The Rich Are with You Always (84 page)

  She began dropping the rose petals, one by one, into the field below, watching them shimmer as they spun and turned in the sunlight.

  Beside her he drew a deep breath. "We must never sell this place," he said. "We must keep our roots up here. We must keep coming back."

  "What about sending Winifred to the Mount School, in York?"

  "Aye," he said. "We must be thinking of the boys' schooling too. Perhaps Uppingham, or Marlborough. Brassey spoke highly of them both."

  Nora smiled at a memory. "They're so different," she said. "Young John and Caspar. When I went to say good night to them last night…" She paused. "Perhaps they've heard us talking about 'glory' contracts and 'bread-and-butter' contracts. Anyway, Caspar said to me, out of the blue, 'Mama. I think money is preferable by far to fame.' Just like that! And Young John"—she began to laugh—"turned over in disgust and said 'You would!' They are so different."

  "Perhaps they should go to different schools." He watched a kestrel wheeling and turning over the cornfield. "How easily we decide for them," he added.

  She was silent, knowing well enough what he meant. "What did you reply to Caspar?" he asked.

  "I said we must try to have both."

  "You sometimes get the answers right, too, then."

  "Is it the right answer?"

  The last rose petal fell. He watched it all the way and then asked: "Does he?"

  "I always cheat," she said. "I always say, he loves me…he loves me more…he loves me…he loves me more…"

  He turned to her then and took her in his arms "You're not far wrong," he said. He tried to kiss her but she just brushed the tip of his nose with her lips and pushed him off. He had got very good at steering away from subjects lately.

  He turned again to the iron railing and the view. A thrush pecked at three of the petals and flew away, disappointed.

  "Money and glory," he said. "We never really settled that."

  "We never settle anything. How can we? Things keep changing."

  She spoke without heat. He shook his head, smiling, but said nothing. "What do you want?" she pressed, still speaking as if this were the most abstract of philosophical discussions. "Send for the three musketeers?"

  He looked at her, puzzled.

  "They'd settle it." She grinned, challenging him. "A flash of the sword. A dashing smile. A few clever words. A lot of clever words. Pages of clever words…oh, they'd settle it." She looked away and a hint of bitterness crept into her voice. "Settle like dust. And the first breath of life would puff it right out the door. Life's no romancer."

  She looked up to see him staring down at her in astonishment. "That's not news to you," she continued to challenge.

  But he ignored it. "How odd. How strange. To live as close to someone as I've lived to you for twelve years before realizing such a…"

  "What?"

  "You revel in it. You love disorder. You don't want to change it."

  She thought before she answered. "I suppose so. But it's a funny thing to say. It's just a fact of life. Of real life. I don't revel in the fact that the sky's above us and the earth's below. I just accept it. Although now…at this moment…" She looked, as a hawk would look, across the cornfields, down into the shadows of the valley, then far out over the awakening world. "Aye. Ye could say I revelled in it now."

  "You see, I think we've a purpose here. We're put on this earth to change it."

  "That?" She spread her hand over the view.

  "We've already done it there. That was all forest once. But I mean everywhere. Everything. I cannot accept disorder as you seem to be able to. I don't want to revel in it. I don't want to use it to my own advantage. I want to change it. And I want the change to benefit everyone."

  She was about to reply when he added, "Perhaps it's just as well I shall be easing myself out of the business. Properly this time. A man who can't accept all the to-ing and fro-ing of circumstance—perhaps he shouldn't…" He fell into thought.

  She said nothing.

  "The Exhibition…" he said, and fell back into silence. She waited, watching him intently. "How it opened my eyes!" He hit the rail with his clenched fist as he spoke. "I've been blind." There was a desperation in him. His eyes scanned the landscape as if he feared he would never find the words he needed.

  At last he turned to her. "I've decided what to do." He gave a short laugh, almost a snort. "I decided at the opening ceremony back in May. Then I've used one excuse after another to delay."

  "Why?" she risked asking.

  "Because…it fills me with…panic." And when she did not prompt him further, he added, "The sheer size of the task!"

  Her silence seemed to embolden him. "There's so much to be done. For us. By us, I mean. We can't escape it. Whole continents to pacify. And civilize. And cultivate. We must." He grew calmer as he spoke; his voice became almost a monotone. "From the very beginning of civilization men have dreamed of a world of plenty. A world without want, where poverty is a bad memory. And now, for the first time ever, thousands of people—not just me—but tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, have seen that it is at last possible! It is in sight. Perhaps not in our lifetime, but in the children's. A century from now, if we do right, this whole world could be
one
civilization, one single civilization. Think of that, Nora love: a brotherhood of man, where there is no want, no war, no bloodshed, no strife. A world of peace and plenty. And we have seen its dawn. This year."

  "No rich and no poor?" she said.

  "No poor. There must always be the rich—to inspire and encourage the rest, to pay for invention, found schools and libraries—to lead taste. You know."

  "Is it possible?" she asked. "Really? D'you think?"

  "I have thought about it all summer. With the machines we have now and with the ones we can already imagine and with the improvements that will certainly follow, even though we cannot guess what they may be—with all that, and with a world so rich and bounteous, whose surface we have barely scratched, whose wealth we cannot even begin to comprehend—how can it
not
happen! It must. It is inevitable. Only human ignorance and folly and greed can prevent it."

  "And you mean to help this come about?"

  "Not me," he said. "England. That too is the lesson of this summer." The monotone relented; his voice became more joyful. "Without really wanting to, England seems to have taken upon herself the mantle of the foremost among the civilized nations of the world. We have given that world a lead this summer. We must not stop now and slip back into the old ways—petty nations under petty crown princes fighting petty causes for petty gains. The world is looking to us for a lead. We must not be too fearful to respond. We have laid the foundations of a great empire. On them we can raise one that will shine ten times more glorious still. And that empire, in its turn, will be the foundation of the brotherhood of all the world. When others see the wealth and the happiness that begins to flow wherever
Pax Britannica
reigns, they will surely flock to join. And if they are prevented, by corrupt rulers or ignorance, we must conquer them and teach them. We dare not shirk our task. What England has is too precious now to let her fainthearts squander."

  She looked at him and was overwhelmed with a protective love. The sheer size of his vision made him seem both isolated and vulnerable. There were a thousand questions to be asked, but they stuck somewhere short of her throat: practical, awkward questions that stressed his vulnerability.

  The fear of it silenced her. But there was also a new, impossible hope. Here was the John she had known years ago. The night they first met. He had fired her spirit and bound her to him for life with just such a vision as this. If he could now recapture all that zest!

  "I must make it happen," he said.

  He looked anxiously at her, wary…for what? Her scorn? Disbelief?

  The gesture hurt—doubly, for it was so unintentional. She smiled, trying to tell him she shared his unquestioning faith in that bright vision.

  He smiled too. "I must play my part anyway."

  She hugged him, convincing herself that disunity was now behind them. "Both of us must," she said. "Nothing has ever been able to withstand us when we've been united."

  She trembled, so fiercely did she cling.

  He, thinking she was cold, said, "Come back inside now."

  Going down the steps she sniffed her fingers, hoping to find a trace of him. Nothing was there—only the lingering smell of the rose he had taken apart and she had scattered.

When the first book in this sequence (World from Rough Stones) appeared, a number of teachers wrote to me saying they would like to use it as parallel reading or enrichment reading in their history classes; but they wanted assurance on the accuracy of the historical references in the story. It occurred to me then that quite a large number of readers might be interested, and even gratified, to learn how much true history there is in these stories. To be sure, all the historical accuracy in the world has no literary value. If the book does not breathe with its own inner life, the historical facts would lie like dung upon the desert sand, fouling what they cannot make fertile. So these notes are a mere afterthought to what I hope was your enjoyment. By no means are they offered in a sense of justification.

  All prices quoted are accurate, whether it's the price per mile of a railway line, the price of lodgings in Rhyll, the price of a seat on the French diligence, the price of a whore in Bristol, or of dollars and pounds against all the other currencies mentioned. All the railway lines mentioned in the text were sanctioned or built or opened when the text says they were—right down to the actual day if a day is given. (Of course, John Stevenson, as a railway contractor, is a composite of men like Thomas Brassey, Samuel Moreton Peto, and Tom Jackson, who actually built most of the lines mentioned.) All the engineering and technological details in the text are accurate (and you may thank my editors that they were not finally given at even greater length!). This refers not only to gossip of the day—such as how Nasmyth's steam hammer first came to be built by Schneider in France—but also to the more enduring achievements, such as the numerically controlled (to use current terms) punching machine and the hydraulic pistons that created and raised the Britannia Bridge.

  The railway mania and the consequent commercial crisis are accurately followed, though only those parts that were especially germane to the Stevenson's business are dwelt upon. I had to resist quite strongly the temptation to point up the astonishing parallels between that crisis and the oil crisis of our own times. Both begin when one sector of the economy tries to grab a historically disproportionate share of the available cash…and in both cases the resulting depression in trade rebounds on the sector that did the grabbing. But these are points for the teacher rather than the novelist to pursue. Similarly, the details of banking, the stock market, and the general management of business are true to the period.

  Everything I write about the Great Exhibition is also factual, from the politicking that preceded its inception to the pomp that attended its opening. Every exhibit I mention really was there. However, the skulduggery between Fox & Henderson (the actual builders of the Crystal Palace) and Stevenson's is invented—although Fox & Henderson's bid really was £79,800.

  Now for some specifics that can't be classified under such general heads. I take them in the order in which they appear in the book. Mrs. Jordan's superstitions are all genuine Yorkshire (East Riding) beliefs of the mid-nineteenth century. The firms in which Beador is supposed to have invested all existed, and all went bankrupt in 1846. The Stevenson's income-tax return is typical of its time. Nora and Sam's tour of Normandy and Mont St. Michel is based on a similar trip made by John Ruskin and his wife in 1847. "Great Missen'em Day" really was like that. Panshanger House was pulled down by a gravel company in 1956—so Nora's threat was not as idle as she might have believed. "Maran Hill" (under another name) survives. The artisans' houses designed by Livings are almost identical to similar dwellings commissioned by Prince Albert and exhibited at the 1851 Exhibition. The Irish evictions witnessed by John actually took place on March 13, 1846, in the village of Ballinglass, County Galway, involving the three hundred tenants of a Mrs. Gerrard. All the other public events described as happening in Ireland are authentic. Nora's supposed caesarian section under general anesthesia: On September 30, 1846, William Morton, a dentist practising in Boston, Massachusetts, first used sulphuric ether as an "anaesthesiant" upon a patient. On December 21, Professor Lister (the one in the text) used it on a patient in London. On January 19, 1847, Sir James Young Simpson used it in his midwifery practise. (In November, he switched to chloroform.) So Nora's operation would have been the pioneer operation by a mere three weeks. John's evidence to the Select Committee is a précis of the evidence of a number of railway contractors. All the members named actually sat on the committee. George Hudson too is a historical character—"The Railway King" of the 1840s. His rise and fall, and the strong element of fraud involved, suited my purpose so well that I could incorporate the whole of it without violating history. His former mansion, Albert Gate, is still the French Embassy in London.

  History is so rich it affords material for any writer's purpose; so it is no great art to have woven in so much. Yet I have to admit, it is a double delight to me to find something that exactly suits my purpose and that really happened. I hope that delight is shared.