Human Traces

by Sebastian Faulks

  Jacques was struck by the similarity of the terrain to that in Carinthia; although what was proposed at home was more modest, many of the difficulties appeared to be the same. Lowe’s engineer had devised a mixed system: an electric trolley for the gentle ascent through the first canyon, which was called Rubio; then, when the gulf ahead had proved impossible to span, the railroad was temporarily abandoned and the passengers were asked to switch to a cable-car, which hauled them to the summit of Echo Mountain, and a sumptuous hotel. Thence the electric railway resumed its more gradual ascent to the peaks of Mount Lowe.

  There were two other passengers in the carriage with Jacques and the bombastic Professor, as it made its way up into the canyon, grabbing power from the line above; it snaked around the poppy fields and through the hills with their covering of chaparral and cactus. Jacques tried to picture the journey as it might be experienced by some patient in the Alps, and the first thing they would need against the European chill, he thought, was wooden sides and windows rather than roll-down canvas. The ride itself, however, would pose no problem to an invalid; one had only to sit back on the wooden bench and admire the cities of the plain. Jacques glanced across at the flushed face of his companion, which was full of the joys of the ride, and at that moment they rounded a sharp bend, the track straightened and James let out a throaty cry. ‘There she is! The Rubio Hotel. Isn’t she a beauty?’

  Jacques smiled. To the right of the track was a large building that seemed to be floating in the void above a narrow gorge, in a green mist of sycamore and fern. The pavilion-hotel was made more remarkable by the fact that two further floors were hanging from its underside, one with its own pitched roof beneath the terrace of the upper building. As the trolley car stopped alongside, Jacques saw that this was an illusion and that the lower floors in fact spanned the narrow ravine and took their footing from its sides; but the appearance of a three-storey pleasure palace somehow suspended in the gulf was enough to make anyone smile.

  ‘Let’s have a look-see, shall we?’ said Professor James, pulling his hat down firmly as he stepped onto the platform. They crossed over to the terrace of the hotel, where several brakemen and drivers were taking a rest, and the Professor led the way down wooden steps to the middle floor, from which walkways departed above the ravine. Jacques followed him at a brisk pace until they came to a waterfall, which the Professor invited him to stop and admire.

  ‘Did you ever see a prettier cascade? Look at those great boulders. Listen to the crash! We have to give folk something to do once they are up here. Most of our visitors are local people who first came out here from the Middle West. The Indiana Colony they used to call it. But since we had our rail connection to Los Angeles last year, we can expect tourists from all over America. Let’s go and take tea at the Rubio, then we can go up the cable car to Echo Mountain itself. You are in for a treat, Jack!’

  Jacques found himself warming a little to the Professor, and as they drank tea in the dining room of the Rubio Hotel, he politely asked him about his title.

  ‘At which seat of learning are you a professor?’

  ‘Retired now,’ said James with a wave of his hand. ‘It is a courtesy more honoured in the breach than the observance. Have some cake.’

  ‘And of what subject? Engineering?’

  ‘No, we have an engineer, Macpherson, none better. My qualifications are in people. Yes, Jack. People and their minds, that’s my special subject.’

  ‘Like me. Though I am only a doctor, not a professor.’

  ‘Yes. Just like you. I used to run a correspondence school here in California. It was for memory training. The human mind is a very wonderful organ.’

  ‘So I believe,’ said Jacques.

  ‘It never forgets. It’s all in here, you know. It’s just a question of knowing how to find it.’

  Jacques nodded, thinking of Janet’s statement that in the human mind ‘nothing ever gets lost’, which sounded more persuasive, but perhaps was no different in essence from what the old salesman was telling him.

  ‘I was born in England,’ James was saying, ‘came out West as a Methodist missionary – what they called a “circuit rider”. Can you believe that? John Wesley was my hero. I used to love to preach and lead the people in singing. Proper hymns for devout people. Now if you’re ready, Jack, we shall go up into the clouds.’

  Jacques followed his guide out onto the wooden platform and over to the foot of the Incline, where an open white cable-car was waiting for them. It had three separate parts, each at an angle to the gradient, so their floors were parallel to the ground far beneath; the lowest section had gilded decorations on the bow, which made the whole contraption look like a three-tiered opera box going up into the unknown.

  The cable gripped and shuddered, the brakeman whistled and the car began its electrically driven ascent, noiseless but for the drag of wheels on the new rail. In a minute, they were looking down steeply on to the roof of the Rubio Hotel; a few seconds later they were lost in low cloud. Jacques felt a roar of childlike exhilaration building up in him. Halfway up the Incline, they slowed as the downward car approached, then passed, as the track briefly widened for the purpose. Shortly afterwards, the upward car lipped over the top at Echo Mountain and drew silently to a halt. It was cold.

  ‘Hop out, Jack, there’s plenty to see up here.’

  Echo Mountain House was a three-storeyed building with a dome, much larger than the Rubio Hotel below, and with a smaller companion chalet built off the edge of the hill. Both were painted bright white. In the palatial lobby of the main building, the Professor asked the housekeeper to reserve him a table for dinner – ‘Keep me back some oysters’, he called after her – then took Jacques outside again.

  ‘This is our zoo,’ he said. ‘We have to keep them interested while they wait for the car to go down. We got racoons, an eagle. Watch this. Hold my hat.’

  He pulled open a cage door and jumped down into a pit, where, to Jacques’s astonishment, he began to wrestle with a black bear. ‘Don’t worry,’ he called up. ‘She likes a roughhouse. Ursa Minor, we call her. She’s a little character, she is. Here, give me a hand up.’

  When he had dusted himself down and consulted his watch, Professor James said, ‘We have just about time to go on up to the Alpine Tavern. I guess that might be of interest to you, coming from Europe. We call these here theAmerican Alps. Sure sounds better than the Sierra Madre.’

  ‘And where is the Alpine Tavern?’

  ‘It’s on the side of Mount Lowe, which is halfway to our final destination at Mount Wilson. After you now.’

  They were just in time to catch a trolley car, like the first one that had taken them up into Rubio Canyon. The ride was up a similar gradient, slow but not particularly steep, as the carriage snaked round the mountains and the rails rattled on their granite bed.

  ‘You could do this back in Europe,’ the Professor said. ‘You could surely do it. But you need a first-class engineer and it could be expensive. What costs you is all the clearance. On this section alone we rolled enough rock into the canyons to build a city the size of Pasadena.’

  ‘But not on the Incline, where the cable-car is?’

  ‘Not so much there. It depends on the landscape and what your surveyor says. The engineering is simple enough. It’s just a thick wire that goes round a wheel! You might have trouble finding a manufacturer in Europe, but you could buy the wire and the wheel in San Francisco. It’s the terrain that holds the key. Just ask the good Lord for a nice even run so you don’t have to blow up half the mountain.’

  After they had negotiated two hairpins, the car stopped to allow them to enjoy the view. Jacques looked down through the evening air from which the earlier cloud had lifted. They could see the dome of the Observatory and across to Echo Mountain House, shining white on its green promontory. The streets of Pasadena were so few and so spread, that the Professor was able to point out to him Fair Oaks and Lake Avenue, like straight scratches made with a burned match in
the surrounding green scrub.

  Although it was evening, they could see the ridges of the hills in the plain, and the towns they enclosed: Glendale to the right, Los Angeles in the centre, and beyond it, the undeveloped land that ran down to the little bathing resort of Santa Monica; and still just visible through the thin air, as the sun began to fade, was the island of Catalina, dimly sparkling in the aptly named Pacific.

  Jacques sighed, loosened his tie and pushed his hat back on his head. What a country, he thought. What a place, where everything was still to do. He decided that in the morning he would make an appointment to see Macpherson, ‘the finest mathematician ever to come out of Cornell’, according to the Professor, and ask his advice about the feasibility of a cable-car in Europe; then he might take the train up to San Francisco to see the wire rope manufacturers. How expensive could it be, he thought – a wheel, a wire and a rail?

  ‘This is our terminus,’ said Professor James. ‘For the time being at least. We call it Ye Alpine Tavern because it looks so old. In fact it’s been open just six months, but it does look European, does it not?’

  It looked like a version of Europe, Jacques thought: to be precise, it looked like the baroque dream of a homesick European exiled in California. The tavern was in the style of a Swiss chalet, cross-timbered, with a stone foundation that rose to the sills of the ground-floor windows. The tall pines and bare-faced granite outcrop behind gave it a slightly melancholy air, though even in June, Jacques noticed, a mountain spring was running nearby.

  They went inside to a wooden lobby, where three women were sitting at a round table playing cards. One of them looked familiar to Jacques, though he could not quite place her. Paris . . . Vienna . . . Sainte Agnès . . . Where? It was quite impossible that he would happen on someone he knew at the top of a mountain on the other side of the world, so he thought no more about it as he pulled up a chair near the door.

  They had been there only a few minutes when one of the three women came over to their table. She was young, plump and confident; she spoke in French.

  ‘Please excuse me for interrupting, but I heard you mention your sanatorium in the Alps. I didn’t mean to listen, but I couldn’t help hearing. It sounded very like a place my father has been to visit. Are you by any chance Dr Rebière?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  The young woman let out a cry of delight and called out to the two other women at her table. ‘Roya! Mama! I told you so! This is the most extraordinary coincidence, is it not? My father is Pierre Valade. Do you know him?’

  ‘Yes, of course. He is a memorable gentleman.’ Jacques could not help smiling at this exuberant young woman.

  ‘I was a patient of your colleague Dr Midwinter some years ago,’ she said. ‘He travelled round Europe with us. That was before you had set up the sanatorium. Now my father says you are both famous.’

  ‘Hardly. I think—’

  ‘Please come and meet my mother.’

  Jacques bowed his head as he was introduced to Madame Valade. ‘And this is Roya Mikhailova. She is my sister. No, no, not really! But she is like a sister to me.’

  There was a gloved hand offered to Jacques; as he took it, he looked up into violet eyes in a pale skin. It was hard to put an age to this second young woman – twenty or nineteen, perhaps – but there was something neither American nor French about her, Jacques thought, as the hand was rapidly withdrawn from his; the name Scheherazade came briefly to mind.

  Nadine was explaining in English to Jacques and to Professor James, who had come across to join them. ‘Mama and I have rooms in Roya’s father’s house in St Petersburg. He is a very wealthy man – stop it, please, Mama, I am allowed to say that. Roya has not been well, but now that she is better, her father thought it would be good for her to travel. California was where she had always dreamed of going. Then my father told me about this mountain railway. I think he had seen an article in a magazine.’

  ‘And does the mountain please you?’ said Professor James.

  ‘Very much,’ said Nadine, ‘though we have been in the Alpine Tavern for three days and we are starting to be bored. We have done all the walks and we want to go down now.’

  ‘Tomorrow, dear,’ said Madame Valade in French.

  ‘So,’ said Nadine, ‘you gentlemen must stay and have dinner with us and then at last we can have a fourth at cards.’

  ‘Alas,’ said Jacques, ‘I must decline. We are returning to dine at Echo Mountain House.’

  ‘My visitor must sample the delights of the dining room at Echo Mountain,’ said the Professor. ‘The table here is a little more modest.’

  ‘If it is good enough for us, surely it is good enough for Dr Rebière,’ said Nadine.

  ‘As you know,’ said the Professor, ‘in the evening they cook only to order for those staying over, so I doubt whether they have food enough in any event.’

  ‘Oh, please, please stay.’

  ‘Really, Nadine,’ said her mother, ‘you should not press the gentleman in that way.’

  Professor James seemed to be weakening, as he considered how all his clients could best be pleased.

  ‘If I can get a message down to Echo Mountain, I could ask them to send up some dinner on the next car,’ he said. ‘But we would not eat before seven. Would that be too late?’

  ‘That would be fine,’ said Jacques. ‘We cannot in all conscience refuse the ladies’ request.’ The higher up the mountain he ascended, the greater his euphoria became.

  The Professor looked across at Jacques. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me.’

  An hour later they sat down at a long table to begin their dinner with a plate of oysters packed in ice. The staff of Ye Alpine Tavern, excited by the presence of the Professor and his guest, did their best to make an occasion of it, opening bottles of wine that had been ferried up from below to go with the beefsteaks that they grilled in one of the large open fireplaces that dominated the downstairs room.

  Jacques found himself placed between MadameValade on one side and Roya Mikhailova on the other. The ladies had been upstairs to change from their walking clothes and Roya now wore a dress of dark purple with a black shawl over the shoulders. The violet of her eyes was echoed in the colour of the dress, but Jacques found it frustrating that so little of her skin was visible in the low light of the tavern.

  He checked himself in the middle of his speculation and forced himself to listen instead to Madame Valade, who was talking about . . . What was she talking about? It began as one thing, then, just when he was about to grasp it, transformed itself into another. There were many names of people no one knew and what they had said and how others were right to be outraged, or disappointed, or indifferent because . . . But they never found out why, because Madame Valade was – not side-tracked exactly, because that implied that there was a path from which she had been diverted – ‘inspired’ was perhaps the word, to continue with a new narrative that was contained within the first one, like a kangaroo in the pouch of its mother. Jacques presumed there was one main idea that she was trying to impart and he nodded in sympathy when he thought he saw it, but Madame Valade looked at him in surprise and waited for his brief interruption to finish before she resumed. It occurred to him that although she had been speaking for about fifteen minutes, he now knew less about what she meant than when she had begun.

  He tried to catch the eye of Nadine, but she was telling Professor James about their time in the mountains; Roya Mikhailova was making contributions to this conversation also, and had turned half away from him, so Jacques was unable to engage her attention. Finally, in desperation, he stood up from the table and asked to be excused.

  It had grown dark outside, though beneath him he could see white Echo Mountain House and the nearby chalet brightly illuminated by electric lamps. He breathed in the cold, thin air and sighed with the relief of silence. He would take home to the Alps, he thought, some of this exhilaration and, above all, some of the feeling he had here that all things were yet po
ssible. At the schloss, he had undoubtedly become too absorbed by the scientific detail of his theory and by the excitement of the paradoxical connections he had made. He had lost sight of the grand design. He would have to make his peace with Thomas – not from a practical point of view, because they had retained their day-to-day civility, but at a deeper level, where they would need to redefine their aims and work more closely together. He had been too much alone, he now saw, while Thomas had been a source of knowledge and invention he had not used; and Thomas himself had not moved onward as he should have done.

  He was aware of a footfall beside him, and a woman’s voice said in French, ‘Are you all right?’ It was Roya.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ he said. ‘It was a little hot in there. The fire in midsummer, even at this altitude . . .’

  ‘Were you admiring the view?’

  ‘Very much so. One feels . . . enlivened. It is inspiring.’

  ‘It reminds me of the Elburz Mountains in Persia, above the Caspian Sea,’ said Roya. ‘I have been there only once.’ Her French was lightly accented, though fluent.

  ‘But you live in St Petersburg, I understand,’ said Jacques.

  ‘That is correct, though my father wishes me to travel. He says the great days of Russia are over and I need to prepare for a new world. Europe is the place, he says.’

  ‘And Mademoiselle Valade said you had been unwell.’

  ‘It was nothing. There was a young man in St Petersburg whom my parents wanted me to marry. I was in love with another. It was painful. I disobeyed them.’

  ‘And what happened?’

  ‘I was diagnosed as suffering some mild exhaustion. It was nothing more than you would expect.’

  ‘I mean, what happened to the man you were in love with?’

  ‘He was sent to a garrison in another town. He was a cavalry officer.’

  ‘You speak of him in the past tense.’