Three days before the christening there had been a stormy meeting of the Wheal Leisure venturers at which Ross and Dr. Choake had again gotten at loggerheads, Ross being all for development—Choake called it gambling—and Choake for consolidation—Ross called it obstruction—and the argument had ended by Ross’s offering to purchase Choake’s share of the mine for three times what he had put in. With great dignity, Choake had accepted, so the morning after the christening, Ross rode in to Truro to see his banker about raising the money.
Harris Pascoe, a little ageless man with steel spectacles and a stammer, confirmed the view that the mortgage on Nampara could be raised to cover it but thought the purchase fantastically unbusinesslike at the price. Copper was at seventy-one, and no one knew where it would end. There was a good deal of bitterness felt for the smelting companies, but what could you expect when often the metal had to lie idle for months before a buyer could be found? Ross liked Harris Pascoe and saw no point in arguing his own side of the case.
On his way out of the house he passed a young man whose face was known to him. He raised his hat and would have passed on, but the man stopped.
“How d’you do, Captain Poldark. It was kind of you to have me yesterday. I’m a stranger in these parts and appreciated your welcome.”
Dwight Enys, whom Joan Pascoe had brought to the party. He had a good head and face; a look of courage strengthened the boyish turn of his cheek and jaw. Ross had never quite passed through that stage. He had gone to America a lanky youth and come back a war veteran.
“Your name suggests a local connection.”
“I have second cousins here, sir, but one does not always wish to presume on relationship. My father came from Penzance, and I have been in London studying medicine.”
“Is it your intention to go in for the profession?”
“I graduated as a physician early this year. But living in London is expensive. I thought to settle in this neighborhood for a time to go on with my studies and to keep myself by taking a few patients.”
“If your interest is in undernourishment or miners’ complaints you will have subjects for your study.”
Enys looked surprised. “Has someone told you?”
“No one has told me anything.”
“It is the lungs really. It seemed to me that if one was to practice at the same time, the proper place was among a mining community where consumption of the lungs is widespread.”
The young man was losing his shyness.
“In the matter of fever too. There is so very much to be learned and experimented on… But no doubt I bore you, sir. I am inclined to run on…”
Ross said, “The surgeons I know are much more prone to talk of their successes in the hunting field. We must speak of it again.”
After going a few paces, he stopped and called Enys back.
“Where do you intend to live?”
“I am staying with the Pascoes for a month. I shall try to take a small house somewhere between here and Chacewater. There is no other medical man in that vicinity.”
Ross said, “You know, perhaps, that I am interested in a mine that you may have seen from my house yesterday?”
“I did notice something. But no, I hadn’t heard…”
“The post of mine surgeon is at present vacant. I think I could get it for you if you were interested. It is very small of course—about eighty men at present—but it would bring you in some fourteen shillings a week and you would gain the experience.”
Dwight Enys’s face flushed with pleasure and embarrassment.
“I hope you did not think…”
“If I thought that I should not have suggested it.”
“It would be a great help to me. That kind of work is what I wish. But…the distance would be considerable.”
“I take it you have not settled on a house. There is scope in our neighborhood.”
“Is there not a surgeon of some repute?”
“Choake? Oh, there’s room enough. He has private means and doesn’t overwork. But think of it and let me know what you decide.”
“Thank you, sir. You’re very kind.”
And if he’s any good, Ross thought as he turned out into the street, I’ll see if he can do something for Jim when he comes out, for Choake could not have done less. Carter had been in prison over a year, and since he had somehow survived in spite of his morbid lung there seemed a hope that he would live through the next ten months and be restored to Jinny and his family. Ross had seen him in January and found him thin and weak, but, for prison life, conditions in Bodmin were supportable. Jinny and her father, Zacky Martin, had seen him twice, walking in one day and back the next, but twenty-six miles each way was too much for a girl who was still nursing her baby. He thought he would take her in himself sometime.
The quarrel with Choake would leave him irritatingly short of money just when he had begun to see his way clear to spend more on the luxuries of life. The necessities too, for he badly needed another horse. And the birth of Julia had involved him in fresh expense that he could not avoid and did not want to avoid.
He was annoyed with himself for having been so reckless.
He turned in at the Red Lion Inn, which was crowded, and chose a seat in the recess by the door. But his entry had not been unnoticed, and after the potboy had been by with his order, a discreet footstep sounded nearby.
“Captain Poldark? Good day to you. We do not often see you in town.”
Ross looked up, a not very welcoming expression in his eyes. It was a man named Blewett, manager and part shareholder in Wheal Maid, one of the copper mines of the Idless Valley.
“No. I have no time to spare except for business visits.”
“May I sit with you? The wool merchants in the parlor have no interest for me. Thank you. I see the price of copper has fallen again.”
“So I have just learned.”
“It must stop soon or we shall all be in bankruptcy.”
“No one deplores that more than I,” said Ross, reluctantly finding common cause with the man whom he disliked only for breaking into his private thoughts.
“One hopes for almost anything to stop the downward trend,” Blewett said, setting down his glass and moving restlessly. “We have lost eight hundred pounds in trading this year. It is a big sum for people like ourselves.”
Ross glanced up again. He saw that Blewett was really worried; there were dark pouches under his eyes, and his mouth sagged. Before him—and not far away—was the debtors’ prison and starvation for his family. It was that which had made him risk the rebuff of a man who had a reputation for being unapproachable. Perhaps he had just come from a meeting with his fellow venturers and felt he must talk or suffocate.
“I don’t think conditions can remain long as they are,” Ross said. “There is an increasing use of copper in engines of all kinds. As the towns use more the price will recover.”
“On a long view you may be right, but unhappily we are all committed to a short-term payment of loan interest. We have to sell the ore addle cheap to exist at all. If the copper and smelting companies were honestly run we might eke out this bad period. But what chance have we today?”
“I don’t think it can be to the interest of the smelters to keep the prices down,” Ross said.
“Not the market price, no, sir, but the price they pay us. It’s all a ring, Captain Poldark, and we know it,” Blewett said. “What chance have we of getting fair returns where the companies do not bid one against another!”
Ross nodded and stared at the people moving in and out of the inn. A blind man was feeling his way toward 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 before, riding up the valley out of Nampara after his fight with Francis, while Verity stood and watched him go.
Ross lowered his head and stared at the table.
Between his eyes and the tabletop—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 forever held in, and the eyes full of self-assertion.
He did not look either way but went straight through into one of the parlors. 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 neighbor. 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 that 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 that 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 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 that 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.
Those 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 parlor. 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, plowing 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. It would put a stop to her pestering.
“I know him,” Aukett said. “He’s master of the Caroline, a brig on the 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 quarreled 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 quarreled 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 at the Fighting Cock’s 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 gray 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 leaped 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. Passersby 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 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 those merchant bankers and ironmasters, 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.