Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  Collis moved aside a stack of hat boxes and came around the glass-topped counter. He held out his hand, and she took it. ‘You mustn’t stay too long,’ she said. ‘Walter’s only gone as far as the Wells Fargo office.’

  ‘What if he comes back?’ said Collis. ‘If you still love me, and if you want me, then he’s got to find out some time.’

  ‘I can’t hurt him, Collis. He’s a very gentle man.’

  ‘So what are you going to do? Stay with him for the rest of your life, masquerading as his affectionate spouse?’

  She gave a nervous shake of her head. ‘I don’t know. Oh, Collis, I’m very muddled. I was all ready to believe that I’d never see you again.’

  Collis squeezed her hand tight, he could feel her wedding band. She seemed so slight and small that he felt he could have picked her up in his arms, like a child. He said, almost as if it were a question, ‘Kiss me?’

  She stared at him. ‘I can’t. Walter will be back at any moment.’

  ‘Then the quicker you do it, the less danger there is.’

  ‘Collis, I can’t.’

  He drew her close. She tried to pull herself away, but he wasn’t going to let her. He bent forward and touched his lips against her cheek, and then against her lips, and then there was nothing that she wanted to do to stop him. She could feel the roughness of his dark-shaved chin, and smell the blend of spicy cologne and tobacco that would always remind her of the days they had spent on the Virginia. She parted her lips just a little.

  They stood away from each other. They were still holding hands. They could have been an engaged couple in a photographer’s studio, posing to celebrate their betrothal. Her hair shone around her head like a halo, and her face was vivid with excitement and relief, and with fear too, of what she would have to do next.

  ‘I won’t push you, Hannah,’ Collis said. ‘I don’t think either of us could stand it. You have to be sure.’

  She looked at him as if she wanted him to tell her, here and now, that everything was changed, that her life with Walter was over, and that he would take her away this afternoon. But then she gently took her hand away, and dropped her gaze, and tried to accept what he had to say.

  ‘I have to stay in San Francisco until Monday,’ he told her. ‘Why don’t you think, during the week, what you really want to do, and then let me know what you’ve decided before I leave.’

  ‘Collis,’ she said, ‘I’m not at all sure that’s the best way. I mean what if Walter –’

  Collis pressed his forehead with his fingertips. ‘Hannah, there isn’t any other way, not for us, not now. If you’re going to leave Walter, you’ll have to leave him openly, and with dignity, and for good.’

  ‘It would mean divorce,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Collis told her, ‘I know. That’s why I think you have to spend a few days making up your mind.’

  She looked across the store, at the bolts of fabric, at the windows, at the plaster girl in her party dress. ‘I believe God meant us to be happy, Collis. I believe that now.’

  ‘If I hadn’t come here today, what would you have done? Would you have stayed with Walter?’

  She gave him a wry smile. ‘Yes, I expect so. But life is made out of accidents, isn’t it? It was an accident us meeting in the first place. If it hadn’t been for Mrs Edgeworth, I would have sailed to California by a later ship. As it was …’

  She paused. She shrugged. Collis reached out and touched a stray curl of blonde hair.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ he said quietly. ‘On Sunday afternoon, I’ll take a ride out to Mission Dolores. I’ll be there by three o’clock. I’ll wait by the flagpole in front of the porch for an hour. If you really want to give up Walter, and if you really want to stay with me, then take a Yellow Line coach out there and meet me. If you don’t, well, I’ll wait until four, and then I’ll go home.’

  At the Eagle Saloon on Thursday evening, Collis met Dan McReady, who took him down to a Chinese restaurant on Sacramento Street called Dear’s. There were red-lacquered lanterns swinging outside in the summer wind, and the fragrance of five-spice powder and honey was wafting from the back.

  They pushed their way through a beaded curtain into a low-ceilinged room, where Chinese sat at low tables, eating with chopsticks from dishes of prawns and bamboo shoots and stir-fried vegetables. There were one or two white devils there, too, eating with knives and forks. Dear’s was a favourite among Western businessmen from the financial district, mainly because the proprietor spoke broken English, and the proprietor’s daughter was delicately pretty and would greet each white devil with a courteous smile.

  Miss Dear, in a shiny red dress, with ribbons in her straight black hair, tottered in front of them to the rear of the restaurant, where there were three or four private booths, enclosed with pierced and decorated screens. She bowed to Collis and Dan as she ushered them into the nearest booth on the left.

  Drinking green tea, and smoking a pipe that smelled like burning flowers, was a small Chinese in a black mandarin skullcap and a black silk shirt decorated with embroidered birds. ‘Collis, this is Mr Yee,’ said Dan McReady. ‘Mr Yee, this is Mr Collis Edmonds, of the Sierra Pacific Railroad Company.’

  The Chinaman indicated that Dan and Collis should sit down. ‘I am very honoured to meet you,’ he said. ‘I have read about you last year in the Golden Hills News.’

  ‘I guess they mentioned Wang-Pu,’ said Collis.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Yee. ‘There are many Chinese in San Francisco who mourned for Wang-Pu.’

  Miss Dear came in with a fresh pot of tea, and more cups. ‘Have you eaten yet?’ Mr Yee asked. ‘The specialty here is wind-dried duck. I can recommend it. The red-cooked pork with squid is also good.’

  ‘The tea will do fine, thanks,’ said Collis.

  They sat for a while sipping the scalding tea, and then Mr Yee put down his cup. ‘You were a friend of Wang-Pu’s, Mr Edmonds.’ It wasn’t a question.

  Collis nodded.

  ‘Wang-Pu talked about you often. He said that the future of the Chinese people in San Francisco was in your breath. That is a Chinese expression which means that your life is tied up with their fate.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ said Collis.

  ‘You have no need to be,’ replied Mr Yee. ‘None of us chooses the path he treads.’

  ‘I believe in destiny,’ Collis told him, ‘but I’m not a fatalist. I could pack my bags now and go back to Sacramento, and spend the rest of my life being a middling-to-average hardware dealer.’

  Mr Yee shook his head and smiled. ‘You could no more do that than I could. What you have to do has been written in your future for centuries past, and it will be written as your history in centuries yet to come.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Dan McReady took out a red rag and blew his nose. ‘What Mr Edmonds really wants to talk about is labour, Mr Yee. Chinese workers to build his railroad for him.’

  Mr Yee poured out more tea and looked down at the leaves as they settled in the cup. ‘I know that, Mr McReady. We have already discussed it among the members of my tong.’

  Collis said nothing. He had learned from Wang-Pu that a respectful silence is considered a thousand times more valuable than even the most worshipful words.

  ‘Whenever you want labour, Mr Edmonds, we can supply it,’ Mr Yee said. ‘Hundreds, if you need them, or thousands. They come in from China every week, and we can organise them for you. All you have to do is say the word.’

  ‘What will you want in return?’ asked Collis.

  Mr Yee raised his hand. ‘Nothing. What you are planning to do is just as much our destiny as yours. We do not expect to be paid for fulfilling our future.’

  Collis took a notepad out of his tailcoat pocket and scribbled three or four words in it, in pencil. ‘I’ve written myself a reminder,’ he told Mr Yee. ‘When we finish the railroad, the Sierra Pacific will make a financial contribution to the Chinese companies, one dollar for every man who worked
on the track. What the companies do with the money – well, that’s up to them. But I hope they use it for better housing and better schools.’

  Mr Yee looked at Collis without blinking. Then he said, ‘I believe there is no question. You are, indeed, the man.’

  Dan McReady sniffed. ‘What do you mean by that? What man?’

  Mr Yee smiled at him. ‘Mr Edmonds knows what I mean. True, Mr Edmonds?’

  ‘I think I’ll try some of that wind-dried duck, if there’s any going,’ Collis said. ‘How about you, Dan?’

  Mission Dolores had been proudly established in 1776 as Spain’s northernmost outpost on the West Coast of America. Now it stood peeling and decrepit among the barren hills of southwest San Francisco, its cemetery overgrown with pampas grass, juniper bushes, ferns, and poinsettias. Birds settled on the clay-tiled roof, watching for bread and oranges discarded by the Sunday visitors who came out to promenade, and picnic, and canter their horses.

  Collis walked around the mission, waving his hat to keep himself cool. Then he stood beside one of the whitewashed adobe walls for a while and had a smoke. He could see the flagstaff from where he was standing, but he wanted to stay in the shadow. There was no cloud, no breeze. Just the glaring sun, and the afternoon dust.

  At about ten after three, he went inside and looked at the church. It was darker there, and cool, because the heat of the day was kept out by mud walls that were four feet thick. There were decorative altars, nearly ninety years old, carved in Mexico and brought to San Francisco by ship, and statues of the saints that had been crudely fashioned by the local Indians. The ceiling was painted in blues and reds and pale greens.

  Collis stood there for a while, in the shadows, and then in a halting, embarrassed voice, he began a prayer. ‘Dear Lord,’ he said, as if he were starting a letter to a friend in a foreign country, ‘I don’t know what it is that You want of me; or even if You want anything from me at all. But I guess it’s You behind all this, because it’s all too big to be anybody else.’

  He paused. He felt like a fool. But he knew, somehow, that God was really there. He knew that God was waiting for him to continue, that God expected more.

  ‘A lot of people have died,’ Collis said in a husky voice. ‘There was Kathleen Mary, at the Monument Hotel, and there was my father, and then there was Wang-Pu. A lot of people have suffered, too, and I’m sorry about that. Hannah suffered, and Delphine suffered, and I guess my mother suffered, as well. I just hope that You’re guiding me, Lord. I just hope that whatever it is I’m doing, You’re still there, holding my hand, because if it all came to nothing, if we never built the railroad, well, I don’t know what the hell it would all have been for. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say “hell”.’

  He waited for a few minutes longer. He could hear excursionists laughing outside, and somebody blowing a slide whistle.

  ‘Stay with me, Lord,’ he whispered at last. ‘If that isn’t too impertinent; after everything I’ve done. So many people seem to depend on me. So many people seem to be waiting for what I’m going to do. It’s a hell of a lot to carry, all on your own.’

  He looked up at the crucifix on the adobe wall. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. He didn’t know what else God expected to hear. He lowered his eyes to the wooden floor. The pampas grass rustled outside the open door.

  He left the church and walked for a while among the gravestones. He stood for almost five minutes in front of a marker which read: ‘Ici reposent Athalie Baudichon avec Charles et Blanche ses deux Enfants trois victimes de l’horrible explosion du Steamboat Jenny Lind le 11 Avril 1853. Priez pour eux.’ He felt saddened, and suddenly tired. He went and sat for a while at the front of the Mission, on a rough stone wall, only a few feet away from the flagstaff.

  Four o’clock came. A few high cirrus clouds shadowed the sun. Collis reached in his pocket and found that he was out of cheroots. Four crushed-out butts lay in the white dust at his feet. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and whistled tunelessly between his teeth. He knew she wasn’t coming. Not this late. Not at five after four. If she’d really wanted to come, she would have been here at three.

  Some of the day-trippers began to gather up their bags and their picnic baskets and make their way towards the Yellow Line coaches. A breeze whipped up the dust and set the flag pulleys clanking dolefully against the flagstaff. A Spanish priest walked across the courtyard, his head bent, and Collis watched him until he was out of sight.

  Well, he thought, this is how it ends. He stood up, brushed down his tailcoat, and put on his hat. He had a return stagecoach ticket into San Francisco, and he reckoned on going back to the International Hotel, changing, and then having dinner at Delmonico’s with Dan McReady. Perhaps he would get drunk, with toast after toast to Walter West, for his persistence and his worthiness, and his commonplace luck. Damn all haberdashers, he thought. Damn all haberdashers to hell.

  He crossed the rough, stony courtyard towards the place where the Yellow Line coaches turned around. One of them had just arrived from downtown, and the conductor was holding the horses while the passengers disembarked. The wind sizzled across the dusty ground.

  A man in a brown tailcoat and thick whiskers stepped down from the coach and turned to help a small blonde woman in a grey dress. Collis was confused at first, because the man seemed to treat the woman with too much familiarity, as if she was his wife, or his niece. But as Collis came nearer, he saw that the conductor had left the horses and had walked across to help the woman with two large carpetbags, and a small leather trunk, and he realized that she must be Hannah. She had to be.

  ‘Hannah!’ he said, with a dry throat.

  She didn’t even hear him; she was too busy looking in her purse for a tip for the conductor. But he was walking towards her, almost running, and a scenic photographer caught them both at that moment, tiny figures under a wide afternoon sky, he with his hat in his hand, she with her head just lifted, and the photograph was later exhibited at the Merchants’ Hall in San Francisco, although the caption never said who they were.

  Chapter 11

  He booked her a separate room at the International – not because the management was fussy about ladies and gentlemen of quality sharing rooms for what they discreetly called ‘private conversations’, but because San Francisco was too small and Collis was already too well known for a double booking to go unremarked in the scandal papers.

  Neither of them wanted to humiliate Walter any more than they had already, and Hannah that evening was still very shy, and unsettled, and frightened by what she had done.

  Over a fish dinner in the downstairs restaurant, Collis held her hand and told her, ‘I was sure you wouldn’t come. It’s like a miracle.’

  ‘A miracle?’

  He shrugged. ‘Well, a minor miracle. Not quite the raising of Lazurus, but the raising of my spirits.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mine are raised too. I feel like a silly young girl again. You won’t fail me, will you?’

  ‘Do you really think you have to ask?’

  She gently stroked the back of his hand, touching the whorls of his knuckles. ‘No,’ she said, and the tear that hovered on her eyelash sparkled like the single diamond in her ring.

  ‘Did you tell Walter you were leaving for good?’

  She nodded. ‘He wouldn’t have accepted my going at all if I hadn’t. He would have told me to hang on, to give him a second chance, to wait and see if my feelings could change.’

  She paused, and added, ‘He was very sad. I think he cried more than I did. But he did say that he would try and understand, and that if I really didn’t love him he wouldn’t stand in my way.’

  ‘He won’t contest a divorce?’

  Hannah turned away. Her pale profile was framed by a panel of fluted oak, and she was so still and melancholy that she could have been posing for a portrait of Rapunzel, waiting for her lost prince.

  ‘Hannah?’ Collis pressed her.

  She lowered her eyes. ‘We di
dn’t discuss a divorce.’

  ‘Why not? Surely a divorce is the whole heart of the matter.’

  ‘It’s too early,’ she said. ‘I’ve left him, yes, but I haven’t even unpacked my bag yet. I can’t think of the future until I’ve learned to cope with the present.’

  ‘I see. So you would rather we lived in sin than cut off your last ties to Walter?’

  She lifted her head again. ‘We won’t be living in sin, Collis. Don’t think the idea hasn’t tormented me for hours. But I’ve come to believe that seeking my own happiness, even if it hurts Walter, is not a sin. Being with you makes me happy. I love your energy and I love your determination. And I promise you, my darling, that I will discuss a divorce with Walter, one day soon when the time is right.’

  Collis laid down his forkful of shad. He took up his glass of champagne and raised it to her.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said, ‘here’s to us. Here’s to our folly, and here’s to our future, and here’s to our love.’

  Hannah didn’t hesitate. She raised her glass and drank. Then the tears glittered in her eyes again, and she said: ‘Oh, Collis. Don’t fail me. Please don’t fail me.’

  At ten o’clock, they retired to their separate rooms – Collis on the fourth floor and Hannah on the third. Collis took a bath, and shaved, and drank a small glass of bourbon while he sat wrapped in a towel reading the evening’s paper and cooling off. He wasn’t entirely sure that Hannah wanted him to come to her room tonight; or, if she did, when. She had kissed him very firmly and lovingly on the lips as he left her outside her door, and said good night to him in a way that had seemed to suggest she was expecting a later assignation. But the more Collis thought about it, the more he began to doubt whether it had.

  He sprayed himself with lavender cologne, combed his hair, and began to dress in a freshly boiled shirt and evening clothes. Of course she wanted him to come down to her room and make love, he reassured himself. Why else had she left Walter? Yet Hannah’s affections confused him, and he still had disturbing recollections of that night aboard the Virginia, when she had refused to let him into her cabin. He didn’t relish the idea of a repeat performance in the august corridors of the International.