The clock struck ten and he turned away from the window to scan his newspapers. The column headings told him what was happening in the world outside. Federal troops were mounting yet another offensive to bring the South to heel, and nearer home Bismarck was rattling the Prussian sabre at the inoffensive Denmark over the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein. Palmerston, he suspected, despite a matching bluster, would do nothing about it, for the Court was against him, the Queen continuing to think of Germany as a pixied fairyland of scented woods and sugarloaf castles where she had once dallied with her adored Albert. Gladstone, who, at fifty-four, was beginning to look like the popular conception of Jehovah, was thundering out more theories of retrenchment. Yet another railway company had gone bankrupt, the twentieth this year. There was agitation among the Radicals for another franchise bill and the abolition of the rotten boroughs on the grounds that it was absurd for Cornwall to send as many representatives to Westminster as all London and Middlesex combined. He supposed he was involved in all this but was able, thank God, to take a detached view of it. His business was not with Danish provinces, rebel states, and rotten boroughs. It was with English counties, English products, English-bred horses, and English-built waggons. He made a note or two from the market page of The Times and then turned to his memoranda pad, on which was written under yesterday's date, “Edith. Australia? Wadsworth's hernia.” It reminded him of two related matters. Could he dissuade Edith Wadsworth from emigrating, as she had indicated last time they met, and, how long could her ageing father continue as general of the Crescents? He picked up his pen with satisfaction. It was always a pleasure to write to Edith, but he had only scratched “My Dear E…” when there was a knock at the door announcing the arrival of someone less timorous than Tybalt. He called, “Who is it?” and Sam Rawlinson, his father-in-law, marched into the room.
The leathery old rascal—Adam could never think of him in any other terms— looked very spry for a man in his late fifties. His broad, aggressive face was tanned the colour of a conker, and he seemed to have lost flesh in the last few months. He said, moderately pleased to see him, “You? I thought your capital was Manchester?” and Sam said heartily that it was, and would be recognised as such as soon as those damned Yankees stopped killing one another and got back to shipping cotton, after which he wrung his son-in-law's hand with an affability he never tried to conceal on the rare occasions they met. Adam seated him and grinned down at him. Notwithstanding the alienation of father and daughter he could never share Henrietta's acrimony having long since come to terms with Rawlinson and all his kind.
“I don’t recall you showing up in London before,” he said, pouring him a brandy, and Sam said that he never had, and what little he had seen of the place had not impressed him. “However,” he went on, “Ah’ve come from somewhere that stinks worse nor river garbage! You’re looking on a travelled man, lad. Ah’ve just stepped ashore from Egypt!”
If Sam had said Tibet Adam could not have been more surprised, and Sam enjoyed his astonishment. “Aye,” he said, “Ah thowt that’d bowl thee over, but you’re not the on’y one wi’ gappy, and the guts to use it! My stocks ran dry last September, so what good would it have done to sit on bloody backside beside looms piping me eye over t'slump, same as all the other noodles? I said to myself, ‘Sam Rawlinson, this is t’chance you been waitin’ on! Find out why Georgia and the Carolinas have hogged monopoly o’ trade and get the missis offen th’ back for a spell.’ I booked a passage out o’ Liverpool and went to see the Pirry-mids.” He paused, sucking in his florid cheeks. “Eeee, but there's a bloody waste o’ manpower! A million men it took to put ’em there and now what are they good for? I’ll tell thee. For catchpenny sideshows, same as they’d set up on Blackpool sands for the gawpers! Did you ever set eyes on ’em?”
“Never,” said Adam, “but I’m far more interested in what you found out about the cotton they grow there. I always heard it was far superior to American fibres.”
“So it is,” said Sam, “finest cotton to be had anywheres, but the damn fools raise it on nine-acre plots. By the time it gets to us it's too damned costly to spin. However, that's neither here nor there, for I saw something that’ll likely make me another fortune before I’m planted out, and that’d be the third, lad. Is that bad for a bit of a lad who started out as a bale-breaker on ninepence a day?”
“It depends on how you make it,” said Adam. “As I’ve told you times enough, I wouldn’t care to go about it the way you did, and still do if the truth's known.”
“Ah, you’ll have heard from yon Catesby, no doubt,” said Sam, but without rancour. “He’ll land you in a reet mess before you’re as old as me, for I’ll tell you what he's been about during slump. Organising a teamsters’ union, right on my patch, damn his impudence! Do you ever give a thought to what a thing like that could lead to?”
“I can’t say as it keeps me awake,” said Adam, smiling.
“Then it should, lad. Time’ll come when all these tinpot unions’ll make ruinous demands on their betters on the strength of withholding labour. I’ll be in my grave then but you won’t.”
They had had this kind of argument before and there was no profit in it. They were so far apart in outlook that it was difficult, at least on Adam's part, to take the man seriously. He represented a generation that regarded a working man's guild as a secret society, and if he had his way men like Catesby would have been shipped off to Botany Bay years ago, leaving their employers free to recruit on a work-or-starve ticket. He said, tolerantly, “Oh, come now, you didn’t call in to warn me about a Lancashire revolution. Pay me the compliment of asking after your daughter and grandchildren. Don’t you ever think of a damned thing but brass and cotton?”
“Not often,” Sam said, unrepentantly, “but since Ah’m here how's she shaping?”
“Very well,” Adam told him, “and as much of a slavedriver as her father since I cut down on her staff and called her to account. Incidentally, she’ll be presenting me with our third any day now.”
The news interested Sam. “She will? Three, in a little over five years? Well, you could ha’ done better but you might ha’ done a damn sight worse, lad. You don’t lack good sense in that direction for it's the only way with ’em. If Ah’d ha’ ketched my Hilda young enough Ah wouldn’t have had to take six months’ holiday from her tongue!”
“So you haven’t started a second family, Sam?”
“Nay,” he said, “Ah get nowt from Hilda but impudence,” and although he said it carelessly Adam detected a tinge of disappointment in his voice, at least enough to prompt him to say, “Why the devil don’t you and Henrietta bury the hatchet? You’d enjoy meeting your grandchildren, and seeing her again, wouldn’t you? Be damned to your pride, Sam. You haven’t all that time left to indulge it.”
Sam said, avoiding his eye, “Ah’m willing, if she is,” and then, with a sincerity that Adam found appealing, “Look, lad, I’ll show my hand and be damned to it. Ah were wrong about you, wrong as could be! You’re all kinds of a fool in many respects but at least you’ve put yourself on the map, same as I did when I were your age, and I’ll tell thee summat else. Folk speak well o’ your concern in the Belt. You weren’t so daft as I took you for when you started hauling vittles free for those soup-kitchens. Now tell me something in return. Did you have business in mind, or was it what I took it for at the time, pie-faced, Come-to-Jesus meddlin’?”
Adam, laughing, admitted it was a little of both. With waggons idle on account of the cotton famine he saw no harm in using them in a good cause.
“Eeee, but that about settles it!” Sam said. “We’ll do business on the strength o’ it, and it’ll amount to zummat by the time they get that ditch finished, and I get a headstart over every other spinner. You’ll have heard o’ that canal they’re about, no doubt?”
“The Suez? Well, naturally, who hasn’t? But what the devil has it got to do with any haulage you head my way?”
Sam said, with the note of gr
avity he reserved for money talk, “More than you think, lad! Or any other man thinks, so far as I can tell by asking around. I’ve seen it. It's a bloody marvel! It’ll make those Pirry-mids sing small I can tell you. One hundred and three miles long an’ deep enough to take ships of any draught. T’passage to India’ll be halved and have you ever thowt what that could mean to spinners? Even if they haven’t bought shares in it, as I have?”
“You’ve put money into the Suez Canal Company? Good God, man, they say it’ll be another ten years in the making. You’ll be nearly seventy before a rowing boat sails through it, if one ever does!”
Sam regarded him sadly. “Eeee, and I took you for a lad wi’ gumption! Listen here, they’ll have that canal open four years from now and cotton’ll come as quick as it does from Savannah and Charlestown, and a damned sight cheaper if you ask me, for India's ours, isn’t it? We can keep the wholesale price steady and hold the Yankee market in check at t'same time. Then there's the export market that now has to trail around Africa. There's a fortune in it for anyone like me, a man who depends on raw cotton in and cotton goods out, and with a piece of that ditch in my britches pocket how can I go wrong? If I were your age I’d buy all the stock I could get while it was there to be bought. Shares’ll rocket the moment the facts sink in but how many have had my gumption to go and see for themselves?” It made sense to Adam, more sense perhaps than it would to someone who had not endured the tedium of a Cape voyage to India, but overextended as he was at the moment, it was hopeless to think of investing in such a venture. He said, “I’m having to work hard to keep my head above water, Sam. A few months ago I thought I should have to contract and only now are things beginning to pick up. Besides, I’m a carrier not a financier. One man one trade is my motto. However, it doesn’t take much brains to see you’re on the right track if you mean to switch to Egyptian and Indian cotton and I take it you do.”
“What choice has a man if he wants to keep his mills open?”
“That war won’t last for ever. The South is about finished, I’d say.”
“Mebbe it is,” Sam said, “but you can add another two years before the plantations are back in production. And there's another aspect that nobody but me seems to have thought on.”
“What's that?”
“For generations the South has been running on slave labour. When they get going again they’ll have to pay hands, same as anyone else. What’ll that do to the wholesale price of every bale set ashore at Liverpool? Nay, lad, from here on I buy in our own market. That's why I’m the only spinner in the Belt opening up new premises.”
“You’re opening a new mill? With things at a standstill up there?”
“Aye, that I am,” Sam said, “for did you never hear what that fellow Rothschild said about buying on a falling market? Well, that's what I’ve done. I telegraphed from Gibraltar a fortnight since and bought a five-acre plot at Rainford, midway between the Liverpool-Manchester and the Liverpool-Bury railways. Land's fair given way up there right now, and bricks’n mortar too, so I got it for the price of a hen-run. It’ll be ready in time for my first Egyptian shipload round about midsummer. That's when I thowt o’ thee and all those waggons o’ yours plying on charity.”
He crossed to the wall map representing the Polygon. It was interesting, Adam thought, how, notwithstanding the gulf between them, they could always find common ground in the no-man's-land of commercial exploitation. Sam seemed just as much at home here as in his lean-to office under the loading ramps of a mill, pointing to the thin triangle slanting north-east out of Liverpool and bounded by the two railways he had mentioned. Among the string of villages along roads connecting St. Helens with the Mersey Estuary was one called Rainford. “Right here it’ll be. Specialising in high quality cloth, and likely to pay for itself in a twelvemonth. You can haul every bale if we can come to terms, loading at dockside and cutting out bloody railroad. That’ll save me time and put money in your pocket. A fleet of three-horse flats it’ll mean but mind, I’ll have first call on ’em, come boom or slump, wet season or dry.”
They got down to detail and Sam made the acquaintance of Frankenstein, for whom he conceived an instant respect. When Adam admitted that he had invented the ready-reckoner their wary relationship entered into a new dimension. “Eeee, lad, but tha’ve brains,” Sam said, admiringly, fumbling with the leaves of the machine and coaxing from it the mileage from Liverpool docks to his new mill-site, at Rainford. “God alone knows how far Ah coulder travelled with a lad like thee to follow me,” and then, hoisting his grey bushy brows, “Did tha mean what tha’ said a while back? Will that lass o’ mine be civil to me if you put in a word, for I’ll own I’ve a rare fancy to see the brats. It's a fine thing for a man to have sons to inherit something he carved from nowt.”
“Stay on in London a day or two and I’ll stage-manage a reconciliation,” Adam promised, “but as to sons to follow me, I don’t bank on that. Henrietta is determined to make gentlemen of them and see them in uniform before the middleaged spread slows her down,” but Sam said, with a shocked expression, “Nay, lad, but you’ll have to beat that dam’ nonsense out of her! I’ll give you a hand if need be.”
“You’ll keep a very civil tongue in your head if you want me to patch things up,” Adam told him, and they went down into the yard where he took his father-in-law on a conducted tour and afterwards lunched him expensively at the George.
2
Mellowness stole upon him throughout the afternoon as he sat working on the drafts of the contracts for the clerks to copy in time for the evening post. The heatless sun dropped away behind the dome of St. Paul's and mists began to drift upriver like a storming party assembling for a night attack on the city. But the day still held surprises.
The first arrived in the form of an express letter from the west, where Hamlet Ratcliffe, lion-catcher extraordinary, had landed an unexpectedly large fish in the person of another westcountry eccentric, none other than Lord Augustus Courtenay-Hopgood, whose scurrilous condemnation of the railways had made him a national figure twenty years before.
It seemed that once again Hamlet had turned local circumstances to good account. Lord Augustus, a fanatical fox-hunter who maintained numerous packs and country-seats between Exe and Tamar, had already passed into legend, and was now a figure of fun in a nation that had come to take the gridiron for granted. Adam could recall a time when Courtenay-Hopgood's peers, equally devoted to the cult of the horse, had sneered at its challenger, but that was long ago, before men like Aaron Walker had poured molten gold through the chinks in their armour and bought off all but the diehards like Lord Augustus, who still opposed every railway bill that came before the Lords. Now, it seemed, Lord Augustus had taken a fancy to concentrate his packs in the hilly, wooded country behind Barnstaple Bay, not very far (as a hunted fox might run) from the spot where the lion Dante was induced to surrender, making Hamlet Ratcliffe's chubby features almost as famous as those of Courtenay-Hopgood. There were no railways within miles of the new seat—Lord Augustus had made certain of that. Furnishings, Hamlet wrote, were to be drawn from hunting lodges dotted about the two counties, plus sufficient necessities from his main seat in East Devon to keep every waggon in the Western Wedge busy for a month. Hamlet added, as a postscript, that money was no object, Lord Augustus being one of the wealthiest landowners in the country. His agent had given Swann-on-Wheels carte blanche, so long as the firm undertook to have everything in place before the cubbing season opened.
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