The Rich Are with You Always (67 page)

  One way and another he was coming to hold a fair bit of railway stock, especially in foreign lines. He was, in 1848-49, building over five hundred miles of line in France, Spain, Italy, Bavaria, and Austria. When he looked at his diary for that period, he found that of 380 days, he had spent 274 overseas.

  European lines were, he soon learned, built on very different commercial principles from those in England. England was a sink-or-swim country. If you saw a chance, you took your capital and your courage in both hands and leaped at it. If you failed, no one in government would throw you a lifeline—the very idea would have horrified them. And if you succeeded and the profits were vast, no one in government felt obliged to trim them—that was the other side of the same coin. But these foreign capitalists wanted someone to guarantee success before they put down any real money; and if it also meant that their profit would be deliberately limited, they didn't mind. They were happy to live in a cosy little cartel of capital and bureaucracy. Small wonder that it was English money (nearly nine million in

1847 and '48) and English engineers and English contractors who were taking on most of the important foreign work. All those foreign countries had words that meant "enterprise" and "risk" and "self-reliance" but very little use for them.

  One result of this was that companies looked to governments for part of their capital, often for most of it. And governments generally were not willing to part with a penny until the line was opened. So the companies had nothing but their own stock to make payments with. Stevenson's went into the year 1849 owning a nominal million and a half pounds' worth of foreign railway stock whose actual cash value, if sold immediately, was no higher than twenty-five thousand—on which the banks were prepared to lend only fifteen. To earn that stock, the firm had put in over a year's work; its actual negotiable value would not pay a weeks wages. It was no way to stay in business.

  So when John came home with the Dresden–Prague line among his trophies— sixty miles at six hundred and eighty thousand pounds, to be paid in stock—his welcome from Nora was not the warmest.

  "It must be the last of these contracts for a long time, love," she told him after she had spent a fraught afternoon on the firm's accounts.

  But he was still cock-a-whoop. "Come on, sweet—the commercial crisis is over. There must be the money out there somewhere. You've just got to work harder to find it."

  She hid her exasperation. "The commercial crisis is not over. The bankruptcies may have stopped but that's all. Trade is terrible. Everyone's just pulling in their horns and sitting it out."

  "That's good, surely! It leaves the field to us. Look—I can build this line for four hundred and eighty thousand. So there's two hundred thousand clear to us in a year's time. That's over forty per cent profit. Now where can we find profits like that in England these days? We can't anymore."

  She still kept her temper. There was no sense in antagonizing him; he had to understand the difficulties. He had to stop working on credit.

  "You can't get profits like that here because there's no money to pay them. Railway investment has dried up—and you can't blame folk for that when you remember how they got burned. Meanwhile, railway income has followed trade down into the pit. But at least you can still get paid in cash here."

  "Piddling little lines!" he sneered. "Ah, but you should see the Dresden–Prague!"

  "Go back, John! Go back and tell them you'll build it for half a million in cash, instead of this worthless stock."

  He really thought she had lost her reason. "What?" He laughed. "Settle for four per cent when I can get forty?"

  "You'd do more good for Stevenson's, I promise," she insisted.

  "Go on! Ye've lost your sense of adventure. No—there's good pickings in Europe. The best. We'll end up worth millions."

  She closed her eyes and sighed. What more could she say? How could she put it even more clearly? Explanation seemed of no use. Simply state the fact, then: "One more such contract and you will break the firm," she said.

  "Ah!" He dismissed her pessimism with a wave of his hand. "You and Chambers will find the money. Chambers will, anyway. He'd never let us go down. It's not just our business he'd lose. Hudson would withdraw his patronage too."

  "If by this time next year, Hudson has enough patronage left to move a single coal wagon one yard over any English metal, I'll boil and eat my best riding boots!" When he stared at her, not knowing how to express his disbelief, she added, "Hudson hasn't yet realized that this railway age is not the one he grew up in. And nor have you. He'll fall all right. And so will you unless you wake up and face facts. No one is too big."

  But it sobered him only slightly.

  Early in 1849, he was sobered properly when Edmund Denison, chairman of the Great Northern, took a leaf out of the foreigners books and said they would have to pay partly in stock rather than cash for the work Stevenson's was doing. He was only the first of several. It was just as Nora had forecast two years earlier, but she had not foreseen that it would be so sudden or so universal.

  
Where,
Nora thought with sour satisfaction,
were the triumphant brayings
of 1845?
Then the railways were ushering in the New Jerusalem and every other child would be born a millionaire! If there was a law of money to match the law of gravity, it was that any person or any group who tried to snatch a disproportionate share of the available wealth impoverished everyone, including themselves. People never learned that lesson.

  She and Chambers did all they could. They realized the fifty thousand Hudson had promised on the 250 Great North of England shares he had given to John to keep the York–Scarborough line cheap. She wondered how much of the money came out of Hudson's own pocket.

  "He'll not last long now," Nora said. Once, she had made that prediction with relish; but now, as the inevitable day drew on, she began to feel almost sorry for the "king." It was not a nickname one heard so often now.

  They sold most of the shares John had bought over the years. They called in loans the firm had made, often giving a good discount for cash. They brought the stocks of the Stevenstown mill down to the danger point, where they would have been unable to fulfil any quick order, even of medium size. And Chambers busied himself around the City as never before, tapping all possible sources of loan. She even got her lawyer, Charles Stoddart, to prepare a complete schedule of all her properties and their values.

  There was no point keeping Chambers in the dark this time. This was no short-term crisis, compounded by the firm's own private difficulties; it was a universal slide toward ruin. No one was safe. Only those who worked as closely and as frankly as possible with their bankers stood a chance.

  Even so, this squeezing of the sponge yielded much less cash than either she or John had expected.

  "It's a good thing you're ready to build at Camden Town," he said with a relieved grin. "Seventeen hundred houses at twenty pounds profit. A good thirty thousand there. And in cash."

  His face fell when he saw her response. "Oh, no," she said firmly. "That's going out to tender."

  Then he grinned again and nudged her. "Clever! Of course it's got to look aboveboard."

  "It will be aboveboard, John," she said, feeling sick within. "Cubitt, Fox, Brassey, Jackson—they'll all be invited. They'll bring their bids. And they'll all be present when opened. And the winning tender will be declared then. And only then."

  He was too angry to speak to her. But as he strode from the room—and for a moment she feared he was going to smash his way out through the door—he said to a portrait of his horse Hermes, "Someone had better think again and think harder."

  She thought hard all right, for the rest of that day. She took out Prometheus, a large black stallion she had hunted most of that season, and went through their own rides and the park and then on through Panshanger to Hertingfordbury before she felt equal to asking herself why she was being so insistent. Then she came back and, though John was still in the house, she wrote him a letter.

He did not come to her that night, and next morning there was a note before her place at breakfast. It read: "Thank you. Will you please be good enough to let Chambers have the title deeds. He is to discharge any debt upon them."

  She read these terse commands several times through before she could bring herself to believe them. The threat to sell instead of simply to mortgage could not be made more plain. He meanwhile had gone to North Wales, where the Britannia Bridge was now well advanced.

  She had expected him to go onward to Ireland, where Flynn had now pushed the Cork line almost as far as Mallow, thirty miles beyond Limerick Junction and only another twenty or so from the terminus. So she was more than surprised, when she delivered the deeds to Chambers later that week, to hear that John was with him. She went into Nathaniel's office and put the deeds on his desk.

  "With all my worldly goods I thee endow," she said to John.

  He treated it as a great joke. She could not tell from his mood whether he was now reconciled to her decision or not. Of course he would not behave in public other than as he had always behaved.

  "I've just been telling Stevenson that with any luck we shan't need to touch these properties," Chambers said.

"Aye. I've been getting the riot act on bidding for too much long-term work."

  "I don't know why he lost his interest in sewerage systems," Chambers told her. "That's the sort of contract the firm ought to be going after."

  "It's not we who've lost interest; it's the municipalities," John grumbled.

  "Aye," Nora agreed. "Just let there be a bad cholera epidemic this summer and the interest will come—if you'll pardon the expression—flooding back."

  "You've a ready wit today," John said.

  "Thank you. You're remarkably cheerful yourself."

  The flat normality of their talk was turning brittle.

  "I spent the morning at Euston. The Great Hall opening is definitely set for May the seventeenth. And they've promised to pay the entire sum in cash or draft, but no shares."

  "Oh!" Nora wanted to dance on the desk. Her properties were safe!

  "Aye. I threatened to demolish the roof if they tried paying in shares. That may have had something to do with it."