Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  Collis stood straight, and held his cloak about him tightly. He was exhausted from the journey, and his face was unshaven and white. It had started to rain on their second day in Panama, and the isthmus train had been held up for two days by mudslides. Then the Charleston had jammed a paddle-wheel bearing off Cape Fear, and they had slopped around for half a day in an uneasy southeasterly wind. All Collis wanted now was a half pint of brandy and twelve hours’ sleep.

  The Charleston whistled hoarsely and began to nudge her way into the high wooden jetty. Soon she was tied up, and the gangplanks were raised to the walkway, and black porters came running on board to take the passenger trunks.

  ‘Well,’ said Collis, tiredly, ‘this is where it all begins’.

  Theodore stretched himself. ‘This is where it continues. It all began a long time ago. It began when the first pioneer on the first wagon dreamed of riding across America on rails.’

  ‘How do you know the first pioneer dreamed of riding on rails?’

  ‘Have you ever travelled any distance by covered wagon?’

  Collis shook his head.

  ‘When you’ve crossed a desert by covered wagon, your backside dictates what your mind dreams about, and what your mind dreams about is parlourcar chairs, and a chance to put your feet up.’

  They disembarked. It was almost dark now, and the jetty was lit only with flickering tallow torches. Their feet made a hollow sound on the walkway as they went ashore.

  A smelly, closed-in cab took them into Washington itself. As it jolted over the unpaved streets, Collis found his eyes closing, and he had to sit rigidly upright to keep himself awake. It wasn’t safe to fall asleep in a strange cab in an unfamiliar city. Too many travellers found themselves taken to the outskirts, robbed, and left in a ditch with nothing but their underwear, and sometimes not even that. It was a moonless night, and so the gas lights along Pennsylvania Avenue were lit. There was a smell of kerosene and horse dung in the air.

  Eventually they drew up outside Willard’s Hotel, a squarish red-brick building with its own gas lights, and their cab door was opened by a uniformed doorman with droopy grey whiskers and a green silk hat. They alighted, and Collis paid the cab driver six cents, and a penny tip.

  As he conducted them through the mahogany swing-doors into the hotel lobby, the doorman muttered, ‘Female companionship, sir?’

  Collis laid a hand on the man’s gold-braided epaulette. ‘My friend, the next time you offer your procurative services, make sure that those to whom you offer it do not bear, as we do, the traces of three weeks’ arduous travelling. We want a bath, a drink, a meal, and a bed. The female companionship can wait.’

  They were sharing a suite of two rooms and a bathroom on the second floor. The suite was high-ceilinged, and carpeted in sombre brown. It smelled of must and stale cigars, a smell which reminded Collis of New York. On the wall was a ‘A View of the President’s House After the Conflagration of 24 August 1814’, showing the derelict White House standing in open fields.

  While Theodore bathed, Collis took off his shoes and rested in an armchair. A young black bellboy came up with a bottle of Old Tate whisky, a jug of iced water, and a copy of the Evening Star. He poked the log fires and stacked them up with wood, and then wished them good-night, and ‘ex’lent dreams, sir’.

  Collis looked through the paper. There was a great deal about the foulness of Washington’s water, and Collis glanced across at the glass jug on his tray and decided he would probably take his Old Tate straight. The paper was also annoyed by a proposition to raise the steamer fare from Alexandria to Washington from twelve and a half cents to fifteen. The weather report ‘from the Morse Telegraph line to the Smithsonian Institution’ said that Friday would be drizzly, and the temperature no higher than forty-six.

  Theodore came out of the bathroom in a pale-blue robe and slippers. His beard was wet and he looked like an otter emerging from a stream. He poured two glasses of whisky and sat down by Collis to toast his toes by the fire.

  ‘You seem depressed,’ he remarked.

  Collis dropped the paper on the floor. ‘Maybe I’m just tired.’

  ‘You don’t have any doubts about what we’re doing, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Collis. ‘No more than usual, anyway.’

  They raised their glasses to each other, and drank. The straight whisky made Collis cough, and he had to take out his handkerchief.

  ‘I can’t pretend that it’s going to be easy,’ Theodore said, ‘coaxing anyone in Congress to support us. Especially with all this talk of Southern secession, and the trouble in Nebraska Territory. But I guess we can try, can’t we?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Collis. ‘I should be getting used to hitting my head against stone walls by now.’

  Theodore looked concerned. ‘You’re definitely out of sorts, aren’t you? Why don’t you take a bath? The water’s good and hot.’

  Collis rubbed his eyes with the back of his wrist. ‘I think it’s coming back to the East that’s upset me. I’ll get over it. But can’t you smell this room? It’s stuffy and stale, and you can just imagine all the fat old Congressmen who must have taken their fancy women up here, or sat here playing cards all night and talking about slavery and political corruption as if they were both games.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Theodore quietly.

  Collis loosened his necktie. ‘I was frightened when I first came West, last year. I was lonesome, too, and I felt that I’d lost all of my friends. But now I’m back, the East suddenly looks old and haggard, and the air seems to stink of mistrust. I’m glad you’re with me. I don’t think I could have stood it on my own.’

  Theodore eased off his slippers. ‘Don’t get yourself too worked up about it. It’s something we’re going to have to bear, whether we like it or not. Now, go take that bath, and I’ll pour out another whisky for you.’

  Collis finished his Old Tate and stood up. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m just about done for.’

  ‘Don’t you want to eat?’

  ‘Sure. But something light. Have them send up some steak and onions, and a bottle of champagne.’

  Theodore went to the bell pull and tugged it. ‘You wait until you see how small the steak is.’ He smiled. ‘Then you’ll really know you’re back East.’

  *

  Collis slept until one o’clock the following afternoon. When he got out of bed and opened the brown drapes of his room, the predicted drizzle had cleared, although the skies were still heavy and grey, and there was a damp wind from the east.

  He poured himself a stiff whisky from the half-empty bottle left on the tray and swallowed it in one gulp. It made him gasp and shudder, but it got his circulation going, and washed out the taste of sleep and yesterday’s tobacco. Then he went and knocked on Theodore’s door, to find out if the railroad engineer was awake. There was no reply, and when he opened the door he found that Theodore was more than awake, he was up and gone.

  Theodore was still downstairs in the dining-room, however, by the time Collis had washed and shaved and dressed in a brown morning coat with braided lapels. Collis ordered pickled oysters, veal Malakoff, and a lemon ice. Theodore had already eaten, but he asked for more beer and a pot of coffee. ‘You don’t know how good it is to taste lager after all these years.’ He smiled. ‘It’s the nectar of the gods.’

  ‘You can keep your lager,’ Collis said. ‘You can keep your Eastern food, too. I’d rather have a glass of steam and one of Bazzuro’s bowls of cioppino.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’ve become that much of a Westerner,’ said Theodore.

  The waiter brought Collis’s oysters, and while he ate, Theodore sipped his beer and suggested a plan of campaign. First of all, in what remained of the afternoon, they should go see Alice Stride and ask if she could suggest some introductions to any Senators who might be remotely intrigued by railroads. Then, over the week-end, they should pay some social calls on congressmen staying at boarding-houses or hotels, most of whom were
bored and homesick over Saturday and Sunday, and might well be receptive to roast beef, cheerful company, and a bottle of brandy – not forgetting some uplifting talk about crossing the continent by rail.

  Sitting back over cigars and strong black coffee, Collis asked Theodore, ‘Who’s our major opposition? In the railroad business, I mean, not in Congress.’

  ‘The Hannibal & St Joseph, no doubt at all,’ said Theodore. ‘They’re quick, and they’re aggressive, and the way they’re building now they should have a line completed from the Mississippi to the Missouri by, what, the middle of next year. They’re laying their railroad from each end of their surveyed route simultaneously, and that means they’ve already got track laid on the banks of the Missouri, before anybody else.’

  Collis smoked quietly. Theodore sat up and drew a line across the tablecloth with his fingernail. ‘If they get to build the railroad westward from St Joe, then we’ve got ourselves some real problems. Or at least we could have, depending on whether they plot their route through the Rockies at Pueblo, in which event we might still be able to join up with them in Utah, or whether they run the whole line south through Raton Pass and Albuquerque, and sneak into Southern California through New Mexico Territory, in which event we’re left without a hope in the world.’

  ‘As far as I can see,’ Collis said, ‘only one thing is going to guarantee a northern route, instead of a southern one.’

  ‘Well, sure. It depends on who can give the most Congressmen the most money,’ said Theodore.

  ‘Yes, I agree with that,’ Collis told him. ‘But if the Southern states secede, then a northern route is a cast-iron certainty.’

  ‘You really think they will? Secede, I mean? I know there’s plenty of talk.’

  ‘I don’t know what they’ll do. But did you hear Senator Badger just now? The South has been painted into a corner. If they don’t declare themselves independent, then they’ll have to accept the humiliation of being citizens of a nation the greater part of which they can’t do business with, nor exploit for its natural wealth, nor even visit with their customary servants.’

  Collis blew out a smoke ring, which shuddered and sloped across the table. ‘I don’t hold with slavery at all,’ he said. ‘But imagine what most Southern landowners and politicians must be feeling right now. Wouldn’t you be thinking of secession, if you were them?’

  Theodore quizzically put his head on one side. ‘I think you’ll do well in the lobbies. I just hope you don’t wind up by starting a civil war.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s much chance of that. In fact, I don’t believe the South will secede for twenty or thirty years. Maybe more. Maybe never at all. But the threat of secession might be just enough to sway a few more Congressmen in favour of a northern route. After all, would you put million of dollars into a Pacific railroad if you thought that it might be taken over by secessionists at any moment? I wouldn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were so political. You surprise me.’

  Collis smiled. ‘It used to be a parlour game, to annoy my father. He was a Wall Street doughface of the worst kind, God rest his soul.’

  ‘Is it really a parlour game? Or do you believe it?’

  There was a pause. Outside the grimy windows of the hotel dining-room, the drizzle started again, and there was the wet, gritty sound of carriage wheels in thick mud. For all its grandiose designs, the width of its avenues, and the scale of its finest administrative buildings, the federal city was still mucky, unfinished, and unsanitary. Massachusetts Avenue, which was shown on the maps as a magnificent four-mile thoroughfare, degenerated after six or seven blocks into a rutted, muddy morass. Cows and goats wandered around Pennsylvania Avenue, and their droppings did little to improve the state of the streets.

  ‘I’ve learned not to ask myself that question,’ Collis said. ‘I want certain things out of my life, and I believe certain things. They’re very strong, these wants and these beliefs. Stronger than I ever thought possible. But I don’t ask what they are, or why I have them, because if I start doing that, I might slip back into what I was before. Casual, devil-may-care, time-wasting, and no good to anyone at all. Least of all me.’

  ‘This is recent, isn’t it, this attitude? Something’s changed you.’

  Collis sucked at his cigar. He made a mouth like a pet fish, and let another smoke ring escape.

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I think I learned that I was more than the sum of my parents. I’d already found out that I was wiser and harder than my father. But there was still my mother, and I guess I had to fight her by proxy. You probably don’t understand what I mean.’

  ‘I think so,’ said Theodore. ‘You found a woman who reminded you of your mother, and you tested your wits against her, and won.’

  Collis nodded.

  Theodore didn’t say anything for a while, but then he stretched and yawned in his chair. ‘I think we’d better go see your friend Alice Stride,’ he suggested. ‘Because if we don’t, I’m going to fall asleep right here and now.’

  When he was in Washington, Senator Stride occupied a four-storey brick house a block south of Pennsylvania Avenue on Eighteenth Street, which he had bought in 1854 for $4200 cash. He liked to take his family with him in the winter months, because there was entertaining to do, and both his wife, Margaret, and his daughter, Alice, were pleasing to his guests. They would flutter their eyelashes and whisper flattery behind their fans, and the Southern democrats, who liked their ladies flirtatious and feminine, adored them. Congressman William Aiken of South Carolina, who owned more than a thousand slaves, called Margaret Stride ‘the Star of G Street’; and Alice was a particular favourite of Georgia’s ‘Little Wizard’, Alexander Stephens.

  It was raining in wet, persistent curtains as Collis and Theodore climbed down from their cab outside Senator Stride’s black-painted railings. On a gas standard nearby, a sodden poster offered a one-cent reward for the return of a runaway cabinet-maker’s apprentice, Ezekiel O’Toole, and solemnly threatened that anyone ‘employing or harbouring said boy will have the law enforced against them’.

  Collis paused in the rain to read the poster, and then turned away from it, shaking his head. ‘And that’s in our federal city,’ he said.

  Theodore shrugged philosophically. ‘There’s a weekly slave auction just two blocks from the White House, every Thursday. We ought to go along next week, and then you’ll see what slavery’s all about.’

  ‘I don’t think I care to,’ Collis told him.

  They went up the steps of Senator Stride’s house and pulled the rain-dewed bell handle. Then they waited, while wagons and carriages clattered along Eighteenth Street, and the rain gurgled in the lead gutters. At last the blue-painted door of Senator Stride’s house was opened, and a black servant in a white starched shirt and a scarlet tailcoat stood in front of them. ‘Yes, gentlemen? Are you expected?’ he said.

  Collis handed over his card, the one he’d had printed after Laurence Melford’s servant had admonished him at the Empire Theatre. It read: ‘Collis T. Edmonds, 54 K Street, Sacramento, California’. The servant took it in a white-gloved hand, but didn’t read it. He probably couldn’t read. Senator Stride had been foremost in declaring in the House that ‘the giving of book-learning to niggers would be a crueller deed than teaching a horse to sing opera; for while a horse would not hanker to take the stage of the Ford’s Theatre, a nigger would believe he could converse equally with white; and that would be laughable.’

  ‘That’s for Miss Alice, if she’s at home,’ Collis said.

  The black servant nodded his head. ‘I’ll see, sir. Please wait for a moment.’

  Theodore stood patiently while the rain from the porch drummed on the top of his hat. He gave Collis a quick, reassuring smile. After a minute or two, the black servant came back and said, ‘Miss Alice says she won’t be more than a moment. Please come in.’

  They stepped inside the hall-way. It was dark, and fitfully lit by candles. On one side there was a heavy oak
dresser, with brass handles; on the other, a hall-stand hung with wet capes. A wide staircase curved upwards into the gloom.

  ‘Rather tomblike,’ remarked Theodore, as the servant took their hats and capes.

  Collis tugged at his cuffs. ‘From what I remember of Senator Stride, he’s a pretty tomb-like man.’

  The servant said, ‘This way, please,’ and led them through to an ante-room. ‘Miss Alice asked that you make yourselves at home.’

  They paced around the ante-room for a while, and then they sat facing each other on two claw-footed armchairs, silenced and stilled by their sombre surroundings. Behind Collis’s back, the windows were hung not only with almost impenetrable lace, but with brown velvet drapes, fringed with dusty tassels; and these seemed to have the effect of strangling even the coppery green light that came in from the drizzle outside. It would have been an unpleasant strain on the eyes to have read a Bible in there, or a newspaper of any quality. There was a grotesque fireplace, with fluted uprights, and carved bunches of grapes, and this was surmounted by one of those blotchy mirrors into which newcomers glance and then surreptitiously touch their cheeks, to see if they have somehow contracted leprosy.

  A black marble-and-gilt clock stood on the centre of the mantlepiece, which was otherwise bare. Collis took out his own watch to check the time, and the clock was depressingly accurate.

  Theodore looked up at an oil painting on the wall beside him. The paint was crazed, and it had been varnished so heavily that it was almost impossible to distinguish what the subject was. But he leaned back a little and said, ‘It’s a portrait. An old man in a powdered wig. He must be one of Senator Stride’s ancestors.’