The Rich Are with You Always (10 page)

  But Nora could sense that there was still something in him that grudged what they had done, so she squeezed his arm and said, "Come on. What is it?"

  "If it's waste fat and sweepings, well enough. But soon it'll be drippings from the kitchen and chimpings from the table and oats from the horses." He looked from one to the other, smiling, wondering if the incident was worth the lesson. He decided it was. "This snow…this hard weather…is sent from God. It's part of God's purpose."

  "Why?" Winifred asked.

  "We cannot know that," he told her. "Perhaps it is a testing for the birds. Most of them may die. But not all. And the ones who live will be the quickest, smartest, strongest, and cleverest. And all the slow, stupid, lazy ones won't lay eggs because they are dead. So perhaps it's God's way of improving the birds. But how can He do that if"—he pointed at the remnants of the feast—"we go feeding the five thousand?"

  He saw that Winifred was going to cry so he quickly stooped and, taking her hands again, spoke directly to her. "But we mustn't forget God's other purpose, must we? When you feel kindly and wish to feed the birds, He put that gentleness in you. So what do we do, eh? There's a puzzle." Curiosity overcame her chagrin. "I'll tell you. We devote our charity to one or two special birds. Make a friend of a pair of robins and look after them. We can't feed the whole world, but we can do our bit for one or two."

  Winifred, remembering the frightening dark clamour of the rapacious hordes of birds, was charmed by this new idea.

  "Willet shall make a little table and we can hang it from the old sundial arm over the nursery window, and you may put a small measure of oats there every day," John said, straightening again, with a cracking of joints. "Eee!" he added. "Hades' flames are crackling today!"

  "We could still put water down for them," Nora said. "That costs nothing."

  "Oh, aye," he agreed. "Put down water by all means." They began to stroll back indoors.

"I put down that," she said, pointing to the pans and trays.

  He laughed and chucked her under the chin. "I'd never have guessed it," he said, "from your manner of speaking."

  She pouted. "Have you eaten?" she asked.

  "I could put myself around a slice of cold pie. Hudson is coming at about six and will stop for dinner before going on to Bessingby Hall."

  "But that's twenty, nearly twenty-five miles. You go up and look at the children's scrapbook and Winifred's stitching, and I'll see about a bite for you. Hudson'd do better to stop the night."

  "Oh, he probably will," John said, lifting a child under each arm to go upstairs; he spoke over their struggling laughter. "But you know him—never promises anyone more than an hour."

  "I'll get a fire lit in the rose room and pans in the sheets."

"That wasn't like you, John," she said later, after he had romped with the children and eaten and come back downstairs to go through correspondence and accounts.

  "I thought there'd be a crop of problems with the freeze-up," he said. "But it seems to have solved more than it's posed. I don't understand it." He put the pile of letters down.

  "John?"

  "What's not like me?" he asked, knowing the answer.

  "All they did was feed the birds. You made a regular sermon out there. I'd say that's not like you."

  "Aye," he laughed, embarrassed. "I thought I was going it to start with. Then…I don't know." He sighed. "Winifred is so—she feels everything so. Takes it all so much to heart. She'll have a lot of money one day. It's bad enough running the gauntlet of all that 'sell what thou hast and give it to the poor' and rich men and camels in the eye of a needle or whatever it is. I can see her taking it all seriously and giving every penny away."

  "John! She's but four." Nora laughed.

  He would not be cajoled into seeing the comic side of it. "She was just the same at two. Always giving things away. We've got to make her understand that that sort of generosity isn't—well, it isn't a kindness in the end. Not to her. Not to the objects of her generosity—certainly not to them. It frustrates God's will, in my view. You'll never make a man better by doing for him what he could and should do for himself."

  "I think the birds frightened her. She thought it would be like scattering crumbs after a picnic. But it was more like free-beer day at elections. I know I was frightened."

  "Well, maybe that's God's way of saying the same thing to her. And to you."

  "Aye," she said, slipping facetiously back into dialect. "'Appen. Be-like. Mayhap." She disliked the implied rebuke and grew tired of the subject.

  He grinned and looked sharply at her through narrowed eyes. "If I ask you for a kiss," he said, "one kiss, and if you grant it, will you promise not to try any of your mucky tricks?"

  She breathed out sharply, pretending astonishment, as if he had hit her in the stomach. "You may sing for it," she said and then made him chase her twice around the room before he got his kiss. "Just one," she said, and she kept her hands folded behind her back.

  "There must be a happy mean," he said as they settled again.

  "You be happy, and I'll be mean," she said.

  He gave a hollow laugh and pretended to fall asleep. She sighed and leaned back into the sofa. There were always these trivial failures of mood and understanding when he came back from a journey; like dog and bitch, circling each other warily, wanting a depth of companionship that could not be instantly had—a depth that had to be plumbed anew each time.

  "Lucky Thornton," she said. "Came out on top, as ever." In his letter from Exeter, he had told her of one of Walter's adulteries.

  "Came in on top, if I know him," John said.

  It was her turn not to laugh, and she wondered why; if he had said it tomorrow, or at any time except in this hour of returning, she'd have laughed.

  "Candidly I'd forgotten him," John said. "There's one thing hammering in here." He tapped his skull. "Iron. Ironworks. I tell thee, love, there's no need to goad me on now. I'm red hot to start. The things I've seen!"

  She sat up, delighted. "In France?"

  "Aye. And here, in Manchester. I came back through Manchester."

  "Ooh. Tell us!"

  "Have ye heard of Schneider-Creusot, the French ironworks?"

  "Of course," she said. "They did a lot of rail for the Paris–Versailles. And others."

  "Well, they sold a big forging hammer to Rodet. And Schneider himself came up with it. I had a long talk with him. Broken French and mangled English but we got through; now there's a man. At the end of 1839, as near as he can remember it, he happened to be at Nasmyth's works in Patricroft, and Nasmyth was away. One of his assistants skimmed through the pages of Nasmyth's scheme book, thinking it was his book of appointments. Well, while he's doing that, Schneider's eye happens to fall on a sketch. 'What's that?' he asks. 'Oh,' says the assistant, 'that's something Mr. Nasmyth sketched for Humphreys before he died—a steam-powered hammer. For the old paddle shafts of the Great Britain. They're not going to build it though; now they're going over to a propellor instead of paddles. No one else has got any use for a hammer that big.' Ha haaa! When Nasmyth called on Schneider at Creusot next year—'What's that?' he says. 'Why, it's
your
steam-powered hammer, Mr. Nasmyth!' says Schneider."

  Nora was shocked. "And he didn't pay for it?"

  "Of course not. Nasmyth hadn't bothered to take out a patent. Why should he pay? Schneider was quite open. Eay—but you never saw such an engine. That's why I came back through Manchester, to see the works at Patricroft."

  "What's Nasmyth like?" Nora asked.

  John thought a while. "You remember that dancing bear at Kipling Cotes Derby?"

  Nora nodded.

  "Something about him put me in mind of that bear. Same puzzled eyes, head on one side, tight little mouth. Must be near forty now. He's built a steam hammer there where he can lift it and lower it with steam under ever such fine control. This'll show you—he put an egg under it and brought the hammer down with such force you'd think not a smattering'd survive. And then in the last instant he halted it so that the hard shell was cracked but the soft shell was left intact!" His eyes shone as he spoke. "What do you say to that?"

  "It's hard to imagine such power."

  "I said at once, 'That's just what we need for driving piles.' Think—it can deliver a blow a second." He began to pound the back of the sofa with his fist in time with the tall clock between the windows. "Ten tons falling like that every second. It solves the problem of wet ground. We could bridge the Wash with a dozen of those. Anyway, he's promised to get out sketches for a transportable engine for pile-driving."

  Nora laughed and put her hands to her cheeks. "Think!" she said. "Your Mr. Nasmyth makes a sketch of an engine to forge a paddle wheel and, without knowing it, he quadruples the value of every bit of marshland at present impeding the progress of every city in the kingdom!"

  "I also told him when our foundry was built I'd take a pair. Schneider says he's made more wrought iron at less cost with that hammer than with five helve hammers. It's the ability to control them, you see. Schneider said a good operator can crack a nutshell without harming the kernel. I thought it was just Frenchman's talk until I saw Nasmyth."

  "So," Nora said, leaning back and grinning at him, "having procrastinated for eight months, we now want our foundry built yesterday."

  He smiled and sighed his agreement.

  "Let's hope Mr. Hudson has brought some good news of your friend and mine, Sir George Beador."

When Hudson's coach came crunching over fresh snow into the courtyard, nearer to seven than the promised six, Nora was certain he'd stay the night. He came in by the garden door, being closer to the stables, and stamped the snow off his boots. "Sticky," he said in disgust. "It keeps heaping and crunching under the tyres. Very discomforting."

  "You'll surely stay the night, Mr. Hudson," Nora urged.

  "Yes, do, Hudson," John said. "You could get halfway to Flamborough and spend the night in a drift."

  Hudson patted a bulge at his breast pocket. "Important papers," he said.

  "Ah well, do what suits your business best," John agreed.

  "Perhaps I will stop," Hudson said quickly. "If it's no great inconvenience." He looked at Nora, who merely smiled as John said, "Madame Clairvoyante there has had a room heated three hours or more."

  Hudson rubbed his hands briskly. "Fate then," he said. "I'll give it no argument. Profound thanks, rather."

  John had put a poker in the fire to heat while they were seeing Hudson in. As soon as they returned to the winter parlour, he withdrew it and plunged it, spitting and fuming, into a punchbowl. "Here's a navvy's drink for you, Hudson," he said. "Rum and rough cider—civilized by Mesdames Stevenson and Jarrett with raisins and cinnebar."

  "Cinnamon!" Nora corrected.

  "Whichever it is," Hudson said, "it's the most welcoming aroma ever to greet me."

  Its fragrance filled the room like an incense.

  He took his glass, waited for Nora, and then supped noisily through his teeth; breathing out fiery satisfaction, he leaned back and shut his eyes, a careful picture of happy exhaustion.

"Hard times, Hudson?" John asked.

"Capital times," Hudson said.

"It's the obtuseness of his codirectors vexes him," Nora said.

  He chuckled scornfully, still with his eyes shut—a good orator's trick, that, Nora thought. "Directors! One of them said the other day to me—to me! At a board meeting too. To me!—'We'd like some account, Mr. Hudson, of the decisions being taken in our name.'" Eyes still shut, he chuckled. Then, quite suddenly he sat up and looked straight at Nora with his blue-grey eyes wide open, as if surprised at himself. "'Do you, sir?' says I. 'Do you indeed? Then you shall not have it!'" He burst into loud, infectious laughter, compelling them to join him.