They talked for a little while longer, about San Francisco and New York, about fashions and politics. It appeared from what Mrs West said that her husband was an enthusiastic supporter of John Frémont, the free-soiler, who had quite narrowly failed in last year’s elections to become the first Republican President, and that he was almost religiously opposed to slavery. ‘When Walter speaks of free soil,’ said Hannah, ‘he sounds as if he’s speaking straight from heaven itself.’
Collis tried to smile. It was difficult enough to compete with an ordinary husband, he reflected, let alone a divine one. Still, at least Walter West’s politics were of Collis’s preferred flavour, and he might make a good friend. With only $200 left to his name and with no prospect of employment, Collis was going to need all the friends he could muster. And getting to know Walter West would at least keep Collis within socialising distance of Hannah. A bird in the bush, even a bird in someone else’s bush, was better than no bird at all.
At last, a few minutes after ten o’clock, Hannah and Mrs Edgeworth decided to retire to their cabin, and Collis raised his hat to them and wished them a good night’s sleep. Before she turned to go, Hannah looked at him again with that odd, lingering magnetism, her eyes as blue as china plates, and he found himself still staring after her when she had closed the varnished saloon door behind her. Perhaps he reminded her of her husband. Perhaps, on the other hand, he didn’t. He took out a cigar and clipped the end off it thoughtfully.
He didn’t want to turn in straight away. He was tired, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep. In any case, he was sharing his cabin with a huge bearded Latvian who had brought on board a catastrophic assortment of paper packages tied up with string and sealing wax, and Collis didn’t particularly fancy lying awake in surroundings reminiscent of the parcel office at the New York & Harlem Railroad Depot. There were only twelve cabins on the Virginia, six for men and six for women, and all of them were shared. The passengers who couldn’t afford cabins, or who had arrived too late to book one, were obliged to spend the night in the dining-saloon, or out on deck, huddled in blankets. Through the lamplit saloon window, at the far end of one of the dining tables, Collis could see that five or six of these passengers had a bottle of whisky open and a faro game going, and he decided that a couple of drinks and a few hands of cards might settle his mind. He would smoke his cigar and watch the coastline moving darkly past for a while, and then he would go inside and try his luck.
He thought of Delphine. He tried composing a letter in his mind. ‘My dearest angel Delphine, now that I am being carried inexorably away from you …’ ‘My dearest darling Delphine, as this cruel steamer widens the distance between us …’ ‘My own dearest Delphine, I am staring out into the night wondering what to say to you …’
It was curious, but he simply didn’t know what to tell her. He could say that he loved her, of course; but would that be really accurate? She had stirred up his lusts and provoked his passions, but somehow he didn’t know enough about her to love her. He didn’t know whether she would read a devoted letter from him with tears in her eyes or with girlish laughter. He didn’t know whether she adored him or whether she was simply teasing him. He could picture her pretty face, if he closed his eyes, and he could still recall the galvanic sensations of their last moments together. But while she had appeared to give him everything of herself, even the most secret recesses of her body, it seemed to him now that she had kept in reserve whatever it was that made her Delphine.
In his mind, he crumpled the invisible letter he couldn’t write and tossed it out on to the windy sea. Maybe after weeks and months and years had passed by, he would be able to think of Delphine in perspective. Maybe he would know what to say to her then. The problem was, the only news he had right now was that he had introduced himself to a married woman whose eyes had stimulated his imagination just as sensationally as Delphine’s discreetly parted thighs had stirred his libido.
He threw his half-smoked cigar after his unwritten letter. Then he thrust his hand into his coat pocket, jingled his handful of dollars, and went inside to join the faro game. As he walked through the dining-saloon, through the blue haze of cigar and pipe smoke, the dealer, a lanky maudlin man in a tan coat and check breeches, pushed back a chair for him without even raising his eyes.
‘C’mon in,’ he said laconically. ‘I reckoned you for a gambling man the second I first seed you.’
They stood side by side on the afterdeck under a sky creamy with clouds and waved goodbye to Mrs Edgeworth as she disembarked with her bevy of basswood trunks at Charleston harbour. A band was playing on the quay, all red jackets and gold frogging and shiny brass instruments, although not for Mrs Edgeworth. In the distance, flocks of birds rose from the rooftops of the white-painted colonial houses and wheeled out over the trees of James Island.
Hannah West was dressed in a simple grey-blue summer coat, with a blue bonnet. She stood a few paces away from Collis, so that even a casual spectator could have told they were simply friends, and not man and wife. Collis, in his fawn day coat and dark-brown pants, was looking a little pale, with dark circles under his eyes. He had spent yet another night at faro, and when he had returned to his cabin just before dawn, his Latvian travelling companion had produced a bottle of home-distilled slivovitz and insisted on an endless series of toasts to the glorious Union, and to the glorious President, Old Buck, and to the glorious United States postal system, and to the glorious steamship Virginia. Collis had finally crept into his upper berth at seven in the morning, his head shattered like crushed marble, and he had slept an uneasy and fractured sleep until nine, when the Virginia had docked. He and Hannah West had said very little to each other, and he had stayed in the background while Hannah and Mrs Edgeworth clasped hands, and kissed, and promised to write. Collis had yawned.
Eventually, Mrs Edgeworth disappeared among the milling crowds of porters and carriages and longshoremen who clamoured around the quay, and Hannah turned away from the rail and stood for a moment sadly by herself. A photographer, his head draped in a black cloth, took an ambrotype of the scene from the back of a stationary wagon, and because Hannah was almost the only person not moving, she later appeared in the developed collodion print to be standing alone on the deck, accompanied only by faint ghosts.
Collis said, ‘You are not alone, you know. Your husband is waiting for you.’
Hannah raised her head and smiled. ‘You’re a genuine gentleman, Mr Edmonds. When I first saw you, I supposed that perhaps you weren’t. I’m sorry for that, because you’ve behaved most kindly.’
‘I am only interested in making sure that you reach your destination safely,’ said Collis. He wasn’t entirely sure that it was true, but it was the right thing to say, because Hannah West smiled vaguely, and nodded, as if she had been suitably reassured. She paced up and down the planks of the deck for a while, taking the air, and he followed her at a respectful distance, but now that Mrs Edgeworth had gone he wasn’t quite sure whether he should continue to accompany her quite so closely. If he wasn’t going to succeed with any kind of romantic overture, then why should he spend so much time escorting her around the deck, and sitting beside her while she read Uncle Tom’s Cabin for what she assured him was the fifth time, and while she crocheted complicated little spiderwebs for setting cups and planters and picture frames on? He told himself that it was mainly because there was nothing else to do on this tedious, threshing, nauseating steamer, except for gambling, and smoking, and drinking toasts to glorious but unlikely features of American life. But maybe it was something more than that. Maybe, for some reason, he actually liked her.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘this is the first time I have ever been further from Boston than Wakefield. This all seems so far away from home, and yet look at the people on the quayside. They seem quite unexcited by living so far away.’
‘San Francisco is a good deal further,’ said Collis.
Hannah nodded, and bit at her lips as if she were thinking hard. Then she sa
id, ‘Mr Edmonds – would it surprise you if I said that I am terribly frightened?’
He looked at her with that worried, sympathetic look of his, and slowly shook his head. ‘Not at all. This is a big adventure for someone who’s never been further than Wakefield. Especially a lady of delicacy, like yourself.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ she said. It appeared that she was almost cross.
‘Then what do you mean? I don’t understand.’
‘I thought you might. You seemed to be a man of – well, of sensitivity.’
‘I might be sensitive, but I’m not psychic.’
‘No, I suppose you’re not,’ she said. She lifted her wrists and unnecessarily unbuttoned and rebuttoned her gloves. ‘I suppose it’s too much to ask of you.’
‘Mrs West, I’m a perfect stranger.’
She looked at him. Her blue eyes were piercing. Then they softened a little. ‘You’re not perfect,’ she said. ‘You’re not really a stranger, either, not now. But your imperfections become you, and your familiarity is quite welcome.’
‘Well,’ he said, with a grunt of amusement, ‘I’m pleased about that.’
‘Mr Edmonds –’ she said.
‘You must call me Collis, particularly since I’m no longer a stranger.’
She paused. ‘Collis, then,’ she said, and blushed. ‘I was brought up in a very observant Boston Catholic home. We knew the priests and we knew the cardinal, and there wasn’t a single Wednesday dinner went by without some priest joining us at the table. You must understand that it’s taken me many years to come to my own personal understanding of God, and of the life that God wishes me to lead, and that I’m still afraid of the individual stand that my conscience led me to take.’
‘What individual stand was that?’
‘I married a Protestant. In spite of what my father said, in spite of how much my mother railed against me. In spite of the priests and everyone else. I loved Walter, and when he asked me to be his bride, I said yes.’
Collis remained silent for a moment, watching the way the shadows from the smoking funnel crossed her face. Then he said gently, ‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘I don’t know. I have to tell someone, I suppose. I’m alone now, Mr Edmonds, and when a weight like this is upon one’s mind, and one is alone, I think one must turn to whomever one can.’
‘Please, call me Collis.’
‘I’m sorry. Collis.’
She looked away, out across Charleston harbour to the distant, humped outline of Fort Sumter. The sea glittered in the morning sunlight. She said, as if she were reciting an article of law, an article which had been drafted and devised in the loneliest moments of her vigil over her mother’s sickbed, ‘I went against my church and my family and I married a Protestant. That’s why, when Walter wanted to go to San Francisco, and mother was so sick, I had to stay. I stayed for two years, nursing her, feeding her, cleaning up her sputum, and changing her sheets. It was depressing and dreary, but I felt it was the penance which had to be done to make up for my disobedience. Every night I went on my knees and thanked Our Lady for sparing my mother for one more day, even though every day that my mother remained alive meant one more day away from Walter.’
She paused and licked her lips. She was quite pale now, and there were tears in her eyes, although Collis couldn’t tell if they were tears of grief or tears from the ocean wind.
‘When mother died,’ she said huskily, ‘I thought my penance was over at last. I had paid my debt to God and Our Lady for marrying Walter. But I don’t think I had reckoned on the severity of the Lord’s punishments.’
‘What do you mean?’
She turned towards him, and it was obvious now that she was crying. She said, in a choked voice, ‘I was separated from Walter for two years, Collis. Two years without the husband you love is an eternity. I’m afraid now that, during that eternity, I’ve changed. I’ve become a particular person who is different from the person I once was. I believe that I’m more self-reliant, less impetuous. I believe that I’m stronger. Believe me, Collis, cleaning up the dying body of your own mother makes you strong. I believe that I have an inner courage that I once lacked altogether.’
‘And? What difference does that make?’
She took out a handkerchief from her purse, but didn’t wipe her eyes. ‘A great deal,’ she said. ‘I believe that I can support Walter more, in his business, and that I can endure the hardships of a pioneer life much better than I could have done before.’
‘But?’ he asked her.
She lowered her head. Then she looked up again, but her mouth was pursed with grief, and she couldn’t speak straight away. Collis waited for her, not moving, while the band on the quay played ‘Queen of the Southlands’.
‘I don’t think I love him any more,’ said Hannah. ‘That was my true penance. To endure two years of separation, to work day and night to comfort my mother, all in the belief that when the end came, there would be happiness and mutual affection; and then to find that everything for which I had suffered so long had become ashes. Not in Walter’s mind, because I think he still loves me. Only in my mind.’
She paused, then added, ‘I take out his picture, and stare at it, and I think: Who on God’s earth are you? Why am I travelling all this way for you? I don’t even know who you are.’
Collis gave her a brief, twitchy smile. ‘You’ll get over it,’ he said. ‘If you ask me, you’re just under the weather. You’ve got a bad attack of nerves, that’s all.’
She shook her head. ‘I know my own mind, Collis. I’ve been through enough wakeful hours holding my mother’s hand in the dead of night to know my own mind. In the dead of night, you see the terrors of the day as they really are.’
Collis pulled a face. ‘If you ask me, you’re suffering from exhaustion and loneliness, not the wrath of God. Once you get to San Francisco, and once you get to know Walter again, you’ll find it’s all different. You must have loved him when you married him, and he can’t have altered so much that you can’t love him now. I don’t suppose he’s grown especially ugly in two years, or lost all his hair.’
Hannah shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose he has. But I don’t mind about his face. Or his hair. It is he, himself, who worries me. I just don’t think I love him any more.’
Collis took her hand. It was bold of him, but under the circumstances she didn’t resist. He held it closely and warmly, much more tightly than he would normally have held the hand of another man’s wife, but then the man was still a goodish distance off, and the wife was plainly in need of more than the usual sympathy.
‘You could always turn back,’ he said gently. ‘You could always disembark, here at Charleston, and take the next steamer for Boston. I would take a letter to Walter for you.’
She shook her head. ‘You know I can’t do that. Besides, the only family I have left in Boston is my brother, and we really don’t get on too well.’
‘Then you don’t have any option but to wait and see, do you?’
‘And if I still don’t love him, when I see him? What can I do then?’
Collis released her hand. Her arm fell by her side, and hung limp. He said: ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. I wish I did.’
She looked out to sea, across the harbour. ‘God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform,’ she said. There was the slightest trace of vitriol in her voice, but only the slightest trace. She sounded almost as if she sympathised with God’s predicament, having to undertake even the simplest of tasks by the roundabout means of miracles, and visions, and holy puzzles.
‘There is always divorce, if you really can’t stand him,’ Collis said.
‘Not for me,’ she answered. ‘I’m a Catholic, remember. And apart from that, I don’t hate him enough to hurt him. I don’t hate him at all, to tell you the truth. I simply feel as if our marriage is a dull day. The sun’s gone in.’
‘Don’t you think you might hurt him more by staying with him, not loving him, than b
y divorcing him?’
She thought about that for a while, and then shook her head again. ‘It’s impossible to tell. As you say, Collis, I think I shall just have to wait and see.’
She turned to him and said something else, but at that moment the ship’s whistle blew, and all he caught was the word ‘you’. The gangplank was dropped to the quayside with a crash, and the engines began to beat, and there was such a clamour of ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Mind the ropes there’ and ‘See you next year’, all mingled with shouting and whistling and a last chorus of ‘I Wish I Was in Dixie’ from the brass band, that he didn’t get the chance to ask her what she had said. The mooring ropes were slipped from their capstans, the whistle blew again, a loud gooselike honk that echoed all across the estuary, and then the paddles began to froth and turn, and the Virginia was on her way to Panama.
As they passed Fort Sumter, with its Union flag flying from the battlements, Hannah said, ‘I think I shall go lie down now. At least with Mrs Edgeworth gone I have a cabin to myself.’
‘I only wish my pestilential Latvian friend had left with her,’ said Collis. ‘Perhaps I shall see you at lunch.’
‘Not if it’s hash again,’ she said and smiled.
When she had gone, Collis sat on a deck chair to watch the Virginia putting out through Charleston sound to the sea. Beside him, in a well-tailored suit of light-coloured English twill, sat a man in his early thirties with a wide-brimmed hat and fraying moustache, a sharp-nosed, sharp-eyed fellow who could have been anything from a salesman to a gambler. A well-worn carpetbag sat at his feet like an obedient dog.
‘You’re bound for San Francisco?’ the man asked, in a strong Tennessee accent.
‘That’s right.’
‘And is that your good lady? The one who just went inside?’
Collis pulled a wry face. ‘I only wish that it were.’
‘Well, you don’t seem to be doing so badly,’ said the man in the wide-brimmed hat. ‘The way she’s been looking at you, I’d say you’ve won her affections, to say the least. That’s why I thought she might have been your wife.’
Railroad Page 15
