The World From Rough Stones

by Malcom Macdonald

  "Be patient and loving, O heart! Shine as a beacon to him, O soul! And let us prove to all the world that perfect marriages are not made in a bed, nor in the passionate congress of our vile bodies, but—oh most true and wonderful—in Heaven!"

  By the end of November, her prayer was answered and her body was quickened—though it was April 1840 before that fact was confirmed to her. Then Walter was, given added inducement to neglect his lower being—at least on her side of the bed.

  Part Three

  Chapter 20

  The winning of the Summit contract had wrought subtle changes in John Stevenson. Aspects of his character whose very existence he had not once suspected were suddenly revealed to him; they had, as it were, lain dormant, waiting for this event to bring them into play. In the first place, to find himself suddenly respectable was more irksome than he had feared. And it was made worse by his determination to play the thing so straight that his word would be as good as a contract and a guarantee in one—the very opposite of what most understood by the word "contractor." He wanted to know that when people told one another "Stevenson has agreed…" or "Stevenson promised it…" they moved from the shadowy realm of uncertainty to a world of accomplished fact. But, as he was finding, it was one thing to specify the end, and quite another to establish the means.

  His attitude toward the men, his lads, had also changed. It showed in small ways. As their ganger, working on a shift all day, he could see a navvy sweat his guts out and idle by turns, if that was the man's nature; if he did the day's measure, that was good enough. But as main contractor, paying out £700 a week in wages alone, he would chafe in fury at the sight of an idle man, and often had to check himself and remember the reasonable accommodations he had once been able to make. He knew that many in that little army of his were only too ready to test the mettle of the new commander, so he was on the lookout for challenge, often where none was offered.

  The change showed in big ways, too; and there, it was less easily dismissed. For instance, he knew that to put navvies on bonus and leave the craftsmen on the old flat piece rate was asking for trouble. In fact, when he first decided on the plan—that day he gained the contract—it did not enter his mind to exclude the trades. Yet in the first few days, after he had put the scheme to one enthusiastic navvy gang after another, he found it almost impossible to formulate a like arrangement for each of the trades. He would half-think one out for the masons when some potential problem with the blacksmiths would intrude, followed by a related difficulty with the bricklayers…and so on in a circle. And for all his obsessional toying with the principles and practicalities of a trades-bonus scheme, nothing of any definite shape would emerge.

  Soon he could no longer blink the fact that something within him was blocking the thought. Something was unwilling to make any kind of solution. That something had an unpalatable thought of its own to suggest. For years afterward he wondered when that thought first gained his conscious recognition—though he never doubted its power and influence before it took such shape. Was it before or after he heard of the first rumblings of trouble among the craftsmen— especially the bricklayers? He never was able to remember.

  But there was such a moment. And the thought, when it finally crept out into the light, ran further: If he could provoke a head-on collision with one of the trades, and if he could win in some overwhelming way, so that folk would talk of it far and wide, he'd never lack for contracts, he'd get closer to becoming independent of the Reverend Prendergast, he'd have no trouble with his labour for years ahead, and—a lesser consideration in the long view, but no less important when he had to conserve every penny he had—he'd save paying bonus to craftsmen until he absolutely had to.

  Small wonder he had hidden these arguments—even from himself—in that first generous flush of his triumph! And even when he did articulate them, he fought a long rearguard against their conclusion. And when, finally and reluctantly, he accepted them, he realized with a deep sadness the truth it revealed about himself: John Stevenson's great ideals might still stand, but they came a poor second to a much more commonplace ideal—the preservation and advancement of self.

  Still—there it was. The sealed orders had been opened, the course set. It was no use sailing backward into battle and protesting later that one had been looking at other things. If you had to kill a pig, you didn't make the blow less cruel by bungling the job and weeping at the creature's anguish. So he buttoned his lip, kept his counsel, and prepared for the storm to come. And when the gangers and the clerk of works and Walter Thornton told him he really must harmonize the bonuses, he would sigh and scratch his head and look harrassed and agree. They, for their part, would say to one another that John Stevenson was as good a man as ever at practical things—there was no workaday problem in the tunnel to which he did not have a ready answer—but he had a lot to learn about the trade of employer. That opinion would have won his grim agreement, for he was about to test his small learning in that field to its very limit.

  For Nora, too, these were difficult days. Even before she married him she knew that a man so afire with ambition and so determined to compete was not the man to offer a life of obscure and petty struggle—which was the most for which she had ever dared to hope. She had had her dreams, naturally, but dreams were toys to make reality acceptable—and God help those who tried swelling them into hallucinations to banish the real world entirely. John Stevenson offered to abolish this division, and her hopes of obscure and petty struggle seemed suddenly tawdry. The change, to be precise, happened when her mind's eye ceased to dwell on servants in powdered wigs feeding pretty little deer in an infinite parkland, and instead settled on a kitchen with an indoor water pump.

  Just as the contract had awoken in Stevenson aspects of his character that had long lain dormant, so his marriage to her, and the prospect of unscaleable heights suddenly brought within grasp, revealed elements within her that were both novel and fascinating. The first thing that struck her was her inward unsurprise at her change in fortune. It was the same with her love for John. In hindsight, she knew that she had fallen under his spell the very moment they met, but it was not until he spoke of marriage that she had dared admit it to herself. Hopes were safe and comforting until you put them into words; then they gained an independence that threw them on the mercy of the world—and she'd had eighteen years of that brand of mercy. So that when she at last, consciously acknowledged her love for him, there was a part of her, deep within, that had known it long before.

  The acknowledgement of her good fortune, too, found that same cool acceptance; part of her had long known that she was worthy of it. Though she had lived a whole life in poverty, only in the last few months had she passed over into out-and-out destitution—the months before she landed the market job. Of her earlier times, when she lived with her father and family, she had only the happiest memories. And her father's memories were all of days impossibly grand. Times without number she and her brothers had sat in their own cottage in Hunslet, passing the warp through the heddles or retying the rinks and marches with their nimble little fingers, while their father, at the other loom, would tell them of their grandfather the farmer and their great grandfather the squire. On the road to market, too, when they carried in the meagre produce of the five acres that still survived from those days of glory, he lightened each weary step with memories of the hunt, of harvest fairs and sheepshearing, of poaching trout and raiding orchards. So she knew, and always had known, that she was of finer clay than the poor around her, who had never been other than poor. She had never felt like one of them, and her stepping up with John was like inheriting a state that, though she had never owned it, had long been intended for her use.

  The first marks of her change were in her clothing. They had to be. The shabby blue dress, purloined from a drunkard in Manchester, soaked by filthy water from rotten sacking, spattered with blood from that orgy of death up at the warrens, and marled with earth when she and John sealed their love together on
the banks below—that dress was hardly fit to smuggle her in by the back door of the Royal Oak at Littleborough.

  "Eay! What'll tha do wi' it?" Nancy Spur, the innkeeper's wife asked. "S'll I burn it for thee? It's not fitten for paupers." She had lent Nora one of her dresses until she could come by some of her own.

  "I s'll keep it," Nora said. "Just as it is—blood, mud, an' all. 'Appen if we get too proud in times to come, it'll find its uses."

  Nora's fitting-up was the first cause of disagreement between herself and John. He had wanted her to get a whole wardrobe of pretty dresses, all ribbons and flounces. She, remembering that dead lilies smell worse than dead weeds, thought it not at all fitting to the risks ahead. She saw, more clearly than he, how ill-organized they were to accept the contract and what a mountain of humdrum work was needed to keep it running smoothly. All the lace and silk in the world wouldn't move a single ounce of hardcore or lay a half a brick.

  He conceded the logic of her argument long before he consented to its conclusion.

  "What dost tha fancy tha'llt be doin'?" he asked.

  "Nay bairn! Dost think I s'll sit 'ere all day in me finery. Takkin' tea an' payin' me mornin' calls?"

  He hadn't thought.

  "I'm a working gel an I s'll be a working wife to thee. I s'll stick by thee like a leech, see tha. Till I know every supplier and 'is competitor, every price an' the cause of its augmentations an' reductions, every carrier, every porter…"

  "I'll be damned if tha does!" he said, divided between anger and laughter at her presumption.

  "An' bankrupted if I don't. Take tha choice."

  "Bankrupted?" Anger began to dominate.

  "Aye. I'm none lookin for trouble, but God 'elps them as meet it ready—an' God 'elp them as doesn't!"

  "Bloody riddles, woman. Speak plain!" he ordered.

  "Tha'rt a bloody one-man circus: John Stevenson, ringmaster, trick rider, singer, dancin' bear, ticket seller, crystal reader. What if th'art sick? 'Oo deals wi't suppliers? 'Oo knows 'oo in 'ell they are till they send a bill? Oo's to check it?"

  "Jack Whitaker'd manage—or Fernley, me clerk o' works," he said. His look was that of a man who had just produced the argument stopper—but his tone was less certain.

  She knew enough not to press him further; just let the doubt nourish itself and grow. But she could not help adding, just to have the last word: "Oh ah! One o' them's tha new factotum then?" And to show it didn't worry her if it didn't worry him, she changed the subject by asking his opinion of the cloth samples the dressmaker had left. She showed great interest in his choice, for there were only good, plain, serviceable materials in single, dark colours to pick among.

  The following morning, at breakfast, he had smiled at her and said: "Tha'd best get tha bonnet an' cloak. 'Appen there's owt i' what tha says."

  And so she had gone with him to Manchester—the first of many visits in the course of which she grew to know every supplier and the ins and outs of his trade as well as Stevenson himself.

  For both of them, it was Summit & Summit every waking hour—and many sleeping ones, too. They had no social life that did not arise directly out of their business. One evening Arabella Thornton, pressed no doubt by Walter, had invited them over for songs and games and a little supper, but it had been a limping fiasco. Nora was embarrassed at the memories Walter inevitably awakened; he, for the same reason, had been ill-at-ease and over-gallant by turns. Arabella, though hostess, behaved as if some law of the universe decreed that a permanent one-fathom divide must always separate her from John Stevenson. And John, in Nora's view, had been worst of all. For instead of helping the evening along, which would have been child's play to a man of his gifts, he had watched them all like a tolerant old hound among puppies. At least he afterward agreed with her that neither of them should even consider social engagements until Christmas. By then, they'd know whether they were to sink or swim.

  Meanwhile, she was glad that the best part of five miles separated them from Pigs Hill; and it did not worry her in the least that Arabella Thornton almost certainly shared the sentiment.

  Yet, despite her wholehearted dedication to their business, she was never certain whether John was patronizing her, or tolerating her, or whether he really saw the force of her argument and actively wanted her along. So it was no easy ride in the dickey seat for her; she constantly felt she ought to prove her point and justify her presence. She managed it in little ways. For instance, she could always remember prices and quotations and little details that the day-to-day press of affairs at the tunnel had obscured in his mind. And everywhere they went she would manage a rapid stocktaking of everything visible and if some item that John might need was running low, she would point it out and get an order in, or even make a purchase herself.

  "She's a sharp little eye that lady o' yours," he was told by more than one of his suppliers.

  "Tha'llt soon be comin' to Manchester by thissen," John said jokingly to her once; but he never actually let her go.

  Then came the day when she proved herself beyond all possibility of doubt. They had gone to Manchester for, among other things, timber—for templates for the arches, for scaffolding, and for shoring up where the driftway ran through fractured overburden. They needed almost a thousand cubes. But it was one of those occasions when a sudden rush on the heavier timber had emptied every yard in the city, taking the merchants themselves by surprise.

  "I think someone's found a way of turning it into gin," one of them told John.

  "It's all these extensions to th' Bridgewater canal," another explained.

  At the last yard they tried—that of the aptly named Ossie Oakshaw—they could get no more than the promise of five hundred cubes for the morrow.

  "But it'll cost," Oakshaw said, sighing with a ready sympathy, as though the rise in price would hit him just as hard.

  "'Ow?" John asked.

  Oakshaw sized him up with a frankness intended to disarm. The autumn sun danced on little flecks of sawdust held lightly in the furrows on his brow and on the luxuriant thickets of bristle that sprouted over his eyes. "Tell you what I'll do, Mr. Stevenson. We've not dealt before, much to my sorrow, for I'd welcome your custom. To show good faith and let ye see what a plain-dealing man I am, I'll take no profit on this load. I can't take a loss—but, as ye'd well imagine, I could take a sizeable profit, things being as they are this week. But, to establish what I hope will be a long association, I'll forgo the immediate advantage. Can't say fairer, can I?"

  "If…?" John prompted.

  "If?" the other repeated in seeming bewilderment.

  "Aye, Oakshaw. You're no fool, for I see the legend 'Established 1805' above your gate."

  "There's no if." Oakshaw winked so violently that a small cataract of sawdust fell sparkling in the sun. He looked different after, plainer and less interesting.

  "What does 'at cost' cost?" John asked.

  "Eighteen pence."

  They both whistled. "But that's threepence over last week's going rate!"

  Oakshaw looked sad again. "I object as much as you. But what with bad weather in the North Sea, the timber ships from the Baltic all put back. There's been but four loads through Hull all week. The price to all is up. Let me assure you—eighteen pence is cost."

  Mention of Hull unlocked a recent memory for Nora. Some weeks earlier she had been standing in the square at Littleborough watching a train laden with goods steam up to the working at Summit. Within minutes, it was out of sight; but on the canal, just beyond the line, a barge still glided north at its snail's pace, hardly seeming to have moved.

  "There's an omen," she had said to Spur, the landlord, out to sun himself before the evening rush began.

  "Don't you believe it," he said. "I don't hold with all these folk as say th' railways'll kill th' canals. Look at yon narrow boat—laden wi' coal for Todmorden. And there he'll get grit from't quarries at Knowl, or vitriol from Gawks Holm, or iron…and so on, working back to Hull. And there he'll pick up B
altic timber and bring it all th' way back to Manchester. At rates they charge, th'railways are never goin to get that trade."

  He had continued in this way for some considerable time, prompted by Nora's careful questioning. She had learned what sort of goods moved up and down and what sort of rate and profit and contract the narrowboat men looked for. And it was that memory, and all the carefully stored information it invoked, which she now recalled.

  John was asking Oakshaw about delivery when Nora, looking idly around the yard, was suddenly struck by its most singular feature—no heavy timber, of the kind they were after, was anywhere to be seen! It could only mean that the timber was still on the barge and the barge still on the canal. She fervently hoped it could only mean that.

  "I think we might as well leave it for a day or two," she said aloud. She was as astonished at her audacity as the two men, but she did not show it.