Chapters (24)
Collis kissed her on her forehead, and then he stood up. He looked down at her for a moment, at her well-boned, animal-attractive face, as if he were taking a mental photograph of her. Then he turned and left the ward, his shoes clicking on the polished floor, and went through to the hallway where his trunk and his bag were waiting for him.
There was no sign of Sister Agnes as he left the hospital in the donkey trap and was taken down the rutted streets in the first light of the day. He looked back once or twice, but he couldn’t even see her face at a window. It wasn’t long before they went around a steep corner, and the Hospital of the Sacred Heart disappeared from sight.
He was rowed out to the Pacific mail steamer California by a toothless ferryman in a wildly fraying straw hat. The ship lay at anchor in the dull morning mist, the flag of the Union hanging from her stern, her two masts empty of sails, and a stain of black smoke rising from her funnel. Collis’s skiff was brought under her lee, bobbing like a toy boat up against the side of a cast-iron bathtub, and a rope was thrown down, which the ferryman enthusiastically wound in.
Collis paid for the ferry, a quarter, and climbed the swaying ladder up the black-varnished side of the ship. His luggage was hoisted aboard, and he was directed by a steward with a face like an old walnut down towards his shared cabin. There were dozens more cabins and cots on the California than there had been on the Virginia, but she was still crowded, mostly with salesmen and fortune hunters and ladies in stained and crumpled dresses who looked as if they had suffered quite enough of steamships and railroads.
While he was still below, unpacking his shaving things, Collis heard the anchor rattle up, and the steam engines begin to turn over. He went to the porthole and looked out at Panama City, cluttered on its curved promontory, and he could just make out the roof of the hospital.
‘Dear God,’ he said, under his breath. Then he went back to his bag, and took out his nightshirt, his tortoise-shell comb, and his travelling clock.