The train whistled as it went through Matachí n, but didn’t stop. A scattering of Indians waved their hats at it as it passed, but few of the passengers felt inclined to wave back. The day was stifling now, even though the locomotive was beginning to rattle its way up the enclosed Rio Obispo valley towards the highest point of the crossing, the station at Culebra.
Andrew Hunt was asleep, his hat pulled over his eyes, his magazine slowly slipping off his lap. Next to him, a stove salesman from Pottstown, Pennsylvania, was sitting uncomfortably in his yellow linen suit, saying nothing, and almost certainly wishing he was back in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. Collis, his handkerchief long since sodden, wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He was so hot now that he didn’t feel like doing anything, sitting, standing, drinking, or smoking. All he could do was sit still and perspire.
At last the train came around the long right-hand curve that took it into Culebra station. Its brakes squealed, and it gradually steamed and sniffed to a halt, the boxcars and passenger cars jerking and banging against each other as they came to rest. A Spanish voice shouted, ‘Culebra! Culebra! Short stop!’ and the train’s passengers leaned out of the windows like chickens looking out of a row of coops, to see what was going on.
The village of Culebra, where the railroad cut through the mountains, was a collection of little more than a dozen palm-thatched huts, a small general store, and a three-storey frame building that proudly announced itself as the American Hotel. The air was cooler and fresher up here, and because the railroad engineers had hacked the forest back, there was even a light breeze blowing from the peaks of the mountains. Collis opened the door of his compartment and stepped down on to the hard-baked turf. Andrew Hunt, who had seen it all before, continued to snooze.
Compared to some of the stations they had passed on the way up to the summit, Culebra was busy. There were three or four trains of mules, heavily laden with baggage and provisions, waiting to continue their journey through the jungle to Colón. Even though the journey was far quicker and safer by rail, not everybody could afford the Panama Railroad Company’s freight charges, and there was still a regular traffic along the muddy and treacherous mule trail. There were two or three dozen Indians here at Culebra, too, broad-faced and obliging, who would carry your bags for you, or sell you cheroots, or simply stand and stare at you with friendly, disconcerting intensity. The train whistled hoarsely, and the sound echoed across the clearing.
A Spanish railroad official in a sweaty uniform came hurrying along the length of the track. He said: ‘Get back aboard, please, señor. We don’t stop here long.’
‘Is anything wrong?’ asked Collis.
The official coughed and quickly crossed himself. ‘Somebody sick, that’s all. The hotel doctor look at her now. Then we go.’
‘Her? Who is it? One of the ladies?’
‘That’s right, señor. Now, please, back in the train.’
Collis looked back along the train. He could see now that several of the women passengers had alighted, and were standing by the side of the track with their hand baggage. The conductor was helping them move into another car, while several Indians stood around and benignly watched. With relief, among the muslin-veiled hats and cream and yellow travelling skirts, Collis recognised Maria-Mamuska, in her blue dress, clutching her bundle and her blanket. He gave her a quick wave, and she waved back.
He couldn’t, however, see Hannah.
‘You must get back on board, señor,’ the railroad official told him. ‘You cannot help.’
‘I can’t see Mrs West,’ said Collis.
‘Mrs Vest?’ asked the railroad official.
‘No, I can’t see her. She was in that compartment.’
‘Señor, most of the ladies have found new seats already. Don’t worry about Mrs Vest. It’s only one lady who is sick. Please now, back on the train.’
Collis shook his head. ‘I want to make sure that Mrs West is well first. Come along.’
The official shrugged and closed the door of Collis’s compartment. Then he followed Collis along the side of the track, still shrugging and having a quiet argument with himself under his breath. The conductor tipped his cap as Collis approached, under the mistaken impression that he was a railroad director, or someone important.
‘What’s happening here?’ asked Collis.
The conductor, a lean pock-marked half-breed with a drooping waxed moustache, said, ‘See for yourself, sir,’ and indicated the open door of the ladies’ compartment. Collis peered inside.
The blinds had been drawn so that the compartment was dim. He could see a portly man sitting with his back to him on the edge of one of the banquettes, and this was presumably the local doctor. On the banquette itself, a woman was lying, her face hidden from view; but Collis could see her small white kid shoes and her white stockings, and he knew with cold certainty that it was Hannah.
He climbed up on the step and entered the gloomy compartment. There was a smell of surgical alcohol and castor oil. Castor oil, for those who didn’t have the stomach for bourbon and mustard, was another of those infallible preventives for yellow fever. Collis stepped cautiously forward and saw Hannah lying on a sweat-stained pillow, her face very pale, her blonde hair dark with perspiration, her eyes closed and swollen. She shuddered and twitched as if she were having a nightmare, and her hands kept clenching and unclenching. Collis stared at her for a long while, his throat dry and his heart beating in slow, taut bumps. It suddenly occurred to him that in the space of only a few weeks, he was standing witness for the second time at the tragedy of a woman caught up in the inevitable accident of her own sad life. He felt almost as if he had been chosen, as a terrible lesson, to watch these women struggle and fall and eventually succumb.
The doctor turned. He was French, with a tobacco-stained moustache and bad teeth. He looked as if he had been living out in the tropics for ever. ‘What do you want?’ he said thickly.
‘I know this lady,’ said Collis.
The doctor sniffed. ‘Well, in that case, I’m sorry.’
‘Is she seriously ill?’
‘There are only two kinds of sicknesses in Panama, my friend,’ said the doctor, rising to his feet and tugging his coat straight. ‘There are the sicknesses from which you recover, and the sicknesses from which you don’t.’
‘Will she recover?’
‘I don’t know. She doesn’t have a very strong constitution.’
Collis looked down at Hannah, as white as the effigy on a saint’s tomb. She seemed to have settled down now, but her lips were parted, and she was breathing with a small moaning sound, like someone in distress.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ asked Collis. ‘Can’t you do something?’
‘My friend, I’ve done everything. She has been dosed with castor oil. But if it’s yellow fever, then there is no cure.’
‘Do you think it is?’
The doctor glanced down at Hannah and pulled a face. ‘Most probably. She has the fever and the shivers, and she is very thirsty. But she doesn’t have any pains in the legs, which is one of the symptoms, nor does she have a headache. But these may come later.’
‘What happens then? After the pains?’
The doctor laid a hand on his arm. ‘Let me tell you outside, my friend. If it is yellow fever, then this is the last place you ought to be. I have seen the whole crew of a clipper die because one of their number caught this disease.’
Collis wiped the sweat from his face. ‘Who’s going to look after her, if it is yellow fever? Someone has to.’
‘My friend,’ insisted the doctor quietly, ‘ la fièvre jaune, it does not distinguish between the young or the old, nor does it care if you are rich or poor. I suggest we step down.’
Collis reluctantly left the ladies’ compartment and climbed down on to the track. Several more passengers had left their cars now and were standing around at a respectful distance. Collis found himself brushing down the lapels of his light-grey suit as
if to brush off the odour of disease.
The doctor came after him and said something in Spanish to the railroad official. Collis couldn’t understand it, but he caught the words fiebre amarilla, and Panama. The railroad official shrugged and went back towards the head of the train, still muttering to himself.
The doctor came up to Collis and said quietly, ‘Since we’re still not sure if it’s yellow fever, they will keep her on the train until you reach Panama. There’s a hospital there, not a very good one, but they can make her more comfortable than I can here.’
‘But you said there’s no cure.’
The doctor looked away towards the huts of Culebra, as if he was thinking about something else altogether – some stray lost memory of long ago. ‘No,’ he said, after a distracted pause. ‘There isn’t.’
He rested his hand on Collis’s shoulder. Close up, Collis could see that his eyes were veined and bloodshot by malaria. ‘First, there is pain, and fever. Then, after a few days, the patient seems to get better, although the face and the eyes take on a yellow hue. After that, as the patient begins to die, he will vomit up black blood in great gushes, what the Panamanians call vómito negro. That means the end is close. The patient will go cold, and die in nine or ten hours.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor added. ‘It’s not too pleasant. I wish I could tell you it was something like a fever, or a chill. But I really don’t know.’
‘Who’s going to look after her, between here and the hospital?’ Collis said shakily.
The doctor took out a small tin of blackcurrant pastilles and offered them around. Only the train conductor took one, but then he looked as if he’d suffered from every equatorial disease known to medical science, and survived them all. The doctor dropped a pastille into his mouth and said, ‘There were some nuns here until last week, but now they’ve gone back to Panama. I don’t know. I don’t think you’ll find anyone to stay with her if it’s the yellow fever. She’ll just have to take her own chances. They’re slim enough anyway. If she dies now, or in a few days’ time, well, I’m sorry, but it won’t make any considerable difference.’
‘There isn’t any alternative, then, is there?’
‘Je ne comprends pas.’
‘I’ll just have to stay with her myself.’
The doctor sucked his pastille carefully. ‘I don’t think you really understand what you’re saying, my friend. Yellow fever comes here every two or three years, and wipes out hundreds of people, sometimes thousands. No one is spared. I have seen young railroad engineers, fit as you could wish, come out here from France. In a month they are wasted away, or dead. You think maybe you are strong enough to fight it off. Well, sometimes physical strength helps people to survive. But seventy-five per cent of the time, their strength is no use. They die.’
He sniffed. ‘If you stay with that lady, and if that lady has yellow fever, then the chances are that you too will die. That is all I can tell you.’
Collis took a deep breath. He was frightened of disease. When his sister, Maude, had come down with influenza, he had studiously avoided her rooms; and while she had convalesced, sitting in the back parlour with her inhalers and her handkerchiefs, he had clamped his hand over his nose and mouth whenever he had gone in to say good night, although much of that had been done to tease her. Still, he found it almost impossible to think of leaving Hannah West alone and sick in a railroad compartment, even for the few short hours it would take to reach Panama City. Not after he had courted her so stubbornly, and promised her so much, and not after Mrs Edgeworth had adjured him so sternly to take care of her.
It could be, too, that he actually loved her, although he tried not to think of that. He knew he desired her, and wanted to possess her. But if that was all he felt about her, why did he feel the responsibility to look after her? Desire, as he knew from those favourite whores of his in New York City who had occasionally appeared with streaming colds or spots, was not a flower which flourished in the sick bay. Only love was hardly enough to withstand bad air and balsam, and the possibility of infection.
‘I’ll stay with her,’ Collis said decisively.
‘My friend, I urge you –’
‘I’ll stay.’
At that moment, Maria-Mamuska came hurrying along the track, holding her dress above her ankles so that she could run better. ‘Collis,’ she said. Her eyes were wide with shock. ‘Collis, you must not do this.’
He gave her a small, tense smile. ‘I believe I have to,’ he told her quietly.
‘She’s not even your relative! Why do you want to stay with her?’
‘I promised I’d look after her, that’s all.’
Maria-Mamuska pouted. ‘You’re not telling me the truth,’ she said. There was only a yard of railroad clinker between them, and yet it seemed like a mile. Heat rippled from the stones and from the roof of the train, and butterflies fluttered between the silent wheels. In the distance they could hear mules braying as they waited to be fed, and, nearer, the dribbling of steam from the locomotive.
Collis turned away. He didn’t know how he could possibly explain what he felt to Maria-Mamuska. He could hardly understand it himself. But ever since Kathleen Mary had fallen from the parapet of the Monument Hotel, he had felt a growing sense of duty and responsibility towards himself, and towards other people, even strangers. He had tried to ignore it. After all, life was much happier without it. Yet it was there inside of him, whether he ignored it or not, and it was strong enough and demanding enough to make him say no to Maria-Mamuska, and yes to an act of duty.
‘Will you fetch my bag?’ he said to the conductor. ‘It’s in the third car back.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And would you be good enough to tell Mr Hunt what has happened? I believe he’s still asleep.’
The conductor walked off, and Collis and Maria-Mamuska were left facing each other, with the French doctor placidly sucking blackcurrant pastilles a few feet away. The sky above them was blue and endless, although there were banks of heavy clouds forming over the mountains towards the south-east, on the wind that the people of Panama City called the fever wind.
‘Have you lost your senses?’ asked Maria-Mamuska. ‘You will catch this horrible fever and –’
‘You won’t persuade me to change my mind,’ Collis said. ‘I don’t know why, but you won’t. This is one of those things that I have to do before I can go on living my life any further.’
‘You love her?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Madam,’ the French doctor said to Maria-Mamuska, ‘If you can’t persuade him to change his mind, with your looks, then I’m sure that none of the rest of us can. It seems to me that he is committed.’
Collis, in the back of his mind, saw Hannah sitting in the mule trap at Aspinwall, on the rainy night of their arrival in Panama, and he could almost hear her saying, ‘I would have to commit myself to you, and I would expect commitment in return.’
‘Is there anything I can give her?’ he said to the doctor. ‘Anything to relieve the fever?’
The doctor shrugged. ‘You can give her plenty to drink. There’s some cold tea in a jug there. The Chinese used to drink tea when they were building the railroad up here, and since none of them got sick from the dysentery. I guessed that tea must be purer than plain water. Something to do with the effusion from the leaves, I think.’
‘What about medicines?’
‘I’m sorry, there’s nothing. I’d be fooling you if I said there was. But I’ll give you some smelling salts in case the pain and the fever are too bad. That’s all I can do.’
Maria-Mamuska stood still, a little way away, holding her pregnant stomach and staring at Collis with black, tear-filled eyes. Collis took two small green bottles from the doctor, and then looked across at her, and knew that he could still change his mind. Nobody in the world was forcing him to stay by Hannah’s side on the trip to Panama. He could have left her there, alone on the banquette, and her chances of survival would pr
obably have been just as good, or just as bad. They way she was at the moment, she wouldn’t even know he was there.
But now the conductor was coming back with his bag, and the Spanish railroad official was shrilling at his whistle and hurrying everybody back aboard, and Maria-Mamuska turned and walked away.
‘I think you are mad,’ said the doctor. ‘But I wish you luck.’
Collis shook his hand. ‘Luck is about all I need.’
The conductor gingerly tossed his bag into the train, and then stood back and saluted as if Collis were a war hero. Collis stepped aboard and closed the door behind him. The locomotive let out a blast of steam, and then released its brakes and began to move slowly out of Culebra, down from the summit of the Panama mountains, on the last stretch of its journey to the Pacific Ocean. It didn’t whistle or ring its bell. Whistling and ringing were for celebrations.
Collis sat on the banquette opposite Hannah and watched her. She appeared to be peacefully asleep at the moment, although every now and then she gave a small shudder and turned over. He leaned over her and softly stroked her forehead, but that disturbed her, and so he sat back again, and crossed his legs, and looked out of the window.
The train passed between green forested mountains, and then through dark volcanic rocks, twisting and turning as it made its way down the valley of the Rio Grande. Soon, the mountains levelled into round hills, and then the hills gave way to miles of lowlands. The sun had moved around, and Collis leaned out of the window to catch the shadow of the train crossing the shrubs and the grass and the sodden turfs.
Railroad Page 21
