A slow smile flickered round Carstairs' face. "You introduce me to the proper people, and I'll tell 'em unblushingly that we're two jolly smart engineers very much underpaid."
"That's the idea! And they'll believe you, such is the paradox of this lying and trustful generation."
These young men, it will be seen, were very young, but their wisdom was much in excess of the pig-headed obstinacy of the average greybeard.
CHAPTER VIII
The works at Southville were rather larger than the works he had just left in the Midlands, and Carstairs felt a delightful sense of exaltation as he first took charge of a shift by himself. For eight hours he was entirely responsible for the efficient, economical, and safe working of about 6000 horsepower of plant. He felt a sense of responsibility, of age; he felt uplifted and steadied. He was very thoughtful, but very confident; he had taken great pains during the week he was on with Darwen to make himself thoroughly acquainted with everything about the station. His confidence was the direct outcome of his knowledge; he looked at the various engines, dynamos, boilers and switch gears, and felt that he fully grasped the why and wherefore of it all; he reviewed the possibilities of what might happen, what might break down, in the various component parts of the complicated whole, and what he would do to tackle it. He considered it all very solemnly and felt very confident; he knew he would not scare. Physically he was in the pink of condition, his head was very clear and his technical knowledge very bright from constant use.
The chief, an awkward-looking, flabby man, came down to see him on his first shift. "Well! do you think you can manage it?" he asked.
"Yes," Carstairs answered, looking his chief steadily in the eyes; the eyes were lack-lustre and heavy, they shifted uneasily and roamed round the engine room: he stepped up to a bit of bright brass work and rubbed his finger across it. "That won't do," he said, holding up a finger soiled with greasy dirt. "Make that man clean that." He turned and went away abruptly.
Carstairs called the engine driver, a little man of herculean build. "I knowed he'd spot that," the man said, in a tone of protest. "Got a eye like a hawk, he have."
It was the first time Carstairs had noticed this man particularly; they had been on different shifts before. He looked him over with approval; the arms, bare to the elbow, were astonishingly big and sinewy-looking; the chest was immensely deep, it arched fully outward from the base of the full, white throat; the top button of his shirt, left undone, showed a glimpse of a very white skin and the commencement of a tattoed picture ("Ajax defying his mother-in-law," the man called it); his eyes were a bright hazel brown, singularly piercing and steady.