Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I wish you’d keep your voice lowered,’ said Andrew. ‘It’s not that I don’t agree with you, it’s just that I don’t want to be shot while I’m eating.’

  ‘I think we’d be better off with a soft-shell Democrat for the time being,’ put in Charles. ‘I won’t say I hold with them. I think they’re the slugs and snails of the earth. But if we had a Republican President who spoke up and said what a Republican President would have to say, then he’d split the Union faster’n a fence rail.’

  ‘A war’s inevitable anyway, if we go on compromising,’ Collis argued. ‘And the longer we go on compromising, the worse it will be when it happens. It’s like clamping the lid on a pan of boiling beans, and sitting on it, and hoping that it won’t boil over.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’re exaggerating, kind of,’ said Charles.

  Collis looked at him. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘I met Senator Stephen Douglas once, a couple of years ago. He came to dinner at my parents’ house on Twenty-first Street, in New York, quite soon after he’d gotten his Nebraska Bill through, setting up Kansas and Nebraska as new territories. My father thought he was the hero of the age. They toasted each other, and laughed at each other’s jokes, and Douglas came out with all his purple spread-eagle oratory, and if you’d seen that little wing-collared toad it would have made you feel sick, I guarantee it.’

  Collis leaned forward, his elbow on the table, the same way he’d done when the pompous little Senator from Illinois had sat opposite him at dinner. ‘I asked him all about the Nebraska Bill, mainly because I didn’t really understand what he was doing at the time. I asked him why he’d proposed that the new territories should be allowed to make up their own minds on whether they wanted to be slave territories or free soil, and he thought about that, and then he told me, very dignified, that he believed in the sovereignty of the common people, in their right to choose their own destiny. “Personally,” he said, “I don’t care if slavery is voted up or voted down.” ’

  Andrew nodded. ‘So you said, being the cussed young man you are, “The trouble with that, Senator, is that there isn’t a dog’s chance in hell of slavery’s being voted down, and that’s just as sure as every free-soiler who tries to cast his vote will get his hide whipped off by Southern bullies.” ’

  Collis laughed. ‘I almost said that. Not quite so impolitely. But Douglas said, well, he was sure that slavery would be voted up. Certain of it. But if it was the will of the people, he couldn’t argue, no matter what he felt about it personally. And it was then that he turned to my father, who’s a portly old buzzard, and said he was sure that most Wall Street bankers were in the same boat as he was, and had Southern business interests to keep sweet, so if slavery was voted up, his friends in the South wouldn’t exactly hate him for it. And above all – and I can remember him saying this as if it were yesterday – he said that quite confidentially he’d wanted to see Kansas and Nebraska set up as territories without too much delay, without too much wrangling over slavery in Congress, because he was all tied up with some Chicago investors who wanted to build a railroad out of Chicago and westward through Council Bluffs, and they couldn’t proceed until Kansas and Nebraska had their own territorial governments.’

  ‘I heard stories about that, too,’ said Andrew. ‘You’re right, Collis, it makes a fellow want to scratch himself, don’t it? What’s it coming to when one man can almost bring the Union to cracking apart just because he wants to line his pockets from some private railroad scheme?’

  ‘Well, that’s what I mean when I say the very people who don’t want war will bring it on us by default,’ said Collis. ‘They’ll go on giving sops to the South, and the South will go on bullying more and more out of them, until the time comes when we’ll have to say, “That’s enough, put ’em up, no damned more.” ’

  ‘So you think there’s going to be a war, do you?’ asked Charles.

  ‘Either war or something very much like it. It depends on who succeeds Old Buck.’

  The waiter reappeared, wheeling in a trolley crowded with silver-covered dishes. He lifted the lids with all the style of a conjuror, broiled beefsteaks here, whole roast chicken here, brown fried potatoes here, corn, green beans, and broiled tomatoes here, grits here, abracadabra. Then he skimmed hot polished plates in front of them and began to serve out with a flourish.

  Collis and Andrew both had steak. Each cut must have weighed almost two pounds on the slab, and they were black and crisp with charcoal on the outside and running with blood on the inside. Charles’s chicken had been roasted with rosemary butter and gave off a rich, herby aroma.

  Charles raised his glass of burgundy. ‘Here’s another toast. To the wholesale confusion of our appetites.’ He watched with satisfaction as two plentiful helpings of fried crumbs were spooned next to his chicken.

  They ate for a while without talking, except to ask for the gravy or the bread, or for more wine. All around them, the noise and the laughter of San Francisco society at dinner rose and fell. It was a strange sound, quite unlike New York when it ate out. Instead of the confidential scissoring of clipped Eastern accents, punctuated by occasional bursts of sardonic laughter, there was a constant repetitive quacking, as if an endless flock of migratory ducks were passing overhead. Collis glanced up a couple of times, and saw Charles cramming half a chicken breast into his mouth, and, at his far corner table, William Tecumseh Sherman with his head bent over his plate, spitting out a piece of gristle with the same ferocity with which he had eaten it. As he cut off yet another slice of steak, Collis realised he wasn’t tired any more, and he certainly wasn’t hungry, and that was why he was being so nitpickingly critical of San Francisco’s comparative crudeness.

  ‘It’s business, not philosophy, that’s going to bring us to war, what’s what I think,’ Andrew said.

  ‘Well, business is very dear to our hearts,’ answered Charles. ‘Do you know something, I ordered a shipload of ice from Sitka in July, six hundred tons of it, and I unloaded it on San Francisco Bay and sold some of it there, and transported the rest of it to Sacramento by steamboat and wagon. Four hundred tons of it melted, but I still made nine hundred dollars profit. I was very pleased with that little exploit.’

  ‘Well, that’s excellent,’ said Collis, ‘but the business of dry goods and the business of selling ice doesn’t depend on slaves. As far as I can make out, it’s not so much a question for most Southerners of whether Negros have any rights under the Constitution or not, as whether they can seriously afford to let their slaves go.’

  ‘Chief Justice Taney doesn’t seem to be able to let his go,’ agreed Charles. He was referring, sardonically, to the Dred Scott decision, handed down in March. It was still being fiercely argued. The Supreme Court Chief Justice, with the President’s open approval, had declared that the slave Dred Scott, who had sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had been living in a free state for four years, was still a slave and had ‘no rights which the white man was bound to respect’. Free-soilers had been furious: they felt that slavery was being forced down their throats.

  Andrew, steadily slicing up and devouring his steak as if his legs were hollow, said, ‘Chief Justice Taney will be the death of us, one of these days.’

  They set down their knives and forks at last, although Collis had left well over a pound of steak on his plate. Charles’s chicken was nothing more than bones, a skeletal fishing boat beached on a shore of hominy grits, and Andrew relentlessly mopped his gravy with the last of the soda bread.

  ‘Don’t worry, Collis,’ said Andrew. ‘You’ll get your appetite back when you’ve had a good sleep.’

  Charles sat back and discreetly released the lower two buttons of his vest. ‘Talking of Frémont and Douglas, you know, I was buttonholed by that railroad pest up at Sacramento last week.’

  ‘What did he have to say?’ asked Andrew.

  ‘Oh, he was still going on about the Pacific railroad, and how he was sure he could take the Sacramento Valley Railroad righ
t over the Sierra Nevada. If you ask me, he’s probably crazy enough to be able to do it; but the fellow’s such a goddam bore. All I know about trains is that they make steaming noises and they bring in my goods from the docks. This fellow’s eternally on about cuts and grades and fills and tunnels. It’s enough to make your damned head spin around.’

  ‘Collis kept talking about a Pacific railroad when we were crossing the isthmus,’ said Andrew. ‘I was afraid he was going to rush straight off the boat when he got here, and start laying track.’

  ‘Everybody talks about Pacific railroads when they’re crossing the isthmus,’ said Charles. ‘There’s no doubt at all that if you could build one, you’d be richer than all hell. Especially if a civil war broke out, and you had control of the damned thing.’

  ‘That’s what I said to Collis,’ Andrew assented. ‘A man who could build a Pacific railroad would make himself rich as Crease-ass.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Charles.

  ‘Never mind,’ said Andrew.

  ‘This fellow up at Sacramento – the railroad pest. Does he really believe he could build a railroad over the mountains?’ asked Collis.

  ‘He says so, but you have to remember he’s a fanatic, and everything fanatics say you have to dilute with vinegar and lemon juice. I was talking to Colonel Charles Wilson – he’s the president of the Sacramento Valley Railroad – and he says it took all his funds and all his energy just to build twenty-two miles of track up to the gold mines at Folsom. Maybe this railroad pest of his could do better, and you have to admit that he knows about railroads backwards, sideways, and forwards, but across the Sierra Nevada? Well, I don’t think so. Do you know what the steepest grade is that a modern railroad locomotive can climb? One hundred sixteen feet to the mile, that’s what Colonel Wilson told me, and that’s so gradual you can’t scarcely see it with the human eye.’

  The waiter brought them another bottle of burgundy and poured a little into Charles’s glass. ‘Just dish it out,’ Charles said testily. ‘If it ain’t the same as the last bottle, it can only be better.’

  The waiter said placidly, ‘Very good, Mr Tucker,’ and filled their glasses.

  ‘What I was saying,’ went on Charles, angling his menu card to represent the steep western slopes of the Sierra Nevada, ‘is that no modern locomotive can traverse the mountains because the grades are all too sharp. And even if you were lucky enough to find yourself a wiggly-waggly way through, all at the right kind of a grade, well, that probably wouldn’t do you any good, because a railroad curve has to have a three-hundred-foot radius, so Colonel Wilson told me, otherwise the locomotive jumps off her tracks.’

  ‘But the railroad pest still thinks there’s a way?’ asked Andrew. ‘In spite of the fact that the menus in this restaurant are too steeply graded for the modern locomotive?’

  ‘Why did John Frémont say there’s a way?’ Charles retorted. ‘Listen, the Army Department sent out four parties of explorers to find ways across the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, four, and why did they all say, each one of them, that they’d found a way? They all said there were ways because they were all supported by money and politics, that’s why, just like Collis’s friend Senator Douglas. The ones who found routes through the southlands were supported by Jeff Davis and the Southern hard-shell politicians, and the ones who found routes across the plains and the northlands were all paid off by Northerners.’

  ‘Maybe they said they found ways because they found ways,’ commented Andrew.

  Charles smacked his hand on the table. ‘If they found ways, smart-ass, why didn’t they start to build a railroad? That was, what, three years ago, four years ago? I think the whole thing’s impossible.’

  ‘What’s the name of this railroad pest of yours?’ Collis asked.

  ‘Theodore Jones,’ Charles told him. ‘He’s a reasonable enough man in his way, unless you get him talking about railroads. His wife, Annie, often drops by the store for a talk with Clara. Nice people. But don’t say anything that reminds him of railroads; don’t say the words “grade”, or “tie”, or “brake”, because that’ll start him off for an hour.’

  Collis smiled. ‘I’d like to meet him.’

  ‘You will. You’re coming out to Sacramento, aren’t you? But just be warned. Everybody says that Theodore Jones is Pacific railroad crazy.’

  ‘Charles,’ said Collis, with complete seriousness, ‘when I crossed the isthmus of Panama, I nearly lost someone for whom I cared very dearly, because of the yellow fever. That’s why I’m interested in the notion of a Pacific railroad, and if there’s a fellow out at Sacramento who says he can find a way for trains to run through the Sierra Nevada, then I’d like to talk to him.’

  Charles sighed. ‘Well, to be frank, you won’t have much choice, as soon as he hears that you’re keen on railroads. But if you ask me, he’s wasting his time, and he’ll waste yours, too. I mean, supposing he does find a way through the Sierras – what then? He still has the Great Basin to cross, where there isn’t water enough for a fly to wash his face, and no timber for hundreds of miles. How do you run a railroad across that? And after the Great Basin, there’s the Rockies, and they’re just as high as the Sierras. You’ve got yourself plains, and deserts, and mountains. You’ve got snow and you’ve got drought. How in hell can you humanly drive a railroad across all that?’

  Over French cognac and Havana cigars, sitting well back in their chairs with faces flushed and polished with good eating and drinking, their conversation wandered from railroads to dancing, and from dancing to the theatre, and from the theatre, naturally enough, to women.

  ‘It’s clear to me that Collis favours a particular style of woman,’ Andrew said. ‘She may be dark, like that half-breed lady on the steamer; or she may be fair, like Mrs West. But she must have a substantial bust, not flat, and she must have a well-boned face. Above all,’ he said, speaking louder to drown out Collis’s protests, ‘she must have mysterious eyes. Eyes that hint of repressed passions and exotic yet unfulfilled desires.’

  Collis laughed. ‘Exotic yet unfulfilled desires? You sound like a Turkish rug salesman.’

  The waiter, with his shoelaces undone and a pencil stuck behind his ear, came around and asked them if they wanted more brandy. It was well past eleven o’clock now, and the restaurant had quietened.

  Andrew raised his brandy glass and looked at Collis seriously, if not too steadily, his bright eyes blurred. ‘The question is,’ he said, ‘what are you going to do about Mrs West? That’s the question.’

  ‘West is a good man from what I hear,’ put in Charles. ‘I don’t think you’d be doing yourself any favours if you cuckolded him.’

  ‘It depends on your definition of a favour,’ said Andrew, drinking.

  Collis tried to smile. ‘I’m not sure what I’m going to do. She’s a most captivating woman, and there’s no mistake of that. While I was with her, I felt as if she had me under some kind of spell. I felt as if I was drawn to love her, whether I wanted to or not. But now – well, I’m not quite so certain. I have the strongest feelings of affection for her, and I expect that if she were sitting here now, she would only have to smile at me and I would swear that I loved her for ever. She has such a sweet, sad smile. Like a trembling orchid.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Charles, amused.

  ‘I wish I could,’ Collis told him. ‘But there are all kinds of problems. The main one, of course, is her marriage to Walter West. I haven’t met the fellow yet. Haven’t even glimpsed him. But it’s only fair on everybody that she have the chance to be reunited with him. He did wait two years, poor fellow, after all, and if he was faithful that’s a devil of a long time. He deserves a chance, doesn’t he, after writing all those letters to her, and putting gunpowder in his coffee to make him feel less frisky? Wouldn’t you say so?’

  ‘I’d say that nobody gets any chances in love,’ said Andrew, with a smile that wasn’t quite a smile at all. ‘I’d say they don’t deserve them, neither. You see, nobody deserves to be love
d. You either are or you ain’t, and all the crying in China isn’t going to change things.’

  ‘You’re very philosophical tonight,’ remarked Charles.

  ‘It seems to me that Collis is the one who’s being philosophical,’ said Andrew. ‘Instead of being passionate, he’s being philosophical. Could it be that absence has made his love for the lady less fond?’

  ‘There’s divorce, too,’ explained Collis. ‘That’s a problem. She’s a Boston Roman Catholic, and I think her marriage to Walter took all the religious fight right out of her. He was a Protestant, you see, and the family didn’t approve. She suffered ten times over for that one act of disobedience, and to divorce him now might be more than she can bring herself to do.’

  ‘So,’ said Andrew, ‘what are you going to do?’

  Collis looked away and thought for a moment. ‘I think I shall probably buy her roses.’

  Charles laughed at that, and thumped the table in approval. Then he unwound his watch chain and inspected his gold half-hunter. ‘I do believe it’s time we moved on, gentlemen, if we’re going to make any money for Collis tonight. Are you still up to a little gaming, Collis, or do you want to go back to Knickerbocker Jane’s and fall into the arms of that Portuguese-speaking dove of yours?’

  ‘I’m game for some gaming,’ said Collis. ‘At least I’ll be sitting quiet when I’m playing cards. The slightest physical activity would give me chronic indigestion, right at this moment.’

  ‘Huzzah,’ replied Charles, ‘then we’re off.’

  They left the International Hotel, bowed out by relieved waiters, and pushed their way through the glass-and-mahogany doors to the steps outside, where they saw Charles’s phaeton waiting on the warm, breathless night.

  ‘Just take us to the Eagle, will you, Billy?’ ordered Charles, and so the coachman clicked his tongue and the phaeton clattered off on its way.