The superintendent settled himself, shooting his long legs under the desk and tilting his chair. “Why take it for granted commercial warfare is less chancy? Or more civilised for that matter? I assure you it isn’t, or not nowadays. The best times are behind us. It's a costermonger's scramble for money and power today. There's no idealism or personal initiative left in it. A thousand companies, most of them bucket shops, scrambling for concessions and for Johnny Raw's cash to squander. No cohesion. No unity of purpose. Just quick profits at the expense of the Crown, the public, and the other speculator over the hill. And speaking of hills, Mr. Swann, I’ll give you something better than a map. Don’t invest a penny in railways. Anything else you care to name but not railways. Why? Because all the main trunk routes are laid, and in less than ten years ninety-five per cent of the smaller lines will be carrying freight and passengers at a loss. All that's left for the gleaners is to build where no railway could possibly pay and that map will prove it. You obviously know something about it, so you might also remember Stephenson's Chat Moss? You watched Balaclava and I watched Chat Moss. It made my blood run cold. His reputation, and hundreds of thousands of speculators’ cash, staked on the double track between Manchester and Liverpool, and there it was, disappearing into a bog overnight.”
“Stephenson mastered Chat Moss.”
“Men like Stephenson and Brunel are two in ten million, Mr. Swann. And in those days their backers were interested in something better than money. Do I make my point?”
Adam said, smiling, “You’re making so many points that I’m beginning to wonder if I should re-enlist,” and then, with an eagerness that made him feel a boy in this man's presence, “I’ve lain out there under the stars dreaming of people like you. Army life made a Crusoe out of me. I’m turned thirty but I’ve got ambition and a certain amount of capital to invest. If you were me, and wanted to start all over again, how would you begin, Mr. Walker?”
“That's putting a damnable responsibility on someone who mistook you for a lawyer's tout,” Walker said, but tilted his chair forward and placed both elbows on the table, so that Adam, watching his expression, knew he would get an honest answer. Walker said, after a longish pause, “Forget steel, coal, cotton, wool, and everything else that gave us a headstart over the Continentals. Forget land too. British agriculture is marked down for death. I don’t see you as a retailer, so what remains? Something where the years behind you aren’t entirely wasted. Something where the lessons you learned in the field can be added to your capital.”
“Go on.”
“You’re an ex-cavalryman and you must have specialist knowledge of horses. There's more future in horse-transport than the Cleverdicks would have you believe. The railways can solve all the big problems but none of the small ones. They can’t in a group of islands threaded by rivers and broken up by stiff gradients and marshes like Chat Moss and the Fens. If I were you, Mr. Swann—and I wish to God I were and starting all over again—I would spend the next week studying the blank areas of that map there. Then travel about and take a look at the goods yards of the most successful companies, and see merchandise piled in the rain on all their loading bays for want of a good dispersal system. Think about that, Mr. Swann. And here's a final piece of advice, to prove I’m a disinterested party. When you go north to Cumberland, don’t use my railway, except for your luggage. You’ve been away from your potential workshop a long time, and you won’t learn anything new about it staring out of a carriage window at cows. Get yourself a good horse—you can buy one at today's market for a handful of guineas—and take advantage of this wonderful weather we’re having.” He looked at the map. “Plymouth to Derwentwater. Say three-fifty miles, at around twenty miles a day, and as good a cross-section of the country as you’d find between any two points of the compass. Think about that too, Mr. Swann, and here is your homework, with my compliments.”
He took the map from its clamps and folded it eight times, reducing it to a crackling package about eighteen inches long and half as broad. Somewhere a bell clanged and Aaron Walker glanced out of his peephole window. “That's the twelve-ten from Bristol, right on time and I have to meet it. There’ll be a gaggle of directors aboard, all come to see how I waste my time ‘downalong.’ I have some difficulty convincing them I am not addicted to playing bowls on the Hoe, Mr. Swann.”
They shook hands across the desk, and Adam followed him out into the arcade. Nothing had changed out here. Sombre gentlemen in dark suits and tall hats, all the cares of commerce on their shoulders, dodged in and out of the platform barriers. Luggage trundled by on two- and four-wheel trolleys. Women in “travelling” crinolines swished past, shaking their flounces to rid them of drifting smuts. The rumble of trucks, the intermittent hiss of escaping steam, the squeals of excited children soared like a multi-tongued prayer to the echoing canopy of the depot. With a lift of his hand Aaron Walker was swallowed up in a swarm of customers and underlings.
Adam drifted back to the luggage cave to claim the stub that the long-nosed clerk had been too busy to bring, and recognising his man he looked worried. “Not had a minute, sir,” he said, “but I got it right here tell the Gaffer,” and he produced a voucher from his waistcoat pocket. “You can get your ticket at the booking-hall under the clock,” he added, as though to ward off a possible reprimand, but Adam felt he could afford the luxury of a small joke. “The luggage is going ahead,” he said, “but I’m following. On horseback,” and he thought he had never seen a man look more outraged. He went out into the June sunshine and boarded the nearest cab for the cattle market.
3
It was the most leisurely journey of his life and certainly the most instructive. As he moved north-east, sometimes taking as long as four days to cross from one county border to the next, a whole spread of England unfolded, so that he saw not merely their geographical features but the crafts and characters of the people rooted in successive hill-folds and river bottoms. His ear, always attuned to dialects, marked their speech idioms, vowel sounds, and habits, and sometimes even their professions were revealed to him in gait and gesture. As he watched them from an inn window overlooking some village green, his sense of isolation fell away, leaving him tolerant, watchful and deeply at peace with himself, as though he had entered into a new and deeper kinship with all he remembered of childhood and boyhood, and all he had admired in Englishmen whose bones lay in shallow graves on the slopes of the Fedioukine Hills and the Causeway Heights, and in half-a-hundred squalid villages along the banks of the Ganges.
But this was by no means all he gained following Aaron Walker's eccentric advice. On still, midsummer nights, and again in the first hour after sunrise, he would sit crosslegged before his bivouac tent pitched in some woodland clearing, or beside some tumbling stream, sniffing, watching, and listening to the life stirring about him, recalling the name of this bird or that, checking his memory against a flash of plumage among the June gorse, and slowly adjusting to the miracle of regeneration that the scenes and scents of the countryside presented. And as this healing process advanced the stench of putrefaction that had lingered in his nostrils since Cawnpore was exorcised by the scent of honeysuckle, and of a hundred hedgerow flowers for which he had no names. Soon this sense of liberation enlarged itself into an almost physical experience, so that to some extent he could analyse it, relating it to memories of a pastoral England that must have been hiding in his saddlebags all these years. It had to do, he supposed, with the casually bestowed legacies of Smollett and Goldsmith, Constable, Cotman, and Crome, who gave a man a sense of belonging in the community of men who shod his horse and women who served him ale. But there was a wider, more restless community in the glades and along the verges where he unsaddled, a shy and puckish life-force that stirred and rustled and whistled and flitted whenever he and his mare were still.
There were so many Englands. On that first day's ride over the moor to Moretonhampstead he crossed a treeless tract that stretched as far as the eye could see, and before
the sun got up, drinking up the ground mist at a draught, he might have been clip-clopping across the clouds with only a distant tor for company. It was the best kind of weather for a jaunt of this kind, cool in the early mornings, when he sometimes urged the mare into a mile-consuming jog-trot, blazing hot at noon, when he sought the sanctuary of the woods, and cool again in the evening, when he would seek a pleasant spot for his bivouac, eat a cold supper, and listen to his thoughts. He was never lonely, as he had been during the voyage. Everywhere he went he met with a polite, impersonal welcome from cottagers, innkeepers, drovers, and village craftsmen, who gave him directions and passed the time of day with the incurious civility of people whose lives had adjusted to the sweep of the centuries, whose traditions were habits before Angevin kings had brought a measure of security and stability into their fields and townships.
He first became aware of this on his third day out, when he was crossing Exeter on a market day and the grey towers of the cathedral were presiding over a weekly rout that had persisted among the huddle of shops and stalls and houses for time out of mind, and a much older England again asserted itself in Honiton, Taunton, and Wells, all of which seemed to him to be enjoying the best of both worlds, the rich fat of a prosperous present, and the serenity of a settled past, for in all three places money was changing hands fast, the children looked fat and rosy, and time, doled out sparingly by the bells of thirteenth-century churches, had no power to accelerate the pace of the countryman's walk, or the speed with which he drove bargains with his neighbours.
On the seventh day he reined in a few miles beyond Bridgewater and looked over his shoulder at the field of Sedgemoor, recalling that these people had had their share of tribulation, and that the peace they took for granted had not been acquired without struggle and sacrifice, for it was in these dykes and withy clumps that Kirke and his dragoons had hunted men like coneys, slaughtering some and delivering others up to Jeffreys as human sacrifices to the bigotry of a London-based king. It crossed his mind then to wonder whether the clamour of battle would ever return to this sun-soaked plain, and whether Englishmen would continue to press for an extension of the basic liberties they had wrestled from Norman overlords, a greedy church, and the swarm of opportunists who, over successive centuries, had gravitated to the wealthiest city in the world. He had to admit that they looked more than capable of surviving down here among their hayricks and their sleek, cud-chewing cattle, but his confidence was shaken somewhat by witnessing, at a place called Radstock, west of Bath, a shift of coal-miners emerge from the pit and disperse to their cottage homes after a ten-hour stint in galleries far below the Mendips. He had not realised until then that they mined coal this far west, or that the stain of industrial expansion had spread so far beyond the Midland plain, the cotton belt, and the woollen towns. The men, moving like stocky gnomes, looked exhausted and apathetic, but then he remembered that dramatic advances in the franchise were already being won from the central government by their counterparts in the Midlands and the North, and also that many vocal leaders were emerging from the ranks of that catalyst of independence, the good old British Puritan.
Through Bath, where he rested his mare for two days, then on over the uplands of the Cotswolds, through stone villages that looked as if they had been built to withstand annual hurricanes and an occasional earthquake, and on beyond Gloucester where he rode across the Vale of Evesham, rich with the promise of a bumper fruit harvest and populated by a brusquer, more matter-of-fact countryman than he had met further west.
It was half a day's ride beyond Worcester that he first saw the dun brown cloud on the north-eastern horizon, telling him that he was now approaching the cluster of towns at the junction of the four shires, shires that remained predominantly agricultural but ceded annual territory to the urban sprawl that constituted one of the main centres of national wealth.
He reined in here for a spell a few miles short of Stourbridge, and the process of assimilation was underlined for him by a sudden and rather poignant memory of young Paget, a chubby Worcestershire lad who had shared some of his vigils in the trenches before Sebastopol, and died soon after on the slopes of the Redan. The memory of Paget was very vivid here on his home ground, a pink-cheeked, fanciful youngster much given to spouting poetry, especially Gray and Wordsworth, a self-confessed hater of industrialisation and particularly averse to the spread of railways that bid fair, he declared, to ruin Worcestershire and Shropshire hunting. Paget, he recalled, had even invented a parable about it, involving the ransom this Midland heart of England had paid to what he called The Company of Black Dwarfs, changelings shown the door by the yeoman of the four shires and had then formed an alliance against them, with headquarters just across the Warwickshire border at what had been the village of Birmingham. Their aim, he vowed, was to extend their domination of every farm, field, and coppice of the island kingdom, until the entire nation slaved and sweated under a sulphur-yellow pall lit by the glow of their furnaces.
It was an extravagant and prejudiced notion, but it had substance of a kind, and looking over his shoulder at the stationary mushroom cloud in the sky, he could share for a moment Paget's gloomy vision of the Black Dwarfs’ master-plan—to filch a green acre there, to raise a brick breastwork there, to push their sooty picquet lines across fields yellow with charlock until their advance was stemmed by the mountain bastions of Wales, once more a final refuge for the original inhabitants of the island. For himself, however, he was prepared to compromise. From where he sat his horse on the last wooded bluffs of Worcestershire, and within sight of the town of Wolverhampton, the country fell away to a greyish plain of uniform flatness, where the theme of enterprise was marked out by the forking lines of the Severn Valley railway and the Oxford, Worcester, and Wolverhampton line picked out in the puff clouds of two, slow-moving freight trains, one heading for the old England, the other into the heart of the new.
He sat there, his feet free of the stirrups, thinking of Aaron Walker's advice, pondering the multiplicity of products piled in those crawling waggons, and wondering what the volume of overland freight might be in the densely populated area on his right. The railways had their own door-to-door delivery services. He had seen some of their flat-topped drays, dragged by gigantic shire horses, moving ponderously along the few main roads he had crossed, but he would say that the service was slow and unpunctual, limited to roads that had gone into a terrible decline since the railways had killed off the coaching and packhorse companies. He took out his map and, dismounting, spread it on the grass verge, securing the corners by pebbles. Half-formed ideas began to shape in his mind, and the most insistent of them was hitched to that parting remark of Walker about the open spaces between the lines criss-crossing the country. There were several to be spotted even here, where towns with populations of around forty thousand were almost two a penny. The great triangle between Worcester, Shrewsbury, and Leominster; the squashed square staked out by Stratford, Spetchley, Droitwich, and Birmingham itself; the hilly, untapped reservoir of central Wales where, he supposed, a railroad could never show a profit, and a closer study of the map showed him it was similar all over the east and south, and along most of the two hundred miles he had already travelled. Only in the north was the iron network dense and interwoven, where rails converged from the south and east towards the ruler-straight slash of Stephenson's pioneer line between Manchester and the coast. Here, as on the far side of the Pennines where lay the woollen towns, rail spurs projected in almost every direction, and even where they did not, dotted lines indicated that surveyors were already at work and the bickering between engineers, farming interests, and foxhunters had begun.
He folded the map, replaced it in his saddlebag, and went down the gentle slope and across the plain to the southern suburbs of the city, the mare's shoes scuffling on sun-slippery setts, the bondsmen of the Black Dwarfs staring up at him curiously, as though they had never seen a man astride a horse.
The acrid atmosphere made him sneeze and the
mare resented it too, for she flung up her head, as though eager to break into a canter and put bricks and mortar behind her. He pushed on through the city, tempted to follow the line of the Shrewsbury and Birmingham Railway to Shifnal and take a passing look at the King's Oak at Boscobel, but he thought better of it, reminding himself that he was here as prospector not sightseer. Thereafter he hugged the great trunk line of the London and North Western, that he might have been riding along had he not chanced to meet Aaron Walker.
Once the city was behind him there was more green country to be seen liberally dotted with farms and occasional coppices of elm, beech, lime, and chestnut. But he had a sense of riding along a shrinking corridor, with pressures at either end, and the countrymen he met lacked the geniality of the men in the west, as though they were uncomfortably aware of the march of the Dwarfs.
At Stafford, and later at Crewe, he found the black army well entrenched, but the next few stages took him on to the broad Cheshire plain where, although sliced in half by a main line, the countryman was still king. Up here were some of the neatest, cleanest, and most prosperous-looking farms Adam had ever seen, and the men who inhabited them were clearly on the road to becoming gentry, for they sat thoroughbred horses arrogantly and wore well-cut broadcloth, with nothing in common with farmers south and west of the Cotswolds but the tan of the open air. It was a pleasant, settled country, likely to put up a sturdy resistance, or so he thought until, on his third day in Cheshire, he approached the northern border half way between Manchester and Liverpool and here, almost at a stride, he re-entered no-man's-land.
God is an Englishman Page 8
