She had recovered completely from the shock of Hugh’s unfaithfulness. Nothing lasted, not even so sharp and biting a sorrow. Time dulled it and in the end took it away. It did not hurt her now. Nothing remained of it but her ironical enduring belief that she was an unlovable woman. Nothing would ever hurt her so deeply again.
Memories came about her like a cloud. There had been another orchard and another Hugh, young, confident, softly affectionate and dear. He had been sure of himself then, and sure of her. Mary stirred uneasily. Would nothing free her from the last light finger touch of memory? Perhaps it was true that marriage had bound her to Hugh in an intimacy from which nothing, no disillusion, could wholly free her, as if the first moment of unequivocal surrender had given into his keeping a Mary who could never again escape him. And then, after that, the living Mary had blundered cruelly away from him. She had lost him to Miss Jardine. She thought of her life as spoiled and of her devotion to the Yard as a blunder, but in her heart of hearts she did not believe that she could have behaved differently. She might have stayed in London and made Hugh her whole life—and perhaps kept him. Yes, she could have done that, but only by denying reality. Her desire of ships was real, and had sustained her when Archie frightened a child out of her senses, when George Roxby died and left her and Richard with nothing but an unencumbered estate. It was as real as her marriage, as real as her love for Hugh.
All this was true, but the thought that in cleaving to the Yard she was in some way betraying the boy Hugh stabbed her through the memory of his cruder betrayal. Even now it shook and hurt her beyond speech or tears. She tried never to think of it. She could bear to think of Hugh’s passion for Miss Jardine, but she could not bear to think that perhaps she herself had not loved him enough. And yet she would—quite simply—have given her life for his.
Another orchard, far below her in the valley, like a pink and white carpet flung down at the foot of the hills. Now she recalled Hugh’s unexpected return at the end of six months. He had made no announcement. He came, in the middle of the afternoon, when she and John Mempes were at work in her office. There were the sounds of his arrival on the gravel outside . . . and John Mempes going out into the hall ostensibly to greet him, really, as Mary knew well, to avoid the meeting between husband and wife . . . Hugh’s voice in the hall: “Good afternoon, sir. Where is my wife?” And at the faint proprietary echo in the words Mary had buried her face in her hands. “I am your wife,” she thought. “I’ve been yours. You’ve had me. I’m glad.” . . . She saw herself standing up to greet Hugh with a friendly clasp of the hand.
The weeks slid past after his return. Mary ceased to spend sleepless nights, tortured by exasperating images of Hugh in Fanny Jardine’s arms. Hugh and she became tremendously more friendly and gay together, and the gulf between them widened and widened, until the figures of those young lovers who had once found nothing more dear, nothing more worth while in the world than their reflection in each other, dwindled into specks, always receding, infinitely pitifully remote. . . . She could smile at them now and at herself, but at the time it had been torture. No one, she thought, would ever understand the crisis through which, without assistance from any living soul, she had passed, nor the greatness of her abnegation. To have let him go—as she had done. Simply to have loosed her hold on what had belonged to her in the highest and deepest sense of possession. To have set him completely free. Never once by look, word or gesture after he returned, to have reminded him that he had once been hers, that he had betrayed her. Oh, it had taken all her strength. It had nearly killed her.
She wondered where Miss Jardine was living. Somewhere in one of the villages up the valley, she thought, from the direction of Hugh’s periodic disappearances. She had been replaced, as secretary, by a dark-haired gnome-like creature, who irritated Hugh very much by her inability to punctuate. Her manuscript resembled a battlefield at the end of a day’s fighting, strewn with dismembered phrases, trunkless heads, and commas like abandoned weapons dropped in furious disorder. Poor Hugh!
Mary roused herself with a strange smile. There was nothing left but memories as shy and delicate as larch flowers and an elusive pain that came and went, hurt less and remained a shorter time in her thoughts than the common disappointments of the day. Mary sighed. And smiled again at a baby rabbit that shot across the road under the very wheels of the carriage. The coachman stood up and waved his whip, shouting loudly. “They be a great nuisance,” he said apologetically, “and shamefully merry. Light feet and a light heart mun lead straight to sin. Tes the law.” He brooded over the shocking levity of rabbits for the rest of the journey.
They came down into the ironmasters’ district on the south bank of the Tees as night turned it into a palace of dusky courtyards and dark columns, lit and crowned with flames and quivering with sinister clangour. Beyond the furnaces lay the river, blackened with docks and shipping, and on its farther side the hidden disorder of the town, a slut in a torn bodice showing starry rents of light.
Mary’s carriage left the ironworks and blast furnaces on the right and set her down, still outside the town, at George Ling’s house. Mrs. George Ling sat on a sofa, yawning at George. The jet beads on her bodice rang like the crystals of the chandelier, punctuating her boredom. There Mary learned, what had been rumoured the day before in Danesacre, that there was trouble in the shipyards, spreading among the iron works and threatening a complete stoppage on Tees-side.
“It began among the brassfounders,” George told her. “They objected to the ironmoulders making the large brass castings that the brassworkers couldn’t undertake until they had learned how to make them. The engineers joined in, with a quarrel they fixed on the boilermakers, who keep a tight hold of jobs to do with angle-iron that the engineers think they ought to. do. Work on a ship in one of the yards fell dead. Every one on her was quarrelling. Other ships and yards joined in. Lord knows where it will stop. It’s among the ironworkers already. This Sillery should have been frapped, though I can’t say I like it. I prefer something with a kick; give me a sparkling wine and you can have all the still stuff that ever dropped dead on a man’s palate.”
“But—madness,” Mary said. “Can’t they settle their quarrels without stopping work on the ships?”
Dinner with the Lings was a portentous feast, enlivened by Mrs. George’s references to the state of George’s digestion and George’s involuntary testimony to the same. When it came to an end at last Mary refused coffee and escaped into the garden. The house stood alone on the gentle hill that stretched up from the iron district into the fields and lanes of the country-side. It occupied the outposts of an advancing change of taste that was pushing the houses of ironmasters and managers out of the town on to the surrounding slopes. Mary leaned against the low wall dividing the garden from the lane. The night was dark, with a moonless sky pressing down on the sinister flaming labyrinth of furnaces and shafts. Every few minutes a column of flame-riven smoke shot up into the sky, illuminating the ironworkers’ quarter and the docks beyond. A blade edge of river flashed in the short-lived glow, and the sky was flushed with a tawny bloom like the bloom on dusk-red berries.
Mary was stirred to a strange excitement. The darkness throbbed with a steady beat as if some monster were alive and moving in the night near her. The threat of trouble, blowing up down there among the narrow streets clustered round the works, sharpened her senses. With a half turn of her head she saw Mrs. George’s figure silhouetted on the blind of the drawing-room window. She would choke if she had to sit in that overheated room, with all this shut out. George talking comfortably of a stoppage vexed her intolerably. A few weeks of “trouble,” and the monstrous heart would cease to beat. The power would fail, the fires slacken and die down. And all through the greed and folly of a few insubordinate workers.
A man approached out of the darkness, coming down the lane from the fields behind the house. As he reached the wall of George Ling’s garden a curtain drawn back in an upper room of the house let
out a flood of light, revealing him as a squat hulk of a man, an ironworker by every sign. He eyed Mary curiously in the dim yellow light. She shrank back into the shadow from that primeval stare. He passed, and was followed at a distance by a shawled weary woman. The light fell on her colourless face and the thin hand grasping her shawl. Thus must be his wife, and the tired crying children dragging at her skirts his. “Come on you,” the woman said, in a harsh exhausted voice. “It’s the last time I’ll take you out for a picnic, misery.” One of the children clutched a bunch of flowers. He was dropping them as he walked. They gleamed faintly on the dark path.
The little procession was swallowed up in the night; a faint sound of crying came up to Mary for a moment before that too was lost and smothered. The picnic party was going home, to sleep, down among that, in the unlit odorous blackness lying like a pool round the feet of the red-tipped chimneys. Mary turned and hurried up the path to the house. She had had a fleeting glimpse of something that disturbed her and on which she did not care to dwell. The front door was opened by George’s wife, in a strange quilted garment covering a calico nightgown fretted with tucks and frills. “I’ve put you an apple preserved in cloves in your room,” Mrs. George said kindly. “It is so good for all disorders. Do you often go out at night? George is displeased with you, but I told him to remember that we are living in the seventies after all.”
She leaned forward with her long jet ear-rings swaying on either side of her face like funeral plumes. Mary submitted mechanically to her embrace and escaped to bed.
2
Thomas Prendergast had been the manager of the Garton Iron Works, raised to that eminence by one of Mark Henry’s more farsighted whims, from the year of Mary’s arrival in Danesacre with Richard in her arms and her small studded trunk bumping about on the box of the Roxby barouche. During that time Mary Henry’s whim had justified itself and him over and over again. Prendergast had an inventive genius. He was a Cornishman, the son of a Cornish tin miner and a north country mother who when her husband died brought her son back to her own people in Middlesborough. Young Prendergast had the naturally gentle manners of his father’s people. He had, too, their mercurial temperament and their divine instability of mind. Women loved him for his looks and his gentle sing-song voice, and disliked him because of his incurable catholicity. They had no hold over him, since he forgot what they had looked like to him when he was pursuing them. He lost an excellent job in the railway superintendent’s office because he could not resist the temptation to drama that presented itself in an election. He forgot, the day after it was over, that he had been a chartist and an inciter to riot, but his employers did not. Their dismissal of him gave his Radical leanings an unusual permanency in his mind, but at the moment he thought less of the poor man’s wrongs than of his own needs. He applied for the job of puddler at Garton’s Iron Works and spent his days stirring at the mouth of hell. That was what it looked like. It was in reality an operation requiring the nicest precision of hand, strength and brain, and he was the best puddler in the mill. An idea he worked out for the mechanical rolling of the malleable iron bars brought him to Mark Henry Garton’s notice. The idea was impracticable, Mark Henry said, because it would have meant reorganising the whole place. A short time later the whole place was reorganised, and Prendergast’s invention, improved and credited to half a dozen other men, was in use in every iron mill in the country. Long before then Mark Henry had quarrelled with his manager and dismissed him, and obeying one of his freakish impulses, had sent for Prendergast.
“Could you run these works?” he asked.
Prendergast pondered. His head was bent and his dark meditative glance was hidden from Mark Henry.
“Yes,” he said finally.
It took him a day to prove that he could. In that short space he dealt with the only immediate trouble centre, a giant of a foreman, by the simple process of plucking him up and throwing him out. In a week he had the place running with a smoothness it had never achieved before. The men worked for him because they liked him. There was a curious sympathy between him and them, a current of secret energy flowing from Prendergast to the ironworkers. It passed into the iron and became one with the human elements that belong to all inanimate stuff that is worked over and tamed by man’s brute intelligence.
When the Garton Iron Works became the Garton Iron and Steel Works, making steel by the new process that converted ore into steel without the intermediate iron process, Prendergast reorganised the works until they were a miracle of efficient running. This was no easy task, for Garton’s Works, growing out of the original huddled sheds separated by a stretch of blackened earth from the two furnaces where the pig-iron was melted down to become wrought-iron rails, had spread out in the haphazard way of the times, proliferating like the undergrowth of a jungle. There were now six furnaces and the steel smelting plant. There was also what was called indifferently the Foundry or the Works. This was in reality an entirely separate organisation, and had begun making ships’ engines only a year before Mark Henry’s impulsive purchase. But there was one manager for the double enterprise, and he needed to possess not only more than the usual equipment of technical knowledge but double springs of vitality. It is significant of the spirit of the age that Prendergast’s predecessor was the first man to fail under the duplicated demands on him. Prendergast proved himself to be a born superintendent. He was more than that. The effortless ease of strength, the seeing hand, the intuitive eye that had made him the best puddler in Garton’s Iron Works served him as well when he was turned loose in a position where his tormenting ideas could be eased out in material expressions of power and use.
His mother was a dark tiny creature with a suspicious turn of mind and an unnatural aptitude in voicing it. She took a fond secret pride in her son because he was successful and had the manners of a gentleman. She strutted about like a little peahen, despising the mothers of the clumsy louts who had been her son’s fellow-workers. At the same time she would not leave the ironworker’s cottage where she and Thomas had come to live when he became a puddler. It stood in a row of similar cottages and backed on to another row. This double street had a common ashbin and a common latrine. Prendergast’s fastidious soul loathed its squalor, but his mother would not move, and he would not leave her. “Get me into a big house,” she said fiercely, “and the first thing you’ll do is to marry one of those large-size women you’re always running to, and turn your mother out to be the laughing-stock of every other woman in the place.”
“I shan’t marry,” Prendergast said calmly. “You’re the only clever woman I ever knew and I’m not allowed to marry you. I hate stupid women, except in bed.” His mother scolded him, but she was pleased. They loved each other with a grudging passion that could not express itself in words. Everything Thomas did was for her, even his experiments with boiler tubes and condensers. When she heard him moving in the first chill of dawn, getting ready to go over to his experimenting shed, she slipped out of bed and made him tea and cut bread and butter. He ate and drank in silence, tugging at his boots, which he never allowed her to clean, as the other women cleaned their men’s boots. Then she gave him his lunch, bread-and-dripping sandwiches in a tin, and a can of tea, with an apple or a small pasty, and Thomas Prendergast went off, laden like the ironworkers who passed him on their way to relieve the night-shift coming off work. These emerged with bowed bodies and white faces, stumbling along in the half light, weary and bent like very old men. They failed to recognise the manager as he pushed through them, a tall heroic figure in a frieze of defeated effort and fatigue.
During Mark Henry’s lifetime, Prendergast’s experiments were hampered by that erratic shipbuilder’s habit of cutting off supplies in a fit of pique. After the failure of the water tube boilers that Prendergast made for the Mary Roxby, he could get no money for his research for many months. Mark Henry descended on him and threatened to dismiss him if he wasted any more time and money on fantastic nonsense.
“I’ll
leave,” said Prendergast.
“You’ll stay,” Mark Henry roared at him. “You’ll stay and do as I tell you, or I’ll have you pushed into the new furnace and we’ll see what sort of iron you make.” His voice changed. “You wouldn’t ruin me now, would you?” he wheedled. “Here am I a poor weak old man depending on you as a father on his son. Bless me, shall I marry you to my only sister? She’s got a husband already, but I understand that’s no barrier to your exploits in that field.”
The young Cornishman looked at the wicked buffoon prancing round him, and laughed loudly. He stayed on.
When Mary inherited she told him that he could have all the money she could spare for his experiments on ships’ engines. She kept her promise and in the intoxication of freedom, Prendergast ran wild and had built, to his design, by a Tees-side firm of shipbuilders, the City of Truro, that monstrous portent of the seventies. She cost Mary a hundred thousand pounds before she was finally sold at a heavy loss to a London firm of cattle shippers and went down off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein on the first voyage she made for them.
The City of Truro was enormously long, 692 feet. She was fitted with a triple-expansion engine, and was the first ship to make a trial of this system, not adopted for many years after Prendergast’s expensive throw-out. Her boilers were a modified form of the water-tube boiler on which Prendergast had been working for so long and she was propelled by a single screw. From the very beginning she was a disastrous and unhandy creature. The first attempt at launching her was a failure. Her enormous weight rested on two gigantic cradles which were supposed to slide down an incline to the water. They slid afoot and stopped. Five months later a hydraulic arrangement persuaded her sideways into the water. A man was killed during the operation and that, for old sailors, sealed the ship’s fate. She was a killer. She did not live long enough to kill more than three people, a man who got fouled in the anchor chain and jerked overboard, a boy whom she mysteriously did away with at sea, at night, and her first captain, who burst a blood-vessel in a rage at her shocking conduct during a storm. As a matter of fact, there was nothing malignant about the unhappy City of Truro. She was merely clumsy. The running of her engines was less a matter of propulsion than a continuous revelation of complicated problems of stress and pressure that might have been worked out in a forty-four ton boat with more ease and at a fraction of the cost. The running costs of the City of Truro were incredible. She was uncertain and heavy to handle in quiet weather, and in a storm became frankly panic-stricken. She behaved like an immensely obese and agitated old lady who has been pushed into a large pond from which she is making frantic efforts to escape. In more than a spoonful of wind she blundered and staggered and halted and retreated and swallowed vast quantities of water and generally behaved in a manner calculated to break any crew’s heart. When she went down, inadvertently drowning the last boatload of men to leave her, the rest heaved a sigh of relief.
The Lovely Ship Page 22
