The Rich Are with You Always (73 page)

He thought he took it well too. True, that night before he dropped off to sleep, he pondered wryly the differences between himself and Nora. He now had, just as she once predicted he would, one of the biggest private fortunes in England—perhaps in the world. To achieve it had cost him more than ten years of unremitting labour; ten years of freezing on remote moors and hillsides, sweltering all summer in high-sided cuttings, walking until the blood squeezed out at his toenails, travelling long days and nights through dust or rain, lying in mud to check footings, dangling over ravines to inspect abutments, scrambling over mountainsides to look at routes that were later abandoned, eating foul and dangerous food, sleeping between verminous sheets in rat-infested inns, falling from horses, getting stuck in bogs, being lied to, cheated, misinformed, let down, clogging his mind with railway politics until the stink of it almost raised his scalp, scheming, bribing, conniving, conspiring, cheating, losing—ten years of it.

  But Nora—in between the bearing of seven children (or six and three quarters, as she would be quick to point out), the managing of two big houses, the assiduous pursuit of almost a thousand foxes, and the financial oversight of the firm—had managed to accumulate a fortune to rival his, indeed, had pledged it to save his.

  The realization certainly took a lot of zest out of the work, or out of the prospect of returning to it. Or was that just the exhaustion of the past year speaking? Perhaps when Stevenson's was awarded the contract to erect this building for next year's Great Exhibition the zest would return.

  In May, he left Nora and Nanette at La Gracieuse and went back to London to nurse his Exhibition tender, which had gone in at a very low hundred and twenty thousand. Stevenson's had guaranteed ten thousand of any losses the Exhibition might sustain. (He had made the guarantee the previous autumn, when they were close to the precipice, because Robert Stephenson, as chairman of the Exhibition's executive committee had asked it and because to refuse would have caused the sort of talk they could then least afford.) He was determined to be the contractor who put up the Exhibition building, a dreadful squat shed (Euston station out of St. Paul's, they joked) over eighteen hundred feet long and made of brick. His tender barely covered the cost of materials. He would build the shed and its dome at his own expense. It would be a fitting end to his first decade as a contractor, he thought—to give back something to the country that had given him so much.

  All May the committee deliberated over the tenders. The design of the building had been their own, a sort of hybrid from Barry out of Wyatt with help from Brunel, Stephenson, Cubitt, et al.—all of them committee members. It was a child spoiled by a surfeit of great parents. The grumbles began to swell. By the end of the month, they were almost deafening. There had always been a strong party against the very idea of the Exhibition. It would allow foreign manufacturers a shop window in the very heart of London for their cheap and nasty foreign wares. Excursion trains were already being planned to bring workingmen from all parts of the kingdom—what would happen to their poor wives and children while they were rushing helter-skelter to London, and what temptations would face the men once they arrived in the great metropolis? What would become of the modesty and chastity of our working-men?
The Times
retreated into a state of blind panic. "The whole of Hyde Park," it roared, "and the whole of Kensington Gardens will be turned into a bivouac of all the vagabonds of London." Foreigners, it warned, were already renting houses near the park and turning them into brothels. In Parliament, Colonel Charles de Laet Waldo Sibthorpe, rabid Protestant and ardent xenophobe, fulminated against the expense of the building while the Irish poor (against whose interests he had consistently voted) were starving; even worse, he said, the building would mean the irrevocable loss of some of Hyde Park's most beautiful elms.

  With this last objection the colonel touched a nerve that all other warnings and thunderings had failed to reach. Londoners loved their trees and parks. Roads, railways, buildings—all had to be redesigned to avoid the loss of a tree. Why should the Exhibition building have any special privilege in that respect? It was a question the committee could not answer.

  That was a terrible month. A million superficial feet of space had already been booked by British and foreign exhibitors. The opening date was set for May Day next year—less than twelve months away. And now it looked as if the entire project was about to fall in ruins because the elms could not be spared. Prince Albert, one of the founders and the chief proponent of the entire scheme, was in despair.

The first week in June, John had to go up to North Wales, where the third of the four tubes of the Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait was now to be lifted into place. The first two had gone up last June, on the down-line side (not without mishap); he had been there then, of course, trying to pretend that his nervousness was all to do with the engineering, nothing to do with finances. Now that the money worries were behind them, he was really looking forward to this particular operation and determined that former mistakes would not be repeated.

  The operation was the one they had pioneered on the Conway Bridge, except that the Conway was not an important navigation and so they had been able to take four days over the lifting, building the masonry up in the niches as they went. Here, with a lift over five times as great, and in an important tideway, they had to hoist the great structure within the day.

  It was a perfect day for it, sunny and calm with only a light breeze. Nora was now back in England and John wished she might have been there, but the baby's time was too close. Most of the railway world was there, together, it seemed, with the entire population of North Wales and the isle of Anglesey. It was, after all, far and away the biggest engineering undertaking in the whole of human history.

  At first light, the great tube was floated down the tideway. This phase was also the most hazardous, because of the strong tidal currents in the Strait. There was no hope of rowing or gently drifting or even of towing the floating structure into place. It all had to be done by the gradual tightening of hawsers and pulleytackle against a tide race of nine knots. Even to the casual onlooker, it seemed a wonderful operation; but to those with a knowledge of engineering, it was a miracle. Only one or two of the hawsers needed to be tightened or slackened at the wrong rate and the forces would combine to try to bend the tube sideways like a snake.

  Small wonder that silence was strictly enforced. Every sound that was voiced had a meaning and resulted in some further action as the inconceivable hulk, stressed by forces unimaginably powerful, inched and nosed its ponderous way into the cavern prepared. Then, when it was fast at that end, all eyes turned to the central pillar, where it was "Haul away!" and "Steady at that" and "Ease a point" and "A mite more, Billy!" and "Hold! Hold! Hold!" and at the last, the sweet touch of a post horn as the alignment was made perfect.

  At the top of the towers, one at each end, were the two biggest hydraulic hoists ever made: a water cylinder of twenty inches bore with a piston and shaft capable of rising vertically through six feet. These massive hydraulic jacks straddled the tops of the niches up which the ends of the tube were to travel.

  As soon as the great tube was directly beneath the two jacks, there were shouts of "Up" and "Hold" and "Down a touch" and "Up a touch" and another blast on the post horn as the socket holes at the bottom of each chain were brought into line with the eyeholes on the top side of the tube.

  When the bolts were all home and tightened, the giant tube and the long chains became one single continuous mass of metal with the hydraulic rams a hundred feet above. This was the most nerve-stretching moment of all. Last year the tube had been lifted through a mere nine inches when the masonry beneath one of the hydraulic cylinders had crumbled. The box-tube had then fallen back on its pontoon, buckling the bottom plates and smashing all the castings; whereupon the cylinder had come crashing down a hundred feet or more onto the top of the tube, completing its destruction—a costly and disheartening delay. Would it be repeated today?

  The steam engines above began to thud and clank, turning at a sedate fortyeight revolutions a minute. They drove the pumps that supplied water at a pressure of nearly two and a half tons a circular inch into the hydraulic cylinders. Each stroke of the supplying pumps lifted the ram only six-hundredths of an inch, so there was no sensation of jerking as the colossal pistons began to raise themselves and take the strain. The first evidence of it was an eerie groaning and a series of cracks, like a repeated whiplash, that filled the air and resounded from the cliff on the Welsh shore as the four long chains stretched and settled. The hollow mass of the iron tube acted as an enormous sounding box in which each reverberation took an age to die. A giant was coming alive.

  To the watchers on the shore and standing on the top of the completed line, the tension was as great as that in the chains which now began to hold the tube. For a while, the pontoons continued to take a part of the load as they rose in the water at just over three inches a minute. At a signal from Robert Stephenson, the men in the pontoons began to untie the lashings that secured the tube. Ten minutes later, the first of the pontoons moved on the tide race, free of its burden but taut on its hawser, swaying this way and that beneath the iron tube; the rest followed in short order. In less than thirty minutes the tube had been raised six feet.

  Then the chain was clamped lower down, leaving the ram to fall back to the bottom of its stroke, take a new grip, and raise the whole thing another six feet. And so the lifting went on all through the day at the rate of thirteen feet an hour. There was no pause for refreshment; men either ate their pies and drank their cordials (no liquor being allowed) as they worked, or like Stephenson and Stevenson, went without. Robert Stephenson directed the entire operation from a point at the centre of the tube. John stayed mainly at the mid-channel end, watching the narrow clearance between the tube and the masonry of the tower, occasionally going to the abutment end to check there too. It was a strange, uneasy feeling to rise at only three inches a minute. Your eyes told you that you were not moving, but your sense of balance and subtle messages from the soles of your feet and your joints brought a worrying contradiction. All the following day John felt an odd light-headedness—a continuing reaction to that uneasy ride.

  The last few stages of the lift brought them close to the tube they had placed last year, on the top of which stood the privileged spectators. Soon they were close enough to talk and exchange congratulations across the gap, and there was a great deal of relieved and good-humoured banter now that it was clear the tube would be placed securely. A lot of it was directed at John, reminding him of the collapse of the masonry last time.

  "Put not your trust in stone, sir!" Henry Cole of the Board of Trade shouted down at him. "What? Eh? Put your trust in iron!"

  He and the man beside him thought this a huge joke; it obviously referred to something private between them.

  "Tell it to Robert Stephenson too," the man beside Cole shouted.

  John was sure he had seen him before—he thought at a Midland Railway meeting. "I feel I know you, sir," he said. "Are you connected with the Midland?"

  "Indeed, indeed!" The man beamed.

  "Allow me," Cole cut in. "Mr. John Stevenson, Mr. Joseph Paxton, proprietor of the
Daily News,
and this is his editor, Mr. Charles Dickens…bless me! Where's the fellow gone?"

  "Over there with the artist," Paxton said.

  "You're also in charge of the Duke of Devonshire's gardens, are you not, sir?" John asked.

  "Indeed, indeed. It must be a proud day for you, Mr. Stevenson."

  "Aye!" John laughed. "We may say 'a burden has been lifted'! But, as Mr. Cole knows, I hope for a prouder day ten months from now."

  Cole's face fell. "Ah, yes, how true," he said and then, turning to Paxton, he added with unnatural emphasis: "Mr. Stevenson has a very keen bid in on the

Exhibition building."

  "Oh!" Paxton said; the news obviously had some meaning for him. Had he also an interest in the building? If so, John did not like his being so close with Cole, who was also on the committee.

  "How keen, Mr. Cole?" John asked pointedly. "Keen enough, would ye say?"

  "Pretty keen, pretty keen," was all he would reply.

  Then John had to check some detail of the lifting, and when he turned back, both Cole and Paxton were walking off quickly toward Dickens. He saw none of them again that day.