Contango (Ill Wind) Read Online Free PDF Page B

eye.”
    “I see,” replied the Agent quietly. For the first time then he
showed signs of emotion, though only for a few seconds. His mind received the
full impact of the future, recoiled a little, and then steadied itself.
“Yes,” he added, in control again, “I think that’s
just about my own attitude too.”
    That midnight, as soon as he was back in his own bedroom, he wrote out a
formal application for leave, received an affirmative reply by return of
post, booked his passage on a French liner bound for Marseilles, and sent his
former Chinese cook two hundred dollars and instructions for the packing and
transhipment of his belongings from Cuava to a furniture depository in
London.
----

CHAPTER TWO. — FLORENCE FAULKNER
    “Oh, dear, now it all begins again,” thought
Miss Faulkner, scampering along the platform with her usual smile of
sprightly welcome. She had a mixed collection of books and papers under her
arm. She nearly always had. And she was nearly always smiling, or scampering,
or both. The clanking carriages drew slowly in, pulled by an electric engine
that stood at the far end ticking like an enormous clock. Faces appeared at
windows—windows that bore the labels of an English travel
organisation, and Miss Faulkner, still scampering, shouted out: “Hello,
everybody—is the train early, or am I late?” which was the kind
of remark which, in her estimation, put people at their ease immediately and
helped them to begin a holiday in the right spirit.
    The train was from Calais; its passengers had been travelling all night
and the day before. The women looked heavy-eyed and bedraggled, the men were
blue-chinned after two days without a shave. They came from the vague
hinterlands of suburb and provinces, urged across eight hundred miles of land
and water by an enterprise which was not their own, but that of a limited
liability company working for profit and earning (in normal years) some
fifteen per cent. This organisation, after the manner of its age,
manufactured the demand which it afterwards proceeded to supply. Its
brochures were superb examples of art-printing and chromo-lithography, and
its well-known advertisement of a pretty girl smiling over the rail of a
Channel steamer in excessively calm and sunny weather had been painted by a
R. A. At the other end of the business, however, expenditure was less lavish.
The usual practice was to charter a second-rate hotel for the season at such
a price that its proprietors, to make any profit at all, had to supply
inferior food. Another economical plan was to employ, instead of full-time
guides and couriers, a semi- amateur staff of part-time workers, most of them
school-teachers, who were willing to work during their summer holidays for
very little more than pocket- money.
    Miss Faulkner was one of these people. She was small-built, pert-faced,
bright-eyed, and aged thirty-seven. Just the person for the job, most people
said: by which they meant that her London Matriculation French was understood
by foreign railway-porters who knew English, that she possessed a sheepdog
aptitude for yapping (though pleasantly) at people’s heels till they
had all climbed into the right vehicles, and that her smile was of the kind
usually described as “infectious.”
    “Ah, well, it’s a nice day, that’s something,”
thought Miss Faulkner, marshalling the arrivals and seeing them installed in
a couple of late-Victorian horse-omnibuses. “Yes, aren’t they
sweet?” she said cheerfully. “I believe there’s some talk
of putting them in the local museum.” People always laughed at that.
She darted about, answering questions, giving orders, ticking names on a
list, already memorising faces; really an exceptionally capable woman. And
smiling all the time. A rather wide smile, showing good teeth, but (if one
bothered to notice such things) a smile that did not cause much to happen to
the rest of her face. “Yes,