Demelza (7 page)

Ross nodded and stared at the people moving in and out of the inn. A blind man was feeling his way towards the bar.

'There are two ways to combat the evil.'

Blewett grasped at the implication of hope. 'What do you suggest?'

'I'd suggest what is not possible. The copper companies never hurt themselves by competitive bidding. Well, if the mines were in similar unity they could withhold supplies until the copper companies were prepared to pay more. After all, they cannot live without us; we are the producers.'

'Yes, yes. I see what you mean. Go on.'

At that moment a man passed the low window of the inn and turned in at the door. Ross's thoughts were on what he had been saying, and for some moments the familiar stocky figure and slightly wide-legged walk made no mark in his mind. Then he was jerked into attention. The last time he had seen the man was years ago riding up the valley out of Nampara after his fight with Francis, whilst Verity stood and watched him go.

Ross lowered his head and stared at the table.

Between his eyes and the table top - as if he had been staring at the sun - was the visual image of what he had just seen. Fine blue coat, neat black cravat, lace at sleeves; stocky and rather impressive - the face was different, though; the lines deeper about the mouth, the mouth itself was tighter as if for ever held in, and the eyes full of self-assertion.

He did not look either way but went straight through into one of the parlours. A fortunate escape.

'What we need, Captain Poldark, is a leader,' said Blewett eagerly. A man of position who is upright and confident and can act for us all. A man, if I may say so, such as yourself.'

'Eh?' said Ross.

'I trust you will pardon the suggestion. But in the mining world it is everyone for himself and Devil take your neighbour. We need a leader who can bind men together and help them to fight as a body. Competition is very well when the industry is booming, but we cannot afford it at times like these. The copper companies are rapacious - there is no other word. Look at the waste allowance they demand. If we could get a leader, Captain Poldark...'

Ross listened with fitful attention. 'What is your other suggestion?'

Blewett asked. 'My suggestion?'

'You said there were two ways of combating the evil of our present conditions…'

'The other solution would be for the mines to form a copper company of their own - one which would purchase the ore, build a smelting works close at hand and refine and sell their own products.'

Blewett tapped his fingers nervously on the table.

'You mean - to – to…'

'To create a company which would bid independently and keep its profits for the men who run the mines. At present what profits there are go to South Wales or into the hands of merchants like the Warleggans, who have a finger in every pie.'

Blewett shook his head. 'It would take a large amount of capital. I wish it had been possible '

'Not more capital than there was, than perhaps there is; but far more unity of purpose.'

'It would be a splendid thing to do,' said Blewett. 'Captain Poldark, you have, if I may say so, the character to lead and to create unity. The companies would fight to squeeze the newcomer out, but it - it would be a hope and an encouragement for many who see nothing but ruin staring them in the face.'

Desperation had given Harry Blewett a touch of eloquence. Ross listened half in scepticism, half seriously. His own suggestions had become more clearly defined as he made them. But he certainly did not see himself in the role of leader of the Cornish mining interests. Knowing his men, their independence, their obstinate resistance to all new ideas, he could see what a tremendous effort would be needed to get anything started at all.

They sipped brandy over it for some time, Blewett seeming to find some comfort in the idle talk. His fears were the less for having been aired. Ross listened with an ear and an eye for Andrew Blamey.

It was nearly time to leave - Demelza, sorely stricken, having been persuaded overnight to go on with her second party. Blewett brought another man to the table, William Aukett, manager of a mine in the Ponsanooth Valley. Eagerly Blewett explained the idea to him. Aukett, a canny man with a cast in one eye, said there was no question but that it might save the industry 'but where was the capital coming from except through the banks, which were tied up with the copper companies?' Ross, driven a little to defend his own idea, said well, there were influential people outside the copper companies. But of course this was no seeking venture that could be floated for five or six hundred. Thirty thousand pounds might be nearer the figure before it was ended - with huge profits or a complete loss as the outcome. One had to see it on the right scale before one could begin to see it at all.

These comments, far from depressing Blewett, seemed to increase his eagerness; but just as he had taken out a sheet of soiled paper and was going to call for pen and ink a crash shook the pewter on the walls of the room and stilled the murmur of voices throughout the inn.

Out of the silence came the sound of someone scrambling on the floor in the next parlour. There was a scurry of feet and the flash of a red waistcoat as the innkeeper went quickly into the room.

'This is no place for brawling, sir. There's always trouble when you come in. I'll have no more of it. I'll . . I'll…'

The voice gave out. Another's took its place, Andrew Blamey's, in anger. He came out, ploughing his way through those who had crowded to the door. He was not drunk. Ross wondered if drink ever had been his real trouble. Blamey knew a stronger master: his own temper.

Francis and Charles and his own early judgment had been right after all. To give the generous softhearted Verity to such a man…

Demelza must be told of this. It would put a stop to her pestering.

'I know him,' Aukett said. 'He's master of the Caroline, a brig on Falmouth-Lisbon packet service. He drives his men; they say too he murdered his wife and children, though in that case how it comes that he is at large I do not know.'

'He quarrelled with his wife and knocked her down when she was with child,' Ross said. 'She died. His two children were not concerned in it, so far as I am informed.'

They stared at him a moment.

'It's said he has quarrelled with everyone in Falmouth,' Aukett observed. 'For my part I avoid the man. I think he has a tormented look.'

Ross went to get his mare, which he had left today at the Fighting Cocks Inn. He saw nothing more of Blamey, but his way took him past the Warleggans' town house and he was held up for a moment by the sight of the Warleggan carriage drawing up outside their door. It was a magnificent vehicle made of rich polished wood with green and white wheels and drawn by four fine grey horses. There was a postillion, a driver and a footman, all in green and white livery, smarter than any owned by a Boscawen or a de Dunstanville.

The footman leapt down to open the door. Out of the carriage stepped George's mother, fat and middle-aged, wreathed in lace and silks but personally overshadowed by all the finery. The door of the big house came open and more footmen stood there to welcome her in. Passers-by stopped to stare. The house swallowed her. The magnificent carriage drove on. Ross was not a man who would have gone in for display had he been able to afford it; but the contrast struck him today with special irony. It was not so much that the Warleggans could afford a carriage with four horses while he could not buy a second horse for the necessary business of life, but that these merchant bankers and iron masters, sprung from illiteracy in two generations, could maintain their full prosperity in the middle of a slump, while worthy men like Blewett and Aukett - and hundreds of others - faced ruin.

THE SECOND CHRISTENING party went off without a hitch. The miners and small holders and their wives had no mental reserves about enjoying themselves. It was Sawle Feast anyway, and if they had not been invited here most of them would have spent the afternoon in Sawle dancing or playing games or sitting in one of the kiddleys getting drunk.

The first half-hour at Nampara was a little constrained while the guests still remembered they were in superior company; but very soon the shyness wore off.

This was a summer feast in the old style, with no newfangled dainties to embarrass anyone. Demelza and Verity and Prudie had been working on it from early morning. Huge beef pies had been made: repeated layers of pastry and beef laid on top of each other in great dishes with cream poured over. Four green geese and twelve fine capons had been roasted; cakes made as big as millstones. There was bee wine and home-brewed ale and cider and port. Ross had reckoned on five quarts of cider for each man and three for each woman, and he thought that this would just be enough.

After the meal everyone went out on the lawn, where there were races for the women, a Maypole for the children and various games, drop the handkerchief, hunt the slipper, blind man's buff, and a wrestling competition for the men. After some bouts, the final match was between the two Daniel brothers, Mark and Paul, and Mark won, as was expected of him. Demelza presented him with a bright red kerchief. Then, having worked off some of their dinner, they were all invited in again to drink tea and eat heavy cake and saffron cake and ginger breads.

The event of the evening was the visit of the travelling players. In Redruth the week before Ross had seen a tattered handbill nailed on a door, announcing that the Aaron Otway Players would visit the town that week to give a fine repertory of musical and sensational plays both ancient and modern.

He had found the leader of the company in the larger of the two shabby caravans in which they travelled and had engaged him to do a play in the library at Nampara on the following Wednesday. The lumber in the library had been moved to one end, the half-derelict room brushed out and planks put across boxes for the audience to sit on. The stage was defined by a few pieces of curtain cord tied together and stretched across the end of the room.

They performed
Eliria
, or
The Lost Wife
, a tragedy, by Johnson Hill, and afterwards a comic play called The
Slaughter House
. Jud Paynter stood at one side and came forward to snuff the candles when they grew too smoky.

To the country people it had all the thrill and glamour of Drury Lane. There were seven in the company; a mixed bag of semigipsies, ham actors and travelling singers. Aaron Otway, the leader, a fat sharp-nosed man with a glass eye, had all the showmanship of a huckster, and spoke the prologue and the entr 'acte through his nose with tremendous gusto; he also acted the crippled father and the murderer, for which last part he wore a black cape, an eye shade and a heavy black periwig. His time, like his cup later in the evening, was well filled. The heroine's part was played by a blonde woman of forty-five with a goitrous neck and large bejewelled hands; but the best actress of the company was a dark pretty slant-eyed girl of about nineteen, who acted the daughter with an unconvincing demureness and a woman of the streets with notable success.

Ross thought that with proper training she would go far. The chances were that neither opportunity nor training would come her way and that she would end up as a drab lurking at street corners or hang from a gibbet for stealing a gentleman's watch.

But other notions flickered through the head of a man sitting near. The gaunt Mark Daniel, tall and long-backed and powerful, was thirty, and never in his life had he seen anything to compare with this girl. She was so slender, so sleek, so glistening, so dainty, the way she stood on her toes, the way she bent her neck, her soft sibilant singing, the ochreous candle-reflecting glint of her dark eyes. To him there was nothing facile in her demureness. The smoky light showed up the soft young curve of her cheeks, the cheap gaudy costumes were exotic and unreal. She looked different from all other women, as if she came from a purer finer breed. He sat there unspeaking through the play and the singing which followed, his black Celtic eyes never leaving her when she was to be seen and staring vacantly at the back cloth when she had gone behind it.

After the play was over and drinks had gone all round, Will Nanfan got out his fiddle, Nick Vigus his flute and Pally Rogers his serpent. The benches were pushed back to the walls and dancing begun. These were not graceful restrained minuets but the full-blooded dances of the English countryside. They danced 'Cuckolds All Awry,' 'All in a Garden Green' and 'An Old Man's a Bedful of Bones.' Then someone proposed 'The Cushion Dance.' A young man began by dancing round the room with a cushion, until after a while he stopped and sang 'This dance I will no farther go,' to which the three musicians replied in chorus, 'I pray ee, good sir, why say so?' Then the dancer sang, 'Because Betty Prowse will not come to,' and the musicians shouted back, 'She must come to whether she will or no.' Then the man laid his cushion before the girl, she knelt on his cushion and he kissed her. After that they had to circle the room hand in hand singing, 'Prinkum, prankum, is a fine dance, an' shall us go dance it over again.' Then it was the girl's turn.

All went well and fun was fast until the old people were drawn in. Then Zacky Martin, intent on mischief, called out Aunt Betsy Triggs. Aunt Betsy, known for a comic when she got going, danced round with Zacky with a great flutter of skirts as if she was sixteen, not sixty-five. When it came to her turn to go alone she made a war dance of it, and at length she stopped at the end of the room. There was a great roar of laughter, for only one man was sitting there.

'This dance I will no farther go,' she screeched. 'I pray ee, good ma'am, why say so?' shouted everybody in reply. 'Because Jud Paynter will not come to!' said Aunt Betsy. Another roar and then everybody chorused: 'He must come to, whether he will or no!'

There was a sudden scuffle and shouts of laughter as several men pounced on Jud just as he was going to sneak away. Protesting and struggling he was brought to the cushion; he would not kneel so they sat him on it. Then Aunt Betsy flung her arms round his neck and kissed him lavishly - so lavishly that he overbalanced and they both went rolling on the floor together, boots and skirts flying. After more uproar they got to their feet and circled the room together, Jud sheepishly joining in the rest, his bloodshot bulldog eyes half peevish, half wily. It was now his choice. Even with Prudie watching it was still his choice, and she could do nothing, it being only a game.