BUSINESS IS BUSINESS.
It reconciled Cleer to leaving London for awhile when she learnt that
Eustace Le Neve was going north to Yorkshire, with Walter Tyrrel, to
inspect the site of the proposed Wharfedale viaduct. Not that she ever
mentioned his companion's name in her father's presence. Mrs.
Trevennack had warned her many times over, with tears in her eyes, but
without cause assigned, never to allude to Tyrrel's existence before
her father's face; and Cleer, though she never for one moment suspected
the need for such reticence, obeyed her mother's injunction with
implicit honesty. So they parted two ways, Eustace and Tyrrel for the
north, the Trevennacks for Devonshire. Cleer needed a change indeed;
she'd spent the best part of a year in London. And for Cleer, that was
a wild and delightful holiday. Though Eustace wasn't there, to be sure,
he wrote hopefully from the north; he was maturing his ideas; he was
evolving a plan; the sense of the magnitude of his stake in this
attempt had given him an unwonted outburst of inspiration. As she
wandered with her father among those boggy uplands, or stood on the
rocky tors that so strangely crest the low flat hill-tops of the great
Devonian moor. She felt a marvelous exhilaration stir her blood--the
old Cornish freedom making itself felt through all the restrictions of
our modern civilization. She was to the manner born, and she loved the
Celtic West Country.
But to Michael Trevennack it was life, health, vigor. He hated London.
He hated officialdom. He hated the bonds of red tape that enveloped
him. It's hard to know yourself an archangel--
"One of the seven who nearest to the throne
Stand ready at command, and are as eyes
That run through all the heavens, or down to the earth,"
and yet to have to sit at a desk all day long, with a pen in your hand,
in obedience to the orders of the First Lord of the Admiralty! It's
hard to know you can
"Bear swift errands over moist and dry,
O'er sea and land,"
as his laureate Milton puts it, and yet be doomed to keep still hour
after hour in a stuffy office, or to haggle over details of pork and
cheese in a malodorous victualing yard. Trevennack knew his "Paradise
Lost" by heart--it was there, indeed, that he had formed his main ideas
of the archangelic character; and he repeated the sonorous lines to
himself, over and over again, in a ringing, loud voice, as he roamed
the free moor or poised light on the craggy pinnacles. This was the
world that he loved, these wild rolling uplands, these tall peaks of
rock, these great granite boulders; he had loved them always, from the
very beginning of things; had he not poised so of old, ages and ages
gone by, on that famous crag
"Of alabaster, piled up to the clouds,
Conspicuous far, winding with one ascent
Accessible from earth, one entrance high;
The rest was craggy cliff that overhung
Still as it rose, impossible to climb."
So he had poised in old days; so he poised himself now, with Cleer by
his side, an angel confessed, on those high tors of Dartmoor.
But amid all the undulations of that great stony ocean, one peak there
was that delighted Trevennack's soul more than any of the rest--a bold
russet crest, bursting suddenly through the heathery waste in abrupt
ascent, and scarcely to be scaled, save on one difficult side, like its
Miltonic prototype. Even Cleer, who accompanied her father everywhere
on his rambles, clad in stout shoes and coarse blue serge gown--. for
Dartmoor is by no means a place to be approached by those who, like
Agag, "walk delicately"--even Cleer didn't know that this craggy peak,
jagged and pointed like some Alpine or dolomitic aiguille, was known to
all the neighboring shepherds around as St. Michael's Tor, from its now
forgotten chapel. A few wild Moorland sheep grazed now and again on the
short herbage at its base; but for the most part father and daughter
found themselves alone amid that gorse-clad solitude. There Michael
Trevennack would stand erect, with head bare and brows knit, in the
full eye of the sun, for hour after hour at a time, fighting the devil
within him. And when he came back at night, tired out with his long
tramp across the moor and his internal struggle, he would murmur to his
wife, "I've conquered him to-day. It was a hard, hard fight! But I
conquered! I conquered him!"
Up in the north, meanwhile, Eustace Le Neve worked away with a will at
the idea for his viaduct. As he rightly wrote to Cleer, the need itself
inspired him. Love is a great engineer, and Eustace learned fast from
him. He was full of the fresh originality of youth; and the place took
his fancy and impressed itself upon him. Gazing at it each day, there
rose up slowly by degrees in his mind, like a dream, the picture of a
great work on a new and startling principle--a modification of the
cantilever to the necessities of the situation. Bit by bit he worked it
out, and reduced his first floating conception to paper; then he
explained it to Walter Tyrrel, who listened hard to his explanations,
and tried his best to understand the force of the technical arguments.
Enthusiasm is catching; and Le Neve was enthusiastic about his
imaginary viaduct, till Walter Tyrrel in turn grew almost as
enthusiastic as the designer himself over its beauty and utility. So
charmed was he with the idea, indeed, that when Le Neve had at last
committed it all to paper, he couldn't resist the temptation of asking
leave to show it to Sir Edward Jones, whom he had already consulted as
to Eustace's prospects.
Eustace permitted him, somewhat reluctantly, to carry the design to the
great railway king, and on the very first day of their return to
London, in the beginning of October, Tyrrel took the papers round to
Sir Edward's house in Onslow Gardens. The millionaire inspected it at
first with cautious reserve. He was a good business man, and he hated
enthusiasm--except in money matters. But gradually, as Walter Tyrrel
explained to him the various points in favor of the design, Sir Edward
thawed. He looked into it carefully. Then he went over the calculations
of material and expense with a critical eye. At the end he leant back
in his study chair, with one finger on the elevation and one eye on the
figures, while he observed with slow emphasis: "This is a very good
design. Why, man, its just about twenty times better than Erasmus
Walker's."
"Then you think it may succeed?" Tyrrel cried, with keen delight, as
anxious for Cleer's sake as if the design were his own. "You think they
may take it?"
"Oh dear, no," Sir Edward answered, confidently, with a superior smile.
"Not the slightest chance in the world of that. They'd never even dream
of it. It's novel, you see, novel, while Walker's is conventional. And
they'll take the conventional one. But its a first rate design for all
that, I can tell you. I never saw a better one."
"Well, but how do you know what Walker's is like?" Tyrrel asked,
somewhat dismayed at the practical man's coolness.
"Oh, he showed it me last night," Sir Edward answered, calmly. "A very
decent design, on the familiar lines, but not fit to hold a candle to
Le Neve's, of course; any journeyman could have drafted it. Still, it
has Walker's name to it, don't you see--it has Walker's name to it;
that means everything."
"Is it cheaper than this would be," Tyrrel asked, for Le Neve had laid
stress on the point that for economy of material, combined with
strength of weight-resisting power, his own plan was remarkable.
"Cheaper!" Sir Edward echoed. "Oh dear, no. By no means. Nothing could
very well be cheaper than this. There's genius in its construction,
don't you see? It's a new idea, intelligently applied to the
peculiarities and difficulties of a very unusual position, taking
advantage most ingeniously of the natural support afforded by the rock
and the inequalities of the situation; I should say your friend is well
within the mark in the estimate he gives." He drummed his finger and
calculated mentally. "It'd save the company from a hundred and fifty to
two hundred thousand pounds, I fancy," he said, ruminating, after a
minute.
"And do you mean to tell me," Tyrrel exclaimed, taken aback, "men of
business like the directors of the Great North Midland will fling away
two hundred thousand pounds of the shareholder's money as if it were
dirt, by accepting Walker's plan when they might accept this one?"
Sir Edward opened his palms, like a Frenchman, in front of him. It was
a trick he had picked up on foreign bourses.
"My dear fellow," he answered, compassionately, "directors are men, and
to err is human. These great North Midland people are mere flesh and
blood, and none of them very brilliant. They know Walker, and they'll
be largely guided by Walker's advice in the matter. If he saw his way
to make more out of contracting for carrying out somebody else's
design, no doubt he'd do it. But failing that, he'll palm his own off
upon them, and Stillingfleet'll accept it. You see with how little
wisdom the railways of the world are governed! People think, if they
get Walker to do a thing for them, they shift the responsibility upon
Walker's shoulders. And knowing nothing themselves, they feel that's a
great point; it saves them trouble and salves their consciences."
A new idea seemed to cross Tyrrel's mind. He leant forward suddenly.
"But as to safety," he asked, with some anxiety, "viewed as a matter of
life and death, I mean? Which of these two viaducts is likely to last
longest, to be freest from danger, to give rise in the end to least and
fewest accidents?"
"Why, your friend Le Neve's, of course," the millionaire answered,
without a moment's hesitation.
"You think so?"
"I don't think so at all, my dear fellow, I know it. I'm sure of it.
Look here," and he pulled out a design from a pigeon-hole in his desk;
"this is in confidence, you understand. I oughtn't to show it to you;
but I can trust your honor. Here's Walker's idea. It isn't an idea at
all, in fact, it's just the ordinary old stone viaduct, with the
ordinary dangers, and the ordinary iron girders--nothing in any way new
or original. It's respectable mediocrity. On an affair like that, and
with this awkward curve, too, just behind taking-off point, the
liability to accident is considerably greater than in a construction
like Le Neve's, where nothing's left to chance, and where every source
of evil, such as land-springs, or freshets, or weakening, or
concussion, is considered beforehand and successfully provided against.
If a company only thought of the lives and limbs of its
passengers--which it never does, of course--and had a head on its
shoulders, which it seldom possesses, Le Neve's is undoubtedly the
design it would adopt in the interests of security."
Tyrrel drew a long breath. "And you know all this," he said, "and yet
you won't say a word for Le Neve to the directors. A recommendation
from YOU, you see--"
Sir Edward shrugged his shoulders. "Impossible!" he answered, at once.
"It would be a great breach of confidence. Remember, Walker showed me
his design as a friend, and after having looked at it I couldn't go
right off and say to Stillingfleet, 'I've seen Walker's plans, and also
another fellow's, and I advise you, for my part, not to take my
friend's.' It wouldn't be gentlemanly."
Tyrrel paused and reflected. He saw the dilemma. And yet, what was the
breach of confidence or of etiquette to the deadly peril to life and
limb involved in choosing the worst design instead of the better one?
It was a hard nut to crack. He could see no way out of it.
"Besides," Sir Edward went on, musingly, "even if I told them they
wouldn't believe me. Whatever Walker sends in they're sure to accept
it. They've more confidence, I feel sure, in Walker than in anybody."
A light broke in on Walter Tyrrel's mind.
"Then the only way," he said, looking up, "would be ... to work upon
Walker; induce him NOT to send in, if that can be managed."
"But it can't be," Sir Edward answered, with brisk promptitude.
"Walker's a money-grubbing chap. If he sees a chance of making a few
thousands more anywhere, depend upon it he'll make 'em. He's a martyr
to money, he is. He toils and slaves for L. s. d. {money} all his life.
He has no other interests."
"What can he want with it?" Tyrrel exclaimed. "He's a bachelor, isn't
he, without wife or child? What can a man like that want to pile up
filthy lucre for?"
"Can't say, I'm sure," Sir Edward answered, good humoredly. "I have my
quiver full of them myself, and every guinea I get I find three of my
children are quarreling among themselves for ten and sixpence apiece of
it. But what Walker can want with money heaven only knows. If _I_ were
a bachelor, now, and had an estate of my own in Cornwall, say, or
Devonshire, I'm sure I don't know what I'd do with my income."
Tyrrel rose abruptly. The chance words had put an idea into his head.
"What's Walker's address?" he asked, in a very curt tone.
Sir Edward gave it him.
"You'll find him a tough nut, though," he added, with a smile, as he
followed the enthusiastic young Cornishman to the door. "But I see
you're in earnest. Good luck go with you!"