CHAPTER V
Carstairs and Darwen were on the same shift together, that is to say, they put in the same eight hours of the day at the works, day, evening, or night; and they shared diggings. They were about the same height and the same weight, they were both extremely interested in their work, both came from the south of England, and consequently both felt like strangers in a strange land. The first evening they were off, Darwen showed Carstairs round the town.
"That's the theatre," he said, with a smile, pointing to a dingy-looking building in a dingy-looking street. He watched Carstairs' face curiously as he spoke.
"I thought it was the prison," Carstairs answered, with his sober smile.
Darwen laughed outright. "This is the last place God made," he said.
They walked round the dingy main streets with their surging crowd of factory girls and factory men, flashily dressed in their evening attire, of poor physique and unhealthy looking.
"Is it possible," Carstairs asked, "to get out into the country?"
"Oh, yes!" Darwen answered. "Can you walk?"
"Pretty fair."
"Come on then. I'll show you a field."
Carstairs looked pained. "The landlady," he remarked, "described that acre or so of bare earth opposite our window, as a field."
"I know, but this is a real field with grass and all that."
"Come on then," Carstairs said, briskly.
Darwen stopped and looked at him impressively. "Mind, I promise nothing! But last time I was there, there were three cows in it." He suddenly relaxed into a sunny smile. "Come on," he said, and started off briskly.
They walked about five miles, past endless rows of symmetrical, dingy, box-like, red brick houses. It was getting dark when they reached the field, but the cows were there—three sorry specimens, grazing on the smoke-grimed, subdued-looking grass. The young engineers sat on the gate and looked at them in amused pity.
"We've come through one town, and we're on the borders of another," Darwen remarked. "It's hard to say just what town you're in at any given moment, about here."
"It seems very bracing although it's so smoky," Carstairs said. "I wonder why any one lives here who could live anywhere else."
"Lord! Don't tell 'em that. I nearly got mobbed for making a similar remark last week. They think these places are very fine towns. When they've made their pile they still stay here."
"How long have you been here?"
"A month."
"How long are you going to stay?"
"Oh, I shall start applying when I've put in four months. Might get away at the end of six, then."
"That's my idea, too. They've got some good plant here, though."
So they lapsed into technicalities; and as they strolled back, the dingy houses and the smoke and grime were all forgotten. Community of interest was drawing these two young men very close together. They sat up late into the night smoking and comparing notes of what they had seen and wished to see in the engineering world. As they went to bed, Carstairs passed Darwen's door.
"Oh! if you come in half a minute, I'll show you those drawings," he said.
He went in, and while Darwen rummaged about in a big trunk, Carstairs glanced round his bedroom. The walls were hung with framed photographs of football teams and cricket teams, school teams and town teams; Darwen's handsome features and sturdy limbs were prominent in all. Carstairs examined them with keen interest. "You're a rugger man, I see," he said, with great appreciation.
"Yes, are you?"
"Oh, yes. I play, but I haven't got an international cap, or—" Carstairs mentioned the name of one of the teams on the wall. Darwen stood up with a roll of engineering drawings in his hand. He flushed slightly with pleasure. "I only played for them one season," he explained, "left the town at the end of it."
Carstairs looked at the drawings and Darwen explained. They sat down together side by side on the bed; for half an hour longer they discussed technicalities, then Carstairs went out. He noticed two photographs on the mantelpiece as he passed, both of girls, both pretty. He noticed also that both of them were autographed across the corner. One of them he thought had "with love" written on it too. "Shouldn't have thought Darwen was the sort of ass to get engaged," he said to himself as he went into his own room and glanced round at the landlady's wishy-washy prints and cheap ornaments.
At the works Carstairs and Darwen were always on together, with Smith as charge engineer. On the night shift (that is, from midnight to eight in the morning), Smith spent most of his time in the drawing office reading novels or newspapers, and sleeping; he took periodical walks round to see that the others were awake, then he went back into the drawing office and reclined peacefully in a chair, his head thrown back against the wall (cushioned by a folded coat), and his feet supported by a small box. During the first two or three hours the two juniors spent their time tracing out connections behind the switchboard, making diagrams, and clambering about on the tops of engines or boilers; later on, they too, usually dozed off, sprawling over the switchboard desk, or stretched out on the floor somewhere out of sight. After about two o'clock a.m. the whole works, in fact, became a sort of temporary palace of sleep; the stoker dozed on his box in the boiler house, the engine driver made himself snug on the bed plate of an engine, the fires in the boilers died gradually down from a fierce white to a dull red glow, the steam pressure gauge dropped back twenty or thirty pounds, the engines hummed away merrily, with a rather soothing sort of buzz from the alternator, and a mild sort of grinding noise from the direct current dynamos, with a little intermittent sparking at the brushes. On the switchboard, the needles of all the instruments remained steady, the pressure showing perhaps a little drop. At irregular intervals the driver would get up and slowly oil round his engines, feeling the bearings at the same time; the stoker would arise and throw a few shovelfuls of coal on his fires, glance up at his water gauges and regulate the feed water, perhaps putting the pump on a little faster, or stopping it off a bit; a switchboard attendant would open one eye and glance sleepily at the big voltmeter swung on an arm at the end of the switchboard, note that the pressure was only a little way back, and close his eyes again in quiet unconcern.
One night Smith had been drinking a lot of strong tea and couldn't sleep; he strolled round at an unaccustomed hour and surveyed the sleeping beauties with a little smile of glee, for Smith was twenty-three years old, and to the healthy young man at that age many things appear humorous which a few years later take on a hue of tragedy.
Going through the boiler house, he carefully examined the steam and water gauges. Then he stood for some moments gazing interestedly at the recumbent stoker; he was rather a ferocious-looking man in ordinary wakeful moments, but thus, with his big jaw dropped to its full extent, his eyes closed, and every feature relaxed, he seemed singularly feeble. Smith took a shovel and threw it with a clatter down on the iron checker plates.
It was quite an appreciable number of seconds before the man moved, then he sprang bolt upright, with his eyes wide open, both arms extended above his head, and every expression of alarm on his countenance; he saw Smith standing there smiling, but it was some moments before his face resumed its normal expression; he looked at the shovel on the iron plates. "Did you drop that, sir?" he asked.
"Yes," Smith answered.
"I must a' dropped off," the man said, half apologetically, half humorously.
"I think you must have," Smith agreed, smiling broadly.
A joke loses more than half its zest if there's no one to share it with. "I'll have those chaps in the engine room now. Come in and see," Smith said, as he led the way to the engine room door. The heavy stoker followed; he was a man over forty, but he grinned like a boy of twelve.
"Half a minute," the engineer said, in a whisper. Leaving the expectant stoker at the door, he carefully surveyed the engine room and switchboard, then he returned with an oil bucket in his hand. "Shut the door, and when I switch the lights out, rattle that like blazes." He handed over the bucket and crossed the engine room again to the station-lighting switchboard, picking up two more buckets as he went. Then he switched off the main switch, putting the place in inky darkness; instantly the stoker rattled his bucket with great vigour. Smith bowled one of his along the iron checker plates on top of the pipe trench, and rattled the other vigorously in his hands.
From the security of their corners they heard voices shouting in the darkness, and the sounds of men in anger swearing.
"What the hell's up?"
"Stand by your engine, Jones!"
"Got a match? Let's have a look at the blooming volts."
Smith heard a bump above his head on the switchboard gallery as though some one had fallen, a match was struck down in the engine room and another on the switchboard, then he heard Darwen's voice say, "Good God! Smith! Hullo! Smith!"
He switched on the lights and ran up the switchboard steps.
Carstairs was lying limp and helpless on his back with Darwen bending over him. Smith turned as white as a ghost.
"What's up?" he asked, in an agitated voice.
"I don't know. Got a shock, I think. Look at his hands, got across the contacts in the dark somehow."
They stretched him out on his back with a folded coat underneath him, and put him through the motions for artificial respiration. The driver and stoker waived ceremony and mounted the switchboard steps to see what was wrong; they stood leaning over the prostrate form watching the anxious efforts of Smith and Darwen in silent, interested sympathy. "Shall I have a spell, sir?" the brawny stoker asked, as the agitated Smith paused for a moment in his efforts.
No one present was ever able to say precisely how long they worked at Carstairs, probably not many minutes before his chest began to heave in a natural breathing motion. They carried him out into the yard, and the fresh air so revived him that in half an hour he walked through the engine room unaided, and lay down on the floor of the drawing office, made comfortable with coats and newspapers, and dozed off into a sleep. When he woke up, and had had a wash, he seemed quite normal again.
Smith was profuse in his apologies. "I'm beastly sorry. I never dreamt of anything of that sort, etc."
"Oh, it's alright," Carstairs answered, with a sincere desire to let the matter drop. "I ought to have stood still, went shoving my hands out, knew I was somewhere near the machine switch, too. Got right past the guards and touched the bare metal first go off, wouldn't happen once in a thousand times. Not your fault at all."
So the incident passed, and remained a secret in the bosoms of those five men till years later, when, Carstairs and Darwen were dim and distant memories at those works, a driver or a stoker would sometimes tell wondering pupils a tale of how a man was nearly killed on the night run through the Shift Engineer "skylarking."
Things went very smoothly for a bit. Darwen and Carstairs got more chummy than ever. They were leaning over the switchboard rail together, it was not quite a week since Carstairs had got the shock. "I rather wanted to see a chap get a shock, not killed, you know," Darwen was saying.
"I was rather curious on the point myself, too."
"What was it like? Just a two hundred shock magnified?"
"Very much magnified. It was devilish."
They drifted off. "I've never seen an alternator burn out yet, have you?"
"No! Wish number three would go now."
They separated to take reading; it was half-past nine in the evening; Carstairs stood looking at an ammeter which was set some way above his head. The divisions on the scale were small and indistinctly figured; Carstairs stood very close in, on tip-toe, straining his neck upwards; the high tension fuses were at the bottom of the board, about level with his knees (carefully calculated as the most awkward possible position), they were seven inches long and enclosed in porcelain pots, which invariably shattered when a fuse blew. As Carstairs stood there taking feeder reading, with what he afterwards learnt was unnecessary accuracy, the needle of the instrument he was looking at gave a sudden violent plunge, the fuse pot, almost touching his trousers, was shattered into a hundred pieces with a report like a miniature cannon, and a vivid arc blazed away under his eyes with a rattling, screaming roar. Carstairs jumped back in an instant, to the furthest limit that the width of the gallery would allow.
Darwen came along from the low tension switchboard; he was all eagerness, his eyes were bright. He stopped and looked at his new friend in amazement. Carstairs cowered against the handrail, gripping his scribbling block and pencil, palpitating, useless.
For two or three seconds Darwen gazed at him in astonishment. Then he fetched the long, insulated crook kept for that purpose, and himself pulled out the feeder switch.
"Bring down your volts, Carstairs," he said, in a kindly, soothing voice, avoiding his eyes.
With a deep, gasping sigh Carstairs pulled himself together, and with an unsteady hand adjusted the rheostat.
They looked down into the engine room and saw Thompson, the chief assistant, looking up, watching them. He came up the steps and looked at the shattered fuse pot and burnt slate; he expressed no surprise, nor even anger; in those early days sparks and blinding flashes were the daily fare of the electrical engineer, very much more than they are now. Thompson picked up one or two of the pieces of partially fused porcelain and examined them with interest, then he glanced at Carstairs with a great wonder in his eyes, but he spoke to Darwen.
That night, as they walked home together, Carstairs was more than usually silent, and the remarks of Darwen were choppy and abrupt. They ate their supper almost in silence, then they lit their pipes and smoked, in easy chairs, one on each side of the fireplace. They puffed in silence for some time, then Carstairs spoke.
"I'm going to start applying," he said.
"Why? You haven't been here three months yet!"
"No! Quite so! But I'm going to look out for a nice, quiet little job in the country with two low tension machines, where the wheels are very small, and fuses never blow."
"My dear chap, you'll get over that; the first one I saw go knocked me all in a heap."
Carstairs appreciated Darwen's sympathetic lying, but it cut him more than all. "Don't give me silly lies, for God's sake," he said, letting his temper get the better of him. "I have found out that I am a skunk with no nerve, not a ha'porth, so I drop behind, into my place, the place of the cur. And the bottom is knocked out of my universe." He puffed vigorously at his pipe, blowing great clouds of smoke.
Darwen was silent, too, for some time, then he spoke slowly, thoughtfully, punctuating his remarks by blowing softly at the wreaths of smoke about him. "I must say (puff), honestly (puff), I was never more surprised in my life (puff). You're such a deliberate, cool sort of chap (puff). Thought earthquakes wouldn't upset you."
"Damn it! I thought so too."
Darwen proceeded: "Surely must be something abnormal (puff). I mean to say, a fuse going is startling, and all that—but (puff), damn it! (puff) you haven't got over that shock, you know, that's what it is." He sat upright with a sudden vigour and a light in his expressive eyes. "That's it, man. You want to go slow for a bit. Dash it! two thousand volts, that usually 'corpses' a chap, you know."
Carstairs brightened somewhat. "Yes," he said, "I'm convinced that's it, too, but how long will it take to get over it? If ever?" He stood up excitedly; it was obvious he was not himself even then. His hand was unsteady as he held his pipe outwards, pointing with the stem at Darwen. "That shock was devilish, Darwen. A nightmare. Devilish. I could feel you chaps working at me, for hours it seemed to me, working so damn slowly. And I wanted to tell you to get on, to keep it up, to go faster, and I couldn't, couldn't budge, couldn't get out a word. Did I sweat? You didn't notice if I sweated. Think I must have. There was a sensation of something fluttering round me, something like a damn great moth in the dark. I could hear it, and I was frightened of the thing, frightened as hell. I wanted to put my arm up to shield my eyes, to beat the thing off, to lash out in sheer terror, and I couldn't budge. God! It was awful! I had no idea terror was so really terrible. Wonder what the moth thing was?"
Darwen looked at him steadily with bright eyes, a world of sympathy in them, sympathy and interest. "Your face was very drawn, I noticed that. You looked terror-stricken."
"I was. And when that fuse went to-night, the bang and the flash and roar brought it all back. I lost control of myself. I wanted to be steady, but I couldn't, I shook like a leaf; you saw it, and Thompson saw it. You'd hardly believe how angry I was, how I was cursing myself." He broke off suddenly and shook his clenched fist in the air. "Curse that blasted silly Smith and his blasted monkey tricks." It was almost a scream.
"Sit down, old chap. You want a rest, that's what it is—shock to the system and that sort of thing, you know. I'll go round with you in the morning and see a doctor."
Carstairs sat down, he seemed almost himself again; calm, discerning, calculating. "Can't do that! What am I to say? Sure to get old Smith into a row. These bally doctors and councillors they're all mixed up, you know, sure to get round."
"My dear chap, damn Smith! You have yourself to consider."
"He'd get the sack; it would wreck him. His people are not very well off; he told me once that before he came here he was getting a quid a week in London—and living on it."
Darwen spread out his hands with an almost continental gesture. "My dear chap, you're following quite an erroneous line of reasoning, it's rather a pet theory of mine, as an engineer. However, tell the doctor you had an accident in the execution of your duty, etc., etc. No need for it to get round at all. He'll forget all about you as soon as you've paid him his fee."
Carstairs was thoughtful, he puffed his pipe in silence for some minutes, then he stood up. "Alright, let's go to two while we're about it, then we can check 'em one on the other. I'm going to bed."