Saratoga Trunk (19 page)

“Send her away. Shut the door.”

“Tonight,
chéri.
That endless journey. Tired.”

He sighed, he released her, he passed a hand across his eyes with the old gesture of one dispelling a mist. “How are you, Ma’am?” Then they both giggled as though he had said something exquisitely witty.

“If you had called me Ma’am once more down there I’d have screamed.”

“I sure would have admired to hear you, Ma’am. Only I’d hated to have you scared Bart thataway. Say, how in Sam Hill did you get him eating out of your hand? When I saw you come in with him easing along beside you I thought for a minute, well, hell’s bells, how in tarnation can I stand here pretending I don’t know her when that little mama’s boy is bowing and scraping and running the whole shebang!”

“Jealous already!”

“You’re damn whistlin’ I am!”

“There is much more to come. You must remember what we’re here for.”

“Look, honey. I’ve been thinking. I can make out for both of us. There’s money to burn around here at the Club House and over at the track. I’m used to stud and red dog but I’ve been making out pretty good at roulette and faro. And I’ve been sitting in on poker games upstairs at the Club House in the private rooms. Say! Look!” He brought forth a wallet, his dexterous hands ruffled a sheaf of yellow-backed bills. “We can clean up pretty and then light out for somewhere else.”

Anger, cold and hard, stiffened her whole body. Her eyes narrowed, her jaw set so that the muscles suddenly showed rigid. Maroon had tossed the fat wallet onto the marble-topped center table. Now her hand seized on it, she drew in her breath with a little hiss, then she hurled the leather-enclosed packet across the room where it lay in a corner of the floor, its golden leaves fluttering a moment before it subsided. He stared at her, uncertainly. He had never before seen her in such anger.

“Poker games!” Her tone was venomous. “Poker games, when there are fools here worth millions and millions! Do you think I came here to pick up dollar bills like those girls you told me of in your cheap dance halls in the West! Do you! Do you!” Then quietly, venomously, “Get out! Get out of my room.”

Kaka appeared in the bedroom doorway, a silken garment in her hand. The bewildered Texan stared at her. Kaka tossed the garment onto a chair and glided swiftly to the distraught woman. Clio thrust her away, but the Negress heeded this no more than if she had been dealing with a tired child. She began to unfasten the snug bodice of Clio’s dress, swifdy and deftly she peeled it from her as she stood, and the heavy silken garment slid to the floor with a soft slithering sound and lay in a crumpled circle at the girl’s feet while she still glared at the Texan and he stared dazedly at her. “My poor little tired baby!” Kakaracou murmured to the figure standing there in the embroidered and beribboned corset-cover and petticoats. Then, over her shoulder to Maroon, “Come, lift her out, lak lil
bébé,
I put her in bed.”

“Too hot,” murmured Clio, her eyes half closed, her anger fled as suddenly as it had come. “I’ll lie on that funny couch there in the bedroom. And you’ll sit and talk to me, Clint, and Kaka will go on unpacking. I love it like that, cozy, and everyone near me, and things stirring.”

As though she had been a doll he picked her up in his arms while Kaka scooped up the dress, and together they deposited her on the couch with its unyielding expanse of brocatel, its lumpy head-rest, in the room littered with the silks and ribbons and bottles and jars and gowns and bonnets only now unpacked by Kakaracou.

“Hep shoes,” ordered Kaka. Maroon knelt with the Negress while each removed one of the little gray kid boots. She slipped a sheer white wrapper over Clio’s head, thrust the girl’s limp arms into the long beribboned sleeves, briskly buttoned it at the throat and tucked a tiny French hand-wrought pillow under the weary head.

“Ah-h-h-h!” breathed Clio, luxuriously. Suddenly she was wide awake; alert. “
Chéri,
I am so sorry. No, don’t go away. Presently I will sleep. Not now. Come, sit here, talk to me. I didn’t sleep, not one hour on that dreadful train, all the way from New Orleans I have not slept. Kaka can sleep standing upright like a cow. Really. And Cupide curled anywhere in a corner, like a monkey. Now, let us talk. This is wonderful. So cozy and gay but peaceful, too. I am happy! I am happy!”

“Hold on, look here,” Maroon remonstrated, though only halfheartedly, for she looked so young and small there on the sofa amongst the cushions. “Now you say you’re happy. But I’ve got a temper too, strong as horseradish. You ever let go at me like that again, why, I’m sure liable to punish you, pronto. Screeching at me like a crazy mare. You try that again, girl, you’ll be here alone.”

She pretended to cower in fright among the pillows, it was impossible to maintain a role of offended dignity in the face of her outrageous simperings. But he refused to smile, he took on a gruffly paternal tone. “Likely you’re lightheaded on account of having no sleep and no decent food, probably.”

He strolled into the sitting room, retrieved the scorned wallet, came back, still talking, and stuffed the billfold into his breast pocket. “Easy come, easy go, that’s my motto, but just the same I’ve got more respect for money than to take and throw it thataway. Better let Kaka fetch you some dinner, maybe that’ll settle you.”

“No. When the train stopped at that town—Poughkeepsie— what a name! When the train stopped there everyone got out and there were women with baskets covered over with clean white napkins, and underneath the most delicious chicken and biscuits and cake. We bought everything. Even Kaka had to say it was not bad. Didn’t you, Kaka?” Kaka made an unladylike sound. “Well, at least we could eat it.”

The Texan was not yet quite mollified. “I never did see a woman grown treated like a baby before. Getting undressed and put to sleep in the middle of the day. Ma, she stayed on her feet and not a yip out of her when she was just about dying.”

“I know. She must have been wonderful, like the pioneer American women in the books. I am not at all like that.” She dismissed the whole matter with the air of one who finds it unimportant. “When I am ill I complain and when I am angry I shout and when I am happy I laugh. It is simpler.” She stirred luxuriously among the pillows, she smiled engagingly up at him. “Stop scowling like a cross little boy! Let’s talk, all cozy and comfortable. Kaka, move that chair nearer. Now. Tell me. Tell me everything. From the beginning.” She clasped her hands like a child waiting to be told a fairy tale.

Rather sulkily he lounged in the armchair by the sofa, his long booted legs stretched out. “Nothing much to tell, comes to that.”

“Clint,
chéri,
don’t be like that. Here we are in Saratoga where we shall make our fortunes. Now then, those rich old men, those wicked old men who sit and rock on that huge fantastic piazza, tell me about them. Have you talked with them? Do they think you are big and important and Western, as we planned?”

In spite of himself he began to kindle to his story. “Well, it ain’t as easy as all that, sugar. They’re a special breed of varmints. I thought I knew something about what was behind men’s faces from watching poker players. I’ve sat in twenty-four-hour games where I got to know that a muscle that kind of twitched in a player’s jaw meant four aces, and once I spotted a royal flush from just happening to notice that Steve Fargo’s face was dead pan but the pupils of his eyes had widened till you couldn’t rightly see the real color of his eyes. But these fellas, they ain’t human . . . Don’t raise your left eyebrow when I say ain’t. I know better but I’m talking Texas every day now, like you said, practicing . . . Well, there’s a kind of coldblooded quiet about them you can’t get at. It ain’t money they’re after. It’s each other’s skins. They’ve already got so much money they can’t keep track of it, no way. I got it straight. Look at Willie Vanderbilt, his pa, the old Commodore—and say, he was no more a Commodore than I’m a Colonel—did I tell you they
took to
calling me Colonel around here, down at the track and over to the Club House—Colonel Maroon—well, as I was saying, the old Commodore left Willie ninety-four million dollars and damned if he hasn’t run it up to two hundred million. Two hundred million, honey! We don’t sit in that game, Clio.”

“Why not! Why not, I’d like to know! Are you afraid?”

“No. I just ain’t interested enough in money to go out and knife these sharks for it. It ain’t money with them. It ain’t even power. It’s like they were playing a game, and the cards are people and the stakes are railroads or mines or water power. They ain’t human. They don’t care for human beings or for their own country or honesty or any decent living thing. These men, they’re not like anybody you ever met up with. They don’t run with the herd, they don’t hunt in packs. They go it alone, dog eat dog. And yet you wouldn’t rightly call what they’ve got by a name like—say—courage or independence. They put me in mind of jackals more than anything—they ain’t dogs and they ain’t wolves—they’ve just got the worst habits and make-up of both. You want me to be like them, Clio?”

“You don’t have to be like them. You only have to be cleverer than they are.”

“Yep. That’s all. I could scheme to grab ahead of’em. But you see, my folks, they were the giving kind, not the taking. They liked to build up, not tear down. When you think how people came over here from the old country and worked like slaves and went through hardships would kill us today. Pa clearing the land and planting it up and Grandpaw at the Alamo—why, say, my fingers they just itch to take out my gun when I see that pack of varmints sitting there, rocking, so soft-spoken and mild-looking. They’re so poison mean their lives are threatened all the time. And that’s why you never see them without two or three big kind of dumb-looking fellows standing around near by, faces like big biscuits with a couple of raisins for eyes. They’re bodyguards. I bet I could pick one or two off right here from this window.”

“Don’t talk like a foolish boy, Clint. They must be quite simple, really, these American millionaires. Simple and cruel, like children. Taking each other’s toys away by force and running off with them. This Van Steed—he seemed rather silly, I thought. Actually frightened of his mother. And a weak digestion. Pink cheeks and white eyelashes and stammers a little. Wouldn’t you think he would have suspected my clumsy little trick! But he swallowed it. Well, now—really!”

He got up and began to pace the floor; then he perched on the footboard of the bed, slouching a litde as though he were sitting on the top rail of a Texas corral fence. “Funny thing, they’re all like that, one way or another. Sick men. It’s like they knew death was on ‘em, and they had to work fast. Vanderbilt looks like he’d burst a blood vessel any minute, his face is red but it isn’t a red you get from health. Now Gould, he’s got a bad heart and they say consumption. It’s common talk he hardly ever sleeps, and times he spits up blood. Nights when everybody’s asleep, two, three o’clock in the morning, he’s sitting there on the piazza, rocking, and all day sending telegrams to New York or talking to the men he sends for, so quiet you couldn’t catch a word if you were passing by slow. Asks the band to play his favorite tune, ‘Lead, Kindly Light.’ . . . You think you can come here and lasso a critter like this Bart Van Steed! He’s one-third bronco, one-third mule and one-third Mama’s boy.”

“I thought he seemed quite charming.”

“Quite charming,” he mimicked in a maddening falsetto.

But she only smiled at him as at a rather naughty but engaging child. “Oh, I wish I weren’t so sleepy. There is so much I want to know. Just to hear your voice. But this cool delicious air after all that heat. It is as if I were drugged.”

He forsook his perch on the footboard to stand over Kaka busy with her bags and boxes. “Kaka, pull down the shades, she’ll go to sleep, and we’ll have a drive at five o’clock, or maybe a horseback ride if you feel like it, Clio.”

Kaka glanced over her shoulder at her mistress, feverish and heavy-eyed. She spoke as if Clio were not in the room, her English very precise. “When she looks like that she will do things her own way. She has been like that for a month now, until she is ready to drop with fatigue, and me I ache in every bone and Cupide’s legs are an inch shorter from running.”

“Well, do something, can’t you! She’ll make herself sick.”

“She was like that in Paris before we came to America. She was like that before she met you in the Market.” She dropped her voice, she became suddenly the black woman, superstitious, witchlike. “She under a
wanga.”

“A what? What’s that?”

“Wanga.
A spell. I give her witch powder but”—her voice dropped so that her mobile lips mouthed the words almost soundlessly—”no good because Miss Clio she a witch woman herself.”

He laughed a little uncomfortably. “Listen at you!”

“What are you two whispering about? Kaka, don’t unpack everything. We may not stay in these rooms.”

He strode over to her then and stood over her menacingly. “What do you mean—not stay here! You’re plumb crazy. You’ve been talking crazy ever since you got here. Where’re you aiming to go!”

“He said the cottages—that man downstairs. Is it more chic, there in the cottages?”

“God, I don’t know! Nothing you’ve said since you drove in here makes a mite of sense. I’ve a mind to get out of here myself, and leave you.”

“No, you won’t, Clint
chéri.”

“Why won’t I!” In a miserable imitation of truculence.

“You won’t,” she repeated, equably. Then, persisting, “The cottages. Tell me.”

“Hell’s bells! I don’t know, I tell you! I don’t even know why they call them cottages. It’s crazy. They’re the rooms at the back where the hotel’s kind of U-shaped and verandas running all around. I don’t want to talk about hotels!”

“He said a garden.”

“Well, there’s a garden back there, right pretty, with big trees and flower-beds. Mornings and evenings the hotel band plays there, and when there’s a hotel hop, why, they string up colored lanterns. Some folks they like to sit there in the garden. Oh, God, I don’t know! This is the looniest talk I ever heard! Look, you’re what they call punch-drunk, you need sleep, you’d better let Kaka put you—”