World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  "Stop it?" John's scorn was deep. "I tell thee—t'union…nay, folk, folk in't union, folk, they'd do it. I'd 'ave a job stoppin' 'em." His tone was suddenly more sad than triumphant and he patted Metcalfe's arm to show that he was no longer offering debate. "Still, I see tha'rt set on't union way. I thowt as this three month past would've seen thee agate some other line."

  Metcalfe relaxed and leaned on the gate, able to turn to Stevenson for the first time and smile at him, equal to equal now that the challenge had gone. "I'm not given to such light conversion," he said.

  Stevenson nodded. "Then tell us, Tom. 'Ere's owt tha must o' ground over i' tha mind in't jailouse. If tha were back on't workin, would tha still seek to combine?"

  But Metcalfe merely laughed. "Give us the job back, and I'll give thee certain answer," he said. When Stevenson did not reply he, too, became serious again. "Navigation work," he went on, "is no place to start wi' unions. Too transient. Nay—I shall go where I can make me weight felt."

  Stevenson suddenly turned to him and held out his hand. "'Appen we s'll meet then, Tom. It's a small world, ours. Good luck go with thee."

  Metcalfe paused before he took the proffered hand; he said, "If we do, it'll be on opposite sides o'th table. I'll show thee no more mercy than tha showed me."

  "Fairly said."

  Then they stood in silence a while, side by side, leaning on the gate and watching the night drain the red from the sky.

  And watching and overhearing them from the fringe of a nearby group, Nora succumbed to a relief whose intensity surprised even herself.

  Part Five

  Chapter 39

  As February passed into March and March into April, John watched Nora's grief dwindle until none but he could see the remnant. She wept no more, heaved no more sighs at unaccountable moments, tossed through no more shallow nights. She spoke less often of Tommy, and when she did it was with a brightness that was less obviously forced. She still visited his grave each week and freshened it with flowers but, outwardly at least, these trips had less and less the nature of a pilgrimage and took on more and more the character of outings for herself and whichever of Lady Henshaw's horses she was exercising that week.

  The mere record of her actions showed that her life had returned in every way to the pattern in which Tommy's death had cut so harsh a wound. Each week she visited Lady Henshaw and corrected the more glaring absurdities of the romance she was writing—though, as Nora said to John, "If you overlook her ignorance about working folk, it's not a bad little yarn—there's excitement in it, I'll say that."

  The book implanted more complex thoughts of which she was not wholly aware, and which she would have found difficult to put into words for him. All her life she had seen the gentry—men like the Duke of Bridgewater's agent and Mr. Orrell, the master of the mill at Stockport—as larger than herself and her kind, yet also distant. The effect was exactly that of looking at people through a telescope. You were sure you could touch them and talk to them; yet, they moved in silence through a remote and glassy kind of medium. Reading Lady Henshaw's book was like putting her eye to the other end of that same telescope. Everything near at hand was suddenly made to appear untouchably remote and small and insignificant.

  Again and again her mind returned to Lady Henshaw's casual assertion that Nora Telling's ancestry counted far more toward her social acceptability than anything Nora Stevenson actually was or did. That, and the attitudes she unconsciously absorbed from the eccentric old woman's book, began a process of subtle change within her. For a long time she was unaware of it, and even when it did begin to strike her, the effects seemed trivial. One day, for instance, it suddenly occurred to her that she no longer minded having Bess and Tabitha around the house. When they had first moved to Rough Stones she had resented their constant presence; it put her always on display. Home was no longer her nest and John's nest, a free-and-easy refuge. All that had vanished; now the house would have felt empty and somehow wrong without servants.

  Even then, she did not at once connect these changes with Lady Henshaw's book.

  John, whose reading of the book was more analytical, pointed out that her ladyship recognized only two kinds of poor. One kind was like a ragged middle class; it knew its place, obeyed the ten commandments, ate well but frugally, kept the temperance code, and always had a few shillings saved. Its children were cherubs in fustian—bonny, chubby, red-cheeked, and mischievous. The other poor were dangerous, vicious, drunken people, always destitute, and deeply dyed in sloth and depravity; they were either mere rag-clad skeletons or towering, hulking bullies—who or what fed them to such gargantuan proportions was a mystery left ravelled; any money they had put by was dishonestly gained.

  "She believes it, too," John said. "They must all believe it. The deserving poor are angels in rags. So if the poor you meet look thin and starved and destitute, they must also be vicious and undeserving."

  "She must ride around here blind then," Nora said.

  She made a comparable division in the language she advised Lady Henshaw to put into the mouths of these figments: a kind of colourless bad grammar with an insipid Northern flavour for the deserving; and a rich, zestful dialect—her own native speech, in fact—full of oaths and insult, for the depraved.

  These literary endeavours and her own tuition in etiquette generally occupied them until luncheon. Then, for most of the afternoon, she would ride, sometimes by the turnpike, sometimes over the top of Summit, but always by way of Littleborough cemetery. Very soon she had reached the degree of proficiency at which most people would begin to attend the meets of their nearby hunt. McGinty was always pressing her to take the plunge, for he was not only proud of her progress, he also felt that Lady Henshaw did not ride to hounds nearly often enough for her own sport, the good of her horses, or his own pleasure.

  "Aw, go on missis!" he would urge. "Sure there's dozens there couldn't sit a horse like yerself can. Ye'd walk past them and they at full gallop. Ye'd put them in the halfpenny place, so ye would."

  But Nora was adamant. She would not hunt this season. "Suppose it came to the kill and I'd kept up all the way and they were breaking up Charley Fox in the next field and me in this one and every hedge a hairy bullfinch and no gate…I'd bust every vein in my skull."

  "Arra! Sure there's no sich field with Milwood benathe ye. He'd swish at any bullfinch and make a rasper of it and lave the rest of the field lookin' for the gate."

  "And me on foot! Or worse. No, you'll not tempt me now. When I hunt, I want riding to be second nature. I want to forget I'm even riding. So save your breath."

  On at least one day each week she and Arabella would hire two hacks from the livery stables next to the cockfighting pit in Todmorden and ride out for a whole morning or afternoon over the moors to the north—once going as far as Haworth, right over the far side. These adventures came to an abrupt end one day when Arabella, in an agony of embarrassment, asked Nora how a woman could know whether or not a baby was on the way—and Nora told her. From that day onward, Arabella retired to live the life of a semi-invalid, not at all from modesty but because, as every doctor knew, pregnancy among the middle classes was the next best thing to a long debilitating illness.

  Each week, too, Nora would go to Manchester to get the supplies for her store, which Wardroper, the Rochdale flannel weaver, was now running with such efficiency. Her battle with Charley Eade had sunk to a state of armed truce. She caught him twice in small deceptions that he passed off as errors; and she was sure no larger swindle escaped her. He appeared to resign himself to the prospect of a steady three or four pounds a week for, at most, a day's work.

  "It's not what I'm used to," he would grumble. "You'll never get me to say I like it."

  But the arrangement suited them both well enough, and so it endured.

  On the other days she would compile the accounts and keep their various books and inventories up to date. She was meticulous, unemotional, as alert and sharp as ever. People said it was wonder
ful how quickly she'd conquered her grief and become mistress of herself again.

  But John knew that she had not. Something had been subtracted from her spirit. Her invention was dulled. She came to him no more with ideas for new and better ways of doing things.

  She left well alone. She made a ritual, almost a housekeeper's chore, out of all she did. That old obsessive, venturesome, aggressive, implacable, obdurate huntress, with her gleaming eyes and the blood on her hands…she was suddenly absent from his landscape.

  When he heard of the explanation she gave for not going hunting this season he thought that in anyone else who had been riding, as an adult, a mere six weeks, it would be a most sufficient excuse; but in Nora it was an evasion. Worse still, she had lost so much of her spark that she did not even recognize it for what it was.

  But how do you go about getting something like that back? When her second letter to Mr. Sugden in Leeds, asking Sam's whereabouts, was returned marked "Gone away" he hoped it would stir her into some positive action on her own part. After all, Leeds was a mere three hours away by coach from Todmorden. But she found some reason not to go; it seemed she wanted nothing to disturb the even tenor of life at Summit. And that was no fit frame of mind for a railroad contractor's wife.

  His patience was not helped by the knowledge that somewhere in Southport the Reverend Prendergast was taking his daily walks up and down the seafront, steadily recovering his strength and his faculties. It could not be long before he returned; and when he did, the tissue of excuse and prevarication would collapse. It would be time to settle.

  Work at the tunnel, too, was growing irksome. The pioneering work was over; no new discoveries remained to be made. It was now a matter of punctilious attention to detail and to following the specification to the inch. He had one major disagreement with Thornton during these months. It concerned the number of rings of brick to be laid in the troublesome fractures section between shafts six and seven. The engineer was sure eight rings would suffice; it was in the middle of a long, straight run of rail and there would be no sustained lateral forces on the roadbed. But John felt in his bones that, in the invert at least, where the fractures had been just as bad as in the walls and soffit of the arch, the specification should be raised to ten. He even put his doubts in writing and asked Thornton to express his confidence in the eight-ring specification in the same way. It was the first important disharmony between them and for a while it led to a cooling of their relations.

  Then in April, a miner was killed during the enlarging of number six shaft for ventilation. To be sure, it would have been unheard of for a venture this size to go to completion without a death; eight deaths, or even a dozen, would have been the average for the time. Nevertheless, John had hoped for the miracle and this marred his record. It was small comfort that the man had been drunk and that, as his mates said, it was a wonder he'd lasted so long, for he'd been close to death a dozen times a week since he'd started there. A death was a death. It called for even tighter vigilance on his part; yet all the time his spirit was impatient to be off, to be agate, to be starting something new.

  Every visit he made to Manchester he saw some new mill going up, some new extension to the canal being made, some decayed area being pulled down to make way for better. It was a time of thrust, vigour, confidence, and expansion; money was flowing there like water. And what was he doing? Wallpapering a rural tunnel with bricks! Three times that spring he tendered for works let in Manchester and Rochdale, and each time he lost to some other contractor— unfairly, he was sure. The luck that had seen him through Summit this year seemed unable to follow him into the world at large.

  Somehow, he knew, the answers to his restlessness and to Nora's unusual lethargy of spirit were one and the same. They were both caught on a circular rail; they needed a jolt, an earthquake, to get them back on the old lines.

  The first rumblings of it came when the month was almost out. John had spent most of the afternoon at the canal wharf, supervising the sorting through of a pile of bricks he was going to reject, when Jack Whitaker came down to say that one of the directors of the railway, a Reverend Prendergast, was attending the site.

  John left Whitaker to complete the sorting while he went up to meet the cleric. A special excitement, nervous, almost fearful, grew within him as he walked. He had not felt it since the day of the strike—or the day before, to be precise, when he had addressed all the craftsmen and had not known what turn matters would take next.

  Here it was then. Nemesis. The consummation that had mocked him all these months, pricking his hope and then dashing it. Here it was. And still he had no answer. His mind was empty and seemed to cringe within him. And every step brought him closer to the black-coated and gaitered figure of the priest, standing just above the cutting with his back toward John. He had forgotten the precise quality of the hatred that figure could arouse.

  "Reverend doctor!" he called. "Glad you've come back among the living!"

  "Stevenson!" He turned around. He was very much thinner than John remembered him—younger-looking, healthier, and jollier. In fact, he was as jolly as he had been on that first day, when he and John had taken lunch together in Manchester. It was an ill omen. He behaved as if he expected a fight and knew that he was bound to win. He clapped and clasped and rubbed his hands together a great deal and spoke with all the hearty insincerity of a horse coper. "Stevenson! Good to see you! It's been too long! Far too long! How are you? Busy?"

  "I'd like the thirty-hour day," he answered. "There's a fortune waiting the man who invents it."

  "Indeed," Prendergast said pleasantly. "There's a fortune awaiting any astute man these days." He looked toward the mouth of Summit East, a furlong from where they stood near Deanroyd bridge—quite close to the spot where Arabella had turned her ankle.

  "Would you care to inspect your tunnel?" John asked. "We're a little before the timetable, despite this chronic shortage of hours in the day."

  "No, I thank you. Mr. Whitaker was kindly enough to take me a hundred yards in and he assures me the remainder is much the same."

  John nodded, and watched, and waited.

  "I've been looking at your accounts from the Miles Platting end of things," the cleric continued. "They, too, are nicely up to timetable."

  "Very nicely," John agreed.

  Prendergast looked around. The whole Vale was renewing its life with the coming of spring. Even the purple-brown moors were shot with a newly verdant hue, and the breeze that poured over them and spilled down into the valley carried the first hint of summer's warmth. It twisted and whitened the shimmering leaves of willow and aspen near the edge of the cutting, along the banks of Walsden water. The brook gurgled sharply over its stony bed, still cold from the upland springs. Birds shrilled and battled for territory all around. Prendergast breathed a contented sigh at all he saw. "Lamb for dinner tonight!" he said with relish.

  "Aye, it soon comes round again," Stevenson agreed.

  "You'll never guess who I happened across in Manchester last week," Prendergast said casually.

  Fear tightened John's guts. There were several dozen in Manchester whose paths he would rather the priest did not cross.

  "Thornton," Prendergast said. "Perhaps he told you?"

  "As a matter of fact, he didn't." John felt only the mildest relief.

  "Strange," the other smiled. "He's such a little chatterbox, don't you find?"

  "He has that reputation."

  "Yet, it's possibly not so strange. The circumstances of our meeting were such as might…embarrass, perhaps, a young man with a pretty wife and they not eight months married. It was the sort of place you'd more likely find elderly celibates like myself."

  John was surprised at the priest's insistence on this detail; it was as if the fellow were trying to put some distance between his vocation and his present business.

  "He has that reputation, too."

  "An interesting man. I'm told there is a stage coach passes at five to the hour; let u
s walk up to the turnpike."

  John strode in silence beside him, waiting his chance.

  "Yes!" sighed the priest. "The seasons come! Every year they come a little sooner. Bringing us…what? Ah me!"

  John decided then that his best hope lay in taking a little of the wind out of Prendergast's sails—going far beyond anything the priest could have reasonably expected when he set out for Summit. "It's brought me great fortune," he said. "You've no idea how well things have gone here since we finished the drift. The accounts at Miles Platting don't tell the half of it."

  "Indeed!" Prendergast was both surprised and delighted.

  "No doubt of it. In fact, I'm desperately looking for new works to invest my surplus in. Canals…turnpikes…even another railroad?" He looked intently at the cleric.

  "Might be able to help you there," Prendergast said carelessly. "Er…what about a dividend, Stevenson?"

  "Had I known you were coming," he said with his widest, warmest, friendliest smile, "I'd have brought all the books completely up to date. However, even without that, I can assure you we've done so well that any dividend—within reason, of course—will be acceptable. Any dividend."