The Rich Are with You Always

by Malcolm Macdonald

  "Amen. Amen!" Charity said desperately.

  She struggled to stand—and fainted.

  That and that alone galvanized the two men to action, and they shuffled unwillingly into the kitchen.

  Arabella stood again. "God is merciful," she said, fondly looking down at the exhausted and now mutilated girl. "I know that God is always in this house, but has He ever worked such wonders among us as this night?"

  "Please cover her, dear," Walter said.

  "There is no sin in her now. She is new born. She is a babe. As pure as a babe."

  "That burn!" John said, only now coming out of his trance.

  "It is where the spear of the centurion entered the side of our Lord. She will bear it as a holy scar."

  "Cover her, do," John said. "And let me carry her up."

  The girl did not awaken until almost noon the following day. Her burn had been dressed with boracic crystals and she said she felt no pain. She appeared very weak but entirely at peace. When John went in to see her, she said she couldn't go to London with him now. She would stay with Mrs. Thornton—whom she obviously worshipped. She kissed him sweetly goodbye and lay back again to sleep. He left her purse beside the bed.

  Chapter 54

  John's visit to Bristol and his re-engagement with the nuts-and-bolts end of their business brought him back from his former state of lassitude. To all outward appearances he was his old self again. He did the round of all their workings, in England and Europe, usually being away three weeks, back for one. He went after new contracts with all his former zest, enjoying the skirmishing and backdoor dealing they involved.

  "All is as it was," he said, a hundred times.

  He went to Ireland to see the progress of their "model estate." It had been cleared of about a thousand tenants, not by the old system of evicting and harrying but by offering free passage and five pounds to any family to emigrate to North America, South Africa, or Australia. Some of the stronger men had come to work for Stevenson's in England. The people did not want to move, of course. Like all peasants, their love of the land went deep. But if there was ever to be any profitable development of the country, the landowners had to create a system in which thirty acres was looked upon as a normal size for a farm; there were still places where people petitioned even for five-acre farms to be divided—on the grounds that such "large" holdings were oppressive.

  As Sarah's trustee, he helped with her move to Bristol and it was he who negotiated the purchase of the Refuge, a secluded gentleman's residence in spacious, wooded grounds at the end of St. James's Place—the road parallel to Montague Parade, where the Thorntons lived. By buying three feet of garden from a neighbour, they were able to arrange a connecting path between the two properties. Sarah, when the time came, left Maran Hill in tears, but Nora knew that she was going for the best of all positive reasons and that she would find the work she and Arabella had undertaken was completely fulfilling to her. John said he hoped that would be so. Charity was being trained to be her lady's maid.

  When they went north for Christmas, he stayed up there and, with Livings and his mill manager, Paul Jacobs, planned and began the first big extension of Stevenstown and the works. "There's going to be a great expansion in manufactures as a result of this Exhibition next year," he promised. "We shall be ready for it."

  Toward the end of that winter, with the feeling but not the evidence of spring in the air, Flynn came once more to Maran Hill, this time to dine with them. He arrived in midafternoon. Nora was having her portrait taken by Llewellyn Roxby, a young painter in whose career she had always shown an interest. Verbally, he flattered her outrageously and without the slightest attempt to make it sound sincere. But he painted her with consummate honesty—in fact, too much honesty for Nora: He had included a little skin blemish she had near her left eye, a sort of small grey mole on a stalk of skin. She had made him paint it out again.

  "Is it all right if I talk?" she asked when Flynn came in.

  "Yes." He was always very short when he was painting.

  "You must have better manners, Rocks, when you paint the queen. Well, Flynn, and was I right last year? Didn't Bristol do him good! No more circuses or talk of retiring."

  "It did," Flynn agreed. "And yet…I don't know why I say 'and yet,' but there's just that feeling about the fella."

  Nora was silent.

  "Do ye not agree, ma'am?"

  "I was hoping you wouldn't say it," she answered. "I was hoping it was only myself had that feeling and that it was just my imagination."

  "I don't know what it is. There's a…"

  "I do. You can't put your finger on anything and say 'He wouldn't have done that before' or on anything he would've done and now doesn't. In a way it's too much like he used to be. Don't you think?"

  "Ah!" Flynn shook his head. "You're right, of course, but it's more than that. You're right too, when you say you can't put your finger on it."

  "He's hit his head on the ceiling, whoever you're talking about," Roxby said.

  "What?" Nora laughed.

  "He's grown and grown and grown and now he's hit his head on the ceiling. He can only get fatter now, not taller. Unless he moves to a different room. It happens to me all the time."

  Nora laughed. "Help yourself to a drink, Flynn," she said.

  "Thank you, not before sundown."

  "We have the same rule here," Nora said. "But we break it when Roxby comes. It helps us survive the occasion. I'd introduce you except I know he'd only be rude."

  Roxby sprang to life behind his easel and came bounding over to Flynn, the picture of extravagant good manners. "My dear sir! Mr. Flynn! Llewellyn Roxby's the name. And may I say how very delighted I am to meet you."

  Flynn laughed in embarrassment and shook hands. He shrugged, bewildered, at Nora while Roxby returned to his place.

  "I really thought," Roxby said, talking to Nora's image on the canvas, "that when I came here to paint you, dear Nora"—here Flynn shot her a look of amazement—"I really and truly believed that I had come into a room with a very high ceiling. Nay, an infinite ceiling. The sky itself. I can paint, I thought, a picture of true honesty. No more corpulent mill owners' wives who want me to pry out the sylph that still lurks somewhere within those oceans of lard."

  Nora sighed wearily. She knew just what was coming.

  "Thus I painted a picture of supreme honesty. For twenty minutes I laboured to re-create an adorable, sweet, honey-grey mole on you there." He was still talking to his portrait. "And"—he ducked, miming a hard blow on the head—"I suddenly hit the ceiling! The infinite sky was no more than a piece of bad Tiepolo. A sham."

  "Shut up, Rocks!" she cried. "It's boring."

  "You are as bad as all of them," he said, pouting. "Worse. Because you have it in you to be so much better. Look!" He threw down his brushes on his studio palette. "I will show you." He tore three sheets of paper from the heart of his sketchbook, and, with a fine sable brush dipped in a pale, warm grey he placed a tiny mark, off-centre, on two of the sheets. One of these he leaned against the back of her portrait canvas; the other two he brought to her.

  "Which is the better portrait of that sheet of paper?" he asked, putting the two into her hands.

  Wearily, she lowered them into her lap and looked at him as a mother might look at a child grown too big to be scolded.

  He took up the challenge in her eyes. "You say to me, 'It's such a little thing, Rocks—so little. Paint it out. Just for me.' And now here, this grey paint is a little thing too. But see what a difference it makes."

  Nora chuckled and gave him back the papers. "I swear, Rocks," she said, "I swear. When the portrait is finished, I will take it to Professor Liston and say, 'There—make me like that.' The surgeon's blade shall force nature to imitate art for once. Does that satisfy you?"

  His dejected walk back to his easel was a parody of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. "I should know better," he said to himself. "After all these years."

  "And that's a fact!"
Flynn added.

  Later, it occurred to Nora that Roxby's insincere and self-serving analogy might be closer to the truth than anything she or Flynn had said. It was not that John had hit a ceiling—precisely the opposite. It was the firm that could no longer grow upward, only sideways. With the successful completion of the Britannia Bridge, it had taken part in the most challenging and difficult engineering feat of all time. There would be others, of course, and they in their turn would also be the most challenging—the most something—but, in a sense, it would be more of the same. And now that he had trained several people to do all that he could do, he was the one supernumerary person in the business. If he wanted to go on growing, he had to do it outside of Stevenson's. Perhaps her ruse with Flynn, getting John to go to Bristol, had been a blunder. Perhaps he had been on the point of making this discovery for himself. If so, to have driven him back into the firm had been the wrong thing to do.

  At her next sitting, she asked Roxby why he was so petulant about having to paint out her mole.

  "It's not petulant, Nora; it's a matter of honesty." Now that he sensed victory in the offing, he shed his jocularity. "I don't know whether you go through Mrs. Jarrett's housekeeping accounts. Do you?"

  "I have been known to."

  "I suppose if you find she's got threepence more in the petty cash box than her book shows she ought to have, you ignore it."

  Nora saw the trap even before the sentence was finished, for Roxby knew her well enough to suppose nothing of the kind. But if she was going to concede the point, she wanted it to be out of greatness of soul, not by a meek submission to logic.

  "It really upsets you so much?" she asked.

  "Dishonesty of any kind upsets me. Beauty is truth—truth to nature, truth to one's material, truth to one's self. Your wish is my command, but it does force me to violate all three."

  "Would it be very difficult to paint it back in again, Rocks?"

  He made a complicit little gesture and beckoned her over. She stood and stretched. While she was crossing the room he soaked a rag in white spirit. She loved the smell of his materials—linseed oil, poppy-seed oil, pigments, turpentine, copal varnish…

  When she could see the painting—and it was always a shock to find herself staring so laconically back, with eyes that followed her around the room—he rubbed gently at the flesh tones over the offending mole. They came away almost at once, leaving the original painting showing once again.

  "Warts and all," he said, vastly satisfied.

  "How?" She had by now learned enough about paints and their drying rates to be mystified.

  "I thought you might come to regret it," he answered. "The flesh tones I put on top of it were mixed with olive oil." Still she was puzzled. "Olive oil does not dry," he added.

  She was angry. She did not like to be anticipated in her caprice. "You are selfish," she said, walking back to her position.

  But his smile soon won her over again. "Rocks," she said, "will you take me to the Exhibition in May?"

  "Won't you be going with Stevenson?"

  "Of course. And again with the girls. And again with the boys. And we're making a big party of friends too. But I would like especially to have your opinion of the displays."

  Chapter 55

  As one of the guarantors of the Great Exhibition, John had certain privileges— free season tickets for himself and his family; the right to a gallery place on the southeast corner of the junction between apse and nave on opening day, looking immediately down on the royal dais; and, at the end, the right to visit and bring any number of friends on the two days between the closing, on the fifteenth of October, and the dismantling of the exhibits. He also assumed the right to walk around any time he liked in order to watch the progress of the building. Charles Fox, and Paxton when he was there, were always very amenable and sometimes even invited his opinion on this or that problem. Very early on, John realized that building in cast iron was a specialty beyond him; indeed, no one in the world but Fox could have put up the building in time—and he often said as much to both men. In January, when an acre of the glazing blew off in a gale, he lent them two hundred Stevenson men to get back the time lost. All rancour was gone.

  It intrigued him to think that even ten years earlier, the building could not have been attempted in that form. The quality and dimensions of the iron would have been too variable; there was no machine then for turning out glass panes of that size and quantity; the railways to transport these materials had not been built; and the electric telegraph for speeding verbal communication between the many parties had then been a toy on a few miles only of the Great Western Railway. Now there were nearly two thousand route miles in Britain alone, and a third-time-lucky cable being laid across to France.

  It meant that every bit of iron and glass that arrived on the site was used within twenty-four hours; there was no stockpiling of materials anywhere—and thus, as Nora was quick to point out, no capital tied up in stocks.

  From February onward, when the exhibits began to arrive, there was always something new and interesting to see. John actually played a part in reassembling the biggest of the machinery exhibits—the great hydraulic ram, one of the pair from the Britannia Bridge. That day was memorable in another respect, too, for it was the day that the famous tenor Herr Reichardt had been invited to pit his voice against the supposedly fragile crystal of the palace. Someone had vowed that the music to be played at the opening and at set times of day throughout the Exhibition would shatter the glass, which would shower down and "cut the ladies to mincemeat." Joshua's triumph at Jericho gave the prediction a scriptural authority.

  The building resounded with the usual hammering and shouting, whistling and sawing. But as Reichardt began, those nearest him fell silent. He stood at the crossing, between apse and nave, beside Osler's great crystal fountain, which had just been completed; and his rich, powerful tenor rang out in those confines with a most beautiful resonance. As wave after wave of song poured down the aisles and galleries, everyone else fell silent; in the end, two thousand workmen stood spellbound, captivated in that eerie and magical vibrancy. It was the most moving moment John could remember, as they stood bathed in the flood of that perfect voice. When Reichardt finished, not a man breathed. They let the very echoes fade to a whisper before they dared burst into applause, and then it rose to a tumult.

  Then came the orchestra, and finally Willis's grand organ with all the power of its forty-five thousand pipes. Later inspection revealed that not one of the 900,000 superficial feet of glass, on its 202 miles of sash bar, fixed to their 2,224 trellis girders and 358 trusses, supported on 1,060 iron columns, was in any way affected by this onslaught acousticale.

  As the official opening on May Day drew nearer and all the 100,000 exhibits found their correct places somewhere along the eleven miles of exhibition stand inside the Crystal Palace, John began to grasp the true magnitude of what was happening in England that year. Only men of the calibre of Brunel and Robert Stephenson would have attempted anything on this scale and have carried it off so perfectly. Only they, with their long experience of railways and of catering to the needs of thousands, could have visualized exactly what was involved. Even what might seem the simplest task—to get each exhibit to its right place, both in the Palace and in the catalogue—could have defeated lesser men, especially when those exhibits arrived toward the end at the rate of five thousand a day.

  By the end of April, when the sawdust and putty scrapings were swept out and burned, the floors all scrubbed, the matting laid, the barriers and turnstiles installed, the royal dais erected and the great canopy suspended above it, and the dust sheets taken off the machines and the statues, models and cases, carpets and tapestries, furniture and stuffed beasts, weapons and minerals, fossils and fans, chandeliers and fountains…by then John thought he knew the Exhibition as well as any man living. But, as he was slowly to learn, he knew all about it except its one most important feature.