Laurence Melford tugged his vest straight and lowered his chin so that it formed into impressive folds.
‘Mr Edwards,’ he said patiently, ‘you will find when you have spent more time in our city that there are certain traditional, accepted notions of behaviour and class. We are divided here into what are vulgarly known as the Chivalry and the Shovelry. Not by prejudice, nor by intolerance, but by the simple fact that some of us were founders of California, and have acquired through time and experience and solid wealth the right to set the standards by which our city lives; and that others of us, the later arrivals, although we may be hard workers and opportunists of the finest kind, have to accept the guidance and direction which the founders provide. I am sure, Mr Edwards, that in New York City your credentials are excellent. You speak well; you dress well. I take you for a gentleman. But remember that this isn’t New York City, this is San Francisco, and that life is different here. Whatever heights you are aspiring to reach, you will never reach mine, and it will save you both time and disappointment if you forgo trying.’
He cleared his throat, as if he were speaking at a public dinner. ‘Now, you’ll forgive me, won’t you? I am a particular admirer of Mr Mulgrave’s, and I would like to hear his soliloquy.’
‘Mr Melford,’ said Collis, as the millionaire turned back to the curtains of his box.
‘Yes?’
‘The day will come, Mr Melford, when you recognise me, as the aged mother recognised the Highland hero. You will squeeze my nose and say, “My God, it’s you.” ’
Laurence Melford stared at Collis with glittering eyes. For some reason, Collis’s words seemed to have troubled him.
‘I was a hero once, Mr Edwards,’ he said, in his deep, thick voice. ‘I still am.’
‘Yes,’ said Collis, ‘but you know what Emerson says – “Every hero becomes a bore at last.” ’
Laurence Melford frowned, and then gradually smiled. ‘Maybe you’re right, Mr Edwards. Maybe you’re right. But if you’re a hero, too, then the same fate will be waiting for you.’
The curtains suddenly parted, and Laurence Melford had to step back. It was Sarah, wide-eyed and surprised, her fan in her hand. ‘Father?’ she said. ‘I was wondering why you were taking so long.’
Close to, Sarah Melford was even more disturbing than she was seventy feet away through opera glasses. There was a warmth about her, a heat as if her body and her personality were glowing with pride at all their attributes – their calm, and their beauty, and their composure. Collis saw that her eyes were very dark, but flecked with pale blue, and that there was a round mole on the side of her left breast, just before it disappeared into her cleavage. Her diamond necklace, in the shape of a wide five-pointed star, must have cost fifty or sixty thousand dollars.
Laurence Melford reached across and took his daughter’s arm, consciously or unconsciously preventing her from stepping any nearer to Collis.
‘We were having a brief philosophical discussion, my darling,’ he told her. ‘It’s over now, and I’m coming back to join you.’
Sarah raised her head. She kept her eyes on Collis, as if he were an interesting sort of dog that had strayed into her parlour.
‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’ she asked her father. ‘The poor fellow looks quite amusing.’
‘There’s no need for that,’ said Laurence Melford. His soft mouth remained in a smile, although he glanced at Collis with eyes that warned, ‘Keep off – don’t ever think that this is for you.’
Collis, partly to needle Melford and partly because Sarah tantalised him so much, gave a polite bow from the waist. ‘Collis Edmonds, Miss Melford, freshly arrived from New York. The man who shot a dealer’s hat at the Eagle Saloon last night.’
Sarah smiled. ‘I’ve heard all about you! Now, isn’t that strange! I heard Dezzie talking about you this morning, with the coachman. Dezzie’s my maid, Desdemona. It seems you must be quite famous, Mr Edmonds! Fancy that!’
‘We must be getting back, Sarah,’ insisted Laurence Melford. ‘I can hear that Mr Mulgrave has begun.’
‘I suppose so,’ said Sarah, fluttering her fan. She spoke in one of those high, breathy feminine voices that Collis had always found absurdly attractive. But it was what she was doing with her fan that intrigued him more than her voice. There were all kinds of secret code signals that young girls transmitted to their beaux by means of fans and handkerchiefs and even dance programmes, and if Collis’s experience of New York balls was anything to go by, Sarah Melford was plainly signalling, ‘I’d love to make your acquaintance.’
He gave her his finest seductive look, all melting and hurt and worried, as if he had loved once, and loved again, but his heart had been crushed by misfortune and cruelty. She looked back at him, and her eyes widened. He knew he had her attention, if nothing else.
‘What do you do, Mr Edmonds?’ she asked. ‘Or are you a gentleman?’
Collis said, with soft regret in his voice, ‘I was a gentleman, Miss Melford. I had all the breeding and the education that a gentleman requires. I lived in New York on independent means.’
‘But?’ asked Sarah Melford.
Collis dropped his gaze. She was sweet, and she might be making signals with her fan, but she was shrewd, too, like her father, and if he knew anything about twenty-year-old girls, she was even harder than her father understood possible.
‘There was some unfortunate speculation. My family lost all their fortune. My father died as an indirect result.’
‘I see. I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t have to be. My father enjoyed the better part of his life with the same intensity that he would have hated the worse part. But now I’m here in San Francisco to make a fortune of my own.’
Sarah raised her fan, spread it wide, and looked at Collis over the curved top of it. Two questioning eyes over a decorative picture of a Persian garden, with peacocks.
‘Come on, now, Sarah,’ said Laurence Melford. ‘I’m sure Mr Edwards wants to see the show for himself. Don’t you, Mr Edwards?’
‘No, no,’ said Sarah, fluttering her fan again. ‘I wanted to ask him how he was going to make his fortune, in what kind of endeavour. I think he’s terribly courageous.’
‘Some nonsense about railroads,’ grumbled Laurence Melford. ‘Now, really, Sarah, we have to go in.’
‘Railroads?’ asked Sarah. ‘But there are no railroads in San Francisco. At least, none to speak of.’
‘There will be, Miss Melford,’ said Collis. ‘I’m going to build one.’
Laurence Melford interrupted, ‘You think you’re going to build one, sir. But take it from me that you will never succeed. Now, if you don’t mind –’
‘Mr Melford,’ said Collis, in a much sharper tone, ‘I will bet you anything you care to name that I will succeed.’
Laurence Melford pulled a testy face. ‘I don’t make bets, Mr Edwards. Especially not with artisans.’
‘Father!’ Sarah admonished him.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Laurence Melford. ‘I should have remembered that you railroad people have special names, don’t you? What are you, a switchman?’
Collis drew a breath. ‘Mr Melford,’ he said, ‘I will bet you your daughter.’
There was a shocked silence. Sarah glanced at her father with an uneasy expression, and the footman took a couple of steps back. Then, without a word, Laurence Melford pushed his daughter away, back through the curtains, making her disappear like a stage conjuring trick. For a moment the strained, histrionic voice of Rodney Mulgrave wafted into the corridor: ‘… there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.’
‘The Winter’s Tale,’ said Collis, surprised at his own knowledge.
Laurence Melford was angry, and unimpressed. He raised one solid finger to Collis, and when he spoke his voice was deep as a rumbling cistern.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ he said. ‘What’s more, I have no desire to know. But I should
warn you that I have dealt with opportunists and rapscallions of your sort before, and that I once had a man of your age hanged from the end beam of the Old Adobe, so that the birds could pick him. You have been forward, and impertinent, and if I ever see you near me or my family again, I’ll have you run into jail as fast as you like. I can do that, you know, and you’d better understand it. Now, get out of here, before I have your arms broken.’
‘The bet still stands,’ said Collis. ‘If you’re going to insult me by calling me an artisan, then damn it I’ll live up to your insult, and I’ll work like an artisan, and I’ll build that damned railroad just to show you that an artisan can do whatever a cowpoke can do, and have the cowpoke’s daughter besides.’
‘You infamous young jelly,’ growled Laurence Melford. ‘If you knew how many of your sort I’ve thrown out of my front door, you wouldn’t even have the nerve to stand where you are.’
The footman stepped forward, unbuttoning the cuffs of his coat, and Collis glanced at him warily.
‘I’m going anyway,’ said Collis. ‘But I’m sure we’ll meet each other again, don’t you, when I’m in better circumstances and you’re in a better temper?’
Melford, stiff with anger, parted the curtains of his box. But before he returned to his family he raised his finger to Collis just once more.
‘I warn you,’ he said. ‘By all the stars above, I warn you. Don’t meddle with affairs that are far beyond you.’
‘Warn away,’ replied Collis. He bowed at Laurence Melford’s disappearing back, and then he stepped smartly on to the footman’s toe and continued quickly away down the corridor, turning only when he reached the corner by the auditorium doors to give the footman a wave. Then, stirred up, still trembling with nervousness and excitement, he returned to Sam Lewis’s box on the other side of the theatre.
‘Well?’ asked Knickerbocker Jane. ‘I could see a bit of flurry going on in their box. Did you get anywhere?’
Collis took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead. ‘I think so,’ he said, pulling his chair forward. ‘With Sarah Melford, anyway. I’m not so sure about Papa. I think he’s one of these gentlemen who has to be your enemy before he can be your friend.’
‘Not a good enemy to have in San Francisco,’ commented Charles. ‘Not a good friend, either. You’d have done better to leave well enough alone.’
Collis shook his head. ‘I can’t. Not a man as powerful and arrogant as that. Not when he’s got a daughter that looks like Sarah.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Knickerbocker Jane and sighed. ‘As the moth to the candle flame is drawn.’
That night, like a man revisiting a compulsive dream, he was back again in the smoky realms of the Eagle Saloon, at Dan McReady’s faro table. Dan McReady had not acknowledged him when he sat down with anything more than a sideways flicker of the eyes, but both men knew why Collis was there, and what the terms of the game were. The atmosphere that they generated between them infected the rest of the saloon, too, and several other tables closed down as drinkers and gamblers came to stand around with cigars and whisky and watch Collis and McReady play.
Collis had brought with him, in a leather satchel he had borrowed from Knickerbocker Jane, the $1000 he had won the night before. He bet steadily, confidently, and evenly; but for the first part of the evening his luck didn’t run very high. As the clock struck one, he was nearly $200 down.
He called for a stone fence, and this time the barman sent a boy to run out for a jug of cider. The stone fence was mixed strong, and served up in a thick glass tankard. Collis drank almost half of it, and then loosened his white tie.
They played until dawn began to shine through the engraved glass doors, throwing shadows in the shape of eagles on the dusty floorboards. Then they counted up what they had, and Collis found that he was $600 better off than the previous night. He stowed it all away in his satchel, and buckled it up, and as he did so, Dan McReady reached under his table and produced his white hat, with the crown still shot out. He placed it on his head without saying a word. Collis nodded in recognition of McReady’s symbolic surrender, and swallowed down the last of his drink before he left.
He played at the Eagle Saloon every night for a week, except for Sunday. Sometimes Andy Hunt and Charles Tucker were there, sometimes he played with strangers. But every night Dan McReady was waiting for him, and every night they did nothing and said nothing, but played faro, hour after hour through the smoke-filled night, until the morning.
On Monday and Tuesday, Collis lost heavily. Those nights, Dan McReady finished up by shuffling his cards with a flourish, packing away the box, and leaving the table before Collis. But on the other nights, Collis bet more and won more than at almost any time in his life, and by dawn on Thursday he had pouches of gold dust worth almost $8000.
As he put them away, he said to McReady, ‘I won’t be back for a while. I’ve got a little work to do. But I won’t forget you.’
McReady rubbed at his bristly moustache with his fingertips. His pale-blue eyes showed no expression at all.
‘You’re interested in business?’ asked Collis. ‘Big business? Plenty of financial rewards?’
McReady nodded. ‘As long as it’s nothing a man could get hanged for.’
‘Do I look like a thief?’
‘Does Parrott? Does McMullin?’
Collis smiled. ‘There’s thieving and thieving.’
McReady banged his pack of cards on the table to square them up. ‘As long as you know which kind is smiled upon, and which ain’t.’
‘I guess I do,’ said Collis. ‘So, if you’re interested, I’ll give you a call, when the time’s right, and maybe you’d like to size up what I’m planning to do.’
‘All right,’ said McReady.
The barman came across in his striped apron, his white shirtsleeves held up with armbands. The early-morning sunlight shone behind him, and he stood for a moment like a posed daguerreotype, his hands on his hips, his black cigarette hanging from his lips. In later years, in odd nostalgic moments, Collis would remember him standing there, one of the classic portraits of the old frontier.
‘Would you gentlemen like to share a bottle of French champagne?’ asked the barman.
Collis looked across at Dan McReady, then nodded. ‘I guess we would. We may have something to celebrate here today.’
On Thursday afternoon, under a hazy sky, Collis rowed out into San Francisco Bay in a small whitehall boat, which he had rented for five dollars. He wore a white shirt, a beige vest, and his black silk opera hat. In the stern of the dinghy was the leather satchel he had borrowed from Knickerbocker Jane, and his folded coat.
The Bay was silent, and the waters calm. As he rowed, the oarlocks groaned and squeaked, one like Punch and the other like Judy. The wharves and the jetties were gradually opalised by fog, and at last the whole city disappeared, and Collis was left on his own, rowing out towards the Golden Gate as if he were the only man left alive in the whole world.
He had bought himself a compass and a chart of the Bay area from an overpriced marine store on California Street, but the price he had paid seemed to be worth it when he successfully reached the shelter of the Golden Gate’s southern promontory, shipped his oars, and tossed overboard a small anchor on a long rope. The day was warm for the time of year, and there was only a faint breeze from the ocean, not even enough to disperse the fog, but he shrugged his coat around his shoulders and took a swallow of Knickerbocker Jane’s brandy from a flask. It was better to be fortified than struck down by influenza. The water rippled and coursed around him, gentle and sibilant, and he lit himself a cheroot to pass the time. He checked his pocket watch, and saw that the time was two-fifty, a half-hour at least before the Aria was due to arrive. He began to hum to himself, one of the songs from Rodney Mulgrave’s revue.
He was just thinking about taking another nip of brandy when he heard a long, low moooottt. He lifted his head and looked out towards the choppier waters of the Golden Gate. He couldn�
�t see anything at first. But then, in utter silence, the prow of a ship appeared, followed by its hull, and its masts, and its rigging. Straining his eyes, Collis could make out the name Aria.
It was time to row, and row fast. He cut his anchor rope with a jack-knife, set his oars in their locks, and then heaved towards the grey, sliding shape of the Aria with every ounce of strength he could manage. After only a dozen strokes, he was gasping, but he kept going, pulling the oars through the broken waters of the Bay with the vicious determination of a man who knows he has enemies to beat, and a point to prove.
‘Ahoy, Aria!’ he screamed, turning his head as he rowed. ‘Ahoy, Aria!’
There was no reply, no sign of life. The cargo vessel slid slowly past in the fog, her navigation lights dimly shining, as if she were crewless and deserted. But Collis kept pulling at the oars, because he knew from the shipping intelligence pages in the San Francisco newspaper that the Aria would drop anchor in the Bay only a short way off, and that he would reach her well before anyone on shore, even the lookouts on Telegraph Hill, had realised she was here.
He grunted and pulled, grunted and pulled, and his hands were already shredded with blisters. He began to curse every sleepless night and every cheroot, but he knew that he wasn’t going to give in. At last he was pitching up and down on the rough water under the Aria’s port bow, and he heard the rattle and splash of her anchor going down.
‘Ahoy, Aria!’ he called, resting his oars. His dinghy rose and fell in the fog. ‘Ahoy, there, Aria!’
‘Ahoy yourself,’ answered an irritable voice. Collis dipped his right oar in the sea and paddled himself around so that he could see who it was. He looked up, and there was a fat bearded sailor with his head shaved like a monk, leaning on the Aria’s ropes. Another sailor, thin and Latin, came up to join him.
‘Is your master there?’ asked Collis.
The fat sailor shrugged. ‘If he ain’t, we’ve lost him some way between here and Panama City.’
‘Can I talk with him?’
‘It depends who you be. It depends what you want.’
Railroad Page 34