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THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS
THE BRIDGE-BUILDERS RUDYARD KIPLING by Ridyard Kipling
The least that Findlayson of the Public Works Department
expected was a C.I.E.; he dreamed of a C.S.I. Indeed his
friends told him that he deserved more. For three years he had
endured heat and cold disappointment discomfort danger and
disease with responsibility almost to top-heavy for one pair of
shoulders; and day by day through that time the great Kashi
Bridge over the Ganges had grown under his charge. Now in less
than three months if all went well his Excellency the Viceroy
would open the bridge in state an archbishop would bless it and
the first trainload of soldiers would come over it and there
would be speeches.
Findlayson C. E. sat in his trolley on a construction line
that ran along one of the main revetments - the huge stone-faced
banks that flared away north and south for three miles on either
side of the river and permitted himself to think of the end.
With its approaches his work was one mile and three-quarters in
length; a lattice-girder bridge trussed with the Findlayson
truss standing on seven-and-twenty brick piers. Each one of
those piers was twenty-four feet in diameter capped with red
Agra stone and sunk eighty feet below the shifting sand of the
Ganges' bed. Above them was a railway-line fifteen feet broad;
above that again a cart-road of eighteen feet flanked with
footpaths. At either end rose towers of red brick loopholed
for musketry and pierced for big guns and the ramp of the road
was being pushed forward to their haunches. The raw earth-ends
were crawling and alive with hundreds upon hundreds of tiny asses
climbing out of the yawning borrow-pit below with sackfuls of
stuff; and the hot afternoon air was filled with the noise of
hooves the rattle of the drivers' sticks and the swish and
roll-down of the dirt. The river was very low and on the
dazzling white sand between the three centre piers stood squat
cribs of railway-sleepers filled within and daubed without with
mud to support the last of the girders as those were riveted up.
In the little deep water left by the drought an overhead crane
travelled to and fro along its spile-pier jerking sections of
iron into place snorting and backing and grunting as an elephant
grunts in the timberyard. Riveters by the hundred swarmed about
the lattice side-work and the iron roof of the railway line hung
from invisible staging under the bellies of the girders
clustered round the throats of the piers and rode on the
overhang of the footpath-stanchions; their fire-pots and the
spurts of flame that answered each hammer-stroke showing no more
than pale yellow in the sun's glare. East and west and north and
south the construction-trains rattled and shrieked up and down
the embankments the piled trucks of brown and white stone
banging behind them till the side-boards were unpinned and with
a roar and a grumble a few thousand tons' more material were
flung out to hold the river in place.
Findlayson C. E. turned on his trolley and looked over the
face of the country that he had changed for seven miles around.
Looked back on the humming village of five thousand work-men; up
stream and down along the vista of spurs and sand; across the
river to the far piers lessening in the haze; overhead to the
guard-towers -and only he knew how strong those were - and with a
sigh of contentment saw that his work was good. There stood his
bridge before him in the sunlight lacking only a few weeks' work
on the girders of the three middle piers - his bridge raw and
ugly as original sin but pukka - permanent - to endure when all
memory of the builder yea even of the splendid Findlayson
truss has perished. Practically the thing was done.
Hitchcock his assistant cantered along the line on a little
switch-tailed Kabuli pony who through long practice could have
trotted securely over trestle and nodded to his chief.
"All but" said he with a smile.
"I've been thinking about it" the senior answered. "Not half a
bad job for two men is it?"
"One - and a half. 'Gad what a Cooper's Hill cub I was when I
came on the works!" Hitchcock felt very old in the crowded
experiences of the past three years that had taught him power
and responsibility.
"You were rather a colt" said Findlayson. "I wonder how you'll
like going back to office-work when this job's over."
"I shall hate it!" said the young man and as he went on his eye
followed Findlayson's and he muttered "Isn't it damned good?"
"I think we'll go up the service together" Findlayson said to
himself. "You're too good a youngster to waste on another man.
Cub thou wast; assistant thou art. Personal assistant and at Simla
thou shalt be if any credit comes to me out of the business!"
Indeed the burden of the work had fallen altogether on
Findlayson and his assistant the young man whom he had chosen
because of his rawness to break to his own needs. There were
labour contractors by the half-hundred - fitters and riveters
European borrowed from the railway workshops with perhaps
twenty white and half-caste subordinates to direct under
direction the bevies of workmen - but none knew better than
these two who trusted each other how the underlings were not to
be trusted. They had been tried many times in sudden crises -
by slipping of booms by breaking of tackle failure of cranes
and the wrath of the river - but no stress had brought to light
any man among men whom Findlayson and Hitchcock would have
honoured by working as remorselessly as they worked them-selves.
Findlayson thought it over from the beginning: the months of
offce-work destroyed at a blow when the Government of India at
the last moment added two feet to the width of the bridge under
the impression that bridges were cut out of paper and so brought
to ruin at least half an acre of calculations- and Hitchcock new
to disappointment buried his head in his arms and wept; the
heart-breaking delays over the filling of the contracts in
England; the futile correspondences hinting at great wealth of
commissions if one only one rather doubtful consignment were
passed; the war that followed the refusal; the careful polite
obstruction at the other end that followed the war till young
Hitchcock putting one month's leave to another month and
borrowing ten days from Findlayson spent his poor little savings
of a year in a wild dash to London and there as his own tongue
asserted and the later consignments proved put the fear of God
into a man so great that he feared only Parliament and said so
till Hitchcock wrought with him across his own dinner table and
- he feared the Kashi Bridge and all who spoke in its name. Then
there was the cholera that came in the night to the village by
the bridge works; and after the cholera smote the small-pox. The
fever they had always with them. Hitchcock had been appointed a
magistrate of the third class with whipping powers for the
better government of the community and Findlayson watched him
wield his powers temperately learning what to overlook and what
to look after. It was a long long reverie and it covered
storm sudden freshets death in every manner and shape violent
and awful rage against red tape half frenzying a mind that knows
it should be busy on other things; drought sanitation finance;
birth wedding burial and riot in the village of twenty warring
castes; argument expostulation persuasion and the blank
despair that a man goes to bed upon thankful that his rifle is
all in pieces in the gun-case. Behind everything rose the black
frame of the Kashi Bridge - plate by plate girder by girder
span by span - and each pier of it recalled Hitchcock the
all-round man who had stood by his chief without failing from
the very first to this last.
So the bridge was two men's work - unless one counted Peroo as
Peroo certainly counted himself. He was a Lascar a Kharva from
Bulsar familiar with every port between Rockhampton and London
who had risen to the rank of serang on the British India boats
but wearying of routine musters and clean clothes had thrown up
the service and gone inland where men of his calibre were sure
of employment. For his knowledge of tackle and the handling of
heavy weights Peroo was worth almost any price he might have
chosen to put upon his services; but custom decreed the wage of
the overhead-men and Peroo was not within many silver pieces of
his proper value. Neither running water nor extreme heights made
him afraid; and as an ex-serang he knew how to hold authority.
No piece of iron was so big or so badly placed that Peroo could
not devise a tackle to lift it - a loose-ended sagging
arrangement rigged with a scandalous amount of talking but
perfectly equal to the work in hand. It was Peroo who had saved
the girder of Number Seven pier from destruction when the new
wire-rope jammed in the eye of the crane and the huge plate
tilted in its slings threatening to slide out sideways. Then
the native workmen lost their heads with great shoutings and
Hitchcock's right arm was broken by a falling T-plate and he
buttoned it up in his coat and swooned and came to and directed
for four hours till Peroo from the top of the crane reported
"All's well" and the plate swung home. There was no one like
Peroo serang to lash and guy and hold to control the
donkey-engines to hoist a fallen locomotive craftily out of the
borrow-pit into which it had tumbled; to strip and dive if need
be to see how the concrete blocks round the piers stood the
scouring of Mother Gunga or to adventure upstream on a monsoon
night and report on the state of the embankment-facings. He
would interrupt the field-councils of Findlayson and Hitchcock
without fear till his wonderful English or his still more
wonderful linguafranca half Portuguese and half Malay ran out
and he was forced to take string and show the knots that he would
recommend. He controlled his own gang of tackle men - mysterious
relatives from Kutch Mandvi gathered month by month and tried to
the uttermost. No consideration of family or kin allowed
Peroo to keep weak hands or a giddy head on the pay-roll.
"My honour is the honour of this bridge" he would say to the
about-to-be-dismissed. "What do I care for your honour?
Go and work on a steamer. That is all you are fit for."
The little cluster of huts where he and his gang lived centred
round the tattered dwelling of a sea-priest - one who had never
set foot on black water but had been chosen as ghostly
counsellor by two generations of sea-rovers all unaffected by
port missions or those creeds which are thrust upon sailors by
agencies along Thames bank. The priest of the Lascars had
nothing to do with their caste or indeed with anything at all.
He ate the offerings of his church and slept and smoked and
slept again "for" said Peroo who had haled him a thousand
miles inland "he is a very holy man. He never cares what you
eat so long as you do not eat beef and that is good because on
land we worship Shiva we Kharvas; but at sea on the Kumpani's
boats we attend strictly to the orders of the Burra Malum
[the first mate] and on this bridge we observe what Finlinson
Sahib says."
Finlinson Sahib had that day given orders to clear the
scaffolding from the guard-tower on the right bank and Peroo
with his mates was casting loose and lowering down the bamboo
poles and planks as swiftly as ever they had whipped the cargo
out of a coaster.
From his trolley he could hear the whistle of the serang's silver
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