There were footsteps in the hallway. Collis quickly withdrew his hand and moved himself back on the chaise longue, trying to appear formal and calm and composed all at once, in spite of the emotions that were heaving up inside him. Delphine mouthed a silent word at him, he wasn’t even sure what it was, but it looked like a plea for something, for understanding or for love, or for the day and the week and maybe even the world to stop right then and there, so that the sensuality of the past few minutes could stay with her always.
The footsteps passed. It was the footman, answering the door to a caller. Delphine took Collis’s hand, the hand that had taken her, and squeezed it tight.
‘I’m sorry, Collis,’ she whispered. ‘It was all my fault. Please don’t think badly of me. Please.’
‘How could I think badly of you?’ he asked her. ‘You’re like an angel. You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met. You disturb me as nobody else.’
‘I didn’t mean to do that,’ she said. Her wide eyes glistened with tears. ‘I didn’t mean to behave like a strumpet. But there isn’t any more time, is there? No more time for proper courting. And I couldn’t let you go without finding out at least what –’
She lowered her head. He could hardly stand to look at the soft curve of her neck, knowing that he was going to lose her. He bit his lip and blinked with sadness.
‘At least what kind of a lover you are,’ she added huskily. ‘At least what kind of a man.’
There was a tremulous pause, and then she began openly to weep, looking at Collis with such regret and desolation that he had to turn away, in case he started to cry too, just as freely.
‘I think I’d better leave,’ he said.
Delphine held him tight for a moment, as close as she possibly could. ‘Go now,’ she begged. ‘Please, before I ask you to stay longer. I can’t bear goodbyes. Just promise me that whatever happens, when you come back to New York, you’ll come to find me. I’ll be waiting for you, Collis, even if I’ve married another man, even if I’ve borne his children. I’ll always be waiting for you, right up until the end.’
‘I’ll come for you,’ he promised, kissing her forehead, and touching her hair for the last time. He tried to smile. ‘Even if I have to build my own railroad to get here.’
They kissed once more, and then he took his malacca cane and his hat, and the lugubrious footman showed him to the door. He turned, on the front step, and Delphine was standing in the shadows of the hallway, watching him leave without tears now, but with an expression of tenderness and love that would stay with him, in his mind, for years and years to come. In her pale-blue silk dress, with her hair in soft brown curls, and her eyelashes still wet from crying. He saw Winifred bustling down the passage in the background and he saw Delphine turn towards her, and that was all he saw before the footman closed the door behind him, and he was shut out from the life that, only a few days before, had been naturally and rightly his. By the curb, the cab driver was snoozing on top of his seat, his curly-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes. Collis tapped his foot with his cane and said, ‘Are you ready? We’re off.’
The cab driver pushed back his hat and stared at Collis as if he was still dreaming.
He paid one last call, to the public cemetery. Under a sky whisked with cirrus clouds, on a shadowless pathway, he stood in front of the wooden cross which marked the grave of Kathleen Mary Murphy, his hat in his hand, and said a prayer. Her death had boiled up his life like a potful of mulligatawny soup, but he felt she deserved some respect, if only a few words of encouragement to enjoy herself wherever she was now, and to rest in peace. In the distance, by the railings, the cab driver waited for Collis with deadened patience, too overwhelmed with boredom even to smoke his pipe. Collis knelt beside the soft earth of the grave mound and pushed a silver dollar into it.
‘You deserve more, Kathleen Mary,’ he said, under his breath. ‘But I regret that I don’t have it to spare. Some other time, perhaps.’
The rough grass and the wild flowers of the cemetery were rippled by a warm summer wind, and the trees bowed, and made a seething sound. Collis raised his head, and knew that the wind was coming from the West.
By six o’clock, the sky was a misty, luminous lilac, and the wind had dropped. Even on the deck of the Atlantic mail steamer Virginia, moving slowly out of New York harbour with rhythmically beating paddles, there was only a soft, reluctant breeze, and the flag at the stern hung limp. Collis stood by the rail and watched the trees of the Battery slide past. Beyond, under a haze of humidity, were the clustered rooftops of the city, the spire of Trinity Church, the rows of red-brick and brownstone houses and the higgledy-piggledy slums and tenements and warehouses. The steamer gave a mournful honk as it passed Governors Island, and he turned away from the stern and walked slowly forward on the port promenade deck, excusing himself as he pushed past the passengers who huddled against the rails, balancing himself against the uneven sway of the waves beneath his feet. He didn’t want to watch New York disappearing into the evening mist. He would rather sit up front, and smoke a cigar, and look towards the sea.
He was still disturbed and aroused by what had happened with Delphine. For any young lady of breeding to admit to erotic appetites was unheard of, at least in mixed company, and the way she had so urgently demanded his touch was tumultuously unsettling. Her desires had not demeaned her, although he wondered how much more there was to her personality than her sexual precocity. She had said she loved him, and that she would wait for him forever if necessary. But did she really have any idea of what love was? She was only nineteen, and completely inexperienced with men.
The Virginia passed a white-painted Cunard paddle steamer, the Persia, coming in from England. Its passengers lined the decks and waved, but Collis was not in the mood for waving at anyone. The Persia blew her whistle, and the sepia smoke from her tall funnel drifted towards the distant woods of Brooklyn, and Collis wished that he were on her, and about to land in New York. But, like any gambler, he knew when he had overstayed his welcome. It was time to open a fresh game.
As they paddled out to the threshold of the grey-green Atlantic, there was a smell of brine and woodsmoke in the air. Not far away, by the rail, a girl in a white dress was holding her bonnet, her face lit by an angle of late sunlight, her petticoats ruffled by the wind. Suddenly she turned around and caught Collis’s eye. She was blonde, with china-blue eyes, and a square, Swedish-looking face. Collis stood up and raised his hat to her, but she turned away without a flicker of acknowledgement and walked off coolly down the deck, until she disappeared from view around behind the lifeboats.
It was two hours before dinner was served, and then the fifty passengers were called into the long lamplit dining-saloon and seated at two narrow varnished maple tables, each passenger in front of a cheap white plate on which a hard roll tumbled from side to side with the pitching and wallowing of the ship. The Virginia had passed Long Branch on the New Jersey shore, and was steaming her way southward towards Atlantic City, which was to be her first port of call with the mail. The swell of the ocean was stronger now, and the steamer’s decks sloped and tilted and rose and sank, which, along with the strong odour of poorly trimmed oil lamps, did very little to improve any of the passengers’ appetites. They sat, unfamiliar and uncomfortable, facing each other in four pale-faced rows of twelve, with one at the end to pass down the gravy, and although most of them attempted to make amusing conversation about ocean voyages and mal de mer, it wasn’t long after the first wafts of barley broth reached them that they began to excuse themselves from the dining-saloon, one and two at a time, to return with their hair standing on end because of the rising wind outside on the deck, their faces the colour of grubby bank-notes.
Collis ate a little soup, declined the meat-and-suet pudding, and finished up with rubbery orange cheese and dusty crackers, washed down with warm lager beer. He talked to a young student with a downy moustache and a linen coat that hung on him as gauntly as if it had been set over the
back of a kitchen chair; and he passed a few words with a fat German woman who ate everything that was put in front of her, and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist until it was shiny with grease. But there was no sign of the blonde girl he had seen on deck. She was probably in her cabin, lying down with a scent-soaked handkerchief pressed to her forehead. On steamers like the Virginia, the passengers were berthed fore and aft, since the paddles took up most of the space amidships, and that meant they were all tossed up and down, even in quite amiable seas, like queasy children on either end of a teeter-totter.
After dinner, Collis took a walk out on deck. His own stomach seemed to have settled down now, although he was still wishing he hadn’t smoked that cigar. It was almost dark now, and across the glossy surface of the sea he could make out the occasional sparkle of light from New Jersey, or the dipping red lamps of inshore fishing boats. He looked upward at the thick smoke which blew into the night from the Virginia’s tall, thin funnel, and at the lights clustered on her masts. It was too cloudy to see the stars.
A little further along the deck, he saw the girl in the white dress. She was wrapped now in a dark-green plaid rug, against the chill of the evening, and she was accompanied by a woman in a brown coat who was so tiny as to be almost a midget. They were standing together watching the foam churned up by the paddles, not even talking. Collis walked up to them, took off his hat, and gave a slight bow.
‘My compliments, ladies,’ he said. ‘Mr Collis Edmonds, of New York.’
The blonde girl turned to him and looked him up and down. Her eyes, even by the dim lights along the promenade deck, were remarkably blue; and close to, she had an irregularity of features that made her face not pretty but extraordinarily attractive, in the same way that a wild animal is attractive. Her eyes were set slightly too wide apart, and her teeth were a little uneven, yet her high cheekbones and her straight nose were classic. At her throat was a white silk ribbon, on which was pinned a cameo of blue and white. She did not smile.
It was the tiny woman who spoke first. She stepped forward until her little black boots were practically touching the toes of Collis’s kid shoes, and she raised a tortoiseshell lorgnette to her black, beady eyes. Collis had the uncomfortable feeling that she was sizing him up for a sharp bite on the leg.
‘Young man,’ she shrilled, in a hard Baltimore accent, ‘if you do not take yourself off at once, and stop bothering us, I shall call for the captain and have you thrown into the sea.’
Collis smiled, but his eyes were fixed on the blonde girl, his expression as warm and sincere as he could possibly make it. The girl tried hard not to smile back, but the corner of her mouth twitched very slightly, and she looked away in case he thought she was encouraging him.
‘I mean it!’ shrieked the midget woman. ‘Off you go, or it’s into the ocean for you!’
Collis leaned forward, so close to the tiny lady that he was peering through her lorgnette from the opposite side. ‘To have met you, madam, even for such a short time, would be worth swimming ten oceans, not just one.’
‘There aren’t ten oceans,’ said the midget woman crossly, although his flattery obviously softened her. ‘There are only five, and two of those are far too cold to swim. In any case, we are married ladies, and I should hope that puts an end to the matter.’
‘I wasn’t aware that it was unseemly to present one’s compliments to married ladies,’ Collis told her. ‘We are standing on the open deck of a steamer, after all, and I can scarcely think of anywhere else where our meeting would be less susceptible to misconstruction.’
‘I would rather there were no misconstructions at all,’ she retorted. ‘Now, isn’t there a bar where you could go, and seek some company of your own kind?’
‘You’re far too harsh,’ said Collis. ‘Although, come to think of it, I’ve always heard it said that beneath the harshest of exteriors, one invariably finds the softest of natures.’
‘You’re very impudent. I think you’d better be on your way.’
‘Not until I know who has sent me.’
The midget woman gave a high-pitched sigh. ‘You’re very persistent, aren’t you, as well as impudent? Very well, my name is Mrs John Edgeworth, and my companion is Mrs Walter West. I am travelling to Charleston, and Hannah – Mrs West – is continuing to San Francisco, to join her husband.’
‘What about your husband, Mrs Edgeworth?’
The midget woman lowered her lorgnette. ‘Mr Edgeworth is not well, I’m afraid. That is the purpose of my visit to Charleston.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ Collis told her. ‘I hope it’s not serious.’
Mrs Edgeworth was silent. Mrs West laid a hand on her shoulder and said to Collis in a soft, hoarse voice, ‘Mr Edgeworth was attacked and beaten by hooligans. He was on a business visit, selling imported rugs. He’s – well, he’s a small person, like his wife. The hospital telegraphed to say that he had very little chance of survival.’
‘Then I’m even more sorry,’ said Collis. ‘If it isn’t impertinent of me, I shall include him in my prayers.’
Mrs Edgeworth took out a small lace-trimmed handkerchief and blew her nose like a penny whistle. ‘That’s very kind of you, Mr Edmonds. I appreciate the thought.’
‘Are you going far yourself?’ asked Mrs West. The night wind blew her fine blonde hair in unravelling curls.
‘As far as you,’ Collis told her. ‘I suppose it sounds very hackneyed, but I’m seeking my fortune out West.’
‘You look as if you have done very comfortably for yourself in the East,’ Mrs West remarked.
Collis shrugged. ‘One is always striving to greater heights, I suppose. I hear that there are great fortunes to be made in California, given some luck, and plenty of hard work. May I ask what line of business your husband is in?’
‘He’s a retailer,’ said Mrs West. ‘He manages an emporium on Montgomery Street. Fancy goods, and notions, and such things.’ She opened a small beaded purse and took out a calotype portrait, which she handed over to Collis with a shy, proud smile. He politely examined it by the light of the ship’s lanterns, but all he could make out was a stiff, upright-looking man of about thirty, with a neat beard and a nervous stare. He handed it back without comment.
‘He went out to San Francisco two and a half years ago,’ said Mrs West. ‘We’ve been writing to each other, of course, but a letter is nothing like a real, live embrace. I’ve missed poor Walter dreadfully, and he’s missed me.’
‘You must be very excited,’ said Collis.
She smiled. ‘I won’t believe it until I see him. It’s like a dream.’
‘He’s a very fortunate man.’
There was a difficult pause. Now he knew that Hannah West was married, and devoted to her husband, there didn’t seem to be very much profit to be had out of continuing such a stilted and formal conversation. With the wife of a New York socialite, things might have been different, but he knew how doughty the morals of the merchant class were. Still, for all Mrs Edgeworth’s shrill protestations, it was obvious that both women were lonely and apprehensive, and it seemed less than courteous to leave them to struggle on by themselves just because Mrs West was unavailable for a shipboard affair. He leaned on the rail, looking down at the frothed-up sea, and wondered if his stomach could stand another cigar, or if his nerves could possibly do without one.
‘Walter built up the store from nothing,’ said Hannah West. ‘He said there were cows grazing on Montgomery Street when he first set up shop, but now it’s becoming quite civilised. He started selling Brussels lace last year, and it caught on so well that he had to order five times as much for his next shipment.’
There was a further silence, and then Hannah West continued, ‘I’m almost afraid to meet him, you know. It’s been so long. I’ve tried and tried to remember what his voice sounds like, and how he looks, but it’s been so difficult.’
Mrs Edgeworth reached up and patted her arm. ‘You mustn’t let yourself get wound up, Hannah. Wind
ing up is for clocks. Make sure she doesn’t get herself wound up, Mr Edmonds.’
‘Yes, I will,’ said Collis.
Hannah looked away. The shadow of her hat fell across her face, but Collis could see a curved reflection of light on her lower lip as she spoke. ‘I feel such a coward,’ she said, in her throaty voice. ‘Poor Walter has been so brave, going out there on his own and setting up a business, and here I am terrified to see him.’
‘Why didn’t you go out with him before?’ asked Collis.
Hannah lowered her head a little. ‘It was my mother. She was dying of consumption. I couldn’t have left her.’
‘I see. I’m sorry.’
‘Oh, don’t be, Mr Edmonds. It’s kind of you to say so, but she went through dreadful agonies, and she’s far better off in the cemetery. At least she’s with God now, and peaceful.’
‘Amelia was a saint,’ declared Mrs Edgeworth. ‘There was no question about that. And Hannah was more than a saint to take care of her for so long. It was a very dragged-out going, if you know what I mean.’
Collis looked up, and was suddenly and strangely aware that Hannah West was staring at him. He had the oddest sensation that all of this small talk about Walter West’s store and the passing of Hannah’s mother was nothing more than a whirl of windblown smoke that was blotting out what was really happening between them. They had said nothing of any intimacy or importance, and yet there was a tension and a disturbance between them. The deck rose and tilted beneath their feet. The paddles churned. But for a moment that was too prolonged to be accidental, they gazed at each other like people who are sure that they must have met before.
He looked away. In the distance, he could see the light that marked the inlet to Barnegat Bay. He said, almost too quietly for Hannah to hear him, ‘Saints are very rare these days.’
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