Railroad Read online

  ‘I believe you’re suspicious of me,’ said Collis.

  Delphine licked ice from the bottom of her spoon. ‘Suspicious? Why should I be?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps you’ve heard stories about me that made you leery.’

  She looked down at her dish. ‘You are a flatterer, aren’t you? First you flatter me, and now you’re flattering yourself. Where on earth would I have heard stories about you?’

  ‘I’m not exactly unknown in New York,’ replied Collis. ‘And you know how stories get about.’

  ‘What sort of stories?’

  He shrugged. He definitely felt that he was on the defensive end of this conversation, no matter how much he tried to push her.

  ‘Well … stories,’ he said. ‘Stories of, well, escapades.’

  ‘You have escapades?’ she asked him. ‘Is that what you do during the day, instead of working? You have escapades?’

  Collis felt slightly hot. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘sometimes.’

  ‘And people tell stories of your escapades?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’

  Delphine laid down her spoon and looked at him boldly. ‘You’re almost a legendary figure then, in your own time?’

  He said, tightly: ‘You’re teasing me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why do you want to do that?’

  ‘Because I want to get to know you better,’ she said, ‘and because there is no quicker way of doing it than to tease. When you tease, people spring to the defence of everything they love dearest, and so you can discover what they love dearest in just a few minutes.’

  ‘Have you found out what I love dearest?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I mean, I guessed it when I first saw you, but now you’ve told me for yourself.’

  Collis leaned forward. ‘What is it,’ he asked her, ‘that I hold so dear?’

  Delphine turned towards her mother and Ida, who had paused to listen for a moment. When they saw that she was looking, they immediately plunged back into their conversation like two diners gobbling the same bowl of spaghetti. Delphine looked back at Collis with her amused, entrancing smile. ‘They seemed to be pleased that we’ve got together,’ she said. ‘Do I sense a plot?’

  ‘Probably,’ said Collis. ‘But who cares, if the plot has such happy results?’

  ‘I don’t know whether it has,’ Delphine replied.

  ‘You grieve me,’ said Collis, trying hard to look grieved.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Delphine. ‘I don’t think you’re capable of being grieved, not for anyone else’s sake, anyway. That’s because the thing you hold dearest, as I was telling you, is your scandalous reputation. You care for your public notoriety more than anything else, and you would defend it to the death.’

  ‘Then you have heard about me,’ said Collis. That was bad news. If she accepted his advances at all, he would have a long, uphill struggle trying to convince her that he was reformed, and that he would never gamble or drink or touch the ladies of the night again. A pretty creature like Delphine Spooner certainly wouldn’t have to put up with an erratic, erotic, boastful rake. She could pick any one of dozens of respectable young bankers instead, and live happily and substantially ever after.

  ‘Yes, I admit I’ve heard about you,’ Delphine told him. She took another spoonful of ice. ‘In fact, your escapades are quite well known.’

  ‘They’re very much exaggerated,’ said Collis.

  ‘Oh?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. Well, you know how people like to talk, and how a story gets embroidered in the telling. Most of the stories that people tell about me are quite inaccurate. Some of them are downright lies. That was why I suspected you might be suspicious. Anybody would be suspicious if they heard stories like that. But they’re not true, I assure you.’

  Delphine inclined her head to one side. ‘That’s a pity,’ she said.

  Collis stared at her. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She turned her eyes towards him. ‘I said, “That’s a pity.” ’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’

  Delphine bent her bonnet confidingly towards him. ‘It’s a pity,’ she said softly, so that Ida and Winifred were unable to hear, no matter how far they inclined themselves in her direction, ‘because I have wanted for a very long time to meet you.’

  ‘You have? I’m afraid I still don’t understand.’

  ‘You’re being very obtuse.’

  ‘My dear young lady, I’m not being obtuse at all. It’s you. You’re talking in complete riddles.’

  She smiled mischievously. ‘All riddles have solutions, my dear sir. The solution to my riddle is that I am quite tired of being introduced to worthy young gentlemen with no reputation. I am bored of bankers, and I am fed up with financiers, and if I have to spend the evening being nice to another high-risk insurance broker, I think I shall scream. I want to meet someone dashing, someone perverse, someone with style. I want to meet men like you. Only when I do, what happens? You tell me that all the stories about you are fabricated, and that you’re probably just as tedious and worthy as all the rest of them.’

  Collis had at first been puzzled, then scandalised, then, gradually, intrigued. Delphine Spooner was a great deal more fascinating than he had first supposed, as well as being prettier. There was something about the way she spoke, about the way she held her head, that made her looks even more compelling. He reached out and laid his hand over hers, oblivious of his mother’s sideways glance, and said: ‘They’re not all lies, you know. Some of them have what you might call a grain of truth.’

  Delphine’s cheeks coloured again, but she kept her composure. ‘You may think me very forward, and I must assure you that I do not normally ask questions of this nature, but have you ever been with strumpets?’

  Collis didn’t know what to answer at first. Here was a girl who could be devious enough to be tricking him into an admission of immorality, so that she could decide if he was worthy of her or not. But here was a girl, too, who could be spirited and unusual enough to feel the need for a man of experience, a man well acquainted with loose women.

  ‘Is that what the stories say of me?’ he said cautiously.

  She nodded, almost eagerly. ‘Melissa Dunlop, Lewis Dunlop’s sister, said that on one occasion you had bedded two ladies at once.’

  Ida, leaning across the table with dangling earrings and rustling coffee-coloured silk, said, ‘Have you two young people found something in common, Collis?’

  Collis said, ‘I think so, Mother,’ but kept his eyes on Delphine. All around them, Taylor’s burbled with conversation, and waiters hurried through the subdued light with trays of coffee and plates of oysters, but he believed, in the few minutes they had been together, that Delphine and he had grown a strange and private understanding. ‘Yes,’ he said to Delphine, pronouncing the words most carefully, ‘that’s true.’

  Delphine closed her eyes. Her hand stirred under his.

  ‘I don’t know whether you’ve been trying to establish if I’m a worthy sort of a man, the sort of man who drinks only one schooner of sherry in three months, and shakes hands with women instead of kissing them; or if you’ve been trying to find out if I’m a scoundrel, who never wakes up without a hangover, and never in his own bed. But whatever you want me to be, I’ll be, because you’re very pretty, Miss Spooner, and because I am absolutely enchanted by you.’

  She opened her eyes again, and stared at him with those huge hazel eyes, eyes he could have lost himself in. He didn’t know for a moment whether she was going to lean forward and kiss him, or whether she was going to slap his face. She did neither. She simply turned to Winifred, her mother, and said clearly, ‘Mr Edmonds has kindly invited me to ride with him on Saturday afternoon, Mother. He has a mare that I may borrow, named Hopeful. Do you think I could go?’

  Ida looked at Winifred, and Winifred looked back at Ida. Then Winifred said, ‘Of course, my pet. I hope
you thanked Mr Edmonds for his generosity.’

  Delphine turned back to Collis and gave him a smile that made the back of his neck prickle with alarm and desire. ‘I shall, Mother. I shall.’

  On the way home in the carriage, Collis unexpectedly took his mother’s hand, and he said, ‘Mother, I’ve accused you of many misdeeds in the past. We’ve argued, you and I, over everything and anything. But the evidence of today has absolutely convinced me that, whatever I do, I must never again criticise your taste.’

  Ida, shaded under her parasol, said loftily, ‘You liked Delphine, then? In spite of the fact that I had to drag you along to meet her like a six-year-old boy?’

  Collis couldn’t help smiling. ‘She is easily the prettiest girl I have seen in two years.’

  ‘Not the prettiest ever?’

  ‘Well, there was Edna Rice Perry.’

  Ida shivered and retrieved her hand from her son’s grasp. ‘I don’t know how you can compare Delphine Spooner and that Perry trollop.’

  But then she turned to Collis with a softer expression and said, ‘Still, if you like Delphine even half as much as you liked Edna, your father and I shall be well satisfied.’

  Collis looked back at his mother for a while, saying nothing, but then he settled back on the cushions of his seat, humming quietly to himself, and wishing it were Saturday.

  Later that night, Collis knocked at the door of his father’s library. He was all dressed up to go to dinner at the Jacobses’, on Union Square, but he couldn’t resist telling Makepeace what he thought of Delphine Spooner. It was such an unusual feeling for him, to be pleased with his parents, that he was quite revelling in it – although he knew perfectly well that as soon as the novelty of meeting Delphine had worn off a little, they would be back to their old scraps about politics and gambling and good manners.

  Collis opened the double oak doors of the gloomy, tobacco-smelling room, to find his father sitting at his desk in the dim, unsteady light of a single oil lamp, a litter of bonds and deeds and stock certificates all around him, his reading spectacles perched on his forehead.

  ‘Sir,’ said Collis.

  There was a pause while Makepeace ran his pencil down a column of figures. Then he lifted his head and said, ‘Ah.’

  ‘If you’re busy, sir …’ said Collis.

  His father shook his head. ‘Not too busy, my boy. I shall have to spend all night at this in any case. Are you going out this evening?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Eli Jacobs is holding a dinner for some foreign composer.’ Collis pulled over a small, heavy chair and sat down. ‘But I really wanted to tell you about Delphine Spooner.’

  ‘Delphine? Oh, yes. Your mother said that you seemed to have taken a shine to her. I’m pleased.’

  There was a difficult silence. It occurred to Collis that his father didn’t look particularly well. His eyes were reddened in the lamplight, and beneath his whiskers his complexion was noticeably pasty. Collis looked around at all the papers strewn on the desk and on the floor, and then he took out a cheroot and carefully bit off the end.

  ‘Is something wrong, Father?’

  Makepeace gave a quick, humourless smirk. ‘Wrong? What makes you think that?’

  ‘All these papers,’ said Collis, striking a match. ‘You’re generally so tidy.’

  ‘I was … looking for something. An old insurance certificate.’

  ‘You don’t usually keep insurance certificates in with stocks and bonds, do you?’

  Makepeace reached across his desk and began to rustle and ruffle through some of the papers. ‘You shouldn’t concern yourself,’ he said. ‘You just go off and have dinner with Eli Jacobs, and leave me to do what I can do best.’

  ‘I was going to tell you about Delphine.’

  His father looked across at him, his odd eye gazing fixedly at the unlit gas bracket on the wall behind Collis’s shoulder. Then, as if he couldn’t help himself from speaking the truth, he said, ‘I believe Delphine’s turned out very pretty. It’s a pity that it’s probably too late to do us any good.’

  ‘Sir?’

  Makepeace shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it. Just do whatever you can.’

  ‘Father,’ said Collis, dismissing a twisted cloud of cheroot smoke with a wave of his hand, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. What’s too late to do us any good?’

  Makepeace was burrowing through a sheaf of legal documents tied up with pink ribbons. ‘I suppose it serves me right for being a doughface. It’s all just useless speculation. The market’s nothing but unsecured credit, puffery, and wind.’

  ‘Sir – will you please talk sense?’

  ‘Sense?’ said Makepeace. ‘What have you ever known about sense? If you’d been the kind of son that a man could rely on, if you’d come into the bank and learned a civilised profession, then we might have avoided this altogether. I was overworked, overstrained. What do you think I do all day, to keep you in liquor and whores? Now the whole damned thing is falling to pieces. It’s like a damned hot-air balloon, with a leak.’

  ‘Father,’ said Collis, ‘will you please tell me what on earth is happening?’

  Makepeace took a deep breath, and then got up from his chair. He walked across to the plain marble fireplace, empty and swept now that it was summer, and stood with his back to Collis, his shoulders hunched, and his arms wrapped around his chest. From the dark-panelled library wall, a few feet to his left, a shadowy oil painting of his grandfather, portly and petulant, looked down at him with disapproval.

  At last, Makepeace turned his head, so that Collis could see his white whiskers and his blunt nose in profile. ‘You’ve never cared before, Collis,’ he said hoarsely, ‘and I’m sure that you don’t seriously care now. In any event, whatever I told you would be quite beyond your understanding.’

  ‘You’re not giving me the opportunity to try to understand, are you, sir?’

  ‘Collis – you can spend money like a prodigal, but you don’t have the faintest notion how to manage it. The management of money is fraught with risks of cataclysmic proportions. The most cataclysmic thing that ever happened to you was a dose of gonorrhea.’

  ‘Father, I am your son.’

  ‘That’s what I’m complaining about! Any other son would have given me respect and support, any other son would have taken some of the burden off my shoulders! But not you. You were quite content to thumb your nose at me with one hand and rifle my pockets with the other!’

  Collis stood up and crossed the rug to where his father was standing. He could see that a greasy film of perspiration was shining on his father’s forehead, and that the old man seemed to be panting, the way he did when he tried to climb more than one flight of stairs at once.

  ‘Father,’ Collis said gently.

  Makepeace raised his one good eye.

  ‘Well, my boy,’ he grumbled after a moment. ‘You always said that I was too self-confident, didn’t you? You always said that the world couldn’t last as it was.’

  ‘What’s happened, Father?’ asked Collis.

  ‘It’s the bank,’ said Makepeace. ‘We’ve overstretched ourselves.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Makepeace nodded. ‘To the tune of two million dollars.’

  ‘Irrecoverable?’

  ‘Completely. All gone on worthless speculations and frauds. It was only discovered this morning, when Greenbaum heard from his agents in California, and it was a good thing he did, or we would have been taken for another million.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Collis.

  Makepeace gestured at all the papers and bonds strewn over his desk. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to work out. With any luck, I may be able to borrow two million for a limited while, and keep things going so that they look normal. But if there’s any fluctuation in the market, I could be very heavily pressed. The bank is right on the brink, Collis. Right on the brink.’

  ‘You mean you could go bankrupt?’

  ‘It’s a possibility
. If I were a betting man, like you, I’d say the odds were five to four against us. It depends mostly on finding a two-million-dollar loan.’

  ‘Is that what you meant when you said my meeting with Delphine was too late to do any good?’

  Makepeace nodded. He was plainly embarrassed. ‘If we could have leaned on Ohio Life and Mutual for a few months, without too many tricky questions being asked, well … I wouldn’t have liked doing it, but it would have been better than nothing.’

  ‘Have you spoken to George Spooner?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Very guardedly, of course. I didn’t tell him anything was wrong. But, even so, I didn’t get very far. He really wants to wait until we can present him with a full investment programme later in the year.’

  Collis went over to his father’s desk and looked down at the pages of figures and frantic notes, all written in that distinctive forward-sloping hand, in black marking ink.

  ‘What happens if you can’t find the money?’ he asked. ‘Is that the end of I. P. Woolmer’s Bank?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s more than that.’

  ‘I don’t understand. It’s not your money, is it? It won’t do your reputation any good, but you won’t be broke.’

  Makepeace gave a quick shake of his head. ‘You’re wrong, Collis. I shall be very broke. I sank a great deal of my own money into these speculations, and worse still, I borrowed from the bank.’

  Collis stared at him. ‘You borrowed from the bank?’

  His father looked away. ‘I know it’s out of character. It’s something I’ve never done before. But I believed I was right, what with the market so bullish this year. I believed I could make a quick, adventurous profit before the bottom started to fall out. It must fall out, of course, and it will. Too many of these speculative investments are built on nothing but clouds and moonshine. But I believed, with all my years of experience, that I could do it.’