Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks
‘He won’t want to leave little Daniel. And Sonia.’
‘I think he will. And I think it would be a good thing if he does.’
Kitty looked unconvinced. ‘What about the cost and all that time away?’
‘The railways are not expensive. In that article Valade showed me, there was a story of the different railroads competing for custom. You could get from Chicago to the Pacific for a dollar. The voyage would cost a good deal, I imagine, but we have a surplus at the bank. As for the time, I think if it could be done in three months, we could manage. Also, it is not as if he would not be working. He would have nothing else to do but read – though I think we should give him some Walter Scott or Dickens rather than Emil Kraepelin.’
Thomas mentioned the idea to Sonia, diffidently, in case she might think he was trying to interfere; to his surprise, she did not resist.
‘I should miss him most dreadfully, but it is not as though I do not have family and friends around me. I am certain that Jacques would benefit from such a venture. It is not just that he needs a rest, it is that he needs to gather himself to go further.’
‘Exactly,’ said Thomas, looking a little curiously at his sister.
Jacques was more difficult to persuade. He argued that he had work which no one else could do and that Sonia needed his presence, particularly now that she had a child. She gently pointed out to him that, fond though he was, he took no care of the infant, seeing him only for a few minutes in the evening, while as for her own needs, she alone was in a position to judge them. Thomas assured him that they could cover his absence, and proposed to offer part-time work to someone he had met in Vienna, Peter Andritsch, a bear-like, bearded man in his thirties who had studied under Janet at the Salpêtrière before setting up as a nerve specialist in Vienna, where he had found the competition intense.
With all his arguments benevolently forestalled, Jacques had no choice but to acquiesce, though he felt wounded by Sonia’s easy compliance and suspicious of Thomas’s motives. He felt as though he had been banished, sent into exile for his failures, by the two people he had most loved.
The person most sympathetic, oddly enough, was his former patient, Katharina. She occupied herself with planning a route for him and investigating how long it would take. The fastest Atlantic crossing, she established, was by the White Star steamships Teutonic and Majestic, which could make the crossing from Cobh, in Ireland, to New York in five and a half days. She showed him a picture of the Teutonic leaving Liverpool, with her twin yellow funnels and triple mast with the company flag showing its white star on a beautiful scarlet background.
‘I wish I was coming myself,’ she said. ‘I have always wanted to go on a beautiful ship like that. Think of the romance.’
‘Think of the hundreds of Irish emigrants in steerage,’ said Jacques. ‘I suppose there is little romance for them.’
‘One of my great-grandfathers was Irish,’ said Kitty.
‘Indeed, I meant only that it is a harrowing journey for them – to leave their home for a new life.’
Kitty laughed. ‘I did not take offence. I have found another possibility. The City of New York, a similar ship, leaves from Southampton for the American Line. I can book you a single ticket from Paris by way of Le Havre and your baggage is transferred. You do not need to go to Liverpool or Ireland. She will take you to New York in six days. She looks even more elegant than the Teutonic, a little longer and with three funnels.’
‘I think the extra funnel must decide it,’ said Jacques. ‘I shall go and pack my bags.’
‘She sails on a Saturday.’
Ten days later, he had said goodbye to Sonia and to Daniel, and found he was halfway to Paris. Le Havre and Southampton passed him by, and he was two days out to sea before he allowed himself to stop and think. While the cabin had its own mahogany washstand and mirrored wardrobe, the steel bulkhead above his face when he lay down left him in no doubt that he was at sea, below decks. He took meals in the saloon and walked about the deck when the weather was fine; he said good-morning to his fellow-passengers, but all the time the great steamer lumbered through the grey waves of the Atlantic, he felt that he was being sundered from his past. At night he heard the rumbling of the twin propellers as they screwed the water out beneath the waves; he thought he could hear the steam bubbling up in its gigantic boilers as it drove the cylinders; he pictured the half-naked men hurling wood and coal into the furnaces, and the thought of that slippery-backed toil helped him at last to fall asleep. The past went down beneath the waves, to be forgotten, as the ship pushed forward into the night, thoughtless, blind, like time.
It was somewhere beside the Susquehanna River – NewYork a dream and Pittsburgh far behind – that Jacques began to feel a change in himself. He had switched to the Fort Wayne and Chicago line and perhaps there was something about the transfer that made him feel he was now embarked beyond a chance of turning back. He thought of Daniel, as though he had never truly thought about him before. The baby was strong enough to support his own weight when he sat, but was still so small that Jacques could balance him on the palm of his right hand with his fingers bracing his back. Sometimes he would lift Daniel up to the light, and turn his wrist so that Sonia could look at her son from all angles, like a jeweller examining a remarkable piece. The boy himself stared back placidly with large eyes given a curious look by the way he sometimes cocked his head to one side, as though he were a bird perching on a branch. My God, thought Jacques, staring at the flashing fields of Indiana, he is my bone and blood, a thought made flesh, and I have barely stopped to ponder it.
In truth, he found it difficult to feel deeply for his son. He watched Sonia with him and her attitude seemed sentimental, and at times affected. How could she be experiencing all those emotions for a creature that she barely knew, that no one knew? He supposed his own responses were shaped by his never having known his mother and by a fear that if Olivier’s disease was in part hereditary, then he himself, though without symptoms, might be a carrier of it. He did not wish to become too fond.
He was told at the Union Pacific Depot in Omaha that for an extra eight dollars he could secure himself a Palace sleeping car all the way to San Francisco, and as the booking clerk pointed out, this was really an economy when you considered that a stopover at even a modest hotel could be four dollars, while the Dellone, where he had stayed the night before, had doubtless cost him . . . But Jacques had already pushed the extra cash through the window and went off to have his spare bag checked through to the coast.
My Dearest Dearest Wife,
I shall write in English because you have so anglicised me. What happened to the Breton child? He is in a ‘sleeping’ car in California, travelling alone between the Rocky Mts & the Sierra Nevada, though little sleeping. I hope you are; and that the boy allows you to. Are you both well? You may telegraph to the station in any large town; I shall check in Omaha and New York on my return, though perhaps I shall be home before this letter.
The train journey will take in all ten days, so with the sea crossing (six), the various stops and the journey from Carinthia, it will have taken me 21 days from my first pace out of the Schloss into Josef’s carriage to my first footstep on Mt Lowe, God willing.
On Wednesday, we made a brief stop at a place called Sherman. This is bad-weather country, as you can tell by the number of‘snow sheds’, which are like wooden tunnels to keep the snow off the most exposed parts of the track. We were urged to step down from the train for a little while. It was hard to breathe. This is landscape of enormous grandeur. Surely believers feel the hand of Him who made them among these desolate peaks.
Thursday, we were in the mountains all day. I was filled with an odd sense of having lived before. This place seems so wild and terrifying. My heart melts when I think of the men and women and their children who had to cross this terrible landscape. Legends of how some never made it, fell ill or died in the mountain passes, starved, ate one another. Unimaginable – yet fami
I do not like these thoughts. They make human life seem perpetual, with no escape from self-awareness, even through death . . .
Oh, Sonia, reading this back, I see how little I have conveyed what I have really felt in my travels – the utter loneliness, as though I knew not one soul in the whole wide world, had never seen your dear face; I sometimes wonder if you really still exist. The appalling strangeness of being entirely alone in this enormous world, a little collection of cells hurried west in clanking wagons. Above all this pointless sense of being alive, or being a soul – a self – perhaps for ever.
If the soul is not distinct enough to die, then what one wants is utter extinction of all consciousness – because there is no rest in individual death. Do you see what I mean? The belief of the Buddhists that one’s soul returns again and again on its climb to perfection is surely absurd. But what we can manifestly see is just as terrifying – as one is extinguished, another, near-identical, reaches self-awareness, and all the old intractable problems begin again. It is intolerable. The human mind has evolved in a way that makes it unable to deal with the pain and mystery of its own existence. No other creature is like this.
Whether this thing I call myself is real or not, whether it is the flickering wave of some electromagnetic field, or exists only as a whirlpool – as a dynamic movement made of other particles – please, God, let it be real: because a self that does not exist cannot be extinguished.
And if my consciousness is not sufficiently differentiated from those of all mankind, then something so close as to be indistinguishable from it is born again each moment in some poor city or village on earth; and I, or a being so like me as to make no difference, is bound to live again, for ever, caught up in some loop of eternal return. Dear God, may my consciousness be real, so that it may die at last . . .
Later: –
That night we made Promontory, elevation 4, 905 feet, so we were into our descent. Ghost town. It was just near here, I was told by the attendant who comes to bring me fresh water, that the East and West of America became one country when the rails of Central Pacific Rail Road were joined to those of the Union Pacific. Men from Maine and Florida shook hands with men from California. Flags, drums and muskets. The final tie in the track was silver-plated. As the last spikes were driven and the telegraph lines were connected – ‘like chained lightning’, he said – all work was suspended in San Francisco and New York. Bells rang out.
The attendant had tears in his eyes as he recounted this story.
Then Friday: the palisades of the Humbolt River. Sheer rock with our ‘cowcatcher’ nose a chisel through the narrow gap.
Finally, the Truckee division. We arrived at Reno in the evening, about nine. This was the last stop in Nevada. It was dark and I could not see outside, but there was the sound of a lone banjo and a man with an English voice singing –
Then I felt the train began a steep descent into the promised land.
I awoke in sunshine which penetrated the lowered blind of the compartment, but it was not the usual four a. m., it was 7.15! Heavenly repose, rest, God be praised.
I was in the station at Sacramento. I had just time to buy coffee and a bag of oranges on the platform.
Oakland Wharf late morning. Across the Bay and disembark at ferry-slip in the city of San Francisco. A morning of transfixing beauty. Explored the city, much of it rebuilt after fires and now home to some 300, 000 people, many in the hills, of which some streets served by new cable-cars. Dined at hotel on oystersand American wine!
I walked at night into a place frequented only by Chinamen. Was advised to avoid the area known as the ‘Barbary Coast’, haunt of pickpockets and villains. San Francisco is an enchantment, it seems to me, but it is also a port; & like all ports draws drifters, misfits – or simply those who have fled the Puritan pioneer towns of Nebraska or Indiana. It is the end of the world. Nothing lies beyond, except what Cortez saw from Mexico – and in the eyes of some of the men at night there is a kind of desperation.
I spent a day in SF, then took a train to Los Angeles: a small town, population about 20, 000, I would guess, though much older than San F – it has been settled for more than a century, a garden city of groves and parks with tropical fruits – orange, lemon, lime, banana, eucalyptus. Connected by train to Santa Monica, bathing resort of about a thousand residents, but I had no time for the seaside waters. What if Santa Monica should precipitate a change as great as that wrought in my life by Deauville?
No: it is on to Pasadena, the end of my voyage. I am on the new train that since only last year has connected the two towns, and as the warm sun floods the carriage, I have only one thought: –
It is for you, my dearest Sonia. May God or Providence be thanked that I found you and was not displeasing to you. I love you. I shall always love you, the thought of you, the soul of you, what lived before in your name and whatever shall survive of you. May it prove to be when I return home that you were not the product of my imagination, but exist in reality, my true and breathing wife.
XV
PASADENA WAS A little town which at first sight looked abandoned in its orange groves at the foot of the mountains, like a piece of sleeping Eden unaccountably spared by the gold rush. Inside, however, there were signs that the settlers had ambitions, and as he stood looking up Fair Oaks Avenue, Jacques could see several stately buildings already in place. Most were formed from cast-iron frames and traditional brickwork, but many also had stone balconies, painted clap-board sides and towers with coloured tiles and flags. The rails of a horsecar line were embedded in the centre of the road, while small carriages waited by the sidewalk as their owners ducked under striped awnings into shops and offices. All around, the workmen drilled and hammered in the even light of sunshine, with palm trees to shade them and hummingbirds darting among the lemons and hibiscus.
The Grand Opera House had onion-dome towers, pierced metal decorations and Moorish window arches; on its ground floor, beneath a steep white sun canopy, were the offices of the Mount Lowe Railway.
‘You need to speak to the Professor,’ said the clerk, a small man in shirtsleeves and an eyeshade, when Jacques went in to ask for help.
‘Professor Lowe?’
‘No. Professor James, the director of publicity for the railway.’
‘I only want to ask some questions, I am not offering to—’
‘I understand,’ said the clerk. ‘The Professor would be mighty pleased to help. He’s from England. You from England, sir?’
‘No, I am from France, but my wife is English.’
‘I thought you spoke funny, if you’ll pardon me saying so. Now the Professor, you might find him taking his dinner in the Green or the Raymond. I do believe he’s going to show some of his magic lantern slides there this evening. But if you want to be sure to catch him, you just stop by here at nine tomorrow morning. That’s when he’s always at his desk.’
‘I’ll come back,’ said Jacques.
‘And if you want somewhere good and homely to eat tonight, can I recommend you try the Acme? It’s right next to the Fire Station on the corner of Dayton and Fair Oaks.’
‘Thank you,’ said Jacques, a little uneasy at what this American’s idea of a good dinner might be. ‘Until tomorrow.’
‘We welcome all kinds to Paradise, sir,’ he said. ‘But a French nerve specialist . . . Well, darn me, that really is something. I shall take you up the mountain myself this afternoon. Perhaps you would care to join me for dinner at Echo Mountain House? I guarantee you will have some travellers’ tales to pass on to your friends back home. Let us meet here at four, when I shall have done my business at the Raymond. We take the railway to Altadena before we embark on our journey. Does that suit you, my friend?’
‘Very well,’ said Jacques.
‘Bring a stick if you care to do some walking in the mountains, and a coat. It will be cool tonight.’
‘Thank you, Professor.’
‘There is no need to call me Professor. Call me George. I shall call you Jack.’
In the train on the short trip to Altadena, Professor James told Jacques that Pasadena had been a settlement for little more than 30 years; it was only in the last decade, when the little town had grown to around ten thousand, that the inhabitants had started to lift their eyes up to the mountains and consider what they offered. The more athletic plain dwellers had made a trail to the summit of Mount Wilson, named after an early settler; but the hike was far too arduous for the majority, who contented themselves with a short climb into the foothills, where they walked among the fields of golden poppies.
‘So this paradise was unexplored. It needed vision. It needed daring. Then,’ said Professor James, as they stepped down from the train and crossed the platform, ‘from New Hampshire by way of Cincinnati, came a genius – Thaddeus S. C. Lowe. You are now climbing onto one of his railroad cars for the journey of your lifetime. All aboard!’