Contango (Ill Wind) (15 page)

She knew him well enough to ask, at length: “Tell me, Mr. Statler,
d’you think Steel Common are going down any more?”

“Surely,” he answered, with dove-like gentleness.

“You think I ought to sell, then? I bought mine at a hundred and
forty.”

“Yeah, you sure oughter sell.”

“You seriously mean that?”

“Yeah, I surriously do.” After a little pause he went on:
“I dunno your Chinese friend, Miss Seydel. He came up to me a moment
ago but I guess he don’t understand our lingo very well.”

She began to laugh. “Oh, you mean Nicky—he must have been up
to one of his games! Prince Nicholas Petcheni’s his full name, and he
speaks quite perfect English.”

“You mean to tell me that guy isn’t Chink at all?”

“Why, of course not. He’s a Roumanian.”

“Acts for the movies, I suppose?”

“No, he’s my secretary.”

“Well, Miss Seydel, all I can say is, you’ve gotten a durned
fine actor as a sekertary. Look at him now….”

They both looked. Nicky was dancing with a tall, pale girl who was
convulsed with laughter, apparently by something he had just said or done.
But his antics were more than merely laughable. He had, in some extraordinary
fashion, converted himself into the almost real thing; his chinoiserie was
more than improvised, it was stylised. From the little tippling movements of
his feet to the slightly bent shoulders and slanted head, he WAS the
Celestial; he had even managed to alter the contour of his features, while
from his lips there came a sharp bubbling treble that was in itself a perfect
caricature.

“Yes,” said Sylvia slowly, “he’s rather good,
isn’t he?”

She liked to add her own careful and discriminating praise of him to the
keener enthusiasm of others. In her troubled reckonings and assessments of
herself and her future, he at least must be counted a triumph; it was
something, anyhow, to have snatched him away from the Palmer woman and to
have installed him amongst her own entourage. He was well-known now all round
the film-colony; he went everywhere, sometimes with her, often with others;
the women were wild about him, and even among the men he was rather
surprisingly popular. Probably, she reflected, people were saying that she
and he were living together. She hardly minded; it was the kind of rumour
that did a film- star no harm, provided she hadn’t always to be put to
the trouble of substantiating it.

Sylvia’s experience of men had been both considerable and, on the
whole, unfortunate. Her first husband, whom she had married at seventeen, was
a production manager in one of the old and now defunct film companies; they
had had an idyllic honeymoon and a fairly happy year, after which he had
capriciously thrown up his job to become a realtor in Kansas City. She
declined to accompany him there, so he left her and found some other woman
eventually; thus she got her first divorce. This experience made her decide
that if ever she married again it would be for money, not for love. Three
years passed, and then one day an exceedingly rich corset-manufacturer from
New Jersey visited Hollywood, met her, became preposterously amorous, and
found that her terms were marriage and the continuance of her professional
work. He agreed, and built a house on Millionaire Drive at Pasadena in token
of complete submission. He was an Italian of between forty and fifty, with a
swarm of children accumulated from vaguely complicated previous alliances;
there were still a houseful of them even after three had been killed in a
motor-smash. Sylvia disliked most of them intensely and soon came to dislike
their father too, especially when he insisted on her providing them with
additional half-brothers and sisters. At last, after many squabblings and
turbulences, the crisis was reached; she left him, and in due course he
discovered a state that was willing to give him a divorce for mental cruelty.
But though matrimonially a failure, she did not count her year with the
corset-manufacturer a wholly wasted effort. Its results were manifest, even
if not in the semblance he would himself have preferred; it was his money
that helped her to establish a social status in the film-world, to say
nothing of its fruition in the form of the house at Pasadena, and a new
corset-factory Los Angeles.

Her next marriage came after her big success, when she was a world-famous
personage and had a growing fortune of her own. She decided this time that
she would marry into her own class—i.e. a film-actor; and she chose
Jeremy Baxter (né Schmidt), who was almost as world-famous as herself. She
did not exactly fall in love with him; rather it might be said that she
manoeuvred herself, with a little strain, into that condition. She had a hazy
idea that they might set up a ménage of slightly notorious
domesticity—something, perhaps, after the Pickford-Fairbanks model.
Unfortunately Jeremy was not the ideal husband even if she had been the ideal
wife. Her synthetic affection for him did not survive the first night, nor
her tolerance the first week; she was hardly straitlaced, but after he had
been involved in a court case over some girl whom he had stripped naked and
tarred and feathered on a speedway, she thought her lawyers might as well do
the rest.

Her third set of divorce papers arrived during those weeks at Santa
Katerina, those weeks of indecision about her future. “There you are,
Nicky,” she said, tossing him the lawyer’s letter.
“I’m through with men now, thank God.” He laughed and
stooped to her bare shoulder with his lips. The relationship between them was
peculiar—so peculiar that she decided it must be a part of him, not of
her, and therefore, like so much else that was his, completely
incomprehensible. She liked him, and assumed that he must like her too; he
flirted with her occasionally, and she did not object. She permitted him many
intimacies which with other men might have been impossible, except at a
price; their bedrooms were on the same floor, and he wandered in and out at
all times of the day and night. It wasn’t that she had any particular
faith in his honourable intentions; indeed, she was never quite certain what
he would do next, or to what fantastic gallantry he might eventually be
impelled. There was a childlike quality in him which made nonsense of all the
usual gradations of amorous dalliance; yet she was aware that this quality
might well be just as bogus as his princeliness. She was not exactly on her
guard against him, but she was determined never to expect too much or to be
prepared for too little. Meanwhile, so long as it lasted, she could enjoy his
company and take whatever he offered that she found acceptable.

Then, quite suddenly, there was a development. They had gone for a long
week-end’s motor-trip to Monterey, and there, on that extraordinary
bleak promontory, the languorous south seemed to end up with a shudder; there
was a hint of foreboding in the darkly waving cypresses and the wind that was
nearly a gale. Nicky stood for a long time on the cliff-edge, gazing far out
over the ocean; and it was then, all at once, that the idea approached her in
the guise of a problem—could he really be accused of always posing
when it was so natural for him to pose? For, in that changed scene, his whole
attitude was changed; she could see his face in profile against the wind, and
it was full of a majestic seriousness; his forehead seemed almost to slope
back more nobly; certainly his lips and nostrils were quivering in new
contours. “Nicky,” she cried, astonished, “what ARE you
doing? Come and help me unpack the food.”

He turned and walked towards her with slow, deliberate steps. “If
you really want to know what I was doing, Sylvia, I was imagining myself an
Indian, chased westward by the white man, and coming at last over the
mountains to this terrific end of the world.”

“But, Nicky, that’s amazing—you LOOKED like an
Indian—you’re still looking like one! If only you had some
feathers and a blanket…”

Thus the idea was born. They talked about it all the rest of that day, and
throughout the next, fanning each other’s enthusiasm till they both
returned to Santa Katerina considerably on fire.

Sylvia had always been fascinated by Indians. Racial problems of all kinds
interested her; she had had many friendships with Japanese and Chinese, and
even to negroes she felt much less than the physical repugnance she found it
politic to assume. But of all the ethnic types in America, the native red man
attracted her most and stirred her to the largest measure of sympathy; often,
seeing them from the train-windows at Albuquerque, Espanola, and other
stations on the Santa Fé railroad, she had sensed the tragedy of their
survival into a machine-ridden age, and had wondered why the subject had not
attracted more attention from writers. In the early days of her career she
had once gone to New Mexico to make a cowboy film with real Indians in it,
but they had been rather degenerate specimens, hard drinkers and bad actors.
That was part of their fate; they were a dumb, stricken race, perishing by
the bounty of the conqueror no less than formerly by his sword. As Sylvia
pondered on the theme, it seemed to her that here she had something she had
never had before—the seed of a possibly gigantic picture, one that
would transcend the usual distinctions between lowbrow and highbrow in an
appeal that might be universally American. Such a picture must present the
whole pageant of conquest and subjection, not with any bitterness against the
conquerors, but in the new spirit of national self-questioning that had been
so rapidly engendered since 1929. She felt, intuitively, what she could not
thoroughly expound—that the God’s-own-country type of American
had withered under the shock of crumbling markets; and that the 1931 model
was a charier being, more darkly sceptical and less eager to accept
statistics of car- loadings as the final touchstone of civilisation.

It gave Sylvia a keen pleasure to work out details of the picture. She
decided it must be based on a simple framework—the story of an Indian
family through several generations, beginning with warfare against the
covered-waggoners and ending with the ignominious semi-captivity of the
present. Nicky, of course, would take the part of a modern Indian youth,
proud of his Chinookan or Seminole ancestry, yet toying with the civilisation
of the invader, going to college, acquiring culture, falling in love with a
city girl, and finally, to complete the cycle, returning to his own people
unfitted for happiness in either their state or any other. For that last
scene she had in mind a constant recollection of an Indian she had once seen
at Silver City, waiting forlornly at the depot as her train halted—a
tall, lonely figure with blue-black hair and hot, restless eyes, tragi-comic
in a black suit, linen collar, and patent shoes. But behind the personal
picture there must always be the background of the ever-westward thrust of
skyscraper and railroad, the growth of little one-street townships into great
cities, the absorption stage by stage of the last outposts of the
Amerind.

Nicky was no less taken with the idea than she was, but enthusiasm alone
would not get them far; and as soon as they had settled the preliminary
details they left Santa Katerina for Beverley Hills, to be nearer the scene
of action. Sylvia in all this was a new woman, lovelier than ever in her
eagerness, and she was really very lovely; there was no thought in her mind
of retirement now; she would stage a magnificent “come-back” with
by far the best thing she had ever done; the world would be at her feet
again. She was sure that, as the American girl in love with the Indian, she
could act as she had never acted before, quickened emotionally by the
interest she felt in the problem behind the story. Nor did she now fear the
day when her contract with Vox’s was due to expire. On the contrary, a
week beforehand she drove up arrogantly in her ten-thousand-dollar
Pierce-Arrow and interviewed Vox himself. He was a cultured Jew, clever,
coldly polite, and rather deprecatory on principle. As soon as she had
sketched out her idea he told her quite definitely that it would never do.
Nor did her claim to have discovered a new male star rouse him to any degree
of rapture. Good ideas and good actors, he indicated, were nearly at
giving-away prices; what a film had to have, in the first place, was a
reasonable chance of securing the dollar-support of the public. And hers
hadn’t. The public, he declared, took no interest whatever in the
Indian problem. It was true that Sylvia herself still had a name, but she
would certainly sacrifice it all if she allowed herself to be featured as an
American woman mixed up with a coloured man. People simply wouldn’t
stand it; in fact, it might even lead to race-riots and be prohibited.

“Didn’t Pocohontas marry a white man?” she
interrupted.

“Yes, and ‘Othello’s’ a story about a nigger and a
white girl,” he retorted, “but you daren’t talk about it in
the Carolinas.”

“But that’s an entirely different matter. The Indian is as
white as the Italian or the Spaniard. He’s as white as the Californian
will be in a few more generations.”

“I don’t dispute it, Miss Seydel,” answered Vox, with a
shrug of the shoulders. “But I still tell you, quite candidly, that to
appear in public in such a picture as you suggest is simply professional
suicide for you.”

“I don’t see that it need be. After all, why shouldn’t
we be proud of the Indian traditions? They’re part of our country. And
even by white standards, a great many Indians are fine-looking, don’t
you think? As for sex-appeal, if the public wants something new in that
direction, I can promise it from the young Roumanian I’ve got in mind
to take the chief part.”

“My dear Miss Seydel, if it were all a matter of only that, I could
produce at least a dozen niggers that have more of it than any white man I
know. And there are plenty of women who’d be thrilled by ’em
easily enough in the safety of a dollar-seat at the movies. The trouble is
that we don’t want certain things to happen in real life, and
that’s why we have to keep them off the stage and screen.”