Theirs Was The Kingdom

by R. F Delderfield

  It was her turn to be amazed. “Spoiled things? The Lord give me patience, why should it? Why would it alter things in any way, except for the better? Do you imagine I haven’t been hoping and praying you’d do something like that for months and months, instead of just… just sitting in that silly little desk, with your tongue peeping out as you copied those dreadful pothooks into your books? I told you once to stop being humble and you heeded it so far as your work went. But in all other ways—why, you think less of yourself than the day I met you, and for the life of me I’ve never known what to do about it, without seeming forward! Well, that's done with, thank goodness, for now I don’t care a hoot how forward you think I am. I love you, Jamie, and I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to tell me you loved me. And now you have, or I think you have, at least enough to get things moving. So here's how I feel about it and if I’m wrong I don’t care if you run out of here and never come back!”

  She jumped off the desk and threw her arms about his neck, showering his face with kisses and finally, having tugged him round so that they were face to face, finding his mouth, and straining herself to him so that he had to brace himself against the angle of the desk lid. Having done this, however, he was able, to some extent, to lift her clear of the dusty floor and crush her in an embrace that drove the breath from her body, so that neither of them saw the grey head of the caretaker through the half-open door, or his grin as he bobbed out of sight and rattled a warning with his dustpan and brush. At the sound, they leaped apart, but when they heard his shuffling steps moving into the adjoining classroom, he said, breathlessly, “I never dreamed anything like this could ’appen, never once! I thought… I bin thinking… well, put yourself in my place, Mary. You’re educated, and a parson's daughter inter the bargain. A girl like you could hook just about anyone, anyone at all…”

  “I don’t want anyone. I want you, Jamie Higson.”

  “Then by God, you got me,” he said, fervently, “and we’ll marry soon as you give the word. And what's more, I’ll tell the Gaffer to make my managership final and let Fraser go. How soon could we get married? I don’t mean the daft way some of ’em do up here, plighting their troth an’ what not, but properly married. In your Dad's church. Wi’ bridesmaids and hymns and all the trimmings?”

  And at that she laughed and said, “Oh, Jamie, Jamie, you are a bairn in spite of it all. But I wouldn’t have you a whit different, and as to us getting married, ‘with all the trimmings’ as you say, that will take a little time. I shall have to discuss it with Aunt Flora tonight, or perhaps you could, after supper, for I’m sure she’ll be surprised as I am! Now strap your books and kiss me again and we’ll talk about dates on the way home. April, perhaps. Why not the first Saturday in April?”

  “I can’t wait that long,” he said. “Just you and Aunt Flora hustle it up and make it early in the new year. My birthday—the one the Guardians give me that is—is the 29th o’ January and I can’t think of a present I’d like more. Will that be too soon?”

  “Not a minute too soon,” she said, gaily. “I wish it could be tonight!”

  And then, to the surprise of both of them, a sudden shyness took possession of them, and they avoided one another's eyes as they pottered about rolling up the map of the world, and packing his books away. But afterwards, when they stepped out into the frosty night, turning their backs on the great bulk of the Castle to cut through narrow streets to George Square, the wonder of the occasion demanded some physical expression and they slowed down and walked with arms about one another's waists and Jake, transmogrified not merely as a man but also as an honorary Scotsman, had the feeling that he not only owned Edinburgh but also was on his way to claim it.

  Five

  1

  EDITH WICKSTEAD—“EDITH-WADSWORTH-THAT-WAS” AS SHE WAS STILL thought of in the network—derived considerable amusement from these occasions.

  As one woman among so many men, she could sit back and watch them ride their hobbyhorses into the ground, for she no longer had a region to defend. She only bothered to attend a conference in case Tom, a very amiable man, allowed himself to be put upon by the more aggressive of Swann's viceroys.

  She always saw them, in her mind's eye, as an assembly of privateer captains, reporting to the Admiral-in-Chief and hoping to gather praise or evade blame for personal triumphs or errors of judgement over the past twelve months. As for Adam, he fitted the role exactly and over the last few years had even begun to look like a pirate, with his narrow, dark-browed face, mahogany tan, and that way of sitting with his artificial leg extended as he listened, without seeming to listen, to their interminable wrangles and debates, to their judgements, extenuations and excuses, almost as though his handicap was the result of a broadside in some half-forgotten venture of his splendid, predatory youth.

  The fancy returned to her now as they sat grouped around the long trestle table, puffing vigorously at their pipes and cigars, until the atmosphere of the warehouse smelled like a taproom, and an ill-favoured taproom at that. Privateers, the whole damned lot of them! Owing no loyalty to anyone save to themselves and to him, each concerned with his own private venture and profits that would result from it, spilling from his pockets to theirs.

  She had known most of them for a quarter of a century now and a few, she told herself, were past their prime. But Adam never pressed for retirement so long as a manager was up to his work, like that little cider-apple of a man,

  Hamlet Ratcliffe of the Western Wedge, still living on credit reaped from two incidents early in his Swann career, the recapture of a circus lion and his initiation of the now famous holiday-brake service that operated throughout the midland and southern regions but had never caught on in the northern sectors of the Swann Empire.

  Then there was Catesby, reinstated as manager of the Polygon after a brief spell as gaffer of Sam Rawlinson's cotton mill. She always thought of him as Caius Cassius, of the lean and hungry look, and the temperamental affinity between him and Adam accounted, she supposed, for the success of their partnership. Both were idealists, although their idealism was no more than a kind of furious obstinacy and dedication to a job of work. Catesby was now an important man in his own right, having been a founder of the Trades Union Congress in days when it was regarded by most employers as a nest of Jacobins, plotting bloody revolution. Never by Swann, however, who had always held eccentric views in the field of capital versus labour and was rumoured by some to have encouraged John Catesby in his efforts to form a trades alliance strong enough to strike bargains with bosses.

  There were others round the table who had little in common with bumpkins like Ratcliffe and fanatics like Catesby, or nothing beyond a steady devotion to the firm. She remembered Adam had once commented on this, saying that a Swann-on-Wheels conference was as good a cross-section of England and Englishmen as one would be likely to find anywhere on earth, even in a regiment. It was true, too, as she could judge for herself, letting her glance move down both sides of the table and half-listening to the free-for-all that invariably attended these occasions.

  There was the patrician Godsall, known among them as “The Grandee,” who had once held the Queen's commission but now ruled in the Kentish Triangle; the dapper Morris, from Southern Pickings, shrewd enough to have made a fortune on his own account but who had clung to Swann's coattails ever since the two had met by chance at a Worcestershire inn. There was the Welshman, Lovell, who always sounded as if he was preaching a sermon when submitting views on insurance rates, or the useful life span of a Clydesdale pulling a frigate or a man-o’-war. There was the shock-headed Dockett, of Tom Tiddler's Ground, another Swann original who had been the first to speak at the first conference held in this room twenty years ago, proposing the introduction of box-waggons for house-removals, and later that saucy slogan painted on each of them—From Drawer to Drawer, a boast, she recalled, that had irritated the clerk Tybalt, who disapproved of all forms of commercial levity.

  Keate, the missionary-waggoner,
was still in his place, urging the claims of one or other of his waifs, who passed through the yard in an endless stream and were represented here by the prim-faced Rookwood, of Southern Square, and that new broom Higson, who had made, so they told her, a very promising start up in Scotland under Fraser, formerly of the Border Triangle.

  In a way she shared his regard for every one of them and why not, since she was married to the best of them, Tom Wickstead, who did not shine at conferences.

  The line of talk they were taking surprised her today. They were planning, with the collective enthusiasm of a gang of schoolboys about to swoop on an orchard, a breakout from the accepted policy of the network up to this time, and she wondered who had set it in train. Not Adam, she was sure, for he had grown conservative over the years and inclined to shy away from innovations, of the kind they were now discussing. Perhaps that thrustful youngster, Jake Higson, or perhaps Dockett, who had always been something of a maverick. Or possibly Morris, or the ambitious Godsall, or even Young Rookwood, who had once confounded them all by digesting a large slice of England when he still grew down on his upper lip.

  Rookwood's spectacular spurt, she remembered, had been encouraged by early marriage and the responsibilities of fatherhood, and her mind shifted a little, contemplating the effect their several womenfolk had had upon the careers of these men. A considerable one she would say, taken all round. Hamlet Ratcliffe had been rescued time and again by his great, motherly spouse, Augusta, whereas Bryn Lovell had moved from triumph to triumph after marrying that half-caste woman, and saddling himself with her brood of coffee-coloured children. Godsall, she knew, was well-married to a handsome, happy-go-lucky woman, whereas Morris, to buttress an independence he had always flaunted, had married money years ago. And on top of this was the part she had played in the making of Tom Wickstead, who had graduated, under her tutelage, from professional thief to third place on the managerial graph that Adam kept locked away in his tower.

  It was a matter of making some kind of pattern of one's life, she supposed, and Adam himself had done that by marrying Henrietta Rawlinson a month or two before he recruited this colourful army. It was strange, in view of that, that he should have fathered five sons and still wanted for one to follow him. Then, having caught the word “diversify,” uttered in ringing tones by Godsall, she began to pay closer attention to what they were discussing; the theme of the conference began to emerge, with the usual factions lining up beside one another: the “diehards,” like Fraser, Ratcliffe and Vicary of The Bonus, and the “Thrusters,” represented by Morris, Rookwood, Godsall, and the Irishman O’Dowd.

  It took her no more than a moment to realise that the day would go to the venturesome. She could read as much in the tolerant eye of Adam Swann, as he sat rolling a cheroot round his lips at the head of the table, and she thought, smiling, “They’ve won him over, that's for sure! There’ll be a right about turn before we’re through today's agenda…” And she understood precisely how eager all of them were to play the parts she had sketched for them—privateers, each with a proud ship of his own and an individual way of sniffing out a prize and boarding her.

  A verse or two of Longfellow came to mind to illustrate the thought: a poem entitled A Dutch Picture concerning an old corsair called Simon Danz, who had retired from piracy to live a bourgeois life by the river Maas, but had thought better of it. How did it go…?

  … but when the winter rains come on

  He sits and smokes by the burning brands,

  And old seafaring men come in,

  Goat-bearded, gray, with double chin,

  And rings upon their hands…

  And they talk of ventures lost and won,

  And their talk is ever and ever the same,

  While they drink the red wine of Tarragon

  From the cellar of some Spanish don,

  Or convent set to flame…

  That was it exactly! A score of ageing men, with a few younger ones eager to take their places, made permanently restless by success and prosperity, so that they came here to sit under a Thameside Simon Danz and plan ventures that would make them feel young again. He should hear about that when the time came, and it would probably flatter him. In the meantime, however, she owed it to Tom to listen, for wherever these new ventures led one thing was certain. Her Tom would be involved in them and so, God willing, would her sons, both earmarked for the Swann network.

  2

  There was a rhythm to Swann-on-Wheels, a rhythm and tempo that insinuated itself subtly and secretively as a theme that was not of his making, nor of the making of any one individual, or grouping of individuals, but stemming, in some way, from the rhythm of the tribe as a whole as it went briskly about the business of building the new Rome in the long afterglow of Waterloo.

  He was aware of the inner rhythm but had no power to regulate it. It was governed by all manner of quirks and circumstances that arose out of his personal life and the lives of his associates, so that he was sometimes slow to isolate it and adjust to it. Once he did, however, he adapted swiftly, letting himself be caught up in the swirl of the concert, telling himself that it had been and still was his destiny to conduct the orchestra, to get it firmly under his hand, and encourage it to make its contribution to the deafening cacophony of the tribe at large. Once he had succeeded in doing this, he was in his element. Once that happened, he would not have been anywhere else but here, wielding a baton of his own choice and design.

  It was always easy, looking back, to isolate the phases of the saga, beginning with the faltering overture of the years 1858 to 1862, when they had been no more than a bunch of amateur fumblers, with little but his faith to sustain them, and this was followed by a flattish patch when they had been occupied getting their second wind and groping for national recognition. But then something went wrong. By the autumn of that same year they were floundering, and in such awful disarray that it seemed to every one of them, to Adam Swann most of all, that the entire enterprise had been an exercise in personal vanity and was likely to take its place among all the other failures in Carey Street, that national repository of failed challengers of the century.

  That this did not happen was due to a string of factors, including luck, a small injection of capital, legal expertise from an unexpected source, the personal reputation he had established among customers and creditors, but, above all, to his obstinate belief in his own qualities of leadership, that had been proved beyond all doubt at that first managerial conference, a week or two before Christmas 1862.

  It was then, within hours of his putting Danton's audacious dictum into practice, that the rhythm and tempo had changed and changed very dramatically. By St. Valentine's Day 1863, the day his second son George was born, they were forging ahead under a full head of steam, set fair for permanence and stability and imprinting themselves, week by week, on the national consciousness. The year 1864 and the first six months of 1865 had been a perfectly splendid period, with expansion in every quarter of the network and more work than they could handle. But then, because of a trivial error on the part of a foreman ganger on a fast stretch of rail between Ashford and Tonbridge, the entire enterprise had been brought to the brink of disaster and would almost surely have collapsed had it not been for the foresight of one woman, Edith Wadsworth, and the hardihood of another, Henrietta Swann, both of whom loved him for his courage.

  There had been a break in the tempo then and the rhythm had faltered, but it picked up again and was more insistent than ever when Adam returned, healed of his terrible wounds. After that, through the remainder of the sixties and the whole of the seventies, the beat had been strong and steady, with the whole island under his hand, and lodgements made as far north as the Grampians, as far west as the Dublin Pale.

  But then a curious thing happened, something that those who knew him well could never have predicted. A stale and repetitious theme began to emerge that first baffled and then exasperated the more discerning instrumentalists.

  No one could
put his or her finger on the precise cause of the loss of momentum. They only sensed that it stemmed from staleness and self-sufficiency, from too much assurance based on too many customers, from too big a turnover and too solid a reputation. All they could be sure of was that zest and crackle had deserted it, that from being a nonstop adventure, it had become just another solidly grounded business, rolling cumbrously from quarter-day to quarter-day, sticking closely to a charted course and distrusting diversions, even those that did not classify as innovations but were no more than adjustments to the faster, more clamorous beat of the nation.

  They told themselves and each other that the Gaffer was feeling his age, that he had too much money, that his old wounds were beginning to ache and sap his patience, that the disinclination of any one of his sons to take the baton from his hand had, to some extent, robbed him of his initiative and would end in his putting on a paunch and spending more and more of his time in that place he maintained on the edge of the Weald. At sixty, they said, he would be growing prize turnips and patronising local charities like all the other city men who had made their mark before reaching middle age.

  They were wrong, of course. Adam Swann was not cast in that mould, and in their hearts those whose associations with him went back to the earliest days knew it. But it did not check the swell of discontent in the regions, or close the widening gap between the Diehards and the Thrusters, the men older than Swann and those who were younger or of the new generation.

  He knew what they were saying, of course. It did not need an overheard conversation between two of his younger pashas, to the effect that “the Gaffer's arteries were hardening,” to tell him what some of them were thinking or what the more ambitious among them were talking about. He knew, and in the privacy of his turret would sometimes grin at Frankenstein, assuring that silent monster that he had still a trick or two up his sleeve. But it needed thinking about. It needed more thought than he had ever given any problem, for what he had in mind amounted to abdication. With his sons scattered, and the problem of succession still confused, he needed time to weigh one factor against another before arriving at a decision from which there could be no turning back.