He had been obliged to get there under cover of darkness and send his cab away, walking briskly along the stretch until he came to the farm and could peep through a chink in the gate to satisfy himself that her information was correct. It was. Several figures moved to and fro in the yard, although it was not yet light enough to identify any one of them. But there, under heavy tarpaulin wrappings, stood George's engine, looking smaller and more compact than he remembered, as though it had shrunk during its sojourn in the North. He did not dare wait until the wrappings were stripped away, but back-tracked towards the station, peering about for a place of concealment and remembering, as he did so, that it was the first time he had done this in pre-dawn murkiness since his Mutiny days, thirty years ago. His instinct for cover seemed to have survived. Five minutes after leaving the farm he was tucked away, with a good view of the road, thanking his stars he had remembered to bring his brandy flask and fortifying himself with a noggin whilst he waited.
Mercifully, they were not long making their preparations. A steady, throbbing mutter shattered the early morning silence as the engine came to life some three hundred yards east of where he sat, and he cocked an ear to the note, comparing it to the uncertain, heavier stutter he remembered when the engine was running in the old stables at Tryst. He thought, “He's done something to harness that thrust. Regulated it somehow. Sounds more like a factory belt, without that harsh, metallic clatter it once had… It's only half its original size too… I remember it reminded me of Trevithick's iron carriage that Keate told me about…” And feeling a little sheepish on account of the sense of occasion that had invaded him, he chafed his hands and blew on them, seeing his breath cloud the air like the trail of exhaust gases of George's machine.
Then, hearing the throbbing sound increase until it had attained an insistent rhythm, he forgot to feel like a schoolboy mounting an extravagant practical joke and surrendered to excitement fortified by all the brandy he had swallowed, inching forward until he could poke his head clear of the prickly leaves.
When it came its rush and clatter stunned his senses. It was almost light now, with a heavy ground mist evaporating over the fields opposite, a million frost-points glittering on the hard-packed flints of the road, as if someone had passed by scattering diamonds. He caught no more than a glimpse of it—a solid, compact mass of iron, brass, and planed timber lunging out of the mist like a gross primeval monster swooping on an enemy. Instinctively he cowered, feeling the rush of air strike his face as it passed, but he saw old George sitting up there like a mahout herding a laden elephant down an Indian forest track, save that no elephant had ever moved at such a speed or with such a sense of purpose.
The apparition passed in a flash. He had just time to notice that the carriage of the machine was piled with what looked like squarish packages of one sort or another. Then, as it slowed down nearer the station, the note of the engine changed again, rising to a snarling roar, so that he thought, “Great God! He’ll have everyone out of their beds screaming that there's been an earthquake…!” But the windows behind him remained curtained. It was clear that George had squared the locals and had almost certainly used this same level stretch for earlier tests.
Then, again taking him by surprise, the thing rushed down on him, so that he wondered how on earth the boy had reversed such a cumbersome vehicle so rapidly. It was now travelling at what he estimated to be something over twenty miles an hour, and this time the passage of man and machine introduced into him a sense of wonder and humility, so that he thought, ruefully, “God help me, I’ve been wrong all the time! That vehicle was carrying freight and nothing I possess in the way of waggons and teams could cover the ground at half the speed.”
In his excitement he quite forgot that he was an uninvited spectator and burst out of the bush, stumping up the road to the point where he could see the machine at a standstill, trailing a plume of blue gas that was poisoning the air around. George was still aboard, but at road level were several other people, one of them a thickset elderly man, muffled to the eyes in a coat with an astrakhan collar and waving his stick to proclaim a schoolboy's glee.
He was within twenty yards of the group when they recognised one another. The topcoated man was Sam Rawlinson, and Adam was so surprised to see the old chap here at this time of day that he stopped dead, but Sam waddled forward, shouting above the raucous tut-sk-tut of the engine, “By Gow, see who's here! George lad, it's your father!” George, who had been bent over the mechanism, jerked himself upright and stared over his shoulder, so that Adam suddenly felt miserably self-conscious concerning his presence, and a little fearful of repercussions on Gisela.
He was relieved, therefore, to see a broad grin split George's face as he jumped down and came running, shouting, “Why, you secretive old…” but then he stopped, himself somewhat embarrassed. Sam expressed what was surely in the boy's mind, saying, “Eeee, but he's a knowing one, is your dad! No flies on him! There's nowt goes on anywhere he doesn’t hear about, and that's summat I decided long ago!”
Then they all shook hands with the utmost cordiality and George said, pride showing through his excitement, “Did you see her go? Did you see that turn of speed back along the road?”
“I did indeed,” Adam said, “and I’m more than half converted. No hedging, lad, I had no idea… it's nothing like I imagined… nothing like it used to be, and you’ve freight aboard. What is it? What have you stowed there?”
“Setts. Road surfacing blocks,” Sam said, with some of George's elation. “Aye, an’ near half a ton of it, not counting cement! I said to George, after he’d made first test run over Blackley way, a month since, I said, ‘Where's t’ damn sense in running her empty again? Load her up, lad, and show she’ll do t’ job she's built for! Aye and she did, didn’t she? Dammit, boy,” turning back to George, “she ran better loaded nor unloaded to my reckoning!” and he joggled a stop-watch he was holding.
“What was the average over the half-mile?” Adam asked, after measuring the distance with his eyes. Sam said, “Tweny-two mile an ower. And don’t tell me you’ve owt in your stables to hold a candle to that!”
“No,” said Adam, “I haven’t, and neither has any other haulier, for that's racetrack speed. And you say there's half a ton aboard?”
“Half a ton plus,” George said, so that Adam thought, “He's pleased to see me but he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t enjoy rubbing it in.” But for the first time since George had arrived home with his twelve crates of junk, Adam could look at the machine with respect, noting that he was right in his assumption that it had been reduced to half its original size. It now looked more like a big, shaftless waggon than a crackpot's fantasy. The tyres, he saw, were steel-studded rubber and great attention seemed to have been paid to springing. The steel leaves inserted above the rear axle were more than six inches thick, and the body of the vehicle, half-full of setts and cement, fitted snugly over the frame, giving the thing a grace it had never possessed in its experimental stages.
“Come aboard while I drive her into the yard,” George said, and Adam hauled himself into the cushioned seat beside the driver's, looking in dismay at the complicated array of knobs and levers protruding from the angled dashboard like flatheaded pins from a pincushion. Under him, as George adjusted two of the controls, the machine vibrated, so that Adam had the sensation of sitting a horse with a bad reputation, and experienced identical qualms. He said nothing, however. Indeed, anything he might have said would have been lost in the engine's roar as George released the heavy brass brake-lever and twisted the steering spokes hard left, after which the machine moved forward at a walking pace, passing between the gates to the cobbled yard. A flood of questions suggested themselves but now, he decided, was not the time to ask them. How much did it cost to build a mechanical carriage of this size and power? How skilled and experienced did a man have to be to propel one on an open road? What guarantees were there that it would not break loose and go thundering across country like a Jugger
naut? All kinds of queries and uncertainties, but the sum total of them seemed frivolous when measured against the boy's achievement.
He climbed down and men hurried forward with tarpaulins, draping them over the machine like grooms of the bedchamber. He noticed something else too, that perhaps everyone else took for granted. Respect for the vehicle was inherent in their approach and in Sam's too, but some of it, a good deal of it he would say, rubbed off on George, who stood about issuing orders like a young Napoleon. Observing this, Adam remembered Gisela's claim concerning the boy, voiced in the tower three days ago. A genius, she had called him, but not with any emphasis in her voice. She said it as a simple statement of fact, as though assuring him categorically that the earth was spherical and not, as he had long assumed, flat.
They all trooped into breakfast at the farm, where Adam discovered he had a schoolboy's appetite, addressing himself ravenously to ham, eggs, marmalade, and a quart of coffee, but he was not so occupied as to overlook the genial relationship that had developed between George and Sam and it made him a little jealous. “The old rascal has resisted fossilisation better than I,” he told himself glumly and said, as soon as Sam was safely engaged in conversation with a sallow man in overalls, whom Adam took to be a mechanic, “What are your plans, George? Are you going to patent the machine?” George, looking him straight in the eye, replied, “It is patented. In your name.”
“In my name?”
But before Adam could exclaim further, George went on smoothly, “There are all kinds of possibilities. We should have to talk them over in great detail, but first I should want you to see the workshop and blueprints.”
He said, quietly, “I couldn’t butt in like that, son. Not at this stage, when you’ve justified yourself in the face of all I had to say about that monster out there. Any credit left over belongs to your grandfather, for he backed you. I didn’t and I’m not the man to wriggle out of it at this stage.”
“Oh, to the devil with niceties,” George said, gaily, “we’re a family, and if you’re convinced there's a future in Maximus, that he's more than a complicated toy, then we can move on from there. As a matter of fact, I’ve already discussed it with Gramp and he isn’t disposed to exercise his rights as sponsor. He's nudging eighty and has all the money he needs, and half his pile is willed to mother in any case.” He smiled and looked at his plate. “I’ll let you into a secret. Sam didn’t back me because he believed in its commercial future any more than you did. He did it for fun. It gave him a new interest in life, when all his others were going stale.”
“Suppose that's true. Where does it leave us, exactly?”
George was silent for a moment. Finally he said, diffidently for him, “I don’t know, Governor. Where you want it to leave us, I imagine.” And then, suddenly stretching his mouth in a way that reminded Adam poignantly of his very first glimpse of him, when he came home to Tryst to learn the boy had been born in his absence, “It was Gisela who got you here, wasn’t it? All right… you don’t have to admit it, and I won’t press her. It was a good idea in the circumstances, but will you tell me something that doesn’t concern her? What would you have done if Maximus had let me down, as she has times enough over the past couple of years?”
“I can answer that,” Adam said. “I should have climbed out of that damned holly bush down the road, caught the milk train from Dunham, and gone home without a word to any one.” He paused, wondering how much he should give away concerning the void George had left in his life. “Something else. I would have gone wishing you luck. I flatter myself I’ve mellowed that much in the last couple of years.”
3
He saw himself in the next few days as having gone full circle. Tagging round after George, coming to terms with the boy's easy mastery of this new, clamorous and rather frightening world, he felt diminished, but not uncomfortably so. There was no sourness left in him and certainly no envy. Why should there be? George was only himself, thirty-odd years ago, when he had plunged into the business of building the network on limited capital, sailing over most of the hurdles that intervened between him and his dreams and demolishing those he was unable to jump so that his work force, men like ex-coachman Blubb, the missionary Keate, Catesby, Lovell, and all the others, could stream after him, tormented by all manner of doubts that had never troubled him.
And at the same time he was conscious of an accelerated ageing process that he had never felt in the tower overlooking the Thames. Up here there were any number of Georges thronging to occupy the citadels of their fathers and ready, if need be, to swarm south in the new decade, a young and victorious army, coveting a capital still dominated by the shellbacks of his own generation.
Yet an understanding, a full acknowledgement of this, did not bother him. Somewhere there was a tightness about it, a logic that he had never accepted as valid until the moment that engine thundered past the Dunham Rectory at twenty-two miles per hour. In his youth and middle age, he had been vain concerning his perception and adaptability, seeing himself as one of the very few eager to explore the vistas opened up by pioneers like Stephenson and Brunel. But time, confound it, knocked everyone off his perch in the end, and here he was, standing in the discarded top-boots of old Tim Blubb, who had never been able to speak of railways without a curse.
The workshop and George's yard (where the original Maximus was already regarded as a museum-piece) did not interest him much from the technical viewpoint, but its portents did. He had been a transport man long enough to see that there was some substance in George's claim that the horse and cart days would not long survive the turn of the century, now only eleven years away. If George, virtually an amateur in the field, could build a machine capable of hauling half a ton of road blocks over a flint road at twenty-two miles an hour, then it followed that the professional engineers would soon be moving in with all manner of prototypes. Indeed, according to George they already had in France and Germany, where the horse was not a national fetish and where there was no Red Flag Act.
The option was open but it was a very narrow one. He could hang on and adapt, he supposed, with George as his preceptor, but he knew himself well enough to understand that this was an uneasy compromise. He had always thought of himself as an innovator, a pioneer, and a winner. Never as a runner-up, entering races he could never hope to win. He did not understand much of George's technical jargon. It seemed that words like “induction,” “transmission,” and even “drive” had other meanings for the boy and his overalled acolytes. The phrase “variable speed” made sense in its literal form, but not when it was applied to the function of cogs and flywheels.
And yet, in a way, he was fascinated, not so much by George's assurance and technical ability, as by his sense of restraint that many might have mistaken for modesty. Yet George was not modest. Deep down he was completely sure of himself, as sure as Adam had been in the very earliest days of the enterprise. For all that he held himself in, spoke guardedly of the machine's future, soft-pedalling his own achievement and the inevitability of dramatic changes in the world of road transport.
Perhaps, Adam thought, two years of trial and error had taught him patience, but this was only partially responsible for his attitude. There was a more emotional reason behind his reticence, and he suspected that it had to do with their relationship, always cordial but ever watchful, a couple of gladiators each aware of the other's strengths and weaknesses. It was this more than the engine's spectacular performance that helped Adam to his decision.
They had gone into the yard's office, hardly more than a lean-to shed, in order to say their goodbyes over a drink. The hansom that was to take Adam to London Road was already at the yard gates, and it was natural that the moment should have significance for them. It was the counterpart of their last private meeting, a few hours before George, with Henrietta's connivance, had struck his tents and abdicated. Adam said, “Will you be staying up here indefinitely? Are there modifications to be made before you’re ready to go into production?�
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And George replied, ruefully he thought, “Not on this model. I’ve taken her as far as I can without finally committing myself.” He smiled. “Does that sound like a recantation?”
“No. Should it?”
“Perhaps. After all, I burned one lot of boats when we parted company two years ago.”
“Yes, you did, and showed a profit on it.”
“That isn’t what I meant, sir.”
“What did you mean?”
George braced himself. “Mechanisation, represented by the old Maximus, was just the mainspring. I had other ideas, remember?”
“Indeed I do. Some of them good ideas, I recall.”
“They were all good ideas and I’ve never renounced one of them. I should be obliged to, however, if I took the plunge, and devoted myself full-time to the kind of specialisation I’ve been about up here.”
The admission surprised him. By now, he supposed, he had come to think of George as a dedicated man who had renounced all thoughts of being anything but a mechanic.
“You’re saying you’re still interested in road haulage in the wider sense? In deliveries, as well as the means of delivery?”
“Did you ever suppose otherwise?”
“Why, naturally I did. And so did your mother.”
The boy looked a little disconcerted, thrusting his hands deep into his trouser pockets and hunching his shoulders, a trick he had when anyone faced him on an issue.
“Then you’re both wrong. I came up here, and worked nonstop on that brute in the yard, simply to prove to myself I could solve at least one complicated problem. Well, I solved it. To spend a lifetime fiddling with variations of it would be too dull for my taste.”
“Am I to understand from that you’d like to come back, under certain conditions.”
“It isn’t for me to lay down conditions. I always maintained you were the Gaffer. You built that network from nothing and it was a far tougher job than getting Maximus moving. I’ve had time to think since I wrote that long-winded report on how the firm should be run, and one thought I’ve had was that I was too cocksure by half. That's something that doesn’t strike you until you find out how damned lonely it can be out in front, with everyone looking to you for answers you haven’t got.”
Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 89
