‘Since you with us have made so free,
Will you kindly tell what your name might be?’
The old man kindly answered them:
‘It might be Japhet, it might be Shem,
Or it might be Ham (though his skin was dark),
Whereas it is Noah, commanding the Ark.
‘Your wheel is new and your pumps are strange,
But otherwise I perceive no change,
And in less than a week, if she did not ground,
I’d sail this hooker the wide world round!’
Both: We tell these tales which are strictest true, etc.
The Wrong Thing
Dan had gone in for building model boats; but after he had filled the schoolroom with chips, which he expected Una to clear away, they turned him out of doors and he took all his tools up the hill to Mr. Springett’s yard, where he knew he could make as much mess as he chose. Old Mr. Springett was a builder, contractor, and sanitary engineer, and his yard, which opened off the village street, was always full of interesting things. At one end of it was a long loft, reached by a ladder, where he kept his iron-bound scaffold planks, tins of paints, pulleys, and odds and ends he had found in old houses. He would sit here by the hour watching his carts as they loaded or unloaded in the yard below, while Dan gouged and grunted at the carpenter’s bench near the loft window. Mr. Springett and Dan had always been particular friends, for Mr. Springett was so old he could remember when railways were being made in the southern counties of England, and people were allowed to drive dogs in carts.
One hot, still afternoon – the tar-paper on the roof smelt like ships – Dan, in his shirt sleeves, was smoothing down a new schooner’s bow, and Mr. Springett was talking of barns and houses he had built. He said he never forgot any stick or stone he had ever handled, or any man, woman, or child he had ever met. Just then he was very proud of the village Hall at the entrance to the village, which he had finished a few weeks before.
‘An’ I don’t mind tellin’ you, Mus’ Dan,’ he said, ‘that the Hall will be my last job top of this mortal earth. I didn’t make ten pounds – no, nor yet five – out o’ the whole contrac’, but my name’s lettered on the foundation stone —Ralph Springett, Builder– and the stone she’s bedded on four foot good concrete. If she shifts any time these five hundred years, I’ll sure-ly turn in my grave. I told the Lunnon architec’ so when he come down to oversee my work.’
‘What did he say?’ Dan was sandpapering the schooner’s port bow.
‘Nothing. The Hall ain’t more than one of his small jobs for him, but ’tain’t small to me, an’ my name is cut and lettered, frontin’ the village street, I do hope an’ pray, for time everlastin.’ You’ll want the little round file for that holler in her bow. Who’s there?’ Mr. Springett turned stiffly in his chair.
A long pile of scaffold-planks ran down the centre of the loft. Dan looked, and saw Hal of the Draft’s touzled head beyond them.3
‘Be you the builder of the village Hall?’ he asked of Mr. Springett.
‘I be,’ was the answer. ‘But if you want a job – ’
Hal laughed. ‘No, faith!’ he said. ‘Only the Hall is as good and honest a piece of work as I’ve ever run a rule over. So, being born hereabouts, and being reckoned a master among masons, and accepted as a master mason, I made bold to pay my brotherly respects to the builder.’
‘Aa – um!’ Mr. Springett looked important. ‘I be a bit rusty, but I’ll try ye!’
He asked Hal several curious questions, and the answers must have pleased him, for he invited Hal to sit down. Hal moved up, always keeping behind the pile of planks so that only his head showed, and sat down on a trestle in the dark corner at the back of Mr. Springett’s desk. He took no notice of Dan, but talked at once to Mr. Springett about bricks, and cement, and lead and glass, and after a while Dan went on with his work. He knew Mr. Springett was pleased, because he tugged his white sandy beard, and smoked his pipe in short puffs. The two men seemed to agree about everything, but when grown-ups agree they interrupt each other almost as much as if they were quarrelling. Hal said something about workmen.
‘Why, that’s what I always say,’ Mr. Springett cried. ‘A man who can only do one thing, he’s but next-above-fool to the man that can’t do nothing. That’s where the Unions make their mistake.’
‘My thought to the very dot.’ Dan heard Hal slap his tight-hosed leg. ‘I’ve suffered in my time from these same Guilds – Unions d’you call ’em? All their precious talk of the mysteries of their trades – why, what does it come to?’
‘Nothin’! You’ve just about hit it,’ said Mr. Springett, and rammed his hot tobacco with his thumb.
‘Take the art of wood-carving,’ Hal went on. He reached across the planks, grabbed a wooden mallet, and moved his other hand as though he wanted something. Mr. Springett without a word passed him one of Dan’s broad chisels. ‘Ah! Wood-carving, for example. If you can cut wood and have a fair draft of what ye mean to do, a Heaven’s name take chisel and mall and let drive at it, say I! You’ll soon find all the mystery, forsooth, of wood-carving under your proper hand!’ Whack, came the mallet on the chisel, and a sliver of wood curled up in front of it. Mr. Springett watched like an old raven.
‘All art is one, man – one!’ said Hal between whacks; ‘and to wait on another man to finish out – ’
‘To finish out your work ain’t no sense,’ Mr. Springett cut in. ‘That’s what I’m always saying to the boy here.’ He nodded towards Dan. ‘That’s what I said when I put the new wheel into Brewster’s Mill in Eighteen hundred Seventy-two. I reckoned I was millwright enough for the job ’thout bringin’ a man from Lunnon. An’ besides, dividin’ work eats up profits, no bounds.’
Hal laughed his beautiful deep laugh, and Mr. Springett joined in till Dan laughed too.
‘You handle your tools, I can see,’ said Mr. Springett. ‘I reckon, if you’re any way like me, you’ve found yourself hindered by those – Guilds, did you call ’em? – Unions, we say.’
‘You may say so!’ Hal pointed to a white scar on his cheek-bone. ‘This is a remembrance from the master watching Foreman of Masons on Magdalen Tower, because, please you, I dared to carve stone without their leave. They said a stone had slipped from the cornice by accident.’
‘I know them accidents. There’s no way to disprove ’em. An’ stones ain’t the only things that slip,’ Mr. Springett grunted. Hal went on:
‘I’ve seen a scaffold-plank keckle and shoot a too-clever workman thirty foot on to the cold chancel floor below. And a rope can break – ’
‘Yes, natural as nature; an’ lime’ll fly up in a man’s eyes without any breath o’ wind sometimes,’ said Mr. Springett. ‘But who’s to show ’twasn’t a accident?’
‘Who do these things?’ Dan asked, and straightened his back at the bench as he turned the schooner end-for-end in the vice to get at her counter.
‘Them which don’t wish other men to work no better nor quicker than they do,’ growled Mr. Springett. ‘Don’t pinch her so hard in the vice, Mus’ Dan. Put a piece o’ rag in the jaws, or you’ll bruise her. More than that’ – he turned towards Hal – ‘if a man has his private spite laid up against you, the Unions give him his excuse for working it off.’
‘Well I know it,’ said Hal.
‘They never let you go, them spiteful ones. I knowed a plasterer in Eighteen hundred Sixty-one – down to the Wells. He was a Frenchy – a bad enemy he was.’
‘I had mine too. He was an