He was beginning to know San Francisco better. From the window of his room on the fourth floor of the elegant five-storey International Hotel, which was one of the most fashionable addresses in town, he could look out over Jackson Street, and northwards to the sparkling lights of the Barbary Coast, that hive of groggeries, dance halls, whorehouses, dining-rooms, and sailors’ cribs that sprawled between Pacific and Vallejo streets. To the east, if he leaned over the window-sill, he could see the solid red-brick banks and exchanges of the business district, and beyond to the waterfront. It hadn’t been more than seven or eight years ago that the site of the International Hotel had been almost on the shore itself; but steady infilling of the bay with wooden pilings and sand from the southern valleys of San Francisco had taken the downtown area out as far as Davis Street, and further, engulfing abandoned ships and derelict jetties as it spread. In the old days, many of the businesses on Montgomery Street, which was now four blocks inland, had given their address as ‘Montgomery Street on the Beach’.
These days, he knew how to get around on the coaches of the Yellow and Red lines, or the horsecars of the Sutter Street line, all at ten cents a trip. He knew where to eat, too, and during the first five days of his visit he dined at Gobey’s Ladies and Gents Oyster Parlour on Sutter Street, which was celebrated for its boiled terrapin; at Delmonico’s on O’Farrell Street, on broiled lobster; and at the Buon Gusto, where Charles had taken him one evening and introduced him to cioppino.
He did some business, buying belting and screws and hand pumps. He walked around a great deal, and bought himself two new suits, and some silk underwear. He bought an overcoat, too, because the days were growing colder and damper, and almost every morning a chilly fog would drift in from the grey Pacific. It was almost time to start selling his blankets.
But he stayed away from the places and the people who meant the most. He avoided Knickerbocker Jane’s on Dupont Street, and he took trouble not to walk past William West’s store on Montgomery. He didn’t go to see Andy Hunt at his offices on Pine Street, by the California Market, because he didn’t want to talk railroads until everything else for which he had come to San Francisco had been settled. He was lonely and silent and he spent too long in the Bank Exchange Saloon, drinking sazeracs and stone fences. He returned to his hotel room almost every night with a thumping headache, and lay on his bed listening to the rattling and rumbling of carriages and wagons on Jackson and Montgomery, and the laughter of passing revelleers. He remembered it years later as a time that was as dark and self-engrossed as a mirror in a strange room, and its effect on him was so strong that he went to considerable pains never to drink alone again.
On the sixth day of his visit, he spent two hours dressing in a grey tailcoat and a grey silk hat. The morning was bitterly cold, and the office buildings and hotels outside his window were blurry with fog. He shaved carefully, combed his hair, and rubbed his hands with Lamot’s Cologne. Then, after a pot of coffee in the hotel lobby, he put on his overcoat and went outside. His chest felt tight with anticipation.
He turned right at the corner of Jackson and Montgomery and walked south past the Monkey Block, the buildings which, apart from housing most of San Francisco’s literary population, contained the Bank Exchange Saloon and Coppa’s Italian restaurant. He was tempted to take a drink, but he didn’t want to have whisky on his breath when he came face to face with Hannah again. He walked on, through the ghostly fog, and he felt as if he were walking through a dream.
He arrived at last at the corner of Montgomery and Bush, and only a few yards in front of him was the frontage of the store which announced itself as Fancy Goods, Sewing Notions, Etc., Walter F. West, Prop. He stood for a long time in the cold, his breath smoking and his eyelashes dewy with fog, before he continued along the boardwalk and stood outside the store.
She came out of the open door of the store and walked straight into him. The meeting was so abrupt, so unheralded, that neither of them could believe for a moment that it was really happening, and the first thing she said was ‘Excuse me.’
‘Hannah?’ he said.
She looked up, startled. She was very small, much smaller than he remembered her, and she had lost twenty or thirty pounds in weight. Her blonde hair was drawn back under a plain charcoal-grey bonnet, with a lace trim, and she was wearing a severe grey cape. Her face was as grey and colourless as an ambrotype portrait, glass over dark paper, and her eyes, although they were as wide and full of feeling as before, seemed unnaturally and unhealthily large.
‘Collis?’ she answered. ‘Is it really you?’
He glanced inside the open door of the store. ‘Is Walter there?’ he asked her.
‘Of course. He’s serving a customer.’
He took her arm. It was bony and frail through the sleeve of her dress. ‘Can’t we go some place to talk? We wouldn’t want him to see us out here.’
‘Collis, I can’t. I’m on my way to buy bread.’
‘But we have to talk. I’ve come all the way from Sacramento.’
She put her hand to her mouth and turned away from him. She had changed, illness and stress had changed her, but her profile was just as exquisite as it had been on that first afternoon on the Virginia, and if anything her suffering had sharpened it, and given it a quality of waiflike innocence.
‘I arrived only two weeks ago, on the Monterey,’ said Hannah. ‘I’ve been resting a great deal, and I haven’t even had the strength to write.’
‘Did you get my message? The one I left at the post office?’
She glanced at him, and there was guilt in her eyes. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t yet discovered where the post office is.’
He held her arm tighter. ‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘it was what we agreed. I left my address at the post office, and as soon as you arrived, you were going to get in touch.’
‘I’m sorry, Collis. I haven’t been well.’
‘You’re well enough to go for bread. The post office is only five blocks north and two blocks east.’
‘Don’t hold me,’ she said. ‘Please. Walter may see.’
He ignored her. ‘We agreed that in Panama, didn’t we? I would leave my address, and you would get in touch.’
‘I don’t know where the post office is,’ she insisted.
He let her go. ‘And you didn’t want to find out, did you? You were hoping that I might have forgotten. Well, I haven’t. I’ve been thinking about you constantly ever since I left you in Panama.’
‘Collis,’ she said faintly, ‘I really don’t think we ought to talk on the sidewalk. People are staring.’
He refused to look around, refused to look at anything but her. His heart was beating in great uncontrollable bumps. Somehow, he had known that his first meeting with her in San Francisco would be like this. But the dull predictability of it did nothing to lessen his pain. He felt as if he were suffering from the grippe, as if his body were trembling with sweats and sudden chills. She took a few steps along the boardwalk, north towards the corner of Bush Street, and he followed her mechanically, still staring at her, still stiff with the realisation that she didn’t care for him after all. Why should she, now she was recovered, and back with her husband? Why should she, now she was safe and secure and respectable once more? Why should she, with God on her side?
‘Hannah,’ he said, in a tight voice.
She didn’t answer, but turned her head away. From behind, in her severe bonnet and her cape, she could have been an elderly woman.
‘Hannah, you have to tell me how you feel.’
She lifted her eyes. ‘I feel unwell,’ she said. ‘The sisters did what they could to nurse me back to normal health, but my constitution was weakened by the yellow fever almost to the point of ruin. They told me that I would never be the same again. I am what you see me to be; and I shall never be any better.’
‘Is that why you didn’t get in touch? Because you didn’t want me to see you this way?’
She shook her head. ‘I wish I could s
ay that it was. But I don’t want to lie to you, Collis, no more now than I ever did.’
She looked over her shoulder at him and gave him a wan smile. ‘By the time I reached San Francisco, after all those days on the Monterey, I wanted nothing from life but security and shelter. I didn’t want romantic adventure. I didn’t even want love. All I wanted was some place to lay down my head and rest; some place to be cared for and fed. I didn’t want to be told that I was beautiful. I didn’t want to be courted or impressed. I wanted ordinary days, and ordinary affection, and there was only one person I knew who could give me those things.’
‘It was all a flight of fancy, then, what happened in Panama?’ Collis said angrily. ‘You used me to assay your love for Walter, and perhaps to put your religious convictions to some kind of test that wouldn’t strain them too greatly? You used me to tickle your feminine sense of tragic drama?’
‘Collis, please –’
‘Please what? Please forget that I ever met you? Please forget that you ever stirred a passion within me that I never felt before, and which won’t let me alone? Hannah, I’ve been here in San Francisco, I’ve been out in Sacramento, I’ve been working hard and working fast. I’ve made money and I’ve made friends, all in the space of two months. But I’ve never been able to forget you, and I never will.’
She looked tired. ‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ she said.
‘Tell me what you told me in Panama. Tell me that you won’t fail me.’
She gave a little ‘hmph’ of sad, amused resignation. ‘I know I said that,’ she said. ‘And I regret it.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘Oh, but I do mean it, Collis, most desperately.’
He tried to pull her towards him, but she twisted her arm free. ‘How can you say that?’ he demanded. ‘After everything that happened in Panama, how can you say that?’
She was collected, and very cold. There was still something of the awkward, unrequited emotion in her that he had first sensed on the decks of the steamship Virginia; but it was certain that she had made up her mind about Collis, and that whatever he said, however much he pleaded or shouted or cajoled, he had lost her. He was beginning to wonder, now, why he had ever wanted her. She seemed so irritatingly dogmatic, so thin, so much like somebody else’s wife.
And yet there was something inside her that disturbed him deeply; something that evoked the same kind of strange, faraway feelings of destiny that the High Sierras had aroused. It was as if Hannah and only Hannah could help him to live the life that was waiting for him in San Francisco, and Sacramento, and across the deserts and mountains of America.
‘Was it really all a fake?’ he asked. ‘Everything you promised?’
‘No,’ she told him.
‘Then why this? Why didn’t you write? Even to tell me you didn’t love me any longer?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
He rubbed at his mouth with his hand.
‘I don’t know what else to say to you,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what to write. I suppose I was afraid of you. I don’t know.’
They stood side by side on the foggy street corner for whole minutes, while passers-by nudged past them, businessmen and shoppers and Chilean dock-workers in blue wool coats, and wagons clattered across the rutted junction.
‘Was, uh, Walter happy to see you?’ asked Collis.
She nodded. Tears suddenly brimmed in her eyes and clung to her lashes.
‘Well,’ said Collis, ‘I can guess that he was.’
He let out a tight breath and tried to smile. ‘I guess I was just infatuated,’ he told her. ‘It shouldn’t take me too long to get over you. I’m pretty busy right now. They made me partner in a hardware store out at Sacramento, fifteen per cent partner. There’s more to do than any one man can cope with. Buying, selling. That kind of thing.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated.
He reached out and gently touched her chin. ‘You shouldn’t be,’ he said, in his softest voice. ‘Whatever happened wasn’t your fault. Whatever brought us together finishes here. It has to.’
He took her hand, held it between the palms of his own hands, and it was cold and thin, the hand of a woman whose love has almost died. She let out three or four muted noises of grief, and he felt his own eyes wet with desolation and disappointment.
The clock on the Mercantile Library Building struck eleven, sonorous and endless, and the chimes fell into the fog like the anchors of eleven abandoned ships.
‘I think I’d better go,’ Collis said.
She watched him cross Bush Street; and as he did so, a horse-drawn steamer from Engine Company Number Two on Kearny Street came jangling and clattering through the fog on its way to a fire on Market. Its three grey horses splattered through the mud, their nostrils fuming, and the highly polished brass steamer bounced after them, the fireman sitting upright and aloof in his cap and buttoned-up jacket.
By the time the steamer had passed by, Collis had disappeared into the crowds on the sidewalk, and Hannah could do nothing else but walk along Montgomery on her own, as far as the New Era German Bakery, where she waited in line at the marble-topped counter, amid the chatter of people taking tea and pumpernickel, and the crusty aroma of fresh-baked loaves, her eyes dry but vacant, and her hands clutched in front of her, holding her purse in a gesture that was both self-protective and pathetic.
The German girl behind the counter had to ask her what she wanted twice to get her attention.
Collis went after lunch to see Andy Hunt in his offices on Pine Street. Andy was right on the top floor of a narrow iron building with more curlicues on it than an Episcopalian christening cake. He was sitting at a battered desk that had once belonged to Joe Downey, one of the earliest of San Francisco’s official clerks, whose only claim to immortality was that he had gotten hopelessly drunk during the city’s first municipal election, clumsily rigged the ballot, and announced himself mayor.
The desk somehow suited Andy Hunt’s entrepreneurial abilities, which varied according to his mood, and also according to his intake of bourbon and crackers.
Andy was wearing a noisy green-and-orange plaid sport coat and a green wide-brimmed hat, and he was bent over a maelstrom of books and accounts and bills of lading. He was writing a business letter in an odd backward-sloping script and his long legs were wound around the rungs of his chair as if correspondence was a chore which demanded a great deal of twisting himself up into knots. Above his head, a gas-lamp glowed soft and white.
Collis, who was short on breath after four flights of wooden stairs, could do nothing at first but rap at the open door, and then step into the crowded office with his hat in his hand and wait for Andy to raise his head and see him. But Andy didn’t have to look up.
‘Collis,’ he said, still scratching away at his letter. ‘How the devil are you?’
‘Winded,’ said Collis.
‘Everybody is when they first come up. It gives me a six-to-four advantage, right from the word go. Especially with debt collectors, or city officials. Have you tried asking for thirty dollars back rent when you don’t even have breath enough to say “help”?’
Collis crossed the bare-board floor. The walls of the office were clustered with maps and timetables and orders, all of which riffled softly in the breeze from an open quarter-light.
‘How did you know it was me?’ he asked, setting his hat on top of a heap of papers. ‘I didn’t write to tell you I was coming down.’
Andy Hunt glanced up at him at last and gave a quick, foxy grin. ‘I don’t miss much that happens in or around the harbour,’ he said. ‘I’ve had to make it my business. And besides, Arthur Teach was grumbling about you last week in Captain Cropper’s. He said you had the gall of a goat and the morals of a duck.’
Collis smiled. ‘If I knew what he meant, I’d ask for satisfaction.’
Andy put down his pen, unwound his legs, and stood up. ‘It’s good to see you, anyway, looking so well. Charles wrote me they’
d made you a partner.’
‘Yes,’ said Collis. ‘And that’s partly why I’ve come to see you.’
‘I was surprised you didn’t come earlier. Not prying, mind. But we could have had ourselves a roaring night out or two. There’s a new house of assignation on Stockton Street, and I hear you can do whatever you care to do with three young beauties, all under the age of fifteen, all night, for less than the price of an oyster supper.’
Collis went to the window. It had a fan-shaped arch to it, and looked eastwards over towards Market Street and the Bay. The topmasts of clippers and schooners glided behind the foggy rooftops on silent errands of trade.
‘I met Hannah,’ he said.
Andy’s face changed at once. He looked cautious, and a little unhappy. ‘Ah,’ he said.
‘You sound as if you knew about her, too.’
‘Well … Montgomery Street isn’t far. My feet do direct themselves past the West emporium from time to time.’
‘So you’ve seen that she’s back with her husband?’
Andy nodded sympathetically. ‘Back, and settled, by the looks of it. As a matter of fact, I did meet them on the street, her husband and her, and I did chew the fat for a minute or two. They were arm in arm, you know, as though they were very contented; although I must say that Hannah still appeared to be pretty sick.’
‘She is,’ said Collis.
Andy scratched the back of his neck. ‘Maybe that’s it, then,’ he said. ‘Maybe she went back to get herself nursed to rights by someone who wasn’t going to give her too much bother.’
‘She wasn’t going to be bothered by me,’ Collis told him. ‘I could have cared for her just as well as Walter West. Didn’t I care for her in Panama, when nobody else would?’
‘Well, sure, you did that,’ said Andy. ‘But have you thought she may not want to start courting right now, because she don’t feel her best? A woman likes to feel her best, you know, when she’s out to win the man she fancies most. Maybe she wants to get better first; and then, when she’s better, get in touch, and try again.’
Railroad Page 41
