The Rich Are with You Always (41 page)

  "It's a good point. I'm persuaded."

  "It's your visiting manufacturer you have to convince. If you can tell him the whole town pays for itself, that's far more impressive than…"

  "I agree. I've said it. Just work it out."

Livings's head went left, right, left, right.

  Ten minutes later Nora said: "With two thousand dwellings, the weekly rent would be four shillings for a labourer, four and tenpence for a mechanic, and eight shillings for an overseer."

  "Still very cheap," Livings said. "What are you allowing on the civic side?"

  Nora looked back at her figures. "Roads, park, dispensary, institute, and so on—a hundred and twenty thousand pounds; repairs and upkeep, recurring, four thousand…" And so on through all the elements that make for the running of a town, ending with the caution that it was "all very round-figurey."

  "It sounds of the right order," John said. "I can't believe the rents are so low."

  Nora checked a sample of them again. "Well, they are," she confirmed. She was feeling quite excited now. On her properties, she usually thought only of leasehold for the most superior housing, as at Alderley Edge, where the houses had between one and five acres each. She wondered that she had never done the calculations for renting humbler and more close-packed estates. Of course, there was the cost of building and repairing, the cost of collecting rents, bad debts, quick turnover of tenancies, property empty. No, it was not for her. Not yet, anyway.

  "How much more would it be," John asked, "if you added a modest profit to us on those outlays?"

  Nora smiled sweetly. "It never occurred to me not to do that in the first place," she said. "Three per cent. Already in."

  Later he teased her for her character-reading ability. "That man's no lecher," he said of Livings.

  "You've found the cure," she said. "Fame and a fat fee."

Flynn's great progress with the GS&W line astonished even John, who already had the highest opinion of the man. It was not merely that he had the work done quickly but he had done it thinkingly. For instance, there was a shortage of surveyors in Ireland at that time; the perennial shortage of all skilled artisans and middle-class professionals had been made worse by the demand for public works to relieve the distress following the potato disease. Trevelyan at the Treasury insisted that every scheme should be properly surveyed and costed, and be personally authorized by him in London, before work began. So surveyors were in great demand all over the country.

  Flynn had overcome this shortage by holding a night school for his gangers, where he taught the simple precepts of laying down a line on the ground from a survey map. Then each ganger was taught how to range the first curve he would be working on. If it was a simple curve, he was taught the "ranging by offsets" technique, which needed no theodolite. If it was a complex curve, starting lazy and getting tight say, Flynn made up a set of templates, each consisting of a plank and three nails to mark the tangent and the offset sighting lines. These planks he marked A, B, C, etc., and all the man had to do was to sight along them in the proper order and he could not help getting the line right. This, in turn, freed his one surveyor to do the really difficult parts—where sight lines were obstructed, for instance—and the parts where errors would be very costly, such as embankments and cuttings.

  It is true that there were one or two errors; but they were all on level ground and cost little to rectify. And it is certainly true that the surveying profession was outraged at the "Flynn system," as it was soon called. For years afterward, whenever a line was accidentally misaligned (as happened, for instance, at Sough Tunnel on the Blackburn & Bolton in 1847), it was always said to have been "laid out on the Flynn principle." But the joke was most unfair, for the Flynn system enabled Stevenson's to lay out the line and start preparing the rail bed from a number of focal points along its path without waiting for survey engineers. By April, track laying had got beyond Lucan, over eight miles from Dublin.

  John was confident enough then to leave Flynn to it and to go off himself to look at the proposed routes of the Waterford & Limerick and the Waterford & Kilkenny lines, both of which had been authorized by Parliament last year but neither of which had yet gone to tender. He was making these trips at the suggestion of Lucas, the engineer to the GS&W, who said that if the distress got much worse, the government could hardly resist appeals to include authorized railways in the list of acceptable public works.

  Lucas "lent" John a guide whose name sounded very like MacMinimum— whose baptismal name, More, made this unusual surname even less likely. John listened hard at each introduction and heard, variously, MacMahanon, MacManamon, MacMarneymum, and—once—MacMillan; he gave up and settled once again for MacMinimum, to which the man invariably answered without so much as the lifting of an eyebrow.

  MacMinimum's relationship to the GS&W remained obscure.

  "Do you work for the company?" John asked, when they were set out on their journey.

  "I do work for them," was the reply. "That is, I do some work. But also for others."

  "For the Waterford & Limerick, for instance?"

  "Oh, of course." He spoke as if he were giving elocution lessons in the Irish accent.

  "And the Waterford & Kilkenny?"

  "Beyond doubt."

  Several minutes later he added: "But I would not like to give you the impression I have worked for either of them yet."

  "Do you have an interest in them?" John asked, meaning, of course, a financial interest.

  "Oh, I'm deeply interested in them and always have been," he drawled. And again, long moments later, he added the qualification: "Though I want to tell you one thing—I know very little about them." John began to wonder whether More MacMinimum was not, after all, a most apt name for this man; perhaps, indeed, he was the figment of his own name. Half an hour in his company left John feeling that nothing of that sort was impossible.

  This accident of geography has created a vast central bog. It extends up and over all but the highest mountains, between whose feet all main roads and railroads must thread their way. There was, thus, little difficulty for the GS&W in choosing its line from Dublin to Cork. It had to go south of the Slieve Bloom mountains, on the southern rim of the central depression, just as it had to go north of the Ballyhoura mountains, seventy miles farther to the southwest. John had ridden this route the previous year, before he had tendered for the contract. He felt a superstitious, almost fatalistic reluctance to look too closely now, in case he discovered some horror he had overlooked on that earlier journey, for the tender was accepted and the price could not be varied.

  So he was pleased enough that MacMinimum was a hard rider and got them to Tipperary in only two days. John noticed that, as they left the rich pastures of Leinster and rode into Munster, the degree of destitution worsened considerably. Even in Queen's County, in the Great Heath of Maryborough, still technically in Leinster, they saw appalling signs of starvation—though it moved John far more than it seemed to move MacMinimum.

  "Sure aren't they like that every year," he said.

  That evening, at the Royal in Tipperary, John asked MacMinimum if that was really so—was the distress always as bad as they had seen it today?

  He replied that he knew damn all about it but would swear it was. They were dining at a common table, and a man sitting opposite to them begged to differ. Ormond, he said his name was, Captain Cashel Ormond. Not only was the distress worse, it had been aggravated by interference from Westminster. Would they wait now while he took another slice off the joint?

  While he was away at the buffet, MacMinimum said quietly to John: "For God's sake, say not a word on railways. The quare fella here is Master of the Tipperary and they hunt all along the valley of the Suir—the way the line is to go. Sure he'd kill ye."

  John began to understand why Lucas had sent MacMinimum along with him.

  Ormond returned. First he tried, not very energetically, to find out what John's business was. When he failed, he reverted quickly to the subject of the distress.

  "You were blaming the government?" John prompted.

  "Indeed, sir. They have no notion of what monster they have formed. If

they had said no help would be forthcoming and no stock of food had been set aside and no extraordinary public works would be undertaken, they might have provided all three by stealth and so avoided a great nuisance. But by God, when governments meddle with labour, trade, and supply, it's time to look to your shutters and locks."

  "Isn't that the truth of it, sir," MacMinimum said.

  "It is. It is," Ormond confirmed. "Look at it here. Not a man gone to the English harvest, because the Board of Works had promised work in Ireland."

  "Not
promised
," John corrected.

  "You explain that to the countryside here! Wasn't there three thousand men in Tipperary last Saturday in a riot for work, outside this very building. And the Relief Committee and the Board of Works inspector upstairs—four of them go out on the balcony, and there was a silence would have lifted off your hat. And every man out there, three thousand I say, goes down on his knees! In the street! The Board of Works sits at God's right hand." He grinned and beckoned John conspiratorially close. "Now you know, sir, and I know, that the Board of Works comprises four clerks working in a back corridor of Dublin Castle, trying desperately to reduce a mountain of ten thousand schemes to order. And we know that when they're finished, though God knows when that will be, the schemes that survive must all be sent on to Whitehall where Trevelyan, and Trevelyan alone, will pronounce upon them. And another thing we know is that when word finally arrives back to Clonahoe or Ballyeen that they can build their road as a relief work, there'll be no one there fit to supervise it."

  "Not the poor law guardians?" John asked. "Surely they are the ideal people?"

  "Of course they are, but that has nothing to do with it. The law provides that they may administer indoor relief; they may not touch outdoor relief! So we shall see hundreds of gangs of idle men, smoking and drinking, and half-building roads that no one needs anyway."

  "Why don't they undertake drainage?" John asked, remembering the appalling wetness of much of the land they had splashed across that day. "God knows you could do with it!"

  "Sure that's the truth!" MacMinimum said.

  "That too is forbidden," Ormond explained.

  "But why, for God's sake?"

  "Because some individuals might benefit more than others; and the rule for public works is that all must benefit indifferently or none may benefit at all. And meanwhile, next year's potatoes will not be planted because the men who should be doing it are on the public works instead—and they are on the public works because that is the only place they can get money to buy the meal they need to replace the potato that failed."

  "And of course," John said, thinking he could see the end of this train of thought, "the price of meal is bound to rise beyond their reach."

  But Ormond shook his head. "Would to God that were true! Even though it would go hard with the poor for this year. But Trevelyan has brought in over a hundred thousand pounds' worth of Indian corn from America, all of it held in the Commissariat depots. Vile yellow stuff it is, hard as flintstone. The people call it Peel's brimstone. And the sole purpose of this corn is not to relieve starvation, but to release onto the market whenever the price rises. Their aim is to keep
down
the price of meal!"

  John shrugged in resignation and disgust. The lunacy of it! He had seen enough of the country to know that, outside the main towns, there was no mercantile system of any kind. He and MacMinimum had ridden through parish after parish, in one of the more prosperous parts of the country, without seeing a single shop of any description. If the government wanted to encourage a new trade in supplying meal to the populace, the last way to do it was to remove all profit from the enterprise.