Railroad Read online

  HE WAS THE MOST HATED – AND

  LOVED – MAN IN AMERICA

  ‘I want to finish this railroad, Charles, because I can’t go back. But if there were any way in which I could trade this railroad, and all its locomotives, and all its ties and its spikes and its rails – if there was any way in which I could trade this railroad for one day with Hannah, one more day with Hannah, then I would do it gladly.’

  He lifted his head, and when he did so, Charles was shocked to see that he was crying.

  ‘I was prepared to see people die for the sake of this railroad. I was prepared to ruin people’s reputations, their happiness, their whole lives. That was the price of progress, I thought.’

  Railroad

  Graham Masterton

  © Graham Masterton 1981 *

  *Indicates the year of first publication.

  Dla mej najserdeczniejszej przyjaciólki …

  mej najbardziej milowanej ukochanej …

  tej, z zawsze bȩdȩ źywić

  me nadzieje, me szczȩscie, me marzenia,

  i której zawsze bȩdȩ oddany cialem i …

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Collis Edmonds had appeared only twice on the observation platform of his private car between Ogden, Utah, where he had joined the train, and Winnemucca, Nevada; and then only to smoke the last quarter of a burned-down cigar and toss it on to the tracks. Emily had been intrigued, and had asked the black conductor who he was. He looked so lonely, standing by the wrought-iron rail – a tall, thin-faced man with a slight stoop and eyes that seemed to be permanently fixed on some point in the middle distance. He was dressed in black, although on the second occasion that Emily had seen him, he had worn a red fez with a tassel, too – the kind that gentlemen used for smoking and writing.

  ‘That,’ the conductor had told her emphatically, ‘is The Boss.’

  Emily went back to her Pullman sleeping car and sat down on the green plush seat, taking out her notepad and her pencil. Outside the window, through the tapestry curtains, the scrubby sagebrush plain moved past at the astonishing speed of twenty miles per hour.

  She wrote, ‘I have seen the man the conductors call “The Boss”. He travels in his own Pullman car, although for one so wealthy, travelling in only one private car must be “roughing it”, as they say out here in the West.’

  She paused, biting the end of her pencil. Then she added, ‘I believe I can understand how a man who has created this extraordinary railroad – a man who has dramatically changed the fate of the whole nation – can wish to remain a recluse. What he must feel within him for having spanned a continent! What thoughts he must have! He is a handsome yet tormented person, and even though I have glimpsed him but twice, I feel a warmth and compassion for his historic predicament, and his loneliness. I wish very much that I might meet him one day, and impart my feelings (discreetly, of course!).’

  She put away her pad. She knew that she ought to write more – about the hazy purple mountain range that sheltered Salt Lake City, about the alkali plains over which they were passing now, with the smoke from the locomotive’s stack rolling southward on the wild like tumbleweed. She ought to write about the comforts of the palace car in which she was travelling, the walnut and primavera panels, the plush sofas, and the gorgeous amaranth mouldings. She was, after all, here to represent her journal, Ladies’ Home Notes, and her New York lady readers would be fascinated to know how food was prepared at twenty miles per hour, and what it was like to eat antelope steak while flying on rails across the very plains on which the animals had been reared.

  But the appearance of The Boss had somehow made all these chatty details seem irrelevant. She thought she had seen in his profile something of the terrifying scale of what had been achieved in building the Sierra Pacific Railroad, and something of the depth and darkness of the imagination which had conceived it. She sat for a long time watching the sun set, her eyes turned by its falling light into transparent amber, her curly hair turned into fraying fire, and her thoughts had been miles and years and hundreds of lifetimes away when the grey-uniformed conductor at last touched her arm and told her that dinner was being served.

  The next morning, Emily stood on the platform, feeling the warmth of the summer wind and smelling the sagebrush. She tried to glimpse what was going on behind the heavy drawn drapes of The Boss’s private car, but all she could see was part of a silver inkstand and the edge of a newspaper. After the train left Reno, however, and began to climb through the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, The Boss appeared outside of his Pullman car more frequently. Emily made a few brief notes about the winding railroad track and the perseverance of the Chinese labourers who had built it, and about how high above sea level they were; but her attention was fixed on the last car of the train, and on the way its single occupant came out for an hour at a time to smoke and drink and stare at the uneven white line in the blue summer sky that marked the snowy peaks of the Sierras.

  It was almost noon by the time the train had climbed at last through the stifling darkness of countless snowsheds and had emerged among the blue-green pines that surrounded Donner Lake, close to the very summit of the mountain pass that would take the train into California. Emily wrapped her beaver coat around her and stood in the open, separated from The Boss’s private car by nothing more than a few feet of chilly mountain air and a greasy coupling.

  The Boss stayed inside, his curtains drawn, right up until the moment when the labouring locomotive hauled the twelve-car train to the summit. Then, quite abruptly, his door opened, and he emerged, wearing a fawn coat with a dark fur collar, his face paler than usual, his eyes tired. He acknowledged Emily with a look that could have been anything from a wince to an unrealised smile, and then he went immediately to the rail, to look out over the Sierras.

  At Colfax, after a long and winding descent through the mountains, the train stopped to take on water. It was warmer here, although the air was still quite crisp. Many of the passengers stepped down from the train to stretch their legs, but Emily stayed in the parlour car, writing up some of her notes. She had almost finished, and was blotting the last page, when the parlour door opened and The Boss walked in.

  Emily sat up straight and tugged at her bottle-green travelling jacket. ‘Good afternoon,’ she said, in a high, curious voice. She hadn’t really meant to sound so inquisitive, but The Boss didn’t appear to notice, or mind. He looked around the car as if he were searching for somebody else, somebody whose face and whose memory somehow eluded him.

  ‘I’m Collis Edmonds,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘And you …?’ he asked her.

  ‘Miss Emily Van Brugh, from New York.’

  Collis Edmonds nodded. His eyes still searched around the parlour.

  ‘Are you enjoying your trip, Miss Van Brugh?’

  ‘Yes, sir. This railroad is more of a marvel than I could have imagined.’

  Collis Edmonds nodded again. ‘Yes,’ he said, as if he were irked by compliments about his achievements. ‘A great marvel. A great … feat of human … what’s-its-name … endeavour.’

  There was an odd, tight silence. Collis Edmonds didn’t seem to have anything to say, yet he didn’t make any move to leave. At last Emily said cautiously, ‘Do you think, Mr Edmo
nds, I might ask you a few questions?’

  ‘Questions? Of course you may. What do you want to know?’

  ‘I want to know why you built the railroad.’

  He turned towards her and focused his eyes on her sharply. ‘You want to know why?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My dear young lady … why on earth do you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Having seen you, and now having met you, I’m not at all certain.’

  He raised his hands. ‘Well, for goodness sake, I built it to make money. I built it because it was needed. I built it because – well, I built it because I did, that’s all.’

  Emily said nothing, but sat framed by the California sunshine that shone through the parlour car’s dusty window, her pencil neatly raised in her hand, her notepad unmarked.

  ‘Aren’t you going to write that down?’ asked Collis Edmonds, after a long pause. ‘No? Then what else would you like? Some facts? Some figures? We built thirty-seven miles of snowsheds through these mountains between ’68 and ’69, using up sixty-five million board feet of timber. There are fifteen tunnels taking the Sierra Pacific through the rock; and on occasions the granite was so hard that we could progress only eight inches in twenty-four hours. Is that the kind of thing? The summit is seven thousand, one hundred and fifty-six feet above mean sea level, and in winter the snow can be anything up to forty feet deep.’

  He stopped. Then he said, much more quietly, ‘You’re not making any notes at all.’

  Emily lowered her eyes. Collis Edmonds watched her for a moment, and then came across to her table, drew out a chair, and sat down. He continued to watch her with an expression that was half amused, half intrigued, his chin resting on his fist.

  ‘You really want to know why, don’t you?’ he asked her.

  Emily glanced up. ‘You must think I’m being very ill-mannered,’ she said. ‘But I do believe you had a special purpose. The way you stand on the platform of your car … the way you look out at the mountains.’

  ‘You have a very romantic turn of mind,’ said Collis Edmonds. ‘Why should you suppose that my mind works in the same way? I’m a railroad builder. Who could be more pragmatic?’

  ‘Well … perhaps I’m mistaken,’ Emily replied. ‘In which case you must accept my apologies.’

  Collis Edmonds sat back and took out an engraved gold pocket watch. He stared at it for a while, then said, ‘We have several hours left before we arrive in Sacramento. Would you think it impertinent of me to ask you to come to my parlour, and take a light supper?’

  ‘I’d be honoured,’ said Emily.

  ‘Good,’ Collis Edmonds told her. ‘I believe my cook is preparing a salmon soufflé, and I have some fine champagne. And while we eat, and while we drink, I shall do my best to answer your question for you, honestly, and at length. You want to know why I built the Sierra Pacific Railroad? I shall tell you. But I must warn you ahead of time that some of what occurred may shock you, and some of it may scandalise you, and some of it may make you wonder how low a human being can sink in the pursuit of glory.’

  Emily blushed, but only a little. ‘I think I can bear to be shocked, Mr Edmonds, and to be scandalised. I am, after all, a reporter.’

  Collis Edmonds grinned and stood up. ‘Join me just before the train leaves,’ he said. ‘I look forward to entertaining you.’

  For the next three hours, as the train gradually descended the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, with the sky darkening behind it and the sun sinking ahead of it, Collis Edmonds talked to Emily Van Brugh. The champagne sparkled in lead-crystal glasses; the cutlery that shuddered on the table was solid silver. There was fresh salmon, and asparagus, and peaches, and delicious sharp cheese.

  After those hours, Emily returned to her own parlour and packed her clothes in preparation for leaving the train at Sacramento. She never saw Collis Edmonds again, although after the train had reached the terminus, and she was waiting to be taken by carriage to her hotel, she saw his special Pullman car detached from the rest of the train and shunted slowly off into the darkness, its curtains drawn tight.

  The story she wrote appeared in Ladies’ Home Notes on 13 October 1870. It was entitled ‘A Modern Ladies’ Companion to Railroad Travel Across the Continent, & How the Unaccompanied Lady Is to Manage in California’. It told of the marvels of the Sierra Pacific Railroad; of the deserts and mountains and towering cliffs; of what to eat, and what to eschew; of what clothes to take, and where to stay. It even mentioned the fact that there were thirty-seven miles of snowsheds through the mountains.

  It told scarcely anything at all of what Collis Edmonds had said to her during that three-hour supper, because that was one of those stories whose pain and tenderness and fierceness would only have offended Emily’s readers – a story that she could only retell in the silence and the quietness of her own memory, and her own heart.

  Chapter 1

  He awoke just after ten o’clock in the morning in a front second-floor room at the Monument Hotel. His head was pounding, and his mouth tasted, in the nauseatingly memorable words of his grandfather, as if he’d been sucking toads all night. He lay there for almost five minutes, blinking up at the decorative plaster moulding on the ceiling, trying to decide what day it was, and what hour it could be, and why the Lord was punishing him this time.

  It was plainly a wet day. He could hear the scattering of rain on the windowpanes, and only a dim submarine light strained through the red-and-cream-striped drapes. It was also plainly quite late, because he could hear the wheels of growlers and carriages outside in the square, and a horse with a distinctive cough. Under the shelter of the hotel’s portico a newsboy yelped in a voice like a Jew’s harp, ‘Tribune! Tribune!’

  Something else rapidly became plain, too; and plain in the plainest way. There was a grunt and a sigh beside him, and the grubby green comforter was thrown back by a white freckled arm, revealing on the pillow beside him a tangle of gingery curls. After a further struggle, a girl’s pallid face rose into view, with reddened eyes and smudged rouge, and an expression that reminded him of a stranded codfish he had once had to kill with a brick.

  ‘Mother in heaven,’ she said, in a strong Irish brogue. ‘Is it morning already?’

  He didn’t answer, but pressed the back of his hand to his thumping forehead. There was no question about it. The Lord was punishing him, yet again, for drinking too many stone fences, smoking too many Virginia cheroots, gambling away too much money, and above all for finishing up his evening’s amusement, as he almost always did, with a girl of irredeemably homely looks. He couldn’t think why he did it. No matter how pretty and enchanting they appeared by gaslight, when he was dizzy with bourbon and sweet cider and exhilarated by the loss of scores of dollars of his father’s money, these girls always emerged from the sheets the following morning tousled and plump, with faces as uncompromising as German mineworkers. The Lord was right, right, right, and he was wrong, wrong, wrong. He only wished the Lord wouldn’t keep rubbing it in.

  The girl stared at him for a long time. She must have been eighteen or nineteen, and her body was still clothed in that white subcutaneous fat that a man’s fingernails could dig into in moments of sexual duress. Duress was the only word he could think of. Ecstasy seemed out of the question. But she was amiable. She bent forward and kissed his dark tousled hair, and smiled at him with a little twist of her mouth that was almost fetching.

  He sat up in bed, accompanied by a chorus of complaining springs, and looked around him. The hotel room was high-ceilinged, and furnished with cheapness and severity. Apart from their large institutional iron bed, the kind of bed to which lunatics were manacled, there was a sawed-oak armchair, a marble-topped washstand, and a grim varnished bureau with an oval mirror on top of it. He let his head drop to his chest and let out a long sigh of resignation.

  ‘You don’t have to look so miserable,’ the girl said. ‘It’s only Tuesday.’

  He turned his eyes towards her balefully. ‘Why shou
ldn’t I be? I feel it.’

  He pushed back the comforter and climbed unsteadily out of bed. The threadbare carpet seemed to tilt and yaw like the deck of a small ship. He groped across to the washstand, and held on to it for a while before he poured a basinful of cold water out of the lily-patterned jug.

  The girl lay back on the pillow and watched him splash himself. In the milky light, his body was naked and angular, and a little underweight, so that his ribs showed. He had a long face, with dark curly sidewhiskers, and a sharp straight nose, and rather worried-looking eyes. Even when he was winning at cards, with a whole handful of queens and jacks, you would have thought by his eyes that he was right on the verge of throwing in the sponge, or even of slitting his throat.

  ‘You don’t have to feel miserable,’ the girl said. ‘You could jump back into bed and feel anything you like.’

  He turned and peered at her with one eye closed against the water. He couldn’t find a towel, so he pulled the drapes towards him and dried himself on those. She looked back at him with that little twisted smile, admiring his melancholy leanness.

  He said in a thick voice, ‘The only feeling I want right now, apart from my misery, with which I’m quite content, is the feeling of Bromo Vichy salts down the back of my throat.’

  She kept on smiling. ‘Misery and Bromo Vichy aren’t the two best feelings you could have.’

  ‘I know,’ he told her. He went to the oval mirror on top of the bureau and inspected his swollen eyes. ‘But they’ll do.’

  She twisted her frayed red curls around her finger. She didn’t say anything for a while, but pouted in what she obviously considered was a sulky and flirtatious manner. ‘Last night, you didn’t seem satisfied with anything,’ she said. ‘I would have called you a tiger.’

  ‘What a pair,’ he replied absently, as he searched for his cotton combinations. ‘The tiger and the hippopotamus.’

  ‘The what?’

  He was on his hands and knees, looking under the bed. He raised his head and said: ‘The hippopotamus. It’s a large beast from Africa, that likes to wallow.’