* * *
The run was scheduled for December 13 and Quirt advised travelling empty. "If she jibs at some of those inclines at least we can get her off the road and send someone by motor-cycle to gie you a hand," he said. "Loaded she'll need towage and a brace o' waggons to offload." Martin thought the precaution unnecessary. She wouldn't jib at any incline and as for descents, there was no metalled slope on the west side of the Pennines that he feared, with his rim block brakes, revolutionary contracting transmission footbrake, and equally novel handbrake controlling internal-expanding units on the rearward wheels of the forward section. There was a further feature Scottie seemed to have overlooked, the speeded up interchangeability of the enlarged driving sprockets, enabling the gear ratio to be altered to match laden or unladen running and varying road conditions. Up or down dale, Martin Fawcett had no doubts at all about his four-ton Fawcett holding the road. He would have wagered all he possessed on this even before the road tests buttressed his faith in the giant.
On the day before he set out, a bulky package arrived for him and was delivered to his lodgings. It turned out to be a handsome present from Uncle George, a heavy leather coat with stylish crossover fastenings, a vizored cap to match, leather gauntlets, and a pair of aviator's goggles. There was a note attached in George's handwriting, reading, "'Rich not gaudy, for the apparel oft proclaims the man!' Good luck. Uncle George and all at H.Q."
He was glad then that the spanking new kit had not been sent to the sheds, for he could never have waited to see himself in it, and the result, reflected in the mirror of his landlady's wardrobe door, did not disappoint him. Cody and Blériot would have envied him the rigout; he looked more like an aviator than an engineer.
He rolled her out into the yard and backed her round facing the double gates, ready for a flying start in the morning. She handled even more easily than he had hoped, as light on the steering as a Swann-Maxie with less than a third of her cubic capacity, but there was no mistaking the chant of her three-cylinder engines. They sang of power and conquest, of even coasting along high plateaux and swift, controlled descents into the valleys. They spoke to him of capacity hauls of over two hundred miles a day, spilling goods into the four corners of the land with a speed and profusion that a fleet of his grandfather's waggons could not have achieved. They made the latest model from the Macclesfield sheds seem as obsolete as a Roman chariot, and a seat on these leather driving-box cushions was a throne, elevating him to the status of king among road travellers. He climbed down and went round to the bonnet, glancing covertly at the shining letters of the newlyaffixed nameplate, a just reward for all the hours of toil that had preceded this moment of triumph. He said to an acolyte, unable to restrain his exuberance, "My stars, but she's a beauty! She's the most beautiful thing I've ever imagined! And this time tomorrow, from here to Salford, she'll pull in the crowds wherever she rides!"
The man to whom he spoke, one Dyson, a carpenter who had bent and fitted her hood poles, was to remember this remark. Especially when his daughter brought him his illustrated paper towards the end of his lie-in the following Sunday morning.
His route was a double compromise.
By the shortest distance, and probing for low gradients and good, metalled roads, he could have knocked miles off his journey and as much as three hours off his time schedule, but he had to reckon on the near certainty of traffic congestion in the complex manufacturing centres stretching eastwards and southwards from Bradford through Halifax to Huddersfield and Oldham. He knew this ground well. Only by night, or on a Sunday, was it free of heavy haulage, up here mostly horsedrawn, and there was no certainty of an easy passage of any of the West Riding towns in mid-week. On the other hand, a more northerly and circuitous route up the valley of the Aire, bearing west by Haworth, then south via Hebden Bridge and Rochdale, presented serious hazards at the time of year. Most of the road ran over high, windswept upland, with the virtual certainty of ice on some gradients. There was, however, a third alternative, the compromise within a compromise, a more tortuous approach over the lower landmass enclosing the Aire gap, heading northwest for Keighley and beyond it to Cross Hill, where the road branched north to Skipton and southwest for Colne and the eastern frontier of the cotton belt. Thus, of the three alternatives, two offered virtual freedom from traffic and of these two the Keighley-Colne route promised the easier climb, although adding more than thirty miles to the journey.
It was this approach he finally chose, stowing two extra drums of fuel in the trailer, for he had no experience on which to base his probable petrol consumption. His own guess was that it would be nearly double that of the heaviest Swann-Maxie on the roads, particularly over the spine of England, but he was in no particular hurry and a series of long climbs and the twenty-mile drop into Lancashire might provide him with the answers to some of the many questions both George and Scottie Quirt would be sure to put at the inquest. And a searching inquest, with two other prototypes in the making, was vital, with a prospect of saving weeks of trial and error when fed back to the Leeds mechanics. It might also be generally useful to Scottie's men in the Macclesfield yard, for every six months or so modifications were adapted to the standard vehicle and not all of them came (by fair means or foul) from the brochures and workshops of competitors. Perhaps half were derived from personal experience within the network, sedulously circulated to the regions in the columns of The Migrant.
The morning was bright, clear, and cold, with the thermometer hovering a couple of degrees over freezing point in the city, so that his hoped-for early start was delayed. There had been a sharp frost in the night, and he decided to wait for the morning sun to get to work on the ice patches. The wind, coming from the west, was very fresh, altogether an exhilarating morning to begin an odyssey, and he set out about ten-thirty, heading west-southwest through Shipley and Bingley, well north of the Bradford suburbs, and found the road surprisingly open.
He was right about the Fawcett attracting attention. Errand boys whistled with surprise as he rumbled past, and he saw one jot down the name of the vehicle in a notebook. He thought, smiling, That'll fox him for sure. Nobody but Uncle George and me, and the Leeds mechanics, have ever heard of the name applied to a motor.
He made very good time, averaging around twenty miles an hour, and before starting the climb to Cross Hill and the Skipton junction he pulled in at a tavern and ordered a ham sandwich and a cup of coffee, occupying himself while the coffee was brewing by stamping about the yard and swinging his arms to restore circulation to his fingertips. The leather coat and gauntlets were a boon, but it was still cold up on that high box. Only his feet were warmed by the engine, and the coffee was so good that, after a reassuring glance at his watch, he ordered a second cup.
The sky had clouded over as he gained height and the wind freshened, veering to the northeast. There were still patches of ice here and there, but he travelled most of this section in second gear, driving with excessive caution. The trailer was inclined to snake a little when he built up speed and his mind was occupied, as he went along, with ways of how this problem could be tackled satisfactorily. Probably by adjustments to the coupling, he thought, as the crossroads came into view a mile beyond the village of Steeton.
From here on it was almost all downslope, a stretch of about eight miles into Colne and the prospect of flatter ground from then on, together with the near certainty of heavy traffic, slow-moving in these narrow, Lancashire streets, after he reached Nelson and Burnley and turned south for Rochdale.
He pulled in to the side of the road at the summit and fed ten gallons of fuel into the tank, using his tin funnel with a filter, but he was impeded somewhat by the ever freshening wind that whipped the hood of cabin and trailer causing them to exclaim like sails and spraying a fine rain of fuel over his gauntlets and the engine cowling. He rolled the cask back and up the plank slide to the trailer tailboard, thinking that it might have been wiser to bring along an apprentice to do the chores, but not seriously, for
this was an experience he did not care to share with anyone, not even with Uncle George or Scottie Quirt, whose brains had contributed far more than his to the creation of the monster. There were parts of it, however, that were indubitably his, so that the name was not really undeserved. He looked westward down the long, straight stretch of road he was to travel and thought: Longest route notwithstanding, I've made rattling good time. At this rate I'll be in Salford by late afternoon, and Cousin Rudi and I can celebrate with a pint and a dish of Lancashire hotpot!
Then he was off again, tackling the decline at about twenty-two miles an hour, but changing down when he saw the long squiggle of ice crossing the road diagonally from south to north where a streamlet had frozen during the night. He had not expected ice this side of the Pennines. Almost always the eastern side was the colder, but it must be the wind blowing in from the North Atlantic.
He felt the skid and heard the distant toot of the horn at the same instant. A hunting horn it was, from somewhere on the fell away to the left, and a second later, as he was steering into the skid on the shoulder of the hill, he saw the hunt streaming diagonally across his front. It was a straggle of about twenty riders less than a hundred yards behind the pack and clearly in full cry, for they were pounding over the frosted turf at a cracking rate, the huntsman out ahead, horn to his lips.
The spectacle did not distract him. He was too good an engineer for that, but he wasted a split second gauging their probable line and trying to judge where, precisely, they would cross the road bounded by low stone walls, no obstacle to experienced horsemen and certainly none to the scrambling pack that went at it in a bunch and were all over the road in a matter of seconds.
He had to brake harder then and out of the corner of his eye he saw the leading horsemen pulling on their reins and one or two of them cavorting parallel with him as the horses, baulking more at the Fawcett than the wall, swung left on a downslope. It was then that he went into the real skid, a long, skittering slide left, right, and left again, and he had a moment to be afraid; not for himself but for the Fawcett, for it flashed across his mind that this would be a ridiculous way to conclude his odyssey, broadside on against a loose stone wall on the eastern slopes of the Pennines.
The landscape lost coherence for him then, at the moment of the first impact. He was hunched over the steering column, wrestling with the heavy vehicle as with a Mastodon, and it was not answering to any of the directions transmitted through his hands and feet. It was like an elephant that had run wild, lashing out with its immense hindquarters and grinding everything in its path. The hunt foamed up on the far side of the wall and about a dozen laggards among the pack were still spewed over the highway, running it seemed in all directions, as though to escape the thundering passage of the vehicle, now almost broadside on with its trailer ricocheting from the base of the wall but always, impelled by its own weight and anchored apex, returning for more punishment.
Then, as though the whole world was turning topsy-turvey, he lost all sense of direction as the cabin heeled over, was checked by the pull of the trailer, halfrecovered its upright position, and finally somersaulted twice, ending up on its nearside wedged between the two walls and piled in the form of a barricade across the full width of the road.
He had a sense of being picked up by the heels and shaken, a vanquished rat in the jaws of a terrier, and experienced a single spasm of fear as he saw, all about him, a soft orange glow and smelled the reek of blazing fuel. His last conscious thought was of that unstowed reserve drum in the trailer, surely the main contributory factor to this holocaust, and his lips framed the word, "Fool… fool!" as he remembered that he was the man who had placed it there, without so much as a brace or a piece of rope to hold it in position against a contingency like this.
Five
Stella
George heard the full truth by telephone from Rudi, who had received it from the police at Colne who, in turn, had got it from the infirmary surgeon examining the charred bundle they brought in for him to certify as dead.
By then Rudi was in Colne himself, having rushed there by motor-cycle and arriving, chilled to the bone, about dusk, when a team of corporation men were still trying, without much success, to clear the road six miles to the east. Rudi telephoned before notifying Scottie Quirt and the Macclesfield depot. Shocked half out of his mind, he still realised it was his responsibility as The Polygon viceroy, and commissioner of the new trailer, to pass the information to Headquarters and ask for instructions.
He could sense his father's numbed horror over the two-hundred-mile gap between them, and when George remained silent for something approaching half a minute, he said, urgently: "You did get it, sir? You… you heard everything?"
George replied, in a voice that seemed to come from the other side of the world, "Yes, Rudi, I heard. It's awful… frightful…" but then, rallying a little, "You're at Colne? Then go out to the scene of the accident. Talk to the police, to anyone who was early on the scene. To the master of that damned hunt, if you can find him. Get all the information you can. Every scrap, you understand?"
"Yes, sir. I'll stay on overnight."
"Arrange to stay indefinitely, and I'll join you for the inquest. I'll get someone to stand in for you at the depot. Meantime, I've got to tell his mother and father."
"Can't someone else do it? The police? Grandfather, perhaps?"
"No, son, it'll have to be me, for I was the one who took him from that farm. Stay on the job, there's a good lad. And thank you for letting me know so quickly. Don't bother with Scottie, I'll see he's notified from H.Q."
"Right, Father. Goodbye."
"Goodbye, son. Leave word where you're staying with the Colne police."
He rehooked the receiver and sat motionless, forcing himself to assemble the factors fed him by Rudi into some kind of sequence. A head-on collision with a hunt in full cry on a Pennine slope. A pile-up, with that immense weight bearing down on the buckled cabin and the man inside it. The first puff of flames, a soft explosion, then an inferno, far too fierce to permit hope of rescue, even if the nearest horsemen could have got to him in time. He remembered the last time he had seen Martin, only a few days ago, and told himself how splendidly the boy was coming along and what an asset he would be to the network in the years ahead. Now he was not a person at all, just a blackened corpse lying in a corporation mortuary two hundred miles to the north, awaiting a string of coroners, solicitors, witnesses, and jurymen to pronounce upon the circumstances of his death. And after that, he supposed, a coffin would trail south, containing all that remained of Martin Fawcett, one-time farmhand, lately someone of infinite promise and charm.
He drew a jotting pad towards him and wrote a few instructions for the head clerk, calling a vanboy and telling him to deliver the note to the counting house at once. The network viceroys at least would have to know in advance; they would never forgive him if they learned it from the newspapers. And thinking of newspapers, he rang for Jeffs, his editor, who came close to breaking down when he heard the news and said, in answer to George's query: "Fleet Street will get on to something of that kind very quickly. Local correspondents will wire in stories by tonight, but there won't be any, most likely, in a place the size of Colne. Probably staff men will go over from Manchester, certainly one on behalf of the Northcliffe press. He'll feature this as his front page tomorrow."
"As soon as that?"
"Almost surely, George." He looked at him steadily. "It means Stella and Denzil will have to know tonight, doesn't it? Would you like Debbie and me to drive over with you?"
"No, this is something I've got to cope with alone. Thank you all the same, Milt. Go on home and arrange for Debbie to go down to Tryst and tell the old folks in the morning. There's no need for them to know yet. The London papers don't get there until around eleven o'clock. Tell Debbie I'll be there by then."
He dragged himself up and across the yard from his ground-floor office block near the weighbridge to the spot where his Daimle
r was parked. The mechanic in charge was polishing the windshield. George said, gruffly, "Leave that, Rigby. Is there enough petrol in the tank to take me down to Tryst?"
"It's half full, sir. I checked a minute since."
He got in and waited for the man to swing the starting handle. Then, tuning the engine, he drove slowly through the main gates and headed south into the thick of the Old Kent Road traffic. The Daimler's oil lamps battled with a low swirl of river mist as he nosed his way carefully into the southbound stream.
He had one meagre slice of luck. Bumping down the length of unsurfaced track from river to farmyard, he saw the wink of a lantern in the byre on his right and pulled up, opening and closing the door softly and treading over frozen ruts to the byre. Denzil was inside, anxiously watching one of his Guernseys. The shed reeked of warm, country smells, touched with a whiff of disinfectant. His brother-in-law looked up as he entered, his broad, red face expressing surprise as he said, "George? You here, this time o' night? Stella never said…"
"Where is she, Denzil?"
Give Us This Day Page 63
