Israel Potter: Chapter 23

Chapter 23

ISRAEL IN EGYPT.

It was a gray, lowering afternoon that, worn out, half starved, and
haggard, Israel arrived within some ten or fifteen miles of London, and
saw scores and scores of forlorn men engaged in a great brickyard.

For the most part, brickmaking is all mud and mire. Where, abroad, the
business is carried on largely, as to supply the London market, hordes
of the poorest wretches are employed, their grimy tatters naturally
adapting them to an employ where cleanliness is as much out of the
question as with a drowned man at the bottom of the lake in the Dismal
Swamp.

Desperate with want, Israel resolved to turn brickmaker, nor did he fear
to present himself as a stranger, nothing doubting that to such a
vocation his rags would be accounted the best letters of introduction.

To be brief, he accosted one of the many surly overseers, or taskmasters
of the yard, who, with no few pompous airs, finally engaged him at six
shillings a week, almost equivalent to a dollar and a half. He was
appointed to one of the mills for grinding up the ingredients. This
mill stood in the open air. It was of a rude, primitive, Eastern aspect,
consisting of a sort of hopper, emptying into a barrel-shaped
receptacle. In the barrel was a clumsy machine turned round at its axis
by a great bent beam, like a well-sweep, only it was horizontal; to this
beam, at its outer end, a spavined old horse was attached. The muddy
mixture was shovelled into the hopper by spavined-looking old men,
while, trudging wearily round and round, the spavined old horse ground
it all up till it slowly squashed out at the bottom of the barrel, in a
doughy compound, all ready for the moulds. Where the dough squeezed out
of the barrel a pit was sunken, so as to bring the moulder here
stationed down to a level with the trough, into which the dough fell.
Israel was assigned to this pit. Men came to him continually, reaching
down rude wooden trays, divided into compartments, each of the size and
shape of a brick. With a flat sort of big ladle, Israel slapped the
dough into the trays from the trough; then, with a bit of smooth board,
scraped the top even, and handed it up. Half buried there in the pit,
all the time handing those desolate trays, poor Israel seemed some
gravedigger, or churchyard man, tucking away dead little innocents in
their coffins on one side, and cunningly disinterring them again to
resurrectionists stationed on the other.

Twenty of these melancholy old mills were in operation. Twenty
heartbroken old horses, rigged out deplorably in cast-off old cart
harness, incessantly tugged at twenty great shaggy beams; while from
twenty half-burst old barrels, twenty wads of mud, with a lava-like
course, gouged out into twenty old troughs, to be slapped by twenty
tattered men into the twenty-times-twenty battered old trays.

Ere entering his pit for the first, Israel had been struck by the
dismally devil-may-care gestures of the moulders. But hardly had he
himself been a moulder three days, when his previous sedateness of
concern at his unfortunate lot, began to conform to the reckless sort of
half jolly despair expressed by the others. The truth indeed was, that
this continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of the dough into the
moulds, begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder, who, by
heedlessly slapping that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, was
thereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness,
his own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration. To these
muddy philosophers, men and bricks were equally of clay. "What signifies
who we be--dukes or ditchers?" thought the moulders; "all is vanity and
clay."

So slap, slap, slap, care-free and negligent, with bitter unconcern,
these dismal desperadoes flapped down the dough. If this recklessness
were vicious of them, be it so; but their vice was like that weed which
but grows on barren ground; enrich the soil, and it disappears.

For thirteen weary weeks, lorded over by the taskmaster, Israel toiled
in his pit. Though this condemned him to a sort of earthy dungeon, or
gravedigger's hole, while he worked, yet even when liberated to his
meals, naught of a cheery nature greeted him. The yard was encamped,
with all its endless rows of tented sheds, and kilns, and mills, upon a
wild waste moor, belted round by bogs and fens. The blank horizon, like
a rope, coiled round the whole.

Sometimes the air was harsh and bleak; the ridged and mottled sky looked
scourged, or cramping fogs set in from sea, for leagues around,
ferreting out each rheumatic human bone, and racking it; the sciatic
limpers shivered; their aguish rags sponged up the mists. No shelter,
though it hailed. The sheds were for the bricks. Unless, indeed,
according to the phrase, each man was a "brick," which, in sober
scripture, was the case; brick is no bad name for any son of Adam; Eden
was but a brickyard; what is a mortal but a few luckless shovelfuls of
clay, moulded in a mould, laid out on a sheet to dry, and ere long
quickened into his queer caprices by the sun? Are not men built into
communities just like bricks into a wall? Consider the great wall of
China: ponder the great populace of Pekin. As man serves bricks, so God
him, building him up by billions into edifices of his purposes. Man
attains not to the nobility of a brick, unless taken in the aggregate.
Yet is there a difference in brick, whether quick or dead; which, for
the last, we now shall see.

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