For all I ever knew to the contrary, it was his own name; and something
about him, name or man or both, always put me in mind, I can't tell you
how, of negroes. As regards the name, I dare say it was something
huggermugger in the mere sound--something that I classed, for no
particular reason, with the dark and ignorant sort of words, such as
"Obi" and "Hoodoo." I only know that after I learned that his name was
Rooum, I couldn't for the life of me have thought of him as being called
anything else.
The first impression that you got of his head was that it was a patchwork
of black and white--black bushy hair and short white beard, or else the
other way about. As a matter of fact, both hair and beard were piebald,
so that if you saw him in the gloom a dim patch of white showed down one
side of his head, and dark tufts cropped up here and there in his beard.
His eyebrows alone were entirely black, with a little sprouting of hair
almost joining them. And perhaps his skin helped to make me think of
negroes, for it was very dark, of the dark brown that always seems to
have more than a hint of green behind it. His forehead was low, and
scored across with deep horizontal furrows.
We never knew when he was going to turn up on a job. We might not have
seen him for weeks, but his face was always as likely as not to appear
over the edge of a crane-platform just when that marvellous mechanical
intuition of his was badly needed. He wasn't certificated. He wasn't even
trained, as the rest of us understood training; and he scoffed at the
drawing-office, and laughed outright at logarithms and our laborious
methods of getting out quantities. But he could set sheers and tackle in
a way that made the rest of us look silly. I remember once how, through
the parting of a chain, a sixty-foot girder had come down and lay under
a ruck of other stuff, as the bottom chip lies under a pile of
spellikins--a hopeless-looking smash. Myself, I'm certificated twice or
three times over; but I can only assure you that I wanted to kick myself
when, after I'd spent a day and a sleepless night over the job, I saw the
game of tit-tat-toe that Rooum made of it in an hour or two. Certificated
or not, a man isn't a fool who can do that sort of thing. And he was
one of these fellows, too, who can "find water"--tell you where water is
and what amount of getting it is likely to take, by just walking over the
place. We aren't certificated up to that yet.
He was offered good money to stick to us--to stick to our firm--but he
always shook his black-and-white piebald head. He'd never be able to keep
the bargain if he were to make it, he told us quite fairly. I know there
are these chaps who can't endure to be clocked to their work with a
patent time-clock in the morning and released of an evening with a
whistle--and it's one of the things no master can ever understand. So
Rooum came and went erratically, showing up maybe in Leeds or Liverpool,
perhaps next on Plymouth breakwater, and once he turned up in an
out-of-the-way place in Glamorganshire just when I was wondering what had
become of him.
The way I got to know him (got to know him, I mean, more than just to
nod) was that he tacked himself on to me one night down Vauxhall way,
where we were setting up some small plant or other. We had knocked off
for the day, and I was walking in the direction of the bridge when he
came up. We walked along together; and we had not gone far before it
appeared that his reason for joining me was that he wanted to know "what
a molecule was."