Part 29 (2/2)
”Pokin' around.”
”Holy Hannah! When you didn't come back down, I didn't know what to think.”
Grigsby nodded. ”Listen, Ned. There's a colored fella travelin' with Wilde. Servant name of Henry. He move into another room?”
Winters nodded. ”He's in room 201 now. Wally said the manager, Mr. Vail, ordered him a new room.”
”He up there now?”
Winters nodded. ”Went out around eight, came back at ten-thirty.”
”You sure? You didn't maybe have yourself a catnap or two?”
”No sir, Marshal. Not a one. I been awake all night. They were all up in their rooms by midnight.” He leaned toward Grigsby. ”But, come on now, Marshal, you sure you can't tell me what's goin' on?”
”Positive. See you.”
From the hotel, Grigsby had ridden the mare back to his house, where he'd cleaned himself up, dressed in fresh clothes, and thrown some spare s.h.i.+rts and an extra union suit into his saddlebag. After leaving the horse at the livery stable, he had set off for the railroad station. He had arrived in Colorado Springs at six in the morning.
And now, as the horse jounced and rocked beneath his aching hip, Grigsby could see, over the tree line, against the bright blue of sky, the smudge of smoke that hung above the chimneys of Manitou Springs.
He realized, abruptly, that he hadn't had a drink since the apple brandy in Mathilde's room. Been so tickled with himself, probably, that he hadn't even thought about it.
He tried to remember the last time he'd gone three or four hours without taking a single drink. Without thinking about a drink. Not since before Clara left.
d.a.m.n, he thought. That was cause for a little celebration.
”d.a.m.n FINE LECTURE, Mr. Wilde,” said the mayor of Manitou Springs.
”Don't cuss, Cleveland,” said his wife.
From over their heads, beyond the now empty chairs aligned in precise rows beneath the glittering chandeliers, Oscar could make out Elizabeth McCourt Doe chatting with Mathilde de la Mole and a gaggle of Manitou Springs luminaries beside the closed French windows that led onto the ballroom's veranda.
”Good turnout, too,” said the Mayor. ”Almost as good as that fella d.i.c.kens got.”
This snared Oscar's attention.
”d.i.c.kens spoke here, did he?” he asked, and sipped at his champagne. Appalling stuff, flat and sulfurous.
”Sure did,” said the mayor. ”He read from that book of his, about the death of Little Nell. d.a.m.n fine writing. Nearly brought a tear to my eye, I don't mind telling you. Isn't that right, Mother?”
”Don't cuss, Cleveland,” said his wife.
”You know d.i.c.kens, Mr. Wilde?” asked the Mayor.
The mayor of Manitou Springs-Mr. Mudds, or Muggs, or something equally glum-was a jolly personage in a poorly tailored but extravagantly tailed dress coat who seemed utterly unaware that in the center of his round red face, roughly where his nose should have been installed, there bloomed an ent.i.ty the size of a pomegranate, veined and gullied and carbuncled. He was short and portly, with skin as taut as a sausage casing. Mrs. Mudds (or Muggs) was a small desiccated woman, prodigiously creased, like a gnome left too long in a pickling vat. She wore a low-cut dress which flaunted an expanse of what probably she believed to be decolletage, but which to Oscar more nearly resembled erosion.
A scrum of Manitou Springians stood huddled about, all of them leaning slightly forward, as though Oscar were standing at the bottom of a shallow crater in the parquet floor. All of them wore evening dress, and all of them looked at least as well fed as Mr. Muggs. No watercress and celery for this lot, except perhaps by the troughful.
They were all wealthy enough to have paid twenty dollars apiece for the lecture and for this ”intimate” champagne party. With the others milling about the ballroom, they were the elite of Manitou Springs-according to Vail, everybody who was anybody in the town. (”In other words,” Oscar had said, ”n.o.body.”) And at the moment none of them, alas, was Elizabeth McCourt Doe.
”Not personally,” Oscar said to the mayor. ”Although of course I know his works. I find them admirable. But I do sometimes wonder at the unusual number of pathetic little waifs he dispatches. In a novel by Mr. d.i.c.kens, one has only to come upon a pathetic little waif to know that the poor moppet is doomed. Sooner or later, usually after wasting away for several months, and for several chapters, he will breathe his last wretched little breath.” Oscar frowned thoughtfully. ”Do you suppose it possible that Mr. d.i.c.kens secretly dislikes children?”
The mayor turned to his wife, she evidently being the authority on literary matters.
”But I thought I read,” she said, frowning, ”that he's got children of his own? A lot of them, I believe. A big family.”
”Ah,” said Oscar. ”Perhaps that explains it.”
As Mrs. Muggs (or Mudds) a.s.similated this (or failed to), and as a few uneasy chuckles, all of these male, sputtered through the crowd, a female voice to Oscar's right asked him, ”Do you mean to tell us, Mr. Wilde, that you dislike children?”
Oscar turned. Beneath a sculpted ma.s.s of blue-white hair which possessed the dull seamless glow of a conquistador's helmet, the woman's jowly face was eloquently puckered in distaste. She was all combative shoulders and cannon-barrel b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and for a moment he felt like the owner of a skiff who looks up and discovers that a frigate is bearing down upon him on a collision course.
”On the contrary, madam. I think they are one of life's great treasures. A joy to us when we are in our prime, and a solace in our decline. As soon as I can afford to do so, I intend to hire several of them.”
More laughter this time, some of it shocked. The frigate's face remained shuttered.
Oscar glanced over at Elizabeth McCourt Doe.
Still gaily smiling with her entourage.
The least she could do was look over in this direction.
He swallowed some champagne. What was it that Holliday, the dentist-gunman, had called that bourbon? Donkey p.i.s.s.
”Mr. Wilde?”
Oscar turned. A small silver-haired man, warm brown puppy eyes peering out from a tracery of amused crinkles. ”Jim Cathcart, editor of the Sentinel. I'll bet you've heard this before”-he smiled an engaging deprecatory smile-”but I guess you can understand that I've got to ask you anyway. What are your feelings so far about America?”
Oscar beamed down at this pleasant little man. ”I can scarce describe my feelings. And of course I can scarce describe America. How could one describe a thing which by its very nature is indescribable? The vastness, the richness, the splendor-they boggle the mind and beggar even my own powers of description.”
Around him, heads nodded in complacent agreement. His puppy eyes s.h.i.+ning, Cathcart asked him, ”Would you like to comment on which parts of it you've liked best?”
”I can answer you without hesitation,” said Oscar. ”More than any other I've enjoyed this Colorado country of yours, filled as it is with splendid vistas and n.o.ble prospects.” Not likely that anyone in this flock knew Johnson's comment to Boswell.
Clearly not. The remark had set more heads abob, and had apparently even taken some of the wind from the frigate's sails. Her jowls had unclenched appreciably.
”Does that mean,” casually asked Cathcart, his brown eyes still warm and s.h.i.+ning, ”that you don't care for the cities of America?”
Oscar smiled again. So: not a puppy after all: a fox. Ah well, Reynard, no nasty quotations from me tonight. ”Not at all,” he said. ”I found Denver, for example, altogether fascinating.”
Heads nodded, indicating that this was not an unpopular opinion. Everybody seemed (rather annoyingly) content to let Cathcart continue playing the part of inquisitor.
”Is it true, Mr. Wilde,” Cathcart asked him, ”that you're traveling with a servant and two steamer trunks packed with clothes?”
Probably none of the Manitou Springs gentry gathered round would be in any way ruffled by the idea of Oscar's traveling with a servant. Those who didn't employ servants themselves doubtless envied those who did. Some of them, possibly most of them, doubtless looked back with fondness to the good old days of slavery. Cathcart was plainly pursuing some plum he could present the rest of his readers.h.i.+p, the simple untutored yeoman, the honest untutored laborer.
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