Valiant Gentlemen

by Sabina Murray

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Garnet’s voice drops lower. “But it will fit. He’ll make it fit, that’s what men do. That’s what it’s all about.” And Garnet’s rueful nodding starts them both laughing.

  Ward is back in New York, having arrived the night before. He had originally told Sarita that he would visit in the afternoon since he’d hoped to see Casement right off, but Casement isn’t at the hotel and, according to Mrs. Sawyer, has been keeping to himself and is out very late some nights—or so her nephew, who acts as the night watchman, has told her. So Ward decides to walk over to Sarita’s house to see if she’s about. He has had very little exercise of late and his trousers, purchased in Rotterdam when he had to get suits for the Manyema, are getting snug. And it’s a nice day—cold and dry—although he still has the wing-coat that’s on the large size and, here in New York where all the stylish people are wearing fitted topcoats, is even more ridiculous than on the boat. There are a lot of people about. Ward is drawing close to Sarita’s house when he sees her, although he does not recognize her at first. She appears galloping along the footpath—not a real gallop, but a sort of skip that in its lopsided repetition recalls a horse and it’s only when she stops and turns to the child (who he now sees is beside her) that he makes the connection. She’s dusting her hands off dramatically and then she rests them on her hips.

  He hears, as he draws closer, “But what if I don’t want to be a monkey?”

  And the child, a boy of maybe six years, says, “Then you can’t be my friend.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because monkeys and horses can’t be friends.”

  She is about to respond when Ward interrupts her. “Miss Sanford,” he says.

  And Sarita, startled, looks to him. “Mister Ward, fancy running into you.”

  “I think you were galloping.”

  Sarita nods, matter-of-fact. “This is Henry, my nephew. Henry, this is Mister Ward.”

  “Tell her,” says the boy.

  “Tell her what?” says Ward. He hasn’t been around children that weren’t carrying his rifle and isn’t sure what tone of voice one is supposed to use.

  “Tell her that monkeys and horses can’t be friends,” says the boy.

  “Monkeys and horses can’t be friends.”

  “So we’re all monkeys?” asks Sarita. “All right, fellow monkey, off you go, and wait at the corner.” She smiles at Ward. “So what brings you over here?”

  “You.”

  “I was expecting you later.”

  “I can come back.”

  “I think it’s all right, provided you don’t mind being friends with a monkey.”

  “Not friends,” says Ward.

  Sarita stops to look at him. He is so suddenly grave that she anticipates the punch line of a particularly well-delivered joke.

  He says, “I think you should marry me.”

  Ward hadn’t been in love with her. He had appreciated her, like a well-sighted rifle or some excellent wine. Maybe it was seeing her galloping down the street, unconcerned. Or her frank manner with the child. That too, surely, but more than that was the instant he recognized her face and felt a flood of relief. Relief. Seeing her on the sidewalk, he got the same feeling as when he finished a long, terrifying march and found a clearing, a fire, the promise of food and shelter. Sarita is the promise of something like shelter, and even though he does not know her well, he knows that she is home to him. She pats the back of his elbow, steering him back up the street, and lightly takes his arm. They’re walking. Henry scuttles ahead, weaving through the legs of passersby. She turns to him.

  “Mister Ward, I don’t know you.”

  Ward thinks. “You might not marry me if you did.”

  Sarita gives him a curious smile as people on the sidewalk move in a hurried, jerky river of human activity, as the sound in the clear air ricochets, making every conversed word about him sound like laughter, as the birds sing in support of this marriage and the sun presents a particularly benign face. She looks at him, biting her lower lip, as if he’s a piece of cake that she wants but does not really need, and he knows he’s won her.

  On the next block they reach the Sanford house. Through the windows one can see activity as the downstairs curtains are being changed and the lack of modesty—the house’s exposure—is palpable. Maids are working as quickly as they can with ladders and stepladders. Manservants keep the drapes off the floor, extended between them to prevent wrinkling. “It’s going to be a bit nutty in there,” she says, “but we can probably get coffee.”

  Henry disappears down the corridor with a savage whooping. The housemaid takes Sarita’s coat and—after a curious look—Ward’s.

  “Doris, what is Paz doing?”

  “The curtains, miss.”

  “And my sister?”

  “She’s with the baby. She asked not to be disturbed.”

  “Well, the house is upside down. Let’s go sit in the dining room.”

  Ward chooses a chair at the long table while Sarita heads to the kitchen, but he’s restless. He pauses at a cabinet filled with silver—he’s seen these before, but usually the urns and soup tureens are old family stuff, handed down, but of sentimental and historical value. All this silver finery is beyond doubt new. It sparkles, and then, as his eyes readjust, he sees his reflection in the glass panel. Ward gets a feeling of what it might be to have money. He then sees Sarita reflected behind him as she enters the room.

  “Coffee’s on its way,” she says. “Seriously, how long does it take to put the curtains up with something like eight people involved?”

  Is she dodging real conversation, or is this what’s occupying her mind? “Are you thinking about what I asked you?”

  She flips her chin up, and her eyes, now thinking. “It was more of a suggestion.”

  “Really?”

  “You said, ‘I think you should marry me.’”

  “It was a proposal.”

  She nods but stays on the other side of the table.

  “I’d like to talk to your father, but I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

  “Herbert,” she says, trying out his name, “have you thought it through? I wouldn’t want you to make a mistake.”

  “I’m thinking now,” he says. “I think the marriage is a very good idea.”

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Because,” he considers, “I can’t imagine life without you.” He realizes that’s a cliché. Strip the language. “Because,” answer her question truthfully, “everything leads to you.”

  “The Congo leads to me?” She is skeptical, although curious.

  “And the Mississippi.”

  “The Amazon?”

  “The Nile. The Seine.”

  She sinks into a chair and for a moment he’s worried he’s upset her. She brings her hand to cover her mouth and every second or so shakes her head in a little shudder, as if in disbelief. She rests her hand on his arm. “Go and talk to my father now. Lunch will be served in twenty minutes and he’ll be in a hurry to get out of the conversation.”

  “And that’s good for us?”

  “Unless he’s hungry and in a bad mood.”

  Sarita waits with her sister, who never has much to say, which is most often dull but currently a relief. Ettie shifts on her chair, adjusting the sleeping baby that’s limp as a rag doll, snoring, mouth open. “They’re so precious at this age. I think she’s going to look like Elizabeth. Don’t you?”

  Elizabeth is the sister who died in New Orleans. “I don’t remember Elizabeth,” says Sarita.

  “I do. She had your gray eyes and my dark hair. And she was a tiny little thing, very slender.”

  That’s because she was dying, thinks Sarita.

  “Are you going to marry him?”<
br />
  “Do you think I should?”

  Ettie adjusts the baby and shifts on her hips. “It’s all about the children, Sarita. What’s the worst that can happen? If you two grow apart, you’ll have the children. You’ll see. You’ll care about your husband for a while and I never wish James any harm. He gave me Henry and Annabel and this little angel, but I don’t really care about him.”

  Sarita laughs. “That’s not true. You do care about James.”

  “No, I don’t. It’s better this way. I do look out for him, you know . . . make him change his tie because it has soup on it, or something.”

  “You’re being ridiculous.”

  “Do you think he wants me to care more? Of course not. We’re the happiest couple I know.”

  Which is hilarious, but, on the face of it, seems true.

  VII

  Lecture Circuit

  January 1890

  Casement, Glave, and Ward, now reunited, are heading westward to San Francisco as Ward continues his lecture tour, bringing the spectacle that is the Congo into the still-spectacular United States. The train is rumbling, as trains do. Casement likes the meter of the word “thunderstorm” to describe the sound of it and the fact that the word itself beats in time with their progression across the country. He writes “thunderstorm” and looks at its presence on the page, a tiny tempest of ink upon a sea of cream-colored nothing. He should write an “American” poem but is not sure what that would entail. He knows that Whitman is all the rage but is not sure what is accomplished by the removal of rhyme and meter. What’s left? And the stuff itself is oddly naked—exposed. He prefers Longfellow, but for him to pursue poetry in this vein seems uninspired. America itself is difficult to pinpoint, can seem like a nation of disparate historical facts that resist coming together into a recognizable whole.

  The American Civil War has been over for a quarter century and, with it, slavery. The Transcontinental Railroad was completed twenty years earlier with Irishmen laboring from the east and Chinamen working from the west, this meridian seam sealed with a golden spike. Indian Wars are still being fought and the great Indian nations—the Apache, Sioux, Cheyenne—are losing and as they expire make all feel complicit in the extinction of a gorgeous, wild thing. As the natives are cleared, the space must be filled, and Europe has the stuff. In New York alone, 5,000 new immigrants are disgorged at Castle Garden every day, many of them Irish. In America, the Negro is black, but not African, although Liberia—the inverse of a Promised Land—has existed since the 1850s. The movements of people, the extermination of people, the enslavement of people, the creation of nations, the destruction of nations—it is all happening in the context of America. The sky in these United States stretches uninterrupted. The plain stretches uninterrupted. Ward stretches, belches in his sleep, with his hands folded neatly in his lap. Ward sleeps everywhere, an untroubled soul—uninterrupted. Casement looks at the blank page, which stretches: uninterrupted.

  If he could only cobble a few lines together.

  He would like to write about disappearing Comanche and the pride of Negroes, but his thoughts are degraded by the knowledge of Ward’s impending marriage. He tells himself that it means nothing. This is where Ward was heading—his only destiny. Ward is not an eternal bachelor, like Glave. Nor an eternal bachelor, like him. And he does not know what it means that Ward has chosen this clear-minded, older, wealthy woman to be his bride. Perhaps this is why it feels like betrayal. This Miss Sanford is not what he had imagined for Ward. She is not a modern-day country maid with pink cheeks and a light laugh. The train lurches, waking Ward, who seems momentarily alarmed, but quickly settles—dog-like—back to sleep. The occasional farmhouses and barns register like sound across the empty landscape. And there it is, the plaintive wail of the train barreling along and this time—as every time now—Casement feels that he has made that howl, that it has come from him.

  “Anything good?” asks Glave.

  “No, not really.”

  “Every time I ask, you give me that or a similar response.”

  Casement smiles. “I hate to think of the reason for that.”

  “Do you really think you’re a bad poet?” Glave is teasing. “Why do it all these years, then? Why not write articles? At least you get paid.”

  “Why do we do these things we do? I’m lazy,” says Casement. “No one needs to see the poems and so they don’t need to meet anyone’s standards but my own.”

  “Why write at all?”

  “I could tie knots. And then untie them.” Casement likes creating, controlling, and his poet voice has an unmarred nobility to it. And he doesn’t think he’s bad, not really. It’s more that the subject of his poems—his Ireland, her history—demands a certain sort of listener, and Glave, much as Casement likes him, is not that man. “I like writing,” says Casement.

  “Although when you’re doing the composing, you look completely miserable.”

  “Poetry is difficult.”

  “Why not keep a diary?”

  “I do.” Besides, he finds much of what Glave and Ward produce to be utterly false—somehow stringing together bits of reality but in a way that creates a cheap, tin version of the Congo. Casement knows the transaction. The American and British public desire a particular cut of Africa and the scribblers work to produce it to the exact specifications as requested, using snippets of the truth but cobbling them in a way that is not representative. The Congo is hacked into pieces for shipment, as might happen in an abattoir, and these choice cuts no more represent Africa than roasts and cutlets and minced meat can represent a cow.

  Ward has sent a telegram to his family in Sacramento, inviting them to his talk. Casement had watched Ward struggle to compose it, and then—unasked—helped with the wording. In San Francisco Feb 17. Stop. Lecture at Platts Hall 7PM. Stop. Tickets saved at door. Stop. Your Herbert. Stop.

  Ward had not been sure about the “your Herbert” part, and he was not sure if the telegram would reach his parents. Ward had saved his mother’s letter and of course this was the source of his information, but the ­letter—at this point—was over a year old and something in his mother’s tone had made Ward think that all was not well. She had said something about “the good Lord” providing and exceptional lives requiring exceptional people. Ward was of the opinion that no one would show up and was frank about the dread and disappointment this would cause him. And Casement, initially tempted to tell Ward that his family would be there, of course, beyond a doubt, had instead just clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Have you told them about Sarita? That you’re getting married?” Ward hadn’t. They didn’t. None of that had made it into the cable. Ward nodded, happy to be redirected to the future, which was comfort to him. Although no comfort to Casement.

  The train is shuddering to a stop. Again. These trains. As they cross. This. Remarkable. Continent.

  “Where are we?” asks Ward, now awake.

  Glave says, “Somewhere between somewhere and somewhere.”

  Which is nowhere. Or perhaps Nebraska. “I’m getting out,” says Casement.

  There’s a need for water, and cargo has to be moved to another ­carriage—things that Casement is glad are not his responsibility. The engineer tells him that they will be stopped for an hour. A ten-minute walk up a dirt path will bring Casement to a farm, if he’s interested, where he can purchase a glass of fresh milk. Casement is not much of a milk drinker but as Glave is deep in his notes and isn’t leaving the train, and Ward has nodded off again, he decides he’ll take this stroll and buy this milk. It’s cold and he wraps his coat tight, pushes his fists deep into his pockets.

  As he makes his way into this broad landscape of no shelter that feels nothing like the Congo, but perhaps a bit like a frozen South African savannah, he is struck by the grandeur of absence. The farmhouse, although at a distance, is completely visible. For a moment Casement has the sensation that t
he only two points in existence are the train and this farmhouse and that he shuttles back and forth between them as if a walker on a tightrope. His leather soles slip on the frozen ground. At the front of the house, no one is visible, so he makes his way around it where he sees the edge of a barn and the planking of a hastily constructed corral. On the railing of the corral are several pelts—wolves or coyotes. Casement is momentarily intrigued and then he sees what is contained in the pen. There are five bison, a small herd, and they have been waiting for him because they all meet his gaze with theirs, judging and silent except for the sound of their rough exhalations. Great curls of steam escape their nostrils. These are enormous animals with sentient eyes. Casement is struck by their noble appearance and feels the tragic reality about their captivity. He thinks of Indians and wonders if there’s a poem in that—their fulminating breath, a sad few left. He wonders how many poets have equated bison and Indians.

  From the farmer, Casement takes a glass of milk and purchases a pie. And then Casement is retracing his footsteps back to the train.

  “What have you got there?” says Ward, already with his pocketknife in hand, blade unsheathed.

  “It’s a pumpkin pie,” Casement says.

  “I already know that this pie,” Glave adds, “will be the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

  As Casement takes his seat, takes the slice of pie offered by Ward on his cloth napkin, he has a vision of the train reeled back to Albany, a vision of the plains being repopulated with buffalo and Indians, of triumphant natives and prehistory, all this pillaging and destruction erased by the reverse movement of the train as it industriously tugs the New World—like a great ­curtain—back and back, returning it to pre-history. He wonders what can be restored. He wonders what can be saved.

  “How do you find it?” asks Glave.

  “How do I find what?” responds Casement.

  “The pie,” says Ward. “How do you find the pie?”

  He thinks. “I find it very nice, preferable to crumbling cheese and stale bread and beef jerky.” Which was actually deer jerky, but why split hairs? And soon enough there will be a constant supply of good food, for in another five days they will be in San Francisco, although he needs to be cautious with his money.