The Bridge-Builders | Page 9

to a yell, half fear and half
wonder: the face of the river whitened from bank to hank between the
stone facings, and the far-away spurs went out in spouts of foam.
Mother Gunga had come bank-high in haste, and a wall of
chocolate-coloured water was her messenger. There was a shriek above
the roar of the water, the complaint of the spans coming down on their
blocks as the cribs were whirled out from under their bellies. The
stone-boats groaned and ground each other in the eddy that swung
round the abutment, and their clumsy masts rose higher and higher
against the dim sky-line.
"Before she was shut between these walls we knew what she would do.
Now she is thus cramped God only knows what she will do!" said
Peroo, watching the furious turmoil round the guard-tower. "Ohe'!
Fight, then! Fight hard, for it is thus that a woman wears herself out."
But Mother Gunga would not fight as Peroo desired. After the first
down-stream plunge there came no more walls of water, but the river
lifted herself bodily, as a snake when she drinks in midsummer,
plucking and fingering along the revetments, and banking up behind
the piers till even Findlayson began to recalculate the strength of his
work.

When day came the village gasped. "Only last night," men said, turning
to each other, "it was as a town in the river-bed! Look now!"
And they looked and wondered afresh at the deep water, the racing
water that licked the throat of the piers. The farther bank was veiled by
rain, into which the bridge ran out and vanished; the spurs up-stream
were marked by no more than eddies and spoutings, and down-stream
the pent river, once freed of her guide-lines, had spread like a sea to the
horizon. Then hurried by, rolling in the water, dead men and oxen
together, with here and there a patch of thatched roof that melted when
it touched a pier.
"Big flood," said Peroo, and Findlayson nodded. It was as big a flood
as he had any wish to watch. His bridge would stand what was upon
her now, but not very much more, and if by any of a thousand chances
there happened to be a weakness in the embankments, Mother Gunga
would carry his honour to the sea with the other raffle. Worst of all,
there was nothing to do except to sit still; and Findlayson sat still under
his macintosh till his helmet became pulp on his head, and his boots
were over-ankle in mire. He took no count of time, for the river was
marking the hours, inch by inch and foot by foot, along the
embankment, and he listened, numb and hungry, to the straining of the
stone-boats, the hollow thunder under the piers, and the hundred noises
that make the full note of a flood. Once a dripping servant brought him
food, but he could not eat; and once he thought that he heard a faint
toot from a locomotive across the river, and then he smiled. The
bridge's failure would hurt his assistant not a little, hut Hitchcock was a
young man with his big work yet to do. For himself the crash meant
everything - everything that made a hard life worth the living. They
would say, the men of his own profession . . .he remembered the
half-pitying things that he himself had said when Lockhart's new
waterworks burst and broke down in brick-heaps and sludge, and
Lockhart's spirit broke in him and he died. He remembered what he
himself had said when the Sumao Bridge went out in the big cyclone
by the sea; and most he remembered poor Hartopp's face three weeks
later, when the shame had marked it. His bridge was twice the size of
Hartopp's, and it carried the Findlayson truss as well as the new

pier-shoe - the Findlayson bolted shoe. There were no excuses in his
service. Government might listen, perhaps, but his own kind would
judge him by his bridge, as that stood or fell. He went over it in his
head, plate by plate, span by span, brick by brick, pier by pier,
remembering, comparing, estimating, and recalculating, lest there
should be any mistake; and through the long hours and through the
flights of formulae that danced and wheeled before him a cold fear
would come to pinch his heart. His side of the sum was beyond
question; but what man knew Mother Gunga's arithmetic? Even as he
was making all sure by the multiplication table, the river might be
scooping a pot-hole to the very bottom of any one of those eighty-foot
piers that carried his reputation. Again a servant came to him with food,
but his mouth was dry, and he could only