by Edna Ferber
Restlessly he began to pace the littered room, stepping over piles of neatly stacked lingerie, trampling stray bits of tissue paper.
“I don’t rightly know yet. I pieced it together from what I picked up. Van Steed owns a hundred miles of road between Albany and Binghamton. Right up near Saratoga here. It’s what they call a trunk line. Only a hundred miles or thereabouts. Years ago his mama gave it to him to play with, his first little railroad. Now it’s turned up worth millions.”
“But why? Why? . . . Kaka, stop that rattling of paper! . . . Why is this—this Saratoga trunk worth millions? These—these are the things I want to know. How can I sleep when there are things like these I must know! Tell me—why millions?”
“Seems it’s the link between the new Pennsylvania hard-coal lands and New England. That little stretch of one hundred miles is what they want to get their claws into. It’s the coal has made all the difference. It’s a coal haul, direct, for all of New England. Sure thing it’s worth millions.”
“Does he know this—Van Steed?”
“Why wouldn’t he know it! He isn’t as dumb as he looks. Van Steed, he’s president of the Albany & Tuscarora, and this trunk line was just a kind of link—it didn’t mean anything until these new coal fields were opened up. They’ve been fighting it out for months now. Gould’s crowd have been buying up town councilors all along the line. The way they work it’s so simple it sounds kind of crazy—or I’d think it was crazy if I hadn’t heard the same kind of story all my life from the way Pa was treated. Honey, you wouldn’t believe it. I can’t even explain it to you. I won’t try. It’s everybody for himself and catch as catch can. Now Van Steed, he’s got a smart fella on his side, a friend named Morgan, a banker lives in New York—J. P. Morgan his name is. He’s a scrapper; they say he’s smarter than Gould or Fisk was or any of them. But he hasn’t started to fight the way the other crowd does, where anything goes. He’s being legal, everything open and aboveboard. And Van Steed, he’s the kind has got to have everything down on paper. Meantime, the Gould crowd, they’re hitting below the belt. Gouge and bite and kick—that’s their way. Talk about the East being civilized, why, say, it makes the West look like a church meeting. I have to laugh when I see these people here, dressed up in their silks and their swallow-tails, driving up and down, smirking and bowing.”
“But these men with their railroads, what are they doing, then? What are they doing? Tell me.”
“What they’re doing they’d be strung up for as outlaws, West. You wouldn’t believe. The Gould crowd, they hire gangs to go out and tear up tracks and chop down tresties. Folks won’t ride the railroad any more. It ain’t safe. That’s just what the old crowd is figuring on. Run it down to nothing.”
“But the government. Where is the government to stop these apaches?”
“Sa-a-ay, they took care of that right early. They’ve got the government bought up, hair and hide, horns and tallow.”
Weary though she was, her mind persisted in its clear reasoning. “We will make ourselves valuable to this little Van Steed. He must be told that you are clever with railroads. I will tell him.”
“Look here, Clio, honey, we don’t aim to be any part of that crowd.”
She ignored this. “If it’s only a hundred miles—this road into the coal fields—why don’t they—the Gould crowd—build their own hundred miles of railroad?”
“Because they can’t get the land. Twenty years ago—even ten, maybe—they could have bought the land or stolen it from the government by going down to Washington and buying up Congress and so on. It’s not so easy now. These railroad men—”
Suddenly she yawned prodigiously. “Railroads, railroads! Railroads bore me. I have no mind for railroads.”
“But you said—”
“I know, I know. But you and I must do things very simply and directly, with our little minds. We have only a month, really.”
“Do? Do what? What things?”
“Oh—I don’t know, chéri. I think I shall marry this little Van Steed. Maybe—”
“Ha! Likely. I sure would like to know how you’re fixing to do that.”
“Oh, he is a simple fellow, really——”
“Don’t fool yourself.”
“Well—” She stretched luxuriously, then stopped abruptly, listening, in the midst of another yawn. “Cupide with my trunks. Kaka, quick, have them put in the hall and left there. My great new Saratoga trunk would hardly squeeze through the door, anyway. Quick, Kaka!”
Here Kaka rebelled. “How you going dress for dinner effen I don’t take out and press!”
“Because I’m not going down, stupid! Do as I say.”
“Not going down!” repeated Maroon. “Tonight!”
“Of course not. And probably not tomorrow. Where’s your dramatic sense, Clint? I made a superb entrance. You will admit that was a great stroke of luck—of course I’d planned it, but who would have thought it would work so magically!”
But he was by now thoroughly exasperated. “Look here, you stop this play-acting or I’ll light out. Hell’s bells, you can’t do this—”
“Wouldn’t it be won der-fill to have some champagne now— immediately—very very cold—so cold that a little mist stands outside the glass. Clint dearest, call Kaka—no, don’t let them see you, of course—Kaka! Kaka! Tell Cupide to order me a bottle of champagne in ice—they will bring it up. Sit down, Clint, sit down.” She picked up the pamphlet on the table by the sofa and flicked its leaves. “The waters, of course. Tell me, which one do you take?”
“Me! I wouldn’t touch the stuff, I can’t stomach it. Tastes worse than desert alky water.”
“But doesn’t everybody? Drink it, I mean. When I used to go to Aix with Mama and Aunt Belle everyone took the waters—there was a regime for the day—you took the waters, you walked, there were baths, you went to the Casino. Mama and Aunt Belle loved it— especially Aunt Belle. It made her thinner for a little while.”
“That’s the way they pass the time of day here. Out before breakfast, some of them over to the Springs. But mostly they don’t take it the way you say—not to say seriously.”
She was reading from the booklet, her pretty nose wrinkling a litde with distaste. “M-m-m, let me see—uh—Empire waters. Rheumatism, gout, irritated condition of the stomach, pimples, blotches, ulcers”—hastily she turned the page—”Columbia water. Possesses valuable di-diur—what is the meaning of that word, Clint? Well, anyway, I shall not drink Columbia water. Liver complaints— dyspepsia—erysipelas—gravel and vidated condition of the—mmmmmmmm—A pint mornings. Ugh! Excelsior Springs—kidney, bladder, gravel—Congress Spring—Mon Dieu!”
“Congress is the one you want, honey. It’s the stylish one. That’s the place to go, mornings, before breakfast or after. Band plays. Everybody bowing and prancing.”
“I can’t imagine you—” She laughed deliciously at the picture of the Texan, booted, mincing, glass in hand, at Congress Spring.
“Me! No Ma’am! Mostly I’m over at the track, mornings, having my breakfast at the stables.”
“Oh, Clint, I’d love that! Could I—” She stopped abruptly. From the street below came the call of a fruit vendor.
“Peaches! Fresh ripe peaches! Raspberries! Red raspberries!”
She was off the couch and across the floor, her head at the window. “Heh! You! Peaches! Peaches here!”
He leaped to the window just ahead of the vigilant Kakaracou. “God A’mighty, Clio! You can’t do that.”
Unwillingly she turned away. “Well, send down, then. Cupide. Or you go. Fresh peaches bobbing in a glass of champagne. That is the way Mama used to eat them in Paris, and Aunt Belle. Delicious, and cool, cool. I am so hot and tired, chéri.”
“Stupide.’“ Kaka scolded, thrusting her back from the window. “A fine lady you are, screaming into the street. You think this is New Orleans!”
“Well, where’s Cupide? Kaka, see if he’s outside the door. I told him to stay there. Send
him down before the peach man is gone. Tell him big ripe yellow ones, with pink cheeks, and the pits like great pigeon-blood rubies in a nest of yellow velvet.”
Cupide, stationed outside the door, was having a fine time. Already he had discovered that the exhilarating and speedy way to reach the ground floor was to slide down the banisters which curved from floor to floor around the stairwell. In Paris and in New Orleans he had had no fine slippery banisters. Now, cautioned by Kaka to make all haste in order to catch the fruit vendor, he nevertheless followed his usual procedure, which was to run up the stairs to the floor above in order to enjoy to the full his new and thrilling form of travel. Starting from these heights it was possible to attain sufficient momentum to swing round the polished curves and slide the entire distance down to the lobby itself, which was the end of the line. As he skimmed down from the third to the second floor a colored chambermaid, ascending the stairs with broom and pail, put out a horrified arm to stop him.
“You, litde boy! Don’t you know you ain’t allowed to slide down no banisters you kill youseff! I going tell you mammy on you you do that again.” His powerful arm jerked her hand that attempted to hold him, he leaped off the banister, the impish face confronted the girl, he scurried around and nipped her smartly behind and, amidst her shriek of surprise, leaped again to the rail, his gargoyle face grinning impishly up at her until he vanished round the curve.
Half an hour later Clio Dulaine was sipping from a tall dewy glass in whose bubbling contents a fat peach bobbed, fragrant and tempting.
“But won’t you just try it, Clint? A sip. It’s heavenly!”
“That’s no drink for a man,” Clint Maroon had said. “Champagne and peaches in the middle of the day. No Ma’am!” Then, as Clio sipped and purred contentedly, “Look, sugar. You put on one of your prettiest dresses and come down for supper tonight, won’t you? There’s a hop tonight. We were introduced downstairs, weren’t we, all regular and proper, by Bart Van Steed. I can talk to you, same as anybody else. No secret in that.”
“Oh, no. I must have my dinner up here.”
“You feel sick, Clio!”
“No, no! I feel so well and happy—happier than I’ve ever been.”
“Then why in tarnation do you want to mope up here?”
“Because they expect me to come down. Because they all saw me arrive and stood there gaping like a lot of peasants. Because they’ll be waiting for me to come down this evening and tomorrow morning and tomorrow noon and tomorrow night. And I shan’t. I shan’t come down until day after tomorrow, in the morning, on my way to the spring. And by that time they will be dying with eagerness to see me. Especially little Van Steed.”
“It sure sounds silly to me.”
She looked at him over the rim of her glass, round-eyed. “Sometimes, Clint, I wonder if it was a good thing or a bad thing, for both of us—that day we met in the French Market.”
“One thing’s sure. If we hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here in Saratoga, drinking champagne out of a big water tumbler with a peach floating around in it.”
She tapped the glass’s rim thoughtfully against her teeth. “You are right.” Suddenly she sat bolt upright, her eyes strained, her lips quivering. “What am I doing here!” she cried, wildly. “Mama is dead! Aunt Belle is dead! What am I doing here! Who are you! How do I know who you are! Kaka! Cupide!”
Swiftly, as before, the Negress ran to her, she took the hysterical girl in her arms. “Hush! Hush your mouth!” She turned to speak to Maroon over her shoulder, as she rocked the girl back and forth. “Champagne make her sad. My lil Rita was the same way, her mama.”
Even as Clint Maroon stared at this new manifestation of his unpredictable lady, the sitting-room door opened to admit a Cupide almost completely hidden by an ambush of very pink roses. The years with Rita Dulaine and Belle Piquery and Kakaracou had accustomed him to more dramatic bedroom scenes than this, with its welter of gowns, shoes, hats, hysteria; and a discomfited male standing by in the background. He now advanced behind the thicket of roses. Unceremoniously he dumped them in the lap of the distraught Clio, who stopped in the midst of a disconsolate wail, her mouth open.
“I could hear you way out in the hall,” Cupide announced, scrutinizing a thorn-pricked thumb and nursing it with his tongue. “There’s quite a crowd out there—chambermaids, waiting, and a woman to scrub and a boy with ice water, and a woman who says she’s the housekeeper. I told ‘em if anybody tried to come in they’d probably be killed. The roses are from that man who drove us from the station.”
“Dutch pink roses!” Clio exclaimed. “I loathe the color. No taste, that little man.” And threw them to the floor. “Kaka, tell them to go away, those people outside. I shall be changing anyway, tomorrow, to the cottage side. Maybe even this afternoon if I’m not too tired—”
Maroon flung his arms out in a gesture that encircled the littered room. “Look at this place! It’s enough to make anybody tired. You don’t even know what you’re saying. That champagne wine’s gone to your head, middle of the day. There you’ve been, cooped up in trains this long trip. No real air. A drive would do you good. A litde later, maybe, cool of the day.”
Drowsily she shook her head. “No. I don’t want to be wide awake. I don’t want to drive. I want to be still, still. Talk to me. Tell me more. Little things that are important to know, and then I will dream about them and when I wake they will be settled in my mind. Who is the important woman, par exemple? Who is it among them that they all follow? This Mrs. Porcelain? Or the Forosini? Who?”
“Nope!” piped up Cupide in his clear boyish voice. “There’s a fat old woman, I heard her talking to that man—the one who stays in the corner under the stairs. They call him the head usher. I heard her say De Chanfret, so I listened way back under the stairs. She said, ‘I knew the De Chanfrets. Never heard of this one.’ He said something about look it up in somebody’s peerage; she said, ‘That’s no good, it’s English.’ “ The midget’s manner was somewhat absent-minded, for his attention was fixed on his thorn-pricked thumb.
“Get out!” scolded Kakaracou. “What do you know, imp!”
“No, stay. Kaka, make yourself neat, go downstairs, say I do not find it quiet here, I shall move into the cottage wing tomorrow. Go, look at the rooms. Don’t take the first apartment they offer. It must have a servant’s room for you. . . . Cupide, who is this fat woman?”
“Bellop,” blurted Cupide.
“Don’t make ugly noises.”
“That’s her name. I asked the bellboys. They call her Bellhop behind her back, but they say everybody in Saratoga is afraid of her. She looks like a washwoman. Big!” He stuck out his chest, he puffed his cheeks, he waddled, his voice suddenly became a booming bass. “Like that. And talks like a man. She called me to her when I was coming up the stairs just now and tried to question me. Where did you come from and how long had we been in this country and what was your name before you married. She gave me a silver dollar. I took it and pretended I spoke only French. I spoke very fast in French and I called her a fat old truie and what do you think! She speaks French like anything!” He went off into peals of laughter. “So I ran away.”
“Oh, dear. I wish I weren’t so terribly sleepy. You sound, all of you, as if you were speaking to me far away. Clint, who is this woman with the ridiculous name?”
Maroon, striding the room impatientiy, tousled the dwarf’s head not unkindly, and sent him into the next room with a little push. “That’s what I’ve been telling you. That’s the kind of thing you get yourself into here. The town is full of bunko steerers. This crowd here in the hotel, millionaires and sharpers, they’re onto each other, no matter which. Our best bet is to be ourselves, get what money we can, have some fun, and light out. I hate ‘em like I hate rattlesnakes, but we’ll never be able to sit in on the big game, honey.”
“This woman,” she persisted. “Who is this woman?”
“Well, far as I know, I’d say she looks about the way Cupide says, Mrs.
Coventry Bellop. That’s her name. Lives in New York but they say she hails from out West somewhere, years back. Got a tongue like an adder. Some say she gets her income from blackmail in a kind of quiet way. They say she lives here at the hotel free of charge, gets up parties, keeps ‘em going, says who is who. Just a fat woman, about fifty-five, in black, plain-featured. I don’t understand it. Maybe you do, Clio, but smart as you are I bet you’ll make nothing out of her.”
“I like the sound of her,” Clio murmured, sleepily. “When a fat and frumpy old woman with no money can rule a place like this Saratoga then she is something uncommon—something original. I think we should know each other.”
In a fury of masculine exasperation and bewilderment he stamped away from her. “Oh, to hell with all your planning and contriving, it’s like something out of a storybook you’ve read somewhere.” He came back to the couch. “Now look here, we’re going to drive out to the lake at six, say, when it’s cool, and have a fish dinner at Moon’s, you can catch ‘em yourself right out of the lake. I’m bossing this outfit.”
She had fished the dripping peach out of the glass and had taken a bite out of its luscious wine-drenched cheek. Now, as he looked at her, the plump fruit fell with a thud from her inert hand and rolled a litde way, tipsily. Clio didn’t reply, she did not hear him. He saw that suddenly, like a child, she was asleep, the long lashes very black against the tear-stained white cheeks.
At the sudden silence Kakaracou looked up.
“Looks like she’s clean beat out,” Maroon whispered. “A nap’ll do her good.”
Quiedy Kaka began to make ready the bed. “She will sleep,” she said, and her tone was like that of a watcher who has at last seen a fever break. “She will sleep perhaps until tomorrow, perhaps until next day. Carry her there to the bed. That is well.”
A sudden suspicion smote him. He strode over to Kaka, he took her bony arms in his great grasp. “Look here, if you’ve given her anything—if this is some of your monkey-shines I’ll break every—”
The black woman looked into his face calmly. “It is bad to be long without sleep.” She went about pulling down the shades. “I will rest here on this couch. Cupide will keep watch there in the next room. But here, until she wakes, it must be quiet. Quiet.” She stood there, in silence, waiting. He paused, irresolutely. The room and the two women in it seemed suddenly of another world, eerie, apart. He turned and walked toward his own door. He felt a stranger to them. He heard the door close after him, the key was turned, the bolt shot. Then he heard the closing of the bedroom door. He stood in the center of his own room, an outsider. To himself he said, “Now’s your chance, Clint. Vamoose. Drag it outa here and drag it quick. You stay in these parts you’re going to get into a heap of trouble. If you’re smart you’ll git—pronto.”
