Silver

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Sure,’ said Henry, ‘and they’ve got gold in the air, too. Blowing in the wind. All you have to do is hang out a muslin sheet, and you’ll catch yourself pounds of it.’

  The miner peered at him with mottled eyes. ‘Is that a fact? You mean, you just hang out a muslin sheet, and that’s all? No digging, no rocking, no nothing?’

  ‘Help yourself to a drink, friend,’ said Henry, and passed him the bottle.

  Henry walked back to his store and post office very drunk. He was whistled at by whores, and propositioned by two seedy old panhandlers, but he took no notice, and plodded as steadily as he could manage along the street which led out towards California Gulch, and the two-storey building which for nearly twenty years he had been calling his home. Outside it took him a long time to find the right key; but at last he pushed open the door with a jangling of bells, and slammed it behind him with a juddering bang.

  ‘Lock it,’ he told himself blurrily, and locked it. Then he edged with exaggerated caution across the floor of the darkened store, shuffling his way between cracker-barrels and pot-bellied stoves and rows of kerosene lamps; hesitated; then dived through the glass-bead curtain, and stumbled into the corridor which led to the back parlour. He leaned against the wall on which the etching of President Lincoln hung, and allowed himself two or three deep breaths before attempting the stairs.

  At that moment, however, Augusta appeared, in her long white nightgown. Henry jumped, and shouted out, and almost lost his balance, and toppled over.

  ‘God damn it, you scared me! I thought you were a ghost!’

  She stood halfway down the stairs, in darkness, looking at him. All he could see of her face was the occasional glint of light from her spectacles.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ she said. Her voice was curiously tight, as if she were just about to burst into tears.

  He glowered at her. ‘Drunk?’ he said, theatrically, swinging his arm. ‘I have never been drunk in my life. Ever! And never wish to be. All you are witnessing now is a slight unsteadiness caused by grief.’

  ‘Grief?’ she said, cuttingly. ‘What grief have you ever suffered?’

  He covered his hand with his mouth. He was beginning to wonder if he was going to be sick. He had drunk nearly a fifth of whiskey, all on his own, and it was gliding and burning around in his stomach like oil, and giving off fumes that seemed to cling in the hairs of his nostrils and filter through the substance of his brain. God, he thought, if you were to wring out my brain now, like a sea-sponge, you could pour it back in a glass, and drink it all over again. He belched at the thought of it.

  Augusta said, ‘You’d better go to bed.’

  ‘That shounds—that sounds—as if you expect me to go to bed alone.’ He beamed at her, and then immediately stopped beaming. Augusta was not the kind of wife who could be beamed at.

  ‘I do expect you to go alone,’ replied Augusta. ‘I am not sleeping with a drunk. I can make up a bed for myself on the ottoman downstairs, and that will be quite adequate, thank you. In any case, I have to be up in three hours, to start the baking.’

  ‘You mean to say…’ said Henry, knowing all the time that he shouldn’t be saying anything; that he should go to bed and keep quiet and wait until the morning, ‘...you mean to say…that you are denying me...the delights....’

  ‘Delights?’ snapped Augusta. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘The delights of your body, my dear! Your belly and your bum and all your other inestimable parts! Surely that is what we were married for, wasn’t it? Not for children, obviously not, for we’ve never had any; although I dare say we could have tried harder. Not for money. Ho no! Certainly not for money! No, my love, we married for lust! Didn’t we? Or didn’t we? Or am I being objectionable? I see from your face that you think that I’m being objectionable.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Augusta. ‘You’re being objectionable.’

  Henry nodded. ‘You’re right. I am. I’m drunk. I’m probably going to be sick, which will compound my disgustingness. But, what can a fellow do? H’m? Answer me that? The problem is universal, all men have it, and so do I. In eighteen years, I have never been able to escape it.’

  ‘Go to bed,’ Augusta commanded.

  ‘No,’ replied Henry, petulantly.

  ‘You’re revolting,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen you like this. How could you?’

  Henry swayed a little nearer to her. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘the reason why you have never seen me like this is because for eighteen years I have been asleep.’

  ‘Go to bed,’ she repeated. ‘I won’t hear any more of this.’

  ‘Asleep!’ he roared, at the top of his voice. ‘Asleep, and damn well dreaming! A whole life gone by, dreaming! Damn you, Augusta, I’ve been asleep, tucked up in bed, like a child, or a cripple, or a lunatic! George Hook has had a better life than me! Damn it to hell, Augusta, damn it to hell, damn it to hell! I’ve been asleep!’

  He beat his fists against the banisters, again and again and again, until they thundered. And then he bent double with his fist clenched tight and screeched so hard that he felt as if he were tearing the skin off his throat, ‘Damn it to hell, Augusta! Damn all of it! Damn it to hell!’

  She came down the last few stairs and tried to put her arms around him; but after this outburst he was quite calm. He pushed her away unsteadily and mounted the stairs himself, missing the second one, but managing with reasonable dignity to get to the top. Augusta stood in the corridor watching him with tears in her eyes. When he had reached the landing he turned around and looked down at her; and he knew then with chilly sobriety that he disliked her, very much. Not so much that he would do anything to harm her; not so much that he could leave her without any conscience; because after all it wasn’t her fault that she was so plain; and that she felt so dependent on him; but enough to wish that there were some way in which he could be free of her; and that he would never again have to wake up in the morning and see her featureless white face lying on the pillow next to him, with those unplucked eyebrows, and that unbecoming bump on the bridge of her nose, and that open, dry-lipped mouth.

  She said, ‘Henry, I know you’re drunk. Forgive me.’

  ‘Forgive you? Why should I forgive you? What have you done?’

  She came halfway up the stairs and held out her hand like a character in a stage romance, The Fatal Wedding, or For Her Children’s Sake: ‘If you strike my mother, I shall shoot!’ Henry looked at her hand, and then turned away, shaking his head. The whiskey was churning around and around in his stomach like dirty washing; that, and the minced-beef pie that Augusta had given him for lunch. He said, ‘I don’t think I feel well enough for melodrama, Augusta,’ and then he marched quickly into the bedroom, took the blue floral water-jug out of the basin on the washstand, and vomited into it noisily.

  Augusta watched him from the doorway, half-disgusted, half-sorrowful. When he had finished, she said, ‘If you want me, I shall be sleeping downstairs.’

  Henry wiped chilly sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Want you?’ he said, but not loud enough for Augusta to be able to hear.

  Nine

  He woke before dawn when she was still asleep, and shaved by the light of the kerosene-lamp beside the bed. Then he dressed in a blue broadcloth suit, rubbed his moustache vigorously with Bellezaire brilliantine, and meticulously combed his hair. The sky outside was just beginning to fade into daylight as he packed his brown leather portmanteau with a spare coat and pants, two clean shirts, and two pairs of long johns; as well as socks, razor, and soap.

  He made no attempt to go down the staircase quietly. If she woke up and asked where he was going, then he would tell her, but he would still go. But when he looked into the parlour, she was still huddled up on the ottoman, her mouth open, covered by a horse-blanket. He closed the door, and went through to the store, where he tore a page out of the order book, with the intention of writing her a note. But his pencil remained poised over the paper for almost a m
inute on end. He couldn’t even bring himself to write the word ‘Dear’; and so he crumpled up the torn page and tossed it into the shavings-barrel.

  Outside, in the chilly mountain air, he began to feel distinctly grey, and very weary. If he hadn’t been so determined to leave; and if he hadn’t already packed; he probably would have gone back into the house and gone back to bed, to wake up later to hot coffee and crackled bacon and hashed potatoes, and sorrow, too.

  But he harnessed up Belinda, their best grey mare; and then led her out of the dusty yard into the street, where he stood breathing fog as he mounted her; and then he rode out of Leadville while it was still silent and rimed with dew, a rough and ready town of smoke and mist and half-finished buildings. The dream continues, he thought to himself. Will I ever really wake up? Or will I dream until I die?

  It took him most of the day to ride through the mountains to Denver. Through the pine trees, the sky was as blue as laundry. He planned to spend the night in Denver, and then take the narrow-gauge Denver & Rio Grande Railroad northwards to Cheyenne, and change on to the transcontinental Union Pacific line for Omaha, and Council Bluffs. The days of waggon-trains and independent scouts like Edward McLowery were long since over; and even though the Sioux were still being troublesome in Dakota, travellers across the plains scarcely ever saw an Indian, let alone suffered a scalping.

  Henry reached Denver early in the evening, when the city’s gas-lights were just being lit, hundreds of tiny amber pinpricks sprinkled across the plain. Since he had first arrived here eighteen years ago, Denver had changed and grown beyond recognition. In the Spring of 1863, the whole of the town centre had been gutted by a ferocious fire started at the Cherokee Hotel; and in the spring of 1864, which had been as thunderously wet as the spring of the previous year had been dry, Cherry Creek had burst its banks and drowned 20 people, as well as causing over a million dollars’ worth of damage. William Byers’ Rocky Mountain News building, printing-presses and everything, had been completely swept away.

  Since then, however, Denver had prospered: as the capital of the newly-established state of Colorado, and as the clearinghouse for gold and silver, coal and iron, and the centre through which all of the state’s farm produce and cattle were funnelled. The extravagant mansions of the rich were everywhere: the stone castle of John Edward Good, the pillared white marble creation of David Moffat, the house owned by real-estate king Charles Kitteredge, in which over a hundred people could be seated in the dining-room; and the palace of silver-miner Sam Hallett, whose wife Julia wrote her letters on a desk that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Solid gold doorknobs and solid silver bathtubs were so commonplace as not to be remarkable. The streets of Denver were served by horse-drawn street-cars; and forested with telegraph-poles; and almost every house was connected to mains water, brought up from deep artesian wells. Already, several of the richer houses were being connected up to the telephone.

  Henry rode into the yard of the Front Range Hotel, where he usually stayed whenever he visited Denver, which was once or twice a year. The groom took Belinda, and the porter took his baggage, and he stiffly limped into the lobby to sign himself into a room. It was a warm evening, although a light wind was blowing over the mountains; and the first thing he did was to take a long hot bath. Augusta would be closing the store by now; putting out the lights, locking the takings in the safe, drawing down the calico blinds. He stood by the window and looked down into the street and smoked a cigar; and thought about Augusta with regret. But he knew that something had been awoken within him which would never again be quieted.

  He dressed, and went down to the hotel restaurant for a supper of beef and home-fried potatoes. Then he hailed a horse-drawn tram and took the ride out to Brown’s Bluff, where William Byers was living these days. Byers had sold the Rocky Mountain News only a month ago; with the intention of taking it easy for a while; but Henry had heard from their mutual friend Alvinus B. Wood that he was already fretting and trying to think up new ways of making money, not to mention new ways of industriously refusing to mind his own business.

  Brown’s Bluff was the local nickname for the high ground south east of the city; once the 160-acre homestead of builder Henry Brown. It was here that most of Denver’s newly-wealthy citizens had settled and built their mansions, and the one-horse tram toiled up the hill between rows of elegant fences and stone sphinxes and wrought-iron gates.

  Henry sat at the back of the tram, next to a giggly young couple who were just coming home from a party and a tired-faced woman who must have been a cook or a maid at one of the richer mansions. The tram reached the top of the Bluff, and everybody climbed out. From here, the tram would roll back down the hill again, with the horse riding on the rear platform, and the conductor steering and braking the vehicle from the front.

  William Byers lived in a square, prosperous mansion of grey dressed granite, with rows of bright green bay trees standing in tubs on either side of the front path. There was a warm light shining from the parlour window, and as he walked up to the front door, Henry could see the back of William’s head, as he sat in a chair talking.

  The door was opened by the Byers’ black butler Giltspur; who took Henry’s hat and coat and showed him into the hallway. William came out almost immediately, a puffier and squatter-looking man than the young newspaper owner whom Henry had first met in Denver eighteen years ago, but still forceful and still direct and still undeniably charming. Henry had been friends with him, on and off, ever since he had moved out to Leadville. Henry’s store had at one time been the only outlet in the district for the Rocky Mountain News, and Henry had taken advertisements for it and passed on mail and advertising revenue. William had even written an article about Henry’s store and called it ‘The Aladdin’s Cave of Leadville.’

  ‘Henry, this is unexpected!’ William enthused, pumping his hand. ‘I’m afraid we’ve eaten already; but there’s some cold sausage if you’re hungry, and I’m sure that Mary’s got some soup.’

  ‘It’s all right, thank you,’ said Henry. ‘I ate at the Front Range. I’m sorry if I’ve interrupted anything. I can always come by tomorrow.’

  ‘Not at all! Come on in, there are two gentlemen here that I’d like you to meet!’

  Henry followed William into the huge, decoratively-carpeted parlour. The room was less crowded with statuettes and pianos and trailing plants than some of the houses on Brown’s Bluff; but all the same it was very fashionably over-furnished with gigantic leather-covered armchairs, and potted ferns, and small tables covered with fringed velveteen cloths, and lamps, and cushioned stools, and a disproportionately enormous bust of Plato. Elizabeth Byers was sitting by the fireplace in a dark green lace-collared dress, looking dignified but rather duck-like, which she always did when she pursed her lips. By the window, with his hands clasped behind his back, stood a short, curly-haired man with a fresh, European appearance, and wildly sprouting side-whiskers. Sitting beside him, his legs crossed, smoking a pipe, was a darkly suntanned man of about 36, one of those cheerful, confident, pugnacious characters who look as if they can always top whatever anybody else has to say with a better story of his own.

  The curly-haired man came forward, and bowed, and held out his hand.

  ‘Henry, this is Baron Walter von Richthofen,’ said William. ‘The baron is thinking of building a kind of resort village, on the southern outskirts of town. With a spa, perhaps, and a beer garden.’

  ‘What you might call Carlsbad in Colorado,’ beamed the baron.

  ‘And this is Mr Henry M. Stanley,’ said William. ‘You should know him by repute, if nothing else.’

  ‘I’m honoured to meet you,’ said Henry, shaking Stanley’s hand. ‘I thought you spent most of your days in Africa.’

  ‘I expect to return next year,’ replied Stanley, with an affable smile. ‘But meanwhile I thought that I might explore the wilds of darkest Denver.’

  ‘I’ve been talking to Mr Stanley about a steamer service along the Platte River
,’ William explained. ‘A side-wheeler, perhaps, docking at Riverfront Park, and plying its way between Denver and the Missouri.’

  ‘Is the Platte navigable, Mr Stanley?’ asked Henry. ‘I always thought it was too silted, and too shallow.’ •

  ‘Well, I went down it once,’ Stanley replied. ‘That’s one of the reasons your friend Mr Byers wanted me here today. And I’m sure if I can do it, then anybody can do it.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Stanley, you’re being too modest,’ put in Elizabeth.

  ‘I should say so,’ laughed von Richthofen. ‘The only man who could find Dr Livingstone was you. You can’t expect everyone to be so daring.’

  Giltspur brought in a silver tray with a decanter of wine, and poured a glass for each of them; although Stanley asked if he might have a glass of water as well, so that he could take his quinine powders. Then they sat and talked about the baron’s plans for building himself and his wife an enormous Germanic castle as the centrepiece of his new suburb, and stocking the grounds with bears and wild boar and canaries.

  ‘Imagine the delights of such a place,’ von Richthofen exclaimed, slapping his tightly-trousered thigh. ‘To sail by steamer all the way across the plains and into Denver, and then to come by carriage to a healthful mountain resort with every conceivable attraction! We shall be millionaires a hundred thousand times over!’

  Later, Henry said to Stanley, ‘I’m sure you’ve been asked this question a thousand times before, but what did you actually say to Dr Livingstone when you first met him?’

  Stanley was lighting his pipe. He sucked at it studiously for a moment or two, and then he blew out his match and settled back in his chair and laughed. ‘Only about a dozen people in the whole world know the secret of that, apart from David Livingstone and myself, and James Gordon Bennett, of the New York Herald, who sent me to find Livingstone in the first place. Both Livingstone and I decided it should be reported as having been very calm, and very dignified, almost offhand. But in fact when I arrived in Ujiji, we simply clung on to each other and burst into tears.’