第61章 The Forty Miles

The porch meeting was held on the Friday, as summoned, and it was full to the churchyard wall, because a parish that has once heard its own affairs read out in London does not readily go back to not knowing them. Arthur stood on the step where judgments were read and funerals mustered, with the printed bill in his hand, and Hollis beside him with the bill's maps unrolled upon two boards borrowed from the Academy, and he did what the trustees had learned to do first in every fight of five years: he told the people plainly what was proposed, before any man could tell them something else. "It is called a mineral railway," he said, "and a railway is what it will be — forty miles of it, laid along the escarpment from the north country down to the canal basin at Westfield, carrying coal from Lord Verrall's pits to the water. That much is honest, and no one in this vale need quarrel with a line that passes ten miles east of us. But hear the rest. The bill asks Parliament for standing powers — powers that live as long as the company lives — to work, drain, and convey minerals under any land within two miles of that line. Not to buy the land. To work under it." He let the boards be turned while he spoke, and Marie's senior form, who had drawn the two-mile boundary overnight from their own survey, had shaded the swept area in blue so that no one should mistake it. The blue came down the escarpment like a tide and took the common, the eastern lane, the village, the Academy, the river meadows, and the park at Ashworth itself. "Gentlemen," Arthur said, into the silence, "there is our valley inside their two miles, all of it, and the words *drain* is doing more work in that clause than all the others put together." It was Clegg — Will Clegg, honest still, and therefore more dangerous to himself than to anyone else — who put the other case from the back of the press, as he had put it in December, and deserved his hearing again. "A station at Westfield is wages walking about in boots," he said. "And yon blue ink is only ink until the act passes, and maybe after it too, for companies are slow to dig under parishes that hate them. I say look before we spend the trust's money fighting paper." "We have looked," said Thomas Gillingwater, without raising his voice at all, which in that assembly carried further than shouting. "We looked in April when the wells fell, and in November when they soured, and in March when the lane flooded to a goose's middle. Every time we looked, Mr. Clegg, it was a boring rod or a borehead collar at the bottom of what we saw. I am done with looking at rods through fences. This bill is four hundred rods with an Act of Parliament tied to their heads." Hollis spoke last, and briefly, because his trade was not oratory but arithmetic, and he gave the porch the arithmetic whole. A private bill died of two things: evidence, and expense. They could not choose the first without choosing the second. Counsel, agents, witnesses brought up from Cornwall, printing, the attendance of thirty tenants in London through a summer — the campaign would cost upwards of three thousand pounds before the committee room was reached, against a fund settled for drainage, schoolrooms, and relief. "I will not dress it," he said. "If you instruct the trustees to oppose, this parish pays for its own water twice over — once in money, once in anxiety — and there are men in Lombard Street who have counted our purse to a shilling and built the bill's timetable upon it. They believe you will flinch at the figure. My advice is to make them learn otherwise at their own cost of learning." The vale instructed the trustees to oppose before Hollis had finished sitting down, which he had expected, and Catherine, who had come up from the manor with the estate's check-book in her basket as though attending a birth, said afterward that she had never seen three thousand pounds voted away so quietly nor so unanimously outside a funeral of the war years. Within the fortnight the enemy's answer began, and it was not engines this time but paper. An agent came over the watershed with a gig and a leather case, calling at farms along the ridge with offers of options — small sums signed for now, larger sums promised upon the act — and he was courteous, and he bought dinners at the George, and by Whitsun he had gathered eleven signatures from the outlying holdings whose owners had never drunk of the eastern lane and could not be blamed for pricing rain against rent. Arthur made no threats against the signatories; the trustees had learned that lesson of the counter-petition winter, that a man frightened out of his name keeps his grievance warm for twenty years. Instead Gillingwater chalked the true map upon his tailboard at market — the forty miles, the two miles each side, and within it, in letters a carrier could read at a trot: YOUR WELL IS IN THIS SQUARE — and the option-men found thereafter that the dinners they bought were eaten in a thoughtful quiet. At evening Arthur kept the new ritual the spring had given him. He walked up the drove road alone, sat by the ring of stones while the light failed, laid his hand flat on the rim stone, and counted; and Fenwick, arriving with his watch, counted with him; and the Watch-book at the Academy received the number in a child's careful figures: seven, still seven, steady as anything alive could be. Then Arthur wrote the other entry the week required, under his sister's ruled heading, and it ran: *A bill lies before the House to take from two miles either side of forty miles of rail whatever it finds beneath us. The ground has beaten one company. It must now beat a kingdom of them. We keep the light.* ---