Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Well, sure,’ said Sam Lewis, ‘but the virtue of hell is that they don’t expect you to sit through some dangdratted thespianism, as well as roast.’

  From the side of the auditorium, the orchestra began to troop in with their instruments. They sat in their pit, and shuffled their scores, and kept knocking over their music stands, and even when they were ready they took out a variety of handkerchiefs and blew their noses loudly as if they were retaliating against the audience. When they were quite finished, the conductor strutted in, a small Italian with curled-up whiskers and a shock of silver hair, and he stood in the limelight that illuminated his rostrum while everyone clapped, and a few of the less couth elements actually cheered. The next five minutes were spent in doleful tuning up.

  Sam Lewis said to Collis, ‘Charles tells me you’re going out to Sacramento to work for him and Leland McCormick. Get yourself some business knowhow.’

  ‘I was thinking of it,’ said Collis.

  ‘Well, you couldn’t learn business under anybody tougher than Leland,’ remarked Sam. He took out a black snakeskin cigar case and offered it around, but both Charles and Collis declined. He stuck one in his own mouth, and patted the pockets of his evening suit for matches, but nobody offered him a light. ‘Charles tells me you’re interested in railroads.’

  ‘Railroads had crossed my mind.’

  ‘Well, if I were you, son, I’d let them cross your mind and keep on going. Railroads are poison. And the reason they’re poison is because you’re investing your money in something that, once you’ve laid it, can’t be moved. Look at that Theodore Jones fellow, the one out in Sacramento. Colonel Wilson brought him in to lay a line from Sacramento to Folsom, twenty-two miles of track, because Folsom was rich with gold. But what happened? The dangdratted gold mines gave out, and three-quarters of Folsom’s population drifted away, and what was he left with? Twenty-two miles of roadbed and rails going absolutely noplace at all. And besides, no train could ever get over the Sierra Nevada unless you took it off its rails and hauled it over by mule.’

  ‘I’ll lay you a bet,’ said Collis.

  Charles raised a gingery eyebrow and tried to signal to Collis to behave more cautiously, but Collis felt determined. The more he heard from men like Teach and Wintle and Lewis that a transcontinental railroad was out of the question, the more certain he was that someone could build it. It must be possible. He couldn’t believe that God could create a country so wealthy and free and fertile and leave it permanently divided by a range of impassable mountains; nor that He could allow so many people to suffer and die on their way through Panama without their lives at least having inspired others to find a way through the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. It didn’t make sense, to man or God. It had to be done, even if it couldn’t be done.

  ‘What will you bet, Mr Edmonds?’ asked Sam Lewis. ‘Will you bet you can drive a railroad locomotive right through the Sierra Nevada?’

  ‘I’ll bet I can find a pass, and prove it possible, within five years,’ said Collis.

  ‘And if you can? What do I have to do? Promise to give up cigars?’

  ‘You have to invest one hundred thousand dollars in my railroad company, no questions asked.’

  ‘But you don’t have a railroad company.’

  ‘At this rate, it looks as though I very shortly will.’

  Sam Lewis let a dribble of cigar smoke escape from between his puckered lips. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘it’s a fair bet, and you’re on. But what will you do for me if you can’t prove that it’s possible?’

  ‘Mr Lewis,’ said Collis. ‘I’ll buy you this theatre, so that you can have the express pleasure of burning it down.’

  Sam Lewis gave a boiled, crimson, crinkly smile. Then he reached across and shook Collis’s hand. ‘You’re definitely on. Definitely. It looks as though I can’t lose either way, and by God, I’ve always wanted to burn down this dangdratted place.’

  At that moment, Knickerbocker Jane reached over and touched Collis’s shoulder. He turned towards her, and she nodded her head meaningfully towards the other side of the auditorium. He looked and saw that the curtains at the back of the Melfords’ box were opening, and that the theatre manager himself was ushering the Melford family to their seats.

  Knickerbocker Jane, without a word, passed over a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses, and Collis raised them to his eyes. The first to take her seat was Althea Melford, a tall, straight-backed woman in her middle forties, with coppery-brown hair drawn back from her face, and dangling ringlets. Her face was sharp, high-cheekboned, and Collis could almost imagine her as a queen of ancient Greece, or as Agrippina, tired of contemplating the ashes of Germanicus, and ready at last for a night of entertainment among hoi polloi. In her pale-blue silk evening gown and her diamonds and pearls, she stepped forward with a classic and haughty mien and sat down as if she were taking her throne.

  Behind her, in a tizzy, came a woman who was obviously some relative or visitor, with a muddled hair-style and a black dress that would have been five years out of date in New York. She sat down abruptly and nervously next to Althea Melford, and dropped her purse. The orchestra played ‘When the Moon on the Lake Is Beaming’, but everybody’s attention, surreptitiously or not, was on the Melfords’ box. Someone in the stalls, for no reason at all, started to clap.

  At last, the curtains parted again, and into the box came the girl for whom Collis had been waiting with such nervous anticipation – Sarah Melford. He knew it was she. She was taller than her mother, and just as straight-backed, but while her mother’s hair was combed away from her forehead, Sarah’s was curled in long glossy ringlets all around, and parted in the centre, shiny and brown as chestnuts. Her face was exquisite, with startlingly large brown eyes, and clearly defined cheekbones, and a nose that was thin but quite straight. Her lips may have been a little too full, but that could have been the effect of cosmetics. Her neck was long and white, and in her low-bodiced evening gown, as dark yellow as a Canada lily, her white breasts rose full and deeply cleft and decorated with diamonds and gold. She paused as she entered the family box. She was used to being stared at by all of San Francisco. In fact, she plainly expected it. Then, tall as she was, she took her place with unfaltering grace, and opened her yellow silk fan, as if to say, ‘That’s enough, you’ve seen all I feel like allowing you to see.’

  Collis had been expecting a noticeable girl, even a beautiful girl. But Sarah Melford, from what he could see through his badly focused opera glasses, was a creature out on her own. She had inherited the classic, cold features of her mother; but they were softened somehow by whatever genes her father’s family had passed on to her, and so she was fashionably pretty as well as perfect in bone structure and bearing. This had the effect of making her erotic, as well as aloof; of making it seem possible that she had earthy desires, as well as elegance. Collis could imagine sitting opposite such a girl at a society dinner, all solid-silver cutlery and sparkling candelabra, and taking off his shoe so that he could inveigle a bare foot up inside her petticoats, and have it gripped in between her hot bare thighs; while above the damascene cloth, feigning unawareness, they spoke of badminton, and riding, and the latest scandal from Washington. Sarah Melford was a rare and wondrous animal, and Collis found himself staring at her as if someone had stunned him with a club. She sat in her chair with utter composure, utter self-assurance, and the stainless confidence that comes from knowing that one is very rich, and very influential, and very beautiful.

  Collis was so entranced with Sarah that at first he didn’t notice the dark, imposing figure who came into the box and stood behind her. But then he perceived through his opera glasses that there was a broad tanned hand on the back of Sarah’s chair, and he followed the hand to a wide white cuff, and then to an arm, and from the arm to a broad, immaculately tailored shoulder. He focused at last on a face, and it was the face of Laurence Melford, one of the most powerful of the California pioneers, a millionaire in gold, whisky, beef, silver,
and real estate. A decider of destinies, and a political giant. From what he could make out, in the shadows of the Melfords’ box, he was heavy-jowled, stern, bristling with grey eyebrows, like General Zachary Taylor, old Rough and Ready, except that his mouth was softer. He bore himself with the exaggerated dignity that all self-made men affect, as a substitute for illustrious ancestors and a wealthy childhood. Collis could see him turning his head from side to side, not so much as if he was scanning the theatre for anybody he might happen to know, but as if he was generously permitting the audience to admire the various aspects of his craggy and handsome face.

  Sarah raised her hand and whispered something in her father’s ear, and he bent over her chair. Collis could see Melford smile, and Sarah laugh, and he would have given fifty silver dollars to know what it was they were saying. He put down the opera glasses and looked across at Charles Tucker with an expression of appreciation, but of frustration, too.

  ‘The princess on top of the glass mountain, I’m afraid,’ said Knickerbocker Jane. ‘The only man who’s ever going to win her is going to have to be rich, and maybe titled, and at least as clever as Bret Harte.’

  ‘She’s right, Collis,’ said Charles. ‘That girl there is the living definition of the word “impregnable”.’

  ‘No girl is impregnable,’ Collis told him, smiling.

  ‘I think Charlie meant “inaccessible”,’ put in Sam Lewis. ‘But I guess the one goes hand in glove with the other, so to speak.’

  ‘They say she’s never even kissed a man,’ said Elsie, ‘and never been alone in the same room with a boy, not in the whole of her twenty years.’

  Collis raised his opera glasses again, but now, rapidly and unsteadily, the auditorium lights began to dim, and the occupants of the Melford box were lost in darkness, except for the occasional glitter of diamonds, or the shadowy flutter of a fan. The orchestra struck up with a scrapy version of ‘The Dance of the Dryads’, by August Müschler, and with a loud mechanical whirring the drapes across the stage began to open. The audience applauded and cheered and whistled, and Collis wearily peeled off his evening gloves and prepared himself for an evening of provincial entertainment.

  Luckily, Rodney Mulgrave wasn’t too dreadful, although Collis found his eyes drooping during an interminable scenario entitled ‘The Highland Hero, Feared Dead, Returns to His Croft to Discover His Aged Mother Blind’, in which Rodney Mulgrave, who was stout, with fiery ginger hair, played both the Highland hero and his aged mother, a double role which involved a great deal of leaping from one side of the stage to the other, and an instant costume change which was effected by wrapping a plaid blanket around his waist (hero’s kilt) and then quickly flinging it over his head (aged mother’s shawl). Collis revived himself in time for the deeply emotional climax (in which the aged mother fondles her son’s face and at last realises that he really has returned alive from the bloody sloughs of Culloden), although he found it hard to believe how the sight of a short fat man in a plaid blanket kneeling on a stage and palpating his own nose could draw such tears and sobs from so many people. Even Knickerbocker Jane was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  During the intermission, Collis sat where he was, preoccupied and quiet, and smoked a cheroot. Charles and Elsie went off to find champagne and chocolates, while Ursula sprayed herself with more perfume and fanned herself languorously.

  Although his head was lowered, Collis had his eyes fixed on the Melford box opposite, where Sarah and her family were drinking iced white wine and laughing with the gaiety of those who know they are being admired. He stared first at Sarah, feeling the soles of his feet fizz with the sheer unusual beauty of her; and then he stared at her father, Laurence, because it was Laurence he was going to have to beat, or win over, if he wanted Sarah and if he wanted San Francisco. Laurence looked as hard and as uncompromising as a mountain in the Sierra Nevada.

  At last, only a few minutes before the curtain was due to go up again, and the audience was about to be regaled first with Rodney Mulgrave’s Shakespearean selections, and then his ‘Soliloquy Spoken by a Marooned Mariner on the Occasion of Washington’s Birthday’, Collis excused himself, left the box, and walked quickly along the corridor that led around the back of the auditorium, pushing past languid young San Franciscan society dogs in cutaway coats and overdone neckties, and scented harlots in silk dresses who had gathered to make assignations for later in the evening.

  He reached the curtains in back of the Melfords’ box. They were guarded by a tall, hawk-nosed footman in a green frogged coat and white knee breeches. The footman’s eyes swivelled down to look at Collis as a buzzard’s eyes revolve to seek out a prairie dog. He said in a chiselled Connecticut accent, ‘Yes, sir? Did you want something?’

  Collis coughed. ‘Well, er, yes. Yes, I did. I was hoping to present my compliments to Mr Melford. I happened to notice that he and his family were present tonight, and, well, I was hoping to present my compliments.’

  ‘Your card, sir?’

  ‘My card?’

  The footman smiled a tight smile. ‘How can I present your compliments without your card, sir?’

  ‘I just arrived here. I mean, I just arrived in San Francisco. I haven’t had occasion to have my cards printed up yet.’

  ‘Then who shall I say is here, sir?’

  Collis didn’t know why he should feel so intimidated by this white-stockinged flunky. Perhaps it was the power and the wealth and the indomitable beauty that he represented. Perhaps it was the thought of Sarah Melford only two or three feet away from him, concealed by curtains but radiating the kind of magnetic attraction that makes iron filings form extraordinary curves and bars of metal cling to each other in scientific passion.

  ‘Tell him Mr Collis Edmonds, out of New York,’ said Collis, more hoarsely than he’d meant to. But then, on an inspiration, he added, ‘Tell him it’s the gentleman who shot a dealer’s hat in the Eagle Saloon last night.’

  ‘Sir?’ said the footman, but Collis simply inclined his head persuasively to one side and said, ‘Go ahead. You heard me.’

  ‘Wait here,’ the footman told him, and then pushed his way through the curtains. For a split second, Collis could see the back of Sarah Melford’s gilt chair, her white shoulder, her dark-yellow dress; and he caught the warm perfume of wealth. Then the curtains closed again, and all he could do was wait in the corridor, his evening gloves clasped in his hand, feeling socially uncertain and gauche for almost the first time in his life.

  He heard the orchestra begin the overture for the second half of Rodney Mulgrave’s performance. He would have done almost anything for a swig from Knickerbocker Jane’s flask. He coughed twice, although he didn’t need to.

  After a moment, the curtains opened again, and the footman reappeared.

  ‘Well?’ asked Collis.

  The footman angled his head, in deliberate mockery of the way that Collis had nodded his. ‘Mr Melford appreciates your compliments, sir, and hopes you enjoy the remainder of the performance.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Did you want more, sir?’

  Collis pursed his lips. ‘Does Mr Melford understand who I am? I am the son of Makepeace Edmonds, the late Makepeace Edmonds, of I. P. Woolmer’s Bank, in New York. I am Collis Edmonds.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ replied the footman. ‘You are also the gentleman who shot a dealer’s hat last night in the Eagle Saloon.’

  ‘Did you tell him that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  The footman smiled archly. ‘He said, sir, that I should send you away with the maximum dispatch. And that is what I have attempted to do.’

  At that moment, the curtains swayed and parted again. Laurence Melford emerged himself, much taller and more powerfully built than Collis had imagined, with a shirt front that was piercingly white and a brow that was so shaggy and grey that he appeared to be looking at Collis through the severe confusion of a thorn-bush. He was rich with the smell o
f brandy, cigars, and French cologne.

  ‘Will you keep this confounded noise down?’ he asked, in a deep growl.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Melford,’ said the footman. ‘But this gentleman here seems to think that you ought to know him.’

  Laurence Melford examined Collis with slow deli beration and rubbed his chin with a broad, work-scarred, but perfectly manicured hand. There was a massive gold ring on his finger engraved with the Gothic initial M. He said, in the same rich basso profundo, ‘Maybe I ought to know you. But I don’t. And that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘You will,’ replied Collis.

  ‘I will? You mean you’re going to take San Francisco by storm?’

  Collis shook his head. His confidence was growing, now that he could see Laurence Melford for a man, and not for a legend. His father, in his greatest days at I. P. Woolmer’s Bank, had made his underlings and most of his customers shudder with fear; but Collis had never been disturbed by him or by anybody, provided he could meet them face to face and talk to them man to man. As his friend Henry Browne had once laconically remarked, ‘Never fear the other fellow for one moment. Always remember that he visits the watercloset, just as you do, and that his dignity, just like yours, has to be dropped around his ankles.’

  ‘I intend to take the continent by storm,’ Collis said. ‘Not just San Francisco.’

  Laurence Melford tugged at his ear. He looked extremely disinterested.

  ‘I’m going to build a railroad, Mr Melford. A railroad that links up San Francisco with Nebraska, and Nebraska with New York. I’m going to turn this whole town upside down, and everybody in it.’

  ‘I see,’ answered Laurence Melford, unperturbed. ‘And is that why you wanted to present your compliments? To warn me that this city isn’t big enough for both of us, and that I ought to consider packing my trunks?’

  ‘No, sir,’ Collis told him. ‘I came to present my compliments because I believe that, one day, you and I could be friends and associates, whether you can credit that now or not.’