Collis released his arm from hers and walked over to the chiffonier. He unstoppered the sherry decanter, poured himself a large glass, and then stood looking at Hannah while he sipped, his eyes questioning, but without saying a word.
‘You fell out with Theodore because you told him the railroad would make you great,’ she said huskily, ‘and that the goal of greatness justifies any and all means which may be necessary to achieve it.’
‘Yes,’ said Collis.
‘Well, I agree with you, fiercely,’ she said, turning towards him. ‘Because the railroad will make you rich, and celebrated, and powerful, and I know that is what you want to be. You will fulfill yourself, if you build this railroad. You will be able to live any way you want, and in any company you desire. Men like Laurence Melford will seem like cheap storekeepers in comparison: and when they talk of California in years to come, they won’t talk first of Vallejo or of Frémont. They will talk of you, of Collis Edmonds, who laid the first transcontinental railroad across the High Sierras.’
Collis said nothing. But Hannah came towards him with a sweep of her skirts and held his hand.
‘Whatever we have to do, you and I, to make this railroad possible, we shall,’ she said. ‘I have learned a bitter lesson about life from my marriage to Walter – that conventional morality and godliness are not necessarily one. For is it godly to be unhappy and unfulfilled? If Walter had not been killed, I still would have divorced him, in the face of the church and of polite society; and whatever you need to do to find your heart’s desire, your railroad, whether it is respectable or not, I will be there to help you.’
She hesitated, then said, ‘I know what kind of a man you are, Collis. Even more than you do yourself, perhaps. I have taken you on as my husband because I love you, but also because I want to see your dream become real, and to be part of your dream myself.’
There was a long silence, two or three minutes or even more. At last Hannah said, ‘Do you understand me?’
Collis kissed her. ‘I do. And I love you, too.’
They made love that night more lingeringly than they had ever done before. They let each kiss last for whole minutes, and each caress stretch out across the moonlit bedroom like the fading echoes of a song. When Collis first embraced Hannah as her husband, she slowly dug her long fingernails into the muscles of his back, deep, and held him against her as if she wanted him to suffocate her; and as their lovemaking moved to its exquisite culmination, she moaned and sniffed with pleasure, and with disappointment that it was over.
Collis sat up in bed afterwards, propped up on his feather pillow, watching the bald light of the moon fall across the rug, and shine on the backs of his silver hairbrushes. Hannah snuggled up close to him, and gradually fell asleep.
He wondered if he would ever be able to tell Hannah about Mr Kwang, and the favour that the On Leong Tong had done for him. Somehow the thought of having to conceal his complicity in Walter’s death for the rest of his married life seemed to be too complicated to bear. It would be like trying to speak to Hannah with a fishbone in his throat.
He looked across at his cigar case, and considered lighting one up. But then he remembered that Hannah was not his mistress anymore, she was his wife, and she would probably object to stale cigar smoke in the bedroom. He watched her sleeping for a while, and touched her eyelids and the tip of her nose with his finger. She looked older when she was asleep, but still beautiful. He wondered if she was dreaming of the High Sierras.
Kwang Lee had a silent and sometimes mocking manner about him, but in time he became as attached to Collis as Wang-Pu had been and served him as efficiently and as loyally. Unlike Wang-Pu, he did not believe in dressing formally, and his usual get-up was a linen cap with the peak turned backwards, a very clean blue shirt, and a hardware apron with dozens of pockets. He lived in a room at the back of the store, and cooked his own food in a wok, and brewed endless cups of Dragon Well tea.
Sometimes Collis joined him for a small bowl of tung-po pork, or bacon and bamboo-shoot soup, and Kwang Lee would tell stories and jokes about his childhood in Hangchow. But there was no sentimentality about them, as there had been with Wang-Pu. Kwang Lee was a smart cookie, a wisecracker, and it was impossible to tell if any of his stories were true.
Once Collis asked him if Mr Kwang was a man who believed in having favours returned, even favours which hadn’t been asked for.
Kwang Lee was stirring bean sprouts in his wok, and the room was hazy with blue smoke. ‘You mean Mr West?’ he asked directly.
Collis raised his eyebrows. ‘Then it was Mr Kwang?’
‘Of course. You did not suspect it to be anyone else, did you?’
‘I guess not.’
Kwang Lee added shrimps and fish gravy to his lunch, and quickly stirred them in. ‘You have to be on your guard with Mr Kwang,’ he said. ‘He has said himself that there is no finer way of influencing those around you than to do them good turns. Mr Kwang has changed your whole life, has he not, with that one good turn?’
‘Yes,’ said Collis uncertainly.
Kwang Lee looked up from his cooking and grinned. ‘In that case, one day Mr Kwang will expect you to return the compliment.’
Collis picked up a pair of chopsticks and dipped into Kwang Lee’s wok, taking out a sample of bean sprouts and shrimp. He ate it slowly, and then said, ‘More soy sauce.’
Kwang Lee smiled and reached for the blue earthenware bottle.
Collis and Hannah left J Street in August, and rented a large white house a little further out of town, on I Street. Hannah began to furnish it and decorate it in a style which she considered suitable for the treasurer of the Sierra Pacific Railroad and his spouse, with plush sofas and heavy armchairs and marquetry tables. She preferred soft colours, like dove greys and pale blues, and the inside of the house, at certain times of the day, had the quality of a smoky dream, a cloudiness about it.
They lived together peaceably, and gently, although they were both quite aware that the time would have to come when their real mettle was tested, and their personal strengths would have to clash. But that would come with the railroad, when the three storekeepers of Sacramento were ready to turn the whole world inside out.
In early September, Theodore travelled to Washington again, in another dogged attempt to raise funds for his detailed survey of the Sierras. He wrote back to his partners that ‘the prospect of starting the railroad seems further away than ever, for although many agreed it is a good idea, they are not prepared to back their enthusiasm with money.’
Leland, who had been toying with the idea for more than a year, had made up his mind at last to run for the governorship of California. He hadn’t really wanted to run until the next elections, but Jane was becoming irritable about the amount of money and credit they had already tied up in the railroad, and it seemed to her that if Leland was in the governor’s mansion, his influence over state’s expenditure on railroads would at least protect the money they had risked so far.
Collis, smiling, said it smacked of corruption. Leland said testily that it smacked of nothing but good sound sense.
During the year, tension between Southerners and Northerners became increasingly open. One evening, there was a fierce argument in the drawing-room of the Willard Mannings, up on Rincon Hill, between Willard Manning himself, a Virginian, and a young man from Illinois called Sturgeon. A knife was drawn, and Sturgeon was stabbed in the face and chest. For the next two weeks, San Francisco society fumed and bubbled with suppressed fear.
Hannah was sitting in their light, spacious front parlour, embroidering a firescreen, when Collis returned home from the store the Tuesday after the Sturgeon stabbing. He came across and kissed her, and then went to the pearwood cabinet for a drink.
‘Did you hear the news from South Park?’ asked Hannah.
‘About the Willard Mannings? Yes. Kwang Lee told me.’
‘What do you think about it?’
Collis turned. ‘What do I think about it?
I don’t think anything about it. The North and the South are steaming themselves up into a condition of civil war, and incidents like this are all part of it.’
Hannah laid her embroidery in her lap. Her blonde hair was tied up in plaits and pinned with combs, making her look rather cold and Nordic.
‘Don’t you think it’s time you went to San Francisco and talked to Mr Laurence Melford?’
‘Melford? You mean about the railroad?’
‘Of course about the railroad. What else? The time is just ripe, with all this uncertainty about the coming elections. Even Laurence Melford isn’t going to be fool enough to ignore the possibility of war, and of Lincoln’s being elected.’
Collis finished mixing himself a stone fence, and then walked thoughtfully across the room. ‘I was going to wait to see the outcome of the elections themselves. But I guess you could be right.’
Hannah reached out her hand for him. ‘If the election goes to Douglas or to Breckinridge, then Melford will ignore you. If it goes to Lincoln, then everyone will be panicking too much to think clearly about railroads at all. Now is an ideal moment, don’t you think? It is far easier to trade on fears than it is on certainties.’
Collis squeezed her hand. ‘Hannah, my darling,’ he said, ‘I do believe you’ll make a fine businesswoman yet.’
She smiled. ‘I know my own weaknesses, Collis. That’s why I can see those in other people.’
‘Even in me?’ he asked her.
She nodded, happily. ‘A man without weaknesses is like a garden wall without a gate.’
Collis sipped his drink and thought about the plan he had devised for Laurence Melford. He hoped to God it would work; but, even more, he hoped to God that Hannah wouldn’t get to hear of it.
Collis did everything he could to persuade Hannah to stay at home in Sacramento while he went to San Francisco to deal with Laurence Melford, but she refused to hear of it. She had friends in San Francisco she wanted to visit, and shopping to do, and she also wanted to tend Walter’s grave. Collis, who before their marriage would have found it comparatively easy to insist that he should go alone, now found Hannah’s gentle obstinacy to be more than he could handle. So their maid, Lilah, packed Hannah’s trunk with nightdresses and frocks and bottles of cosmetics, and Hannah joined Collis on the deck of the steamer Renown in her most elegant cream cap and parasol.
They stayed at the International, mostly for the sake of sentiment. The manager shook Collis by the hand and welcomed him back, and gave Hannah a distinctly uneasy look.
‘Mrs Edmonds,’ explained Collis, without looking up from the register book.
The manager clasped his hands together and said, ‘Of course.’
‘The real Mrs Edmonds,’ said Collis, putting down the pen. ‘We were married in Sacramento in March.’
‘Of course,’ said the manager. ‘Congratulations.’
Hannah maintained a face of stony disapproval until they were shown up to their suite. Then, when the porter had gone, she burst out laughing. ‘The poor man,’ she said. ‘Did you see his face? He couldn’t believe that the terrible Collis Edmonds was actually married.’
Collis took his pocket watch out of his vest and checked the time. ‘No,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘No, he couldn’t, could he?’
Hannah sat up. ‘You don’t seem very amused. Didn’t it amuse you?’
‘Sure it amused me.’
‘You’re not laughing.’
Collis shrugged. ‘I was thinking of Laurence Melford.’
She took off her bonnet and tossed it on to the bed. ‘Of course you were. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been so frivolous.’
‘No, no. I like you when you’re frivolous. It lets me know when you’re happy. Before, you were always so serious. So worried.’ Collis came over and gave her an unconvincing kiss. He tried to smile, but he knew she wasn’t fooled. He hesitated for a moment, but then he opened his trunk and took a clean white shirt out of its tissue-paper wrapping.
‘You’re not going out right away?’ Hannah asked him.
‘I have to. I want to let Andy Hunt know that we’re here, and Dan McReady, and then I want to go down to Laurence Melford’s attorneys and fix up an appointment to meet him.’
‘Very well,’ said Hannah, as if disappointed that he was going out so soon, but trying to show that she didn’t care. ‘Then you won’t mind if I go down to Liebes and try on some new dresses?’
‘Of course not. And tonight we’ll go have dinner at the Poodle Dog. How would you like that?’
‘That would be nice,’ Hannah said, a little airily, and went towards the bathroom.
Collis caught her arm. She didn’t turn to face him, but stopped where she was, her head slightly lowered.
‘Everything’s all right, you know,’ said Collis. ‘It’s all completely taken care of.’
‘Yes,’ said Hannah.
‘I have the feeling you don’t trust me,’ Collis told her.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’
‘No reason. But when I said I had to go see Andy and Dan –’
Hannah turned her head and kissed him, slowly and lovingly, on the lips.
‘Whatever you think is best for the railroad, my darling, is best for us,’ she said.
*
‘I think you’re crazy,’ Andy Hunt said. ‘Overplaying your hand.’
‘I don’t think there’s any other way,’ Collis told him. ‘Not unless we pull out a gun on him, and say that’s the way it’s going to be, whether you like it or not.’
‘It’s sure tricky,’ put in Dan McReady.
Collis sat down. They were gathered in Andy’s cluttered office on Pine Street, a little after five in the afternoon, and outside it had begun to rain. Fat, wet drops that dribbled down the windows like the tears of saints.
Andy, in a peppery-coloured suit, was chewing a bulky cud of tobacco. Dan McReady looked more formal than usual, in a striped serge suit. He picked at his cuticles nervously and cleared his throat from time to time. It was plain that neither he nor Andy was particularly enthusiastic about Collis’s plan.
‘We’re talking about pressure,’ Collis said. ‘Laurence Melford will only react if it looks as though his family’s being threatened, or his livelihood. And since there isn’t any possible way we can threaten his livelihood, we have to go for his daughter.’
‘I hope you realize he’s going to nail your heart to the front doors of the Melford Building if anything goes wrong,’ said Andy. ‘And mine too, if he finds out I’ve been helping you.’
‘I’m lucky,’ said Dan McReady. ‘I don’t have a heart.’
‘Listen,’ Collis explained, ‘the single most important factor is that whatever he thinks of me, Laurence Melford trusts me with his children’s welfare. After that duel with Grant, he sent me a letter thanking me for firing into the air. I could have blown Grant’s head off, and the law would have supported me. He knows that. But he thinks I’m a humanitarian, and that I wouldn’t harm anybody unless it was in self-defence.’
‘Is that true?’ asked Andy sharply.
‘True enough,’ said Collis. ‘True enough to carry us through this particular ploy, in any case.’
Andy spat brown tobacco juice into the brass spittoon beside his desk.
Dan McReady said, ‘I still think he’s bound to find out it’s us. I mean, who else would do it – and for what motive?’
‘Anybody would do it,’ said Collis. ‘And for the same reason, too. For money.’
‘Well, I think it’s a hell of a risk,’ said Andy. ‘And I for one don’t fancy hanging by my neck from any second-storey balconies just for the sake of a railroad.’
Collis stood up. ‘You don’t want any part of it, then?’ he asked Andy.
‘I didn’t say that,’ said Andy. ‘I just said it’s crazy.’
Collis smiled. ‘That’s all right, then. Welcome to the gang.’
Dan McReady let out a short, dry laugh.
Chapter 12
&n
bsp; During the afternoon, while Hannah was resting, Collis took a cab south on Kearny, across Market, and then south again on Third Street and up the lower slope of Rincon Hill to South Park. He was nervous, and he constantly drammed his fingers on the sill of the carriage’s window. The afternoon was cloudy, and it looked as if it could rain.
South Park was an elegant ellipse of London-style brick houses, standing nearly a hundred feet above the level of the city on its own airy hill. It was here that San Francisco’s millionaires and socialites had clustered themselves, around an immaculate garden, well away from the crowds and the smells of the docks and the markets. The garden was surrounded by wrought-iron railings and locked gates, to which only the residents had keys.
It wasn’t surprising that South Park was unsettled these days. Most of the families who lived here were Southerners, and most of their money came from plantations in the South, and slave labour. In a few years’ time, many of them would be ruined; and even sooner than they could have suspected, the cable-car companies would excavate Second Street, cut right through Rincon Hill itself, and destroy their charmed way of life forever. Rincon Hill today is irrevocably buried under the approaches to the Bay Bridge.
Collis alighted from the cab outside No. 12 South Park, and told the driver to wait. The house was flat-fronted, with fresh-painted railings and gleaming brass door handles. The nameplate announced that it was called Colusa. The net curtains were drawn back in fancy flounces and tied with white silk ribbons. Inside one of the front windows, Collis could see a white parrot in a white cage. He rang.
The door was opened promptly by a Negro footman. ‘Sir?’ he asked.
‘I have a letter for Miss Melford,’ said Collis. ‘I’d be obliged if you’d make sure she gets it.’
The footman held out his white-gloved hand. Collis made as if he was going to give him the letter, but then suddenly whipped it back out of his reach.
‘Miss Melford, you understand?’ he said. ‘Not Papa or Mama. Not brother Grant. Miss Sarah Melford herself.’
Railroad Page 63