3204. You do not then think, as some have held, that unions, if they were formed among the labourers, would encourage safer working?— Unions put a permanent tyranny in place of one that is temporary. They do not suit the nature of railway work nor the spirit of the railway worker.
When Nora had finished reading this evidence she understood exactly what was making her so nervous about John and his behaviour toward Ireland—more than nervous, in fact, angry. There, in every word he had spoken, was all his humanity, all his wisdom, all that deep, unsentimental knowledge of human nature—the very qualities that had brought Lord George over the Irish Sea of a purpose to see him. So why did John only have to set foot on Irish soil to abandon even the most obvious commonsense notions of business and human nature? The country had allowed millions of people to slip beyond the reach of the monied system; they lived without trade, cash was no inducement to them, and lack of it was no discouragement. Until now. They lived on a food—the potato—that could be made almost as available as water. Until now. Their survival had seemed to mock the great natural laws that govern the wealth of nations. Until now.
Now those great laws were taking their delayed but inevitable course, and it could no more be prevented than the onset of winter. To pretend that it could was both arrogant and cruel—arrogant of oneself and cruel to those poor souls whose deaths were now about to show how wide the writ of economic law could run—and how deep. And damn it, she thought, remembering the winter before last at Thorpe, who was it berated myself and the children for feeding all the birds of the air!
She distrusted Bentinck too. Governments had no business meddling in trade. Ireland had more than enough private wealth to satisfy her need for railways. If the owners of that wealth preferred to invest it in Spanish or Austrian, or even Indian, railways instead, that was a clear message to the Irish that they were not offering enough of the right security. Let them stop their outrages—and their outrageous demands—and the capital would come falling out of the very thatch. There'd be no need for government subsidies then. The only thing such subsidies did was to prevent the people from ever learning the hard but unavoidable lessons of economic life.
Nora was well in steam by the time John returned. She congratulated him on his evidence to the select committee and asked him how his talk with Bentinck had gone.
"I told him all I knew about the Irish companies, and of the lines that, in my view, could he made profitably if they only had the capital."
"And did you also tell him that in your view the Tories have ruined this country with their protection and patronage? And that the last cure she needs is another dose of the same medicine?"
He laughed.
"I'm serious," she said.
"I know you are."
"Well? Did you?"
"I would have liked to. But we were not talking to that purpose." He could sense the anger in her silence. "However, I told him all the arguments that Russell and Wood and Trevelyan might muster against him, and…"
"And how to rebuff them, I suppose!" She threw up her hands in resigned disgust.
"It will mean money for Irish railroad building—which can certainly do us no harm."
She said nothing.
"Or do you think we can manage without?"
She turned to him, trying to stay calm, trying to keep the heat out of her voice. "Give a government a million to invest and their first thought is who do we owe a favour or who can we bind to us with a favour or where can we buy support or buy…"
"Or buy the public peace," John interrupted. "That's understood. Support for industries that cannot attract commercial capital is exactly that: buying peace. Like everything else, public order has its market price. No one is pretending otherwise."
"But that's just what they will do—pretend otherwise. They'll pretend it's charity—the soul of a Christian nation expressing itself. Such hypocrisy!"
His tolerant smile angered her even more than his argument. "What would you prefer? Let the ruffians know their disorder has a value in cash?"
"Of course not! But bring them to understand that peace and hard work do have such value. In the long run there can be no benefit to anyone in buying them off by unsound investment. If governments are to start pumping money into unprofitable business or unprofitable corners of the kingdom, they will end by impoverishing all business, impoverishing all the parts of the kingdom, and all the people. I say we should not take one step along that path. And nor should we assist those like Bentinck who want us to."
"Well," he said, stretching his shoulders, "I'm sure this ministry will take your line. Lord George's bill has no more chance than…Prosser's Patent Wooden Railway."
"Ooooh!" she fumed. "When you don't want to discuss anything…!"
His attitude changed at once. He appeared to resign himself—painfully—to the necessity of talking with her, which brought all her anger back to the boil.
"Very well, Nora." He sighed. "What do you want? Let's talk about our money. The profits we're making on the GS and W. Do you now think it
would be wrong to invest them here?"
It was a question too important for anger; she forced herself to speak reasonably. "If the government is going to start handing out money to everyone who waves a begging bowl under their noses, it will make reasonable business decisions impossible."
"I doubt if the government will do that. I doubt it very much."
"Too much. There is altogether too much doubt. We ought to wait until it's resolved."
"You twist my words."
"And you don't answer mine."
He began to pace the room restlessly. "But we cannot just hold on to that money while people are starving to death. We'd never sleep easy again."
"And I say we cannot lay it out anywhere the government may later come blundering in. We could lose it all."
"Now we have it! There is the exact difference between us. I would rather lay it out and lose it—knowing at least I did all I could."
"Then you ought to be in politics, not business. Go and vote the repeal of economic law—and throw in the law of gravity while you're at it."
"How dare you talk to me like that!" His tolerance broke at last. But then he merely glowered at her, afraid in case he should go too far as well.
To her surprise his anger calmed her. "What else should I do? Pretend I no longer care for our business?"
"You care for it well enough. You care for it to the exclusion of everything else."
"But it is everything else. It makes everything else possible."
"Things are so terrible here," he said, making one last stab at the argument. "Distress is so abject. It is not time to observe every scruple and nicety of economic law."
She buried her face in her hands. "John, oh John!" She looked up wearily. "There's no two people in all the country who know better than you and me how to take one pound and turn it into two—or twenty-two. If there's any faculty Ireland needs desperately at this crisis, it's that faculty. For God's sake—and for Ireland's sake—let us use it. How will it be if we, and all the others who possess it too, if we all resign our responsibilities and contemplate instead of turning each pound into—into nothing? How can that ever help this country?"
He sighed. "I wish we'd never come here. Brassey's wise to stay away."
"Amen to that," she said.
Chapter 37
Stevenstown, or its first two hundred houses, and the vast steelworks, or at least the first bay of what might become such a works, was opened just before Christmas that year—twelve months to the day from the turning of the first sod. It was a festive ceremony, with a dinner for the operatives in the works and a champagne supper for deputies, supervisors, and local bigwigs in Stockton. John spoke at both—a simple message that labour and capital were a partnership, not foes locked in permanent and inevitable combat. They had more in common, he said, than the interests that divided them. Above all they had initiative; the road to the top was open to any man who lived in
Stevenstown; thrift, diligence, perseverance, study, daring, and luck were all that was needed.
The message was better received at the mill than among those already well advanced along that road. And there were rumblings from the townsfolk too. The mayor pressed John especially on the sewerage system he had installed; he was plainly worried it would lead to demands in Stockton among the "progressives" for a municipal drainage system there too. It was all very well to put in a system in a new town; but the cost in a town whose buildings went back over the centuries was ruinous. "D'ye mind," he asked John, "if I put it about that it's mainly for the run-off from your ironworks? The connection to the housing's only incidental?" He was diffident because of Sir George's connection with the firm. Sir George, restored now to modest fortune, was there, ensuring respect.
"Oh," John said, with a wink. "I thought that fact was already perfectly understood." He liked aldermen; he felt at home with their petty-minded venality.
But his spirit was not really in these proceedings. Over two hundred miles away to the south, at Maran Hill, Nora was having a hard time of it with their fifth child. They ought not to have moved; he saw that now. But she had had a succession of minor ailments all autumn and with the baby due and winter coming on, it seemed only sensible to move somewhere milder and less isolated. Their doctor had advised it, as well. And now the child was two weeks late in arriving.
He was on the point of retiring for that night, ready for an early start south next morning, the morning of Christmas Eve, when a lad in a fly came hell-forleather to the inn. He did not even hammer at the door but stood in the yard and bellowed "Mr. John Stevenson!" over and over.
John flung wide the window. "Aye, lad?" It was a porter from the station.
"You're to come back with me, sir. A train is waiting to take you south."
He wasted no time over questions. Nor did he take anything but his writing case and wallet. The horse, which had been merely winded in the tavern yard, was lathered to a terror by the time it got them back to the station. Mills, the stationmaster, grim-faced, handed him a sheet of paper. "Off the company's telegraph, sir. Twenty minutes ago."
John read: 'Stevenson go south at once special waiting at Stockton with priority through to Boxmoor regret grave news from Marran Hall God speed Hudson.' He looked again at the misspelling; it definitely read "Marran Hall."
"From Mr. Hudson himself, sir," Mills said. "Thank the powers we had one still fired up." He pointed down the line, where an engine was lurching toward them on skirts of steam. "She'll get you to Stockton."
John nodded, unable to speak. His mind, clutching at any straw, prayed for there really to be a Marran Hall and for that misunderstanding to be the basis of this nightmare.
"I'll wish you God speed too, sir," Mills said.
"And me," the porter added.
"Thank you." John spoke at last as he swung himself in beside the engineer on the still-moving engine. The porter, trotting beside, dropped his writing case onto the footplate.
"I'll fire for you," John said, grabbing the coal shovel from the engineer. The man hesitated. John thrust the shovel back into his hands and opened the steam valve further. "Or I'll drive," he said. The engine, free of any load but its own tender, lurched forward. The engineer gave him back his shovel. "Right!" he said.
They took that engine to its limit over the twenty-six-odd miles between Stockton and the main line at Darlington—the line on which public steam railways had begun, twenty years earlier. On that day, a man had walked in front of the engine; tonight, a hare could not have run before them. The engine groaned and clanked as it hurtled through the dark over the ringing metal; the fire roared and the water boiled with a muted thunder—the explosive birth of a million steam bubbles.
The night was windless but the air, rushing past them, shrieked over the engine's surfaces and streamed through their hair. It was like a goodish gale. John put his hat on the writing case.
"Must be fifty mile an hour," he shouted to the driver.
"Just the night for sheep on the line!"
"How often does that happen?"
"Never! But it's times like this you think of it."
The man's words were comforting. Indeed, John thought, it's times like this you think the worst—and it doesn't happen.
At least the sheep didn't happen, and they reached Darlington in just thirty-one minutes. His hat had blown away somewhere on that record dash.
Christmas Eve was thirty minutes old when the special pulled out of Darlington on its long journey south; it was Kitson's long-boilered Hector, the very engine of which Hudson had given a silver model replica to Chambers. John wondered if that was an omen. This time there was both an engineer and a fireman; he had a coach to himself. The master at Darlington apologized that it was not a directors' coach.
There was a further telegraph message, also from Hudson: "News is no worse and I will see you at York."
He tried to sleep. His rolling-stone way of life had taught him to catnap in any position at any time of day. But tonight, with the whole padded seat to lie out on, sleep was nowhere near. The unthinkable clamoured at his mind, besieging his wakefulness. To hold it at bay he said, "Nora my love…Nora my love… Nora my love…" like a compulsive prayer, in time with the chatter of the wheels over the rail butts. He pressed his ear to the cloth of the seat and filled his mind with the deep, sonorous rumble of the axles. It was, he said, the coursing of the blood in Nora's veins.
At York they stopped to take on water. While they were still moving, the door opened and Hudson's huge bulk swung up and in. He hung his lantern, momentarily blinding John, and sat shivering, drawing himself inward. His neck, never prominent, vanished into his great chest.
"It's very good of you, this," John said.
"Good? I never felt less adequate."
"Any more news?"
"None from your home. You will be met at Boxmoor. I wish the Great Northern were already built!"
John laughed faintly. "The worst is being so far away," he said. "These things are often better when we're there." He saw from the faintness of Hudson's smile that such hope was, in this case, thin.
A porter opened the door and put in four footwarmers and a number of blankets. Behind him stood the engineer. "Ready, Mr. Hudson, sir," he said. Hudson climbed out as swiftly as he had got in. "How long to Boxmoor?" John asked.
"If we make the same time as we made since Darlington, we'll be there by five. A little earlier."
Hudson gripped his hand. "If prayers count," he said, "there's hundreds praying already. Tomorrow it will be thousands. The day after, tens of thousands."
John nodded, too moved to speak his thanks.
A half-mile down the line he blew out the lantern Hudson had left and, wrapping himself in the blankets, sat with two footwarmers by his feet and one on the seat each side of him—a tent of warmth in that icy carriage.
Years ago Nora had said to him, "Why don't they conduct the waste steam back through the coaches?" and he had explained there was no heat in waste steam. But it would surely be warmer than this.
He let himself think of Nora now—of all the amazing contradictions she was. How she could think of their business and future with such cold and longsighted vision; she put more effort into that alone than most people could put into several lives. And yet how impetuous she was at times, and what risks she took! In anyone else, it would have seemed both blind and mad; but with Nora you felt that even in the highest flights of her impetuosity that cold, logical part of her mind was still quietly at work. There were times in their discussions (outsiders who did not know them well would say "arguments") when she was pressing some point of view most vehemently and yet he could see a momentary flicker of doubt in her eye, which showed that other possibilities were even then passing through her mind. How did she hold that endless ferment together? It was like a monster class of unruly but brilliant children.
There was an image of her he had carried from the day they had me
t, that hot August day in 1839, when he had been no more than a navvy ganger. They had supped together and walked out on the banks of spoil from the tunnel he was working on. Then she had gone back to his bed to wait on him while he spoke with Walter Thornton, who was the engineer to the tunnel. He had come back to find her exhausted and asleep. Again in his mind he saw the rough blanket fall from her, saw her underfed, naked body in the moonlight, saw her waken and realize where she was, saw the lust and invitation kindle in her eyes. And then his own reluctant voice, saying, "Nay, lass, there's more important work afoot." How she had worked that night! She had costed the operations and materials on that tunnel six ways to Sunday before dawn, while he had forged his letter of credit on Chambers' bank, and thought of ever-more desperate ways to spin his capital out until the payments came in. All next day, while he fought and won his case with the railway company to become their main contractor on the tunnel, she had helped break open a rabbit warren, standing over the holes and hurling great rocks down upon the luckless would-be escapers. When he saw her that evening she had two dozen of them slung over her shoulder.
The Rich Are with You Always Page 39