THE BRIDGE BUILDERS
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he least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department, expectedwas a C.I.E.; he dreamed of a C.S.I.: indeed his friends told him thathe deserved more. For three years he had endured heat and cold,disappointment, discomfort, danger, and disease, with responsibilityalmost too heavy for one pair of shoulders; and day by day, throughthat time, the great Kashi Bridge over the Ganges had grown under hischarge. Now, in less than three months, if all went well, HisExcellency the Viceroy would open the bridge in state, an archbishopwould bless it, the first train-load of soldiers would come over it,and there would be speeches. Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction-line that ranalong one of the main revetments--the huge, stone-faced banks that flaredaway north and south for three miles on either side of the river--andpermitted himself to think of the end. With its approaches, his work wasone mile and three-quarters in length; a lattice-girder bridge, trussedwith the Findlayson truss, standing on seven-and-twenty brick piers. Eachone of those piers was twenty-four feet in diameter, capped with red Agrastone and sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the Ganges' bed.Above them ran the railway-line fifteen feet broad; above that, again, acart-road of eighteen feet, flanked with footpaths. At either end rosetowers of red brick, loopholed for musketry and pierced for big guns, andthe ramp of the road was being pushed forward to their haunches. The rawearth-ends were crawling and alive with hundreds upon hundreds of tinyasses climbing out of the yawning borrow-pit below with sackfuls of stuff;and the hot afternoon air was filled with the noise of hooves, the rattleof the drivers' sticks, and the swish and roll-down of the dirt. The riverwas very low, and on the dazzling white sand between the three centrepiers stood squat cribs of railway-sleepers, filled within and daubedwithout with mud, to support the last of the girders as those were rivetedup. In the little deep water left by the drought, an overhead-cranetravelled to and fro along its spile-pier, jerking sections of iron intoplace, snorting and backing and grunting as an elephant grunts in thetimber-yard. Riveters by the hundred swarmed about the lattice side-workand the iron roof of the railway-line, hung from invisible staging underthe bellies of the girders, clustered round the throats of the piers, androde on the overhang of the footpath-stanchions; their fire-pots and thespurts of flame that answered each hammer-stroke showing no more than paleyellow in the sun's glare. East and west and north and south theconstruction-trains rattled and shrieked up and down the embankments, thepiled trucks of brown and white stone banging behind them till theside-boards were unpinned, and with a roar and a grumble a few thousandtons more material were thrown out to hold the river in place. Findlayson, C. E., turned on his trolley and looked over the face of thecountry that he had changed for seven miles around. Looked back on thehumming village of five thousand workmen; up stream and down, along thevista of spurs and sand; across the river to the far piers, lessening inthe haze; overhead to the guard-towers--and only he knew how strong thosewere--and with a sigh of contentment saw that his work was good. Therestood his bridge before him in the sunlight, lacking only a few weeks'work on the girders of the three middle piers--his bridge, raw and ugly asoriginal sin, but _pukka_--permanent--to endure when all memory of thebuilder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson truss, had perished.Practically, the thing was done. Hitchcock, his assistant, cantered along the line on a littleswitch-tailed Kabuli pony, who, through long practice, could havetrotted securely over a trestle, and nodded to his chief. "All but," said he, with a smile. "I've been thinking about it," the senior answered, "Not half a badjob for two men, is it?" "One--and a half. 'Gad, what a Cooper's Hillcub I was when I came on the works!" Hitchcock felt very old in thecrowded experiences of the past three years, that had taught him powerand responsibility. "You _were_ rather a colt," said Findlayson. "I wonder how you'll likegoing back to office work when this job's over." "I shall hate it!" said the young man, and as he went on his eyefollowed Findlayson's, and he muttered, "Is n't it good?" "I think we'll go up the service together," Findlayson said tohimself. "You're too good a youngster to waste on another man. Cubthou wast; assistant thou art. Personal assistant, and at Simla, thoushalt be, if any credit comes to me out of the business!" Indeed, the burden of the work had fallen altogether on Findlayson andhis assistant, the young man whom he had chosen because of his rawnessto break to his own needs. There were labour-contractors by thehalf-hundred--fitters and riveters, European, borrowed from therailway workshops, with perhaps twenty white and half-castesubordinates to direct, under direction, the bevies of workmen--butnone knew better than these two, who trusted each other, how theunderlings were not to be trusted. They had been tried many times insudden crises--by slipping of booms, by breaking of tackle, failureof cranes, and the wrath of the river--but no stress had brought tolight any man among them whom Findlayson and Hitchcock would havehonoured by working as remorselessly as they worked themselves.Findlayson thought it over from the beginning: the months of officework destroyed at a blow when the Government of India, at the lastmoment, added two feet to the width of the bridge, under theimpression that bridges were cut out of paper, and so brought to ruinat least half an acre of calculations--and Hitchcock, new todisappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; theheart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in England;the futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of commission ifone, only one, rather doubtful consignment were passed; the war thatfollowed the refusal; the careful, polite obstruction at the other endthat followed the war, till young Hitchcock, putting one month's leaveto another month, and borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent hispoor little savings of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, ashis own tongue asserted, and the later consignments proved, put theFear of God into a man so great that he feared only Parliament, andsaid so till Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner-table,and--he feared the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Thenthere was the cholera that came in the night to the village by thebridge-works; and after the cholera smote the small-pox. The feverthey had always with them. Hitchcock had been appointed a magistrateof the third class with whipping powers, for the better government ofthe community, and Findlayson watched him wield his powerstemperately, learning what to overlook and what to look after. It wasa long, long reverie, and it covered storm, sudden freshets, death inevery manner and shape, violent and awful rage against red tape halffrenzying a mind that knows it should be busy on other things;drought, sanitation, finance; birth, wedding, burial, and riot in thevillage of twenty warring castes; argument, expostulation, persuasion,and the blank despair that a man goes to bed upon, thankful that hisrifle is all in pieces in the gun-case. Behind everything rose theblack frame of the Kashi Bridge--plate by plate, girder by girder,span by span--and each pier of it recalled Hitchcock, the all-roundman, who had stood by his chief without failing from the very first tothis last. So the bridge was two men's work--unless one counted Peroo,as Peroo certainly counted himself. He was a lascar, a Kharva fromBulsar, familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London, whohad risen to the rank of serang on the British India boats, butwearying of routine musters and clean clothes, had thrown up theservice and gone inland, where men of his calibre were sure ofemployment. For his knowledge of tackle and the handling of heavyweights, Peroo was worth almost any price he might have chosen to putupon his services; but custom decreed the wage of the overhead-men,and Peroo was not within many silver pieces of his proper value.Neither running water nor extreme heights made him afraid; and, as anex-serang, he knew how to hold authority. No piece of iron was so bigor so badly placed that Peroo could not devise a tackle to lift it--aloose-ended, sagging arrangement, rigged with a scandalous amount oftalking, but perfectly equal to the work in hand. It was Peroo who hadsaved the girder of Number Seven Pier from destruction when the newwire rope jammed in the eye of the crane, and the huge plate tilted inits slings, threatening to slide out sideways. Then the native workmenlost their heads with great shoutings, and Hitchcock's right arm wasbroken by a falling T-plate, and he buttoned it up in his coat andswooned, and came to and directed for four hours till Peroo, from thetop of the crane reported, "All's well," and the plate swung home.There was no one like Peroo, serang, to lash and guy and hold, tocontrol the donkey-engines, to hoist a fallen locomotive craftily outof the borrow-pit into which it had tumbled; to strip and dive, ifneed be, to see how the concrete blocks round the piers stood thescouring of Mother Gunga, or to adventure up-stream on a monsoon nightand report on the state of the embankment-facings. He would interruptthe field-councils of Findlayson and Hitchcock without fear, till hiswonderful English, or his still more wonderful _lingua-franca_, halfPortuguese and half Malay, ran out and he was forced to take stringand show the knots that he would recommend. He controlled his own gangof tacklemen--mysterious relatives from Kutch Mandvi gathered month bymonth and tried to the uttermost. No consideration of family or kinallowed Peroo to keep weak hands or a giddy head on the pay-roll. "Myhonour is the honour of this bridge," he would say to the about-to-bedismissed. "What do I care for your honour? Go and work on a steamer.That is all you are fit for." The little cluster of huts where he and his gang lived centred roundthe tattered dwelling of a sea-priest--one who had never set foot onBlack Water, but had been chosen as ghostly counsellor by twogenerations of sea-rovers, all unaffected by port missions or thosecreeds which are thrust upon sailors by agencies along Thames' bank.The priest of the lascars had nothing to do with their caste, orindeed with anything at all. He ate the offerings of his church, andslept and smoked, and slept again, "for," said Peroo, who had haledhim a thousand miles inland, "he is a very holy man. He never careswhat you eat so long as you do not eat beef, and that is good, becauseon land we worship Shiva, we Kharvas; but at sea on the Kumpani'sboats we attend strictly to the orders of the Burra Malum (the firstmate), and on this bridge we observe what Finlinson Sahib says." Findlayson Sahib had that day given orders to clear the scaffoldingfrom the guard-tower on the right bank, and Peroo with his mates wascasting loose and lowering down the bamboo poles and planks as swiftlyas ever they had whipped the cargo out of a coaster. From his trolley he could hear the whistle of the serang's silver pipeand the creak and clatter of the pulleys. Peroo was standing on thetopmost coping of the tower, clad in the blue dungaree of hisabandoned service, and as Findlayson motioned to him to be careful,for his was no life to throw away, he gripped the last pole, and,shading his eyes ship-fashion, answered with the long-drawn wail ofthe fo'c'sle lookout: "_Ham dekhta hai_" ("I am looking out").Findlayson laughed, and then sighed. It was years since he had seen asteamer, and he was sick for home. As his trolley passed under thetower, Peroo descended by a rope, ape-fashion, and cried: "It lookswell now, Sahib. Our bridge is all but done. What think you MotherGunga will say when the rail runs over?" "She has said little so far. It was never Mother Gunga that delayedus." "There is always time for her; and none the less there has been delay.Has the Sahib forgotten last autumn's flood, when the stone-boatswere sunk without warning--or only a half-day's warning?" "Yes, but nothing save a big flood could hurt us now. The spurs areholding well on the west bank." "Mother Gunga eats great allowances. There is always room for morestone on the revetments. I tell this to the Chota Sahib"--he meantHitchcock--"and he laughs." "No matter, Peroo. Another year thou wilt be able to build a bridge inthine own fashion." The lascar grinned. "Then it will not be in this way--with stoneworksunk under water, as the _Quetta_ was sunk. I like sus-sus-pen-sheenbridges that fly from bank to bank, with one big step, like agang-plank. Then no water can hurt. When does the Lord Sahib come toopen the bridge?" "In three months, when the weather is cooler." "Ho! ho! He is like the Burra Malum. He sleeps below while the work isbeing done. Then he comes upon the quarter-deck and touches with hisfinger and says: 'This is not clean! Jiboon-wallah!'" "But the Lord Sahib does not call me a jiboon-wallah, Peroo." "No, Sahib; but he does not come on deck till the work is allfinished. Even the Burra Malum of the _Nerbudda_ said once atTuticorin----" "Bah! Go! I am busy." "I, also!" said Peroo, with an unshaken countenance. "May I take thelight dinghy now and row along the spurs?" "To hold them with thy hands? They are, I think, sufficiently heavy." "Nay, Sahib. It is thus. At sea, on the Black Water, we have room tobe blown up and down without care. Here we have no room at all. Lookyou, we have put the river into a dock, and run her between stonesills."
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