It didn’t matter. As the quartet played ‘Le Pantalon’, the first part of the quadrille, in 6/8 time, Collis danced with an easy perfection learned through good dancing lessons and years of practice at New York society balls, and Sarah danced with an elegance born of beauty, and balance, and supreme self-confidence.
Their partners hurried and stumbled, but neither Collis nor Sarah really saw them, except when they missed a step, or accidentally collided, and when that happened they simply danced their way around. They didn’t take their eyes off each other, and the reception room sparkled and turned about them as if they were dancing on the axis of the world.
The quadrille changed to 2/4 time for its second part, ‘L’Été,’ and Collis felt intoxicated with champagne, music, light, and laughter. He had thought Sarah Melford provocative and beautiful before, but now she was infinitely desirable, and her face approached and retreated during the moves of the contredanse like a tantalising vision. They couldn’t talk to each other as they danced, but her eyes were warm and expressive and bright with amusement.
Every now and then, as he spun around, Collis glimpsed Grant’s glowering, unhappy face, as he stood there with his arms by his sides and his lower lip stuck out, waiting for the quadrille to end.
On the last chords of ‘La Pastourelle’, it eventually did. One of their partners, a small round Moravian woman in a diamond choker, was gasping and panting, and her husband had to support her. The younger couple gave a nervous smile and disappeared at once to find sherbets and lemonade. Collis was left alone on the floor with Sarah, and he reached out his hand to her and said gently, ‘Will you take some refreshment? We’ve been dancing all this time and we haven’t spoken a word.’
She came towards him, her silk skirts and underskirts rustling. ‘Do you have to speak to let people know what you think?’
He gave a small shake of his head. ‘Not with people like you.’
She held back her hand at the last moment and raised an eyebrow. ‘I didn’t know there were any people like me.’
‘One or two. But none as beautiful.’
Suddenly Grant came up and stood right in front of Collis, with his hands on his hips and his face looking bigger and more boiled than ever.
‘I’ve just spoken to my father about you, Mr Edmonds. He says you’re to leave Sarah alone, please, with his compliments, and why don’t you go dance with someone your own style.’
Collis raised his hand. ‘There’s no need to bark, Mr Melford. You can see that I haven’t abducted your sister, nor seduced her. She’s here, safe and sound, and smiling of her own free will. She’s danced with me once with no apparent ill effects, and if she wants to dance with me again, then she will.’
‘Not if I can help it.’
‘You can’t,’ said Collis.
‘What if I belt you in the nose?’ demanded Grant.
Collis slowly let go of Sarah’s hand. He felt suddenly cold, and he could feel the sweat of the dance under his armpits. If there was one thing that angered him beyond the point of coherence, it was the threat of assault. He wasn’t particularly brave, and in most confrontations he would rather back down than risk a black eye. But young college greenhorns who thought they could frighten him with bluster and bunched-up fists were something else. They needed what his friend Henry Browne used to call ‘the lesson that the rooster taught his eggs’.
Sarah sensed the change in Collis’s demeanour. ‘Grant,’ she said, a little breathlessly, ‘it’s all right. We’ll only have one dance more.’
‘Father won’t permit it. And neither will I.’ He kept his eyes on Collis, and his lower lip firmly stuck out, like the bottom drawer of a bureau.
Collis looked at Sarah, and gave a weary shrug. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose we must honour your dear brother’s wishes. He seems to believe he has your best interests at heart, in a bovine fashion.’
‘Bovine?’ asked Grant. ‘What’s bovine?’
‘I thought you were a college man,’ said Collis, with overacted tiredness.
‘I am, sir, and you’d better believe it. But what’s bovine?’
He was talking so loudly now that people all around the room were turning their heads to see what was going on, and even the string quartet began to falter. His red-flushed cheeks had turned crimson, and there were clear droplets of sweat on his forehead. He didn’t notice what an exhibition he was making of himself. He was concentrating too hard on doing what his father had told him to do, and that was to chase away hounds like Collis Edmonds.
Collis straightened his cuffs. ‘Bovine,’ he said, crisply, ‘comes from a Latin word, bos, meaning ox. Roughly interpreted, it means that you’re behaving as if you were solid dried beef from ear to ear.’
Behind Grant Melford’s back, unseen by him, his father, Laurence, appeared in the veranda doorway, accompanied by John Frémont. There was an embarrassed hush over the whole reception room, except for the thready strains of a popular song, and everybody’s eyes went back from Collis, to Sarah, to Grant, to Laurence, and then back again. In the back room, a woman obliviously laughed a high scream of amusement.
Grant wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘You’ll take that back, sir,’ he said shakily. ‘You’ll damn well take that back.’
Sarah stepped away. Collis glanced at her, but she gave him an almost imperceptible shake of her head. Even though Grant was her brother, this was man’s business. The atmosphere was bristling with masculine anger and masculine pride.
‘I’ll do no such thing,’ Collis said. ‘It’s absurd. You can’t ask a man to take back an honest remark about an observable truth.’
Grant’s voice was breaking with tension. He sounded as if he had a mouthful of smashed glass. ‘Then, sir,’ he said, ‘you’ll give me satisfaction.’
Collis stared at him, and then gave a pfff of hilarity. ‘Satisfaction? How? By pouring gravy over your head and serving you up with beans?’
‘I demand it!’ roared Grant.
Collis tugged off his white evening gloves little by little, and then rolled them up. ‘I don’t think you know what you’re asking,’ he said in a very serious tone.
‘I’m asking for an apology,’ Grant blustered. ‘Or, if I don’t get that, satisfaction.’
There was silence. Laurence Melford, soft and deep, said, ‘Grant.’
‘This is my argument, Father,’ he said loudly. ‘I’m my own man now, and I’d appreciate it if you left it to me.’
‘Grant,’ said Laurence, ‘I’m thinking of your safety as well as your pride. This man provokes people like you by nature. He even provokes me. But if we play the game by his rules, we’ll only wind up defeated, and hurt.’
‘He called me an ox,’ said Grant.
Laurence Melford came down the steps from the veranda and crossed the reception-room floor. He didn’t look at Collis once. Only at his son, who was now faced with the most dangerous decision of his twenty-year-old life.
‘Of course he called you an ox,’ Laurence Melford said warmly. ‘He’s good at choosing words that stir people up the most. He’ll probably be great, and rich, and successful, although I hate to admit it. But he’ll only get that way because he can always find the words that shock people, and irritate people, and startle them out of their complacency. But why don’t you be man enough to recognize what he’s doing to you, and that you’d earn yourself far more respect if you refused to be goaded into behaving the way he wants you to?’
‘Father,’ said Grant, ‘I’m asking for your support.’
‘You know you always have it,’ answered Laurence Melford, laying his hand on his son’s shoulder. ‘But not when you’re risking your life for no sensible reason. Ignore this man. You’re worth a hundred of him.’
Grant Melford wiped his forehead again. Staring at Collis, he said, ‘What’s it to be? You can choose your weapons, and the time, too.’
‘Grant!’ snapped his father.
Grant tugged his father’s
hand off his shoulder like a disillusioned infantryman ripping off one of his own epaulettes.
‘I forbid it!’ Laurence Melford told him loudly. ‘I absolutely forbid it!’
‘You forbid me to defend my good name?’ shouted Grant.
‘Your good name? He called you an ox, and by God, you were an ox to let him rile you!’
‘Your father’s right, Grant,’ Collis said. ‘You shouldn’t have let it upset you.’
Laurence Melford gave him a quick, testy glance. ‘There’s only one thing I want to hear from you, sir, and that’s an apology.’
‘Ah. I was afraid you might say that,’ Collis said.
‘I suppose that means that you won’t?’
‘You called him an ox yourself, sir. I’m hardly likely to withdraw a remark that has such eminent endorsement.’
‘There’s no choice, you see, Father,’ Grant put in. ‘He’s intractable. He’s damned rude, and damned arrogant, and he needs to be whipped.’
‘I don’t care, Grant. I forbid you to duel.’
‘Father, I shall do what my honour obliges me to do.’
Laurence Melford looked around. The quadrille music had faltered away altogether now, and the assembled guests were whispering and staring in embarrassment and confusion.
‘Can we continue this discussion in some private place?’ he asked John Frémont. Frémont nodded, and looked at them all sadly. ‘This way, Laurence,’ he said, and led them out of the main reception room, along the panelled corridor, and into a small study. Not far behind them, Jessie Frémont was taking Sarah Melford and her mother upstairs, to her private parlour. Sarah was looking strained and frightened.
Behind them, as they left, the gossip started up like a rising gust of wind through a field of dry wheat.
‘Well, now,’ said Laurence Melford, closing the study door behind him. ‘How can we settle this quickly?’
‘By tanning this insolent fellow’s hide,’ said Grant aggressively.
Laurence Melford turned to Collis. ‘How much will you take?’ he asked in a businesslike way. ‘I’m really quite used to this kind of thing, so you don’t have to skirt around the mountain to get to the mine.’
Collis lit a cheroot. He dropped the match into a china dish on the study desk, and it made a tiny tinkling sound.
‘Believe it or not, Mr Melford, this has nothing whatever to do with money.’
‘Come on, Mr Edmonds,’ said Laurence Melford. ‘You told me yourself you needed capital. How much do you want? A thousand dollars? Two thousand? How much will it take for you to go away and leave my family alone?’
Collis waved smoke away from his face. ‘I think you’ve misunderstood this little argument, sir,’ he said. His voice was very quiet. ‘I did nothing worse than dance a quadrille with your daughter, and exchange a few polite words, and in the kind of society I come from, that kind of behaviour is considered not only normal but commendable.’
‘I’m sure your social credentials are quite sound,’ Laurence Melford told him. ‘But whether they are or whether they aren’t, that doesn’t settle the problem that you’ve insulted my son, and he’s demanding an apology, or satisfaction.’
‘I suggest he put it down to experience, sir,’ said Collis. ‘Many more men will call him far worse names than I did, especially if he follows in his father’s footsteps. And just like his father, he will have to learn to keep his temper and preserve his pride.’
‘When I was a young man, Mr Edmonds, I would have been just as hot-headed as Grant about what you said, and I would have fought you, too, because I didn’t have a father who loved me and cared whether I lived or died. As it is, I forbid Grant to fight you, and I don’t expect an apology. But I want you to understand something else, Mr Edmonds. If you try to talk to me, or Sarah, or any other member of my family again, or if you pester us in any way, then I swear that I shall take the sternest measures I know.’
‘What will they be?’ asked Collis. ‘Will you sell me off to the Barbary Coast crimps? Or will the Whitehall boatmen find me floating around and around your oyster beds, with my toes curled up?’
A muscle flinched in Laurence Melford’s cheek. ‘All you can do is try me,’ he said. ‘Try me, and find out for yourself.’
He straightened his coat, and looked significantly at both Grant and Collis to make sure that they understood how he felt. Then he turned around, opened the door, and left the study without saying another word.
Grant waited until his father had gone. He peered around the door to make sure. Then he said to Collis, in a heated whisper, ‘What my father says doesn’t alter anything. You called me an ox and you’ve got to take it back, or else I want satisfaction.’
Collis gave him a wry grin. ‘Please, Grant, why don’t you just let it lie? Your dear papa is determined to drop me into the Bay with an anchor around my neck, and you’re hardly likely to get much more satisfaction than that.’
‘I insist.’
‘Don’t be so goddam old-fashioned. Have you ever seen a duel? There’s nothing heroic about it. A duel is either boring or tragic, sometimes both. What I said was a joke. If you didn’t find it funny, then all you had to do was refuse to laugh. My God, if you’d made a fool of yourself like that in New York, you wouldn’t have been invited back to the ratcatcher’s ball.’
‘Will you withdraw your insult?’
‘No, Grant, I most certainly won’t.’
‘Then it’s pistols,’ said Grant.
‘Pistols?’ asked Collis, in disbelief. ‘I never fired a pistol in my whole life.’
‘It doesn’t matter. You only have to fire once. I’ll meet you at the northern tip of Lake Merced, tomorrow, at seven o’clock sharp. All you have to do is bring a second. I’ll bring the guns, and arrange for a doctor.’
‘You’re out of your mind.’
‘Perhaps I am. But I’m proud, too. And what will you be, if you don’t show up to face me?’
‘Alive,’ said Collis. ‘And just as much to the point, so will you. It’s not an easy matter being proud, especially when you’re lying face down on the turf with a hole between your eyes.’
Grant wiped his perspiring face with a handkerchief. ‘I would rather be dead than a yellow coward.’
Collis smoked his cheroot, and watched young Melford with his worried, dark-ringed eyes. Grant’s fists opened and closed, opened and closed, in nervous anticipation. Eventually, Collis tapped the ash off the end of his cheroot and said, ‘Very well. Seven o’clock tomorrow, sharp. Bring some champagne, and a couple of glasses. With any luck, we might both miss.’
He hardly spoke to Andy on the way back to the International Hotel. Andy didn’t ask him much, either. Their rented brougham rattled and swayed over the ruts of Montgomery Street, and all around them the lights of San Francisco glittered and flared. Collis’s head was thumping from too much champagne, and the night seemed to pass him by in a kaleidoscopic blur of piano music, laughter, fried shrimps, banging doors, and shouts. At the corner of Montgomery and California, a fandango guitarist in a wide-fringed hat was furiously strumming, and kicking at the planks of the boardwalk with his heel.
Collis looked the other way when they passed Walter West’s store, between Sutter and Bush, but out of the corner of his eye he saw that the blinds of the second-floor windows were suffused with the orange glow of an oil lamp, and that shadows were flickering within. He pressed his lips together tight. He didn’t want to imagine what was going on there. He didn’t want to think about Hannah unbuttoning her dress, stepping out of her ribboned bloomers, and reaching out for someone else. He didn’t want to picture Walter West’s thread-scarred fingers caressing her face, or stroking her gleaming blonde hair. If he could have understood why he really loved her it might have been easier to bear. Instead, he had nothing to grasp but disjointed memories of Panama, and nothing to explain what he felt but fragments of half-forgotten conversation, and a grey vision of Hannah standing outside her husband’s store with tears in her eye
s.
‘You sorted everything out with the Melfords, then?’ said Andy.
‘Kind of,’ Collis told him.
‘Well, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I don’t mind. It was just that you came out of that study looking as if someone had put two spoonfuls of salt in your champagne.’
‘It’s sorted out,’ said Collis. ‘Or at least it will be.’
‘Tell me about it when your hangover’s gone,’ Andy said and grinned. ‘Come around to the office when you wake up, and we’ll have ourselves a plateful of Caen tripe at the Poodle Dog.’
Collis pulled a face. ‘Thanks, Andy. That’s just what I feel like.’
They turned the corner of Jackson Street and drew up outside the International Hotel. The sidewalk outside was crowded with returning diners and theatregoers, elegant prostitutes in shining silks, small boys who were ready to run errands for two bits, shoe-shiners, horse holders, and laconic magazine sellers who leaned against the gas standards selling copies of Varieties. It was almost one o’clock in the morning, but San Francisco was still revelling in her perpetual carnival.
Collis got down from the carriage and reached out his hand. Andy shook it and said, ‘Good night. Take some essence of peppermint before you go to sleep, and drink plenty of water. I’d hate to see you looking worse in the morning than you do now.’
‘Thanks, Andy. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Collis stood on the sidewalk and watched the brougham turn and make its way back towards Montgomery. Andy raised his hat and gave him a foxy-faced grin, and it occured to Collis, with a feeling like lowering himself into a colder-than-tepid bathtub, that he might never see Andy again.
‘Andy!’ he called. But Andy simply waved and smiled and shook his head to show that he couldn’t hear. The brougham paused for a moment to let a tarpaulined beer wagon rumble southwards on Montgomery, and then it was gone.
Inside the lobby, on a circular red-leather banquette, his face shadowed by the fronds of a palm, sat Dan McReady. He looked as if he had been waiting with stony patience for several hours. Collis walked across and stood beside him, his hat still in his hands.
Railroad Page 45
