The Rich Are with You Always (44 page)

  If they had been on the same side of the bed, he would have struck her. As it was, he clenched his fist and glared at her across the gulf that divided them.

  A whimper from the girl distracted them. Both looked down at her. Large tears brimmed in her eyes as she stared dumbly from one to the other. When she blinked, the tears overflowed and ran back along her cheekbones to her ears, where the swaddling absorbed them. She raised her hands feebly outward, the left to John, the right to Nora. She had nothing else to offer them.

  Ashamed, each took one shivering hand. The girl shut her eyes and gripped back for dear life. Neither of them felt able to speak.

  "I hope you're satisfied," Nora said, breaking the silence at last. Before John could answer, she sat down at the child's side, took out a lace handkerchief, and, with her free hand, dabbed at the run of the tears. "It isn't you, Mary," she said. "It's not you, popsie. You're going to be all right. You'll be safe here, and we'll go on looking for your mammy and daddy. Have no fear." She spoke in this way until the girl's hand went limp and she seemed to have fallen into a doze.

  Nora looked up to see John doing his best to hide a smile of triumph. "I mean we'll pay someone to do it for us," she snapped at him. "Which is what should have been done a week since."

  "Shhh!" he whispered, grinning.

  Outside in the street, where she could raise her voice again, she almost shouted at him, telling him he was to stop behaving as if he had been right and she wrong—as if he believed she now shared his views and endorsed his ridiculous maunderings. When he refused, and persisted in his lofty, tolerant self- satisfaction, she understood that only some drastic gesture would persuade him of her seriousness. So when he went to take his bath, she hired a fresh chaise, had her luggage transferred to it, and left at once for Dublin.

  She was tired enough then to feel a certain caustic amusement that John's infidelity to the firm touched her so much more on the raw than his infidelity to her.

Nora's abrupt departure had, at first, the desired effect upon John. That very night he saw a lawyer, the priest, the chairman of the poor-law guardians, and the nurse, putting in hand all the arrangements necessary to secure Mary's immediate future. Early the following day, he too set out for Dublin.

  The more he thought about it though, the less pleased he felt. He told himself he had fully intended to make all those arrangements in any case. Nora's virtual command, reinforced by her petulant departure, had no bearing—except that she had taken all the pleasure out of it for him. She had turned an act of his own free will into an act of meek obedience to her. The hurtful things she had said came crowding back in his memory. They became less and less forgivable as time cooled the heat of the moments in which they had been spoken.

  She was getting too damned arrogant. Flying across England and Ireland like that to deliver him an angry homily on his duty to his firm! Well, he'd have a flea or two to put in her ear next time they met. Ever since he'd given her that power of attorney she'd been getting above herself. He ought never to have listened to Chambers's advice on that.

  Yet it was comforting too, when he was alone—especially at night—to say her name to himself and to think of all the good things about her. There were still plenty of them too.

  Business had piled up while he had been "milksopping" around in Waterford. He arrived back in Dublin to find no trace of Nora—and several urgent letters, each making demands on his time. Before he left, he wrote to Routh suggesting that if some of the money now wasted utterly in relief works were instead put into interest-free loans to the Irish railways, a great deal of employment would follow, not only on the lines but in the trade they would stimulate. His anger at the ineptitude of the present government action led him to suggest that "when the loans were repaid and the revenues from new commerce were collected, the Treasury might even be able to soothe Parliament with the claim that it had, after all, turned famine into a going concern." Once the letter was sent he regretted the remark—and he got a frosty reply from Sir Randolph. The lack of judgement that led him to write to Routh in such a vein was Nora's fault. He

had not realized how deeply she had disturbed him.

  The most urgent of his letters was from Jack Whitaker, his deputy on the Chester & Holyhead line through North Wales. Whitaker had been with him from the very start, a solid, dependable man who knew his own limitations. Chiefly he lacked the flair, or the confidence, for tackling out-of-the-way problems, especially among the men. His trouble this time was that masons, carpenters, and other mechanics were leaving the job almost as soon as they started, because of the outrageous rents being demanded by the people with houses bordering the line, especially in Rhyll, where they wanted ten shillings a week just for a room. John could easily believe it; he remembered how, when he was walking the route of that particular line, he had once asked for a glass of water at a cottage and been charged eightpence for it.

  Another letter was from Robert Stephenson, son of the great George, who was the engineer to the Chester & Holyhead; he was eager to advance the Conway tubular bridge, and could John meet him at Conway in the coming week?

The worst of the lodgings in Rhyll consisted of one dirty room with decaying plaster and a leaking roof, over a coal merchant's in the narrow part of the town. Here a carpenter and his wife were lodging. "And it's ten shillings a week?" he asked the man.

  "Ten and sixpence," the carpenter said. "He wanted twelve shillings. I said we'd sooner sleep under the hedges. But I shall leave at the end of this week, Lord John. I can't pay a third of the wage in lodgings."

  All the while the coal merchant looked on, smiling.

  "Why do you charge so much?" John asked him. "You know the room is not worth two shillings, much less ten."

  "It's worth what it will fetch, see," the man said, unruffled. "Who says only two shillings? You. I say twelve, and I let it for less because I'm soft-hearted. Rooms is scarce in Rhyll, see. Demand and supply. I do both, see."

  One way and another, John had had his fill of the theory of price lately, and the last person he wanted to take lessons in economics from was an avaricious north Welsh merchant. "I'll teach you about 'demand and supply,' sir," he said angrily. "You shall learn of the Law of Avarice—a gluttonous trader makes a glutted market. In ten days, no man of mine will seek a single lodging in Rhyll. No, nor anywhere else in this neighbourhood."

  He had no idea how he was going to fulfil this promise; he knew only that he

was determined to teach these greedy people a lesson.

  "What now, guvnor?" Jack Whitaker asked when they were on their way back to the workings.

  "That's a good question, Jack. Are you friendly with any farmers locally?" He had an idea of renting barns, putting up partitions, and making some form of acceptable shelter, at least as a temporary expedient.

  But on his way to one of the farmers that Jack had forlornly recommended, John hit upon the real answer: a large timber plantation of about twenty acres—ash, sycamore, larch, balsam poplar, noble fir, silver pine—all in just the right condition for his purpose.

  "Jack!" he said excitedly. "Where's our nearest timber yard, our own yard, where we could handle trees like yon?"

  Whitaker looked at them. They were not so big as to require steam lifting- machinery and powered saws. "We could handle those here," he said. "The timber yard's at Mostyn, five miles back."

  So John bought all twenty acres of timber as it stood. He took three gangs off the line and within a week not a tree was left standing. A fourth gang had meanwhile laid a narrow bogey line downhill from the woods to the workings and soon a steady flow of timber, all cut to lengths, was arriving at the lower end. There it was quickly turned into log cabins and dormitories—all erected on company ground along the fringes of the cuttings. John had never seen men work so willingly or cheerfully. All had suffered the greed of the local landlords to some extent and the thought of taking this revenge had really fired their spirits. On payday, at the end of the week, most of them refused their wages and John had to be called to the site to intervene.

  "We think as you're out o' pocket enough, what wi' buyin' the timber, an' it's to our advantage," a carpenter explained—the man who had been cheated by the coal merchant.

  All the counterarguments flitted through his mind—the law of price and the business of supply and demand again—and he saw how impossibly incongruous they would sound in these circumstances. They wanted to sacrifice the wage so that they could feel they had personally taken part in the humiliation of the local landlords.

  "Well, I thank you," he said. "I thank all of you. But you must know that my main interest is in getting men to stay on this line. And if it meant the purchase of a
hundred
acres of timber, I'd count it cash well spent—especially to get men who can work as I've seen you lads work this week!" Ironical groans began at that. "If you put that same elbow grease into finishing this line…" He was drowned in laughter and mocking cheers. "But seriously now, lads," he went on, "I'll not be out o' pocket in th' end. I've worked out that a rent of tenpence a week on each log cabin, or sixpence for each bunk in a dormitory, will just pay me back by the end of this contract. Timber and wages. So you must take the wage. If ye don't, it'll bugger up all the books."

  He had known it would not satisfy them, and he waited for the rumbles to grow before he said: "Very well. You want more? You want the chance to spit in the eye of these landlords?"

  "Aye!" a great raucous cheer went up, joyful at the implied promise.

  "I'll tell ye what, then. Most of them are petty tradesmen. The worst was a coal merchant. There's a way we could hit a lot of them, especially that one. There's enough spare kindling and wood up there, trimmed off the trees, to keep Rhyll warm for a year."

  "Burn the bloody place!" called an excited navvy.

  "Nay!" John said with relish. "Cleverer nor that! If on my time, you prepare that waste wood into bundles such as any man could store at home, and if in your own time, you will carry those bundles around the town and distribute them free, to rich and poor alike—but not to any man who was landlord to any among us—we may together teach them…" The rest of his words were drowned in a universal roar of delight.

  "So that's why you wouldn't let them burn the trimmings," Whitaker said. "I wondered."

  "Aye. I had that in mind all week, but I couldn't see how I could afford it."

Robert Stephenson, when John met him after the week's delay, was amused at the story of the Triumph of Rhyll.

  "You're a lucky man, Stevenson," he said. "Your men will work with a spirit all summer now. They always do after something like that. And now"—he made a gesture that cleared the air around them of all such trivia—"I want to show you a machine that's going to put some spirit into my work this summer. If I told you I want to install the first tube of the bridge next March or thereabouts, what'd you say?"

  "I'd say good luck. And we'll be ready for you."

  Stephenson chuckled. "You're good for my digestion," he said. "I'll tell that to Fairburn when he gets back."

  The machine was a device for punching rivet holes in flat sheets of wrought iron. The ingenuity of it was that it operated exactly like a Jacquard loom, which is a loom for weaving tapestries without human control no matter how intricate or varied the design. It is very easy to devise a machine that will punch one rivet hole every six inches, but imagine a column of newsprint in which every letter
o—
scattered at random—was a hole through the paper. And then imagine that the paper was magnified to a width of two feet and pasted onto a sheet of wrought iron, half an inch thick. It is easy to imagine then, the labour and skill that would go into marking such random—yet precisely required—holes in the metal and punching them out by hand. The machine Robert Stephenson was so proud of could punch such a sheet in less than four minutes, never forgetting a hole, never punching a superfluous one.