Root of His Evil (17 page)

I had started around eight o’clock in the morning. I gassed and had lunch at a little town about halfway down and arrived at Goldfield around supper time. It didn’t look at all as Pa Selden had described it or like the pictures he had shown me. For it is practically a ghost town now, and I discovered that some years ago they had had a fire which wiped out most of it, with the ruins still there. But the hotel was the same, a big brick building five or six stories high, with a completely deserted lobby full of the leather furniture and oil paintings that were fashionable thirty years ago. The proprietor came forward to meet me and I said: “Can you let me have a room?”

“Lady,” he said, with a very sad smile, “I can let you have a dozen?”

It was all very sad and yet somehow romantic and affected me the way the Welsh music did the first night

I met Mr. Holden. At dinner the proprietor stopped by my table to ask if everything was all right, and when he found what I had come for he called several men who were in the bar and they came and took off their hats in a very elegant way and sat down at the table with me. I offered them something to drink, and they accepted with the most comical little speeches. They were all men of advanced middle age and they wore the big hats you see in the West, and looked exactly like the illustrations in Western stories. It turned out they were old-timers who had been in Goldfield during its great days, and one of them said he remembered Pa Selden, but I don’t believe he did at all. Because they constantly told tall stories to kid me and make my eyes pop open, and yet with the most perfect manners. But they all believed that some day Goldfield would come back, and I think it was this that made it all seem so romantic and so pathetic.

But next morning two or three of them were on hand to guide me around, and ugly as the old gold workings were, I found them completely fascinating. They showed me everything from the big piles of ore, which had turned green with the passage of years, to a new mine that had recently been opened up where they said $750,000 had been spent on equipment with not an ounce of pay dirt taken out yet. Then they took me to an assay office which was a rough shack on a back street, where a man poked his head out and acted very mysteriously while we waited outside for him to let us in. They explained that assaying is a very secret work. But pretty soon we went inside and the assayer talked to me and I thrilled all over when he showed me what he called a “button,” which remained in his crucible after he had made his tests, and I realized I was handling a little lump of pure gold and that this was the first step in the production of money.

I
LEFT NEXT MORNING
and beyond Tonopah I noticed something in the road ahead of me. The desert air was so clear that things were visible for miles before you actually got to them, and so I drove some little time before I was sure it was a man, and some little time after that before I could see a car beside the road down on the desert floor. He stood up when I approached and motioned me to stop. This was something I would have been afraid to do anywhere near civilization, but out there in the desert everything seemed different and I felt I had to. He was a small, nervous-looking man of about fifty and wore gray flannels, a sports coat and felt hat, all very rough and yet very good quality. He lifted his hat and seemed very annoyed. “I’ll borrow your shovel, if you don’t mind.”

“Shovel?”

“They took mine out when they washed the car yesterday and forgot to put it back, damn them.”

“But I have no shovel.”

He looked at me then for the first time, and his eye was very sharp. “You have no shovel? Didn’t they tell you about that?”

“Nobody said anything to me about a shovel.”

“Never start across this desert without a shovel, a towline and a jar of water. All right, if you have no shovel we’ll have to hook on the towline.”

I got out then and saw what had happened. He had pulled out for a passing car and the whole shoulder had given way, dumping him out on the desert floor, where his wheels were buried up to the axles in the alkali dust. What he wanted the shovel for was to dig them out and probably sprinkle enough gravel in front of them to enable him to get back on the road. He wasted no time in explanations, however, but at once got the towline out of his car, made it fast to his front axle and, as soon as I had pulled up a few feet, to my rear axle. Then he got in his car, took the wheel and told me to pull up until the towline was tight. This I did. When my car stalled I started it again and he yelled: “All right, give her the gun.”

I gave her the gun but I didn’t move. Then I became aware of a smell of burning rubber, and he yelled at me to stop. I then assumed I had been spinning my wheels without moving him. But when he came, jumped in my car and pushed me from behind the wheel I discovered it had been a little worse than that. The traction of my wheels had caused the road to slide again, and there I was, hanging over the edge and about to go down in the desert any second. Before he jumped into my car he had unfastened the towline from his own front axle, and now shot my car ahead just as the whole road gave way and spilled out onto the desert in another slide. When we were on safe ground he stopped, took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow. “Close shave.”

“Yes, it certainly was.”

“Wait a minute.”

He got out, unfastened the towline from my rear axle, coiled it up and pitched it in the bottom of my car. “Well, you’ll have to give me a ride in to Hawthorne—that’s the nearest place I can get a tow car.”

So I gave him a ride in to Hawthorne, which was about ten miles, but I let him drive, which relieved my nervousness. As soon as he made sure the garage there would pull him out he thanked me and then asked: “Where do you live?”

“I’m staying in Reno.”

“At the Riverside?”

“Yes.”

“That’s where I live. I’ll see you there.”

Next morning while I was eating breakfast he sat down at my table and began to talk without saying good morning or anything. I found out it was his custom to begin in the middle or perhaps where he left off yesterday, without any preliminaries at all, and while it was an unusual way to do, it was completely a part of him. He was in the same rough clothes, and lit a cigarette, then glanced at me sidewise. “I kept trying to place you yesterday—haven’t I met you somewhere before? My name is Bolton. Charles Bolton.”

“No, I think not.”

“Then I’ve seen you somewhere. What’s your name?”

“Carrie Harris.”

“Oh—oh yes, of course. The pictures in the papers. What happened, anyway? Did Agnes bust it up?”

“You
know
her?”

“For years.”

“...Do you know Grant?”

“She had three or four brats and I think one of them was a boy. I suppose I know him.”

“Yes. As you put it, she busted it up.”

“I thought she would when I read the first dispatches about it. She’s no angel, Agnes isn’t. Is she still good-looking?”

“Yes.”

“Something unhealthy about her, though. She’s not quite—you know what I mean?—normal.”

“I found that out.”

“Distinctly alarming, I would say.”

“You live here?”

“Lung.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. So long as I stay out here where it’s dry it doesn’t bother me. White, unmarried, Episcopalian. What are you doing today?”

“Why—nothing.”

“Let’s go to Tahoe.”

“I don’t know why not.”

“It’s all closed up there now so it’ll be pleasant to tramp around. We’ll drop down to Truckee for lunch and then we’ll come back. Do you have galoshes?”

“Do I need them?”

“Snow.”

“Oh—fine.”

“You’d better wear something rough and warm.”

So I hurriedly went down and bought myself a rough skirt and sweater, a beret, woolen stockings, a short reefer coat and stout shoes with galoshes, and about half-past ten we started out in his car. We drove to Truckee, which was only a few miles along the main road to the Coast, then drove up a side road for about a half-hour until we came to Lake Tahoe, and there we parked and walked around. It was marvelous, with the water so clear you could see stones on the bottom, even where it was quite deep, and the fir trees and oaks had snow on them so they looked exactly like Christmas cards. But the mountain air made it quite fatiguing, so after an hour or so we got in the car again and drove back to Truckee, where we had lunch at a little roadside stand. I was so hungry I ate two tongue sandwiches and one made with chopped olive and egg, and had two glasses of milk.

Then he said: “I’ve lived in that hotel for ten years now and I’m a little over-familiar with the menu. Let’s go over to Sacramento for dinner.”

“All right.”

So we took the afternoon driving to Sacramento, and it was one of the most beautiful trips I ever took in my life. We crossed the Sierra Nevada, where at Donner Summit the road is 8,000 feet up and away down below you is Donner Lake, which looks like a blue mirror reflecting the sky. All around us was snow, and I was almost sorry when we left it behind us and dropped down into the rolling country of California. We went marching in, rough clothes and all, to a little restaurant he was familiar with, and I had a lobster which was different from the kind I had eaten in the East, as it had no claws, only big legs with little nippers on the end. He said it was really a langouste, but I didn’t care what it was, the tail was full of white tender meat and went wonderfully with mayonnaise. After that I had a steak.

We started back for Reno around nine o’clock, and on the mountain curves not much was being said. But then suddenly with that trick he had of beginning right in the middle, he said: “So you get the divorce—and then what?”

“Well—a man wants to marry me.”

“And you?”

“I don’t know. And I
won’t
know until—”

I stopped, for it swept over me again what had been such an obsession with me in New York. He looked at me sharply and I went on, but my voice sounded hard and not at all humorous, as I intended. “...Until I get back at dear Agnes.”

“Now tell me what happened.”

I didn’t want to tell him, but he kept asking little shrewd questions, and then it began coming out of me in short jerks—not all of what happened, at least on Grant’s side, but enough to make sense. After I got a lot of it off my chest I sort of ran down, then added: “I wish there were some way I could snub that Agnes. Her face would be as red as—”

“Ah! Now I get it ...So you hate her, is that it?”

“Wouldn’t you, if she took your husband—”

“That’s got nothing to do with it.”

“Oh? Just nothing at all?”

“If that was all you’d hate him, not her. But you don’t. You’re still in love with him.”

“Grant means nothing to me. It’s all over—”

“I say you’re in love with him. Besides, even if she hadn’t taken him away from you, you’d hate her just the same, wouldn’t you?”

“She’s an unadmirable character.”

“And she showed you up for—what did you say you were?”

“...A waitress.”

“That’s what hurt.”

“I’m not ashamed of what I was.”

“Suppose, just to pass the time and make a little money, you took a job as waitress in one of our Reno restaurants and then suppose Agnes came in and sat down. What would you do?”

“Pour hot soup down her back.”

“You would not. You’d go hide.”

“...I guess I would.”

“I know you would.”

He drove for awhile and then he said: “Well—I don’t know how you’re going to get back at her. So long as you feel this inferiority she has a bulge on you that no bawling out can ever change. That is, unless you really do enter High Society.”

“I
hate
High Society. And how, by the way, could I ever enter it?”

“Oh, that wouldn’t be hard. You have money. Not much, but enough. The rest of it’s simple. You merely prostrate yourself on the ground and knock your head three times in front of the Great God Horse.”

“The Great God—what did you say?”

“I said you have to worship horses. Silly horses, of course. Not circus horses, brewery horses, milk wagon horses, horses that do arithmetic, or any other horses that perform a useful function. Hunters, for example. Horses dedicated to chasing the fox, probably the most futile occupation even seen. Jumpers. Ponies. Ladies’ driving horses—in an age that travels by automobile. All sorts of horses, provided they’re conspicuously and offensively silly. It’s all covered in the literature of the subject. Aldous Huxley and Thorstein Veblen go into it thoroughly, but I do believe some of the shrewdest comment on it was written by Robert W. Chambers. The horse is a symbol. He’s this century’s pinch of incense on the altars of Caesar—and remember, it was not required that you love Caesar, or believe in his gods or like his friends. Incense was enough. So with High Society. Manners, culture, breeding—they don’t mean anything. The horse does. Funny, isn’t it, to see people spend millions to get in—on yachts, charities, music and champagne—when one $500 hunter would turn the trick? With $50,000 and a mare for the horse shows, Carrie, you’re automatically in. Nobody can keep you out.”

“I don’t want to be in. I want to—”

“Spit in her eye?”

“Yes...I know one thing I can do. I can give her back her $50,000 and—”

“What?”

“Yes. That’s it! Now I know what’s been pent up in me, making me feel miserable and ashamed. I took that woman’s money and—”

“Carrie! That won’t make her face turn red. It’ll only make her laugh!”

“Oh, don’t worry! I won’t do anything foolish!”

We went on a lot of trips after that, to Carson City and Fallon and Death Valley and all around, and we kept having the discussion. He seemed set on the idea that I had to become a social leader and kept calling himself Pygmalion, whatever he meant by that. But I was wholly indifferent to everything but some scheme for using the money I already had in order to get more money quick and pay back Mrs. Harris the money I had taken off her and perhaps in that way forget her. We took our trips mostly in the afternoon, as he wasn’t fond of getting up early, so in the mornings I began dropping in at a brokerage house that was located in an office building down the street from the hotel. In my days of sitting around the apartment in New York I had already become somewhat acquainted with financial matters through studying Grant’s books. I wanted to learn more, though at the time I had no exact idea of what I was going to do with my knowledge after I got it. But I asked a lot of questions and followed the ticker and the blackboard and kept reading the
Wall Street Journal,
which was on file there, until I began to have a pretty fair idea of how the whole thing worked. All during this time I could feel stirring in me ambitions much more daring than I had ever had before, and knew that my interest in money, even apart from Mrs. Harris, was becoming a most important factor in my life.