Read Contango (Ill Wind) for Free Online Page B

and pastel-drawing, were unfortunately less able to read
and write. Her ambition was some clay to become an M.P., and to this end she
was already associated with many of the movements and campaigns of advanced
Socialism. Not that she was by any means insincere. A passion almost
flame-like in its intensity sustained her in her many activities; she really
did possess a love for humanity, and the further removed humanity was, both
in space and time, the more she loved it. Her favourite school lesson, for
instance, was one in which she described the sufferings of the little boy
chimney-sweeps in the early nineteenth century; and in modern times a Chinese
famine, especially when documented by Blue Book or White Paper statistics,
could move her to genuine tears of compassion. With the local unemployed she
would probably have sympathised almost as warmly had not so many of them
approached her for personal help. “My good man, I can’t give to
everybody,” she would say; which was true enough, for four hundred a
year did not go far when one had a half-share of a flat in West Kensington,
and when even the telephone- bill often came to ten shillings a week. She
was, anyhow, continually giving money away, more often in guineas than
coppers, and her chief reason for spending August as she did was to obtain a
healthful holiday of a kind and duration that she could not otherwise have
afforded.
    Besides, as she often remarked to friends in England, it was a means of
doing good to others as well as to herself. “I don’t see why the
loveliest places in the world should only be visited by the rich,” she
would say, with that clear-voiced truculence especially designed by nature
for the painless extraction of “hear-hear’s” from an
audience. “We get the middle classes as a rule, you know, and though
they may be a little tiresome at times, one does feel that one is helping
them to enjoy experiences they ought to have. Sometimes we even get actual
working- men—we had a most intelligent engine-driver only the other
week. I think that sort of thing is just splendid.” Miss Faulkner
always spoke of working-men as of some astonishing natural phenomenon which
she had studied for a university doctorate.
    That evening she saw the man at the “Oberland” again. He was
taking coffee on the terrace after dinner, and from the crowded lobby of the
“Magnifique” she could observe him whenever anyone pushed open
the swing-doors to go out or come in. He was reading a paper and smoking a
cigar, and in the light of the orange-shaded lamp at his elbow she could see
that his hair was greyish. Elderly, therefore. And by himself. On business?
But no; she had not thought he looked a business man. And suddenly, perhaps
because the report she had lately been reading was connected with it, she
imagined him as having something to do with the League of Nations. Its
headquarters were at Geneva; what more likely than that its personnel should
take trips to Interlaken? But that, of course, raised a possible doubt as to
his nationality; his accent might be perfect, but might not a League official
have a perfect English accent without being necessarily English? He must be
Nordic, on account of his blue eyes; and she therefore imagined him a German,
because she had an emotional pity for Germans and because at one moment, when
she glanced at him, she thought he looked rather sombre. Pondering, perhaps,
on the iniquities of the Treaty of Versailles or on the problem of the Polish
Corridor.
    Later that evening, after he had left the terrace, she went out for a
short stroll and, on the way back, stopped to chat a while with the uniformed
porter of the “Oberland,” whom she knew quite familiarly, and who
graciously permitted the exercise of her French. After discussing the chances
of the next day’s weather she said, abruptly: “Oh, by the way,
who is that man who was taking coffee on the terrace just