"No, I don't think it is." Carstairs pulled out his watch. "I must go and have a look round; the load is heavy to-night." He opened the door and Darwen followed him.
They went out through the engine room into the boiler house. Carstairs brightened up at once, the hum of running machinery, and the bustle of working men, was the breath of life to him; his face hardened and his eye brightened with the "splendid purpose." Darwen observed him closely.
"You're a born engineer, you know, Carstairs."
"Do you think so? Sometimes I think so myself." He looked around him with keen appreciation at the long row of boilers under steam, with the furnace-doors red hot, "a beautiful orange glow" he was wont to describe it as; at the coal-grimed, brawny men, with the sweat running off them as they sliced up the dazzling white fires. He gazed critically into the blinding glare as they opened the red hot doors, the radiant heat scorched his face and the intense light dazzled his eyes, so that for some minutes afterwards everything was green and blue to him. He looked at the men with their hard, strong faces and their bare muscular arms and chests, the whole scene gave him a sensation of extreme pleasure. To him it was more than beautiful, it was sublime. A sensation of majestic force, of overwhelming power, such as a towering mountain, the limitless ocean, or a vast moorland conjure up. This sensation was his now, and it was uplifting, artistic; he felt beyond the earth; yet in many ways there was little of the artist in him, he was essentially of the earth, earthly. Such is the best type of that modern product, the Engineer.
And that you may know him when you meet him, I will tell you that he is rather a rare bird. At the present time, probably, no profession contains more "wasters" than electrical engineering; this is because any man who can persuade a mayor and corporation or a chief engineer to give him the job, can take charge of many thousands of horse-power in boilers, and engines and dynamos, with infinite possibilities of damage, and the lives of many men resting on his direction, nerve and knowledge. Those dear men, who scorn to take an interest in their work, are not the breed I mean; nor are those greasy individuals who have arrived, oilcan in hand, from the engine bed: they are practical they say, which means that their minds are a storehouse of undoubtedly useful facts, they have a fairly clear recollection of a great number of engineering possibilities which they have actually witnessed; but, their reasoning powers are undeveloped, and their methods of procedure on new lines are particularly hap-hazard trial and error. The engineer to whom I refer is essentially a man of science; he is mathematical, theoretical, and practical; he holds an engineering degree and has been through the "shops"; he understands both men and materials and the methods of handling them; frequently he is a lonely sort of savage. He knows little of billiards, cards, or dancing; his work precludes him from much intercourse with other men except in business hours; often he is silent and somewhat shy with women; usually he is of good physique and logically minded; his life-work is the pursuit of truth; in the "shops" he learns to file "truly," then he learns to set a thing in the lathe "truly." He tests his finished work carefully to see that it runs "true," and on the test plate he learns to measure accurately, in the drawing office to calculate exactly; he works under, with, and over the working man, and learns to know him better than anyone else; he does not shine at football or cricket, but is often a particularly useful man in a rough and tumble fight, an accomplishment he acquires in his progress through the "shops"; he is an individual; he thinks and sees things as they are, for that is what his work teaches him; he regards things carefully, observing their quality, and speculating on the process of their manufacture; he sums up men quickly. In my opinion, he is only inferior to the sailor.
The æsthetic soul of Darwen was moved, too. "You're making 'em do their damnedest," he observed.
Carstairs nodded. "That's what I like; you know the Yankee definition, 'An engineer is a man who can do for one dollar what any fool can do for two.' It's not bad, but like most Yankee things, it's cheap and incomplete."
"The taint of the cheapness, old chap, is passing from the Americans to us. You can get quality in the States, if you pay for it, now."
"That is so in some things, and to my mind that's the most marked sign of progress; the nation without quality is as a house built upon the sand. The moral effect on the workman who manufactures cheap articles must be disastrous."
"The workmen, dear boy, are the people, and the people are mud. That is the one point upon which I disagree with dear old Nick Machiavelli."