Jack and Susan in 1913 (24 page)

“Wonderful! But I guess that's enough,” Junius Fane shouted, waving at someone inside the train. “Stop the cameras.”

“How was I to know?” Jack asked Susan. He'd
begged
five minutes' conversation with her. She'd assented with a dour nod.

“Mr. Fane made an announcement that there was to be a mock holdup.”

“That must have been when I was changing my clothes. And it looked real. The bandits looked real. Their horses were real. Their guns were real.”

“But, thank heaven, loaded with blanks,” said Susan. “As it was, those blows you landed were real. Didn't you recognize Mr. Perks and Mr. Westermeade? You'd seen them often enough at the studio.”

“They were wearing masks, remember?” Jack protested. “I was sure that the holdup was real. And I was certain that the bandit leader was going to shoot Ida in the back.”

“You must have thought you were saving her life,” said Susan thoughtfully. “You were very stupid, but very brave.” She didn't speak in a tone of voice that Jack could construe as admiration.

The passengers had returned to the train, laughing and excited by the staged robbery and by Jack's unplanned part in the moving picture adventure. The two actors, with bruised jaws and loosened teeth, were being tended to in the conductor's little cabin at the rear of the train. Jack and Susan sat at the back of the second to last car and talked in whispers, uncomfortably aware that everyone else in the car was making no secret of their interest in their exchange.

After a few moments' pause, Jack tried to think of a way to bring the conversation around to the subject of their engagement. He admitted to himself that Susan probably didn't consider it still on. The same subject was evidently on Susan's mind, because she also didn't seem to know how to begin.

“Hosmer told me about your most recent pack of lies,” she began.

“Every word was true,” Jack protested.

“I'm to believe that you are, in reality, a Wall Street broker, and that you gave up your family, your home, your position, and your friends, in order to impersonate a penniless inventor so that you could be near me? This is what I'm to believe? And find endearing? And to look upon as proof of your affection for me? You ask me to think of months of daily deception, high-handedness, and prevarication as a sign of your regard and respect? I'm to thank you for allowing me to believe that Mr. Fane was paying me thirty-five dollars for every script I wrote, when in reality, it was
you
who was placing five-dollar bills in those envelopes? I'm to think it was merely a beau's clever stratagem to advance me five hundred dollars so that I would have the opportunity of lending it to you again?”

Jack was silent under this barrage. She wasn't firing blanks. Jack's only comfort was that this speech was obviously rehearsed, which meant that she'd been thinking about him. Not with any generosity, it was true, but at least he'd been on her mind.

“The only things I have to thank you for, Jack Beaumont, or whatever your name is—”

“My name really is Jack Beaumont, I promise.”

She ignored the interruption. “—the only things I have to thank you for are severe humiliation, a broken leg, and the loss of my career on the stage.”

“Are you going to marry Hosmer?” Jack asked suddenly.

Susan stared at him. “Weren't you listening to me?”

“Of course. But are you going to marry Hosmer? I saw him showing you a ring.”

Susan spoke very deliberately. Outside, the sun spilled across fields of spring wheat. “Whether I marry, when I marry, and whom I marry are none of your business.”

“But it is my business,” Jack protested, “because you said you'd marry me.”

Susan shook her head in apparent disbelief. “I agreed to come in here to talk to you for the sole reason that I intend for this to be the last time that I ever speak to you in this life. If there is a heaven, if there is a hell, if there is something in between, and we, by chance, meet in any of those places, you're welcome to renew your suit. But not here, in New York, or Kansas, and particularly not in California. Let me try to put this simply, Mr. Beaumont—I never want to speak to you again. I would also like never to see you again, hear of you again or see your name in print except perhaps with a black border around it. Also, since you're evidently such a rich financier, I'd like my five hundred dollars back.”

“It's not your five hundred dollars,” said Jack. “
I
gave it to you in the first place.”

“Jay Austin gave it to me,” returned Susan coldly. “And as Jay Austin doesn't exist and apparently never did exist, the money is very much mine. So I want it back.”

Susan didn't believe Jack when he told her that he'd been fired and disinherited, and that what remained of that five hundred dollars was his only means in the world. Why should she believe anything he said? When he claimed that his plans for the camera improvement had been stolen, she wanted to know if the lies would
ever
stop. She went back into the rear car, and warned him that if he tried to talk to her again, she'd throw Tripod in his direction.

The train twisted through the mountains of Colorado, where the night was as black as the occasional tunnel. Jack stared morosely out of the window at nothing and was positively rude to the two forward young women who came to the rear of the car to praise with giggles his useless bravery against the moving-picture thieves.

What was he to do now? Here he was, on a train headed for Los Angeles, a place where he knew no one, a place where he had no hope of finding a job, a place he knew nothing whatever about except that oranges grew there and the sun set rather than rose over the ocean. Susan Bright, whom he loved, was no more than twenty feet away from him, but he had no more hope of obtaining her hand than he had of stepping outside, picking up the train, and turning it around heading back east.

“Pretty bleak,” he said aloud to himself.

“I beg your pardon?” said a voice at his side.

He turned, and saw Hosmer Collamore smiling down at him. “May I sit?” the cameraman asked.

Jack nodded. Already, at the other end of the car, the porter was making up berths. It was past nine o'clock. Jack hadn't eaten anything all day.

“I meant to visit you earlier,” said Hosmer, “but what with one thing and another…”

“Sorry I spoiled your scenes,” Jack apologized. “When I didn't see you in the crowd outside, I should have put two and two together and figured that you were inside filming the whole thing.”

“Mr. Fane thought we might as well use the trip for profit, and get some footage on the way out. No particular story yet, but there's always room for a train robbery somewhere. And I've been hopping out at every stop, filming the little towns and some of the countryside. Come in handy and save us some time, expense, and travel someday. Anyway, I don't think you spoiled it. We can always write you in as a character, and then you get killed in the next scene—we'll try to find somebody as tall as you to act as double—and Ida can weep bitter tears. Ida has it in her contract that she gets to weep in every picture.”

“How are Mr. Perks and Mr. Westermeade?” Jack asked, a little uncomfortably.

“Bearing up. But I wouldn't advise you to visit 'em just now. Wait till the swelling goes down, then buy 'em a box of cigars. Then it'll be right as roses again. Except it doesn't really matter, since we won't ever be seeing you again once we get to California.”

Jack looked at Hosmer sharply. “Who's ‘we'? What are you saying?”

“Why are you on this train?” Hosmer returned, as quickly.

“I came after Susan.”

“Suss don't want you coming after her.”

“She can speak for herself.”

“Yes, she can,” agreed Hosmer. “But so can her husband.”

“
H
ER HUSBAND!”

“We're engaged,” said Hosmer complacently. “And when I am her husband, I will have every right to speak for Suss. And right now, as the man to whom she has given her consent, I think I can say I don't like it very much that you came all the way across the country in pursuit of her when it is pretty clear that she doesn't want to be pursued by you. We don't need you running about, making trouble for us. And if you still don't believe it, ask Suss.”

“I like that idea,” said Jack, getting up instantly, and stretching one long leg over Hosmer's in order to get to the aisle.

“Oh, no,” said Hosmer, “ask her tomorrow, when we get into Los Angeles.”

“I'll ask her now.”

“Porter's already made up the berths, and Suss is lying there in a cotton nightdress and sweet repose, dreaming of me and our wedding night. Ask her tomorrow at the station, and then you may take leave of her and me forever. I was pleased and proud to be your friend on West Sixtieth Street, Jack Beaumont, but it's time for you to move along, and you know it as well as I know it, 'cause one and two make three, three's a crowd, and two can live as cheap as one. So if I were you, I'd dig in my pocket at the station tomorrow, and pull out the money needed for a ticket, and I'd hop on the next train back to New York, 'cause there's nothing for you in California but an aching heart and a burning head.”

With that advice, Hosmer Collamore got up and returned to the other car, leaving Jack Beaumont sitting all alone, his head throbbing.

The train reached Los Angeles near the end of the following day. The trip across the country had taken three nights and three days. Bedraggled, weary from too little sleep, soot-begrimed and dusty, frayed and short-tempered, the two dozen members of Mr. Fane's organization who had elected to make the move from one side of the continent to the other, staggered off the stuffy railway car into the warm California sunshine.

“It smells the way heaven is gonna smell,” said Miss Songar, who had spent the tedious hours reading a testament handed to her in St. Louis by a member of the Salvation Army. The scent of orange blossoms overcame even the machinery stench of a railway station. Massive mounds of red and yellow flowers boiled out of tubs at the doors of the station.

“Makes me feel even grubbier than I did,” complained Ida Conquest. “Just look at my feathers.”

Jack slipped out with the passengers in the other car, and rushed forward in hope of helping Susan with her bags. Susan had prepared for this contingency and taken Tripod off his leash. The dog leapt at Jack. Jack had also come prepared, and had in his hand another biscuit soaked in the sleeping draught he'd obtained from the St. Louis veterinarian. Too smart to be tricked more than once, Tripod jumped past the biscuit, worked his wagging head up under the cuff of Jack's right trouser leg, and sank his teeth into Jack's ankle.

Jack yelled in pain. Susan slowly came forward, and disengaged her pet. “Tripod speaks for me, Mr. Beaumont,” Susan said in a wintry voice. “California, I'm told, has many felicities—its climate, its natural scenery, its healthful air—but it will always be dear to me as the place where I managed to rid myself of you.”