Traffics and Discoveries

"Your assumptions are deliciously sweeping, but may I point out that a decent and – the dear old Abbot of Wilton would have put it in his resonant monkish Latin much better than I can – a scholarly reserve, does not necessarily connote blank vacuity of mind on all subjects."

"Ah, the dear old Abbot of Wilton," said the Rat sympathetically, as one nursed in that bosom. "Charmin' fellow – thorough scholar and gentleman. Such a pity!"

"Oh, Sacred Fountains!" the Waters were fairly boiling. "He goes out of his way to expose his ignorance by triple bucketfuls. He creaks to high Heaven that he is hopelessly behind the common order of things! He invites the streams of Five Watersheds to witness his su-su-su-pernal incompetence, and then he talks as though there were untold reserves of knowledge behind him that he is too modest to bring forward. For a bland, circular, absolutely sincere impostor, you're a miracle, O Wheel!"

"I do not pretend to be anything more than an integral portion of an accepted and not altogether mushroom institution."

"Quite so," said the Waters. "Then go round – hard – "

"To what end?" asked the Wheel.

"Till a big box of tanks in your house begins to fizz and fume – gassing is the proper word."

"It would be," said the Cat, sniffing.

"That will show that your accumulators are full. When the accumulators are exhausted, and the lights burn badly, you will find us whacking you round and round again."

"The end of life as decreed by Mangles and his creatures is to go whacking round and round for ever," said the Cat.

"In order," the Rat said, "that you may throw raw and unnecessary illumination upon all the unloveliness in the world. Unloveliness which we shall – er – have always with us. At the same time you will riotously neglect the so-called little but vital graces that make up Life."

"Yes, Life," said the Cat, "with its dim delicious half-tones and veiled indeterminate distances. Its surprisals, escapes, encounters, and dizzying leaps – its full-throated choruses in honour of the morning star, and its melting reveries beneath the sun-warmed wall."

"Oh, you can go on the tiles, Pussalina, just the same as usual," said the laughing Waters. "We sha'n't interfere with you."

"On the tiles, forsooth!" hissed the Cat.

"Well, that's what it amounts to," persisted the Waters. "We see a good deal of the minor graces of life on our way down to our job."

"And – but I fear I speak to deaf ears – do they never impress you?" said the Wheel.

"Enormously," said the Waters. "We have already learned six refined synonyms for loafing."

"But (here again I feel as though preaching in the wilderness) it never occurs to you that there may exist some small difference between the wholly animal – ah – rumination of bovine minds and the discerning, well- apportioned leisure of the finer type of intellect?"

"Oh, yes. The bovine mind goes to sleep under a hedge and makes no bones about it when it's shouted at. We've seen that– in haying-time – all along the meadows. The finer type is wide awake enough to fudge up excuses for shirking, and mean enough to get stuffy when its excuses aren't accepted. Turn over!"

"But, my good people, no gentleman gets stuffy as you call it. A certain proper pride, to put it no higher, forbids – "

"Nothing that he wants to do if he really wants to do it. Get along! What are you giving us? D'you suppose we've scoured half heaven in the clouds, and half earth in the mists, to be taken in at this time of the day by a bone-idle, old hand-quern of your type?"

"It is not for me to bandy personalities with you. I can only say that I simply decline to accept the situation."

"Decline away. It doesn't make any odds. They'll probably put in a turbine if you decline too much."

"What's a turbine?" said the Wheel, quickly.

"A little thing you don't see, that performs surprising revolutions. But you won't decline. You'll hang on to your two nice red-strapped axles and your new machine-moulded pinions like – a – like a leech on a lily stem! There's centuries of work in your old bones if you'd only apply yourself to it; and, mechanically, an overshot wheel with this head of water is about as efficient as a turbine."

"So in future I am to be considered mechanically? I have been painted by at least five Royal Academicians."

"Oh, you can be painted by five hundred when you aren't at work, of course. But while you are at work you'll work. You won't half-stop and think and talk about rare plants and dicky-birds and farinaceous fiduciary interests. You'll continue to revolve, and this new head of water will see that you do so continue."

"It is a matter on which it would be exceedingly ill-advised to form a hasty or a premature conclusion. I will give it my most careful consideration," said the Wheel.

"Please do," said the Waters gravely. "Hullo! Here's the Miller again."

The Cat coiled herself in a picturesque attitude on the softest corner of a sack, and the Rat without haste, yet certainly without rest, slipped behind the sacking as though an appointment had just occurred to him.

In the doorway, with the young Engineer, stood the Miller grinning amazedly.

"Well – well – well! 'tis true-ly won'erful. An' what a power o' dirt! It come over me now looking at these lights, that I've never rightly seen my own mill before. She needs a lot bein' done to her."

"Ah! I suppose one must make oneself moderately agreeable to the baser sort. They have their uses. This thing controls the dairy." The Cat, pincing on her toes, came forward and rubbed her head against the Miller's knee.

"Ay, you pretty puss," he said, stooping. "You're as big a cheat as the rest of 'em that catch no mice about me. A won'erful smooth-skinned, rough-tongued cheat you be. I've more than half a mind – "

"She does her work well," said the Engineer, pointing to where the Rat's beady eyes showed behind the sacking. "Cats and Rats livin' together – see?"

"Too much they do – too long they've done. I'm sick and tired of it. Go and take a swim and larn to find your own vittles honest when you come out, Pussy."

"My word!" said the Waters, as a sprawling Cat landed all unannounced in the centre of the tail-race. "Is that you, Mewsalina? You seem to have been quarrelling with your best friend. Get over to the left. It's shallowest there. Up on that alder-root with all four paws. Good-night!"

"You'll never get any they rats," said the Miller, as the young Engineer struck wrathfully with his stick at the sacking. "They're not the common sort. They're the old black English sort."

"Are they, by Jove? I must catch one to stuff, some day."

Six months later, in the chill of a January afternoon, they were letting in the Waters as usual.

"Come along! It's both gears this evening," said the Wheel, kicking joyously in the first rush of the icy stream. "There's a heavy load of grist just in from Lamber's Wood. Eleven miles it came in an hour and a half in our new motor-lorry, and the Miller's rigged five new five-candle lights in his cow-stables. I'm feeding 'em to-night. There's a cow due to calve. Oh, while I think of it, what's the news from Callton Rise?"

"The waters are finding their level as usual – but why do you ask?" said the deep outpouring Waters.

"Because Mangles and Felden and the Miller are talking of increasing the plant here and running a saw-mill by electricity. I was wondering whether we – "

"I beg your pardon," said the Waters chuckling. "What did you say?"

"Whether we, of course, had power enough for the job. It will be a biggish contract. There's all Harpenden Brook to be considered and Batten's Ponds as well, and Witches' Fountain, and the Churt's Hawd system.

"We've power enough for anything in the world," said the Waters. "The only question is whether you could stand the strain if we came down on you full head."

"Of course I can," said the Wheel. "Mangles is going to turn me into a set of turbines – beauties."

"Oh – er – I suppose it's the frost that has made us a little thick-headed, but to whom are we talking?" asked the amazed Waters.

"To me – the Spirit of the Mill, of course."

"Not to the old Wheel, then?"

"I happen to be living in the old Wheel just at present. When the turbines are installed I shall go and live in them. What earthly difference does it make?"

"Absolutely none," said the Waters, "in the earth or in the waters under the earth. But we thought turbines didn't appeal to you."

"Not like turbines? Me? My dear fellows, turbines are good for fifteen hundred revolutions a minute – and with our power we can drive 'em at full speed. Why, there's nothing we couldn't grind or saw or illuminate or heat with a set of turbines! That's to say if all the Five Watersheds are agreeable."

"Oh, we've been agreeable for ever so long."

"Then why didn't you tell me?"

"Don't know. Suppose it slipped our memory."

The Waters were holding themselves in for fear of bursting with mirth.

"How careless of you! You should keep abreast of the age, my dear fellows. We might have settled it long ago, if you'd only spoken. Yes, four good turbines and a neat brick penstock – eh? This old Wheel's absurdly out of date."

"Well," said the Cat, who after a little proud seclusion had returned to her place impenitent as ever. "Praised be Pasht and the Old Gods, that whatever may have happened I, at least, have preserved the Spirit of the Mill!"

She looked round as expecting her faithful ally, the Black Rat; but that very week the Engineer had caught and stuffed him, and had put him in a glass case; he being a genuine old English black rat. That breed, the report says, is rapidly diminishing before the incursions of the brown variety.