Give Us This Day

by R. F Delderfield

  "Splendid idea," he said, his approval of her increasing with each new encounter. "The more mobile he is, the easier he'll adjust, and after all these months in hospital he needs all the exercise he can get."

  Truscott was an instant success, a sunburned man about fifty with legs like saplings and a jerky way of carrying himself, as though he was forever on the point of breaking into a trot. He had the traditional parade-ground bark, even when he was trying to please, and his yell of "Sah!" every time Hugo summoned him so intrigued the grandchildren that they at once incorporated him into their games. Indeed, within days of Truscott's arrival the game of "Sah!" took over from hide and seek and prisoner's base, and soon Hugo's batman was a firm family favourite. Adam watched them set off one morning on their first tramp over the plateau that enclosed Tryst from the east and noted with relief that sightlessness had done nothing to shorten the effortless stride that had carried Hugo to victory over so many miles of track and steeplechase course. He thought, seeing the pair move into the screen of elms that topped the spur, He'll do, so long as that woman sticks to him… and went into his study to report on both Helen and Hugo in a long and explicit letter to Giles. Of all his children Giles alone shared his complete confidence.

  3

  On January 22nd the news was broadcast from Osborne to the remotest corners of the world, tapped out on countless telegraph keys, spoken over thickening clusters of wires that were beginning to enclose every sizeable city of the land, passed from mouth to mouth across the island that had once been marked as "Tom Tiddler's Ground" on the Swann waggon maps, then over the Solent to the mainland, then out across the shires to the coasts of Donegal, Sutherland, and the Empire beyond the seas. The impossible had happened. Victoria had slipped away on a grey winter's day and a curtain of black fell on an era.

  It was as though nobody had ever died before. As though, to yield up the spirit, and be trundled away in a coffin, was a privilege extended to the very few, a singular dispensation by Providence as a reward for spectacular services on earth.

  The face of the nation changed overnight. Every public building was hung with circular wreaths that looked like so many black lifebelts and many were shrouded in yards of whispering crêpe. Black crepe was at a premium. Top-hatted city gents tied it about their arms, cabbies tipped their whips with crêpe bows, and every woman who valued her neighbour's regard (and quite a few who did not) went into full mourning, including the ultra-loyal among the London prostitutes who continued, however, to ply a brisk trade among the thousands of provincials who travelled up to town for the occasion.

  Adam, secretly amused, was among them, reminding himself that he had no business witnessing the event for he had been born two reigns ago and could recall wearing crêpe round his straw hat for Silly Billy, the Queen's uncle.

  The ceremonial of the four tribes had always interested him, however, and he sauntered about glancing at solemn faces and hoping to catch one of them offguard. He was unsuccessful. On a 'bus ride from London Bridge to Kensington he did not record so much as a single smile, and even the Thameside costers looked as if they were losing money on every hot potato they sold in response to their dolorous cry of "Warm yer 'ands an' warm yer belly for 'apen'y!"

  When he read that the royal corpse was being conveyed by state procession to Paddington for its final journey to Windsor, he took a fancy to travel up again and avail himself of an old customer's offer to watch its departure from a hotel window overlooking the station approach. Henrietta declined to accompany him and not, as she claimed, on account of the cold, foggy weather. Her dismay was genuine, more genuine than even he realised, for more and more of late she had begun to identify with Victoria, and there seemed no point in reminding oneself of one's mortality at this chilly season of the year. So he went alone, staying overnight at the Norfolk and booking an early cab to his vantage point where his host had a comfortable sitting-room with balcony and a supply of hot toddy to keep out the cold.

  It moved him more than he would have believed, all those cloaked potentates marching behind the gun-carriage with its pall topped by the Imperial crown; the silent ranks of infantry standing with bowed heads and reversed arms between the cortege and dense phalanxes of Cockneys, Londoners without a speck of colour about them save the odd splash of undertaker's mauve. He had never liked the woman much (though he had always entertained respect for her dead husband), but he did not begrudge her her eight cream-coloured horses. One had to admit she had stayed the course better than most monarchs and had even succeeded in pulling herself together somewhat after the first twenty-five years of widowhood.

  He had plenty of time, as the cavalcade crawled past, to let his mind range freely back and forth across the decades, as it often did on occasions of this kind. Odd, irrelevant thoughts occurred to him, tiny tributaries of the national stream of history personally explored by him over many years. He remembered when the army had discarded traditional headgear in favour of the German pickelhaube, a curious concession to the widely accepted belief among military men that the Prussian army's performance against the French in 1870 entitled them to set military fashions, as though the design of a man's helmet determined his prowess in the field. He found it difficult to see the heavy, tired-looking man riding behind the bier as the future King, remembering, with an inward chuckle, all the fuss there had been about Bertie's frolics with the girls and at the gaming tables, that had earned him his mother's disapproval since he was eighteen or thereabouts and breaking out from the frigid mould she and Albert had cast for him. And on the King's immediate right he had more serious doubts about Vicky's unpredictable grandson, the German Emperor, wondering if he was qualified to run a village skittles team, much less a thrustful nation of eighty million. He seemed on his very best behaviour, however, reining back as they approached the station entrance in order to allow Uncle Edward to exercise his priority rights. He could see nothing of the new Queen and princesses, in their closed carriage pulled by a mere four horses, so that his mind was free to conjure with the secret thoughts of the spectators, wondering how genuine was their involvement in this splendid panoply of death. Reasonably so, he would imagine, but not for the obvious reasons. Very few of them down there could recall any royal symbol other than the little old woman on that gun-carriage, now on her way to lie beside her beloved Albert so that they would see this, he supposed, as a break in the continuity of their lives. That would disturb many of them. The English did not like their continuity broken, fearing changes in the national pattern as much as the French and Italians welcomed them. All their lives she had been there, as unchangeable as a feature of English topography, the cliffs of Dover or the curves of the Thames. Ever since childhood her double-chinned silhouette had crystallised their awareness of national prejudices and preferences, and whereas her withdrawal, in the 'sixties and 'seventies, had made her unpopular, the two Jubilees had restored her to her place at the pinnacle of the royal pyramid. So that it followed they were watching not her exactly but their own past, a past transforming itself into a future, and that meant uncertainty for most. Especially those no longer fortified by the arrogance of youth.

  * * *

  The kings, princes, and flunkeys moved on and he sipped a whisky, awaiting dispersal and a chance to make his way back to Charing Cross and home. His old friend Lord Roberts repassed below, his horse (black like everything else today) led by a groom, along with the horse the King had been riding, and there came to him again a brief vision of the crossroads he and Roberts had occupied immediately after the Sepoy Mutiny, when Roberts had opted for glory while he had seen a military career for what it was—years of boredom and heartache for all but the mystics like Roberts. Instead he had devoted himself to what? To money-making, or something more exalted? What was it exactly? Surrender to a compulsion that had nagged him since boyhood? To make a mark, to fulfil his own extravagant fancies in competition with other egotists? He didn't know. He never had known with certainty. Yet he was sure of one thing. He di
dn't regret his choice, and given his youth he would do it again but sooner, much sooner. The real point was, where did one go from here, if anywhere? He was seventy-three and unlikely to see another royal funeral, unless Edward VII, fourteen years his junior, gorged and whored himself to death. The long years of striving were behind him and in the time left he could never be more than a spectator. A keenly interested one, however, not only of his own concerns but of the ultimate destiny of his race, and he could make no more than a guess or two at that. They had passed their apogee, he supposed, a year or two back, when they involved themselves in this ridiculous war with a bunch of farmers, but the country was still sound enough, politically and financially, so long as it stopped short of tearing itself in two unequal halves, the Little Englanders on one side, the Imperialists on the other. And that mightn't matter in the end. It was hard to believe that anything cataclysmic would result from this temporary schism for the people. Even those like Giles and his radicals howling for social reforms, were conservative at heart, trafficking mostly in compromise. It seemed more likely that the real challenge would come from outside. Not from the Germans as he had once thought—they wouldn't get far with that ass of a Kaiser raising dust everywhere he went. More probably from France that George said was leading the field in the new technologies, or from that vigorous offshoot of the British across the Atlantic that had its own way to make in the world. If he lived as long as Vicky he might begin to discern some of the answers. Whatever they were they would be interesting… interesting…

  The penetrating cold tormented the stump of his leg, and he thought longingly of his own fireside and Henrietta's eager questions about the funeral procession. He said his good-byes, despatched an urchin for a cab with the promise of a florin if he got one, and went downstairs on to the porch. The crowds were rapidly dispersing, already forgetting the bier and its contents in search of something to keep out the cold. The boy arrived with a growler and he climbed in, sitting back in the musty interior saturated with spectacle and turning his thoughts towards home.

  PART THREE

  Towards the Summit

  One

  Headstart

  The old hands about the yard—and there were still some who remembered Adam Swann's heyday—exchanged wry jokes when it got about that the New Broom had retreated to the tower, the only section of the Thameside premises to emerge more or less intact from the fire.

  It struck them as ironic that a man who preached the heresy that the horse was obsolete, and was threatening to supersede them by the spawn of that snorting, juddering contraption he had driven down from Manchester three years ago, should choose a draughty, fourteenth-century belfry, approached by a narrow, twisting stair, as the hub of his empire. In deliberate preference, moreover, to the new red-brick office block they had built fifty yards short of the Tooley Street exit.

  It was out of character somehow. A man who had, as it were, forced upon them every kind of innovation in the last decade, was not a likely candidate for withdrawal to a lumber room lit by oil lamps and not even served by a telephone but equipped, instead, with the speaking tube apparatus Adam had employed all the years he had worked up here. In a way they saw it as a recantation, an admission that the new ways were, after all, inferior to the old, and when he remained up there fourteen months, making but fleeting visits to ground level, they told one another that he had mended his ways and not before time.

  They would have been outraged had they realised that what George was doing was to use his father's eyrie as a kind of Guy Fawkes's cellar, to hatch a plot aimed at erasing every familiar aspect of the yard and setting in motion shock waves that would be felt in every corner of the network beyond. Neither did they suspect that the tidal wave that followed would wash every last one of them into premature retirement, making way for newcomers who would talk a language largely unintelligible to them, who would think in terms of horse-power rather than horses, and whose avowed purpose would be to reduce haulage schedules, routes, and laden capacity to a series of formulae that made no kind of sense to them.

  For all that, they were not entirely wrong about him. There was about his withdrawal a hint of the Adam of the 'sixties and 'seventies, a man who found it essential to commune with himself in solitude before he could focus his mind on the immensity of his task and solve a thousand closely interrelated hypothetical conundrums. For what George was doing in the fourteen months that succeeded the submission of his engineer's report that a fleet of motor-vehicles was costed down to the last detail, was to redesign the national arena in which the fleet would operate. Such a task, far more formidable than any his father had tackled in his up-and-coming days, needed not merely physical stamina but a very high degree of concentration. To say nothing of access to the hundreds of route maps and trade summaries built up over the forty-two years Swann-on-Wheels had been in operation.

  No one else could have done it. No one else could have attempted it, and there was a reason for this. George Swann, New Broom Extraordinare, was the firm's only real link between past, present, and future. At least, the future as he saw it.

  It was, he came to decide, a matter of gradients. Everything in his flirtation with power-driven vehicles over the past twenty years suggested that gradients were the key to every imponderable. Perhaps others would see it differently, would give priority to factors like wear and tear of rolling stock, centres of population, concentrations of industry, quality of road surfaces, and other come-day-go-day aspects of the hauling trade. But George's experience equipped him to survey each of these factors separately and make a deliberate choice as to which of them demanded maximum attention. It did not take him long, after studying Scottie Quirt's report, to select gradients as the keystone of the exercise. Everything else was relative. Everything hinged upon a single, deter-minable axiom, viz: Can a Swann-Maxie waggon haul a given weight from point A to B if a gradient, in excess of a given limit, interposes between point of departure and point of arrival? If it could, well and good. If it could not, one might as well consign the whole complex of dreams to the wastepaper basket and indent for fifty thousand pounds' worth of younger horseflesh and new waggons, leaving the advancement of power-driven vehicles to the wealthy amateur with time on his hands and a bottomless pocket.

  It looked at first as if the answer to this equation was negative. Swann's main routes, according to copies of Adam's maps (the originals still occupied pride of place in The Hermitage museum, at Tryst), established that a laden waggon, with flexible traction as regards the number of horses employed per haul, could be dragged over almost any terrain where business was to be found. All the initiator was required to do was to increase teams or change the nature of the waggon in relation to the load and the natural obstacles in question. Bearing this in mind, the entire country was wide open and Adam Swann had proved as much forty years ago. Swann's frigates regularly crossed the Pennine Ridge and used unsurfaced cart-tracks in the remotest areas of Wales and the West Country. Its pinnacles, with one nimble Cleveland Bay between the shafts, threaded the most congested centres of the nation's cities, usually without loss of routeing time, for there was always a maze of side streets available. Even Swarm's men-o'-war and Goliaths, eight-, six-, and four-horse vehicles, could, given a leisurely time schedule and diligent routeing, haul enormous loads clear across country, from North Sea coast to Cardigan Bay. But Scottie Quirt's report confirmed that one could not hope for such flexibility if one substituted power-driven vehicles for the drag-horse. Britain was not a level plain, served by modern bridges. There were always, God curse them, gradients, some a mere one in ten but often as steep as one in five, or even four, that could defeat, with a sneer-scream of grit or a flurry of liquid mud, the maximum thrust of a Swann-Maxie engine.

  It had not needed his experiences on the trial run south to teach him this, although those experiences highlighted the two-edged sword suspended over the neck of the too-hasty innovator. Two-edged because it involved not only ascents but also descents. Wher
eas it was a matter of routine to apply drag-shoes at the summit of a hill before tackling a sharp descent with a waggon, one now had to rely upon braking power, and he foresaw that it might be years before some bright spark evolved a foolproof method of checking a fully-laden waggon on a one-in-four hill. One could not always rely on the presence of an amiable and inventive amateur, awaiting one's thundering descent into a ford, as had occurred early in the trial trip. Neither could one bank on the presence of an evangelist knife-grinder to straighten things out, as had occurred on his second day's run into London. He saw now, looking back, that he had enjoyed the devil's own luck on that trial run south. Who could hope for such fortunate encounters when Swann's new waggons were making daily runs from the Tay to the Channel, from the Wash to Cardigan Bay?

  It was then that he began to regret his arbitrary abolition of the localised structure of the network. With the original seventeen territories reduced to a mere five, with the scrapping of the old patriarchal system, and the new (and so far successful) policy of centralisation, the initiative of the regions had been superseded. More and more hauls were planned and routed from Headquarters. Improvisation on the part of provincial viceroys was not encouraged. Indeed, in many respects it was frowned upon. The power of the men out there had been subtly curtailed as they had learned to rely more and more upon the guiding hand of Headquarters, less and less upon their own reactions to local problems and this policy had seemed to pay dividends. For one thing, it put a stop to regional jealousies. For another, it checked indiscriminate exchange of teams, waggons, and even contracts between managers who liked one another and overall reluctance to co-operate between men who did not. It knit the entire enterprise together. It encouraged a variety of lucrative byproducts, not least among them a far closer co-operation with the railways than any achieved in his father's day. But it had, as he now saw with dismaying clarity, a fatal defect. It introduced a system of long, interlocked hauls over all kinds of terrain, and Maxies could not adapt to such demands. In a month, he suspected, Headquarters would be swamped with reports of ditched vehicles, stranded loads of perishable goods, helpless drivers, and infuriated customers. In bad weather half the fleet would be off the roads. And in six months Swann's forty-year-old boast, that he could haul anything anywhere in less time than his liveliest competitor, would become a tavern jest. What could result from that but ruin?