Silver

by Graham Masterton

  Augusta held out her hand for him; and they walked together through the breezy afternoon. ‘I think our lives were always meant to be woven together,’ said Augusta. ‘I think somehow that you and I were made for each other in Heaven.’

  Henry said nothing, but stopped, and frowned, as if he thought that he had heard somebody calling his name. Augusta held his arm tight, and pressed her cheek against his shoulder, and said, ‘I have never been happier.’

  Afternoon settled into evening. They ate supper at the Checeago Dining Rooms on Division Street, whitefish with sesame seeds; and then returned to the Union Hotel. Tonight they began to feel the enormous distances surrounding them: a thousand miles to Carmington, two thousand miles to San Francisco. And as the sun began to burn its way down toward the prairies of the West, Henry went out into the corridor and stood for a long time staring at the wharves, and the depots, and the litter of timber and packing cases, and the noisy yards of the Illinois Central railroad.

  Augusta came up behind him and wound her arms around his waist. ‘Come to bed with me,’ she asked.

  He turned his head. ‘I was looking at the lake.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But come to bed with me.’

  They closed the door of number 5 behind them, and Henry locked it. Augusta carefully unwound her spectacles and laid them on the bedside table. Then she unfastened her dress, and her corset cover, and turned her back to unhook the corset. Henry sat on the edge of the bed meanwhile and undressed with the elaborate care of a man who is preparing himself for the inevitable. He folded his pants, and wrapped up his shirt for the hotel to take care of, and set his shoes side by side. Someone in the room below was singing a sentimental song that was popular that year, ‘My Misty Reminiscences Of You’.

  ‘Where woodbine grows and where the swallow sings

  We walked in summer and exchanged our rings…’

  Augusta said, ‘Henry,’ and Henry turned, and there she was, kneeling on the opposite edge of the bed, nude, with a curving stomach like a heavy child, and small diagonally-slanting breasts, and her hair let down. She lifted her arms for him to hold her; and although he had still not taken off his cotton underwear, he did, and kissed her bare fat shoulder, and squeezed her close to him, thinking, God, this is all my responsibility; I let this happen by default. I failed to tell her firmly at every turn that I didn’t love her, and every time she asked me if I loved her and I didn’t reply, she took it to mean that I did. And this is the ultimate punishment for it; to have to make love to her, to have to pretend that I want her, and that she’s beautiful. Because this has all gone too far, through no fault of hers, and if I tell her now that I find her plain, and unexciting, then God knows how much I’m going to hurt her.

  She whispered in his ear, ‘You may have me, Henry; but not in the way that a husband takes his bride.’ Her words sounded both lewd and ludicrous; and Henry frowned at her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. And downstairs, the amateur tenor placidly sang,

  ‘Now all the winter through

  I walk through shadows blue…’

  Augusta, quite pink, said, ‘I have some cream. It’s what my mother used to do, with Father, before they were married. She said that it was quite all right, that it was clean, and that it didn’t count as actual knowledge. She said that it was commonly practised among the Highland Scottish, and considered quite usual.’

  She turned away suddenly, and started to weep. ‘Oh, Henry, how can you! The very first time that I have dared to give myself to anyone, and you have made me speak to you like a whore! Henry, have you no romance? You said that everything was going to be so roma-hantic, ohh…’

  ‘And all I have is misty reminiscences of you.... ‘

  Henry sat baffled on the edge of the bed, and then reached out and clasped her shoulder; as gently but as firmly as he could.

  ‘Augusta, perhaps we’re not quite ready. Perhaps we’re not completely sure.’

  ‘I’m sure!’ Augusta retorted, her face hot with tears.

  ‘Yes, but if we can’t conduct ourselves as man and wife—if we have to resort to—well, different things—I mean—’

  He found himself looking at himself again in the mirror on the washstand, skinny and glum in his underwear, with shoulders like broomsticks. He couldn’t even make himself smile. He felt unhappy, that was all; and sad for Augusta; and what was worse, responsible for everything she did. She was quite right: she was a completely dependent person, and already she had come to depend on Henry for amusement, for shelter, for conversation, for every decision in her daily life from what time to get up in the morning to where shall we eat at lunchtime, and what. Now she was offering herself as a sexual dependent, too; with one important sanction; although Henry felt that this was just one more ploy in Augusta’s complicated repertoire of emotional gambits. He would be able to take her, sooner or later, if he wanted to; or even if he didn’t.

  Augusta’s strength was that she was completely absorbed in him, in nothing and nobody else, and that she needed him desperately. Her unrelenting need was like an addiction to morphia; and, just like an addict, it made her crafty and manipulative beyond even her own understanding. Henry was too amiable and too straightforward to realize how much Augusta wanted him; and to understand that if he wanted to be free of her, he would have to forget his politeness, and his natural sense of responsibility, and speak to her with harshness and complete finality.

  They lay together in bed for almost two hours, like waxworks. It was not yet completely dark, and the sinking sunlight moved across the ceiling of their brown-papered room like some carefully-devised clock, reaching the top of the sampler when the chimes in the hallway outside struck seven; reaching the rose-transferred water-jug when the chimes struck eight.

  At last, mutely, Augusta reached across to the bedside table, and picked up a jar of Eastman’s Violette Cold Cream. Scooping into it with her fingers, she lifted out a large white fragrant lump; which she then massaged between the cheeks of her large white bottom. She kept her back to Henry: that long white back with a mole on the right shoulder-blade, her dark hair spread across the pillow. And then she said, ‘You may have me now.’

  ‘Augusta—’ Henry began. But then she clutched her buttocks in her own hands, and spread them apart for him; and the blatant obscenity of what she was doing aroused him, so that his penis rose, and he found himself thinking: if I had gone with any of those Broadway prostitutes, would they have been any better? They certainly wouldn’t have been so friendly; nor so clean; nor, God damn it, so compliant.

  He shifted himself nearer towards her on his left hip, and held his erection in front of him in his fist. Augusta had her eyes closed; but she demanded, ‘Stroke my hair.’ Then, ‘Feel my breasts.’ And Henry did what she told him to do, knowing how much he would hurt her if he didn’t. At last, Augusta said, ‘Don’t hurt me,’ and that he knew was the final instruction to penetrate her. Not complete knowledge, of course, not full consummation; she kept her hand firmly cupped over any possibility of that. But a pushing, violent, eyes-squeezed, lips-bit, grunting intrusion into her bottom; until she quivered and said, ‘Oh, Mary,’ and Henry could lean away from her a little to see himself buried inside her, between her large curved, curd-like buttocks, tugging and thrusting at the crimson-pink clench of her anus.

  When he came, which was quickly, he felt as if he had been hit on the back of the neck with a black cinder brick. He pulled himself out of her at once, and she was right, it was clean, but she lay there motionless for what seemed like a very long time, offering him nothing more than the broad white landscape of her shoulder, and the forest of her hair, even when he said, ‘Augusta? Are you all right?’

  She was sobbing, of course. It was probably agony. She sobbed and buried her face in the pillow, letting out whispered exclamations every now and then which Henry couldn’t quite hear, although they sounded like ‘oh, Mother, how could you!’ and ‘please, Mother, please.’ Henry clutched her shou
lder a second time, and said, ‘Augusta?’

  Augusta at last turned over, and looked at him with a watery smile. ‘I love you, Henry, forgive me.’

  ‘I hurt you,’ he said.

  She clutched him, her small breasts wobbling like twin blancmanges. ‘I know, but it doesn’t matter. You can hurt me all you want to. I don’t mind being hurt as long as it’s you.’

  They said very little more that evening. They lay side by side on their backs looking up at the ceiling while the room darkened and the sun glided around the other side of the world. They slept. Augusta snored. In the morning, before it was light, she reached across for him, and held him as if she were bearing a sceptre; and she guided him up between her buttocks yet again, so that he could sodomize her a second time. He tried once, jerkily, unsuccessfully, to slip out of her bottom and penetrate her vagina, but her hand remained unremittingly clutched over the entrance which she regarded as the gateway to Christian knowledge. In revenge, perhaps, or in frustration, Henry pushed himself right up inside her as far as he could go. He knew he was hurting her, but he kept himself there, snarling in the dark, thrusting and thrusting until he finally ejaculated, deep inside her bowels.

  The experience shook him. After ten minutes or so, he got out of bed and tugged on his britches, and buttoned up his shirt. Augusta stirred and said, ‘Henry?’ but all he replied was, ‘It’s all right. It’s only six o’clock.’ Then he pulled on his shoes and left the room and went downstairs to the parlour.

  The old man in the eyeshade was down there already, drinking coffee out of a large blue china pot and sorting out mail and newspapers.

  ‘Help yourself,’ he said to Henry, nodding towards the coffee-pot.

  Henry brought over a cup from one of the parlour tables, where breakfast was laid out, and poured himself a half-cup of coffee, and sipped it.

  ‘You’re travelling on today, aren’t you?’ the old man asked him.

  ‘That’s right. Omaha. Bound for California, eventually.’

  ‘Well, it’s a long trail,’ said the old man, reflectively. Then he nodded towards the stairs and asked, ‘That your wife?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Henry; and then, when the old man continued to stare at him from underneath his green-tinted eyeshade, ‘Well, no, not exactly.’

  ‘Didn’t think you were,’ the old man said, dryly. ‘Seen too many. Get to know them, those that are suited, and those that aren’t. You two don’t go together at all, you two don’t. Nothing between you, is there, except for someone to travel with?’

  ‘Well,’ Henry replied, ‘I don’t really think that’s any of your business.’

  ‘Didn’t say it was,’ the old man grimaced, scratching the criss-cross creases at the back of his neck.

  Henry finished his coffee, and then went outside. Although he was wearing only a shirt and britches, the morning was already warm enough for him not to feel chilled. He walked across the street towards the lake-shore, and then sat for a while on the gunwales of a small fishing-boat.

  A small raggedy boy came up and said, ‘Got a penny, mister?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have a bean,’ Henry told him.

  ‘I didn’t ask you for a damned bean,’ the boy retorted. ‘I asked you for a damned penny.’

  ‘You want to go to Heaven or not?’ Henry shouted after him.

  ‘Not if you’re there!’ the boy yelled back.

  Henry was beginning to wonder what Heaven could actually be; especially when a plain, religiously brought-up girl like Augusta could indulge herself so fiercely in what Henry had always thought of as an unnatural act, just for the sake of keeping herself ‘pure’ for her wedding. He had heard that there were girls who would sometimes permit it. George Davies had told him ‘on first-hand authorization’ that Willard Noakes had been occasionally allowed by his pretty fiancée Pamela Woodnut to have ‘tea and cakes in the back parlour’. Willard and Pamela’s engagement had been unusually prolonged by the death of Pamela’s father, and the year-long mourning which had followed it, and Pamela was a wilful, vivacious girl who must have found it difficult to wait.

  Henry supposed that for some families sodomy must have become the modern alternative to the old-fashioned ritual of bundling; and that ‘tea and cakes’ was probably better for some young couples than an unwanted infant. But while he could understand girls like Pamela Woodnut doing it, girls who were deeply in love, and engaged to be married, he found it hard to accept Augusta’s urgent enthusiasm for it. She had wept the first time. It must have hurt her badly. Yet she had wanted more. Perhaps that was the reason why Augusta wanted him so much, and why she had followed him. Perhaps she had known that he would always give her the satisfaction of being hurt.

  He went back to the Union Hotel in a thoughtful, dislocated kind of mood. The old man behind the counter grinned at him as he came in, and winked. ‘Your wife’s been up, and had some morning tea,’ he remarked.

  ‘Thank you,’ Henry had told him, and gone upstairs.

  Augusta was standing in front of the washstand, in a cream nainsook blouse and a frilly brown skirt, brushing her hair out into the sunlight and humming the tune that the string quartet had been playing when Henry had met her at the Collamore, ‘Silken Ribbons’. Henry came in and closed the door behind him and stood with his hands in his pockets watching her.

  ‘You went for a walk,’ said Augusta, brightly.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Down to the lake.’

  ‘You should have waited for me. I would have come with you.’

  ‘I wanted to think.’

  ‘I had some tea in the parlour, and a muffin. I felt such a pig, eating on my own! Aren’t you hungry?’

  ‘I had some coffee, thanks.’

  ‘It’s still very early. Perhaps we should go to a coffee-house before we go to catch the train.’

  ‘Augusta—’

  She turned, and looked at him, her head a little to one side, and smiled. It was the same smile that he had dreamed about on the train, slow and drawn-out; the sort of smile that made Henry feel as if he couldn’t breathe, as if someone was forcing a soft feathery pillow up against his face.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Augusta, and came over and put her arms around his neck. ‘Here I am, chattering on about food, and muffins; and saying nothing to thank you for all of your care, and all of your dear consideration. You’re such a darling, Henry. You look after me in every way. I ask so much of you, don’t I? And yet you always give me everything I need, without any recrimination.’

  She brought her lips close to his left ear, and whispered, in three or four bursts of hot breath, ‘And last night, my lover, you were not only strong, but understanding, too; and that is why I will love you for ever.’

  ‘Augusta,’ said Henry, ‘I’m not in love with you.’

  ‘Henry, I know that. You made that plain to me right from the very beginning; and I don’t expect you to be, not so soon after losing dear Doris. But even if you have no room inside your heart for me just at the moment, please allow me to love you the way I really want to. At least accept love, even if you can’t give it. It’s the only way in which your wounds will ever heal.’

  He clasped her wrists, and lowered her hands away from his neck. ‘It’s more than that, Augusta,’ he told her, as steadily as he could. ‘The thing is, I don’t think we should travel together any further. It’s my fault; but I think the idea of us going to California together, well, it wasn’t as clever a notion as I first thought it was. I’m sorry.’

  Augusta looked pale, and slowly crossed her hands over her breasts. ‘I don’t understand you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m trying to say it as gently as I can, Augusta. I simply don’t think that you and I are particularly suited. It would really be better, it would really save both of us a considerable amount of embarrassment and pain—well, if we were to call a halt to it here in Chicago, before it goes too far, before we end up committing ourselves too completely. Augusta, do you understand me? I don’t want
to hurt you.’

  Augusta sat down smartly on the end of the bed. She looked quite shocked: her mouth open, her eyes roaming the room as if she were searching for some rapidly-escaping animal called logic.

  ‘Augusta,’ Henry repeated, ‘what happened last night—’

  She stared at him through spectacles beaded with tears. ‘I love you, Henry. I’m so sorry about what happened last night; but I couldn’t give you everything, not before we’re married. Please, Henry, we must go to California together. We can’t go back now.’

  ‘Did your mother really tell you that you could do that, and that it wouldn’t make any difference?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What we did together last night. Do you really believe that you can do something like that and still remain pure? I mean, Augusta, how can you reconcile Christian purity with—well, what we did?’

  ‘It was very painful, you know,’ she said, with great gravity.

  ‘Well, I’m sure that it was; but just because you suffered, that doesn’t make it right; and it certainly doesn’t make you innocent. Augusta, by doing that, you have given up your virginity just as surely as if we’d made love together properly.’

  She glanced at him, a curious sly sideways look, and shook her head emphatically. ‘If you were to kiss my lips, I would still be a virgin. If you were to put your arms around me, and caress me, I would still be a virgin. Henry, you know that’s true. Henry, how can you say that I’m not a virgin? How can you say that? Henry!’