Kindling by Nevil Shute Page A

it’s better to face up to the facts.” He considered for a minute, and then said, “If prosperity comes back to the country, as I think it will, I’m afraid Sharples will be left behind. It’s five years now since your shipyard closed down, since your mine stopped and the rolling-mills. Your executives have gone to other jobs, and your workmen have grown weak and flabby on outdoor relief. If you got a ship to build now, at a bumper price, you couldn’t build it profitably, or complete it to time. And it’s the same in the plate mills, and the mine.”
    “You don’t think any work will come back here when shipbuilding revives?”
    “It depends on the extent of the revival. Another war might do it. Nothing less.”
    “Well,” said the surgeon at last, a little heavily, “as you say, it’s better to have the truth.” He glanced again at Warren. “I have always understood that you people in the City controlled industry,” he said. “That you moved companies and businesses about like chessmen. I’ve seen a great deal in the papers about the banks assisting industry. Don’t they assist places like Sharples?
    “This place built fine ships once, and not so long ago,” he said. “There were seven Barlow destroyers at the Battle of Jutland. Seven, no less.”
    “I have heard that,” said Warren gravely. “It’s very creditable.
    “What you say about the City is only partly true,” he said. “People deposit money in the banks, or lend it out to companies, and our job is to see that that money is kept reasonably safe. That is what we call legitimate business. In this case, to give ships out to be built in Sharples would entail a risk of non-completion or bad work that nobody would dare to take.”
    “I quite understand,” said the surgeon.
    Warren rose to take his leave. “I am afraid that I see nothing whatsoever to be done for Sharples,” he said evenly. “Legitimately, that is to say …”
    He turned to the other. “It has been so kind of you …” he said formally. They walked together to the door.
    “I’ll let you know when our wireless installation is complete,” said Dr. Miller. They said good-bye, and he closed his door again, and turned back to the consulting room. There he stood for a long time fingering two cheques. He wore the expression of a man who at the age of fifty-six no longer believes in fairies, and has received indisputable proof of their existence.
    Warren sat in the train till evening, as it roared the length of England down to London. He was alone in his compartment; most of the time he lay in one corner, motionless, staring out of the window. It seemed to him that he had come to one of the turning points in his life, in his career. He knew what he was going back to. He was returning to the work that he had been doing for the last fifteen years, with the distinction that now he would have to live in chambers, quite alone. He was already a wealthy man; he would go on working, making more money, because that was the only interesthe knew. He felt that before long that interest would desert him. It would be difficult to keep an interest in the work if he were working only for himself …
    Of course, he might marry again after his divorce. That might be. But next time, he would marry somebody who knew the discipline of work.
    Darlington swept past him, and Northallerton; he passed through York. With every mile that took him south he grew a little more depressed; it seemed to him that he was leaving a place where people had been kind to him, to go back to an empty life of nothing but his work. He felt that the people he had known in Sharples needed him, and that he was running away back to his own life. He had given them several hundred pounds; surely that was enough to quiet the conscience of anyone but a fool. But it wasn’t.
    He passed through Doncaster. There were fifty acres of the shipyard, more or less—one wouldn’t give a bean more than five thousand pounds for