Contango (Ill Wind) Read Free

smouldering behind the
youth’s words, that dream of being lordly and prosperous that had
wilted during a few months’ experience of dragooning natives on a
nearly bankrupt plantation. Gathergood felt sorry for him. He touched his
arm—a rare thing for him to do to anyone—and answered:
“Don’t worry. When I next see the Sultan I’ll indicate to
him, if I can, the desirability of keeping his kampong hotheads under
control. He doesn’t want trouble, remember, any more than we
do.”
    “He’ll get it, though, if he’s not mighty careful, sir.
It’s pretty obvious he’s shielding Morrison’s murderer. It
can’t go on. Everyone knows these native states are
ana—ana”—he stumbled over the half-known word and added,
more confidently—“out-of-date.”
    There was a certain pathos, to the Agent, in the triteness of all that. It
was rather like saying “I do think flowers are lovely” at a
horticultural show. On the club verandah it was the everlasting small change
of minor grousing; while in Singapore civil servants had grown grey in
turning it into Blue Book prose. Gathergood did not conceive it his duty
either to have or to express an opinion on the subject. Cuava was Cuava; he
was content to accommodate himself to the system as it existed. He took
little interest in politics, and had no passionate conviction that direct
control from Singapore would be an improvement. He said, comfortingly:
“All the same, I shouldn’t worry, if I were you.”
    But the youth’s remarks had made him feel that he might, perhaps,
expedite his visit to the Sultan. He went that evening.
    Gathergood had no car; the lack of roads in Cuava made one an unnecessary
expense. There was, it is true, a track of sorts leading steeply up to the
Sultan’s palace, but the Agent preferred the more tranquil if slower
method of having his native boys paddle him upstream to a point from which
the palace lay but half an hour’s walk uphill. He had travelled thus on
many occasions, and had perfected a pleasurable technique in sparing his boys
as much expenditure of energy as possible. He first let the canoe drift
across the estuary with the incoming tide; then he steered his way amongst
the slow channels of the mangrove swamps, thus escaping the force of the
current in midstream. It was possible, except at the height of the dry
season, to traverse almost the entire distance in this manner; the journey
took time, but there was rarely any particular reason for hurry. Nor did
Gathergood find the scenery tedious as others might have done; the swamps
were certainly desolate, but he could find plenty of interest in them, the
more so as their tangles of rotting foliage had often yielded important
additions to his naturalist’s collection. He liked the play of light,
especially towards sunset, on the pale, sword-like nippa leaves; and the
swish of the wind through them amused him sometimes by its likeness to human
whispering.
    That night he arrived at the Sultan’s private landing-place amid the
warm scents of twilight. He climbed the wooden stairs, crossed the jetties of
split palm-trunks, and took the ascending path to the palace. When at last he
reached it, the widespread litter of buildings, with lights here and there,
was shrouded in mystery, but it did not affect him; he knew it well enough,
and after a few words to a turbanned sentry was admitted through familiar
entrances into familiar rooms. Most of them were of the same type, though
larger than the ordinary Cuavanese but; and only the throne-room, into which
he was finally ushered, presented any original features. It was a lofty
wooden apartment, lit with oil-lamps and hung with mats and strips of red
cotton sheeting; it also exhibited, apparently as an objet d’art, a
three-year-old business calendar advertising a San Francisco insurance
company.
    Gathergood, thin and ghost-like in his white ducks, waited for several
moments without