World From Rough Stones

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Nora shuddered at the thought. "Poor fellows. What was the contract let for."

  Stevenson raised his eyebrows. "Ninety-nine thousand; it must have looked attractive until they got into the quicksand."

  Nora shuddered even more at that.

  "And you never saw more reckless men," John went on. "I worked at the north end myself for a month. There were three men killed there playing followmy-leader trying to leap over a shaft. The leader, who was drunk, managed the leap; the three followers, who were very drunk, failed. I don't know how many were killed in all on that contract but it was a terrible one."

  Nora listened raptly for John rarely spoke of the dangers or difficulties of their branch of engineering. "So really," she said, "what I've seen at Summit is nothing like the business in general?"

  "No," he agreed. "We've been lucky at Summit. It's done as well as openskies working. Most roadlaying goes well enough." He looked out through the window. "This stretch here I remember; we more or less danced all the way. It's when you get into deep cuttings, tunnels, bogs, big embankings— unusual places like that. They spell trouble. And profit, of course. The receipt for success is to reduce the risks to the point where working in such places becomes as easy and smooth as level tracklaying over hard ground. Then you earn the profits that attend the risks but you expend only the labour that goes with the simple workings."

  "That's what you're good at," she said with pride. "There's none better than you at it, I'll lay odds."

  He smiled. "But think of poor Robert Stephenson. Before Kilsby was even finished, he's up in Todmorden with Gooch and Thornton, surveying a route for a tunnel over four hundred yards longer! That's what you call a man with stomach!"

  "That explains why he was so pleased with you when he came out that time. Oh, that reminds me! The strike, our strike—that was the twentieth, wasn't it, November?" He nodded. "Well so was this opening of Parliament." She patted her book. "Isn't that funny? All this going on down there at Westminster and all that going on up at Summit with us."

  He gazed again out of the window, and said: "When they come to write the history of these times, which event, I wonder, will they think most important? If Tom Metcalfe becomes hereafter an important leader of unions or if we make anything of ourselves who knows?"

  Chapter 42

  They drew into Camden Town on the northern fringe of London just before six that evening. There, they were relieved of their tickets, and the engine was shunted away to a siding while all the coaches were attached to the cable by which their freewheeling descent to the depot at Euston was regulated. "If there's a train due out, our descent helps to haul it up here, where they attach the engine and pull away to Birmingham," John explained. They watched the bankrider climb on to the front of the now engineless train, ready to guide them down; then they got back inside for the final one and a quarter miles.

  "Oh!" Nora said, startled by the utter smoothness of the ride. "It's like floating in a boat."

  "Aye!" John agreed. "Until you do this you don't realize how much of each piston thrust is transmitted to every coach. One day all railway travel will be as smooth as this."

  Ten minutes later, they came gracefully to rest at the depot—a simple opensided shed containing two platforms and four tracks—the two inner ones serving merely as empty-carriage roads, filled by means of small manual turnplates on which any single coach on the arrival or departure line could be rotated through

  90 degrees and sent to a similar turnplate on the empty-carriage road. Each platform was about 140 yards long. The arrival platform, on the eastern, open side of the depot, was a milling throng of omnibuses, porters, hackney coaches, hotel touts, private carriages, and people waiting to greet the new arrivals or to pick their pockets or—if they were young, pretty, and poorly chaperoned (a slim hope as this train was first-class only)—to help them into the gay life. There were paper sellers, pie sellers, beverage sellers, and girls, all with their wares attractively on display. Grooms in livery led pairs of well-matched horses to the flat wagons at the back of the train, on which the private coaches were roped. Self-important servants of the Royal Mails unlocked their coach and loaded its contents into a covered wagon, which they backed across the platform to butt with the train. They forced everyone to go around the horses, whose heads were soon buried again in their nosebags.

  "We're to look for a man with a red cravat," John said, his eyes searching among the restless melee.

  "With white spots?" Nora asked. "Like the one over there? Second column from the end."

  John searched and found the man. He, too, was scanning the crowd and evidently not finding what he sought. "Could be," John said. The man's eye caught his; he waved; the man smiled and began to thread his way toward them.

  "I need to bury a quaker," Nora said.

  "That's over the other platform. As soon as this fellow gets our bags, I'll take you around there. Show you a small tragedy, too."

  "Mr. Stevenson, sir?" the man asked as soon as he reached them.

  "And you are from…?" John answered.

  "The Talbot, sir, off Vellington Street."

  His cockney accent confused the word. "D'ye say Talbot or Tabard? We're to stay at the Tabard."

  The man laughed at that. "Quite right, sir," he said. "Werry confusin'. Tabard is indeed the name above the gateway. But they all calls it Talbot. Don't ask me! But Talbot it is."

  "Who sent you?" John asked, still wary.

  "Vy, Mr. Tom Cornelius, landlord of the Talbot, sir."

  "Good fellow," John said and showed him which bags were theirs. "We'll come back in ten to fifteen minutes," he added.

  "Talkin' of vich, sir, don't forget to move your vatches and clocks to London time. Ten minutes before Manchester time as a rule."

  They thanked him and walked around to the arrivals platform where a colonnade of buildings housed the waiting rooms for the first and the second classes, the ticket offices, staff rooms, and the earth closets for ladies and gentlemen, one at each end. She emerged to find John waiting for her on the departure platform. Here, too, the crush was great, for the evening train to Watford was due to leave at the quarter hour. It was a very different sort of crowd from the ones they had mingled with at Newton and Birmingham; here there were no private coaches, no bags, no anxious or tearful relatives, no excitement; just ranks of sober gentlemen waiting for the coaches to be manhandled off the turnplates and be joined to make a train of first- and second-class carriages. Each man seemed to know his seat, too, for as soon as a new coach was added, a group would detach themselves from the waiting mass and take their places as if by agreed allotment.

  He led her among the crowd and across the central granite roadway, where omnibuses and carriages were arriving in an almost constant stream, entering through a giant triumphal archway held on four massive fluted columns. Its soaring grandeur, after the dirty, primitive and disorderly arrangement of the platforms and offices was breathtaking. "Eay!" she said. "Isn't that grand?"

  "Tragic, I call it," he said. "And this. Look at this." He took her to a barred gate in a tall fence wall. Through it, she could see a large waste area—a sea of young weeds and garbage.

  "What is it?" she asked.

  "That is the Great Western Railway depot—or was—or was going to be."

  "The one that's at Paddington now?"

  He nodded in disgust. "The London and Birmingham bought all this for a joint depot; and then they couldn't agree. Imagine how it might have been: You come in from the north and the Midlands there…" He nodded back at the platforms they had just left. "Cross the road here, and get on a train to the West. But now…you've got to take a coach or get on a bus—all that fuss with your bags—and drive way out into the countryside at Paddington. Leaving that behind." He gestured at the triumphal arch. "Thirty-five thousand pounds they forked out for that."

  "Eay," she said. "They'd have done better to save their money and built a decent depot."

  "Their money," he snorted.
"Our money. I should think threepence off each ticket pays for that…essay in delusion. Come and see it from outside."

  From Drummond Street the great 72-foot-high portico, already dirty after only two years exposure to London, certainly looked impressive, leading one to imagine great echoing halls behind it—a railway Temple to which this would be but a propylaeum. The dingy little cast-iron barn, open down one side and both ends, matched by acres of weed and rubbish on the other flank, was just laughable.

  "Still," she said. "When they get a station worthy of it, it'll not look too bad. It has a grand air of permanence."

  "Aye," he laughed. "It's permanent all right. I'll say that for it. It'd cost a thousand or two to get rid of."

  It also symbolized—though she would have found this impossible to explain to him or even to put into words for herself—it also symbolized an atmosphere that was London, a sense which pervaded all she had read that day, which sprang at you from the map, which seemed to float like a will-o'-the-wisp around the streets and among the houses. It symbolized money. And though she did not recognize it consciously until the following day, the awareness of it was already stirring the essential Nora from her long slumber, quickening her blood, sharpening her senses, filling her eyes with a gleam they had held only fitfully since Tommy's death.

  In the coach on the way to the Talbot, or Tabard, they passed no fine houses and saw no great estates; but even the poverty that stretched all around, the abject, grinding poverty, more desperate than anything to be found so casually in Manchester, even that spoke of huge wealth—somewhere. Such assemblies of paupers could not be gathered in such permanent concentration unless, somewhere nearby, there were tables groaning with silver plate and vaults stuffed with gold. She sensed that wealth in her very bones.

  It was clear from the way they had to fight their way south down Grays Inn Road, against the main northward rush as the City emptied; it was clear from the rash of "Rooms to Let" signs in the windows, beacons to the hopeful; and it was clear in the sheer number of pawnshops, repositories of hopes forlorn. Here was the city where men brought their dreams. Here was the magnet of all ambition. Here was where big fish from little ponds learned of the ocean's existence. Here was the honeypot. And just as an English foxhound, transported suddenly to the American plains and knowing nothing of, say, white-tailed deer, would nevertheless recognize its scent as spelling game and quarry, and would at once give tongue and own the line and follow it in hopes of a kill, so Nora, cast suddenly into this new land, owned its scent of gold and lusted for her kill, knowing nothing yet of the shape and form of her actual quarry.

  "The Tabard, where we're staying," John said, "is very near the Greenwich Railway's depot at London Bridge. That's mainly why I chose it. That's built all on arches, you see. Like the Manchester link line may be. We can go and see it."

  She smiled and nodded happily, wondering what it was that invigorated her so. Out of the window she saw the sign over a shop; Grays Inn Pharmacy. Grays Inn Road! The address of the mysterious Mr. Dow—the possible arsonist! The…something Inn. No…Arms. The Calthorpe Arms!

  She threw open the window, poked out her head and said: "Is this Grays Inn Road?"

  "Indeed it is, madam."

  "D'ye know the Calthorpe Arms?"

  "Right be'ind yer, lidy," he pointed with his whip.

  "Stop!" she cried. "I have business there." She turned back quickly to John. "No time to explain it now," she gabbled. "It's something Nancy Spur told me last week."

  "Shall I come?"

  She hesitated.

  "Very well," he smiled. "Be as quick as you can."

  She walked swiftly up Wells Street to the side entrance of the inn. The light inside was so dim that she could at first see nothing. She had no idea what her next move ought to be.

  "Yus?" a girl's voice said. The air stank of cabbage, liquor, and smoke.

  She drew herself up to full height and, without having consciously intended it, said in perfect imitation of Lady Henshaw: "Be so kind as to summon Mr. Tighe. I wish to have him brought to me."

  She could see the girl now, a plain dumpling, staring at her stupidly.

  "Do you understand me?" she asked, with exactly Lady Henshaw's mixture of sharpness and kindliness.

  "What is it, Margaret?" asked a man, out of view around the corner.

  "Lidy wants you, sir."

  A shadow fell across the girl as the man approached. She backed away to make room for him. He was a big man, almost as big as John—for which she was glad. Big men were more gallant and obliging than small ones. Small men were suspicious and belligerent creatures.

  True to form the big man smiled. "Yes, madam?"

  Taking her courage in both hands she said, without smiling: "I've come for the messages and letters for Mr. Dow."

  "Dow?" he said, as if he had never heard of the name. But he immediately gave himself away by adding. "All right you, Margaret. Leave us."

  Nora's heart began to hammer at her throat. What had she done? She had let herself into something far over her head here. Mr. Tighe was no longer smiling. "I've not seen you before," he said. "You've never come before."

  Now she smiled. "I appreciate your caution Mr. Tighe. And so, I'm sure, does…Mr. Dow." She put enough of a pause before the name to suggest that she knew it was a pseudonym. The device appeared to relax the landlord slightly, though he was still suspicious. "But I have a carriage outside and much business still to do. So if you will please hand me over what you have."

  Tighe looked very dubious. "I don't know," he said unhappily. "He ought to have said he was sending you."

  "You mean he didn't?" she said, scandalized. "Oh! Why in that case, I can hardly blame you! He certainly should have sent to tell you. I was persuaded he had. What a bloody pickle!"

  If he had doubted her quality, those doubts were removed by her swearing, and her manner of swearing. "Tell you what, madam," he said, "I can't just take your word, much as I'd want to. But if you can tell me Mr. D's…well, shall we say another name for him, I'll turn over to you what I have."

  Nora thought rapidly and played her last card. She looked around as if every wall had eyes and ears lurked in every corner. Then, drawing close to him, leaning up toward his ear, steadying herself with a gentle hand laid upon his arm, she breathed the initials that had stood on Mr. Dow's luggage: "N…C."

  Tighe, no doubt swayed in part by her beauty and the closeness, pulled reluctantly away, breathed heavily, and shook his head in admiration. "He's a careful one that Mr.…C," he said.

  "In his place, would not you be careful, too?" she asked.

  "Indeed!" He spoke as if Dow lived always on the verge of summary arrest.

  He capitulated then and went somewhere into the back of the house to fetch whatever awaited the mystery man. She trembled with delight; soon, perhaps, the mystery would be cleared up. Peering into the gloom, she was unnerved to realize that a pair of eyes was fixed unrelentingly upon her.

  But it was only young Margaret, pricked by curiosity—as became clear when Tighe, returning with two envelopes, shooed her before him up the passage and into the bar.

  As he handed her the letters, he said: "Who shall I confirm as having called for them?"

  "Lady Summit," Nora said unhesitatingly. "It's not my name but it's the one he and I agreed on. And I shall use it every time I call in future."

  Tighe smiled and bowed before, remembering himself, he sprang to open the door for her. "There'll be no trouble next time your ladyship. Tell Mr.…C that."

  "I'm heartily glad to hear it, Tighe," she said as she swept by. "So will he be. So will he."

  "Good night, your ladyship."

  The coach from the Tabard was not in sight. With a quick look up and down the short street she thrust the letters into her bodice, aligning them with the side panels and gripping them with her arm. Even as she hid them she knew it was something dreadful she had done. Suppose Mr. Dow was completely aboveboard? The consequences didn't bea
r thinking of. John would be furious. It was the thought of John's fury that really awoke her to the enormity of her action.

  Back in Grays Inn Road, she saw the coach had moved on about fifteen paces, to the next corner.

  "Come and see!" John called. He and the horse seemed bathed in fire.

  When she drew level with him, there was no need to point out what had drawn him. For there, over the heads of passing horsemen and coaches, stretching between the houses that flanked Guilford Street, hung bars of fiery cloud, crimson where they caught the light of the sun that had set ten minutes earlier, deep smoky green where they were shaded from it.

  The pair of them stood spellbound by its intensity. Not one inch of the scene before them was devoid of colour. The sky ranged from gold through cold turquoise, to azure, to purple. The houses, stark against the skyline, were a rich prussian blue, the streets a kind of lilac gray, the windows opposite, set in the deep, muffled red of London stock bricks, burned back the twice reflected fire of the sunstruck walls on this side of the street.