Silver Read online

  Mrs Roberts stood on the windy sidewalk watching Mr Cutforth for a whole chilly minute. Then she reached up and gently tugged at the sleeve of his furry raccoon coat.

  ‘Mr Cutforth,’ she said, so quietly that he could hardly hear her, ‘I was born to nothing; for most of my life I lived as nothing. I have returned to nothing. The editor of the Leadville Evening Chronicle said that Henry and I had lived our lives in a perfect circle, from rags to riches and back to rags; and that we should be an example to everyone who thinks that wealth can be acquired by chance.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  She said nothing for a moment, but lifted her head with remembered pride. Then she whispered, ‘We still have the Matchless. One day, perhaps, it will all be different. One day, perhaps, I will be able to dress myself in ermine again.’

  ‘Do you really want to?’

  Mrs Roberts looked at him with those dark, hooded eyes; and for a moment Mr Cutforth saw something in her expression that he couldn’t understand; an emotion of which he had no experience.

  ‘You have never been really rich, Mr Cutforth; or you would never ask that question. Now, I have to go.’

  ‘Mrs Roberts—’

  ‘Goodnight, Mr Cutforth.’

  She hobbled on one boot-heel back towards the hotel. He saw her open the door, releasing a burst of light and laughter. Then the door closed and the street was deserted again. The wind worried around the verandah, and feathered the snow. Mr Cutforth remained where he was for a moment or two; but it was too cold for much in the way of serious reflection; and so he turned back towards the chew-and-cheroo store, clapping his hands as he went to restore the circulation that both the freezing wind and Mrs Roberts’ remoteness had constricted.

  The store was warm, bare-boarded, and musky with the fragrance of Latakias and Burleys. An old grey-bearded man in a long grey duster coat was measuring out chewing-tobacco for another oldtimer sitting on a keg in a shaggy fur jacket and a shaggy fur hat that obscured everything except his plum-coloured buttony nose.

  ‘Be with you in a minute, son,’ the grey-beard told Mr Cutforth.

  ‘That’s all right,’ Mr Cutforth acknowledged, and went up to the black iron stove and rubbed his hands over the red-hot lid. ‘I’m not in any hurry.’

  ‘You visiting, or prospecting?’ asked the grey-beard, balancing his tall brass scales.

  ‘Visiting,’ said Mr Cutforth.

  ‘Seen the ice-castle yet?’

  ‘I plan to go tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s something, that ice-castle,’ grey-beard asserted. ‘You won’t see nothing like it if’n you live to be twice my age; not again; it’s a one-time wonder; one in a million million.’

  ‘Well, I’ve heard that it’s pretty spectacular,’ said Mr Cutforth. He looked around at the rows of burled walnut tobacco jars, each with its own decoratively-painted label.

  The old-timer in the shaggy fur hat suddenly said, in a harsh voice, ‘That mine that old Jim McCorquodale was excavating down at Cripple Creek; what a borrasca that turned out to be. He was digging down there for a month and a half before he twigged that the Hilary Brothers must’ve salted it; did you know that? And that’s why he hit Dennis Hilary with that three-legged stool and damn near popped his eye out, too.’

  ‘Had an excuse, then?’ the grey-beard remarked.

  ‘What do you think? That mine was scraped so deep you could have walked through to Australia. There was nothing in it; never had been much. But Gideon Hilary, he had the notion of firing a shotgun loaded with silver pellets, slap-bang into the rockface; so that when Jim looked it over, prior to buying it, why, he thought he had the May Queen mine all over again.’

  Mr Cutforth said, ‘Pardon me for interrupting; but did you ever know Henry T. Roberts?’

  The old man in the shaggy fur hat shifted himself around on his keg; and glared at Mr Cutforth with glittering, beaver-like eyes. ‘Henry T. Roberts? What does Henry T. Roberts have to do with Jim McCorquodale? And besides, do I know you, sir?’

  Mr Cutforth came forward and held out his hand. The old man in the shaggy hat stared at it in surprise and disgust, as if Mr Cutforth had suddenly produced a dead mine-rat out of his sleeve. ‘Well, now,’ he said. ‘This is kind of improper.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you take no notice of Squirrel here,’ said the grey-beard behind the counter, wrapping up his chewing-tobacco in a paper twist. ‘My friend Squirrel here thinks he’s king of the mountain; won’t talk to visitors; not unless he’s known them for forty years; and won’t talk nothing but silver.’

  ‘In that case, I’m proud to know you,’ Mr Cutforth said, and shook Squirrel’s reluctant hand as if he were pumping water out of an unprimed well.

  ‘Hope y’are,’ gruffed Squirrel.

  Mr Cutforth said to old grey-beard, ‘How about a good two ounces of best smoking-tobacco? And maybe Mr Squirrel here can tell me something about Henry T. Roberts while you’re weighing up.’

  He produced a silver dollar out of his waistcoat pocket; and bit it; and looked at Squirrel, and inclined his head, as if to suggest, well, here it is, a silver dollar, you can have it if you feel like talking. He flipped it, and said ‘heads’ and slapped it on to the back of his hand; then peered at it, and said, ‘Heads it is.’

  Squirrel glanced at old grey-beard, and rearranged his buttocks on his keg. ‘Humph,’ he said. ‘Not at all usual; this kind of thing. Asking questions, expecting answers. Not a deputy, are you? Not some kind of half-fangled kind of a lawman?’

  Mr Cutforth shook his head.

  ‘Well,’ said Squirrel, ‘one dollar buys a fair amount of liquor across the street; enough to get a man happy.’

  ‘Tell him if you want to,’ said the old grey-beard. He grinned and winked at Mr Cutforth as he unscrewed the tobacco jar marked Indianhead. ‘But if you don’t want to tell him, then don’t.’

  Squirrel noisily cleared his sinuses. ‘Long as you never tell that it came from me. But he’s a sick man, that Henry T. Roberts. Dying, I’d say. He’s got that yellow look about him that Roaring George Dunn had, just before he died of the fever up at Yippee. Sick, and trembling; you go take a look at him, he runs the post office. Then you’ll see. Can’t scarcely hold a sheet of paper so that it don’t rustle and shake.’

  ‘And Mrs Roberts?’ asked Mr Cutforth, more gently.

  Squirrel snorted; thought for a while; swilled phlegm around in his mouth, and at last spat it into the tobacco-store cuspidor, leaving a glistening web trailing from his beard.

  ‘Mrs Roberts? Is that who you’re interested in?’ he wanted to know.

  Mr Cutford said nothing; but waited for Squirrel to reply, which he knew he inevitably would.

  ‘Mrs Roberts is not a woman to be interested in,’ he said. ‘Mrs Roberts don’t live for nobody excepting that dying man of hers; and on the memories of what was. Any man with any sense stays away from a woman like that.’

  Mr Cutforth glanced towards the grey-beard behind the counter. Old grey-beard was holding up his packet of pipe-tobacco, and it was plain from the expression on his face that he was advising Mr Cutforth not to ask any more questions. The tragedy of Henry T. Roberts was the tragedy which every miner feared: to strike it rich, and then to lose everything. To the prospectors and businessmen of Leadville, the very presence of the Roberts family, in their single room next to the attic at the Imperial Hotel, was like a curse, an inland albatross.

  Squirrel said, ‘That Henry Roberts, I saw him one day coming out of the Clarendon Hotel, and he was wearing a top-hat, and a fur coat you could’ve mistook for a genuine still-alive grizzly, and there was rings on his fingers with diamonds like ice-cubes, and his shoes shining; and I saw one poor young prospector with raggedy trousers come up to him, and say, “Mr Roberts, what makes you a better man than me? You tell me that Mr Roberts.” And do you know what that Henry Roberts told him? He said, “Luck, my boy, that’s all; because there’s only a regulated allocation of luck in this here universe, and so
me of us gets a share and others don’t; and I did, and you didn’t; and that’s the difference, so you step out of my way, because it’s nothing to do with me that I’m rich and it’s nothing to do with you that you’re poor, and there’s an end to it.” ‘

  Mr Cutforth, took off his pince-nez and looked at squirrel with watery, unfocused eyes. ‘Do you think that Henry Roberts actually believed that?’ he asked.

  Squirrel opened up his packet of chewing-tobacco and inspected it carefully. Then he said, ‘Who knows? Henry Roberts was a pretty puzzling kind of a fellow; hard to figure out. Good-looking as all hell. Drew the women like flies round a jackass; but hard to figure out. Although, who isn’t?’

  Mr Cutforth nodded, and handed Squirrel the silver dollar. Squirrel tucked it somewhere complicated under his fur coat, and then snorted again and sat back on his keg as if he had never heard of Henry T. Roberts, or anything to do with anything. He said to old grey-beard, ‘Not as cold as it was in Wardner, when I was looking for gold. Not a damned bit of it.’

  *

  At breakfast the following morning, while Mr Cutforth was eating bacon and eggs and grits, Finney the porter came into the dining-rooms and whispered confidentially in his ear, ‘They declined the pie, sir.’

  Mr Cutforth laid down his knife and fork, and sat up straight. He found that he was quite distressed.

  Finney said, ‘They said that they could never accept charity, not on any account.’

  ‘Who said? Mr Roberts, or Mrs Roberts?’

  Finney pulled a face. ‘Mrs, most likely, I’d say. It’s Mrs who does most of the talking. Mr, well, Mr just goes to the post office, and then comes back. There’s not much spunk left in Mr; and, if you ask me, he could use a piece of pie.’

  Mr Cutforth finished his breakfast without much appetite, although the bacon was crisp and the coffee was hot and strong. Several people came into the dining-rooms and said, ‘Good morning,’ although he had never seen them before. One fat man with a haywire ginger moustache said, ‘Fine day for a snowball fight.’

  Mr Cutforth left the table and walked through to the lobby, where the boiler was spitting and crackling with fresh wood, and an old man with one arm was making a fairly poor job of sweeping up last night’s cigar-butts, hundreds of which had carpeted the floor like the flattened dung of some pungent herd of passing elks. Mr Cutforth went to the window, and stood with his hands in his pockets looking out at the snow, which was now falling even more thickly than it had last night. He had slept very badly. Somebody had been arguing and banging around until two o’clock in the morning in the room across the hallway; and even when they had at last decided to call a truce, and he had been able to close his eyes and doze, he had dreamed of Baby Doe; in ermine and diamonds; and wrapped in snow; Baby Doe slipping in the street without anybody to catch her; Baby Doe closing her eyes in bitter acceptance of a fate that would last for ever and ever.

  At dawn he had sat up in bed and smoked a pipe of tobacco. Why should he care so much? he had asked himself. He was a newspaper photographer, a journalist. He had seen tragedies far worse than this. He had seen young children dead of typhoid, and wives with their heads half shot off. Most of the families of Colorado would have been delighted to have been able to stay at the Imperial Hotel in Leadville; for all that they would have to share a room. And nobody who had seen the shanties and shacks of Cripple Cleek and Climax and Scofield, Utah, could ever say that the Roberts family were the worst off as far as accommodation was concerned.

  Perhaps it was simply that even those who have never known wealth can feel pity for those who have had it and then lost it. But was it really pity that Mr Cutforth felt?

  He wondered, with a flush of embarrassment that brought two spots of pinkness to his protuberant cheeks, whether the truth of it was that he had become infatuated with Mrs Elizabeth Roberts; or worse.

  He was about to ask Finney where he could find himself a newspaper when he heard the lightest of footsteps on the staircase. Down came Baby Doe, in worn brown boots, and a camel-coloured coat with dark brown frogging. She wore a large dark brown hat, with a veil, and she carried an umbrella. She walked quickly across the lobby, but not quickly enough to prevent Mr Cutforth from stepping forward and opening the street door for her.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Roberts,’ he said, bowing his head.

  She hesitated, and then she said, ‘Good morning, Mr Cutforth. If you’ll excuse me.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You’re going out? The weather doesn’t look very pleasant this morning.’

  ‘I haven’t been out for pleasure, Mr Cutforth, for many more years than I care to remember.’

  Mr Cutforth opened the street door a little wider. A keen cold wind blew into the lobby and ruffled the illustrated magazines on the sofa, and made the fire in the boiler quietly flare. A fat man in a green tailcoat looked around in annoyance, and called, ‘Close that damned door, sir.’

  Mr Cutforth had no option but to let Mrs Roberts push past him, and step outside. He closed the door behind her, but stood with his face against the window, watching her cross the street diagonally, her umbrella raised against the softly-pelting snow. He bit his lip. Then, decisively, he ran upstairs, unlocked his room, and took down his overcoat and his camera-case. Within two or three minutes, he was dressed up for the weather, with a long scarf wound three times around his neck; and was struggling out of the front door of the Imperial Hotel with all his photographic equipment, including his unmanageable tripod.

  He crossed the street, and tried to find Baby Doe’s footprints on the opposite sidewalk. Only four or five people had walked that way this morning, but the snow was falling so densely that their footprints had already been blurred, and it was almost impossible to tell which were the bootmarks of striding miners, and which were the delicate feet of Baby Doe. He stood where he was for a moment, squinting against the glare, the snowflakes clinging to the lenses of his spectacles and dissolving in watery patterns of crystal.

  A horse-drawn sleigh jingled past, and the driver waved a hand and called out, ‘Sonofabitchofday, ain’t it?’ and jingled on.

  Mr Cutforth thought he glimpsed a dark figure at the far end of the street; and hefting up his case and his tripod, he began to walk after it, slowly at first, but then more quickly, his feet slipping from time to time in the snow, his tripod banging awkwardly and regularly against his case.

  He passed a short row of stores, saloons, and a ‘Home-Cooked’ restaurant. All of them looked dead and deserted, their windows dark. The restaurant was superseded by a tumble-down livery stable, its timbers protruding through the snow like the black skeleton of a wrecked ship. Then there was nothing but the whirling snow and the sky the colour of tarnished bronze, and the felty sound of his boots in the freshly-fallen fields of white.

  He stopped. It was so silent that he could hear the snow pattering on to his hat, and his own gasping breath. He must have made a mistake. She couldn’t have come this way. Perhaps she had gone into the restaurant for cheap left-overs, so that her husband and daughters could have some breakfast. He looked around him. The snow was so thick that now it was almost impossible to see where the town had vanished.

  But as he turned, he glimpsed it again: the dark hurrying figure. And again he picked up his camera-case and his tripod from out of the snow, and went stumbling after it, as if it were some alluring will-o’-the-wisp, a dark and dancing fairy who enticed innocent newspaper photographers to unsuspected and unimaginable fates.

  He struggled on for another half-mile, and then, to his astonishment, he began to make out the ghostly outline of an enormous building, gradually becoming visible through the blizzard. He almost forgot his pursuit of Baby Doe, and trudged forward with dogged, abrupt steps, nearer and nearer, and with each step his frustration and his tiredness changed increasingly into awe and, eventually, delight.

  He stopped, and put down his equipment, and propped his hands on his hips, and said to himself, ‘My God. Look at that. My God.’


  Towering nearly a hundred feet above him was a medieval castle, its turrets billowing with snow; a vast fortress with battlements and buttresses and circular towers. Frozen flags, nearly a dozen of them, flew stiffly from each turret, and at the entrance stood a massive statue of a woman bearing a scroll.

  Even in the corroded darkness of a snowstorm, the castle shone with an extraordinary, unnatural translucence; a dream castle; a castle of wintry extravagance; the kind of castle that men could imagine but should never have come to be. It. was constructed, as Mr Cutforth already knew, out of thousands of blocks of ice. But knowing in advance that it was constructed out of blocks of ice and actually seeing it in front of him were two quite different things. It enthralled him: the way it shone, the sheer incredible wastefulness of it, the pomp, the absurd yet wonderful imagination that had built anything so fantastic in the sure knowledge that by springtime it would melt away.

  Now he saw the dark figure which he had been pursuing go to the small wooden ticket-office which stood outside the castle gates. He picked up his camera and started after her once more, convinced now that it was Baby Doe. The figure disappeared through the castle gates just as he himself reached the ticket-office, and fumbled for his entrance fee of 25 cents.

  ‘Guidebook?’ the red-nosed man behind the ticket window asked him.

  ‘Later,’ he said, and hurried towards the entrance.

  Mr Cutforth had already read the stunning facts about the ice-palace. Covering five acres, it had cost $20,000 to build, making it the largest and the most expensive building ever made anywhere out of ice. Work had started on it two months ago, when 260 loggers and carpenters and stonemasons had erected wooden frames on which the blocks of ice would be supported, and then trekked out to the lakes of the local water company to hew out the ice itself.