‘I’m afraid that’s true, Mr Edmonds,’ added the hotel manager. ‘There are two gentlemen of no mean size out here.’
‘What’s size, compared to genius?’ called out Collis, and quietly ushered Kathleen Mary to the open window. ‘Climb out on to the parapet,’ he told her softly, ‘and keep close to the wall. You can walk along to the costume makers next door. They’re bound to have their windows open – it’s a hot-house in there.’
‘How do you know?’ Kathleen Mary asked him anxiously.
‘I’ve done this before, my dear, more times than you can count. Now, get going, before the manager unlocks the door. It’s quite safe.’
‘I’m not at all sure,’ said Kathleen Mary. ‘It looks an awful long way down to the ground.’
‘Just go, will you?’ urged Collis. Behind him he could hear the manager’s keys in the door.
He bent down and laced his fingers together so that Kathleen Mary could use his hands as a step. Shakily, with her green dress held up, she clambered through the open window and crouched on the parapet on her hands and knees.
‘Go on!’ said Collis.
‘I can’t,’ she told him in a squeaky voice. ‘I’m frightened.’
The bedroom door burst open, and there was the manager in his tailcoat, and the proprietor of the Madison Saloon, a stocky, bluff fellow with wide whiskers and extravagant eyebrows, and behind them both, looming very large, the wide shoulders and the stony, stitched-up face of a Chatham Square bruiser.
‘Too late!’ Collis grinned and swung out on to the parapet. ‘The phantom table waltzer escapes again!’
They rushed across the room towards him, but he slammed down the sash window from the outside and pulled a grotesque, triumphant face. He turned to Kathleen Mary. ‘Come on, girl,’ he ordered. ‘Get yourself moving.’
But Kathleen Mary was unable to move. Her fear of the height had overwhelmed her, and she was still kneeling in an inch of rainwater, her face buried in her hands, her green dress sodden and her lace bonnet already awry. Collis put out a hand and held her shoulder, firm and fat beneath the cotton dress, and he could feel her shivering uncontrollably, the shiver of total hysteria. Already behind him the window was being jerked up again, and he knew that unless Kathleen Mary could be prodded into action, he was probably in for a beating, not to mention the humiliation of having to cough up money for the Madison’s broken glassware.
‘Up, girl, for the love of God!’ he shouted. ‘They’re right on our tails!’
‘I can’t, sir!’ she panted. ‘I simply can’t!’
Collis glanced towards the street. It was certainly too far to try jumping, a good thirty feet down to the muddy sidewalk. He could see a cab waiting in the drizzle, the cabbie hunched and caped in canvas, and his mud-streaked horse in a similarly melancholy pose. He could see the newsboy sheltering on the corner, his newsbill flapping wetly around his waist. A policeman was sheltering, too, across the street, and passing the time of day with a portly storekeeper. All around were red-brick hotels and houses, streaked with rain and glistening in the watery daylight.
The sashed window rattled up. ‘Right, sir!’ said the proprietor of the Madison Saloon. ‘Now we have you!’
‘Move!’ bellowed Collis to Kathleen Mary.
She reared up, the poor heavy girl, but as she did so, the window immediately ahead of her banged open, and the second bruiser popped out his head, all shaven scalp and bottle scars. She fell back in surprise and lost her footing. Collis tried to seize her, but all he caught was her dress, which tore with a loud rip. She swayed, stumbled again, reached for the low stone parapet to save herself from toppling, but her hand slipped on the wet green moss which covered it.
Collis scrabbled to reach her again, but to his horror she went over the parapet and the next thing he heard was a tremendous crack as she hit the flagged sidewalk below.
‘The woman’s fallen!’ shouted the bruiser with the shaved head.
Collis leaned over the edge of the parapet and looked wildly down to the street. The policeman was already halfway across the muddy roadway, and people seemed to be running from all directions, their feet splashing in the puddles. He could see Kathleen Mary’s white legs, and her boots, but that was all, because four or five people were already bending over her. He balanced back along the parapet and climbed back in through the open window.
The manager was waiting for him, impatient and bulging-eyed. His brilliantined hair was sticking up like a chicken’s comb. All through the hotel there was the reverberation of running feet.
‘Now you’ve done it, by God,’ quivered the manager. ‘All your damned fooling about. Now you’ve done it.’
Collis seized the man’s necktie and pushed him back against the doorframe. He stared furiously and intently into the manager’s face as if he were ready to hit him, but then he let him go without a word and walked off quickly along the landing and down the stairs. He was too shocked to think of hitting anybody. He could still see Kathleen Mary tumbling over the parapet, and still hear the resounding crack of her impact on the sidewalk.
Collis crossed the hotel lobby, with its worn patterned carpets, its sombre mahogany desk, and its smell of leaking gas. He pushed open the engraved-glass doors and stepped out into the crowd which was gathering around Kathleen Mary. The drizzle had died away altogether now, and the day was uncomfortably bright and warm.
He pushed two or three protesting bystanders out of the way, and there she was, spreadeagled on the flags, her head supported by a tapestry cushion which the hotel doorman had brought out from the lobby. A doctor was already kneeling beside her, a fat bespectacled man in a fawn vest who smelled of whisky, his brown leather bag incontinently opened to reveal an unsanitary collection of linen bandages, tongue depressors, cough candies, and red rubber tubing. He was lifting up her eyelids with his thumb, baring her white naked eyes, and trying to feel for her pulse.
‘Is she dead?’ asked Collis.
The doctor looked up at him with piggy eyes. ‘Is she a friend of yours?’ he asked sharply.
‘I was there when she fell.’
‘Well, she isn’t dead,’ said the doctor.
Collis closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Thank God,’ he said quietly.
‘Hmph,’ said the doctor. ‘Considering her calling, she might have been better off dead. She struck her pelvis on the edge of the curbstone, you see, and there’s no doubt that it’s crushed. She won’t go a-whoring again.’
‘You knew her?’ asked Collis.
The doctor nodded. ‘She came to me regular, for babies, and for diseases. I know them all around here. Her name’s Kathleen Mary Murphy. Her father’s a drunken bum, and her brother’s a cretin. The Lord only knows what’s going to happen to them.’
Collis looked down at Kathleen Mary’s abraded face. Her eyes were closed now, although she was still breathing in rough, irregular gasps. She could have drowned, or suffocated, she looked so blue. He couldn’t believe that only a few minutes before he had been joking and arguing with her, and that last night she had actually lain in his arms.
The policeman elbowed his way through the crowd and tugged at Collis’s coatsleeve. His peaked cap was studded with raindrops, and the shoulders of his tightly belted uniform jacket were dark with damp. He wore muttonchop whiskers, fluffed into curls, so that his intent little eyes stared at Collis like a bird from a hedge. He said, ‘I want to ask you a question or two, sir, if you’ll step out of the crowd.’
Collis shook his head. ‘There’s nothing to say. She missed her footing and fell.’
‘All the same, sir.’
Collis turned back to Kathleen Mary. For a moment he thought he saw her eyelids flutter, and he touched her forehead with his fingertips. But the doctor said, ‘She’s out cold. Concussed, most like. She won’t wake up for a while, and that’s if she wakes up at all.’
‘All right,’ said Collis. He stood up, watched by the jostling crowd around him. ‘Do you have a card, so that I c
ould keep in touch with you, to see how she is?’
The doctor didn’t look up. ‘You’d be better off forgetting about her, if you want my opinion. I mean that. Those that show an interest are admitting a liability, and the last thing a young man like you wants is a family like the Murphys around his neck for the rest of his life. Forget her. It was just one of those accidents, that’s all.’
Collis hesitated for a moment, but then the policeman said, ‘When you’re ready, sir,’ and Collis turned away from Kathleen Mary and pushed his way to the edge of the throng. The proprietor of the Madison Saloon was there, one hand rammed deep in his vest pocket, the other twiddling his moustache, and Collis couldn’t remember having seen so wheat-coloured and objectionable a man in years. Behind him stood the two thugs, the broad-shouldered bruiser in a tight grey tailcoat, and his shaven-headed friend in a blue sailor’s pullover. One of them was whistling between broken teeth.
‘These gentlemen say they saw everything,’ the policeman said to Collis. ‘They saw the woman fall.’
The proprietor of the Madison gave a slanted smile. ‘We’ll even give evidence in court that it was all an accident, if we’re so required. That’s if Mr Edmonds plays fair with us.’
Collis looked from the saloon proprietor to the policeman, and then at the two bruisers. At the door to the Monument Hotel, the hotel manager stood watching, and he wasn’t to be trusted any more than they were. So it was either a question of agreeing to pay for the Madison’s breakages, and probably a little bit more besides, or of going to jail under suspicion of having pushed Kathleen Mary off the ledge, for whatever motive these scoundrels could concoct.
‘Well,’ said Collis, taking out his leather wallet. ‘How much fair play do you think you need?’
The policeman said blandly, ‘Ten dollars each will suffice for the evidence, sir, plus twenty-three dollars and eight cents for this gentleman’s glassware and bottles.’
Collis, without a word, counted out seventy-five dollars in bills and handed them over. ‘You can keep the change,’ he said dryly.
The policeman openly shared out the money and tucked his own ten-dollar bill into the pocket of his coat. Then, tipping his cap to the proprietor of the Madison, he went across to help clear the crowds away from the black-varnished van which had just arrived to take Kathleen Mary to the hospital. Collis watched, with a feeling of emptiness and exhaustion, as she was lifted from the sidewalk, her legs swinging like an unstrung marionette’s, and laid on a narrow bed inside the van’s cream-painted interior.
Before they closed the van doors, the doctor waddled across to Collis, snapping shut his leather bag in a shower of tongue depressors, and held his arm. ‘I want to tell you that it’s no use feeling guilty,’ he said. ‘It’s no use blaming yourself.’
Collis lowered his eyes. ‘I still feel responsible,’ he said hoarsely.
The doctor shrugged. ‘I’m not saying you’re not responsible. I’m just telling you that if Kathleen Mary hadn’t fallen off that parapet today, she would have been knifed in the back, or worse, tomorrow. Whatever happened, this hasn’t changed her fate. It’s only brought it nearer.’
The doctor gave his arm a brief squeeze, and then went back to the van and climbed aboard. The door was closed, the horses geed up, and the van rumbled and splashed off across the rutted street. Gradually the crowd around the hotel began to disperse. Only Collis remained on the sidewalk, watching the van disappear around the corner; and long after it was gone, he stayed where he was, his face thoughtful and pale.
Collis lit a cheroot, smoked it for a while, then tossed it fizzing into a puddle and hailed a hack. ‘Seventy-two East Twenty-first Street,’ he wearily instructed.
When he came down from his rooms after two hours’ sleep and a shave, his father was just returning home. They met in the dark cavernous hallway, and both of them paused, Collis at the foot of the wide marble staircase and his father by the gilt umbrella stand, suspicious actors from different plays. Their butler, Angus, discreetly took off his father’s light-grey spring coat, and then retired on creaking shoes.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ said Collis.
His father said nothing, but took a few paces forward on the shiny stone floor and then adopted one of his favourite poses, his legs apart, his hands tucked behind his back under the tails of his coat, his head cocked in unconscious imitation of the President, James Buchanan. He was a stout, white-haired man, with a florid face and heavy white moustache. He had one eye that never quite looked straight, and which had unnerved Collis ever since he was a small boy. He wore a black tailcoat, and a black vest, across which was suspended the longest gold watch chain that Collis had ever seen, and he wore upright collars that were starched as stiff as cuttlefish shells. He walked, his father, as if he were chest-deep in water, and as if it were only his round belly that kept him buoyant. His friends on Wall Street called him the Black Ship, after the Navy’s steam-propelled men-of-war; his enemies called him Porky Boy.
‘How’s the market?’ asked Collis guardedly.
‘Tolerable, tolerable,’ answered his father. He kept his one good eye fixed on Collis, while the other seemed to wander around of its own accord, as if half of his mind wasn’t paying attention. ‘Cereals are holding their price, though silver’s shaky.’
‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ said Collis.
His father remained where he was, immovable. ‘I don’t have to be pacified, you know,’ he said, in a testy tone. ‘I don’t have to be humoured.’
Collis said nothing, but raised his eyebrows slightly, as if to suggest, ‘Well, Father, that’s what you say.’
‘I sometimes wonder if you think of me as an ogre,’ said his father. ‘I’m not, you know. I like my fun as well as the next man.’
Collis shrugged. ‘I believe you. If you think that playing backgammon with all your old banker friends is fun, and if you think that entertaining rabid Southern Democrats for dinner is fun, then, sure, I believe you have fun.’
His father’s eyes protruded a little, and his chins settled back into his collars like thick pink junket poured from a jug. It was a sure sign that he was displeased, and impatient, and on the very edge of being annoyed. ‘You’re a damn whippersnapper Yankee, that’s your trouble,’ he said. ‘It’s damn whippersnappers like you who will break up the Union. And then don’t come around with your hand open, asking for your allowance, because there won’t be a crust to be had.’
Collis smiled. ‘I suppose you’re right, sir. You usually are.’
His father tugged out a large white handkerchief and dabbed at his mouth. Then, tucking it back into his sleeve, he told Collis, ‘What you need to learn, young man, is that there is no dishonour in compromise. Compromise is the watchword of an ordered life.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Collis. ‘Now, I do believe that Mother’s waiting for you in the drawing-room.’
‘Don’t rush me, Collis,’ retorted his father irritably. ‘It’s about time that you and I had a good long talk about your future, and all this political stuff and nonsense you’ve been flirting with.’
‘Father, this is hardly the time or the place. Mother’s waiting, and there are hot spiced buns with your afternoon tea. Apart from that, I’m really not in a political frame of mind at the moment. Look – if it makes you feel any better, I’ll spend the rest of the day talking like a doughface.’
‘I’ll be damned if you’ll mention that word in this house again!’ shouted his father.
Collis turned away with exaggerated weariness and raised his eyes to the huge crystal chandelier which hung over the hallway, as if he were praying that it might drop suddenly on their heads and at least break the monotony of their daily arguments.
‘You understand nothing,’ said his father, in a tight, blustering voice. ‘You don’t understand where your money comes from, or what a man has to do for his country in order to earn it. You don’t understand about freedom, or democracy, or the guarantees of the Constitution. You do
n’t understand slavery, nor the God-given right of the landowner. You’re a wastrel, and a parasite, and if you weren’t my natural-born son, and if I didn’t believe that one day you’ll collect your scattered senses, I’d pay you one penny here and now and kick you out into the street.’
Collis tugged down his immaculate grey vest of watered silk and looked at his father with an indulgent smile.
‘Yes, Father,’ he said. ‘I understand.’
His father stared at him for a moment with his one good eye, and Collis knew from experience how much he was boiling up inside, like a steam locomotive with its safety valve closed down. They always had this effect on each other, though, no matter how cordially their conversations began. They were both too stubborn, both too certain that they were absolutely right, not only politically and morally, but on every subject under the sun, from geography to piano-playing.
Collis’s father twisted at his thick white moustache and then said, with extreme self-control, ‘I see you’re in no mood for rational conversation. Let’s go in to tea, shall we?’
Collis nodded. ‘If you don’t mind eating your hot spiced buns with a Black Republican.’
‘If I believed that you really were, Collis, I’d wring your neck.’
Collis, with great formality, took his father’s elbow. They walked side by side along the gloomy hallway, their shoes clicking on the floors of polished brown marble, until they reached the white-painted double doors that led to the drawing-room. Through amber-tinted windows and elaborately tasselled lace drapes, the warm light of Tuesday evening sifted across the hall, and before they opened the doors, father and son looked at each other, and each was a dim portrait, like a sepia daguerreotype, a portrait grown faded with age and familiarity and vexatious argument.
‘There’s one thing, sir,’ said Collis, his hand hesitating on the doorhandle.
His father looked away. ‘I suppose you want money.’
‘A hundred would do.’
‘A hundred? I gave you seventy-five on Saturday.’
Railroad Page 3
