World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  He shook himself alert again. It did no good. He should never have come here like this. It impoverished the present and mortgaged the future—for the sake of a past that was beyond mending. Of course, he wouldn't give up his new life. Or Nora. Of course not. It was a meaningless suggestion anyway.

  Before he left, he vaulted the gate and walked among the briar and weeds. Rooting around with the toe of his boot he unearthed an occasional brick or a lump of charred timber. Then he found a broken china saucer and, a little later, part of a cheap clay pipe. He held both in his hands for a while, looking at them, uncertain whether to throw them away or not. At last, he stuffed them into his pocket, returned to the lane, and then retraced his steps to the city. He walked with his head low and with a halting pace; his accustomed jauntiness was nowhere in evidence.

  He arrived back at Littleborough at seven that evening, prepared—though not really expecting—to see a knot of angry workers picketing his lodging. But in that chill wind no one stood anywhere for long. Passers-by hurried from work to home or home to shop or shop to pub. Only two dogs, larking around in the light from the bakery window—each trying vainly to make the other take the unnatural part—watched him pass. They panted hard and stared up with guilty, bloodshot gaze until he had gone by. Then they returned to their fun.

  Nora took his coat, kissed him hard and long, and shivered by proxy at the cold that seemed to radiate from him.

  "Eay," she said. "One day they'll find a way o' conductin't waste steam from't engine back along pipes through't coaches."

  "There's no heat in waste steam," he said.

  "Nay—nor in't bloody coaches, neither."

  As his senses thawed, he became aware of a certain edge to her behaviour; it was so excessively normal as to be odd. "Whitaker bin 'ere?" he asked. He knew she did not like him and that whenever he called at the Royal Oak it left her uneasy.

  Nora maintained that there was an unreliable streak at the core of Jack Whitaker, that one day he would let John down. John, for his part, would tell her she was a better judge of figures than she was of men. "That must flatter thee!" she said.

  He knew, from the careless way she turned to face him and the synthetic effort she put into trying to remember who might have called that day, that Whitaker had indeed come a-calling.

  "There's trouble," he said.

  She smiled confidently. "When is there not?" She turned him to the door and gave a playful push. "Come and sup. Broth'll warm thee and beef'll fill thee."

  He obeyed. "Whitaker'll be back," he said.

  "'Appen."

  Whitaker was back, very soon. He must have guessed at Stevenson's hour of return. They had barely swallowed their broth when they saw his rubicund face and curly hair peering this way and that through the smoke of the four-ale. At last he saw them and threaded his way among the crowd until he stood at their table.

  "Bring our beef pies," Nora told the pot boy who was then clearing away their bowls. She could see that John was tense and…excited. As if he could not wait for Whitaker to begin.

  And Whitaker certainly was biding his time. He stood looking down at John as if he had eight things to say and couldn't decide their proper order. John swallowed his impatience.

  "Sit down, Whitaker," he said, pointing to a vacant stool. "Sup wi' us? 'Ave ye supped?"

  "That I have not. Nor do I think you will when you hear what I have to say." He paused.

  "Am I to hear it then?" John asked. She could see he was becoming desperate for Whitaker to speak.

  "There's trouble at the workings. Ye'd best come."

  John looked at him coolly. "The brickies?" he asked, almost gleefully.

  "Aye." Whitaker's brow furrowed.

  "I thought ye'd never come!"

  "I came this dinnertime," he protested. "It started this morning."

  John laughed. "Nay lad—I meant five weeks back. I've been ready for this five weeks now. Five and more." He stood, eager to leave, rubbing his hands. Time for battle.

  Nora leaned over the table and plucked his sleeve. "Ye'd best eat," she said.

  With a delight that was near-feverish, he looked from her to him; his hand absently reduced a slice of bread to crumbs. "I'm ready for this fight," he said. Excitement slurred his voice.

  "Are ye drunk?" Whitaker asked.

  Nora looked sharply at him; she did not know John permitted such familiarity.

  John merely laughed.

  "If tha can swallow thy glee," she said, "that'llt think 'ow it may look if word gets out?"

  John frowned. "Word? What word?"

  "'E comes in 'ere," she nodded at Whitaker, "wi' glum tidins an' tha'rt out like a shot off a shovel. It'd look like 'e'd put wind up thee."

  John looked undecided.

  "What were yon ship's captain," she asked, "went on playin' skittles when't Frenchy fleet were due?"

  John laughed at that. "'Appen tha'rt right," he said and sat again. "Come on, Whitaker. Sit an' sup."

  Glad to have the decision taken from him, Whitaker did as he was bid and ate and supped his fill.

  "Do you want a fight?" he asked unbelievingly.

  John grinned but made no other reply. Whitaker looked at Nora and she at him; they raised their eyebrows and shrugged, but the subject was not raised again.

  Nora inclined her head toward John. "I pity the poor, ill-thriven sods as think they could duff yon man o' mine!"

  Six beef pies and a gallon of ale later, the two men strode out through the door, buttoned their coats against the flurries of sleet that howled around the deserted square, and set off for the workings, whose southern end was just over a mile distant.

  "We'll go up't track," Stevenson said.

  They went along the Ripponden road, under the new railroad bridge, and, climbing through the still uncompleted fence, scrambled up the eastern embankment to the track.

  "I can see nothing," Whitaker said. "It's a blind man's holiday all right. Let's at least get a lantern from the station."

  "They'll be shut."

  "We can wake him up."

  "Nay," Stevenson said firmly, and set off northward. "I can see just grand with these two ears." After a minute of steady walking, with only the moaning of the wind to accompany the soft fall of their feet on the wet sleepers, he stopped. "Someone coming," he said. "One man. On his own."

  In a little while, the sound of approaching feet was plain even to Whitaker. "Don't frighten him off," Stevenson said and coughed.

  The footsteps fell silent.

  "'Ooo's that?" Stevenson called out.

  After a silence a voice asked, "Why?"

  "I'm John Stevenson, contractor to this line. I ask—'ave you a right on these workings?"

  "Oh!" the voice was relieved. "Lord John!"

  "Aye. Mr. Stevenson to you, if that's Peter Etheridge."

  Silence. The other walked closer.

  "Is it? Peter Etheridge?"

  "Aye, sir." He came right up to them. "I'm not meant to talk with ye. Is this Mr. Whitaker an all?"

  "Yes," Whitaker said.

  "Not talk?" John said, scornfully. "No. Of course not. Took an oath, didn't ye!" It was frustrating to talk to someone he couldn't see and yet whom he so desperately needed to see. He strained his ears for every scrap of information they could glean.

  Etheridge merely breathed. Was it indecision? Or stubbornness?

  "I 'ope thou 'ast taken no oath," Stevenson prompted.

  "I'll not join their bloody oaths."

  Silence.

  "The gawmless fools," Stevenson said, hopefully.

  Sniff. "Aye." Long pause. "But I'll join in their demand."

  "Oh ah," Stevenson agreed. "'Appen I s'll know what that is soon enough."

  "Aye."

  Another silence.

  "So there'd be no great damage like if I know now?"

  Still Etheridge did not speak. The sleet had stopped falling and the wind was dropping a little.

  "Does't bonus run through all't tra
des?"

  "There's…" Etheridge began and then halted.

  Stevenson played his last card. His voice rich with understanding and sympathy, he reached out, patted the other on the arm and said, "Never tha fret, lad. I thowt as tha were no part o't conspiracy. Or I'd not 'ave pressed thee. But I see th'art in it up to thy neck."

  He felt Etheridge stiffen at the word conspiracy. He heard him breathe in to speak. He turned to leave just as Etheridge blurted out, "No bonus!"

  Stevenson halted, his breath stopped in midflow. "No bonus," he said at length in as neutral a voice as he could muster.

  Etheridge walked quickly away. "We want three an six a day, flat rate."

  "That's not too bad, guvnor," Whitaker said when they heard the last of Etheridge's footsteps. "Forty-two pence."

  Stevenson did not at once reply. At last he said, with what sounded like wonder in his voice: "They've sworn a combination!"

  "You don't mind?"

  Stevenson turned to him in the dark. "Mind? I came out tonight to meet a demand for bonus that I thought would be fair and difficult to fight. And instead it's me as is given't bonus. Two bonuses. One—flat rate demand. Two—they swore a combination. Gawmless fools! It's like nailin' spice off a sleepin' bairn." He stamped his feet to restart the circulation. "I've got 'em, Jack. I don't want 'em—or I do and I don't—but I've got 'em, see tha."

  "You sound as if you don't want them."

  Stevenson thought before replying. "I don't," he said. "As God is my witness, I'd as soon forgo this fight. But…we are as He made us in a world as He made it. If I shirk this contest now, I s'll live to fight it more bitterly and win it to someone's greater hurt hereafter." He sighed. "Aye. Well then. Set to!"

  "Are you going up to the workings?"

  "Nay. Meetin'll be squandered now." He turned and shook Whitaker's arm warmly. "Nay, Jack. Go on 'ome now. There's no more work this neet."

  "And you?"

  "Now, I'm come out I'd as well take a look at yon new windin' engine. We s'll assemble that tomorn."

  He left Whitaker standing in the dark. But he did not, as he had said, go up to the working at all; in fact, he went no farther than the old wooden shanty, Meg's Palace as it now was.

  Going through that door was like a homecoming. It was a furnace heat that pressed itself onto his face and reached up his cuffs and down his neck; it was laden with the steam of drying clothes and boiling beef, the aroma of spirits, the acrid smoke of tobacco and candle wicks, and the pungent stink of thirty or more bodies that bathed in nothing but their own sweat. As a fisherman might sniff the salt-laden winds or a farmer the breeze off a new-ploughed field, Stevenson breathed his lungs full of that rich reek.

  "Shut yon door!" several called before he was halfway in and they could see who it was.

  A cheer went up from a card school almost at his feet. Yorky Slen was there, and Bacca Barra.

  "Come and join us, Lord John," Yorky said; and the cry was taken up by others.

  "Aye—let's win some more money off of thee," Bacca said.

  He grinned down at them and then at the rest of the room; these were the only men he'd ever understand. The only folk he'd be proud to own. The only ones who knew what it meant to call him Lord John. Navvies'd never form a combination. They might use their fists, they might do a mischief to the guvnor with the sharp end of a steel shovel and leg it fast to the next working, but they'd never do owt so daft as surrender themselves to a union.

  "Nay, lads," he said. "It's brickies' turn now." They roared at that. "Where's Meg?"

  Bacca pointed to his old corner. As he went across to the curtain, he heard the laughter spread with the repetition of his joke from group to group.

  Old Meg sat alone staring into a cracked jug with a little gin at the bottom. His heart sank; he needed her sober. He pushed the jug to one side, sat down facing her, and pulled the candle between them. She looked very sinister with the light shining upward onto her face.

  "Lonely, in't it," he said. "In 'ere."

  She looked up at him. Her eye was steady and his heart rose as he realized she might not be so drunk as the nearly empty jug suggested. "'Ave a drop," she said.

  He took a sip from the jug. The raw spirit burned his lips and tongue; its subtler flavour of juniper hit him only when he breathed out its fire. "Cold out," he said.

  "Was it snow I seed?"

  "It's not layin'." He looked around approvingly. She was keeping it all neat—and she was ruling the men well. "Aye, Meg. It's quarter day. I've come for me rent."

  Her eyes narrowed until he laid a finger up the side of his nose and winked. "Oh ah!" she said, suddenly recalling their bargain.

  "Art sober?"

  She giggled hoarsely. "Nay, I canna say."

  "Sober enough I fancy. 'Ast 'eard?"

  "'Eard what?"

  He showed his impatience. "I didn't give thee this shanty to bandy words wi' me."

  Com-bi-na-tion? Her lips mimed the words and her brow framed the question that his ears barely heard.

  He nodded. "What are't lads sayin'. Speak up. Don't be feared."

  "They say as brickies is bloody fools. They say as Lord John'll make soup an' two veg on 'em an' swallow 'em fer 'is supper."

  He breathed easier. "There's no sympathy?" The word meant nothing to her. "No fellow-feelin'?" he corrected.

  Her lips curled in scorn over the black gaps in her teeth. "Fellow-feelin'! They've no feelin' for thersels. Nor one for th'other. Fellow-feelin'!"

  But he persisted. "It's important to me, Meg. There's none said…'brickies in't daft'…or…'t'int all wrong on't one side'…or owt o' that sort?"

  "When navvies take side wi' brickies tha'll 'ear th'last trump!" she said; but he sensed she was holding something back—not out of cunning but because she had remembered it and dismissed it as trivial at the same moment.

  "Not one?" he urged.

  She said it at last. "There's Catsmeat an' Steam Punch."

  He was surprised. "Steam Punch? What were on my gang this August?"

  She shook her head. "Nay. New ones. Started wi' Banner's gang this morn. They said…" She fell silent and her eyes grew vacant.

  "What they say?"

  He moved the candle to one side; the reek from it stung his eyes. She came back to him. Again, for a fleeting instant, he saw the young girl she must have been as her soft gray eyes came to rest on his. "Shut thy gob an' I'll tell thee. They said, or Catsmeat said…they're in't corner, if ye want 'em. Sharin' a wench."

  "I s'll get to know 'em. What they say?"

  "Catsmeat said as brickies on't Great Western's gettin five'n three a day on bonus."

  He shrugged. It meant nothing—threatened nothing. "Were that afore our brickies met this evenin'? To form't combination?"

  "Nay," she assured him. "They never said owt till Bacca come in wi' th'news o' th'combination."

  "Catsmeat and Steam Punch," he repeated, more to himself than to her.

  "Sup more." She pushed the jug at him.

  He shook his head. "'Ow's yon Pengilly? Pegoleggy Pengilly?"

  "Sleepin'," she said and drained the jug. She looked deep into it and added, "Strange thing. Since 'e lost 'is leg I've not seen 'im touch a drop o' sperrit. 'E'll sup a drop o' stingo to wash down 'is meat, but e's never drunk now."

  Stevenson nodded.

  "An' 'e's takin good money as windin' engineer." She reached across and patted Stevenson's forearm. "Tha done 'im a reight good turn there."

  "Does 'e say so?" Stevenson did not smile.

  "'E never stops singin' Lord John's praises. To 'ear im talk, Lord John's the risen Lord an' new Messiah in one."

  Stevenson shook his head sadly. "That's blasphemy," he said without making it a reprimand. For a while he looked down and closed his eyes, seeming to fall into prayer. When he opened them again, he thrust his hand in his pocket and pulled out all his loose change: a sixpence, a groat, a penny, and a farthing. He made a neat pile of the coins and passed them ac
ross to her. "I s'll need thy 'elp, Meg. I s'll need all me friends."

  He left without looking to see what her response might be.

  Chapter 22

  Combination or no combination, the ordinary work—even the ordinary bricklaying—went on. In fact, the working ran more smoothly and tightly that next day than it had during all the preceding weeks of slowly building tension. Those whose knowledge of John Stevenson was only superficial expected him to come like a fury through the works and seek out the instigators of the combination. But those who knew him well were not in the least surprised to see him behaving as though this day were like any other.