The Difference Engine (55 page)

The Master Emeritus Recalls Wellington

The reddish glow of enfeebled gas-light. The rhythmic, echoing clank and screech of the Brunel Tunneling Torpedo. Thirty-six cork-screw teeth of best Birmingham steel gnaw with relentless vigor into a reeking seam of ancient London clay.

Master Sapper Joseph Pearson, at his ease at the mid-day meal, feeds himself a congealed wedge of gravy-thick meat-pie from a hinged tin box. “Aye, I met the great Mallory,” he says, voice echoing from arching whale-ribs of riveted cast-iron. “We warn’t exactly introduced, like, but he was Leviathan Mallory, right-enough, for I seen his phiz in the penny-papers. He stood as close to me as I am to you now, lad. ‘Lord Jefferies?’ the Leviathan says to me, all surprised and angry, ‘I know Jefferies! The fookin’ bastard should be censured for fraud!’ ”

Master Pearson grins in triumph, red light glinting from a gold earring, a gold tooth. “And damme if that savant Jefferies didn’t catch every kind of hell, once the Stink had passed. Leviathan Mallory took a proper hand in that chastisement, sure enough. He’s one of Nature’s noblemen. Leviathan Mallory is.”

“I seen that brontosaur,” says ‘Prentice David Waller, nodding, eyes bright. “That’s a fine thing!”

“I myself was workin’ the shaft in ‘54, when they dug up them elephant teeth.” Master Pearson, rubber-booted feet dangling from the second-story platform of the excavation-shaft, shifts on his damp-proofed mat of coir and burlap, and yanks a split of champagne from a pocket of his excavation-gear. “French fizz, Davey-lad. Your first time down; ye got to have a taste of this.”

“That ain’t proper, is it, sir? ‘Gainst the book.”

Pearson wrenches the cork loose, no pop, no gush of foam. He winks. “Hell, lad, it’s your first time down; won’t never be another first time.” Pearson tosses sugary dregs of strong tea from his tin cup, fills it to the brim with champagne.     “It’s gone flat,” ‘Prentice Waller mourns.

Pearson laughs, rubbing a burst vein in his fleshy nose. “It’s the pressure, lad. Wait till ye get topside. It goes off right inside yer. You’ll fart like an ox.”

‘Prentice Waller sips, with some caution. An iron bell rings, above them. “Chamber coming down,” Pearson says, hastily corking the bottle. He stuffs it back into a pocket, gulps the rest of the cup, wipes his mouth.

A bullet-shaped cage descends, passing with cloacal slowness through a membrane of heavy waxed leather. There are hisses, creaks, as the cage touches bottom.

Two men emerge. The Chief Foreman wears a helmet, digging-gear, and leather apron. With him, carrying a brass dark-lantern, is a tall, white-haired man in a black tailcoat and black satin cravat, a kerchief of black silk crepe about his polished top-hat. In the red light of the tunnel, a pigeon’s-egg diamond, or perhaps a ruby, glints at the old man’s throat. Like the Chief Foreman, his trousered legs are swathed in knee-high boots of india-rubber.

“The Grand Master Miner Emeritus,” Pearson gasps in a single breath, and scrambles at once to his feet. Waller leaps up as well.

The two of them stand at attention as the Grand Master strolls beneath them, up the tunnel toward the Torpedo’s massive digging-face. He does not glance up, takes no notice of them, but speaks with cool authority to the Foreman. He examines bolts, seams, and grouting with the stabbing beam of his bull’s-eye lantern. The lantern has no handle, for the Grand Master carries the hot brass caught in a sleek iron hook which protrudes from an empty sleeve.

“But that’s a queer way to dress, ain’t it?” whispers young Waller.

“He’s still in mourning,” Pearson whispers.

“Ah,” says the ‘prentice. He watches the Grand Master walk on a bit. “Still?”

“He knew Lord Byron dead-familiar like, the Grand Master did. Knew Lord Babbage too! In the Time o’ Troubles — when they was running from Wellington’s Tory police! They warn’t no Lordships then — not proper Rad Lords, anyway, just rebels and agitators, like, with a price on their heads. The Grand Master hid ‘em out down a digging once — a reg’lar Party headquarters, it was. The Rad Lords never forgot the great favors he done for ‘em. That’s why we’re the greatest of Radical unions.”

“Ah.”

“That’s a great man, Davey! Master of iron, a great master of blasting-powder . . . They don’t make ‘em like him, today.”

“So — he must be nigh eighty now, eh?”

“Still hale and hearty.”

“Could we get down, sir, d’ye think — could I see him up close, like? Maybe shake his famous hook!”

“All right, lad — but on your dignity now. No bad words.”

They climb down to the bare planks at the base of the tunnel.

As they follow the Grand Master, the gnawing rumble of the Torpedo changes abruptly. The Torpedo’s crew leaps up, for such a change means trouble — quicksand, a vein of water, or worse. Pearson and his ‘prentice break into a shuffling run toward the digging-face.

Shavings of soft black filth begin to pour from the sharp iron spirals of the thirty-six twisting teeth, falling in greasy clods to the flat-carts of the carriage-ramp. From within the black soil of the digging-face come little muffled pops of old embedded gas-pockets, weak as Pearson’s enfeebled champagne-cork. No deadly rush of water, though; no slurry of quicksand. They inch forward warily, gazing after the sharp white beam of the Grand Master’s lantern.

Knobs of hardened yellow show amid greenish-black muck. “Bones, is it?” says a workman, wiping his nose at a smell of soured dust. “Fossils, like . . .”

Bones pour forth in a broken torrent as the Torpedo’s hydraulics lurch in reaction, pressing it forward into the softening mass. Human bones.

“A cemetery!” Pearson cries. “We’ve hit a churchyard!”

But the tunnel is too deep for that, and there are too many bones, bones tangled thick as the branches of a fallen forest, in a deep promiscuous mass, and mixed of a sudden with a thin and deadly reek, of long-buried lime and sulphur.

“Plague pit!” the Chief Foreman cries in terror, and the men fall back, stumbling. There is a lurch, and a hiss of steam as the Foreman shuts down the Torpedo.

The Grand Master has not moved.     He stands quietly, regarding the work of the teeth.

He puts his lamp aside, and reaches into the heap of spoil. He dabbles in it with his shining hook, and has something up by one eyehole. A skull.

“Ah, then,” he says, his deep voice ringing in the sudden utter silence, “ye poor damn’ bastard.”

The Gaming Lady Is Bad Luck

“The Gaming Lady is bad luck to those that know her. When a poor night at the wagering-machines has emptied her purse, her jewels are carried privately into Lombard Street, and Fortune is tempted yet again with a sum from my lady’s pawnbroker! Then she sells off her wardrobe as well, to the grief of her maids; stretches her credit amongst those she deals with, pawns her honor to her intimates, in vain hope to recover her losses!

“The passions suffer no less by this gaming-fever than the understanding and the imagination. What vivid, unnatural hope and fear, joy and anger, sorrow and discontent, burst out all at once upon a roll of the dice, a turn of the card, a run of the shining gurneys! Who can consider without indignation that all those womanly affections, which should have been consecrated to children and husband, are thus vilely prostituted and thrown away. I cannot but be grieved when I see the Gaming Lady fretting and bleeding inwardly from such evil and unworthy obsessions; when I behold the face of an angel agitated by the heart of a fury!

“It is divinely ordered that almost everything which corrupts the soul, must also decay the body. Hollow eyes, haggard looks, and pale complexion are the natural indications of a female gamester. Her morning sleeps cannot repair her sordid midnight watchings. I have looked long and hard upon the face of the Gaming Lady. Yes, I have watched her well. I have seen her earned off half-dead from Crockford’s gambling-hell, at two o’clock in the morning, looking like a specter amid a flare of wicked gas-lamps —

“Pray resume your seat, sir. You are in the House of God. Is that remark to be taken as a threat, sir? How dare you. These are dark times, grave times indeed! I tell you, sir, as I tell this congregation, as I will tell all the world, that I have seen her, I have witnessed your Queen of Engines at her vile dissipations —

“Help me! Stop him! Stop him! Oh dear Jesus, I am shot! I am undone! Murder! Can none of you stop him?”

Gentlemen, The Choice Is Yours

[At the height of the Parliamentary crisis of 1855, Lord Brunel assembled and addressed the members of his Cabinet. His remarks were recorded by his private secretary, using the Babbage shorthand notation.]

“Gentlemen, I cannot call to mind a single instance in which any individual in the Party or the Ministry has spoken, even casually, in my defense within the walls of Parliament. I have waited patiently, and I hope uncomplainingly, doing what little I could to protect and extend the wise legacy of the late Lord Byron, and to heal the reckless wounds inflicted on our Party by over-zealous juniors.

“But there has been no change in the contempt in which you honorable gentlemen seem to hold me. On the contrary, the last two nights have been taken up with a debate on a vote of want-of-confidence, directed, obviously and especially, against the head of the Government. The discussion has been marked with more than usual violence against my office, and there has been no defense from any of you — the members of my own Cabinet.

“How, under these circumstances, are we to successfully resolve the matter of the murder of the Reverend Alistair Roseberry? This shameful, atavistic crime, brutally perpetrated within a Christian church, has blackened the reputation of Party and Government, and cast the gravest doubts on our intentions and integrity. And how are we to root out the murderous dark-lantern societies whose power, and provocative daring, grows daily?

“God knows, gentlemen, that I never sought my present office. Indeed, I would have done anything, consistent with honor, to avoid assuming it. But I must be master in this House, or else resign my office — abandoning this nation to the purported leadership of men whose intentions are increasingly stark in their clarity. Gentlemen, the choice is yours.”

Death of the Marquess of Hastings

Yes, sir, two-fifteen to be quite exact, sir — and no other way to be, as we’re on the Colt & Maxwell system of patent punch-clocks.

Just a sort of dripping sound, sir.

For a moment I took it to be a leakage, forgetting the night was clear. Rain, I thought, and that was all my anxiety, sir, thinking the Land Leviathan would be damaged by damp, so I flung my lantern’s beam up quick, and there the poor rascal hung, and blood all down the Leviathan’s neck-bones, sir, and all on the — what d’ye call ‘em? — the armatures, what hold the beast upright. And his head a bloody min, sir — no longer as you’d call a head at all. Dangling there by his ankles from this manner of harness, and I saw the ropes and pulleys going straight up, taut, into the dark of the great dome, and the sight struck me so, sir, that it wasn’t till I’d sounded the alarm that I saw the Leviathan’s head was missing too.

Yes, sir, I do believe that to be the case — the manner in which it was done. He was lowered down from the dome and did the job up there, in the dark, and paused when he’d hear my footsteps, and then continue his work. The work of some hours, for they’d had to rig their lines and pulleys. Likely I passed beneath them several times, on my watch. And when he’d got it free, the head, sir, someone else winched it up, and took it away through that panel they’d unbolted. But something must have given, sir, or slipped, for down he came, square into the floor, best Florentine marble that is. We found where his brains had been dashed, sir, though I’d as soon forget it. And I did then recall a sound, sir, likely of him striking, but no outcry.

If I may say, sir, what strikes me as vilest, in the whole business, must be the cool way they hauled him back up, quiet as spiders, and left him slung there, like a coney in a butcher’s window, and stole away across the roof-top with their booty. There’s a deal of meanness in that, isn’t there?

-
KENNETH
REYNOLDS
, night watchman, the Museum of Practical Geology, in deposition before Magistrate G. H. S. Peters, Bow Street, Nov. 1855.

Believe Me Always

MY
DEAR
EGREMONT
,

I write to you to express my profound regret that the circumstances of the moment should deprive me of the opportunity and hope of enlisting your great capacity in the further service of Party and Government.

You will well understand that my recognition of your difficult personal circumstances is absolutely separate from any want of confidence in you as a statesman; this is the last idea I should wish to convey.

How can I close without fervently expressing to you my desire that there may be reserved for you a place of permanent public distinction?

Believe me always,

Yours sincerely,

I. K.
BRUNEL

-Ministerial letter to Charles Egremont, M.P., Dec. 1855.

Memorandum to the Foreign Office

On this occasion, our distinguished guest, the ex-President of the American Union, Mr. Clement L. Vallandigham, got as drunk as a fiddle. The eminent Democrat showed that he could be as profligate as any English Lord. He fumbled Mrs. A., kissed the shrieking Miss B., pinched the plump Mrs. C. black and blue, and ran at Miss D. with flagrant intent to ravish her!

Finally, after throwing our female guests into hysterics by behaving like an elephant in must, the noble beast was captured by main force, and carried upstairs, all four feet in the air, by our household staff. Within his room, Mrs. Vallandigham was awaiting him, in shift and mobcap. There and then, to our considerable amazement, this remarkable man satiated his baffled lust on the unresisting body of his legitimate spouse, and copiously vomited during the operation. Those who have seen Mrs. Vallandigham would not think this latter incredible.

News has now reached me that the former President of Texas, Samuel Houston, has died in Veracruz, in his Mexican exile. He was, I believe, awaiting any call to arms that might have brought him back to eminence; but the French alcaldes were likely too wily for him. Houston had his faults, I know, but he was easily worth ten of Clement Vallandigham, who made a shrinking peace with the Confederacy, and has allowed the vultures of Red Manhattan Communism to gnaw the carcass of his dishonored country.