“Less three thousand five hundred of your advance. I can be prickly too.”
“There's no condition attached to that advance, except an interest rate of five per cent, payable half-yearly.”
“And the balance?”
“Keep it in reserve. You still don’t know what you’re up against. A long spell of frost, a series of mishaps, an alliance of pilferers among your waggoners, or a single crooked depot manager in the pay of a competitor—any one of these things could cripple you. If you think big, as I’m urging you to, you’re going to need every penny of that capital, and I’m likely to prove a better custodian than you. What do you say to that, Johnny Raw?”
Adam was silent a moment. Then he said, “I’ll say be damned to you unless you agree to take half of the balance, for I’ll not be under that much of an obligation to anyone. If you won’t do that then come in as a full partner. Take your choice. Fourteen and a half Burmese rubies or a half-share of the profits. Let's see how much of a gambler you really are.”
“You said you wanted independence.”
“I did and I do, but I could work with you if you stayed in the background. To my way of thinking it would double my chances, me as roving field manager, you sitting right here in London.”
“Swann and Avery? Something of a pun, eh?”
He lounged over, hands in pockets. “You’re feeling your way now, and open to good advice, but later on, once you settle to the collar, you could be as obstinate as a pack mule. Very well, so be it, and we’ll drink to it while we’re still on speaking terms.”
He poured two glasses of port, and they spun a coin for the twenty-ninth stone. Adam called heads and won. “Lucky as ever,” Avery said, “but I made allowances for that. Anyone else would have lost that necklace between here and Jhansi. That makes you senior partner, I suppose?”
“To the tune of three hundred guineas. Not enough margin to hamstring a man like you, Josh.”
They sipped their port in silence as dusk stole into the room. Presently Avery said, “Let's stop assessing one another's potential and talk strategy. We’ll need a depot, with good stabling and a warehouse. The bread and butter money is right here, within easy reach of the docks, Covent Garden, Smithfield, Billingsgate. When you’ve taken the road, those four areas alone could keep your light traffic moving.” He took out a map and spread it on the table. It was a large-scale map of the capital and its environs, with the Thames writhing a course clear across the centre creases, all the way from Chertsey to Woolwich. “Somewhere in this rectangle, that's our pitch,” Avery said, and pencilled a square bounded by Rotherhithe, Whitechapel, Ludgate Hill, and the Abbey. “North of the river would be ideal, for there we should be in the direct line of goods flowing southeast, but the kind of premises we’re looking for would be hard to find, and the rent would come too high. It will have to be somewhere south, west of the Surrey Docks, east of the Waterloo Road. Will that wife of yours adapt to that kind of neighbourhood?”
“She won’t have to,” said Adam. “I’ve taken a short lease on a small place in the country.”
“How deep in the country?”
“Deep enough. I shouldn’t care to spend the brief periods I’m likely to be home in a district where I couldn’t get a canter and breathe pure air. It's near Addiscombe, within a stone's throw of the old Academy. You probably remember it as good riding country.”
“Now it is,” Avery said, “but don’t deceive yourself. This city is expanding north, south, east, and west, at the rate of more than a mile a year.”
“I can always move out ahead of it.”
“Aye, and get further and further from your main field of operations. We’ve both seen campaigns lost that way.”
“London isn’t my stamping-ground, Josh, and never will be. I chose this business for the elbow room it offers. If I didn’t think I could leave the hub, and know you were available, I wouldn’t have agreed to a partnership.”
“I’m agreeable,” Avery said, “for you can browse among your hawthorn and honeysuckle for my part. To live anywhere out of town is a kind of death to me. My father was a country parson, and even now the sound of church bells drives me to the bottle! However, talking of parsons reminds me of Keate.”
“Who is Keate?”
“The best recruiting-sergeant I could enlist on your behalf. He's calling for you now. Take my word for it, you’ll get along famously. You’re both Puritans.”
“What's his function?”
“Anything you care to call it. Waggonmaster, yard gaffer, even bodyguard. He worked for me for a spell, and I should have liked to have kept him, but some of my dealings ran contrary to his moral principles. Keate is strong on principles and a dedicated family man into the bargain. Yes, I see you and Keate harmonising.”
“I don’t need one man, I need fifty.”
“Keate will find you the men you want, and if he recommends them sign them on, without indulging in any fancy notions concerning their suitability. Keate knows his business. He spent fifteen years as a commissariat N.C.O., and a further ten in charge of Drury & Dagenham's brewery deliveries. That was before he forswore the Daemon Drink and took to preaching. I had the devil's own job to find him again, and when I did it wasn’t easy to persuade him to work for any friend of mine.”
“He sounds a prig.”
“Oh, he's an insufferable prig, but then, you’re something of a prig yourself, Adam.”
There was a knock at the front door, and they heard the landlady answering it. Avery said, “That’ll be Keate. Punctuality itself. I’ll see myself out, via the back if you’ve no objection. I prefer you and Keate to step off on the right foot,” and he stuffed the map into his pocket and left the room, so that Adam wondered, briefly, if they had entered into a business partnership or had been indulging in a bout of mess buffoonery. Always, he was to find, it was to be this way with Joshua Avery. The value of his seemingly casual judgements were sometimes hidden for as long as a year, or even two years. It was so in the matter of Saul Keate, servant of Christ, amateur philanthropist, and waggonmaster extraordinary.
Two
1
THE FOUR-WHEELER SET THEM DOWN AT THE JUNCTION OF THE BOROUGH High Street and Old Kent Road, and they walked north to London Bridge, then east into Tooley Street.
It was a Saturday night exploration of the south bank in the company of not so much a man as a Presence, and Adam had been aware of this during the cab ride. Now, taking lengthy strides to keep pace with the gigantic Keate, he had a sense of accompanying a celestial ambassador on a tour of Tartarus, and of receiving considered judgements on everything they saw down there among the sulphur clouds.
He had always thought of himself as being above average height and strongly made, but beside Keate he felt puny, for Keate stood six foot five inches in his socks and his breadth was equally impressive, the two features combining to give his grizzled head, with its countryman's red cheeks and mournful eyes, a slightly incongruous look, as though God, suddenly appalled by the majesty of His handiwork, had decided to spare lesser men the menace of a head to match.
When Keate first introduced himself, enclosing Adam's hand in one approaching the size of a mattock blade, Adam thought at once of a Cromwellian troop-captain, the kind of man of whom the Protector had once written, “…give me the men who know what they fight for and love what they know,” a warrior who would dash among the Amalekites shouting Isaiah into the wind and oversetting Cavaliers like ninepins. Now, as they elbowed their way through a Saturday night Bacchanalian riot, this impression enlarged itself. He would not have been much surprised had Keate gravely excused himself, taken hold of a handy beam or shutter, and cleared the streets before resuming his commentary on the shortcomings of modern Babylon.
Avery had obviously told the giant a good deal more about the project than he had indicated, for Keate was in possession of all relevant details, even such matters as the type of waggon and draught horses Adam had ordered from Blunderstone's an
d McSawney's. It was also obvious that he approved of the enterprise and Avery had been right about the man's undoubted experience in transport, for Keate told him he had been in the business one way or another since childhood. He had served his apprenticeship as a drayboy and had graduated to the post of coachman on the famous “Wonder,” that achieved the record run between London and Shrewsbury, a run of 158 miles, at an average speed of twelve miles per hour. He had then served a term as driver with George Shillibeer, who operated the three-horse omnibus service running between Paddington and Marble Arch and could talk informatively of the various attempts to promote a practical steam-carriage omnibus service in the capital, notably the original Trevithick model, that had attained an average speed of fifteen miles per hour between London and Windsor twenty years before.
All this, however, concerned his profession, and Saul Keate was far from being absorbed in the pursuit of his daily bread. Most of his nervous energy, Adam gathered, was directed towards soul-saving, and by looking about him Adam realised that it was a task likely to sap the patience and initiative of even such a man as Keate.
He had anticipated revelry on a lively scale when Keate proposed they should walk from London Bridge to Greenwich marshes, before looking in on his home at Rotherhithe, and discussing terms of engagement, but the scene far exceeded his expectations. Avery, however, had not exaggerated Keate's moral rectitude or the prejudices it inspired, and it soon became evident that he was not a man to be signed on or rejected at the whim of a prospective employer. He reserved the right, as a freeborn Englishman certain of a place in Paradise, to comment freely, and ask as many questions as he answered, and as they went along Adam realised that this tour of the South Bank was a kind of examination to which Keate was submitting him, in order to discover his fitness as a hirer of labour.
Tooley Street, that headed them down into Southwark and round the south bend of the Thames to the docks, was lined with naphthalit stalls, and studded with taverns and beer-houses. Both stalls and taverns were doing thriving trade, for hordes of ragged women surrounded the street vendors and the drinking shops were crammed with men, many of whom were already fighting drunk. In the space of a hundred yards Adam saw three broils and five arrests. The uproar was continuous and deafening, and the turmoil in the less well-lit sections was reminiscent of an Eastern street riot. In the long funnel between the tall warehouses sweating police, operating in groups of four based on two-horse vans, were engaged on every side, mostly with men and women too far gone in drink to put up more than a token resistance. The major fights they avoided if possible and Adam did not blame them. Had hucksters, street-traders and revellers made common cause against them the scattered detachments would have been overwhelmed at once.
“They do their best, poor fellows,” said Keate, “but they achieve very little. Nothing can be done down here until Parliament limits the hours the taverns may remain open, and the age and sex of the poor wretches The Trade exploits. For most of these people Saturday night is a brief escape from the weekly drudgery of up to a hundred hours’ toil. So long as they have a few pence in their pocket they’ll make the most of it. The curious thing is, Mr. Swann, it ceases on the last stroke of midnight, when police reinforcements are sent into the Borough, not to save life and property but to ensure the sanctity of the Sabbath. A curious concession to Almighty God, is it not? Six days of debauchery and unbridled licence, with rich profits flowing into the pockets of the brewers, then one day set aside for Our Father.”
“You actually live among this?” Adam asked, “a man of your convictions?” and the giant turned reproachful eyes on him, saying, “But of course, Mr. Swann. Where else could I do His bidding? Further on, when we get as far as the coal wharves, you will understand, perhaps. That's where the street Arabs can be found about this time, and I have a certain proposition to put to you concerning a few of the most promising of them. We shall see, Mr. Swann. I think, somehow, that I may be of some service to you, so that you may be of some service to Him.”
He spoke as though a carrier service was very small beer measured against the larger enterprise of salvaging humanity, and Adam wondered if, by dispatching him on this evangelical tour, Avery had been exercising his eccentric sense of humour. For the time being, however, he kept his thoughts to himself, commenting, “Mr. Avery gave me to understand you could find me some drivers. I shan’t need them for a month or so, but good waggoners are always in demand, and I should be prepared to advance retaining fees if we found the right type of man. Is that at all likely in this stew?”
“I keep a register,” Keate said, “with the name and lodging of some of the experienced waggoners hereabouts. We shall consult it. I have no doubt but that I can find you the men you require, and some of them might be willing to work outside London. However, I would be uncommonly obliged to you if you could spare an hour to look at my boys, for it is there we should seek the roots of a long-term enterprise, such as I am given to understand you have in mind.”
He spoke, Adam thought, a stilted, half-Biblical English, entirely out of keeping with his background, and with hardly a trace of accent. He said, cautiously, “I take it you are a self-educated man, Mr. Keate?” and Keate said that he was, having taught himself to read at the age of nineteen (George Stephenson's literate age, Adam reflected) and to write legibly a year or so later. Since then, he added modestly, he had studied some of the social prophets, including Bentham, Owen, Ruskin, and even Carlyle, so that Adam's respect for this huge, bumbling carter-coachman began to increase. Keate, he reflected, was an embodiment of the popular doctrine of self-help, and his portentous earnestness and obvious sincerity, something of a counter-poise to the appalling squalor around them. He thought, with a certain satisfaction, “The double standard works among men like him, as well as with greedy merchants and class-conscious churchmen. With a couple of thousand men like Keate I could fight my way from here to Cathay if I had to,” and he said, “What induced a man like you to enlist, Mr. Keate?”
“Curiosity, sir,” Keate replied, promptly, and with the wisp of a smile, “and it was more than satisfied in the Crimea. I took my discharge in ’55 but by then, of course, I had made the Surrender, and realised my work was here. It is of little use, Mr. Swann, sending Christian missionaries among the heathen when one encounters this kind of thing on one's own doorstep,” and he pointed to a screaming crone, blouse open and drooping breasts bare, being frogmarched along the pavement between two bearded police officers.
“I’ve thought the same for some time now,” said Adam, and they passed into the relative peace of Southwark, heading down towards the river, with the docks on their right and the Thames making another of its loops, this time round the Isle of Dogs, made famous all over the English-speaking world by Dickens’ Oliver Twist. It looked, thought Adam, a foul, unsavoury place, and a fit breeding-ground for any number of Fagins.
It was about here that they came, unexpectedly so far as Adam was concerned, on the first of Keate's boys, a filthy little urchin with bare, mud-encrusted legs, who was engrossed in the task of emptying a bucket of mud dredged from the foreshore and extracting from the liquid mess a few knobs of coal that had fallen from a collier's barge. In the last glow of the orange sunset Adam watched him with interest, and Keate said, “One of the coal gleaners. There are hundreds of them hereabouts living on what they dredge up and sell for a ha’penny a bag. They are some of the few on friendly terms with Jack Frost. In a hard winter their prices rise by as much as two hundred per cent.”
“Where the devil do they sleep?” Adam asked, and Keate pointed to a long row of hogsheads flanking the quay wall. Looking more closely Adam saw that about a dozen of the hogsheads were occupied by children, some sitting up, others sleeping under pieces of sacking.
“Don’t the local authorities accept any kind of responsibility for these waifs?”
“Yes, indeed, if approached by parents who are unable to feed or house them,” said Keate, “but these are survivors of the
baby-farm scandal. They either do the best they can or go into the workhouse, to be farmed out to manufacturers as slaves. Mostly they prefer their independence, insecure as it is. They not only feed better on average over the year but they have the whole Borough in which to dodge the police. It's a hard life, no doubt, but no harder than working under a foreman's strap in the match or paper factories.”
“But isn’t there legislation against that kind of exploitation?”
“Yes, there is, in Shaftesbury's Bill, but who is there to enforce it properly? No one is interested in teaching them a trade, and that brings me to my point. When your freight line is established how will the waggons operate over a long-distance haul? With a single carter, responsible for delivery only?”
“Why not? Loading and unloading would be the responsibility of consignor and consignee, that's the usual practice, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” said Keate, “but what I have in mind is to enroll a carefully selected group of boys as trainee drivers, each under the supervision of a responsible waggoner. Given food, clothing, and a place to sleep, a majority are industrious little rascals, as you can see, and all are quick learners. Down here, living on their wits, they have developed the self-sufficiency one looks for among trained infantrymen. They can even be taught self-respect and become useful, God-fearing citizens, providing one has the patience. It is not so difficult as one might imagine, providing one catches them early enough. But now that you’ve seen them, come along home with me, sir, and I can introduce you to my own small family,” and he gave the little coalsorter a coin and led the way up the wharfside entry and across the main artery into a maze of streets of terrace houses, all leaning one upon the other as if, deprived of mutual support, they would collapse in a cloud of yellow dust.
God is an Englishman Page 18
