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 won