God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  Here and there certain prophets had raised their voices—John Stuart Mill, Peel, Shaftesbury, that solemn, clever fellow, Gladstone, and the persuasive chap, Disraeli, and because they were vocal they were heard at Westminster but not beyond it, not in the shires, not even in big provincial communities that were becoming semi-autonomous states, ruled by families whom sudden wealth had invested with power that was as parochial as feudalism. Unashamedly these people, who ought surely to have enlisted in the vanguard of progress, were preoccupied with conserving, and conservation was a word that made no appeal to him. Perhaps it should have done. Perhaps he should have taken things more slowly, limiting his field of action, and remaining the tenant of Tryst while he built up his reserves. Then, because he knew himself better than most men, he realised that he would stay on the offensive to the day he died for that was the way he was made, and a man never got far if he ran contrary to his nature. Now, with his future in the balance, he could see no other course but to attack, and it was Blunderstone and McSawney who gave ground before the first onrush of his sortie torrentielle.

  He marched into Blunderstone's waggon yard and declined the clerk's invitation to be fobbed off with Blunderstone's son, a product of the new type of gentleman currently being turned loose on the city by imitators of the pious Doctor Arnold of Rugby, and better fitted, to his mind, to lead a cavalry squadron than kick their heels here, where a man's word did not rest on a handshake and a work force was not to be rallied by a bugle call.

  Blunderstone senior waddled out on demand, and Adam, who had always found the coach-builder an honest, imaginative craftsman, was as blunt with him as he had been with Stock. Having told him his needs, he asked for a fleet of two hundred men-o’-war and frigates, in proportions of two to one, delivery to be made in time for the spring hauls.

  Blunderstone said, rubbing his hands, “I thought it was time you came to me for replacements, Swann. Some of those vehicles I sold you were refits if I remember rightly, for you were short on capital then. The way you’ve been working them they must be held together by wire by now. A hundred and thirty flats and seventy two-horse vans? My word, that’ll make a hole in your pocket, won’t it?”

  “That depends on you, for I can’t confirm the order if you want cash. Either you accept it on the basis of a spread-over, carrying us into 1865, or I make do with replacements at Gideon's.”

  Blunderstone looked almost as horrified as Tybalt when told that his employer's personal account was overdrawn.

  “Gideon?” he said. “You’d haul your customers’ goods in a Gideon-built vehicle? They told me you prided yourself on speed and minimum wastage. How can you do that with waggons built for door-to-door deliveries?”

  “I should have to overload and make allowances for breakdowns in my quotations. The fact is, Blunderstone, I’m faced with a very heavy outlay this year, and although prospects never looked better I could only pay you twenty-five per cent on delivery and the rest over the next nine months. I’ve been a good customer to you, and I’ve never had reason to complain of your vehicles. I’ve built my reputation on your waggons but now it's Hobson's Choice so far as I’m concerned. You can take it or leave it, I’m not here to beg favours.”

  “Now hold hard,” Blunderstone protested. “Say forty per cent on delivery.”

  “I couldn’t meet it. It's no use pretending that I could.”

  “Two hundred new waggons will occupy more than half my work force over the next four months. It would mean putting off other customers, with cash in their hands.”

  “Orders for odd vehicles,” Adam reminded him. “I’m buying in bulk and that entitles me to credit.”

  “What about security?”

  “I could offer you existing teams and stock, plus goodwill. Nothing more, I’m afraid.”

  “I hear you’ve bought yourself a big place on the Kent-Surrey border. Now I’ve always fancied myself as a country squire in my declining years. Suppose you deposit the deeds?”

  Adam could chuckle at this. “You heard right but you didn’t hear enough. Tryst is barely one-third paid for and the rest is left on at six per cent.”

  “You think too big for an amateur,” Blunderstone said, but there was friendliness in his tone. “Suppose you give me a week to mull it over?”

  “I can give you two days. I’ve got a depot managers’ conference on Friday, and I’ll need your answer by Saturday.”

  “Waggons are no good without teams,” Blunderstone said, “and unless you take half your vehicles off the road you’ll have to buy in fresh from McSawney. You won’t find him as accommodating as me, he's from Aberdeen.”

  “I hope to talk him round,” Adam said, “for McSawney wouldn’t care to see me buy crossbreds in Suffolk.”

  “Nay, lad,” said Blunderstone, paternally, “stick to the beasts you built your reputation on and if necessary double up on heavy loads.” He looked at Adam thoughtfully, rolling a cheroot from one side of his mouth to the other. “How old are you, Swann? Thirty-four? Thirty-five?” and when Adam told him he was thirty-six he said, “I wish to God you were my lad. I made a bad mistake about Charlie. Sent him to one of those new gentlemen's schools thinking he’d amount to something and so he has, providing a man's looking for someone who can read Latin on a tombstone. But I see my error now. I should have put him clean through the trade—joinery, wheelwright, and coach-builder, same as my old father did for me. Away with you then, to gammon McSawney, and damned good luck to you!”

  McSawney, however, was not so easily gammoned. As Blunderstone had predicted he drove a hard bargain and refused to supply teams on the basis of twenty-five per cent down and the rest spread over a year. The best terms Adam could get, and they kept him in McSawney's stables for the rest of the day, was fifty per cent on delivery and the balance in nine months, with a flat rate of three per cent interest on the outstanding debt. Adam would have agreed to harsher terms. Like Blunderstone he had an unshakable faith in his Clydesdales and Cleveland Bays, and his teamsters were now well accustomed to them and knew to a few pounds how much they could draw over a specified route.

  It was dusk when he made his way back to London Bridge Station and caught a train for Croydon, and supper time when he drove his gig between the leafless copper beeches and saw the glow in the tall downstairs windows and the one patch of light above, where Phoebe Fraser was patrolling the nursery. He stopped short of the stableyard and looked along the rambling frontage of the old house, reflecting that, when all was said and done, it had been these bricks and mortar, and all they meant to Henrietta, that he was fighting to retain. He thought, “I daresay I’m a fool to hamstring myself this way. With that four thousand in my account I could have ridden this out in less than a year,” but then he remembered the striking change in Henrietta since the night at the George where they had drove their bargain, and after that the queer satisfaction he derived from meeting a challenge that was tantamount to starting all over again. “I don’t give a damn what figures tell me,” he reflected, “I’m happier following my nose. Josh was right about one thing. It's folly to dig in when your instinct tells you digging in means getting bogged down, and as for Edith's advice, there aren’t many city men who can ask for loyalty over an empty cash-box and be pretty sure of getting it!” He shook out his reins and drove into the yard as Henrietta, hearing the scrunch of gravel, came to the yard door to greet him. He called cheerily to her and she must have gauged his mood by his tone of voice for she hitched her skirts and ran tripping down the stone stair and round the angle of the stable door to a point where they could not be overlooked from the kitchen windows. He said, throwing out his arms, “By God, I’ve had a day of it and I’m damnably glad to be home!” and then kissed her and slid his hands over her hips in a way that confirmed her belief that she was growing on him at a pace that she would have thought very unlikely a few months ago. She said, trying to keep gaiety from her voice, “The Colonel's gone to bed to nurse a cold so there's only the two of us. Will you
say good night to the children while I see about supper?”

  “Ten minutes,” he said, throwing off the last buckle and turning the horse into the loose box, “and send down for a bottle of Beaune. It's a celebration of a sort.” They went out of the yard and up the steps, and he walked with his arm round her. It was a gesture, she reflected, that he had not made in public since their clash over the chimney sweep.

  2

  It was as though, between them all, they were reassembling an engine that had been known to work but did not work now, for it stood in need of so many adjustments and modifications and had, moreover, run clear out of steam.

  The blueprint was before them in their collective experience and in the simplified figures of Tybalt and the written statements of Saul Keate, the one proclaiming the facts, the other assessing them in terms of past, present, and future.

  They sat along each side of the long trestle table, with Adam at the head, Tybalt on his right, Keate on his left, and at the far end the clerk Rookwood, whom Adam thought of as the Artful Dodger. Rookwood's duties were to take careful notes on what might emerge from the discussion.

  They were all there, talking little among themselves and each, it seemed, impressed by the solemnity of the occasion. Catesby, with his Caius Cassius look, Bryn Lovell, thoughtful and attentive, and Hamlet Ratcliffe puffing at his cherrywood pipe that he had asked permission to light as an aid to concentration. Wadsworth and his daughter Edith were there representing the Crescent South, the one looking his phlegmatic self, the other dressed in her Sunday best. Immediately below her, representing the Border Triangle, sat the Scot Fraser, making his first visit to the capital and still dazed by the speed of his journey south that had begun twelve hours before. Comparative newcomers were there, some of them meeting one another for the first time; Vicary, from The Bonus; the islander Dockett, from Tom Tiddler's Ground; young Godsall, from the Northern Pickings, secretly assessing Blubb whom he would succeed in a year or two, and thinking it might be sooner than that as he contemplated the old coachman's purple complexion and vast, waistcoated belly. Abbott, the Southern Square slave-driver, was there, a man who begrudged the time spent so far from his patch, and Morris, the Jew recently given the task of seeing what he could make of the Southern Pickings in the Hereford-Worcester area, a man who had impressed Adam with his knowledge of the high-grade china traffic that demanded a specialist's packing. The tally was complete with Goodbody and Horncastle, sub-depot managers who worked under Wadsworth's direction in Crescent Centre and Crescent North, together with Lawrence, the Headquarters’ farrier, whom Keate had called in at the last moment.

  They heard Tybalt and Keate in attentive silence, the clerk giving a rundown on the year's estimates, the waggonmaster translating the figures into terms of waggons and teams, and as the voices of the two men droned on Adam watched the faces of the fourteen men and one woman for reactions, reading very little in their expressions for, with the exception of old Blubb and the laconic Abbott, each of them seemed awed by the occasion. Only the pink-cheeked Ratcliffe, once again fearing for his future, showed signs of stress when Keate announced that unless the turnover could be doubled in twelve months depots would be closed down, and the waggons and teams absorbed into a truncated network. He said nothing of personnel, leaving them to draw their own gloomy conclusions.

  When Keate sat down there was a volley of throat-clearing and foot-scuffling and then everyone was silent again as Adam rose.

  He did not make a long speech, telling them simply that the crisis had been brought about by two factors, his backer's unexpected disappearance, and his own over-extension. He owed it to them, he felt, to make this clear, lest any of them should assume he held the view that they had contributed to the situation. He was unequivocal, however, regarding the necessity to bring about a dramatic increase in business within a very limited period, and underlined this by announcing the terms under which he had purchased a new fleet of waggons, to be distributed according to the demand among the districts. It was this statement that made the maximum impression, perhaps because it introduced an element of competition among them. The hint was clear enough. Those who brought new business would qualify for new teams whereas, if there was to be contraction, the sluggish areas would be those selected for the pruning-hook. As he sat down and lit a cheroot he caught Edith Wadsworth's eye and her glance seemed to say, “So far, so good. Now let's see if their loyalty can match mine,” and suddenly he felt immensely grateful for her presence, for it seemed to anchor him to them in a way that had not been so obvious when he rose to speak.

  Surprisingly, Dockett was the first to comment, a gangling man with a prominent Adam's Apple, who had never had much to say and had seemed, up to that time, a conscientious manager content to work on a very limited scale. He used what Adam thought of as the “Southcountry-Barsetshire” brogue, flattening his vowels and lengthening his consonants, in the manner of the traditional yokel in a music hall sketch. Standing there, sweating freely and red in the face, he groped for words, reminding Adam of a recruit facing his baptism of fire.

  “I got somethin’ to zay,” he began, swallowing hard, “but mebbe it conzerns my patch on’y. It's shifting chattels, house to house. That's my strong line on the island. Alwus ’as bin. Dunno why,” and he stopped, as though appalled by his own temerity.

  “They got var more’n their share o’ fleas over there and it keeps ’em moving,” prompted Blubb, and there was a general laughter that died quickly when Adam snapped, “Hold your tongue, Blubb! You can joke as much as you like over your pot afterwards, but we’re not here to amuse each other. Carry on, Dockett.”

  Blubb subsided and Dockett plunged again. “It's just we could zave money on mileage wi’ box-cars, same as the railway use on the mainlan’. We could make one trip take the place of three but charge the zame.”

  Catesby said, “Aye, happen you could. But those box-waggons need a four-horse team to haul ’em.”

  Blubb spoke up, this time seriously, “What's wrong with a foursome, if it saves time an’ mileage? It never paid to pull a coach unicorn in my day, and the same applies to freight today.”

  “What do you say to that, Keate?” Adam asked and the waggon-master said that Dockett and Blubb were talking sense, providing secondhand box-cars could be bought cheaply from Blunderstone.

  “I ’abben vinished yet,” Dockett said, still more surprisingly, and although Edith Wadsworth smiled, this time nobody laughed. “What I was leadin’ up to was this. A chattel haul has been a straight door-to-door job up to now, wi’ the customer packing and unpacking the goods. That's well enough, and zaves us the trouble I reckon, but it wastes time and it wastes space, for most o’ they vools got no notion of how to stow an’ pile it on any old how. Suppose we make an overall charge for crating and uncrating? All but the poorest volk would be right pleased to get shot of the job, for it's a main tiring one if you don’t know how. We could use our own crates and do it in a quarter o’ the time, besides which we’d stow in a way that’d cut down on damage in transit, and scotch all manner o’ claims, just an’ false.”

  “That's more good sense,” Blubb said, and there was a murmur of agreement that encouraged Adam to ask a general question.

  “I’ve always thought it strange that Dockett is the only one here who does a steady line in house removals,” he said. “Suppose we charged a standard rate according to mileage and the number of waggons used, how many of you would be likely to increase turnover?”

  Half a dozen hands were lifted and Adam said, quietly, “Thank you, Dockett. Mr. Tybalt will go into the figures and I’ll see what we can do to replace a dozen flats with box-cars. That's exactly the kind of suggestion I’m looking for,” and Dockett sat down as suddenly as a spent mechanical toy, blushing at the round of applause Adam's compliment had earned him.