Mr. American

by George MacDonald Fraser

  *

  Once outside the Customs shed, Mr Franklin paused to examine the railway timetable board; there were, he saw, five companies competing to carry him to London on Monday. After some deliberation, he decided on the London and North-western, which undertook to convey him to Euston in something over four hours, via Crewe and Rugby, for 29 shillings first-class. Just under six dollars, in fact. It was the fastest train, not that that could matter to a man who had not taken the special vestibuled boat-train for Atlantic passengers which was even now pulling out of Riverside Station with a shrilling of steam.

  His porter was waiting at the cab rank, and on his inquiring whether the gentleman wished to travel by taxi or horse cab, Mr Franklin fixed him with a thoughtful grey eye and asked what the fare might be.

  `Cab's a shillin' a mile, taxis sixpence a half-mile an' twopence every sixth of a mile after that,' replied the porter.

  `And how far is the Adelphi Hotel?' asked Mr Franklin.

  This innocent question caused some consternation among the taximen and cab drivers; some thought it would be about a mile, if not slightly more, but there was a school of thought that held it was a bare mile by the shortest route. No one knew for certain, and finally the porter, a practical man who wanted to get back to the Customs shed for another client, settled the matter by spitting and declaring emphatically:

  `It'll cost you a shillin', anyways.'

  Mr Franklin nodded judiciously, indicated a horse-cab, and then paid the porter. He seemed to be having some difficulty with the massive British copper coins, to which he was plainly unaccustomed, and the tiny silver 'doll's-eye' threepence which he eventually bestowed; the porter sighed and reflected that this was a damned queer Yank; most of them scattered their money like water.

  This was not lost on the cabby, who mentally abandoned the notion of suggesting that he take his passenger by way of Rodney Street - which would have added at least sixpence to the fare - there to gaze on Number 62, the birthplace of the late Mr Gladstone. Americans, in his experience, loved to see the sights, and would exclaim at the Grand Old Man's childhood home and add as much as a shilling to the tip. An even better bet was the house in Brunswick Street where Nathaniel Hawthorne had kept his office as U.S. Consul in the middle of the previous century, but somehow, the cabby reflected morosely, this particular American didn't look as though he'd be interested in the author of Tanglewood and The Scarlet Letter either.

  The cab drew out of the quayside gates and up the long pier to the main street at the top, where the electric trams clanged and rumbled and a slow-moving stream of traffic, most of it horse-drawn, but with the occasional motor here and there, slowed the cab to a walk. The cabby noted that his fare was sitting forward, surveying the scene with the air of a man who is intent on drinking everything in, but giving no sign of whether he found it pleasing or otherwise. For the cabby's money, central Liverpool was not an inspiring sight in any weather, with its bustling pavements and dirty over-crowded streets, and he was genuinely startled when after some little distance his passenger called out sharply to him to hold on. He was staring intently down the street which they were crossing, a long, grimy thoroughfare of chandlers' shops and warehouses; he was smiling, the wondering cabby noticed, in a strange, faraway fashion, as though seeing something that wasn't there at all. He was humming, too, gently under his breath, as he surveyed the long seedy stretch of ugly buildings and cobbles on which the rain was beginning to fall.

  `You want to go down there, sir?' the cabby inquired. `Takes us oot o' the road to the Adelphi, like.'

  'No,' said Mr Franklin. 'Just looking.' He nodded at the street-sign, a plaque fixed high on the corner building. 'Paradise Street.' And then to the cabby's astonishment he laughed and sat back, quoting to himself in an absent-minded way:

  'As I was walking down Paradise Street, Way-hay, blow the man down. Thirty miles out from Liverpool town, Gimme some time to blow the man down.'

  That had been Tracy's song, Tracy the Irishman who had been a sailor. And there was Paradise Street itself, come on all unexpected, and nothing like the picture the song had conjured up when Tracy sang it, far from the sea. What had he imagined? Waving palms, blue water, sandy shores - and here were the cold grey stones of Liverpool's sailortown. Very unexpected - but then England was sure to be full of unexpected, unimagined things. He became aware that the cabby, twisted round on his box, was viewing him with some concern; Mr Franklin nodded and gestured him to drive on.

  A funny monkey, the driver decided; American interest in things English was, he knew from experience, liable to be eccentric, but Paradise Street ... ? Was this bloke one of those who might be enthused by a view of St George's Hall, that startling showpiece of Liverpudlian architecture which they would see towards the end of their journey? Or if he didn't care for mock Graeco-Roman temples five hundred feet long, would he respond to some useful information on the subject of the Walker Fine Art Gallery, with its striking sketch by Tintoretto and its portrait of Margaret de Valois, possibly by Holbein but more probably school of J. Clouet? The cabby, who had done his homework carefully for the benefit of tourists, stole another look at his fare's impassive bronzed face and decided regretfully that he wouldn't. Putting all hope of a substantial tip out of his head, he drove on to the Adelphi Hotel.

  Here, he was rewarded with his shilling fare and another carefully selected silver threepence, and Mr Franklin was escorted by porters into the luxurious marble and red plush interior of the lobby. He paused to survey the elegant little staircase leading to the main lounge, the mixed throng of affluent transit guests and local, nononsense business men in sober suits and watch-chains, the quiet efficiency of the Adelphi's numerous hall staff - and was surveyed in his turn by the Irish head porter, who was as great an expert in his way as Inspector Griffin. No stick, no gloves, well-worn boots, and a decidedly colonial look to his clothing, the porter thought; his first question'll be the price of a room.

  `How much do you charge,' asked Mr Franklin quietly, 'for a single room?'

  'Four shillings and upwards, sir,' replied the porter. 'That's eighty cents in your own money,' and he favoured Mr Franklin with an avuncular smile, being one who had relatives in Philadelphia himself. 'Just off the boat, sir? You'll be ready for a bite of breakfast, then. In the coffee-room, sir; the gentlemen's cloak-room is to your right. And the name, sir? Franklin, very good. Of - ?'

  'Ah ... United States.'

  'First-rate, sir. The boy will take up your luggage. You'll be staying ... two nights, sir. I see. Now, when you've breakfasted, if there's any assistance I can give, you just inquire at my desk. Not at all, sir.' And as Mr Franklin hesitated, as though wondering whether to reach into his waistcoat pocket for another threepence, the porter generously solved the problem for him by turning to attend to an angular English lady, changing in that instant from a warm and genial father-figure into the respectfully impersonal butler to whom her ladyship was accustomed.

  Mr Franklin left his cape and hat in the cloak-room, warily examined the array of flacons of lavender water, Hammam's Bouquet, Mennen's toilet powder, and Eno's Fruit Salts laid out for exterior and internal refreshment, and compromised by washing his hands. He should have stayed over in New York, at the Belmont or the Clarendon, to get the feel of these places, but the city had been bursting at the seams for the Hudson-Fulton festivities celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of the former's discovery of Manhattan, and the hundredth of the latter's steam navigation; consequently, there had been no. rooms to be had. Besides, he had had a vague desire to come fresh to England from where he had been; an odd ambition which he would have had difficulty in defining.

  He ate an excellent breakfast in the cosy coffee-room, sitting at a little window table and watching the constant stream of traffic and pedestrians in the street outside. He deliberately ate slowly, conscious of a mounting feeling of excitement - which he found strange in himself, for he was not normally an excitable man. Then he returned to the lobby,
and questioned the attentive porter.

  'Guide books to London and East Anglia, sir? Sure, now, I can get those for you. And a large-scale map of the county of Norfolk?' The porter's eyebrows rose a fraction. `You'll want the ordnance survey - yes, I dare say I can get that, too. It may take an hour or so, but if you're going out ... you are, for a look at the town. Capital, sir.'

  Mr Franklin thanked him, and set off to tour the city on foot, content to walk at random, watching and listening, standing on street corners to observe the passing crowds, trying to accustom his ear to the strange, soft mumbling accent of the Liverpudlians, observing the magisterial police on traffic duty, spending five minutes listening to an altercation between a stout woman and a street trader, riding on an electric tram and on the famous overhead railway, and generally presenting the appearance of an interested wanderer absorbing the sights and sounds around him.

  He lunched in a public house off soup and sandwiches, washed down by a pint of heavy dark beer which he found rather cloyingly sweet, spent another couple of hours in apparently aimless strolling, and returned to the Adelphi as dusk was falling. There he dined, and after calculating that the five shillings, or one dollar, which the dinner cost, still left him with a comfortable balance from the ten dollars which, the Mauretania's purser had assured him, was all that a first-class traveller need spend per day in England, retired to his room.

  Here the guide books which the porter had obtained were waiting for him, but he ignored them in favour of the large ordnance survey map of Norfolk, which he spread out on the bed and began to examine with close attention. For half an hour he pored over it, the dark face intent as he traced over the fine print and symbols denoting such detailed items as railway cuttings, plantations, marshes, forest paths, churches with spires (and with towers), historic sites, and the like, and the quaint, pastoral place-names, Attleborough, Sheringham, Swaffham, Methwold, and Castle Lancing.

  Mr Franklin smiled, and lay down on the bed, and for another half-hour he was quite still, stretched out, hands behind his head, the dark grey eyes staring up at the ceiling, the gentle mouth beneath the black moustache slightly open. An onlooker would have thought he was asleep, but presently he came swiftly to his feet, and went purposefully to the work of undressing and preparing himself for bed.

  He unpacked his few toilet articles from his valise, took off his jacket, removed the money-belt round his waist and methodically counted its contents - one hundred and ninety-eight gold sovereigns, which was a considerable sum, even for a transatlantic passenger, and had caused the American Express clerk in New York to purse his lips doubtfully when Mr Franklin, changing his dollars, had insisted on carrying so much on his person. If Inspector Griffin, or the Irish head porter, had been privileged to peep into Mr Franklin's room they, too, might have been mildly surprised. But they would not have thought anything particularly out of the way until the moment when Mr Franklin, having stood for several minutes contemplating his battered trunk where it stood against the wall, gave way apparently to a sudden impulse, and unbuckled the straps which secured it. Even then there was nothing strange in his behaviour, or in the way he paused, glancing round the room with its homely fittings, the shaded light, the marble wash-stand with its bowl and ewer, the floral wall-paper and patterned carpet, the little notice informing guests of meal-times and fire precautions; nor even in the way he meditatively touched the linen pillow and embroidered bed-spread, like a man reassuring himself of his surroundings, before he turned to the trunk again and threw back the lid.

  At that point they might have taken notice, for the contents of Mr Franklin's trunk were, to say the least, slightly unusual for a guest in a Liverpool hotel. Not that there was anything about them to excite Inspector Griffin's professional attention; there was no contraband, no illicit goods, nothing to which, in those easygoing days, even a law officer could have taken exception, although he might have made a mental note that Mr Franklin was a man of unusual background and, possibly, behaviour.

  The principal object in the trunk, taking up most of its space, was a saddle - but the kind of saddle that would have made an English hunting squire rub his eyes and exclaim with disgust. It was what the Mexicans call a charro saddle, heavily ornamented and studded with metal-work, very high both before and behind, and therefore a sure recipe (in the eyes of the English squire) for a broken pelvis if its owner were unwise enough to use it over hedges. There was also a blanket, of Indian pattern, neatly folded, and a heavy canvas slicker, or cape; a very worn and stained wideawake hat, a pair of heavy leather gauntlets, a pair of battered boots in sore need of repair, a large drinking mug of cheap metal, and several packets of papers done up in oil-skin.

  Mr Franklin, squatting in front of the trunk in his long underwear - he had discarded his newly-bought nightshirt on the first day of his voyage - handled each item in turn, very carefully, running his long fingers over their surfaces, caressingly almost as a man will handle old things which are familiar friends. He spun the big rowels on the spurred boots and put them back, smiling a little, rapped his knuckle on the mug, balanced the packets of papers in his hands, and restored them to their places. There were half a dozen books in the trunk; he leafed through them slowly - Old Mortality, Oliver Twist, Humphrey Clinker, Baedeker's Guide to England, the 1897 edition; the poetical works of Wordsworth, George Borrow's Lavengro, Huckleberry Finn, the complete works of Shakespeare.

  He read the fly-leaf on the Shakespeare, although he knew the inscription off by heart, the spidery writing in faded ink: 'To Luke Franklin, in the earnest hope that he may find profit, pleasure, and peace of mind in its pages, from his affectionate father'. The signature was Jno. Franklin, 1858'. His grandfather's gift to his own father; he could hear the old man's voice reading from it - Luke Franklin had loved best of all to recite Falstaffs part, chuckling over the grosser jests, rolling Shakespeare's rich periods over his tongue . . . 'when I was of thy years I was not an eagle's talon in the waist; I could have crept me into any alderman's thumb ring.' He had wondered what an alderman was, and Luke Franklin had told him, on a soft and starry summer night when they camped on the road to El Paso; he had been just a boy then, lying staring into the fire, listening while his father explained that it was a corruption of 'eolderman', an old English word -'it's the same as elder, an elder man, an alderman, who is a kind of city councilman back in England. They still have them there.' His father had resumed his reading aloud, and the boy had gone to sleep, to awake in the pearly dawn, beside a dead fire, with his father still croaking away through the Battle of Shrewsbury, oblivious of time and place, lost in the magic of the play.

  Mr Franklin sighed. Shakespeare and he had travelled some long roads since then, into some strange places. There had been the time in the silver camp when he had read Othello to a group of amusement starved miners, and old Davis, his partner, had burst out: 'Why, that

  damfool nigger! Couldn't he have asked around? Couldn't he see they were makin' a jackass out of him?' Or the night in Hole-in-the-Wall when he had lent the book to Cassidy, the last man on earth who might have been expected to appreciate the Swan of Avon, but he had studied away at it, the broad, beefy face frowning as he spelled out the words, and Franklin had caught the whispered mutter: 'Before these eyes take themselves to slumber, I'll do good service, or lie in the ground for it, aye, or go to death. But I'll pay it as valorously as I may. That will I surely do.' Yes, Cassidy might never have heard of Harfleur or the Salic Law, but he could understand that kind of talk, all right. Wonder where he was now? Where were any of them, for that matter?

  Well, he was here, in Liverpool, Lancashire County, England, quarter f the way round the world from Hole-in-the-Wall, or El Paso, or the Tonopah diggings, or the Nebraska farm that he could barely remember. Already it seemed far away, that other world, in mind as well as distance. Only the instinct of the wanderer, whose home and effects travelled with him, whose whole being could be contained in one old trunk, had prompted him to hold on to al
l these relics - not the books, but the trail gear. Why hadn't he abandoned it? Habit? Sentiment, perhaps? Insurance? Mr Franklin had to admit that he did not know.

  He replaced the books, paused, and then reached under the saddle and drew out the belt with its scabbards and the two .44 Remingtons; he unsheathed them and weighed them in his hand, one after the other, the light catching the long slim silver barrels. Like the Shakespeare, they had belonged to his father; like the Shakespeare, they were rather old and out of date; but again, he told himself, like the Shakespeare they would probably outlast most modern innovations. He rolled the cylinders, listening to the soft oily clicks of the mechanism; then he frowned, broke open the chambers, and carefully shook the little brass shells out into his palm. Loaded pistols in Liverpool were as incongruous as ... as Shakespeare in Hole-in-the-Wall.

  Dropping the cartridges into an old cloth, he knotted it and stowed it under the saddle with the empty pistols. Then he closed the trunk, buckled its straps securely, looked round the room again, rolled into bed, and turned out the light.

  2

  Mr Franklin travelled down to London on the Monday afternoon; noting that the railway company hedged its bets by giving the journey time as 'from four to five and a half hours' he armed himself with every paper and periodical that the head porter could find and walked the short distance to Lime Street with his luggage borne behind him on the hotel barrow. Here he resisted the offer of a five-guinea book of rail tickets for 1000 miles-worth of first-class travel, buying only a single, and found himself an empty carriage, rather dusty and redolent of stale cigar smoke and Victorian grandeur.