‘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’17 – 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 Quetta18 was sunk. I like sus-sus-pen-sheen bridges that fly from bank to bank, with one big step, like a gangplank. 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’ jiboonwallah!” ’19
‘But the Lord Sahib does not call me a dam’ jiboonwallah, 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 up 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 pujah20 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 limewash beside the door was covered with rough drawings and formulae, and the sentry-path trodden in the matting of the veranda 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-press 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.21 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 wires, 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 Ghat and seven’s sixteen and a half to Latodi – 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 time!’
‘That’s why it happens. I’ve only known Indian rivers for five-and-twenty years, and I don’t pretend to understand ’em. 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 river-bed. 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 veranda 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, M‘Cartney’s bugle, a weapon of offence on Sundays and festivals, brayed desperately, calling to ‘Stables’. Engine after engine toiling home along the spurs after her day’s work whistled in reply 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 highwater 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 cribs22 – were all but in position. They needed just as many rivets as could be driven into them, for the flood would assuredly wash out the su
pports, 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-bound 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 back the dinghy 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 gave 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. M‘Cartney, 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 channels.
‘Get them behind the swell of the guard-tower,’ he shouted to Peroo. ‘It will be dead-water there; get them below the bridge.’
‘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 river-bed.’
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 latticework.
‘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 burned sand, 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 down-stream.’
‘Oh, I’ll be as prudent as you are! ’Night! Heavens, how she’s filling! Here’s the rain in earnest!’ Findlayson picked his way back to his bank, sweeping the last of M‘Cartney’s riveters before him. The gangs had spread themselves along the embankments, regardless of the cold rain of the dawn, and there they waited for the flood. Only Peroo kept his men together behind the swell of the guard-tower, where the stone-boats lay tied fore and aft with hawsers, wire rope, and chains.
A shrill wail ran along the line, growing to a yell, half fear and half wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to bank between the stone facings, and the far-away spurs went out in spouts of foam. Mother Gunga had come bank-high in haste, and a wall of chocolate-coloured water was her messenger. There was a shriek above the roar of the water, the complaint of the spans coming down on their blocks as the cribs were whirled out from under their bellies. The stone-boats groaned and ground each other in the eddy that swung round the abutments and their clumsy masts rose higher and higher against the dim skyline.
‘Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do. Now she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!’ said Peroo, watching the furious turmoil round the guard-tower. ‘Ohé! Fight, then! Fight hard! It is thus that a woman wears herself out.’
But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired. After the first down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer, plucking and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind the piers till even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his work.
When day came the village gasped. ‘Only last night,’ men said, turning to each other, ‘it was as a town in the river-bed. Look now!’
And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing water that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled by rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs up-stream were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and down-stream the pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to the horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when it touched a pier.
‘Big flood,’ said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood as he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon her now, but not very much more; and if by any of a thousand chances there happened to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga would carry his honour to the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all, there was nothing to do except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under his mackintosh till his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots were over-ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was marking the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the embankment, and he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the stone-boats, the hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred noises that make the full note of a flood. Once a dripping servant brought him food, but he could not eat; and once he thought that he heard a faint toot from a locomotive across the river, and then he smiled. The bridge’s failure would hurt his assistant not a little, but Hitchcock was a young man with his big work yet to do. For himself the crash meant everything – everything that made a hard life worth the living. They would say, the men of his own profession – he remembered the half-pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart’s big water-works burst and broke down in brick-heaps and sludge, and Lockhart’s spirit broke in him and he died. He remembered what he himself had said when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone by the sea; and most he remembered poor Hartopp’s face three weeks later, when the shame had marked it. His bridge was twice the size of Hartopp’s, and it carried the Findlayson truss as well as the new pier-shoe – the Findlayson bolted shoe. There were no excuses in his Service. Government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind would judge him by his bridge, as that stood or fell. He went over it in his head, plate by plate, span by span,
brick by brick, pier by pier, remembering, comparing, estimating, and recalculating, lest there should be any mistake; and through the long hours and through the flights of formulae that danced and wheeled before him a cold fear would come to pinch his heart. His side of the sum was beyond question; but what man knew Mother Gunga’s arthimetic? Even as he was making all sure by the multiplication-table, the river might be scooping pot-holes to the very bottom of any one of those eighty-foot piers that carried his reputation. Again a servant came to him with food, but his mouth was dry, and he could only drink and return to the decimals in his brain. And the river was still rising. Peroo, in a mat shelter-coat, crouched at his feet, watching now his face and now the face of the river, but saying nothing.
At last the Lascar rose and floundered through the mud towards the village, but he was careful to leave an ally to watch the boats.
Presently he returned, most irreverently driving before him the priest of his creed – a fat old man, with a grey beard that whipped the wind with the wet cloth that blew over his shoulder. Never was seen so lamentable a guru.
‘What good are offerings and little kerosene lamps and dry grain,’ shouted Peroo, ‘if squatting in the mud is all that thou canst do? Thou hast dealt long with the Gods when they were contented and well-wishing. Now they are angry. Speak to them!’
‘What is a man against the Wrath of Gods?’ whined the priest, cowering as the wind took him. ‘Let me go to the temple, and I will pray there.’
‘Son of a pig, pray here! Is there no return for salt fish and curry powder and dried onions? Call aloud! Tell Mother Gunga we have had enough. Bid her be still for the night. I cannot pray, but I have served in the Kumpani’s boats, and when men did not obey my orders I –’ A flourish of the wire-rope colt23 rounded the sentence, and the priest, breaking from his disciple, fled to the village.