Джеймс Хилтон - So Well Remembered

You know, it’s a queer thing when you have to talk to a gentleman in the social sense who has somehow broken the code of a gentleman in the ethical sense. You can never quite come to grips with the situation. You fence and evade and know that he knows all the time what you’re really thinking. I never, for instance, came anywhere near hinting to Winslow that he might be both a liar and a coward, yet he must have known that that was the inevitable implication behind all the questioning. And presently it all boiled down to that simple question: Had he or had he not received those instructions? He stuck to it that he hadn’t, and he sounded convincing, but long experience has left me with the opinion that lies are, if anything, easier to tell convincingly than the truth. Besides, evidence that the instructions HAD reached him was almost watertight, so I had to accept it. But of course I did not say so. I said, quietly and politely: “Well, Winslow, we seem to have reached a deadlock. Maybe there’ll be some further evidence… if so, perhaps you’ll be good enough to come here again.”

He answered then, with a certain austere dignity which I liked (whether he were a liar and a coward or not): “Of course I will, but it’s nine months now since I was advised to come home on leave, and since then I’ve been kept waiting for the enquiry to finish. It’s rather a strain, in some ways. Besides, I should very much like to go back to my job.”

It was then my duty to tell him that there was little chance of his ever resuming that kind of job under Government service. He took it very well. He said he was sorry—which I knew did not mean any kind of confession, but merely that the outcome was a blow to him. I said I was sorry too— and by that I did not mean that as a liar and a coward he deserved any special leniency, but merely that it grieved me, as a member of the so-called ruling class, to see another member acquitting himself out of style. You see what snobs we all are… Anyhow, I shook hands with him and wished him well and didn’t expect to see him again.

But I just couldn’t get the fellow out of my mind. He’d interested me —not only because the departure from tradition is always more interesting than the tradition itself, of which one gets a little bored when one is, as I am, a somewhat cynical conformist. I should be believed, no doubt, if I said that after talking to Winslow I paced up and down my office floor wondering if, in his place, I should have behaved any better. Yet actually I didn’t wonder at all, because I knew. I have fought in wars, and there have been several occasions on which I risked my life, not because I was brave, nor because I hated the enemy, but because risking my life was the thing to do in those particular circumstances, and all my training had been to make me act both accordingly and automatically. That’s one of the reasons why Winslow interested me—because his training had been, if anything, more traditional than mine. Who’s Who and Debrett were sufficient authorities for that. He’d been to a good public school and to Oxford, had then passed into the Diplomatic and been an attaché at various European embassies. Quite brilliant at Oxford, by the way, and with his family connections he must have been exactly the type for whom one would forecast a distinguished future. All of which added to the mystery—for why, if one came to think of it, should such a fellow ever fetch up at Kemalpan? That was decidedly NOT the thing to have done… and since it was unlikely that anybody would take Kemalpan from choice, what had forced him into it? Well, there were people I knew who could throw out a few hints. Our friend Sprigge is the expert there. Scandals, women, mésalliances, bad cheques —he can usually tell you. In Winslow’s case it was a divorce— which in those prim days didn’t help anyone… and I needn’t say more about that to you.

I also discovered that Winslow had written a book of essays on moral philosophy that had attracted some attention in its field, and might have led to a useful subsidiary reputation had not his main career gone off at such a tangent. I was interested enough to get hold of the book. I found it a bit above my head, but I thought it showed signs of a first-class mind, and first-class minds are such rare things in our time and land that it becomes a crime, in my opinion, to frustrate, side-track, or otherwise stultify them. And his, at least, had been side-tracked at Kemalpan, for—apart from the career—there had been no succeeding books.

During the following months a trickle of further evidence came in, but none of it helpful to his case. A Chinese clerk reported that he had personally delivered the coded cable message from the telegraph station to Winslow’s bungalow, where he had handed it to a responsible servant; the servant said Winslow was out at the time, so he had placed it on his desk along with other messages and letters… The case also began to look blacker from another angle, for at the time the message was received it was known at the coast settlement that the lives of white refugees in the Sultan’s palace were endangered, so that if Winslow had been concerned with his own personal safety he must also have weighed it against the safety of others. About twenty, to be precise—including women and children. And to complete the indictment, it seemed reasonably probable that if he had managed to get the message through to the Sultan, the latter would have put up a defence instead of a surrender, and the five lives might have been saved. Altogether there was very little excuse for Winslow, and when, just about the time this latter evidence came in, I got a letter from him in Ireland I was in a rather unsympathetic mood for considering it, especially as the first few sentences showed me he was asking the impossible. Briefly, he wanted a job. Not, of course, the same job in Kemalpan, or even that kind of job in that kind of place; yet, he argued, could not a decade of experience in the Far East, plus the knowledge of several obscure languages and dialects, be put to some use somehow and somewhere? What he hinted at was a job in some Government office, where he could continue in the public service, however humbly.

I wrote back and told him how little chance he had. And a week later Mrs. Winslow herself came to see me.

It was another interesting meeting. I had heard of this Mrs. Winslow once before, in connection with her oft-quoted and misquoted remark about Hitler at the Batavia dinner-party; I hadn’t disliked her for that (because it seemed to me she had probably been misunderstood), but it had given me an impression that she was a dangerous partner for a man of affairs. And now, when I saw her across my desk, I was immediately struck by a certain controlled intention in her whole look and attitude. She faced me as if she knew what she wanted and meant to get her own way at all costs. After a mere good-morning she plunged right in—couldn’t I possibly find her husband some desk job in Whitehall? Apparently my letter had been the final blow to his hopes, and she was afraid of a breakdown if he didn’t find some work where he felt he could be useful. And though she herself preferred to live in Ireland, she would not say no to London if Jeffrey had to be there. She talked of living in London as a sort of sacrifice she would make for her husband if the Government in return would do its part.

I told her flatly it was impossible, and when she stressed the personal angle I delicately hinted that Government posts were not handed out to prevent breakdowns. The Kemalpan incident, I said, was of a kind that they must both recognize had called at least a halt to Jeffrey’s career. At that she began to protest and argue, but of course I wouldn’t go over all the details with her. “Even assuming some tragic mistake, one can do nothing about it now. Men’s careers have been ruined before by mistakes—it would be nothing new.”