The World From Rough Stones

by Malcom Macdonald

  "Tha may send thy bulldog 'ome," he said. She looked at the pride in his eyes, and she luxuriated in it. His pleasure and his approval were the real profit on her day.

  "Nay," she said. "'E's to stop. 'E can take back't bill o' lading."

  "It's all ready—waiting for't cash."

  She counted out seven pound ten, held it up and winked at him, and dropped it in her pocket book. His response was ambivalent, but he took the pouch with the rest of the money, counted his own contribution into it, and went to complete the sale.

  As they watched Oakshaw's man go off with the boatman and two of the boats she said, "By rights I should go missen, but that'd only rub 'is nose in it."

  "Bad was it?"

  "Not in't end, as it fell out."

  He sniffed. "Seven ten? I thowt as tha might o' gotten nine."

  "I might," she said airily. "I might very easily. But I 'ad better reason not to press Ossie Oakshaw. I left 'im in good cheer. Laughin' at issen. 'Appen that's worth more to us nor fifty bob."

  He stopped and turned to her, taking her face between his great hands. She saw his head come down, down, out of the sky, growing larger and larger until it filled her universe. It became her universe when he kissed her, tenderly, briefly. "What've I gotten missen?" he asked, the wonder of it still in his gaze.

  She blinked and swallowed. "A peck o' trouble?" she suggested.

  He laughed then and began to walk again. "'Appen," he chuckled. "Aye, 'appen." He looked up at the clear blue sky, above the haze of smoke, and tasted the cool sulphurous air. "Eay! Autumn's a grand season, though ye'd never think it 'ere in Manchester."

  She gazed in disgust at the belching chimneys, the filthy, reeking canal, the stinking middens, and the mean, cramped dwellings all around. "Aye," she sighed, "the threat is ever near."

  "Nay!" he said, becoming cheerful again. "This'll never do! What's next?"

  She took the half sovereign from her pocket book. "Dinner," she said. "I'm takkin thee to't best in Manchester. The Mitre!"

  He whistled. "I can't afford that!"

  "I said, I s'll pay."

  And, of course, she did not need to ask if she could be trusted with some of the purchasing in future.

  Chapter 21

  John Stevenson still had to go into Manchester from time to time, for the gaining of supplies was only a part of his business there. When it was done, he would withdraw to the luncheon houses or taverns where businessmen met. And there, he would keep his eyes open and his ear close to the ground, learning of the movements of trade, who was building what and where, how the canals were being extended, where the new mills and warehouses were—always on the lookout for future contracting work.

  On these visits, he often ran across members of the board of the Manchester & Leeds, most of whom would find an occasion to buy him a drink and nudge him in the ribs while they congratulated him on the shrewd bargain he had driven against them. He always managed an astonished, pained look in reply—which made them chuckle the harder. Within weeks the news of his adroitness had become a byword among the fraternity. A younger man would have had his head turned by such attention and might then have made a bad blunder. But Stevenson was old enough to know that his future depended on gaining a reputation for performance to match the one based on his astuteness. Smooth Jacks came and went; astute men who kept their word were as gold.

  Sometimes on these visits he would meet the Reverend Doctor Prendergast. More than once he was sure it was no accident, though the cleric was always careful to show the greatest surprise and delight at the chance that brought them together. For his part, Stevenson conveyed the impression of a worried man putting a bold face on his problems.

  "I think we s'll pull through," he would say. "But we're not that far off't back end. It's bread-an-scrape for a week or two yet I'd say."

  And once, when Prendergast seemed to be getting a little short of trust, he added: "I fancy I may be callin' on your offer of capital soon, reverend. We're nigh broke for a bit o' ballast." (That was the week when his net profit first topped the thousand mark.) His suggestion induced in Prendergast a sudden interest in his watch and in the distant horizon. Nevertheless, the threat was always there, always dimming his and Nora's pleasure at the success they were making of Summit. He'd have to do something more positive soon.

  Jack Whitaker, his assistant, said of Stevenson at this time that he was "greedy" for work, but there was a whiff of sour grapes in the judgement. Whitaker had failed, through no fault of his own, on the Bolton line. Stevenson, never one to see a good man wasted, had taken him on as an assistant at £120; Whitaker, though glad of the rescue, and duly grateful, nevertheless remained a trifle resentful of the contrast in their fortunes.

  He admired Stevenson for the deal with the company, which he estimated to be worth £2.15.0 a yard for the driftway and a further £43.10.0 a yard for the tunnel. At these rates—though they were geared to performance—he could hardly fail; and his contract ensured that the cash flowed from the very outset. That was a feature which Whitaker especially noted; he himself had failed not because the ultimate profit was insecure but because he ran out of cash along the way to it.

  He therefore could not understand why Stevenson was not content to bank the profit, see the contract out, and then begin another somewhere else. Why this endless ferreting around in Manchester for work he was in no position yet to undertake? The time it cost—and the effort! To Whitaker it seemed obsessive to the point of monomania.

  Stevenson worked a gruelling eighteen-hour day, seven days a week, except for service each Sunday. He was out at five each morning and had toured all the workings before any of the gangs came on at six. Within weeks, he knew the name and face of every one of his thousand lads. He measured every inch of progress himself, and he learned every square foot of rock face as it was exposed. Though he had never worked through millstone strata before, he soon learned its nature and its quirks. Before long his mind knew the geology below Reddish as well as a cattle drover knows a long, tortuous trail. Often he would say to Whitaker something like: "Make a note that when we're enlarging the drift, the northward party must cease at the fourteen-twenty-yard mark until the southward party come though to meet them." Or, "There's a chain's length to shore north of the two-thousand-fifteen mark when we come to line it." Nothing that could be charted was left to chance.

  For most of the day, Stevenson was up and down the workings like a jackin-the-box, and many gangs and gangers must have thought he harboured an exclusive concern for their particular section of the face. There were those who said he had "too much go in him" and they'd "thank God when he got other contracts to bleed off some of his interest," adding that "it couldn't happen too soon."

  But, as Walter Thornton said when Whitaker passed on some of this complaining gossip: "We've lost not a single life here since John Stevenson took over. When you think there's close on a thousand men, most of them half drunk, working over twenty faces, up to three hundred foot below ground, with powder lying around in open barrels—a lot of credit has to go to Stevenson." And he told of other contractors up the line who spent seven days a week never more than two foot from a gin bottle, with men in the shallowest of cuttings and on the smallest of embankments, where at least one life a month was lost. You couldn't gainsay figures like that.

  Thornton himself was boundless in his admiration of Stevenson. It was quite possible for a young railroad engineer, especially one with an income and pretensions to being a gentleman, to spend much of the day hunting the country bordering the line he was supposed to supervise, or paying so-called morning visits around the neighbourhood each afternoon. But Stevenson, by his conduct, shamed Thornton into becoming the sort of professional he might have slightly despised only a year earlier. Like the contractor, Thornton now rose early— sometimes as early as six o'clock—and worked late several nights a week.

  Even when the whistles blew at seven p.m. and the gangs went off to sup, Stevenson, though he went back t
o the Royal Oak himself at that time, usually returned to some part of the workings for several more hours. There were always stores to check, engine parts to maintain, and changes in the deployment of the gangs to be prepared against tomorrow.

  Though he was too intuitive, too natural an organizer, to see it in the terms of an accountant, he knew that the same man working with the same effort might be worth ten times more in one place than another—and that those profitable and profitless places changed from week to week. He knew that a ton of muck brought out by steam cost much more than a ton brought out by gravity but that against this there was an equilibrium to be struck in speed of working, congestion of the face and line, and the ease of disposing of the spoil. Poor Skelm, now gaoled for debt and fraud, had never begun to grasp such notions; to Stevenson it was second nature from his very first day.

  On top of all his other work, he had two further chores that few other contractors might face. Every midday dinner hour, fair weather or foul, he would personally inspect every foot of rope on the windings of two and sometimes three of the shafts, so that every shaft winding was checked in rotation every week. He did not, as many do, get the engineer to turn the winding drum slowly and hope to spot a defect as it turned. He actually spanned each shaft with a portable catwalk and would make the engineer pay out every yard, as slowly as possible, while he watched it pass him and run through his fingers on its way into the bowels of the pit.

  There were those who—behind his back, to be sure—mocked him for his caution; but they were few. Most of his people were glad enough that such a man was in charge of the contract and reckoned him the best contractor they'd ever worked for. Craftsmen as well as navvies shared this opinion, which must go far to explain why the trouble among them took all of three months to come to its head. Men accustomed to taking a lot of rough with very little smooth were not quick to ignite—not when personal insult or threat was absent.

  The other chore was more immediately profitable. It went back in origin to Nora's inspired suggestion to the boatman on that unforgettable day at the Varley Street Wharf. When he had spoken of other contractors up the line quarrying stone for lack of it in the cuttings, and turnpikes crying out for hardcore, his words had been no hot flannel; and it was not long before he had a regular and very paying trade in stone and grit, with boats plying both west and east. The notion of selling unwanted spoil to other contractors, who might be desperate for muck for embankments, though it was very simple and obvious, was then quite novel in railroad working. Within five years, it had become commonplace and before the decade was out it was the rule. By then, contracts were awarded at rates that discounted the profit from selling the excess. Until that time, however, Stevenson had the profit of the idea, for he took care always to bid for sections where there would be a surplus. At Summit the total profit on these sales was a respectable £873, as near as Nora could reckon it. In later years, Stevenson himself often claimed that the scheme was the saving of his neck at the time, and he always credited her with the devising of it. In a contract that, when all the accounts were in, netted a little over £30,000 (just as he had forecast), this claim was obviously more than exaggeration. However, the scheme did bring a welcome inflow of hard cash in that grim November of 1839, when the great dispute threatened to slow the working, and the bonuses from the Manchester & Leeds might cease, temporarily, to flow.

  In an industry where tempers are generally strong and violence never very far below the surface, the trouble on Summit must have established some kind of precedent for the length of its gestation and the frequency with which all and sundry, right down to the lad who brought the ale up to the site office, predicted its eruption. Indeed, those closest to Stevenson, who had predicted it earliest of all, were so discomfited by the middle of November that they had begun to shake their heads in pained surprise and to say that perhaps he would get away with it after all.

  Stevenson himself had a special set of nerves for these things. On Sunday, 17th November, he knew that the unrest among the tradesmen—among the bricklayers, to be precise—would come to its head the following day. Accordingly, by ten o'clock, he was off the site and on his way to Manchester, where he took care to stay until gone six o'clock that evening.

  Most other mortals, after so many months of unremitting labour, would have seized the chance of this enforced absence to make it a day of rest. But Stevenson put it to better account. What was left of the morning he used for small, tidyingup errands. He had his hair cut and got himself measured for a suit, a riding habit, and some waterproof boots. He also got his fob watch oiled and a new, unscratched glass put in it.

  Then he had lunch with Sir Sidney Rowbottom, whom he "happened" to run across at the house he was known to frequent almost every day. Without revealing his strategy, he left the chairman feeling assured that he, Stevenson, knew what he was doing and was well able to deal with the troubles now about to break out.

  Only a fortnight earlier, to that very day, the Welsh magistrate John Frost had led the Chartist riot in Newport. With seven thousand men, and more waiting in the hills, he had mounted an armed assault upon the Westgate Hotel to secure the release of a fellow Chartist, Henry Vincent, then under trial for sedition. The hotel was guarded by no more than thirty soldiers. The mob discharged their guns into the building, wounding the mayor and several others. The thirty soldiers fired back. Whereupon the seven thousand, displaying the undiluted self-interest that has kept England safe from revolution ever since it forgot what Cromwell taught, took to their heels and the hills, and left poor Frost to the law.

  Yet this sad little incident now had respectable England agog with tales of rebellion and unrest. Manchester, like all the northern towns, was deeply divided. Until 1832, the archaic system of apportioning the parliamentary constituencies had left them virtually disenfranchised. The towns and manufacturing valleys had bristled with Parliamentary Reform Associations whose list of demands had closely foreshadowed those of the Chartists. Now, with the high price of corn, the depression of wages, and the long and fruitless wrangle to establish a 58- instead of a 72-hour week, the centre of discontent had shifted from the newly enfranchised millowner and townsman to the disgruntled labourer and factory hand.

  But in that winter of 1839, the shift was incomplete. And though the mill owner and burger neither saw nor felt a common interest with the farmer and landowner, memories were long—certainly long enough to reach back to Peterloo, when for an unguarded moment the old order of aristocracy and gentry had shown their naked contempt for the new. So industrial Lancashire met the disorders of that year with mind and heart at odds. There were enough of the older "moral-force" Chartists left to give silent and uncomfortable acquiescence to their newer "physical-force" brethren.

  Stevenson found the town alive with rumour and innuendo. The agitation gave him a certain melancholy satisfaction; he could not have wished for a better backdrop against which to stage manage his own approaching drama—if he wanted to take things that way. It was still a big if.

  In the afternoon, he called at Payter's offices and asked him to put in a good word to the Duke of Bridgewater's agent for the next major works on the canal. If he was to get the better of Prendergast, he needed more money than Summit was yielding. And that meant more work.

  "I don't know!" Payter said. "If they go on like this, we'll have more miles of canal than Venice. Do what I can, dear fellow."

  And finally, he went to his bank in Piccadilly and asked them to open an account for him at Bolitho and Chambers, bankers of Dowgate in the City of London—his supposed guarantors. To them he transferred a modest one hundred pounds. It was the other thrust in his campaign to rid himself of the Reverend Doctor Prendergast.

  Then, having three more hours to kill before it was time for his return to Littleborough, he braved the biting November wind and walked out along Chapel Street, through The Crescent, past Peel Park, on past Pendlebury, and so out along the Bolton Turnpike to Irlam's-o-th'Ights. There he turned
down a narrow lane between two derelict cottages; soon it became no more than a deeply rutted cart track that skirted a spinney of ash and sycamore. On the far side a wicket gate, perilously decrepit, gave access to a small paddock or abandoned garden. Here he stopped and gazed long, over the sloping fields, down to the new Bolton line, and the not-so-new canal, down to Agecroft, and far across through the November mists to where his mind's eye placed the distant uplands of the Forest of Rossendale.

  He drank the scene in as though life itself depended on his never forgetting it. Again and again his eyes stole across to a nearby patch of thistle and briar, where his memory conjured a small, low-roofed cottage. At its door stood a plain young girl—plain as the world might see her, perhaps, but fairer still than all that world to him.

  Alice.

  He wished then that he had not made this self-tormenting pilgrimage. It did no good. Alice was beyond his power of doing good. And—he closed his eyes and held his breathing—of doing harm. And thought of harm made him think of the child. What of the child? Had it lived? Where? And where was it now?

  As his inner eye relinquished its hold on the cottage and on Alice, he wondered what he would give to bring her back. His new life? Nora? Nothing within him hastened to deny it.