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CHAPTER FOUR
The following morning it took Monk an hour and a half after leaving the town to reach the workings of the new railway.
It was a fine day with a light wind rippling the grass, carrying the scents of earth and spring and the sound of sheep in the distance. From the height of the horse’s back he could see the hawthorn hedges sweeping low, already with leaves bursting. Later he knew they would be heaped with white blossoms almost to the ground. He was following a track that climbed slowly up toward the summit over a mile away, beyond which lay the last curve of the railway line. The breeze was light and cool in his face, and sweet with the smell of earth and grass.
There was an acute pleasure in feeling the strength of a good animal beneath him. It was a long time since he had ridden, yet the moment he had swung up into the saddle, there was a familiarity to it and he was at ease. These great rolling spaces were at once a freedom and a resurrection of something quite different.
Far away to his right he could see the roofs of a village half hidden by trees, the church spire towering above them, and elms scattered over green parkland.
A rabbit shot out of the grass almost at the horse’s feet, white tail flashing, and ran a dozen yards before disappearing again.
He half turned to speak, smiling, prepared to say how surprised he was to see it, and then realized with a jolt that there was no one else with him. Whom had he expected? He could see him as clearly as if he had been there, a tall man with white hair, a lean face, prominent nose and dark eyes. He would be smiling also, knowing exactly what Monk meant so there was no need to elaborate on it. It was a comfortable thought.
Arrol Dundas. Monk knew it as surely as if it had happened. They had ridden together on bright spring days like this, up hills in all kinds of country, towards rail tracks half finished where hundreds of navvies worked. He could hear the sounds of shouting, the thud of picks on earth, the ring as the iron hit stone, the rumble of wheels on boards as if they were only beyond the rise. He saw in his mind’s eye the bent backs of men, bearded as navvies nearly all were, lifting shovels, pushing barrows of rock and earth, urging the horses on. He and Dundas would be going to see the progress, to estimate the time till completion, or to sort out some problem or other.
Here there was silence but for the wind carrying the distant sounds of cattle and sheep, the occasional bark of a dog. Half a mile away he could see a cart moving along a lane, but he could not hear the sound of the wheels in the muddy ruts; the cart was too far away.
What kind of problems? Protesters, angry villagers, farmers whose land was divided, saying their cows were giving no milk because of the disturbance and when the engines were roaring through, shattering the peace of the fields, it would only be worse.
It was different in towns. Houses were knocked down, and scores of people, hundreds, were dispossessed. He dimly remembered some plan to use the arches of viaducts to house the homeless. There were to be three classes of accommodation—different qualities, different prices. The lowest was to be on clean straw, and free. He could not remember if it had ever come about.
But there had been no moral or practical decision to make. It was progress and inevitable.
He tried to snatch back more detail of memory, not the emotional but the practical. What had they spoken of? What did he know of the land purchases in detail? What was the fraud involved? Wedgewood had said there was no such thing as land across which it was not possible to make a track. It was only a question of cost. And navvies knew how to set up rails on pontoons, if necessary, which could cross marshland, shifting streams, subsidence, anything you cared to think of. They tunneled through shale or clay, chalk, sandstone, anything at all. Again, it was only cost which made the difference. Back to money.
All land had to be purchased. Was it as simple as money passed back to the officer of the company who decided which route to take? A track diverted from one path to another, the officer bribed by the landowner in order to keep his property intact? Or otherwise worthless land sold at an inflated price, and the profits shared back with the officer, straight into his own pocket, defrauding the company and the investors?
That was obvious, but was it so much that it had been overlooked, at least for a while? What arrogance, to imagine they could escape forever.
Had Dundas been arrogant? Monk tried again to recapture a sense of the man he had once known so well, and the harder he looked the more any clear remembrance evaded him. It was as if he could see it only in the corner of his vision; focus on it and it vanished.
The wind was growing warmer across the grass, and far above him, piercingly sweet, he heard skylarks singing. It was timeless. It must have been like this when trains were only a thing of the imagination, when Wellington’s armies gathered to cross the Channel, or Marlborough’s, or Henry VIII’s for that matter, bound for the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Why could he not turn in the saddle now and catch some clearer glimpse of Dundas?
The brightness of the sun on his face brought back a feeling of affection and well-being, but it was no more than that, a remembrance of being utterly comfortable with someone, laughing at the same jokes, a kind of happiness in the past that was gone, because Dundas was dead. He had died alone in a prison, disgraced, his life ruined, his wife isolated, no longer able to live in the city that had been her home.
Had he had children? Monk thought not. There were none he could recall. In a sense Monk himself had been son to him, the young man he had nurtured and taught, to whom he had passed on his knowledge, his love of fine things, of arts and pleasures, good books, good food, good wine, good clothes. Monk remembered something of a beautiful desk, wood like silk, shining, inlaid, a depth to the color like light through a goblet of brandy.
He had a sudden sharp vision of himself standing before the looking glass in a tailor’s rooms, younger, thinner in the shoulders and chest, and Dundas behind him, his face so clear the tiny lines in the skin around his eyes were etched sharply, telling of years of squinting against the light, and quick laughter.
“For heaven’s sake, stand up straight!” he had said. “And change that cravat! Tie it properly. You look like a popinjay!”
Monk had felt crushed. He had thought it rather stylish.
He knew later that Dundas was right. He was always right in matters of taste. Monk had absorbed it like blotting paper, taking a blurred but recognizable print of his mentor.
What had happened to Dundas’s money? If he had been found guilty of fraud, there must have been a profit somewhere. Had he spent it, perhaps on fine clothes, pictures, wine? Or had it been confiscated? Monk had no idea.
He breasted the rise, and the panorama that spread out in front of him took his breath away. Fields and moorlands stretched to the farther hills five or six miles distant and around the curve of the escarpment on which he sat. The unfinished track snaked over farmland and open tussock toward the sudden dip of a stream and an adjoining marshy stretch across which spanned the incomplete arches of a viaduct. When it was finished it would be over a mile long. It was a thing of extraordinary beauty. The sheer engineering skill of it filled him with a sense of exhilaration, almost spiritual uplift at the possibilities of man and the certainty in his own mind of what it would be when the last tie was driven in. The great iron engines with more power than hundreds of horses would carry tons of goods or scores of people at breakneck speeds from city to city without resting. It was a marvelous, complicated beauty of strength, the force of nature harnessed by the genius of man to serve the future.
He remembered his own words: “It’ll be on time!” He could see Dundas’s face as clearly as if he had been there, hair a little windblown, skin burned, narrowing his eyes against the light. Monk was stung by loneliness that there was nothing but miles of empty grass rippling over the long curve toward the valley, broken by a few wildflowers, white and gold in the green.
He could remember the joy of it like a beat in the blood. It was not money, or gain of any natural things; it was the accomplishment, the moment when they heard the whistle in the distance and saw the white plume of steam and heard the roar of the train as it swept into view, a creation of immense, superb, totally disciplined power. It was a kind of perfection.
Dundas had felt exactly the same. Monk knew that with certainty. He could hear the vibrancy in his mentor’s voice as if he had just spoken, see it in his face, his eyes. Time and again they had ridden until they were exhausted, just to see a great engine, boiler fired, belching steam, begin to move on some inaugural journey. He could see those engines, green paint gleaming, steel polished, great wheels silent on the track until the whistle blew. The excitement was at fever pitch, the railmen with faces beaming as at last the great beast stirred, like a giant waking. It would gather speed slowly—a puff, a gasp, a turn of the wheels, another, and another, the power as huge and inevitable as an avalanche, albeit man-made and man-controlled. It was one of the greatest achievements of the age. It would change the face of nations, eventually of the world. To have a part in it was to shape history.
Dundas had said that. They were not Monk’s words. He could hear Dundas’s voice in his head, deep, a little edge to it, a preciseness as if he had practiced to lose some accent he disliked. Just as he had taught Monk to lose his lilting country Northumbrian.
What had Monk really felt for Arrol Dundas? It had probably begun with ambition and, he hoped, gratitude. Surely later on affection had been the greater part? What he remembered now was the sense of loss, the absence of that warmth of friendship, and the certainty of having owed Dundas so much more than knowledge and advantage, but things of the inner sel
