Part 13

‘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 nothin’. 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 justabout 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 maul 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 sayin’ 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 cheekbone. ‘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 workin’ 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 Italian, called Benedetto. I met him first at Oxford on Magdalen Tower when I was learning my trade-or trades, I should say. A bad enemy he was, as you say, but he came to be my singular good friend,’ said Hal as he put down the mallet and settled himself comfortably.

‘What might his trade have been--plastering’ Mr Springett asked.

‘Plastering of a sort. He worked in stucco--fresco we call it. Made pictures on plaster. Not but what he had a fine sweep of the hand in drawing. He’d take the long sides of a cloister, trowel on his stuff, and roll out his great all-abroad pictures of saints and croppy-topped trees quick as a webster unrolling cloth almost. Oh, Benedetto could draw, but ‘a was a little-minded man, professing to be full of secrets of colour or plaster--common tricks, all of ‘em--and his one single talk was how Tom, Dick or Harry had stole this or t’other secret art from him.’

‘I know that sort,’ said Mr Springett. ‘There’s no keeping peace or making peace with such. An’ they’re mostly born an’ bone idle.’

‘True. Even his fellow-countrymen laughed at his jealousy. We two came to loggerheads early on Magdalen Tower. I was a youngster then. Maybe I spoke my mind about his work.’

‘You shouldn’t never do that.’ Mr Springett shook his head. ‘That sort lay it up against you.’

‘True enough. This Benedetto did most specially. Body o’ me, the man lived to hate me! But I always kept my eyes open on a plank or a scaffold. I was mighty glad to be shut of him when he quarrelled with his Guild foreman, and went off, nose in air, and paints under his arm. But’--Hal leaned forward--‘if you hate a man or a man hates you--’

‘I know. You’re everlastin’ running acrost him,’ Mr Springett interrupted. ‘Excuse me, sir.’ He leaned out of the window, and shouted to a carter who was loading a cart with bricks.

‘Ain’t you no more sense than to heap ‘em up that way?’ he said. ‘Take an’ throw a hundred of ‘em off. It’s more than the team can compass. Throw ‘em off, I tell you, and make another trip for what’s left over. Excuse me, sir. You was sayin’-’