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." I stared at him a bit. "What do you want to know that for?" I said. "What does a chap like you,
who can do it all backwards, want with molecules?" Oh, he just wanted to know, he said. So, on the way across the bridge, I gave it him more or less from the
book--molecular theory and all the rest of it. But, from the childish
questions he put, it was plain that he hadn't got the hang of it at all. "Did the molecular theory allow things to pass through one another?" he
wanted to know; "_Could_ things pass through one another?" and a lot of
ridiculous things like that. I gave it up. "You're a genius in your own way, Rooum," I said finally; "you know these
things without the books we plodders have to depend on. If I'd luck like
that, I think I should be content with it." But he didn't seem satisfied, though he dropped the matter for that time. But I had his acquaintance, which was more than most of us had. He
asked me, rather timidly, if I'd lend him a book or two. I did so, but
they didn't seem to contain what he wanted to know, and he soon returned
them, without remark. Now you'd expect a fellow to be specially sensitive, one way or another,
who can tell when there's water a hundred feet beneath him; and as you
know, the big men are squabbling yet about this water-finding business. But, somehow, the water-finding puzzled me less than it did that Rooum
should be extraordinarily sensitive to something far commoner and easier
to understand--ordinary echoes. He couldn't stand echoes. He'd go a
mile round rather than pass a place that he knew had an echo; and if he
came on one by chance, sometimes he'd hurry through as quick as he
could, and sometimes he'd loiter and listen very intently. I rather joked
about this at first, till I found it really distressed him; then, of
course, I pretended not to notice. We're all cranky somewhere, and for
that matter, I can't touch a spider myself. For the remarkable thing that overtook Rooum--(that, by the way, is an
odd way to put it, as you'll see presently; but the words came that
way into my head, so let them stand)--for the remarkable thing that
overtook Rooum, I don't think I can begin better than with the first
time, or very soon after the first time, that I noticed this peculiarity
about the echoes. It was early on a particularly dismal November evening, and this time we
were somewhere out south-east London way, just beyond what they are
pleased to call the building-line--you know these districts of wretched
trees and grimy fields and market-gardens that are about the same to real
country that a slum is to a town. It rained that night; rain was the most
appropriate weather for the brickfields and sewage-farms and yards of old
carts and railway-sleepers we were passing. The rain shone on the black
hand-bag that Rooum always carried; and I sucked at the dottle of a pipe
that it was too much trouble to fill and light again. We were walking in
the direction of Lewisham (I think it would be), and were still a little
way from that eruption of red-brick houses that ... but you've doubtless
seen them. You know how, when they're laying out new roads, they lay down the
narrow strip of kerb first, with neither setts on the one hand nor
flagstones on the other? We had come upon one of these. (I had noticed
how, as we had come a few minutes before under a tall hollow-ringing
railway arch, Rooum had all at once stopped talking--it was the echo, of
course, that bothered him.) The unmade road to which we had come had
headless lamp-standards at intervals, and ramparts of grey road-metal
ready for use; and save for the strip of kerb, it was a broth of mud
and stiff clay. A red light or two showed where the road-barriers
were--they were laying the mains; a green railway light showed on an
embankment; and the Lewisham lamps made a rusty glare through the rain. Rooum went first, walking along the narrow strip of kerb.