Part 19 (1/2)

A rich man's pampered son and a.s.suredly not a b.a.s.t.a.r.d, thinks Harmon Liges with a thrill of hatred-”Like myself.”

Shortly afterward, however, when breakfast is brought to him, Liges relaxes. Devours with his usual appet.i.te beefsteak, eggs and potatoes; drinks several cups of black coffee; lingers over his own copy of the Gazette, though columns of print fatigue his eyes and arouse in him a vague feeling of resentment and an urge to do hurt; luxuriantly, he fouls the air about him with a long thin Mexican cigar; quite by accident glancing up as the gentleman across the way glances toward him . . . with that faint, simpering smile of the Easterner hoping to be made welcome. (Apparently the stranger doesn't note the similarity between himself and Liges, for Liges doesn't look like ”himself” these days, having changed his appearance considerably, and practicably, from that of Elias Harden, who'd run a surprisingly successful gambling operation in Ouray, Colorado, the previous winter; just as Elias Harden bore but a superficial resemblance to Jeb Jones, an itinerant salesman for Doctor Merton's All-Purpose Medical Elixir, previously.) Inspired, Liges smiles warmly, bracketing the cigar; being so clearly a Westerner, he feels it his obligation to be kindly and welcoming to an Easterner. This smile is magic! For Father has said Smile and any fool will smile with you. The young man, lonely Roland Shrikesdale, leans forward eager as a puppy, nearly spilling his cup of cream-marbled coffee, and smiles in Liges's direction.

So it begins. And no one to blame.

SO LIGES AND Shrikesdale meet on the morning of 10 April 1914 in the s.p.a.cious dining room of the Hotel Edinburgh, and Liges invites Shrikesdale to join him for more coffee; the young men talk amicably of travel in Colorado, and of hunting and fis.h.i.+ng in the remote Medicine Bow Mountains, where Liges has been; an oddity of their meeting being that, though Harmon Liges introduces himself in a fairly forthright manner as the superintendent of the Camp Yankee Basin Mine, though in fact he's the former superintendent of this ill-fated mine, Roland Shrikesdale introduces himself as-Robert Smith!

(”Which means that Shrikesdale is a name I should know,” Liges shrewdly reasons, ”-for he hopes to hide his ident.i.ty. But it's a name I shall know, shortly.”)

Yet during the several weeks of their friends.h.i.+p, up to the morning of his disappearance in the foothills of wild Larimer County, the nervous young Easterner continued to represent himself to Liges as ”Robert Smith”-a harmless if puzzling bit of subterfuge Liges thought more appealing than not. Always encourage it when a man will lie to you Father has said for, in the effort of lying, it will never occur to him that another might play his game, too. And it pleased him who had no friends he could trust, in truth no friends at all, to be in the position of warmly ”befriending” the incognito Easterner who declined to speak of his family except to indicate that they were ”financially secure, yet sadly contentious” and that his widowed mother perhaps loved him ”too exclusively”-all this while knowing that he was in fact befriending Roland Shrikesdale III of Philadelphia, princ.i.p.al heir at the age of thirty-two to the great Shrikesdale fortune. (In Denver, Liges learned within a day or two that Roland was the son and grandson of the infamous ”Hard Iron” Shrikesdales who'd made millions of dollars in the turbulent years following the Civil War: their investments being in railroads, coal mines, grains, asbestos and predominantly nails. Roland's mother was the former Anna Emery Sewall, heiress to the Sewall fortune (barrels, nails), a Christian female who'd brought censure and ridicule upon herself several years before by giving more than $1 million to the Good Samaritan Animal Hospital in Philadelphia, with the consequence that the animal hospital was better equipped than nearly any hospital for human beings in the region. The Shrikesdales were a contentious lot, quarreling among themselves over such issues as how to deal with striking miners in their home state: whether to use the militia or hire a battalion of even more bloodthirsty Pinkerton's men, and risk public criticism. (The Pinkerton mercenaries were hired.) Roland was an only child, rumored to be almost frantically doted upon by his mother; though appalled by the excesses of his family, particularly the cruelty with which they treated their workers, Roland stood to inherit most of the fortune when she died. Since there were numerous Shrikesdale and Sewall cousins of his approximate age, some of them involved in running the family's companies, it was believed that they would share in it as well-to some degree. Liges's sources concurred that Roland, or ”Robert Smith,” was generally believed to be somewhat simpleminded; not mentally deficient exactly, but not mentally efficient; a pa.s.sive, weakly affable, religious young man with little interest in the Shrikesdale riches, let alone in increasing them.) ”And 'Robert' is so wonderfully trusting,” Liges thought. ”The very best species of friend.”

SO IT HAPPENED that Harmon Liges, ex-superintendent of the Camp Yankee Basin Mine, volunteered to show young Robert Smith the West, and to be his protector; for trusting young men traveling alone in those days, and giving signs of being well-to-do, did require protection from more experienced travelers. What plans they made together! What adventures lay in store for Mrs. Anna Emery's sheltered child, whose imagination had been flamed, from early boyhood, by such popular tales of the West as Owen Wister's The Virginian, Bret Harte's ”The Luck of Roaring Camp” and ”The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” Mark Twain's Roughing It and Teddy Roosevelt's celebration of Anglo-Saxon masculinity in The Winning of the West and The Strenuous Life. Harmon Liges had never read these, nor would have wished to, but he took, it seemed, an almost brotherly delight in sharing with his charge plans of camping in the mountains; hunting, and fis.h.i.+ng; visiting ”a typical gold mine”; visiting ”a typical ranch”; riding, by horseback, the treacherous canyon trails ”as natives do.” In addition there were, here and there, such notorious establishments as the Trivoli Club in Denver, the Hotel de la Paix in Boulder, the Black Swan in Central City, and a few others to which, Liges said hesitantly, he'd bring Smith if Smith wished; though such places were likely to seem vulgar and lacking in dignity to a Philadelphian.

”'Vulgar' and 'lacking in dignity'? How so?” Robert Smith asked, blinking eagerly. ”In what way, Harmon?”

”In a way of presenting females-I mean, women.” Liges frowned and stared at his hands, as if overcome by embarra.s.sment. ”That's to say-in the way such women present themselves. To men.”

It turned out that Smith had never traveled farther west before this than Akron, Ohio, where he, and his mother, had visited Sewall relatives; this trip to Colorado was the great adventure of his life. In fact, he'd left home in defiance of his mother's wishes . . . and he'd left home alone, which he had never done before. ”So it may be that these are the very persons I ought to meet, if I'm to make a 'man' of myself once and for all,” he said, s.h.i.+fting almost uneasily in his seat. ”That is, of course, Harmon-if you'll be my guide.”

Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt's cattle ranching in Dakota, and his much-publicized hunting expeditions in the Rocky Mountains, Africa and elsewhere, it had become a tradition of sorts for men of good family to distinguish themselves in the wilderness (or, in most cases, as with Roosevelt himself, the quasi wilderness): that they might be declared fully and incontestably male, hundreds upon thousands of wild creatures must die. (In Africa alone, Roosevelt killed two hundred ninety-six lions, elephants, water buffaloes, and smaller creatures.) Though Harmon Liges had resided in the West less than five years, he had encountered a number of wealthy sportsmen during that time, bent on bagging as much ”wild game” as possible, with the least amount of discomfort and danger; but never had he encountered anyone quite like Smith. It was usually the case, for instance, that such gentlemen traveled in small caravans, bringing cooks, valets, and even butlers with them up into the mountains, and camping in elegant walled tents, in the most idyllic of circ.u.mstances. (One of the most notorious of the luxury expeditions, hosted by Mr. Potter Palmer of the great Palmer Ranch in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1909, involved some fifteen covered wagons, approximately forty horses, and two servants for each of his twenty-five honored guests; the hunters bagged hundreds of wild animals and birds, but ate few of them, preferring the less ”gamey” food they had brought with them in tins.) Yet here was the heir to the great Shrikesdale fortune, entirely alone in the West, unescorted, and unprotected-except for Harmon Liges.

On the whole, Liges thought that admirable.

On the whole, he rather liked Smith. Or would have liked him, had he been in the habit of ”liking.” In any case it was difficult not to imagine himself, in his mind's eye, as a dream-distortion of Smith-coa.r.s.ely dark where Smith was coa.r.s.ely pale, muscular where Smith was merely fleshy, given a rough sort of hauteur by his Vand.y.k.e beard, where Smith, clean-shaven as a baby, exuded frankness, innocence, and unfailing hope. (”He's the man I might have been,” Harmon Liges thought one night, sleepless, a curious pang in his chest, ”-if his father had been mine.”) LINGERING COMPANIONABLY OVER the remains of a venison dinner, as Smith sips coffee marbled with cream and sweetened with teaspoons of sugar, and Liges smokes a Mexican cigar, in the zestful, smoky atmosphere of the Trivoli Club, they speak of many things; or, rather, Smith speaks and Liges attentively listens. Smith, like most shy, self-conscious individuals, has discovered that it's easy, wonderfully easy, to talk, if only someone will listen.

Clever ”Robert Smith”!-he doesn't once blunder and mention the name Shrikesdale; or Castlewoood Hall-the family estate in Philadelphia; nor does he hint that his family, and he, are burdened with wealth. Yet it wouldn't require an unnaturally sharp-witted observer (and Harmon Liges is sharp-witted, indeed) to gather by way of allusions and a.s.sumptions that Smith is surely not ”Smith”; an anonymous American; but comes from a most unusual family. A Scottish nanny named Mary Maclean . . . an English governess named Miss Crofts . . . a Shetland pony named Blackburn . . . Grandfather's house in Philadelphia . . . Grandfather's private railway car . . . a ”cottage” in Newport . . . a house in Manhattan (overlooking the Park) . . . a nursery farm on Long Island . . . a small horse ranch in Bucks County, Pennsylvania . . . Mother's gardens, Mother's art collection, Mother's charities . . . the sporting activities (yachting, sailing, polo, tennis, skiing) in which the ill-coordinated youth could not partic.i.p.ate, to his and his family's chagrin . . . preparatory school at St. Jerome's and college at Haverford and a year at Princeton Theological Seminary . . . .

”I hope you won't laugh at me,” Smith says earnestly, fixing his moist brown eyes on Liges's face, ”but it is experience, and experience alone, I crave. You cannot understand, perhaps, what it is like to be nearly thirty-three years old, yet never to have lived as a man; never to have gone anywhere without Mother-except to school, and there she visited me as often as possible. (Not of course that I minded at the time, because I was terribly lonely, and homesick, and miserable as a child, and dearly loved her: which was ever my predicament-!) When I should have begun a career of my own, perhaps a serious career in the ministry, I did not, because Mother prevailed upon me to accompany her to Newport, or to Paris, or to Trinidad; when I should have cultivated friends of my own, and become acquainted with young women, I did not, because Mother was taken ill; or I was taken ill myself. And so the years went by. And so I have so little to show for them, I am quite frightened . . . .This past winter, for instance, I suffered from a mysterious illness that settled in my chest, and drove my temperature up as high as one hundred and three degrees, and forced me to cancel all my plans for nearly two months . . . during which time I lay abed looking idly through books of photographs of the Rocky Mountains, and dreaming of this . . . this trip, this escape, to I know not what! . . . though part of the time poor Mother nursed me . . . insisted upon nursing me, despite her own ill health . . . for she had suffered a stroke of some kind a few years ago . . . though it was never called such . . . a 'fainting spell,' Dr. Thurman called it . . . a 'spasm of the brain' . . . from which she eventually recovered; or so it is believed. In any case I lay weak with fever for a very long time and during that period, I'm ashamed to say, I often exulted in my sickness . . . for I was free to dream of the mountains, and of the deserts, and of horses, and rivers, and hunting, and fis.h.i.+ng, and such gentlemen as you . . . though, dear Harmon, I could never have imagined you! . . . never. But at the same time I could relax in Mother's care, and take no thought for any of the family problems, and forbid her even to mention the contretemps between one or another of my cousins . . . for, you know, Bertram is always fighting with Lyle, and Lyle is always fighting with Willard, and Uncle Stafford spurs them on as if he glories in such behavior . . . nor is Great-aunt Florence (my mother's aunt) any better. Ah, they are such a family! And Mother and I are quite terrified of them! . . . ever since Father's death, when everything began to go wrong. (For that was shortly after poor President McKinley died; and Roosevelt was sworn into office; and the trouble began with Mr. Morgan . . . and was it Mr. Hill? . . . and the Northern Pacific Railroad . . . and the stock market collapse, which I never understood; and think it all a disgusting business, in any case, profit making at the expense of others.) Despite my illness, however, I wasn't truly unhappy for there was always Mother . . . there is always Mother. Are you close to your mother, Harmon?”

Harmon Liges, staring raptly at his friend's face, seems not to hear the query at first. Then he frowns, and replies succinctly-”My mother died at my birth. And my father, too. I mean-not long afterward. End of story.”

”Really? You were an orphan?”

Liges shrugs indifferently.

”But what does it feel like, to be an orphan?”

Again, Liges shrugs indifferently.

”I suppose, to an orphan, his condition seems . . . a natural one. As mine, so very different, seems natural to me,” Smith says slowly. He rubs his eyes as if overcome with emotion; perhaps it's pity for his friend, or a sudden pang of nostalgia for Mother. He says, after a moment, smiling, ”But how comforting it was, when Mother stayed at my bedside, reading to me for hours as she had when I was a small child! Mother's favorite book of the Bible is Proverbs, which is surely a beautiful book though difficult to grasp. Mother reads so well, one almost doesn't mind that the verse is rather like a riddle sometimes- 'Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep; so shall thy poverty come as one that travelleth, and thy want as an armed man.'

All very poetical; but what d'you think it means?”

Seeing that the plump young Smith takes his own question so seriously, and that his eyes fairly s.h.i.+ne with ardor, Liges checks the impulse to shrug again; saying, instead, in as thoughtful a manner as he can summon forth, ”The ways of G.o.d are inscrutable, it's said. His riddles are not for us to decipher.”

How the world is honeycombed with riddles, in fact.

With products of the poetic imagination, fantastical notions and man-made fancies that, to the ma.s.ses of mankind, yet seem wholly real.

If mankind will agree, to collectively believe.

The value of gold, for instance.

Gold, silver, diamonds-”precious stones.”

All mere fancy, if you think of it. Worthless minerals in themselves, yet, as commodities, forms of complicity; delusions worth untold millions of dollars . . . if men will but consent to believe.

And here in the vast West, mankind's very imagination seems limitless. Where in the overly settled, mapped and calibrated East, too many people, among them overseers of the commonweal, make it their business to pry into a man's private affairs.

In New York State, for instance, even in the middle of Muirkirk-there he was fated to be ”Harwood Licht.” So long as his tyrant of a father guided his life, he was fated to be ”Harwood Licht.” And, in a deep spiritual sense, he acknowledges that he is, and will always be ”Harwood Licht”-for there's no gainsaying the fact of blood inheritance, the potent Licht blood that courses through his veins. Out of Muirkirk mud, a lineage to conquer Heaven. So, the temporary impersonation of, say, Elias Harden, Jeb Jones, Harmon Liges or their predecessors Hurricane Brown and Harry Washburn, count for little: hardly more than masks, to be worn and removed at will. Or whim. Or necessity.

This, Harwood's father would understand well. Every action of which Harwood is capable, his father would understand well; and, surely, since the old man's blood courses through the younger's veins, approve.

”One day, I'll make myself known to him,” Harwood vows. ”I'll make him proud of me, one day. And Thurston utterly gone.”

(For Harwood had the vague notion that Thurston had in fact been hanged, and was of no more consequence to anyone. End of story.) Surprisingly, these past several years, Harwood has become a thoughtful man, at least when idle and not absorbed in the energies of The Game. Like Abraham Licht he sees little profit in brooding on the past unless such mental exertion yields future rewards; but of course there are interludes in a man's life (hiding in the desolate hills above Ouray, for example, or for six days and nights ensconsed in the filthy Larimer County jail near-devoured alive by lice) when one has little choice but to brood.

And to plot.

Perfect strategies of revenge.

For all the world is the Enemy, as Father taught.

”And I'll certainly never make Thurston's mistake,” Harwood thinks, jeering. ”To kill a b.i.t.c.h of a woman, a screamer, as he did; and to fail to escape.” He laughs, thinking of Thurston swinging on the gallows. His tall Viking-fair elder brother whom women made cow-eyes at in the street, while taking not the slightest notice of him, so much more the virile and stronger of the two. ”That's the one unforgivable sin-to fail to escape.”

Like Abraham Licht, Harwood is an angry man.

It matters not why, or at what-his feeling consumes itself, and justifies itself.

Always he feels he's being cheated. This is the American credo-I'm being cheated! Somebody else, anybody else, is doing better than I am; deserving no more, but reaping far more than I am; life cheats me, or other men cheat me, or women; I have yet to receive my due, and never will. If liked, I'm not sufficiently liked. If loved, not sufficiently loved. If admired, not sufficiently admired. If feared, not sufficiently feared. Harwood's numerous ident.i.ties have yielded numerous rewards, it's true, and there have been times when his pockets have bulged with thousands of dollars; but never so much as he expected or deserved. Never so much as another man might have reaped in his place.

I could murder you all he thinks pleasantly, strolling along the bustling Denver streets.

If only you had a single neck, I could murder you all with my hands. The memory of that woman's neck (the woman's name now forgotten, for Harwood is careless about details) twitching in his fingers.

He's twenty-eight years old with the look of a man who's never been a boy. The hooded eyes, sullen mouth, hair like limp chicken feathers, unkempt whiskers and sideburns, musclebound shoulders, the fighter's rolling gait . . . In the casual observer, even another male, Harwood arouses the apprehension one might feel for an aggrieved bison or a coiled rattlesnake. Poor Harwood: even when he smiles, his teeth proclaim his anger; when his linen is fresh it isn't, somehow, fresh; on him, aftershave cologne smells like bacon grease; a purloined gold signet ring edged in diamonds, shoved onto his smallest finger, looks like trash. Yet he has his dignity. He has his pride. He has his plans.

”One day, everyone in the United States will take notice of me,” he thinks, ”-whatever my G.o.d-d.a.m.ned name.”