第69章 The Inspection

They came down on the Tuesday in two special trains, forty-one gentlemen with silk hats in the racks and the Union's carriages waiting at Westfield, and the day had been arranged by Verrall's people like a coronation. First the northern collieries: the members descended in cages to a gallery where the Great Eastern pump of the Greystones deep stood gleaming, and at a signal it lifted, in one stroke, a quantity of water that drew involuntary applause — water conducted away clean in riveted mains to a leat that turned wheels on its way to the river. Verrall moved among his guests saying little, letting the iron speak, and it spoke well; and if any member noticed that the pump drew from sumps fed by goaves eight hundred feet deep, and that the water so lifted came up faintly warm, and that the south drive, closed and locked, breathed warm air against its doors — only Fenwick noticed, and Fenwick said nothing, and wrote three words in his notebook at the cage foot: *warm from south.* Then the vale. By design of the chairman, acting perhaps on some instinct of fairness, the inspection began at the Academy, and Marie had been given one day's notice and needed none. The senior form answered questions in the manner of a gun-crew serving their piece: depths, dates, tastes, recoveries, the rings of failure plotted inward and the recovery plotted outward, each child rising to give a figure entered in its own hand in the Watch-book. Mr. Ettrick examined two of them closely, trying them with changed numbers, and got the changes carried without a wobble; and afterward he said to Marie, not kindly but justly, that he had examined candidates for the Royal Military Academy who would not have passed her form. "They keep books, sir," said Marie. "It concentrates the mind wonderfully, signing your name under a number." From the school to the eastern lane, cottage doors open, buckets drawn sweet before the members' eyes; the Widow Carker telling her cellar story with the relish of a professional; Hobbs producing, unasked, the five pounds of the counter-petition converted into rope and bucket, receipted in the club's minutes. One member asked Gillingwater what the club cost a family in a bad year, and got the answer to the wrong question and the right one together: "A penny the month, sir, wet or fine; and in a bad year it costs us nothing but fear, which the books take the edge off." The member put in his notebook: *a penny the month against four thousand gallons,* and underlined neither figure, being a careful man. From the lane to the common, where the party divided: the greater number to the ring of stones, five — Ettrick, two members, Braithwaite as the promoters' engineer, and Caulfield — to descend the shaft with Arthur, Vane, and Fenwick, by leave of the trustees and under the standing rules, lamps lit, bell code explained at the mouth. Catherine had provisioned the head of the shaft against their rising as though they were going to sea, and Thomas Gillingwater took the bell himself, saying he had rung it for better men than any parliament sends and would ring it true today regardless. At the ninety-foot chamber Vane showed them the wheel and crown cut in the rock, and said nothing about it beyond its age, letting the older silence do its work; then the left-hand heading, two hundred yards of black oak shoring giving back the lamplight like wet leather, and the warmth rising upon them degree by degree until even Caulfield, who despised theatre on principle, unbuttoned his coat. At the bulkhead the talk stopped of itself. Vane set the driving-bar to the facing stone, and held it, and gave it to Ettrick; and the chairman of the committee, who had spent thirty years listening for the false note in ledgers, stood in the eighty-year dark with his hand upon an iron that beat seven times the minute, slow and enormous, against a wall of clay packed by men whose bones were in the churchyard above; and after a while he passed the bar to his neighbour without remark, and each man counted privately, and no one made a joke, which among members of Parliament is the sincerest form of awe. On the facing stone the chalked words stood plain in the lamp-light, and Caulfield caused no surprise by asking leave to have them photographed by an artist he had brought; and it was noted that Braithwaite looked at the niche with its burnt-down candle longer than at anything else in the chamber, as a man looks at an instrument he recognizes. They came up into the evening light with the whole valley assembled about the ring — not organized; simply there, as at funerals and coach departures, the parish attending itself — and it was then, with the members grouped at the rim and the sun going red behind the western ridge, that Fenwick walked to the stone, knelt, laid both hands flat, and asked the senior form's captain for the watch. The boy timed it aloud against the second hand, as drilled, his voice cracking once: sixty seconds; and the count was six. Fenwick had him take it again. Six. And again. Six, steady, unhurried, the interval grown by nearly a seventh since March — the first change, in all the book of counts, since the thaw. A silence followed in which the only sound was the lantern behind them finding the wind. Then Ettrick said quietly: "Your figures, sir, are sworn weekly by these children?" They were, my lord, and countersigned. "Then the committee has just witnessed a change in material fact, attested in open view. Mr. Caulfield, you will wish to put the circumstance on the record." It was put on the record; the boy signed the Watch-book on the rim stone by lantern-light, before forty-one witnesses, and the entry stands: *August 25th, 1844. Counted six to the minute at 7 of the clock p.m., before the honourable committee. — J. Protheroe.* Across the circle, Lord Verrall received the number without expression, and turned his head northward along the black line of the escarpment, where five miles off no light burned and nothing moved, and looked for a long moment at nothing, as a man listens for a knock he has been expecting; and Arthur, watching him and not the north, understood with cold certainty that the Chairman of the Union had known the count before the boy had spoken it. ---