Traffics and Discoveries

"Amazingly lucid," said the Cat. She was the more to be admired because the language of Domesday Book is not, perhaps, the clearest medium wherein to describe a small but complete electric-light installation, deriving its power from a water-wheel by means of cogs and gearing.

"See for yourself – by all means, see for yourself," said the Waters, spluttering and choking with mirth.

"Upon my word," said the Black Rat furiously, "I may be at fault, but I wholly fail to perceive where these offensive eavesdroppers – er – come in. We were discussing a matter that solely affected our Order."

Suddenly they heard, as they had heard many times before, the Miller shutting off the water. To the rattle and rumble of the labouring stones succeeded thick silence, punctuated with little drops from the stayed wheel. Then some water-bird in the dam fluttered her wings as she slid to her nest, and the plop of a water-rat sounded like the fall of a log in the water.

"It is all over – it always is all over at just this time. Listen, the Miller is going to bed – as usual. Nothing has occurred," said the Cat.

Something creaked in the house where the pig-styes had stood, as metal engaged on metal with a clink and a burr.

"Shall I turn her on?" cried the Miller.

"Ay," said the voice from the dynamo-house.

"A human in Mangles' new house!" the Rat squeaked.

"What of it?" said the Grey Cat. "Even supposing Mr. Mangles' cats'-meat- coloured hovel ululated with humans, can't you see for yourself – that – ?"

There was a solid crash of released waters leaping upon the wheel more furiously than ever, a grinding of cogs, a hum like the hum of a hornet, and then the unvisited darkness of the old mill was scattered by intolerable white light. It threw up every cobweb, every burl and knot in the beams and the floor; till the shadows behind the flakes of rough plaster on the wall lay clear-cut as shadows of mountains on the photographed moon.

"See! See! See!" hissed the Waters in full flood. "Yes, see for yourselves. Nothing has occurred. Can't you see?"

The Rat, amazed, had fallen from his foothold and lay half-stunned on the floor. The Cat, following her instinct, leaped nigh to the ceiling, and with flattened ears and bared teeth backed in a corner ready to fight whatever terror might be loosed on her. But nothing happened. Through the long aching minutes nothing whatever happened, and her wire-brush tail returned slowly to its proper shape.

"Whatever it is," she said at last, "it's overdone. They can never keep it up, you know."

"Much you know," said the Waters. "Over you go, old man. You can take the full head of us now. Those new steel axle-straps of yours can stand anything. Come along, Raven's Gill, Harpenden, Callton Rise, Batten's Ponds, Witches' Spring, all together! Let's show these gentlemen how to work!"

"But – but – I thought it was a decoration. Why – why – why – it only means more work for me!"

"Exactly. You're to supply about sixty eight-candle lights when required.

But they won't be all in use at once – "

"Ah! I thought as much," said the Cat. "The reaction is bound to come."

"And" said the Waters, "you will do the ordinary work of the mill as well."

"Impossible!" the old Wheel quivered as it drove. "Aluric never did it – nor Azor, nor Reinbert. Not even William de Warrenne or the Papal Legate. There's no precedent for it. I tell you there's no precedent for working a wheel like this."

"Wait a while! We're making one as fast as we can. Aluric and Co. are dead. So's the Papal Legate. You've no notion how dead they are, but we're here – the Waters of Five Separate Systems. We're just as interesting as Domesday Book. Would you like to hear about the land-tenure in Trott's Wood? It's squat-right, chiefly." The mocking Waters leaped one over the other, chuckling and chattering profanely.

"In that hundred Jenkins, a tinker, with one dog —unis canis– holds, by the Grace of God and a habit he has of working hard, unam hidam– a large potato patch. Charmin' fellow, Jenkins. Friend of ours. Now, who the dooce did Jenkins keep? … In the hundred of Callton is one charcoal-burner irreligiosissimus homo– a bit of a rip – but a thorough sportsman. Ibi est ecclesia. Non multum. Not much of a church, quia because, episcopus the Vicar irritated the Nonconformists tunc et post et modo – then and afterwards and now – until they built a cut-stone Congregational chapel with red brick facings that did not return itself —defendebat se – at four thousand pounds."

"Charcoal-burners, vicars, schismatics, and red brick facings," groaned the Wheel. "But this is sheer blasphemy. What waters have they let in upon me?"

"Floods from the gutters. Faugh, this light is positively sickening!" said the Cat, rearranging her fur.

"We come down from the clouds or up from the springs, exactly like all other waters everywhere. Is that what's surprising you?" sang the Waters.

"Of course not. I know my work if you don't. What I complain of is your lack of reverence and repose. You've no instinct of deference towards your betters – your heartless parody of the Sacred volume (the Wheel meant Domesday Book) – proves it."

"Our betters?" said the Waters most solemnly. "What is there in all this dammed race that hasn't come down from the clouds, or – "

"Spare me that talk, please," the Wheel persisted. "You'd never understand. It's the tone – your tone that we object to."

"Yes. It's your tone," said the Black Rat, picking himself up limb by limb.

"If you thought a trifle more about the work you're supposed to do, and a trifle less about your precious feelings, you'd render a little more duty in return for the power vested in you – we mean wasted on you," the Waters replied.

"I have been some hundreds of years laboriously acquiring the knowledge which you see fit to challenge so light-heartedly," the Wheel jarred.

"Challenge him! Challenge him!" clamoured the little waves riddling down through the tail-race. "As well now as later. Take him up!"

The main mass of the Waters plunging on the Wheel shocked that well-bolted structure almost into box-lids by saying: "Very good. Tell us what you suppose yourself to be doing at the present moment."

"Waiving the offensive form of your question, I answer, purely as a matter of courtesy, that I am engaged in the trituration of farinaceous substances whose ultimate destination it would be a breach of the trust reposed in me to reveal."

"Fiddle!" said the Waters. "We knew it all along! The first direct question shows his ignorance of his own job. Listen, old thing. Thanks to us, you are now actuating a machine of whose construction you know nothing, that that machine may, over wires of whose ramifications you are, by your very position, profoundly ignorant, deliver a power which you can never realise, to localities beyond the extreme limits of your mental horizon, with the object of producing phenomena which in your wildest dreams (if you ever dream) you could never comprehend. Is that clear, or would you like it all in words of four syllables?"

"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.