Without warning, she dashed herself off the edge of the bed on to the floor, and began to hammer at the carpet with clenched fists.
‘How can you say that!’ she screeched. ‘How can you say that!’
‘Augusta!’ Henry shouted. He knelt down beside her, and grappled with her, but she beat furiously at the carpet, and then at him, her eyes staring with hysteria, thrashing out at everything around her. ‘How can you say that! How can you say that! Henry! How can you say that!’
Henry shook her, and shook her again, and at last she was quiet, panting and rolling her eyes like a floppy Silesia doll. ‘I can’t bear it,’ she whispered. ‘I love you, Henry; I can’t bear you to leave me. Henry, please Henry don’t leave me; don’t make me go back. It would kill me, Henry, if I had to go back. Don’t humiliate me, Henry, please.’
Henry held her close to him, and she guffawed in anguish against his shirt. Oh God, he thought: have I really become responsible, me, for this weeping ugly girl with her tiny spectacles and her big white face and her pear-shaped body? Is it really up to me now, me alone, to calm whatever fears she has, and to satisfy all of her lusts? Do I have to be the one who listens to all of her eccentric ideas about morality and purity and love; do I have to feed her insatiable appetite for reassurance and approval? God, how on earth could I have allowed this to happen? How did I get so ridiculously entangled? And how on earth, now, can I summon up the courage to send her packing back to Bennington?
‘Augusta,’ he said stroking her hair. ‘Augusta, you have to go back.’
‘I’ll kill myself first,’ she told him, in a muffled voice. ‘I’ll drown myself, or cut my wrists.’
‘Augusta, I’m trying to be kind to you.’
‘I don’t want you to be kind to me.’
‘Augusta, this cannot continue. This whole expedition is turning into a farce.’
Augusta knelt up straight, and cast off her hysteria as deftly as a riding-cloak. She fixed Henry with those bland myopic eyes of hers, and said coolly, ‘It wasn’t a farce last night. Not for you.’
‘Augusta—’
‘No, Henry; let’s be truthful. It wasn’t a farce when you really wanted me; and don’t try to deny it, you did. No man could have done what you did to me unless he wanted to. You took me with love, no matter what you say. You were strong and gentle and you cared for me, and I was aching with all of my being to give in to you. I know that you’re not quite ready for me yet, I know that you don’t want to give me everything, not all of yourself, not until you’ve forgotten Doris. But I gave you as much as I dared, Henry, and you know that when you marry me, you can have all of me, without reservation, to do with me whatever you will. I shall be your slave, Henry, don’t doubt it, and all I ask in return is the honour of a loving master.’
Henry let his arms drop, and knelt on the carpet in defeat, his head bowed. Augusta immediately hugged him, and kissed him, prodding her spectacles uncomfortably into his cheek; and cooed, ‘My darling Henry; my dear darling Henry.’
Henry said nothing, but freed himself from her arms, and went across to the window, and looked out over the rooftops, the tilted chimney-stacks, the boarded facades, the signs advertising hotels and restaurants and patent pills. The Martin Patent Long-Reach Bull Snap, keeps your bull at bay, reduces to a minimum the chance of being gored, 14-cents. Kowalski’s Hardware. Schmidt’s Beer.
Augusta came up behind him and tenderly put her arms around his waist. ‘I know that you feel uncertain, Henry; but I will be patient for as long as you need. It is true love, Henry, that beats in my heart, and I am devoted to you. Whatever happens, you can always count on that.’
Henry slowly nodded, with the somnolent certainty of a man in a dream. Over the city, a flock of black scoter ducks circled, like the ashes of a burned newspaper, and then vanished.
‘The common scoter,’ said Henry. ‘Inappropriately named, because it is in fact one of the least common ducks; and the male is the only all-black duck we know of, in America.’
Augusta said, ‘You know so much.’
‘Well, my father made sure I had a good education,’ said Henry, more to himself than to her. ‘The trouble is, I don’t seem to know very much about women. Not as much as I had thought, anyway.’
‘Don’t decry yourself,’ said Augusta, although there was a noticeable lilt of satisfaction in her voice.
Henry replied, ‘No, I’m not. But it strikes me that women are a good deal more complicated than men.’
‘Complicated?’ asked Augusta, and squeezed him hard.
He decided then that he would wait for a day or two; just long enough to give Augusta the time to settle down; but that he would definitely send her home as soon as they reached the terminus at Council Bluffs. No matter how fiercely she protested, not matter what she said about loving him, he would send her back. ‘This is the very end, Augusta.’ He could silently frame the words with his lips, even now. ‘Goodbye, Augusta.’ And what a sense of relief, to be alone. At least she could say when she returned to Bennington that she had seen Chicago, and the Mississippi River, and the prairies of Illinois and Iowa. At least she would have a romance to remember for the rest of her life; something to dream about when she lay in her bed at night, in Bennington, while Henry was sitting in whatever yard he might eventually own in San Francisco, surrounded by stacked-up tombstones, with wine, in sunlight, and free.
Henry smiled at Augusta, and she smiled back at him, and the sun came around a drainpipe on the corner of the building and lit up the room as if they were standing in church.
Augusta said, ‘We ought to go, Henry. We don’t want to miss the train.’
Five
Henry was taciturn for the rest of the day; smoking too many cigars and drinking too much whiskey; and staring out at the fields and houses of Illinois as the train clattered gradually westwards, at 20 miles an hour. They had left Chicago just after nine o’clock; and made sure that the baggage-handler loaded their trunks on to the ten o’clock special headed to Joliet, La Salle, and Rock Island, handing them five brass tags to identify their baggage when they eventually arrived at Council Bluffs.
It was a hot, deaf day, and the train moved like a mirage through the wavering green and yellow landscape. In the club car, swearing men in straw hats were playing cards and drinking Fish House punch. In second-class, tired middle-class women were staring out at the endlessly unwinding fields and wondering if they would ever stop travelling, if they would ever be able to unpack their cases and set up a home, even a vase of daisies would have been something, perched on a mantelpiece. The insects droned in and out of the windows, and babies squalled, and the engineer leaned out of his cab with a wheat-stalk twirling between his teeth and whistled ‘Sweet Maria’.
While Henry drank, and dozed, and paced up and down the train, Augusta maintained a calm that was too beatific to be real; poised on her seat reading her book; or amusing her hands with a little crochet; smiling at children who ran up and down the aisles of the passenger-cars; and talking to harassed mothers about God, and changing diapers. Henry stood at the far end of their car once, and watched her, and realized that he could very easily grow to hate her; and for the very first time in his life he began to understand how men could beat women, or even murder them. If there was ever a murder victim waiting for a murderer, it was Augusta. He could picture her now, glasses crazed where the perpetrator’s heel had stepped on them, blood on her corset-cover, eyes white as a steamed cod’s. He turned away, and looked instead at the passing scenery of Bureau County; trees, fields, an occasional farmhouse, and children in smocks waving out of the ripened wheat.
The train took eleven hours to reach Rock Island from Chicago, and so it was dark by the time it reached the Illinois shore of the Mississippi. They waited for almost half an hour, while the locomotive took on water, but then the whistle shrilled, and the conductor called, ‘Passengers for Iowa, keep your seats,’ and with a sudden jolt they were on their way again.
I
t was only a little over four years since the Rock Island railroad bridge had been opened over the Mississippi, and so most of the passengers were respectfully silent as the train glided slowly between the parapets. Children were lifted up to the windows so that that they could see the huge black breast of the Mississippi sliding beneath them, but few of them understood what they were being lifted up for, and it was too dark to see the river anyway.
At last, however, they reached the farther shore, where the train stopped again, and a score of passengers alighted for Davenport. Henry sat back in his seat looking at the lights of the city through the window, while Augusta snoozed with her mouth open. As the train gradually began to roll off again, into the night, Augusta opened her eyes and stared at him as if she didn’t know who he could be.
‘I must have been dreaming,’ she said, and took out her mother-of-pearl mirror, and peered at herself.
‘What were you dreaming?’ asked Henry.
‘I don’t know. I dreamed that you left me. We were right in the middle of the country somewhere, and you just turned your back and left me.’
Henry didn’t say anything; but watched her; his fingers drumming on the rosewood sill of the window.
‘We’re in Iowa now,’ he told her. ‘We just crossed the Mississippi.’
‘Iowa!’ Augusta exclaimed.
‘Another twelve hours, and we should be in Council Bluffs.’
Augusta was silent. The train whistled defiantly as it rolled out of Davenport into the night, its headlight gleaming into the summer darkness, and nothing ahead of it but miles and miles of glistening rails, and prairie, and wind. Henry said, ‘Why don’t you get some sleep? It’s almost nine o’clock.’
‘I don’t feel tired.’
‘Well, I’m going to go to bed soon.’
Augusta put away her mirror, and primped her hair, and then decided to delve in her bag for her rice-powder.
‘Augusta,’ said Henry, even though he could hear himself saying it, ‘I’m not going to leave you.’
She didn’t look up at him. ‘I was very frightened that you might,’ she replied. ‘After what you said this morning.’ Her voice was tight, congested, disapproving. Henry, in response, closed his eyes.
They reached Council Bluffs on the banks of the Missouri at midnight the following night; and Henry and Augusta and thirty other passengers were taken in two smelly horse-drawn omnibuses to the Pottawattamie Hotel: a large wooden building which stood by itself on the outskirts of the town, where the wind whistled through the grass, and tumbleweed blew. The Pottawattamie was supervised by an enormously fat woman with a fine moustache called Mrs Newell, whose husband had died only two years after he had taken her out west. Mrs Newell had no children: and so she regularly embraced the tired and the disillusioned with all the warmth of a mother, finding them rooms, feeding them with corn chowder, and tucking them up like bedfuls of babies in the warm prairie night. She knew that beyond the Big Muddy, where the railroad did not yet run, there was nothing but the prairie, and then the Rocky Mountains; and then beyond the Rocky Mountains the snow-peaked Sierras. Even those who had managed to come out as far as Council Bluffs in reasonable spirits would find that their will and their stamina would be sorely tested by what lay ahead.
That night, in their room, in a bed like a huge creaking raft, ‘Mr and Mrs Roberts’ listened to the wind blowing across the river. At two o’clock in the morning, both of them wakeful, they watched the moon rise and illuminate their room with silver. The walls were boarded, and painted with white distemper. There was a pine chest, painted with Hungarian flowers; and a chest of drawers with a small looking-glass on top of it, one of those looking-glasses in which it is impossible to see your whole face at once, but which somehow managed tonight to catch the moon, and reflect it on to the red and green Indian rug on the floor.
Augusta put her arm around Henry’s chest. She smelled of soap. She said, ‘Henry, you won’t leave me, will you?’
Someone in the room next door was having jouncing intercourse on their squeaky-springed bed. Henry said, ‘Let’s talk about it tomorrow.’
‘But you said you wouldn’t.’
‘Then you have your word, don’t you? If I said I wouldn’t, I won’t. Now I’m tired, Augusta. In the morning we’re going to have to find ourselves an emigrant party to travel to California with. And buy ourselves a waggon; and all the stores that we’re going to need.’
‘Henry,’ said Augusta, and she suddenly twisted herself around to turn her back to him, and tugged up her nightgown. ‘Henry, take me again, Henry; please.’
Henry lay where he was, wooden with impatience and repulsion. Next door, a woman’s throat let out a cry like a wounded swan, and there was a great crescendo of springs, which abruptly stopped. Blindly, Augusta groped behind her at Henry’s nightshirt, scrabbling at his thighs, and panted, ‘Henry, please; take me, Henry. I want you so much!’
Henry pushed her hand away; but it came back again, searching for him, tugging at him, and at last he gripped her wrist and twisted her arm around until she cried out in pain.
‘Henry! That hurt—’
Henry hurled back the patchwork comforter and leaped out of bed. ‘I’m sorry! I apologize! But for the love of God, Augusta, I can’t sleep with you any more!’
‘Henry, what’s the matter?’
‘It’s you, damn it, you’re the matter. You’ve been pushing yourself at me, on and on, ever since we left New York, telling me how much you love me, and how you’re going to be my slave, and when are we going to be married? Augusta, I don’t love you now, and I never will love you, and if you happen to love me then I’m sorry. But I can’t do anything about it, and I won’t do anything about it.’
‘But you said you’d never leave me.’ Tearful, uncertain, in the moonlight.
‘The way you went on at me, I would have said anything to stop you from nagging.’
‘You said that you might learn to love me.’
‘I didn’t say anything of the kind. God damn it, Augusta, don’t you listen? Don’t you understand? I don’t love you. How can I make it any plainer than that?’
‘But when you get over Doris—’
‘No!’ Henry roared at her. ‘Not when I get over Doris! Not ever! What the hell can I do to get it through your head that I don’t love you. I don’t even like you, in fact I detest the sight of you!’
She sniffed, and trembled. Somebody thumped on the wall next door and shouted, ‘Shut that row, will you? Folks is attempting to sleep.’
‘Shut up yourself!’ Henry shouted back, still quaking with frustration and fury.
The thumping was renewed. ‘You listen here, mister, we got four kids in here; and now you’ve woken the baby. So you just shove a sock in it, you hear, or else I’m going to come next door and shut you up for good and all!’
‘What the hell’s going on?’ demanded a voice from upstairs, and a pair of heels drummed on the ceiling. First one baby started crying, and then another, and then two older children started grizzling, and a woman began to scream at her husband to keep quiet.
‘Now see what you’ve done, with that ridiculous outburst,’ Augusta said, bitterly.
‘Me?’ Henry hissed, kneeling forward on the bed and leaning over her. ‘It wasn’t me. It was you. If only you’d had the grace to understand. Can’t you see what kind of a position you’ve put me in? Can’t you see just how much you’ve been cornering me? I’m not an angry person, Augusta; I wasn’t brought up that way. I was brought up to say what I had to say clearly and politely, in English, without the need for cursing. But by God you’ve pushed me so far, I swear to you that I’ve never felt like shouting at anyone in my whole life before, not the way I feel like shouting at you. For God’s sake, Augusta, help yourself. Have some strength, have some spirit.’
‘I told you that I would be dependent on you,’ Augusta said. Her voice was almost accusing. ‘I warned you, right from the very beginning.’
‘But one p
erson can’t be dependent on another, not the way you’re trying to be dependent on me. I can’t think for you; I can’t lead your life for you. I’m not your husband, and I’m never going to be. I’m not your father, either.’
Augusta clutched miserably at the shoulders of Henry’s nightshirt. ‘But I’m so weak,’ she wept. ‘Henry, I need you! I can’t manage on my own! How am I going to manage on my own, out here in the middle of the prairie? Oh, Henry, I knew my dream was right. You’re going to leave me, aren’t you? You’re going to leave me here.’
Henry squeezed his eyes tightly shut. He felt such rage within him that he couldn’t stop himself from shuddering. And all the time Augusta mewled and pawed him and begged him not to leave her, please don’t leave me, Henry; you know that I love you; Henry, I promise I won’t nag you any more; you don’t even have to sleep with me; you don’t have to do anything, Henry; but please don’t leave me.
He opened his eyes unexpectedly; and in unnerving contrast to the entreaty in her voice, her face was completely calm, and her eyes were staring at him with a look that disturbed him deeply, even frightened him. There was adoration there; he could see that. But there was something else: a calculating avarice, as if she could have eaten him alive. He was beginning to understand now what she really was, a cannibal, with an insatiable appetite for reassurance. A woman whose self-esteem was so low that it had to be fed on the constant approval of everybody she liked; and on the jealousy of those that she didn’t. Henry had always been the dude of Carmington; and now she, Augusta, had won him for herself. And there was no doubt that she would write back to everyone in Carmington as soon as they were settled in California, and crow about it. She would go through any kind of humiliation; she would submit to anything at all; as long as she could boast that she had won Henry.
Henry was about to say, ‘I hate you,’ but his anger had been quelled by his realization of what Augusta needed from him. Instead, he tugged his sleeve away from her clutching hand, and stood up, and quickly dressed.
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