Chapter 73 The Report Stage

The report stage came on the Tuesday as promised, and the vale's people learned what a fortnight's arithmetic buys in Room Eleven: nothing that cannot be bought twice. Prendergast had spent the interval the way his kind spend intervals — in rooms off corridors, with whips and agents and men whose names appear on no paper — and he opened the proceedings with the smoothness of a millrace. The committee had seen the ground, he conceded, all honour to its diligence; it had heard children count, and counted itself; and the promoters, so far from resenting scrutiny, proposed of their own motion two clauses of safeguard. The first bound the company to fence every cutting within sight of any public well. The second, drafted in letters of gold upon vellum so far as the eye could see, required the Union to make good *any injury to any water supply which a court of competent jurisdiction should find to have been caused by the works* — a clause Caulfield, rising slowly, compared to a promise by a flood to pay for the drowned whenever a court should establish which drop was guilty. He moved three amendments in answer. That no works of drainage be authorised until the identity of the waters moved was tried at law. That the company give security, in money lodged, against injury pending trial. That the powers of the act be made inoperative within five miles of any shaft-mark of ancient digging until the appeal then depending before the Court of Appeal in Chancery should be determined. The first was negatived by seven to five, the chairman alone of his own side dividing with the petitioners; the second was negatived by eight to four; the third was withdrawn upon Ettrick's private advice, given in the corridor with his watch open in his palm, that the House would not thank a committee for legislating around a court already seised, and that the court, if the vale kept its nerve and its evidence clean, would prove the better room. Braithwaite gave the promoters their answer to the ninth-day rumours, and gave it carefully. Asked by his own counsel whether the level at Cinder Slack had any object beyond the drainage of surface water, he said it had not; asked by Caulfield why, then, the company had ordered engine cylinders through the Westfield staiths, he looked once toward his principals' bench, found no rescue there, and said that drainage required engines, as surgery required knives; and the committee, which had watched him survey beautifully all summer, heard a plain tradesman defend his trade and did not hold it against him. It was left to Caulfield, in one sentence before he sat down, to hang the cost of that loyalty where the room could see it. "Mr. Braithwaite has told you drainage requires knives," he said. "The petitioners have shown you where the patient lies. Gentlemen will draw their own conclusions about who holds the knife and who is lying on the table." The bill passed the report stage that evening. The third reading was set down for the first week of the next session, months away across the winter; and Hollis, walking out with Arthur through the lobby where thirty vale-men rose as one man and sat again without instruction, said the truest thing spoken in Westminster that week. "They have not beaten us today, my lord; they have bought themselves a calendar. The act is a key cut but not yet turned, and Verrall will spend every day between now and the turn of it finishing his lock in private. We have winter. He has winter too, and deeper pockets for coal and candles." He stopped under the last lamp before the doors. "Go home, sir. Open your ninth door. I will keep one clerk and one newspaper man on this corridor all session, and Prosser keeps the staiths, and between us we shall know everything the Union does that casts a shadow." There was one more scene in London worth the coach-fare, though no member witnessed it. On the Thursday, waiting at the telegraph office for answers to three wires, Arthur fell in with the young member for the coastal borough, who was posting a paragraph to his local press with his own hand and had ink to the second knuckle. The member asked after the count of the water, having dined out twice on the story of the parish that kept books; and when Arthur told him six to the minute, and falling, the young man went quiet, and then said a thing that followed Arthur home like a passenger. "You know what I cannot get over, Lord Pemberton? Not the villainy — villainy is common as rats. It is the counting. Eleven days they measured, you told me, while gentlemen argued whether they existed. My committee sits on the franchise of ten thousand men whom nobody has ever thought to count at all; and I begin to believe the counting is the whole of the reform, and the rest of us are only the clerks." He posted his paragraph, and offered his hansom as far as Paddington, which was refused on principle of the night coach being cheaper; and the two men parted, neither knowing that the paragraph would come back to them both within the year, printed larger than either had written it. Arthur reached Ashworth on the Saturday night, and found the household keeping a discipline stranger than any lobby's. Fenwick and two estate men slept in turns at Nine Chimneys under a tarpaulin, guarding an excavation nobody had yet begun against interference nobody had yet attempted; Trevanion had answered the telegram within a day — *COMING. KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THE TIMBER TILL I COME. CHALK IS A PROPHET WHEN IT IS FRESH.* — and arrived himself on the Friday with a canvas bag of tools and a Cornishman's contempt for English haste; Devereux walked the garden paths each morning under escort, learning the shape of the valley he had mapped for sale, saying little, watched by the lane from behind curtains with a steadiness the lane would not have granted him a month before; and Vane had not left the hill since Sunday. He sat now, Arthur found, on a camp-stool beside the thorn at the ninth mound, wrapped in a rug against the evening damp although the night was warm, with the probe-rod's marked depth chalked on a slate at his feet: eleven feet. "She waited sixty years," the old man said, without turning his head. "I can sit with her a few evenings longer. Go in, my lord. Tomorrow we cut thorn." ---