Contango (Ill Wind) Read Free Page A

impatience. He was a man who did not object to waiting, and
to whom the mere saving of seconds seemed of little value without some
definite use for the time saved. It was this attitude of mind which, though
he had never thought out the question, gave him ease in dealing with
Orientals and made him often appear stiff and dilatory before the
quick-dealing Westerner.
    At length a door opened and Gathergood made a profound bow. An old, an
almost incredibly old man was tottering forward. His body, which had once
been very tall, now stooped to a mere five feet above the ground; his head,
wrinkled and shaven, was partly covered by a turban of green silk; while the
rest of his attire revealed itself, to all outward conjecture, as the
badly-fitting uniform of a liner-steward.
    Yet, with every inelegance and incongruity, there was a quality in the old
man that made Gathergood’s bow a fitting gesture. Pathetic dignity
reposed in the slowly raised head and in the grim, toothless smile; the nose
and lips, strong and sensual at one time, had been thinned by age to a
sharpness which, with the small, gleaming eyes, reminded Gathergood of
newspaper pictures of Philip Snowden.
    Meanwhile the Sultan of Cuava held out his hand with a brave imitation of
the western salutation. Gathergood offered his own hand, and the old man held
it limply for a moment. “Your Highness is well?” queried
Gathergood, and a cracked, scarcely audible voice replied: “Very well,
Tuan.”
    But it was rather obvious that he was not. He was wheezy, asthmatic, and
unsteady on his legs; only with assistance from Gathergood and two personal
attendants did he finally seat himself on the royal throne, which was a
shabby wooden affair, decorated with strips of coloured cloth. He was,
indeed, immensely old—some said over a hundred, though that was
probably an exaggeration. It was well established, however, that he had
feasted on human flesh during his earlier manhood, and that he had begotten
several children since becoming a great-grandfather; nor was it impossible,
as legend asserted, that he had once slaughtered with his own hands two
hundred prisoners captured in battle. One could imagine sometimes that the
memory of such exploits gleamed in his brilliant eyes; and, in fact, most
white visitors (such as government officials from Singapore) were so apt to
imagine things of this sort that they scarcely ever managed to treat him as a
human being. Gathergood, however, was not a man of imagination, nor, in his
relations with the Sultan, was he troubled by reflections sinister or
abstruse. It did not occur to him that His Highness’s nondescript
clothing and enormously developed stomach made him comic, or, at least, any
more comic than his own notorious chastity must seem to the Sultan. The two
of them, one so old and the other no longer young, respected each other.
Sometimes they talked about plants, birds, and insects; the Sultan was
interested in Gathergood’s expeditions to the interior and had always
used his influence to further them. His eyes forgot their years during such
interviews, and the Agent, shouting the lilting Cuavanese dialect into the
old man’s ear, chatted with no more difficulty than with some deaf old
crony in an English bar-parlour.
    That evening their talk was protracted longer than usual. Bright-turbaned
attendants brought the Agent a long ceremonial cigarette, and lit beside him
two large, beeswax candles. The first question, raised by the Sultan himself,
concerned a letter he had recently received from an American university,
offering to confer on him the degree of Doctor of Literature in return for a
registration fee of a hundred dollars. The Sultan, sincerely proud of the
distinctions that civilised countries had already granted him, asked
Gathergood’s advice; and the latter returned a simple negative. It was
thus that they had dealt with many problems during the past four years.
    Then