"About that."
"These things are always interesting. It is essential to understand the machine you work with, and the people you live with. To properly grip the bent of a man's mind, it is necessary to know his antecedents. The seaman, we observe, has a natural aptitude for engineering, coupled with great tenacity and self-reliance, a particularly good friend, a just, but particularly unpleasant enemy; a touch of sentiment and superstition, the results of much battering and erratic favours from Father Neptune. The gipsy, on the other——"
"Oh, damn that gipsy," Carstairs flushed an angry red.
"Here we have a most interesting relic of the Berserk rage of the Norseman. If within reach, that gipsy would have a particularly rough time just at this moment."
"Oh, go to the devil, Darwen."
"Thanks very much for the advice, but I will return to the gipsy, who, as I was about to observe, is, on the other hand, naturally a poacher and very vindictive, and will therefore have to be poached, that is to say, captured by stealth which——"
A sudden flash like miniature lightning illuminated the engine room, followed immediately by a loud report.
Carstairs' big jaw tightened. Darwen's eyes glittered with an æsthetic sort of joy. "Breakdown," he observed, "and I'm a spectator."
A circuit fuse had blown, and was instantly followed by a continuous flash and bang of some half dozen fuses, going one after the other, like a straggling volley of small artillery. By an ingenious inter-connection of the network of main supply cables it is arranged that if one circuit fuse goes half a dozen immediately follow suit. This is one of the many diabolical devices on which mains superintendents particularly pride themselves. Carstairs strode up on to the switchboard, very alert, but very cool. He switched out all the switches, replaced the fuses by bigger ones, and switched in again, the switchboard attendant assisting him in a high state of nervous excitement. Now there is a piece of apparatus known as a magnetic automatic circuit breaker. It is carefully designed to come out at the wrong time and stay in at all other times; the good chief of Southville, in the simplicity of his trust in catalogues, had, "for safety," as he expressed it, two of these devices fixed on every machine; when, therefore, Carstairs plugged in again on the heavier fuses, these "safety" devices promptly opened, one after the other, all except one small one, which hung in with a tenacity worthy of a better cause. The station was plunged into instant inky darkness, relieved only by fitful flashes from the commutators of the idle machines, the governor of one of which having stuck, it raced away in a frantic effort to burst its fly-wheel and wreck the engine room; the one small machine, left all alone struggling valiantly with a load four times too big for it, first of all stopped dead till its field died away, then pounded into the work with little spurts and pauses, being helped out with a little juice from the kindly, helpful battery (which was ruining itself in the process). All the boiler feed pumps, fans, and condenser pumps stopped. (The chief, being a wireman, liked to have all the accessories electrically driven.) Pandemonium at once reigned. There was much shouting in the darkness, an engine-driver and a stoker, in their frantic efforts to do something, collided violently, and collapsed on the floor, groaning, to the accompaniment of soft nothings, whispered sweetly to the empty air; the boilers blew off, the steam roared and shrieked out of twelve safety valves like ten thousand fiends let loose; they were blowing off for high steam first of all, and very shortly afterwards for low water as well. In the middle of it all, the alternators (which were unaffected) hummed merrily in the darkness, while the telephone bell screamed an angry protest from an adjacent wall. At such moments the meek and lowly Shift Engineer feels that he is really alive; his only wish is that his chief may happen to drop in and share his happiness with him, or one or two of the councillors; he could accommodate them all with comfortable seats on the safety valves, and the possibility of a quick passage to heaven by the shortest route, straight upwards. Most chiefs are worse than useless on a switchboard during a breakdown; the Shift Engineer, handling the switches every day of his life, sometimes makes mistakes when he is in a hurry; the chief, who handles them once a year, always does; usually his nerves are not as steady as they should be; he wants to know what the Shift Engineer is going to do, and why he doesn't do it at once, then, just to add to the general concert, he plugs in a wrong switch. Councillors generally stand like fools, and wonder what it's all about, or else button-hole the Shift Engineer and demand an immediate explanation. In this case, no one appeared to hinder him, and Carstairs proceeded all alone. Striking a match, he went along the switchboard and pulled out all the circuit switches; the little machine and the battery, pulling together, then raced away joyously and lit up the station with a superabundant light; the switchboard attendant soon altered that, however, and Carstairs went quickly round the boiler house, switching out all the pumps, etc., as very few of them had "no load releases" on, and some that had were tied in; he glanced up at the boiler water gauges as he passed, for he did not want cold water to be suddenly pumped into empty boilers. It took him precisely one minute before he returned to the switchboard and put in the circuit breakers one by one, tieing them in with a piece of insulated wire. "Now!" he said, "we'll start again, more or less in comfort."
He plugged in a circuit and the fuse held though the lights grew dim, and the machines flashed and groaned. The switchboard attendant plugged in another, and the fuse blew in his face. He stood shielding his eyes in a dazed sort of way, the flash had temporarily blinded him. In those days things in central stations were carefully designed to kill and maim as many as possible; men have become more expensive since and a little more care is taken of them, almost as much, in fact, as of the machines. The fuses on this low tension switchboard were accurately adjusted to the level of an average man's eyes and the instrument placed just beneath, as a sort of bait, so that as he took a reading he got the full benefit of the flash and the molten metal flying about if a fuse went, which they did frequently. Carstairs stood up and pulled the switch out, he then replaced the fuse and switched in again. The machine gave a groan, and a fuse at the other end of the board blew simultaneously with the one he had just replaced.