge. They had already
entered the train and she had climbed in after them and found a vacant seat
before noticing that he was opposite her. “Good morning,” she
said, with brisk eagerness.
    “Good morning,” he answered.
    He had a book open on his knee, and she obeyed a natural impulse to
decipher the title upside down. It was Shaw’s “Intelligent
Woman’s Guide to Socialism.” Her eyes glinted; surely it was a
good sign when a man was found reading Shaw in a train. She meant (for she
was already aware that he interested her) that it was so much the more likely
that they would have tastes in common. And she slightly revised her picture
of him as a German delegate to the League of Nations; perhaps, if the Shaw
were any evidence, he was in the International Labour Office. “A
fascinating book,” she commented, keenly.
    He looked up and answered, after a pause: “Personally, I’m
finding it rather dull.”
    “Really?” She yet contrived to smile. She knew there were lots
of people nowadays who thought Shaw a back number, and she remembered once
hearing a pert Communist at a committee meeting say that Shaw’s book
would have been much more interesting had it been an Intelligent
Socialist’s Guide to Woman.
    “Of course Shaw’s getting very old,” she said, with a
hint of unutterable drawbacks.
    “Yes, he must be.”
    And then she remarked in the casual way she had so often found effective:
“I can’t say I was ever impressed with him myself. He talks at
you rather than to you, and it gets on one’s nerves after a time. At
least it did on mine.”
    Here, of course, his obvious cue was to express surprise that she had
actually met Shaw, and the fact that he didn’t only disappointed her
until she realised that he was probably so used to meeting famous people
himself that it had hardly struck him as remarkable. She became quite
certain, at that moment, that he was “somebody.”
    All he said was the one word “Indeed?”
    She was just a little discouraged by this, and did not speak again until
they had to change trains at