The Day\'s Work Part I

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THE DAY'S WORK - PART I

By RUDYARD KIPLING

CONTENTS

PART I

THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS

A WALKING DELEGATE

THE SHIP THAT FOUND HERSELF

THE TOMB OF HIS ANCESTORS.

THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR- PART I

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR - PART II

THE SON OF HIS FATHER

THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS

The least that Findlayson, of the Public Works Department,
expected was a C.I.E.; he dreamed of a C. S. I. Indeed, his
friends told him that he deserved more. For three years he had
endured heat and cold, disappointment, discomfort, danger, and
disease, with responsibility almost to top-heavy for one pair of
shoulders; and day by day, through that time, the great Kashi
Bridge over the Ganges had grown under his charge. Now, in less
than three months, if all went well, his Excellency the Viceroy
would open the bridge in state, an archbishop would bless it,
and the first trainload of soldiers would come over it, and
there would be speeches.

Findlayson, C. E., sat in his trolley on a construction line that
ran along one of the main revetments - the huge stone-faced
banks that flared away north and south for three miles on either
side of the river and permitted himself to think of the end.
With its approaches, his work was one mile and three-quarters in
length; a lattice~girder bridge, trussed with the Findlayson
truss standing on seven-and-twenty brick piers. Each one of those
piers was twenty-four feet in diameter, capped with red Agra
stone and sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the Ganges'
bed. Above them was a railway-line fifteen feet broad; above
that, again, a cart-road of eighteen feet, flanked with
footpaths. At either end rose towers, of red brick, loopholed
for musketry and pierced for big guns, and the ramp of the road
was being pushed forward to their haunches. The raw earth-ends
were crawling and alive with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny asses
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 rattle of the drivers' sticks, and the swish and
roll-down of the dirt. The river was very low, and on the
dazzling white sand between the three centre piers stood squat
cribs of railway~sleepers, filled within and daubed without with
mud, to support the last of the girders as those were riveted up.
In the little deep water left by the drought, an overhead crane
travelled to and fro along its spile-pier, jerking sections of
iron into place, snorting and backing and grunting as an elephant
grunts in the timberyard. Riveters by the hundred swarmed about
the lattice side-work and the iron roof of the railway line hung
from invisible staging under the bellies of the girders,
clustered round the throats of the piers, and rode on the
overhang
of the footpath-stanchions; their fire-pots and the spurts of
flame that answered each hammer-stroke showing no more than pale
yellow in the sun's glare. East and west and north and south the
construction-trains rattled and shrieked up and down the
embankments, the piled trucks of brown and white stone banging
behind them till the side-boards were unpinned, and with a roar
and a grumble a few thousand tons' more material were flung out
to hold the river in place. Findlayson, C. E., turned on his
trolley and looked over the face of the country that he had
changed for seven miles around. Looked back on the humming
village of five thousand work-men; up stream and down, along the
vista of spurs and sand; across the river to the far piers,
lessening in the haze; overhead to the guard-towers -and only he
knew how strong those were - and with a sigh of contentment saw
that his work was good. There stood 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 as original
sin, but pukka - permanent - to endure when all memory of the
builder, yea, even of the splendid Findlayson truss, has
perished. Practically, the thing was done.

Hitchcock, his assistant, cantered along the line on a little
switch-tailed Kabuli pony who through long practice could have
trotted securely over 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
bad job for two men, is it?"

"One - and a half. 'Gad, what a Cooper's Hill cub I was when I
came on the works!" Hitchcock felt very old in the crowded
experiences of the past three years, that had taught him power
and responsibility.

"You were rather a colt," said Findlayson. "I wonder how you'll
like going back to office-work when this job's over."

"I shall hate it!" said the young man, and as he went on his eye
followed Findlayson's, and he muttered, "Isn't it damned good?"

"I think we'll go up the service together," Findlayson said to
himself. "You're too good a youngster to waste on another man.
Cub thou wast; assistant thou art. Personal assistant, and at
Simla, thou shalt be, if any credit comes to me out of the
business!"

Indeed, the burden of the work had fallen altogether on
Findlayson and his assistant, the young man whom he had chosen
because of his rawness to break to his own needs. There were
labour contractors by the half-hundred - fitters and riveters,
European, borrowed from the railway workshops, with, perhaps,
twenty white and half-caste subordinates to direct, under
direction, the bevies of workmen - but none knew better than
these two, who trusted each other, how the underlings were not
to be trusted. They had been tried many times in sudden crises
- by slipping of booms, by breaking of tackle, failure of cranes,
and the wrath of the river - but no stress had brought to light
any man among men whom Findlayson and Hitchcock would have
honoured by working as remorselessly as they worked them-selves.
Findlayson thought it over from the beginning: the months of
office-work destroyed at a blow when the Government of India, at
the last moment, added two feet to the width of the bridge, under
the impression that bridges were cut out of paper, and so brought
to ruin at least half an acre of calculations- and Hitchcock, new
to disappointment, buried his head in his arms and wept; the
heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in
England; the futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of
commissions if one, only one, rather doubtful consignment were
passed; the war that followed the refusal; the careful, polite
obstruction at the other end that followed the war, till young
Hitchcock, putting one month's leave to another month, and
borrowing ten days from Findlayson, spent his poor little savings
of a year in a wild dash to London, and there, as his own tongue
asserted and the later consignments proved, put the fear of God
into a man so great that he feared only Parliament and said so
till Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner table, and
- he feared the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Then
there was the cholera that came in the night to the village by
the bridge works; and after the cholera smote the small-pox. The
fever they had always with them. Hitchcock had been appointed a
magistrate of the third class with whipping powers, for the
better government of the community, and Findlayson watched him
wield his powers temperately, learning what to overlook and what
to look after. It was a long, long reverie, and it covered
storm, sudden freshets, death in every manner and shape, violent
and awful rage against red tape half frenzying a mind that knows
it should be busy on other things; drought, sanitation, finance;
birth, wedding, burial, and riot in the village of twenty warring
castes; argument, expostulation, persuasion, and the blank
despair that a man goes to bed upon, thankful that his rifle is
all in pieces in the gun-case. Behind everything rose the black
frame of the Kashi Bridge - plate by plate, girder by girder,
span by span - and each pier of it recalled Hitchcock, the
all-round man, who had stood by his chief without failing from
the very first to this last.

So the bridge was two men's work - unless one counted Peroo, as
Peroo certainly counted himself. He was a Lascar, a Kharva from
Bulsar, familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London,
who had risen to the rank of serang on the British India boats,
but wearying of routine musters and clean clothes, had thrown up
the service and gone inland, where men of his calibre were sure
of employment. For his knowledge of tackle and the handling of
heavy weights, Peroo was worth almost any price he might have
chosen to put upon 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 an ex-serang, he knew how to hold authority.
No piece of iron was so big or so badly placed that Peroo could
not devise a tackle to lift it - a loose-ended, sagging
arrangement, rigged with a scandalous amount of talking, but
perfectly equal to the work in hand. It was Peroo who had saved
the girder of Number Seven pier from destruction when the new
wire-rope jammed in the eye of the crane, and the huge plate
tilted in its slings, threatening to slide out sideways. Then
the native workmen lost their heads with great shoutings, and
Hitchcock's right arm was broken by a falling T-plate, and he
buttoned it up in his coat and swooned, and came to and directed
for four hours till Peroo, from the top 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, to control the
donkey-engines, to hoist a fallen locomotive craftily out of the
borrow-pit into which it had tumbled; to strip, and dive, if need
be, to see how the concrete blocks round the piers stood the
scouring of Mother Gunga, or to adventure upstream on a monsoon
night and report on the state of the embankment-facings. He
would interrupt the field-councils of Findlayson and Hitchcock
without fear, till his wonderful English, or his still more
wonderful lingua franca, half Portuguese and half Malay, ran out
and he was forced to take string and show the knots that he would
recommend. He controlled his own gang of tackle men -
mysterious relatives from Kutch Mandvi gathered month by month
and tried to the uttermost. No consideration of family or kin
allowed Peroo to keep weak hands or a giddy head on the
pay-roll. "My honour is the honour of this bridge," he would
say to the about-to-be-dismissed. "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
round the tattered dwelling of a sea-priest - one who had never
set foot on black water, but had been chosen as ghostly
counsellor by two generations of sea-rovers all unaffected by
port missions or those creeds which are thrust upon sailors by
agencies along Thames bank. The priest of the Lascars had
nothing to do with their caste, or indeed with anything at all.
He ate the offerings of his church, and slept and smoked, and
slept again, "for," said Peroo, who had haled him a thousand
miles inland, "he is a very holy man. He never cares what you
eat so long as you do not eat beef, and that is good, because on
land we worship Shiva, we Kharvas; but at sea on the Kumpani's
boats we attend strictly to the orders of the Burra Malum [the
first mate], and on this bridge we observe what Finlinson Sahib
says."

Finlinson Sahib had that day given orders to clear the
scaffolding from the guard-tower on the right bank, and Peroo
with his mates was casting loose and lowering down the bamboo
poles and planks as swiftly as ever they had whipped the cargo
out of a coaster.

From his trolley he could hear the whistle of the serang's
silver pipe and the creek and clatter of the pulleys. Peroo was
standing on the top-most coping of the tower, clad in the blue
dungaree of his abandoned 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 of the fo'c'sle lookout: "Ham dekhta hai"
("I
am looking out"). Findlayson laughed and then sighed. It was
years since he had seen a steamer, and he was sick for home. As
his trolley passed under the tower, Peroo descended by a rope,
ape-fashion, and cried: "It looks well now, Sahib. Our bridge is
all but done. What think you Mother Gunga will say when the rail
runs over?"

"She has said little so far. It was never Mother Gunga that
delayed us."

"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-boats were sunk without warning - or only a half-day's
warning?"

"Yes, but nothing save a big flood could hurt us now. The spurs
are holding well on the West Bank."

"Mother Gunga eats great allowances. There is always room for
more stone on the revetments. I tell this to the Chota Sahib "-
he meant Hitchcock - "and he laughs."

"No matter, Peroo. Another year thou wilt be able to build a
bridge in thine own fashion."

The Lascar grinned. "Then it will not be in this way - with
stonework sunk under water, as the Qyetta was sunk. I like
sus-sus-pen-sheen bridges that fly from bank to bank. with one
big step, like a gang-plank. Then no water can hurt. When does
the Lord Sahib come to open the bridge?"

"In three months, when the weather is cooler."

"Ho! ho! He is like the Burra Malum. He sleeps below while the
work is being done. Then he comes upon the quarter-deck and
touches with his finger, and says: 'This is not clean! Dam
jibboonwallah!'"

"But the Lord Sahib does not call me a dam jibboonwallah, Peroo."

"No, Sahib; but he does not come on deck till the work is all
finished. Even the Burra Malum of the Nerbudda said once at
Tuticorin -"

"Bah! Go! I am busy."

"I, also!" said Peroo, with an unshaken countenance. "May I take
the light 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 to be blown up and down without care. Here we have no room
at all. Look you, we have put the river into a dock, and run her
between stone sills."

Findlayson smiled at the "we."

"We have bitted and bridled her. She is not like the sea, that
can beat against a soft beach. She is Mother Gunga - in irons."
His voice fell a little.

"Peroo, thou hast been up and down the world more even than I.
Speak true talk, now. How much dost thou in thy heart believe of
Mother Gunga?"

"All that our priest says. London is London, Sahib. Sydney is
Sydney, and Port Darwin is Port Darwin. Also Mother Gunga is
Mother Gunga, and when I come back to her banks I know this and
worship. In London I did poojah to the big temple by the river
for the sake of the God within. . . . Yes, I will not take the
cushions in the dinghy."

Findlayson mounted his horse and trotted to the shed of a
bungalow that he shared with his assistant. The place had
become home to him in the last three years. He had grilled in
the heat, sweated in the rains, and shivered with fever under
the rude thatch roof; the lime-wash beside the door was covered
with rough drawings and formulae, and the sentry-path trodden in
the matting of the verandah showed where he had walked alone.
There is no eight-hour limit to an engineer's work, and the
evening meal with Hitchcock was eaten booted and spurred: over
their cigars they listened to the hum of the village as the
gangs came up from the river-bed and the lights began to
twinkle.

"Peroo has gone up the spurs in your dinghy. He's taken a couple
of nephews with him, and he's lolling in the stern like a
commodore," said Hitchcock.

"That's all right. He's got something on his mind. You'd think
that ten years in the British India boats would have knocked
most of his religion out of him."

"So it has," said Hitchcock, chuckling. "I overheard him the
other day in the middle of a most atheistical talk with that fat
old guru of theirs. Peroo denied the efficacy of prayer; and
wanted the guru to go to sea and watch a gale out with him, and
see if he could stop a monsoon."

"All the same, if you carried off his guru he'd leave us like a
shot. He was yarning away to me about praying to the dome of St.
Paul's when he was in London."

"He told me that the first time he went into the engine-room of a
steamer, when he was a boy, he prayed to the low-pressure
cylinder."

"Not half a bad thing to pray to, either. He's propitiating his
own Gods now, and he wants to know what Mother Gunga will think
of a bridge being run across her. Who's there?" A shadow
darkened the doorway, and a telegram was put into Hitchcock's
hand.

"She ought to be pretty well used to it by this time. Only a tar.

It ought to be Ralli's answer about the new rivets. . . . Great
Heavens!" Hitchcock jumped to his feet.

"What is it?" said the senior, and took the form. "that's what
Mother Gunga thinks, is it," he said, reading. "Keep cool, young
'un. We've got all our work cut out for us. Let's see. Muir wired
half an hour ago: 'Floods on the Ramgunga. Look out.' Well, that
gives us - one, two - nine and a half for the flood to reach
Melipur Ghaut and seven's sixteen and a half to Lataoli - say
fifteen hours before it comes down to us."

"Curse that hill-fed sewer of a Ramgunga! Findlayson, this is two
months before anything could have been expected, and the left
bank is littered up with stuff still. Two full months before
the time!"

"That's why it comes. I've only known Indian rivers for
five-and-twenty years, and I don't pretend to understand. Here
comes another tar." Findlayson opened the telegram. "Cockran,
this time, from the Ganges Canal: 'Heavy rains here. Bad.' He
might have saved the last word. Well, we don't want to know any
more. We've got to work the gangs all night and clean up the
riverbed. You'll take the east bank and work out to meet me in
the middle. Get everything that floats below the bridge: we
shall have quite enough river-craft coming down adrift anyhow,
without letting the stone-boats ram the piers. What have you got
on the east bank that needs looking after?

"Pontoon - one big pontoon with the overhead crane on it.
T'other overhead crane on the mended pontoon, with the cart-road
rivets from Twenty to Twenty~three piers - two construction
lines, and a turning-spur. The pilework must take its chance,"
said Hitchcock.

"All right. Roll up everything you can lay hands on. We'll give
the gang fifteen minutes more to eat their grub."

Close to the verandah stood a big night~gong, never used except
for flood, or fire in the village. Hitchcock had called for a
fresh horse, and was off to his side of the bridge when
Findlayson took the cloth-bound stick and smote with the rubbing
stroke that brings out the full thunder of the metal.

Long before the last rumble ceased every night-gong in the
village had taken up the warning. To these were added the hoarse
screaming of conches in the little temples; the throbbing of
drums and tom-toms; and, from the European quarters, where the
riveters lived, McCartney's bugle, a weapon of offence on Sundays
and festivals, brayed desperately, calling to "Stables." Engine
after engine toiling home along the spurs at the end of her day's
work whistled in answer till the whistles were answered from the
far bank. Then the big gong thundered thrice for a sign that it
was flood and not fire; conch, drum, and whistle echoed the
call, and the village quivered to the sound of bare feet running
upon soft earth. The order in all cases was to stand by the
day's work and wait instructions. The gangs poured by in the
dusk; men stopping to knot a loin-cloth or fasten a sandal;
gang-foremen shouting to their subordinates as they ran or paused
by the tool-issue sheds for bars and mattocks; locomotives
creeping down their tracks wheel-deep in the crowd; till the
brown torrent disappeared into the dusk of the river-bed, raced
over the pilework, swarmed along the lattices, clustered by the
cranes, and stood still - each man in his place.

Then the troubled beating of the gong carried the order to take
up everything and bear it beyond high-water mark, and the
flare-lamps broke out by the hundred between the webs of dull
iron as the riveters began a night's work, racing against the
flood that was to come. The girders of the three centre piers -
those that stood on the cribs -were all but in position. They
needed just as many rivets as could be driven into them, for the
flood would assuredly wash out their supports, and the ironwork
would settle down on the caps of stone if they were not blocked
at the ends. A hundred crowbars strained at the sleepers of the
temporary line that fed the unfinished piers. It was heaved up
in lengths, loaded into trucks, and backed up the bank beyond
flood-level by the groaning locomotives. The tool-sheds on the
sands melted away before the attack of shouting armies, and with
them went the stacked ranks of Government stores, iron-hound
boxes of rivets, pliers, cutters, duplicate parts of the
riveting-machines, spare pumps and chains. The big crane would
be the last to be shifted, for she was hoisting all the heavy
stuff up to the main structure of the bridge. The concrete
blocks on the fleet of stone-boats were dropped overside, where
there was any depth of water, to guard the piers, and the empty
boats themselves were poled under the bridge down-stream. It was
here that Peroo's pipe shrilled loudest, for the first stroke of
the big gong had brought the dinghy back at racing speed, and
Peroo and his people were stripped to the waist, working for the
honour and credit which are better than life.

"I knew she would speak," he cried. "I knew, but the telegraph
gives us good warning. O sons of unthinkable begetting -
children of unspeakable shame - are we here for the look of the
thing?" It was two feet of wire-rope frayed at the ends, and it
did wonders as Peroo leaped from gunnel to gunnel, shouting the
language of the sea.

Findlayson was more troubled for the stone boats than anything
else. McCartney, with his gangs, was blocking up the ends of
the three doubtful spans. but boats adrift, if the flood chanced
to be a high one, might endanger the girders; and there was a
very fleet in the shrunken channel.

"Get them behind the swell of the guard tower," he shouted down
to
Peroo. "It will be dead-water there. Get them below the
bridge."

"Accha! [Very good.] I know; we are mooring them with
wire-rope," was the answer. "Heh! Listen to the Chota Sahib. He
is working hard."

>From across the river came an almost continuous whistling of
locomotives, backed by the rumble of stone. Hitchcock at the
last minute was spending a few hundred more trucks of Tarakee
stone in reinforcing his spurs and embankments.

"The bridge challenges Mother Gunga," said Peroo, with a laugh.
"But when she talks I know whose voice will be the loudest."

For hours the naked men worked, screaming and shouting under the
lights. It was a hot, moonless night; the end of it was
darkened by clouds and a sudden squall that made Findlayson very
grave.

"She moves!" said Peroo, just before the dawn. "Mother Gunga is
awake! Hear!" He dipped his hand over the side of a boat and the
current mumbled on it. A little wave hit the side of a pier with
a crisp slap.

"Six hours before her time," said Findlayson, mopping his
forehead savagely. "Now we can't depend on anything. We'd
better clear all hands out of the riverbed."

Again the big gong beat, and a second time there was the rushing
of naked feet on earth and ringing iron; the clatter of tools
ceased. In the silence, men heard the dry yawn of water
crawling over thirsty sand.

Foreman after foreman shouted to Findlayson, who had posted
himself by the guard-tower, that his section of the river-bed
had been cleaned out, and when the last voice dropped Findlayson
hurried over the bridge till the iron plating of the permanent
way gave place to the temporary plank-walk over the three centre
piers, and there he met Hitchcock.

"'All clear your side?" said Findlayson. The whisper rang in the

box of lattice work.

"Yes, and the east channel's filling now. We're utterly out of
our reckoning. When is this thing down on us?"

"There's no saying. She's filling as fast as she can. Look!"
Findlayson pointed to the planks below his feet, where the sand,
burned and defiled by months of work, was beginning to whisper
and fizz.

"What orders?" said Hitchcock.

"Call the roll - count stores sit on your hunkers - and pray for
the bridge. That's all I can think of Good night. Don't risk
your life trying to fish out anything that may go downstream."

"Oh, I'll be as prudent as you are! 'Night. Heavens, how she's
filling! Here's the rain in earnest.

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