Chapter 53 What the Wells Said

The valley took the news the way a field takes rain — not all at once, and not in one place, but everywhere, according to its own nature. It went first through the church porch on Sunday, where the trustees stood after service with their hats off and their faces set, and Arthur read them his grandfather's line from the paper he had copied out fair that morning, and Vane read them the water entries from his family's ledger in a voice that never once shook, though his thumb pressed white against the board of the book. The porch was silent while he read. When he had done, an old shepherd named Hobbs, who had taken the company's shilling in the spring for his name to a counter-petition, looked down at his own boots and said, so that everyone heard it: "I signed their paper for five pounds. I will give the five pounds to the well-club. And I will give my name to this." Whether it was shame or sense or the sight of sixty years of patience standing hatless among them no man could say; but there was not one in the porch who laughed at him, and by Thursday the five pounds had bought new rope and a clean bucket for the eastern lane. From the porch it went to the kitchens, and from the kitchens to the lanes, and here Eleanor did work that no newspaper ever printed and no court ever rewarded. She rode the vale with a notebook for eleven days, from the river meadows to the head of the eastern lane, and at every cottage she asked the same questions in the same order: how deep is your well, what does the water taste of, has it changed since spring, and when did you last have to dig deeper? The answers came back in a pattern that Fenwick, plotting them at night upon a chart of the parish, could only call terrifying in its orderliness. Along the eastern lane, within half a mile of the common, every well had fallen between two and four feet since April, and three of them had begun to taste of iron. Farther west the falling thinned. By the river it vanished altogether. The wells were failing in rings, like ripples run backwards — circles closing inward upon the hill. The eastern lane took the news hardest, because it had always known the most. The families there were descended from well-sinkers — men who had bored the vale's water before ever a Pemberton drew deed or charter, whose craft had come down father to son like a trade secret, along with a standing rule no one had thought to write anywhere: that on the east side of the parish no shaft was sunk past forty feet, and no reason was asked. Now the grandsons of those men stood at their own heads with plumb-lines and tasted iron, and understood that their great-grandfathers had been keeping faith with something all along, and had never told them what. Marie turned the Academy to the same end, because Marie had never in her life met a fact she did not want drawn, dated, and countersigned. The older children mapped every well and pump and spring within three miles, each with its depth marked in her own hand; the middle forms kept the rainfall record against which Fenwick tested the falls in the water; and the youngest, to their lasting glory, were set to interview their grandmothers, and brought back such a cargo of old sayings as no survey could have bought. It was the grandmothers who supplied the verse every child in the lane already knew and none had thought to weigh: *Dig deep, drink sweet;* *Dig deeper, bitter meet;* *Dig deepest of the nine,* *And the vale shall taste the brine.* "Brine," Fenwick said, when Marie copied it out for him. He sat looking at it for a long while. "My lord, if that is memory and not rhyme — if the mother-water ever tasted of salt in living memory — then it lies deeper than I judged, against the old marine measures, and pressure above it is the whole of our safety. A cistern under a column of stone. And we have been drilling holes in the bottom of the column." There was dissent still, because a valley is not a choir. Will Clegg, who had shared Hobbs's five pounds and felt none of his remorse, put the other case plainly at the trustees' second meeting, and deserved the hearing he got. "Coal is wages," he said. "Warm kitchens, and boys kept home from the poorhouse, and old men with pensions off a company instead of begging off a parish. You can drink water, my lords, but you cannot eat it, and I never yet saw a schoolroom built out of rain." Arthur let him finish, and answered him in kind. "You are right about wages, Clegg, and I will hold you to it. But count them honestly. The Grand Western's shafts would employ forty men of this parish for perhaps ten years. The water under this common gives every well in the vale its drink for ever, and every cow its milk, and every crop on the lower meadows its growth; and when the coal was dug and gone, and the companies gone after it, the wells would still be asked to feed the children those wages were meant for. We are offered ten years of coin for ever of water. That is the bargain, and no man in this parish should sign it without seeing both sides of the paper." Clegg sat down unconvinced but silenced, which in December was as much as could be carried. The company's men bored all week behind their ridge fence, and the sound of the rods came down the wind with the regularity of a pulse. On Wednesday their engine was erected — a small one, second-hand, its chimney smoking like a single grey feather pinned to the skyline. Thomas Gillingwater watched it through a glass from the top field each morning at first light and recorded what he saw in chalk upon the tailboard of his cart, where the whole market might read it: *Day six. Rods down forty feet.* *Day nine. Water drawn up, warm.* On the eleventh day the chalk said only: *They have stopped.* "They stopped because the bore made water faster than the engine could drink it," the Cornish captain told his men that evening, by the account of one whose sister cooked at the Academy. Captain Trevanion was his name — a broad, weathered man out of the Redruth country, thirty years sunk in other people's ground — and he stood at the borehead with the warm water rising about his boots and looked northward across the darkening valley at the scattered lamps of the eastern lane, where families were drawing their supper water from holes his trade had emptied, and something in him turned over, as such things do, quietly, without witnesses. "In Cornwall," he said, "we boast our ground is honest, because it kills a man quick and shows him his grave. This ground is not honest. It lies asleep, and it dreams, and I will not be the man who wakes it for a company's wages." He gave orders to collar the bore with clay and iron before dawn, and he wrote to London that the freehold strip was unworkable by the methods proposed; and the letter, passing through four hands on its way to four intermediaries, reached Silas Devereux on the Friday, who read it twice, smiled without pleasure, and wrote back a single instruction: *Sink elsewhere. Buy the widow's closes below the ridge. The act gives us everything inside six hundred yards of the line — and the widow's closes are inside it.*