Theirs Was The Kingdom (88 page)

George had obeyed the letter of his instructions. He had devoted several pages to a thesis on the advantages of centralisation, and the appointment of specialists to take charge of excursion traffic, house-removals, and the like. But his real purpose, as was immediately apparent, was to strip away the dead wood of the network by wholesale retirements, made compulsory at the age of sixty-seven, and optional at sixty. He then went on to advocate a system of promotion by merit, with no sentimental nonsense about seniority, a closer tie-in with railways along the lines of some of Swann’s most successful competitors; the downgrading of two or three less prosperous areas into sub-regions; and the expansions of others, among them Northern Pickings, to take in several industrial cities in the West Midlands. He gave it as his opinion that the Scottish territory was too unwieldy in its present form and that, good as Jake Higson was—and he stressed this—no one man could be responsible for territory including so many industries. He outlined a plan for breaking out of the Dublin Pale and establishing a service clear across Ireland to Galway and Cork, with a second depot at Belfast.

All this was far-reaching enough, both from the point of view of investment and its likely effect on personnel, but there was a paragraph in the summing up that gave Adam the key to George’s thinking and raised his hackles at first reading. It ran: “Many of these changes may well be forced on the company by circumstances in a year or so, but even where they are no more than desirable they would be likely to give the network a clear lead when, as is virtually certain to my mind, the horse begins to be replaced by mechanically propelled vehicles of one sort or another. I see this happening in ten to twelve years, and it would seem to me advisable to restructure well in advance to steal a march over competitors. For when it does happen it will happen almost overnight, like the introduction of steam.”

Adam sat there a long time before he had succeeded in swallowing his bile. Time enough to force himself to look at this deluge of truths, half-truths, and what he saw as downright fantasy objectively, perhaps as something more than a display of arrogance by a lad still wet behind the ears. Whatever one said, George clearly possessed abundant faith in himself, so that if he was to be deflated (and if Swann-on-Wheels was to continue as a going concern this seemed inevitable) then it would have to be done tactfully. Tact was not one of Adam Swann’s specialities. All these years he had had to manage without it.

Yet George was the Crown Prince, designated by himself, and whilst it did not do to give a Crown Prince licence to overset the throne, it was almost as dangerous to humiliate him, to dismiss every suggestion he put forward as hot-air generated, most likely, by that hissing, humming, clattering juggernaut that occupied so much of George’s time and was beginning, it seemed, to regulate his entire thinking.

There was room for compromise here, for a formula that would save the boy’s face when he learned that no proposals as revolutionary as these could be put before a conference of men who had devoted their lives to road-haulage. He could yield a point here and there, perhaps softening the blow somewhat by pleading poverty, but this would only postpone confrontation. Somehow the boy must be made to understand that he, Adam Swann, had never seen his creation as an impersonal, endlessly proliferating venture, taking people and using their strength, like some half-crazed Pharaoh raising a pyramid. He had no patience with the soap-boilers, match-makers, and biscuit manufacturers, who used a workforce in the way they used their machines. That had never been his way. Not because it ran counter to his religious convictions (he had none worth speaking of) and certainly not because he saw himself as one of these fashionable theorists, who made a cult of universal brotherhood. Mainly it was because he saw every one of those men out in the shires as a friend, someone who had agreed to join him in a half-humorous conspiracy to milk a living out of the men dedicated to the making of money. Under a scheme such as George’s this easy camaraderie would disappear overnight.

He took a pen and went to work on the report, annotating it paragraph by paragraph, sometimes with a word, sometimes a paragraph, and when he was done he sent for Tybalt and told him to give it to George as soon as he returned for the afternoon appointment. “I’ll give the lad an hour to mull it over,” he told himself and went out, drifting down towards the docks and watching the steady bustle there, remembering a time when every ship about here carried sail and there was very little of the fug and clatter that overhung the whole area now. The reflection linked itself to George’s final paragraph; he wondered if there was anything in the boy’s prophecy and whether, in his lifetime, he would see horses disappear from these congested streets and the acrid stink of dung superseded by the fumes that filled the old stable at home where George, who would be thirty-seven when the century had run its course, tinkered and tinkered with that juggernaut he had shipped home from Vienna.

2

George had gone by the time he returned, leaving a curt note to the effect that he had read his father’s comments and needed time to consider them before making any constructive counter-proposals. Not knowing what to make of this, Adam returned to routine work and caught an early train back to Tryst, but George was not there, and when he looked in at the millhouse Gisela said he had not yet arrived home. Adam said, “He’ll be late, I shouldn’t wonder. Don’t worry if he stays over in town for the night. Why not join us up at the house for dinner?” But Gisela declined and he thought he detected a little stiffness in her attitude, so that he went away thinking, “She’ll stand by him and that’s as it should be. He’s probably already talked her into believing I’m a backward old buffer, bogged down in the eighteenth century, but that’s the way of things, I suppose. I thought it of my father at his age, but then I was right—the old chap never did a damned thing but lop the ears from Frenchmen and paint a few watercolours…” And he sought out Henrietta with relief, feeling drained by the demands of the day.

He said nothing of his passage of arms with the heir-apparent and it was not until they were on their way to bed that he noticed, or thought he noticed, the same reserve about her as he had spotted in his daughter-in-law. The thought crossed his mind then that both women were privy to George’s brutal assessment of his life’s work. He said, casually, “Did George mention that he was working up terms of reference for a special conference down at the yard?” and she said, uneasily, “He told me something on those lines a few days ago. Gisela and I were discussing it yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

He was quite sure then that they had been conspiring, that George had briefed his wife, who had then approached Henrietta, almost surely with a view to enlisting her support, and maybe the promise of a backstairs campaign. Somehow it accounted for George’s cancellation of their appointment that afternoon. He said, half-jesting. “What’s going on, exactly? Have they been getting at you, about the kind of changes that boy has in mind?”

“They told me about the report. They even let me read it. Gisela said George was going to give it to you this morning. Did he do that?”

“Yes, by God, he did!” Adam said. “And I’m not sure that I care for this hole-in-the-corner way of going about things. Why do you suppose he took you into his confidence before I knew of the existence of the damned thing?”

“Is that how you think of it?”

“Of course it is, how else? If I went ahead with a plan like that half the regional managers would throw in their hand and the other half—Godsall, Rookwood, and the like—would set about talking me into early retirement, so that they could convert Swann-on-Wheels into a kind of mobile factory.”

“What does that mean exactly? That you’ve thrown his report out?”

“Of course I’ve thrown it out.”

“
All
of it?”

“Practically all of it. I’ll concede a few of his points, but as to restructuring on that scale, why, it’s mad. I wouldn’t consider it at any price.”

“You’ve told him that?”

“I haven’t had the chance. We had an appointment to discuss it this afternoon but he preferred to mooch off with my marginal comments burning his ears.” He looked at her reflection as she sat brushing her hair in front of the dressing-table mirror. Her expression, he thought, was very serious, unusually so for an occasion when they were alone up here. She said, deliberately, “I think you’re making a very big mistake, Adam.”

“Oh, you do, do you?”

“Yes, I do. I went over that report twice. Here and there it seemed to me to take too much for granted but, by and large, I thought it clever and long-sighted.” He was amazed at her perfidy. If anything, it hardened his attitude to George. He limped across the room and glared down at her.

“You mean you believe in that stinking contraption he plays with out there in the stable?”

“Yes, I believe in it, and so does Gisela. I would have thought you would too, for I never did see you as a stick-in-the-mud. Quite the opposite, in fact. You always struck me as a person with his eyes very much on the future. You were when you were his age, I’ll be bound, even more so than when I met you and you started the network.”

“So I was,” he exploded, “but I dealt in facts not fancies! I started a family business and kept it going as such. If I carried out half his proposals we should lose all personal touch with those chaps in the regions and become just one more London-based, money-making concern. You know me well enough to understand how I should react to that, don’t you, Hetty?”

She said, softly, “There’s very little I don’t know about you, Adam Swann. Enough to know you’ve got it all wrong now, for instance, and that you aren’t being honest with yourself.” She laid the brush aside and stood up. “You want me to go on?”

“Say what you have to and let’s bring this whole thing out in the open.”

“Very well. Your opposition is personal. In your heart you know very well that Swann-on-Wheels needs gingering up, and that George is perfectly right about shedding dead wood and modernising. And I’m not talking about that machine or any machine that’ll likely replace horse-power in the years ahead, the way the railways drove the stage coaches off the roads when you were a lad. That’s a side issue and you’re using it as a red herring. I’m talking about your approach to the firm as a whole. Yours and that of the old hands, like Ratcliffe, Lovell, Catesby, and even comparative go-aheads like Edith and Tom Wickstead.”

“How do you mean ‘personal’? What’s so personal about it? We’ve done pretty well as a team these years, haven’t we? We’ve gone on expanding and stayed on the map, despite all the competition.”

“Of course. But you’re sixty now, and having a lot of trouble admitting it, Adam. That’s partly why you defend conservatism on grounds of loyalty to the old stagers.”

“Damn it, woman, doesn’t experience count for anything at all?”

“It’s not a matter of experience. Experience belongs to the past. It’s adapting to the future that George is concerned about.”

“Has he got the prerogative to look into the future?”

“His generation has. He’s seven years younger than you were when you started out. Besides, you trained him with that in mind, didn’t you?”

“Aye, I did, and it looks to me as if I’ve been sowing dragon’s teeth!” he growled.

But she said, sharply, “That’s rubbish and you know it’s rubbish! The root of your objections lie in the fact that, when it comes to bedrock, you can’t bear the prospect of stepping aside, not even for one of your own sons—the one you always planned to take over. The network is too much a part of you. In a way it would be like dying, and I can understand that. But it has to be done, sooner or later. You, and all those old cronies of yours, can’t hand over in name and still keep control of the policy. If you do you’ll fall apart, like any other worn-out machine.”

He was outraged now, for her deadly logic touched his manhood at a raw spot. “So you think of me as a worn-out machine?”

She looked very troubled then, and seized his hand. “No, no… not as a person, not as a man… But you must understand that a thing as big and complex as the network needs new ideas all the time, just as it did through all the years you ran it virtually alone. If I were in your shoes I should be proud of George, and go out of my way to encourage him. After all, he’s the only one among them who has inherited your gambling instinct.”

He thought, “By God, she’s right, and that’s the trouble. Maybe there is a personal element, but my loyalty isn’t just to him. It’s to all the men of my generation, and most of us aren’t ready to step down… not yet… not for a year or so…”

He said, gruffly, “We ought to be able to arrive at some kind of compromise. He’s got support in the network, I’ll admit that, but all this is a leap in the dark, involving every bit of capital we have and frankly I’m against it, and that’s a fact. He’ll have to see it my way until I put my feet up. Then he and those other youngsters like Higson can take their chances, sink or swim.”

“But you won’t ever put your feet up, Adam. That’s what bothers them I think. Sooner or later it’ll come to a straight choice. You or them.”

“Don’t lose sleep on that account,” he said, grimly, “they all know which side their bread is buttered!”

But she countered, swiftly, “Men like Jake Higson and Godsall do, but George occupies an entirely different position. He isn’t absolutely dependent on you, and even if he were there’s far too much of you in him to admit it. He’ll go his own way, and Gisela will stand by him. And that’s something I shouldn’t care to see happen.”