Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Oh!’ said Walker nervously, evidently wondering whether he could possibly get back on the train; the High Plains always took people that way. What clearly worried him was the fact that there appeared not to be any town, any place, here at all; presumably he was thinking that the train had simply stopped at some chance spot on the route, at someone’s whimsy, and they had simply decided to put him off. No doubt he was assuming that he would be left to wander about the deserted landscape until, stricken with sunstroke and starving, he stumbled into a drain and died. Froelich could imagine the feeling, the special foreign shiver, the English nervousness (were there Indians, and if so were they friendly?). It was an old experience that the west had always given, felt the sharper now because of the distance this man had come. It was the first lesson, and Froelich lay back and watched while it sank in. It was not cruelty but regard that made him do this; this moment, which he had created, was one that he wanted to be a central one in Walker’s life.

  The porter came down from the coach again and placed beside Walker, to bedeck the barren scene, his two suitcases and his typewriter, all generously covered in flapping labels explaining who he was and where he was supposed to be going, labels that assumed men to read and helpers to direct. The word Fulbright stood out, in red letters, appealing to a standard of civilization and urbanity that went without saying in the seaboard states, but said precisely nothing in those western deadlands. Fulbright? Now the conductor had taken the . . . dime, was it? . . . that Walker, confident in his largesse, had given him, and had jumped back into the car and pulled up the steps. The locomotive shrieked, the wheels turned and painfully yet gently the train moved out, the faces of the passengers turning inward again. Left alone, silent, bare, Walker stood for a moment, looking after it. Then he turned and looked at the plain again, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. Froelich, extending the golden moment, pulled in his feet and imagined the growing doubt in Walker, and within it the profound and English confidence. Froelich knew the English and was a devout Anglophile; he had a psychiatric fascination with the race. People, that English mind would now be thinking, were not left stranded in the middle of what was, after all, a reasonably civilized country. Action was surely being taken, with so valuable a property as himself on the way. The only question was, what was the action, how was it being taken, what did one do to put oneself in the way of it? There was nothing here except a shuttered house and an apparently empty car. There were no telephones in evidence, no taxis, no people. Froelich, peering with fascination through the spokes of the driving wheel, watched the anxious face turn from side to side. Still the figure made no move, standing there in his baggy country suit, the English genius, the man who was to change Party. The suit was made of thick Harris tweed, and Froelich could see, from this distance, the beads of sweat forming on his brow and dripping on to the jacket, forming pearly droplets on the tips of its shaggy fibres. For this western sun, the get-up was farcical, and in a sense noble. Moreover it was so travel-stained and dishevelled that it was impossible to avoid concluding that Walker had slept in his clothes in the Pullman. Well, British modesty probably demanded no less, as British phlegm demanded the uneasy courage with which Walker was facing his situation. Froelich, in spirit, wanted to applaud.

  And now Walker suddenly seemed to resolve his dilemma. He buttoned up his tweed jacket, picked up his suitcases, tucking the typewriter under his arm, and began to stride confidently along the tracks as if he had made up his mind to walk back to New York, two thousand miles to the east. Froelich, in whom there was endless fascination but no cruelty, felt he had let the matter go on long enough. Now he wanted to know and love this man. He opened the car door and hurried after Walker, who was stepping off into the skyline like the end of a supremely hopeful movie. He wanted to succour him, to save him, to win him in friendship. He was a genius and a soulmate, and it was he, Froelich, who had won him for the west. Froelich prided himself on his cosmopolitanism; he had, so to speak, graduated from England, and had a special love of its men and its minds. He had done the voyage in reverse; he had had a Fulbright to London University. There he had been almost odiously American, as Walker now was being English; in the British Museum, in the professional academic hush, he would lean over some English scholar, smelling as musty as the books he was reading, and say, ‘Say, those books look interesting. More interesting than mine.’ But now, back home, he usually wore imported British shoes and spoke with an imported British accent; they were part of his academic style. Harris Bourbon, his department head, one day had stopped him in the doorway of the faculty lounge and complimented him on his looks – skilful use of tweed sports-jacket, briar pipe, hair cut slightly long. ‘I like your style, Dr Froelich; all you need now are a few publications,’ he had said, puffing on his briar and knocking the ash off his tweeds (he was a local man who had been a Rhodes Scholar in the twenties). Froelich was so touched by England as to be, in a sentimental way, something of a monarchist. ‘I think he’s a communist; he says the United States ought to have a king,’ one intense girl student of his had complained when she went to Bourbon to ask to have Froelich fired. Froelich could hardly wait to introduce Walker to all these congenial sympathies, to show him that here he could be at home. ‘Hi! hi!’ he shouted. Walker turned, saw Froelich, and increased speed perceptibly. Froelich caught up and tugged at the tail of his jacket, jerking him to a standstill and tumbling his suitcases round him. ‘Hey there, old fruit,’ he said. ‘It’s good to see you.’ He held out his hand in hospitality.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Walker, not taking it. ‘I wonder whether you could give me some directions?’

  ‘You are James Walker, aren’t you?’ asked Froelich. The evidence was plentiful; there could scarcely be two such Englishmen wandering the plains in this way; but there was just faint room for doubt. Walker had been classically vague about his arrival; his cablegram had said, with simple purity, ‘Arrive station 5 p.m. Walker.’ Isn’t that cute?, everyone had said; one of the graduate assistants, Ewart Hummingbee, had taken it home to frame it. Meanwhile Harris Bourbon had assigned various members of the faculty to cover the three train stations and, as an afterthought, the three bus depots in a thirty-mile radius, at one of which, he hoped, Walker would arrive. This was the west; there was no station in Party. It had been suggested in the department that the heavens would open up at five and Walker would descend in a golden car, like Juno in The Tempest, but though this had been dismissed as improbable everyone felt that one didn’t know with the English. Subdued excitement had grown; and thus, even now, faculty members up to the rank of distinguished service professor were bounding up to strangers in places of public concourse throughout the state, asking the question Froelich was now putting. But of course Froelich had struck lucky; Walker’s face shone, as if a new bulb had been put in, and said, ‘Yes, I’m Walker. Are you someone from the university?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Froelich, ‘my name’s Bernard Froelich, and I’m an associate professor in the English Department here. Look, you weren’t leaving, were you?’

  ‘Oh, no, not at all!’ said Walker.

  They shook hands, and then Froelich reached out and took the two suitcases as Walker bent to retrieve them.

  ‘Not going anywhere special?’ asked Froelich.

  ‘No,’ said Walker.

  ‘Good, that’s fine. We’d hate to lose you now you’ve got this far. We’ve all been looking forward to having you here very much.’

  ‘No, I was just looking.’

  ‘Looking?’ said Froelich, stepping out toward the car.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It?’

  ‘The university.’

  ‘Oh, that. Well, we’re about fifteen miles out of town here.’

  ‘Rather a funny place to put a railway station, isn’t it?’

  Froelich began to laugh; it took a finished social world, twenty generations of teapots and civilization, to produce a remark, indeed a cultural artefact, like th
at. ‘You see, there’s no railway station’ – it was a pleasure for Froelich to use the English phrase – ‘in Party itself. The western habit is just to drop you off in nowhere. Of course, there’s a good historical reason. The railroad was built before most of these towns were settled. People went further west before they came to Party. What you have here is the Great Plains – the high plain west of the platte that Cooper said was like the steppes of Tartary. It’s all treeless, shortgrass prairie, buffalo country; people thought it was unfit for cultivation. In fact, a lot of people around still think the same.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Walker, ‘it’s very unvaried. It doesn’t look like a landscape. Just a concatenation of circumstances.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Froelich, reaching the Pontiac and opening up the trunk, ‘when you come out here you have to develop a new brand of aesthetics. I’m still groping for mine; I’m a stranger here myself.’

  ‘Is this your car?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Froelich. In fact the car wasn’t his but Harris Bourbon’s; Harris, knowing the broken-down state of Froelich’s own automobile, had lent him his expressly for the purpose of hunting down Walker and bringing him to the English Department faculty lounge, wherein the faculty were even now assembled and currently passing bowls of pretzels over one another’s heads and developing a tension over the new arrival. ‘You look after it very well,’ said Walker. Froelich realized they were in the midst of one of those Anglo-American confusions that gave life such relish; he had simply meant that it was the car he was driving. But Walker had meant, of course, as he ought to have known, do you possess this car? Is it your property? Ergo, do you exist? The English, Froelich recalled, didn’t think they’d described anything until they’d said to whom it belonged. ‘Like it?’ asked Froelich.

  ‘It’s very big, isn’t it?’

  Froelich got in behind the wheel and noticed that Walker was waiting politely outside until, presumably, Froelich unlocked the passenger door, which was not of course locked – this was the west. ‘Come on in,’ said Froelich, reaching over and pushing it open. ‘If there’s anything you want you don’t see, just ask.’

  Walker got in and sat close to the door, his hands on his knees.

  ‘Do you drive?’ asked Froelich.

  ‘No,’ said Walker, looking ahead through the windshield.

  ‘Well, I’m afraid you won’t get by in this section of the country without a car of your own. As you’ve seen, the public sector of life isn’t very well supplied out here. We’re all individualists. You’ll have to learn.’

  ‘I’m quite prepared to,’ said Walker.

  ‘Here,’ said Froelich, ‘why don’t you try? There’s nothing round here you could hit.’

  Walker looked nervously at him and said, ‘No, I’d better not.’

  Froelich pressed a button and the windows went up and down; he pressed another and the seat whirled upward and backward. Walker looked even more frightened. ‘We have all the gadgets,’ said Froelich. ‘Do they make cars like this in England?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, I ride a bike.’

  ‘Well, let’s go,’ said Froelich. ‘I hope you don’t mind meeting a lot of people. Out here you’re a real celebrity, because we get so few visitors.’

  ‘I’m a bit nervous of big gatherings,’ said Walker.

  Froelich, looking for signs of stature and genius, felt a faint wave of disappointment, sensing that here was a man not quite cut out for his destiny. This did not lessen his genial regard for him; if anything, it increased it. But it did mean that more depended upon him, Froelich, the man who had claimed stature for Walker and was determined that he should have it. ‘You’ll like the people here; they’re simpler than they would be in the east, but they have a lot of style and interest. The west’s a special place, another state of mind,’ he said, switching on the ignition and letting out the clutch. The car reversed and smacked into the paling fence behind them. ‘Jesus,’ said Froelich, ‘what was that?’ He looked at Walker, who appeared to have noticed nothing; he gazed steadily ahead into his future. Froelich fiddled with the gearstick and let out the clutch again. The fence swayed in his driving mirror but the car failed to move. ‘We’ll have to wait a second,’ said Froelich. ‘We’re in some trouble.’ He got out and went round the back to survey the tangle. The fender was neatly fixed over a metal spike.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Walker, coming round the other side of the car.

  ‘Well, that’s how it is,’ said Froelich, ‘no matter how careful you are, there’s always the other fellow.’

  ‘Bit of a mess, isn’t it?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Froelich.

  ‘You must have been in reverse,’ said Walker, his longish roundish English face peering seriously into the damage, as if a word or two from him might rectify the situation.

  ‘Well,’ said Froelich, ‘don’t just do something, stand there. Now look, will you give me a little help? Why don’t you bounce up and down on the fender, and I’ll try to drive her out.’

  ‘All right,’ said Walker.

  As Froelich got into the car again, he was worried. Though luckily I have tenure, he thought. Still, the idea of damaging Bourbon’s new car wasn’t very freshening. However, the sight he now had in his mirror, of Walker pumping himself up and down on the fender, his eyes round with surprise, his expression serious and slightly dispirited, as if to imply that this was not quite what he was used to – this reminded Froelich that he was living out a classic day. He could have wished for a photograph; it would have been a superb illustration for his book. He released the clutch again and let the car go gently forward. The fender on Bourbon’s new car stood up as it might have been expected to do on a highly finished piece of modern engineering, the flower of American experiment – it ripped away from the bodywork and fell with a loud clang to the ground. Walker toppled precipitously from his perch. ‘Come on, Mr Walker, jump in before someone sees us,’ shouted Froelich through the window, noticing that the fence was also down. Walker got in dejectedly and put his hands on his knees again, saying nothing; Froelich drove off at some speed. ‘What happened back there, Mr Walker?’ he asked when they were on the open road.

  ‘The bumper came off and the fence broke when I fell on it.’

  ‘You fell on the fence? I hope you’re not hurt.’

  ‘As it happens, I don’t think I am,’ said Walker. He looked displeased and Froelich grew worried for the friendship he felt was growing between them.

  ‘Well, here you have it, the shortgrass plain,’ said Froelich, gesturing out of the car, ‘your spiritual home for the year.’ The land was flat and lightly cultivated. Corn stood, seemingly withered, in the fields, in gross misshapen clumps. A sign on a barn end said: Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco. Treat Yourself to the Best. Strange prehistoric mating calls, ferocious cries, sounded out of the haze. It was the whistle of the train Walker had come on, heading out towards the Rockies. Dust flitted into the car. ‘It’s hot here,’ said Walker.

  ‘This is about the average for the season. Actually you’re fine if you dress for the climate. You’ll feel it as long as you stick to those clothes.’

  ‘I’m certainly sticking to them now,’ said Walker. This touch of whimsicality didn’t soften his face, which still seemed to detest all that was happening to it. Froelich grew embarrassed, as if it was he who had brought this man here to make him unhappy.

  He said, ‘Why don’t you loosen your neck-tie?’

  ‘I’m all right, thank you. In a new place you have to be careful not to catch cold.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Froelich, driving close to the centre line, not quite sure how wide the car was. A farm truck coming the other way made him swerve over, and he ran up on the shoulder, tilting the car and scattering gravel. Walker winced and put his hands on the instrument panel. Froelich began to hope piously that he would get Walker to Party alive. There might be faint credit in being found dead in a roadside smash with a distinguished British n
ovelist, but Froelich had more complicated plans for Walker than that. He hoped he was going the right way to achieve them, but with one thing and another the relationship didn’t seem to be taking the turn he would have wished. He tried anew. ‘Tell me, Mr Walker,’ he said, ‘are you an Oggsford marn?’

  Walker looked at him and said, ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Did you go to Oxford?’

  ‘No,’ said Walker. ‘To tell the truth, I went to one of the provincial universities.’ Froelich knew this – he had researched his subject thoroughly, and knew all the essential factual details, even down to Walker’s poor degree – but he wanted to prompt some of that intense social observation that had made Walker’s name hit the quarterlies.

  ‘Which one?’ he asked.

  ‘You won’t have heard of it.’

  ‘Why won’t I?’ asked Froelich, rather stung at this.

  ‘It’s not particularly well known.’

  ‘I’ve been in England.’

  ‘Oh, very nice. Which part?’

  ‘All of it, it’s not so goddam big.’

  ‘Well, it’s big enough,’ said Walker.

  Froelich was a sure, confident man, not used to rebuffs, and it came hard to him to discover that he was doing very badly in this relationship, one he had come to prize intensely. He had been thinking about Walker for weeks, worrying about him, planning this good day, planning this good year. But as he looked at Walker, his side pressed against the side of the car, as if indicating an urgent subconscious impulse not to be in it at all, he felt his failure. Was he pushing too hard? That, of course, the English didn’t like; there was something craggy and hard about their personalities that discouraged access. Americans knew this problem of old. Froelich could remember saying to his wife, in the Earl’s Court days, as they sat lonely and huddled for warmth over the one-bar gas fire, beneath that iron there’s solid gold. You’ve simply got to keep chipping away, and forget the notion that if you haven’t established a relationship in the first five minutes these people don’t want to know you. The thing about the English is that they really stand out against the light, the word ‘character’ means something here, they fully exist, more so than we do. They don’t spend themselves in relationships until they know what the odds are; long hours spent as babies lying in the rain outside greengrocers’ shops have made them tough.