Chapter 68 Standing

The question of standing was argued on the Monday in a room so crowded that members sat on the windowsills, and Prendergast opened it with the point honed since the previous week. The trust's lands lay outside the two-mile limit — outside, indeed, the very boundary of the shaded map; no clause of the bill touched trust property; therefore the trustees had no locus to be heard upon the merits, and the inhabitants less, for what injury could persons suffer in common which the law recognized? The bill was not aimed at the vale. If passed, it would not authorize the taking of one rood of it. A court might pause at the mouth of a shaft; a committee on a bill of rails could hardly be asked to pause at the mouth of a clause. Caulfield answered with the deed itself, and with the judgment. The trust's purpose, he submitted, was written into its constitution by the Master's own construction: the preservation of the ground of the common in its natural and unbroken state. A power to drain within two miles — with a catchment level drawn upon the promoters' own plates, running toward that common from the north — was, if exercised, a work which the trust existed to resist; the injury threatened was precisely and peculiarly the injury the trust was created to prevent; and if that were not interest enough to stand upon, then the word had no meaning left. As for the inhabitants: forty-one families held their water in common under the well-club's rules, and the House, which had just been pleased to receive their minutes, could not hold both that they owned the water together and that they could be injured in it only severally. He ended upon the point no one had briefed him for and which he had taken himself from reading the Chronicle in the train: "The parish has kept books, sir. Books are evidence of interest. Men do not measure for eleven days what does not matter to them." The committee divided upon the preliminary point and saved the petitioners by seven votes to five; and Mr. Ettrick, giving his reasons briefly for the benefit of the journal, said a sentence that travelled back to Ashworth by the next mail and was chalked on a tailboard within the week: *Where a community has reduced its interest to writing and maintained it by measurement for years, this committee is not the body to tell it that its interest is imaginary.* Then came the merits, and the heat, and the witnesses. Fenwick gave his charts and his balance-sheet of rain and level; Murchison, recalled, faced his former chief across the bar of the committee room, and the exchange between the two surveyors was the thing the reporters waited for. Braithwaite swore the catchment level of Plate IV was designed solely to conduct surface water from the old ironstone diggings. Murchison, examined by Caulfield, took the plate and read aloud the fall marked upon the dotted line, and the strata annotated along it, and observed mildly that surface water ran on gradients of one in twenty and not one in four hundred, and that no drain for fields needed a heading twelve feet by nine, timbered throughout, driven upon the strike of the coal measures. "You surveyed this ground yourself, Mr. Braithwaite, in my employment, six years ago," he said, closing the folio. "There was then no surface water at Cinder Slack worth a field-drain, as your own field book of April 1838 shows. What your plate drains is below the rockhead. You know it, and I know it, and now the committee knows it." Braithwaite, given to the committee by courtesy, said only that surveys improved with information; but the room had watched a craftsman correct a forgery with another man's own notebooks, and the atmosphere thereafter required management by the whips. Trevanion arrived from Cornwall on the Wednesday, sworn, magnificent, and terrible in his plainness; and it was he who asked for Devereux to be present when he gave his evidence, and faced him across the floor while he explained to the committee, with chalk upon a blackboard brought for the purpose, what a feeder level run along the strike would do to any wet ground it was pointed at, and what signs such a level shows within a month of its opening — pale timber, bright spoil, warm constant water. Asked whether he knew of any such level in existence near this district, the Captain looked at Devereux for the space of three seconds, which the shorthand writer recorded as a pause, and said: "Not yet, sir. But I have been paid wages in my life for driving things that were drawn in reports exactly like that yin; and the man who draws the plate is seldom far from the pick that follows it." Devereux, cross-examined by Caulfield upon the borehead failure at the widow Harbury's closes — insured, engineered to his specification, abandoned to its collar — gave answers that were correct individually and damning in sequence, and the young member for the coastal borough, watching him, wrote in his pocket-book a line he later used in a debate that made some noise: *Every failure in this business wears this witness's signature, and every signature an insurance policy.* The vote, when it came, was taken without division-counting drama — the tellers reported seven to five in under a minute — and the vale's people heard it as they heard all such things, in stillness first and afterwards in the street. Gillingwater sent one telegram home, the first his family had ever paid for, and its whole text went up on the Academy wall by Thursday: STANDING CARRIED SEVEN TO FIVE. BOOKS ARE EVIDENCE OF INTEREST. Marie read it to the school twice, once for the news and once, she said, for the grammar. Trevanion arrived from Cornwall on the Wednesday, sworn, magnificent, and terrible in his plainness; he had travelled third class with his chalk-box as luggage and refused a cab from the station on principle of habit rather than economy, so that the committee's officers found him waiting at the door an hour early with sea-salt still in his voice. It was he who asked for Devereux to be present when he gave his evidence, and faced him across the floor while he explained to the committee, with chalk upon a blackboard brought for the purpose, what a feeder level run along the strike would do to any wet ground it was pointed at, and what signs such a level shows within a month of its opening — pale timber, bright spoil, warm constant water. Asked whether he knew of any such level in existence near this district, the Captain looked at Devereux for the space of three seconds, which the shorthand writer recorded as a pause, and said: "Not yet, sir. But I have been paid wages in my life for driving things that were drawn in reports exactly like that yin; and the man who draws the plate is seldom far from the pick that follows it." Devereux, cross-examined by Caulfield upon the borehead failure at the widow Harbury's closes — insured, engineered to his specification, abandoned to its collar — gave answers that were correct individually and damning in sequence, and the young member for the coastal borough, watching him, wrote in his pocket-book a line he later used in a debate that made some noise: *Every failure in this business wears this witness's signature, and every signature an insurance policy.* The committee resolved to view the locality on the following Tuesday, travelling by special train to Westfield; Lord Verrall announced that the members would be the guests of the Union at his northern collieries en route, where the company would have "the honour of showing the practical management of water upon the largest scale in England"; and Hollis, hearing of it, wrote down to Arthur a single line beneath the official notice: *He means to show them a pump. See that we show them a heartbeat.* ---