The Bridge-Builders | Page 5

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 pipe
and the creek and clatter of the pulleys. Peroo was standing on the
top-most coping of the tower, clad in the blue dungaree of his
abandoned service, and as Findlayson motioned to him to be careful,
for his